The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

by Joyce Carol Oates

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  …The pleasures of revising & recasting. My ridiculous delight, in having trimmed seven pages out of the manuscript so far. Would that I might be able to continue at that pace….

  …Invisibility. Visible to others; invisible to ourselves. Our paradox. What is indecipherable to us may be readily available to others, even to strangers…. The rare pleasure of a Saturday evening at home!—sitting cozily in our “new” room reading. And the Horror set aside for another twelve hours.

  October 14, 1981. […] The remarkable energy and passion of these autumn days: simply, a feast for the eye…almost dazzling, such beauty…maples, and ashes, and dogwood (dogwood in particular)…. We’ve gone on long hikes to Bayberry Hill, and through Titusville, along the Delaware; and in fields around Hopewell. Why is my wish always, always and forever, if only this season would never pass.

  …How tiresome, by contrast, certain conversations of late. Sexual anxiety amongst gentlemen of a certain age, whose names I won’t list, the other evening at the Keeleys’: jousting, strained witticisms, allusions, asides: a familiar subject, therefore a contemptible one. These jokes center upon what one must assume is the men’s dwindling sense of manhood; or, in fact, their dwindling manhood. What a woman can’t exactly know is whether the presence of women (in this case, tolerant “amused” wives) provokes this sort of display; or (thank God) inhibits it…. Sadly boring, because it is so familiar; because it thwarts serious conversation; because it is a cry from the heart, we are growing old, we are fearful of death, couched in such silly adolescent terms, a sympathetic response is impossible.

  …Dinner Sunday evening, at Ed’s and George’s. And then we listened to a taped radio interview with Ed, and two of his remarkable piano compositions. Haunting, beautiful, alarmingly difficult pieces, which Ed had played himself. The tragedy is, these superb compositions for piano haven’t been recorded; and Ed thinks that probably no one has played them, apart from him.

  …A brief respite from the intensities of The Crosswicks Horror. But I miss those intensities…! I don’t want the leisure of a normal freedom; but I don’t want the frightening experience of being so absorbed in a book, my soul is drained from me…. Teaching The Picture of Dorian Gray this afternoon. The “novel” interests me only minimally, the “ideas” interest me greatly. That particular novel is only a sort of cocoon, or husk, for its ideas. Wilde as helpless and uncanny prophet….

  …Dinners, luncheons, parties. Shall I list them? No. And even the temporary pleasures, the hilarity, the intellectual satisfactions—these are too transient to be mentioned. Our own party for Bob was quite a success, last Friday. A kind of landmark for us: as much as I care to do all autumn…. N.B.: The mortal man, the immortal soul. Conversely, the “immortal” (youthful) man, and the “mortal” soul.

  October 15, 1981. […] Yesterday, a most rewarding & fascinating seminar on Picture of Dorian Gray. I think it’s simply that I adore these students […] and I adore teaching…talking with them, comparing Wilde & Hemingway. […] Discussing French symbolists, Pater, Huysmans…. My elder-sisterly and/or maternal instincts toward these young people, the oldest of whom is about thirty. Next week, magisterial Nabokov.

  …Rewriting Crosswicks is absorbing but not unnerving. If I can stay with this for months and months, I can avoid the extraordinary tension that seems to overtake me, in writing something new and feeling, half-consciously, that I won’t live to “perfect” it…. Today the Nobel Prize was announced, but I don’t know who won, only who didn’t: rumor has it (rumor always has it!) Carlos [Fuentes] might win; or Nadine Gordimer; or Arthur Miller; or—but this was a fairly local rumor, by way of Richard Howard—JCO; and numberless others. This year, fortunately, I am spared the awkwardness of the AP news release, that I was “the leading contender.”*

  …Reading Alice James’s marvelous diary. “L’inertie de la bête devant l’irrevocable a presque toujours l’aspect du courage.”—So the inert & doubtless courageous Alice remarks of herself, & her various ailments. A magnificent voice, not unlike Flannery O’Connor. And how very queer, that I have already completed Adelaide Bayard’s diary chapters…and see in Alice’s acerbic voice a bit of Adelaide…. “I shall proclaim,” says Alice, “that anyone who spends her life as an appendage to five cushions and three shawls is justified in committing the sloppiest kind of suicide at a moment’s notice.”…Wonderful, how the ghostly & unfailingly amiable Harry appears in these pages. What might it have been like, or be like, to have so remarkable a brother!…I can’t share, of course, in Alice’s predilection for death and her fairly obscene glorying in growing “old” (when she is forty-one, she yearns to be sixty-one), but, how dear, how assertive, how sisterly and invaluable a voice: “I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn’t happen, I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and isolation which abides with me.”…“…scribbling at my notes and reading, [that I might clarify] the density and shape the formless mass within…. Life seems inconceivably rich.”

