The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Yet one must resist.

  […]

  May 15, 1981.…“From an obscure little village we have become the capital of America”—Ashbel Green of Princeton, 1783.

  …Working on The Crosswicks Horror. Taking notes on Woodrow Wilson, preparing two elaborate charts, going for bicycle rides, walks, brooding, thinking, enjoying the continued calm…tranquility…of having finished a season of “public appearances” that went fairly well, I suppose, yet were taxing in many ways…. The nuisance of such events being not that they are difficult in themselves but that one must think about them beforehand; one must travel to them (the tiresome NYC trip—twice as draining at night, late, with only the road to watch, and invariable rain); and during the time of the appearance, and the obligatory cocktail period through dinner and onward ending with the “reception,” one can’t be anonymous, private, & spontaneous, because in fact the entire evening is organized around one’s presence, and it is surely disingenuous to pretend otherwise. The luxury of relaxation, privacy, laziness, these long splendid May days, staying up later and later reading & taking notes (an untidy mess of papers gathering—spread out on the table here in the “new room”—my desk in my study being too small), no longer rising at 6:30…the entire schedule more elastic, open to surprises & improvisations, perhaps we will drive over to Cranbury this afternoon to the azalea gardens and the “rare” book store…where I can carry my curious brood of people with me…Josiah and Annabel and Wilhelmina and Axson and Dr. Slade and…and all the rest.

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  May 20, 1981. […] The conscious and unconscious creating of myths, stories one whispers to oneself, ways of apprehending, anticipating, controlling…. Can I say with any degree of confidence that, at the age of forty-two (and soon to be forty-three) I seem to be “established”…? I don’t mean in terms of my present work, the ongoing experiment of that bizarre project, that prose, because one is never established in that sense; but in an external dimension, in a public “career.”…I suppose it must be true, whatever injury it must do to my grasp of myself as an “outsider.”…A woman, and therefore the despised; a daughter of the working-class, the rural poor; bookish, too cerebral, always brooding, plotting, prank-minded…. Well, that image is outworn, but I can’t surrender it. So I must transpose it. So I will “invent” this public persona of a woman writer not unlike myself who identifies with failure—the failure of the work-in-progress, that is.

  …In my innermost heart, no. It’s fiction. “Failure” and “success” don’t mean a thing—in the intoxicating process of writing. But for a purpose I seem to think necessary I must create this metaphor of a person who does identify with failure…. (Perhaps it is simply my sudden realization of a kinship, a sisterhood and brotherhood, with others—that exciting and unmistakable spark of what might be called simple interest, simple surprised interest, when I began my talk on “failure” at NYU a few weeks ago. Suddenly—this is it! My bond, my connection, not only with the audience before me, but with the distinguished dead, Emily Dickinson, Whitman, Joyce…. To feel them so like oneself, on that level, in that void…. )

  …The pose of feeling always tentative, like the pose of skepticism. In truth we are all too childlike, too voracious, too easily cajoled, seduced, won, convinced, discarded, again charmed, again won!—it happens again and again, and begins once again, with this massive strategy of the new novel, and the promise of all sorts of unlook’d-for revelations ahead. Yet one must not hurry—why not make it a lifetime?

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  May 29, 1981.…To immerse myself in a personality so contrary to my own, and then to discover, it is my own.

  …Lovely long days, sunshine, freedom, strenuous exercise (bicycling primarily), sleeping very hard at night, fresh bright moist air, everything (again) green: that startling “lurid” green I remember from last year: the light very queer, very pleasing, foliage & grass somehow in the air, reflected from the moisture invisible in the air—or so it seems.

  …Working on The Crosswicks Horror. Slow, page after page, paragraphs, sentences, feeling my way, a great packet of notes already accumulated, and I spent but one afternoon at the “special collections” wing of Firestone [Library]!—and more, much more, to absorb. The horror of paralysis—so many notes on WW, Henry van Dyke, Princeton University—how to select, organize—and then the remarkable good luck, the “epiphanies”—a declaration of WW’s surfacing at just the right moment—as if in a magical way the novel I have invented out of my head, for allegorical purposes, turns out to be the novel, the secret mythology, of Woodrow Wilson’s (secret) life.

