The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (15 page)

“All the Good People I’ve Left Behind.” Was there ever so banal an idea, so inevitable an idea, yet so strangely irresistible (to me)…? I wasn’t a married graduate student in Ann Arbor in the 60’s and Ray and I didn’t live in married students’ housing and we didn’t have a couple we were close to…and our lives subsequently have turned out far different from the lives the story investigates. Why then do I feel such an intensity of emotion for the two couples? It’s peculiar. I know that such people lived and are living still and perhaps it’s the gradual working-out of their separate fates that entrances me…. The subtle defeats and enlargements, the surprises (which we know in advance but they don’t know), the paradoxes, ironies, qualified triumphs…. To realize that life happens to oneself and not just to other people—! That a kind of pattern appears, inevitably—!

“We are not the readers but the very personages of the world drama.” Wm. James.
^§

May 7, 1976.
…That knowledge comes primarily through the senses in an empirical way; that it arises (somehow) inside the mind, the structure of the mind: extroversion, introversion, a pendulum that swings
ceaselessly. Robert Bly’s essay on the awakening of the senses in poetry, the discovery of the shadow (the Jungian shadow, obviously): seems to assume that an acknowledgment of the shadow necessarily makes a person better, more liberal. But why? Perhaps the average human being isn’t “good” or even very nice. Why must we assume he should be decent and then, reacting against his shortcomings, condemn him? People are not flawed, it’s the idea that they are flawed that is mistaken.

My idealism never really evaporates. I am still as naïve as I was years ago, despite the “evidence of the senses.” Idealism leads to revelation and to despair. One must not, dare not, be an idealist. Better realism, whatever that means. A healthily skeptical vision of mankind’s possibilities.

The idealist believes he should see ideals and ends by actually seeing them—and not seeing the ordinary men and women around him. Hence the Orient’s holy men & their visions of the One; the perfect Buddha mind; a vast galaxy into which sufferings & imperfections are tossed. A kind of indifference, contempt for what exists. Cynicism. But its outward face is benign & holy.

Working on “All the Good People I’ve Left Behind.” Given energy by the knowledge that the story or novella isn’t “one of my best.”

The gradual immunity of life. Growing older, we grow apart from raw emotions because we’ve experienced them before.[…]

Leaving tomorrow for my parents’, then to NYC to stay with Evelyn. Poetry reading Monday evening. Then: freedom to explore New York. Our favorite city. The only city.

May 20, 1976.
…A totally enjoyable, many-faceted visit to New York City. The undeniable attraction of that city: its pulse, atmosphere, people. (NYC is much maligned by the rest of the country out of resentment, one suspects. There is only one city in the United States and the others are envious.) Visited with my parents and my brother Fred and
sister-in-law Nancy on the way down; drove through central & southern New York State on a Sunday, to Evelyn’s on Central Park West; stayed there until the following Saturday.

Innumerable impressions….

Evelyn Shrifte a wonderful, hospitable person; what might have become of me, if I hadn’t been taken up by Vanguard? I am grateful for the personal attention I’ve received there and don’t take it for granted. Warm, friendly people, always approachable. And Evelyn is highly intelligent. (Her apartment is a strange place. About ten rooms on the tenth floor of a handsome aging building—135 Central Park West—grown quite shabby over the years. The living room is attractive enough, with a marvelous view of the park and the city skyline (especially beautiful at night). Elsewhere there are water-stains on the windowsills and the ceiling, the plumbing is ancient, the bathroom not very clean, the guest-rooms rather dusty, unheated, sad, strange, old. A depressing place in wet or overcast weather.) […] Ray and I like Evelyn very much, I feel a deep, strong affection for her, which would be very difficult to articulate, but staying at her apartment does have its negative sides; but it’s absurd to be critical, after all. Much of NYC is run-down. Even affluent people live rather crudely in certain respects.

Our first evening, we walked in the mid-town area, down to about 53rd St., and back to the apartment. Had dinner on 57th St. near Carnegie Hall, a small Italian restaurant. Our great joy at being in NYC together again. Such a sense of romance…! Holding hands, looking in store windows. Indefatigable. (Which is fortunate since we walked innumerable miles in the next several days.)