  October 23, 1981.…Solitude & rain & a melancholy-sweet landscape. Thinking of Conrad’s remark, “…one’s own personality is only a ridiculous and aimless masquerade of something hopelessly unknown.”

  …Person; personality; persona. But also Fate.

  …Crosswicks is a kind of diary of psychic states; a highly formalized journal, in code, of “something hopelessly unknown.” But, in some respects, it is certainly known.

  …My slight disappointment in Lolita. Which I had read, and reread, and probably reread again, over the years—since about 1960. The tedium of self-referential art, ultimately. The airlessness, myopia, over-evaluation of the Self, a curious sort of failure of imagination, at bottom. But many of the sentences—I should say, most—are brilliantly executed and, in a sense, that has become my primary requirement—at least, when little else is forthcoming.

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  Very much moved by Alice James, whom I am reading with delicious slowness. As if—I suppose it’s obvious: as if I don’t want the little diary to end WHICH IS TO SAY I don’t want Alice to die. Albeit she wants to die. But—.[…]

  …Poor Ray, with a strained tendon in his left knee…. P[ublishers] W[eekly] arrives, vulgar & satisfying: Bellefleur in paperback, returned for a third printing, now a remarkable 783,000 copies in print. Unfortunately there aren’t that many literate North Americans “in print.”…How lovely, to be at home all day; to be grounded by weather, and Ray’s knee; to dabble; to play at the piano; to actually yawn—it’s been so long.

  November 9, 1981.…Walking along Nassau Street in the glowering drizzly dusk, a long day accomplished (prowling about the house at 7 A.M., eager & restless to begin, & then a luncheon-meeting at Lahiere’s, our creative writing committee, & then my long class, & then conferences: my marvelous students […] I felt the privilege, the keenness, the exquisite good luck (for isn’t it at bottom sheerly that, luck?) of being alive; and of “walking along Nassau Street in the glowering drizzly dusk….” Being JCO can’t be an accident either. There are no accidents.

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  Thank God, the “gothic” is behind me. Or beneath me. I feel like Joyce’s classical artist, on high, filing my nails, reaching down at random (or nearly) to choose pages & sections to rewrite. Here, there, there, & there…! How marvelous, to have completed a novel of 800+ pages: and this particular novel: and not to have caved in midway.

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  November 24, 1981.…Can one be insomniac at 4:30 P.M.?…after two amazing nights…or was it three: the body’s mechanism bright & nervous & plotting & as filled with life as a fireworks display…alas, casting little light and no warmth. Hour upon hour upon hour…. Finally I gave up and read Jane Eyre for a while. But it’s tepid stuff after my lovely two weeks of basking in Wuthering Heights…. A profound “reading” experience, if that doesn’t sound too silly. And our intense discussion in my seminar; and my several days of agreeable exploratory work, assembling thou
ghts on the novel, writing an essay. (“The Magnanimity of Wuthering Heights.”)* Now I can’t determine whether it is that great novel I miss, or my own novel; or some other, unnamed novelty.

  …Have nearly completed revising The Crosswicks Horror. And the novel is certainly excluding me. Its “voice” seems so complete and private now…. My desire to relive the excitement (sometimes, the over-excitement) of that novel should be countered with the recollection of how much I yearned to be free of it! And now I am free, and feel my customary half-melancholia.

  …Remarkable days. I can’t say why: they seem simply dense with images, sensations, revelations. Last night I was “reading” Chopin’s nocturnes…and something on the life of George Eliot (unhappy Marian, writing to the priggish Spencer, “I would be very good and cheerful and never annoy you”—but he rejected her all the same), and trying to take notes for a new long novel (Mysteries of…. Or: The Adventures of…. I am thinking of a hero named Fergus Kilgarvan), and for a short story, to be called “On Not Being ‘Charley’ Stickney”…but the story’s focus simply won’t come. Hence my sense of being stalled; my purplish melancholia, headachy lethargy, the predicament of insomnia…insomnia at night & during the day…and, at the same time, a curious impatient indifference to such things. Who cares!

  […] Stalled. Balked. Stagnation. Insomnia all day. I feel like an immense rain-battered billboard…. In such queer pockets of the soul, the small pleasures of making dinner & reading in the evening, the two of us on the sofa, pressing together: Ray reading Delmore Schwartz, me reading Jane Eyre & DHL—these small pleasures loom gigantic. And then I wonder, does anything else ever matter?…The imagination is fertile and restless enough, electric-bright, insomnia-bright, but nothing shifts into focus. The process can’t be forced, as I know. And yet I insist upon trying to force it and feel exhausted as a consequence.