  …Last Saturday, a marvelous evening with Norman and Norris Mailer, and Norman’s twenty-one-year-old daughter Betsey, graduating from Princeton: we had a pleasant dinner at Lahiere’s (the area’s prestige restaurant: indifferent food, vainglorious prices), then went to a play on campus, strolled about…. Norman and I talked of the obsessional nature of novels, particularly long novels (but his is now 1500 pages long, and he has a year yet to go); and the mystery of “machismo”; my story “The Precipice,” which he seems to have liked;* boxing, the Vonneguts, mutual acquaintances…. Norris is as sweet and as intelligent (or nearly) as she is beautiful: one certainly sees why Norman, though married (but then he has always been married), fell in love with her, and felt that he must marry her, when he went to Arkansas some seven or eight years ago, to give a reading…. I’ve suggested her for a part in “Spoils,” which is supposed to be read at Lincoln Center (that is, the Mitzie Newhouse Theatre) on June 2…. The quality in Norman that most arouses loyalty, I think, is his utter lack of pretension; his spirited warmth; his reasonableness—despite the image of Mailer; and (though I should have thought otherwise) his generosity toward certain other writers…. By contrast, other “social” evenings lately have seemed rather tame and desultory, a matter of going through the motions: last night, other nights, perfectly pleasant acquaintances whom I won’t name.

  …The requirement for fiction: time so spacious, one can stretch out in it; one can exult in the luxury of near-boredom…which is the necessary state of mind, perhaps, for the most imaginative sorts of creation…. The immense koan of this new novel. One’s buried fears, parodied apprehensions, alternative selves, old grudges, wounded feelings, befuddlements…riddles never solved (Kay’s death, and others). The springing-forth of the “lost” self: does it express something deep & inviolate in us, or is it merely the functional expression of something formal—a form, that is, of aesthetic pretensions, created in order to be filled—? Which is to say, does the form (of the novel) create the flood of “lost” selves; or is it the vehicle by which they are finally apprehended…. Does the dreamer cause the dream, or the dream the dreamer; does one fast in search of visions, or do the visions insist upon the fasting….

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  June 7, 1981.…A splendid day: work in the morning; an hour in the courtyard, reading; a lengthy and ambitious bicycle ride, along the Canal Road in Griggstown, and then along the canal; home again, and more work on Crosswicks; and dinner—trout, vegetables, salad from Ray’s garden; and now, in the evening, nearing 11 P.M., more work on the novel. Finished Chap. 5—. Recalling last year at this time, that interminable tour in Europe, so many nights of insomnia, so many hours of protracted idleness…. Simply to be here, to be home, amidst our books, our things, our woods, our garden, our work; free of being and performing “JCO”; free of the ceremonial luncheons, receptions, dinners…. I am infatuated with the private life, and with anonymity; perhaps even invisibility. Long may it endure….

  …The utterly engrossing “fable” of Crosswicks. Within the large general structure I have planned, all sorts of surprises occur—the story tells itself to me—it spins itself out—some of my most felicitous ideas arising during our bicycle rides—amidst the eye-dazzling hills and meadows, the farmland, cattle, calves, horses, china-blue skies, banks of wild roses, honeysuckle, wild daisies, asters—my God, the riches of the natural world!—to think th
at it is all (merely) natural.

  …Friday evening, at the Keeleys’, meeting Mike’s brother Bob, the US ambassador to Zimbabwe; talking with the Fagles, Ed Cone, Phil Fraser (of Ann Arbor), and others, my usual light-headedness at parties—a sense of too much to say, to think, the urgency of the moment, so quickly passing: and then, afterward, one wonders what it is all about, what is the point of it, never saying quite enough, never touching another person quite as one might wish….