  December 1, 1981.…Finished & revised “The Victim,” a story that had been haunting me for some time:* the process of haunting, of “preying-upon,” being both theme and content of the story itself…. And the fact of divorce and loss and insomnia relates to my “loss” of The Crosswicks Horror, which I hadn’t altogether realized when I began writing the story.

  …Thus, constant turning-over & turmoil, in the psyche. What is art but the individual’s acknowledgment to the collective of both his individuality and his impersonality. As I suspect I am, as I “read” myself, so, I suspect, are others—countless others.

  …The exact arrangement of words. The precise incantation. As Philip Stearns says, What words, what are the words, the correct words—the perfect utterance?

  …So, the inner life, the life-in-language. Which sometimes distresses me (last Tuesday being a particularly headachy insomniac unsettled curious day, seemingly inhabited by someone other than myself ) but more generally, and more often, is utterly astounding. Mesmerizing. “Now we know why we live—!”

  …The outer life, busy & engaging & delightful & vari-colored. Teaching (today’s workshop went especially well: George Pitcher’s story about the derelict—based on a philosophy professor–acquaintance of his, dying on the Bowery: the value of the story residing in its secret connections to George himself, which I’m not altogether certain George comprehends)…. Yesterday we drove to NYC with the Showalters. Had a marvelous brunch at the Goldmans’ (Eleanor made an Italian omelet, we had croissants, smoked salmon, an apple dessert from the Morgenthaus’ Fishkill farm), Bob and Lucinda, Elaine and English, and afterward a visit to the Guggenheim to see the Costakis exhibit, Angelica Rudenstine’s project, all very rich, rewarding, various. […]

  …Thinking vaguely of the next big novel, the next ambitious undertaking. Mysteries of Winterthur. Lovely title at least. I envision a narrative voice at odds with the subject. I envisions lots of tales, interrelated. Winterthur, Winterthur, tales of winter, fables, yarns, legends, parables, surreal episodes, mysteries, mock-mysteries, a Gothic world overlaid with “detective-fiction” formalities. The psychic connections are almost clear. Fergus Kilgarvan (if that is his name—I’m not certain at the moment) is myself, in part; the inventor, the narrator, the detective in quest of solutions, the novelist working with stray clues. Working backward from the clues, the eruption of the crime into “public life,” trying to assemble a coherent narrative, a logical structure. Some slight parody of the novelist’s preoccupation, the detective’s obsession. But much is unclear. And I don’t want to hurry the genesis. […]

  December 10, 1981.…Retaining a sense of sin, while the hope for (& dread of ) salvation is long vanished.

  …Sunny wintry days. The idyll of (inner) loneliness. Are you depressed because you’ve finished your novel, Stephen [Koch] asked me this morning. Not depressed, I said, but dazed. What am I going to do with my life…?

  …Working on a short story in which I haven’t much faith. “Delia’s Adventures.”* The story makes me anxious because I know, but don’t know, precisely where it is going. Delia and her “early middle age.” Her lover Ian who isn’t her lover. The ominous “I.” And his shadow-self Paulie. A hellish triangle from which Delia must escape…. I see her passionately, running and stumbling along that downward path, in the lightly falling snow; I can virtually hear her shouting silent voice. But the tension between what I know and what I can communicate is considerable.

  …A “melancholic seriousness” characterized my responses to Stephen Koch’s questions at the Columbia seminar, last spring. But I had imagined I was so jocular and witty and good-humored!

  …“The will is the strong blind man who carries on his shoulders the lame blind man who can see.” Schopenhauer. Smug in his despair.

  …Teaching from 1:30 until 4:30 yesterday. And might have continued for another hour or two. The peculiar thing is, I began the semester by being exhausted by these long sessions; with each class meeting I seem to have adapted a little more; and now—now that the semester is over!—I am perfectly at ease, and in fact enjoy the seminars immensely. What ineffable pleasure, which cannot be repeated often enough, the simple task of “teaching” a masterpiece to interested, bright, and congenial young (or not so young) people—!

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  December 16, 1981.…Crosswicks mailed off; A Bloodsmoor Romance reread, and various changes (mainly cuts & trimming) attended to; last night a most romantic blizzard and this morning a splendid dazzling snow-blinding landscape (the colors before me are white, white, white, and evergreen-green, and a sun-bronzed brown, and the “pellucid” blue sky, and dozens of red berries on the holly tree); and my great immense relief verging on actual elation, that I have struck upon the kind of “narrative” I seem to require at the present time, in writing, yet not writing, about certain subjects.

  …Prose poems. The looseness of the structure. To instruct myself not to plan ahead. Not to construct those elaborate clockwork mechanisms. Not to allow myself to think very much about Mysteries of Winterthur. (Shall I confess, these past two weeks or so have been quite difficult…reading “mysteries,” “murders,” “crimes of high life,” etc…. distressing and repulsive…like having a container of trash dumped over one’s head…. And in any case I am not ready to begin this new novel. I may not be ready for a long time.)…In place of the tight clockwork plot of the long novels, no plot at all; the “buried plot” of daily and nightly life. My task is to explore each phase of my mental existence with an eye toward objectifying it (as in “The Wren’s Hunger”);* and there is the undeniable pleasure of the chiseling of language, paring back, always back, to get everything into a page or two…. My dissatisfaction with certain elements of short stories. Though I love to read them; and still get some satisfaction (however intermittent) from writing them.

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  December 23, 1981.…Pleasures of revising. (“Funland.”)* Pleasures of reading a novel so incontestably great, it hasn’t any aura of a quality so tedious & self-conscious as “greatness.” (Don Quixote, the Cohen translation.) What delight, an almost vertiginous delight, to discover
in that early seventeenth-century novel a Post-Modernist masterpiece. (I capitalize “Post-Modernist” to suggest the priggish self-importance of the practitioners of that “movement” and their obsequious critics.) Lovely, simply & sheerly lovely, the experience of reading it, of sounding the words in my head, & lying in bed late last night (our nights are later & later—we are in the midst of the Princeton party season) I began to laugh aloud at something I recalled between D.Q. and S.P. Surely one of the fantastical delights of Don Quixote is the parodied narrative “strategy.” How to tell a story: you see, says Cervantes, there are various ways, and I have mastered them all. (Or nearly.) What interests me greatly regarding the novel is of course my experience in reading it, over and above the wonders of the novel itself. (Only 900+ pages long! And I have read 200+ so far! I want to drag my heels, read as slowly as possible, it’s the sensation I have at the end of writing a novel, nearing the end, for months I’ve been driven, besotted, anxious, groping, wanting only freedom, and now…and now…will I be granted this precious “freedom” and find it…utterly vacuous? So too in reading a novel of the greatness of Don Quixote. The solution would be, to simply read it forever. Already I anticipate the ending, I know in outline how it must end, Quixote’s death, and I wonder if it is an ending I can accommodate.)

  …The curiosities of “freedom.” The freedom of certain persons of my acquaintance is actually a kind of higher idleness: but is this wrong? is this contemptible? is this unhealthy, unhuman? I sit in the University chapel, the combined Princeton high school choirs & orchestras are giving their Christmas concert, a piece by Palestrina of heartstopping beauty (sung by the mixed choir, in the balcony at the rear—Vinca Showalter one of the singers), another haunting piece by Britten…. The contentment of the moment, when the moment is given over to such beauty. I go to the piano at the far end of the living room, everything is ablaze with sunlight, the woods denuded of leaves & the winter sun consequently glaring in, the snow’s reflection, etc., I depress a single key of the piano and feel…what?…an ineffable delicious sense of…the rightness, the precision, the…the pleasure of (I suppose) SIMPLY DEPRESSING A PIANO KEY. And then a chord, several chords, a scale with many flats, some Bach, some Chopin, something out of the exercise book…. The intoxication of the moment. The privilege of such intoxication. Running up to the chapel last night (we were almost late, Ray was parking the car, the Show-alters were saving us seats) I felt almost with alarm how marvelous it was to run, again, not having had much exercise (as a consequence of the weather) for weeks…. Why, I think, I must run everywhere! Tomorrow morning! Everywhere! And now it’s a sunny not-cold morning nearing noon and I haven’t ventured out of the house, a combination of laziness & work at my desk (which often comes to the same thing)…though the winter days are so soon eclips’d…. This afternoon, late, a cocktail party at the Bromberts’. For which they have, I don’t doubt, cast a very wide net. I shall wear my blue crushed velvet dress…my gold jewelry…my jade ring, set in gold…. But already the sense of distraction & bemusement will have set in, though I’ve finished and mailed out this new story (which I like immensely—though the first draft upset me for its obtuseness & lack of grace—) only today…. End-of-year melancholy, where is it? I miss it! Even the days have been so relentlessly sunny, one doesn’t mind dusk at 5 P.M. To live forever like this…Ray so sweetly companionable, head abuzz with plans for the press; friends yesterday & the day before & tomorrow & tonight; the Horror safely concluded, I hope forever; no new long tyrannical project begun.