  …Odd, the sudden pockets of loneliness, at large gatherings. My sense of apartness; distance; déjàvu. Alone, by myself, I am incapable of feeling lonely or bored—if writing isn’t available, reading is. In both, one plunges deep beneath the surface of time, the ephemera, to the timeless, the near-permanent…. How interesting that the “gothic” should grip me, these past few years. Where the realistic novel postulates an individual thinking of certain matters, the gothic novel sweeps aside the psychological convention, and postulates the object of thought in itself: which is where the great challenge enters. How to make the objects funny, and terrible, and emotionally accurate, and surprising, and unpredictable…how to keep myself off guard…. The buried fears & emotions surfacing; the triumph of the repressed; what is most loathed, suddenly embraced. The “Easter lilies” that are in fact poisonous Angel trumpets. (And what a boon it is, to discover how closely they resemble each other!—repulsive jimson weed, and that beautiful flower known as the lily.) The danger in happiness: now everything is wonderful, now I love every fate that comes along…. *

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  June 8, 1981.…Very early in the morning, flashes of images in the brain: and what is the writing, then, but the pleasant task of fitting words to rhythms…. My canny narrator: the layer that divides him from me, and from the characters in the novel; the characters themselves in their separate phantom-haunted worlds…. The subaqueous world of the imagination that must be entered, but also resisted; for one can drown there.

  …Hour upon hour, the “subaqueous” element! At times I feel that I could write endlessly, scarcely rising to the surface to eat, or even breathe. One image, pursued, exhausted, then begets another…. My narrator, obsessed with words (long “impressive” nineteenth-century words!) and with word-rhythms, is my perfect mate. In any case—the Crosswicks Horror has driven him crazy, as it would drive any of us crazy, had we the moral strength.

  …A pleasant evening planned for tonight, with Elaine and English: dinner, and then a movie, The Last Metro. And next Sunday, unfortunately, a Phoenix workshop production of The Widows…

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  June 22, 1981.…A tornado watch here; glowering skies; gale-force winds; terrific humidity. Having finished an ambitious “outline” for the rest of Crosswicks I find myself in a kind of interregnum…not ready to write the concluding chapter of Book I (“The Demon Bridegroom”), not quite prepared to do anything else. A lazy sort of equilibrium….

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  …The visit with my parents went so very well!—and so quickly. Inexplicably saddened afterward. Burst into tears at the little Princeton airport—their little two-engine plane, eight-passenger, disappearing into the air. So sad. So silly, my reaction. Sentiment, love, longing, loss, the irrefutable evidence of the passage of time, theirs, mine, Ray’s, the world’s…. (Yet they are, still, remarkably young; and even look young.) The vertigo of time; inevitability of change; the sense of a…conveyor belt, of days, hours, minutes; carrying us remorselessly onward. The only certainty. And how queer, that this sole reality is fantasized by some (scientists, poets) as having no actual existence…. Tragedy, comedy, conflict, drama, surprise: none of these forms or elements are “artificial,” but in fact built into the very fabric of our human existence. As are “beginnings, middles, ends, resolution.”…Even hard covers. Even language, whether print, or lapidary.

  …Crosswicks, a perpetual delight. For the author at least. Pages & pages of outline, to be transformed, at my leisure (and that of Pearce van Dijck II) into the fascinating particularities of words. Ideas into stories into actual sentences, language, gem-hard, continuously evolving and continuously surprising. I am the “inspired” internuncio, betwixt the Platonic region of ideas, and the lovely preposterous sounds of words, English words, grave & noble & wayward & demented, on the page.

  June 27, 1981.…Working on The Crosswicks Horror. The fascination of the parabolic tale, made flesh—so to speak. Words. The dignity and playfulness of language. (Have just begun “Slade’s Villainy.”)

  …Last night, one of our most pleasant social evenings, here: the Showalters, the Goldmans, Ed and George; Elaine brought three cold dishes, plus dessert; George brought dessert; I made several cold salads, we had cold turkey and ham, bread, cheese, pâté, fruit—a marvelous feast! And so very informal; so much fun.

  …I must make a decision, reluctantly. So much pressure is being put upon me to do publicity appearances, not only here but in Europe (that is, France), I must devise some means, some strategy, of avoiding it: yet I can’t say that I prefer not to, like Melville’s stubborn Bartleby; I don’t want to say that traveling bores me, fatigues me, meeting people, being interviewed (O God, being interviewed: is anything more a waste of time?—meeting oneself, oneself, forever), the simple procedures of travel, all so empty, so unproductive, so sterile, so…beyond the reach of art. Nor do I want to say that I am ill, or of “uncertain health.” I see now the temptation, for the nineteenth-century woman, of invalidism. But where these hapless females succumbed to imaginary ills, in order to escape responsibilities of a tiresome nature (not excluding sexual relations with their husbands—and having babies), I don’t think I am quite that desperate. I will simply say that I can’t travel, or travel rarely, or haven’t the strength, or….

  …I’m conscious of the irony, that the more “successful” I am, the more invitations I will receive: and the more excuses I will have to make. And why? So that I can absorb myself in my work; so that the new novel doesn’t get lost.

  …“Success” in a public sense is a punishment, not a reward. For it drains our energies, diffracts our attention. What I want to do is write: to write something strong, lasting, surprising, original…something that is, in any case, my own. My own language. Clearly, novels like A Bloodsmoor Romance and The Crosswicks Horror are not for everyone; I would not have liked them, perhaps, at an earlier stage in my own life. But I can’t help that. That isn’t my concern. I must follow the riddle, the koan, to its completion; no deliberate labyrinth, but a necessity—and I can’t accomplish this by flying to Paris and answering questions. Yes of course I like Bellefleur, I love Bellefleur, but going on French television in October is only a means of selling books, in Paris, for Editions Stock, not a means of making Bellefleur better, or continuing with Crosswicks. And so, and so…. Well, I must exaggerate my difficulties with travel…. Something in me is repulsed, by the very notion of invalidism, but I have no choice, really; I have to protect myself, my freedom.

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  July 3, 1981.…The discipline of Crosswicks: that grid of peculiar skewed language, that doesn’t inhibit the flow of the story, or the pressure of “inspiration” from the unconscious, but, in a way I could not have anticipated, seems to stimulate it. The icy heart of the stylist—! So very different from my former, my old, my abandoned way of writing; but then I am a very different person.

  …Though of course I am not: I never will be.

  …The ease of lazy summer days. Yet I work from about 8:30 until 1:30 every day, before stopping (for breakfast); then we take the afternoon off—usually a long bicycle ride. (Today we rode from Harrison Street out to Kingston, and to the Delaware-Raritan Canal, which we took around the far shore of Lake Carnegie; then back by way of Harrison. The canal banks are lush with vines, unusual birds, the very air seemed altered, as I rode along I experienced a minor pang of—might it have been regret?!—that nothing in my life now is against the grain of what I want to do; I do only what I want; yet I seem at times to be pushing myself too
severely, straining at the limit of what I can bear, as if observing myself, testing, experimenting…. To be here, yet there; in one place, and in another; it must be the novelist’s magical “objectivity.”)

  …Pascal’s idea of God: the center everywhere, the circumference nowhere. But this impresses me as common sense.

  …Now I find myself so suddenly on of Crosswicks. And Josiah’s section is longer than I had anticipated. Storytelling means telling a story to oneself. And surprising oneself. But the grid is always there, the yoga of narrative movement, the plot—an absolute structure. And the bizarre language which isn’t my own, but Pearce van Dijck’s. All this is immensely, immensely interesting; and surprising. I’ve come 180 degrees around to a kind of allegorical fiction I couldn’t have read, let alone written, twenty years ago. Yet I suppose the “themes” are similar—for whatever that insight is worth.

  July 8, 1981.…Ninety-four degrees today, working on Crosswicks; now in the utterly engrossing chapter of Adelaide’s—“The Cruel Husband.” Yesterday, a very long (too long) drive to the Jersey shore—Cape May—Cape May City—Ocean City—back very late at night—seven hours driving—so that we were both fatigued with the experience yet at the same time near-exhilarated with relief to be home, that, in a peculiar way, it was well worth it: for it makes me realize that we hadn’t better attempt the drive to Washington. (The Washington Post would like me to come down in August, or July, for an interview/story connected with the publication of Angel of Light. But I shall pass this “golden” opportunity…. )