[…]

George Plimpton took me to lunch.
Paris Review
interview (done by Bob Phillips). Scheduled when—? Not for years, I suspect.
*
George P’s apartment on the East River, 72nd St., very handsome, congenial. Windows on
all sides. Books. In one room a large pool table. (Which I could do without, of course.) His daughter came in, a pretty six-year-old, asked if they could go bicycling, he said they’d go later in the afternoon since he needed to do some shopping. (Charming aspects of NYC life—a man of Plimpton’s age and stature going shopping on a bicycle.) Lunch at a crowded and popular restaurant on Lexington & 75th. One is impressed with the physical attractiveness of many New Yorkers—it is only surface, perhaps, but it is at least surface…. The
Paris Review
’s distinguished past. So many marvelous interviews: the most recent being James Dickey. (Rather reckless in his derogatory remarks about other poets.) A sense of tradition, continuity, a fearful sense of…what?…being drawn up in a stream of writers, an impersonal ceaseless stream. Being good copy…. Liked George Plimpton and his managing editor Molly very much. My old friend Bob Phillips friendly as always.

[…]

Afterward, we met Ray at the Guggenheim. From there, strolling along Madison Ave. Looked in galleries—almost bought a small Pissaro (Jean-Paul, that is) priced at $4800; seemed rather high. Saw Carol Anthony’s show of small life-mocking forms—eerie creations, almost alive; parodies of a certain kind of small-town American life of the recent past. Very imaginative, successful…. Saw David Holmes’s beautiful, melancholy paintings of rural America at a gallery on, I think, East 57th (?); would have loved to buy a painting but they were rather expensive also—$7800—barns, steeples, fields, old decaying houses. Wyeth-like, yet finally quite different…. Visited galleries in SoHo as well; but they were disappointing. Aggressively amateurish avant-garde art, not very original. On Friday, we went to the Kennedy Galleries on 57th St. & bought a lithograph by Leonard Baskin and another by a French artist named Minaux. Had wanted a Ben Shahn but those that were outstanding were very expensive ($20,000) and those we could afford weren’t quite so appealing.

[…]

(I am writing this quickly and recklessly because I really want to return to my novella, “All the Good People….” It’s going along well enough, with a few small pleasant surprises, a decidedly minor work, for that reason
satisfying; but I can’t seem to get to it. Returned from NYC to the usual small mountains of letters, many of which must be answered at once. Among them John Martin’s queries about
Spider Monkey
.)

[…]

Donald Barthelme took Ray and me to lunch at Hopper’s, 6th Ave. & 11th St., then to his apartment nearby. He is high-spirited, sharp, intelligent, perhaps a little domineering—though in a charming way. Enjoys drinking. (Thank God Ray was along; I would have disappointed him.) When I said I thought I’d seen
City Life
on the best-seller list once he immediately flared up, denied it, bet me $100 (wisely I declined the bet), called his editor Roger Straus at once & made me talk to the man, in order to be told that Barthelme had never had a best-seller, no, not once. (He seemed unnecessarily concerned with money matters. Is it just alimony, or something else—? Perhaps he thinks I make money on my writing!) In all, Barthelme strikes me as a most charming, in a way haunting person. I keep thinking of him. Why…? He doesn’t care for my writing, nor do I care for his, in general. But that seems in a way insignificant. He & I are colleagues of a sort; inexplicable. Perhaps we’ll meet again.

Lovely afternoon with Gail Godwin & Robert Starer at their rented house in Stone Ridge. Pastoral; good conversation; warm & lively people. What riches the human world offers—the “bright peopled world” beyond Windsor. Home now, we are a little homesick for there. Beyond Windsor.

[…]

Donald Barthelme is evidently trying to establish a kind of literary community. He seems to want people to meet, to become friendly. “You should meet Susan Sontag,” he said. “You’d like her.” No doubt, but she wouldn’t like me.
*
…The Morgans want me to meet John Simon, who is (of course) “not so bad as he seems.”
^†
Why, no one could be…! And I never
did call Lillian Hellman, as I knew beforehand I wouldn’t, out of timidity; and she seemed so friendly to me last year.

Writing isn’t so lonely as people commonly think, especially not the writing of poetry. And the reading of it—! A marvelous communal experience. Sheer enjoyment. Words are meant to draw us together, after all. Published words are no longer private creations. Using the language, we are immediately related to everyone else who has used the language; we are no longer isolated. (And what a beautiful language it is, English…Wonderful fluid miraculous bits of sound transformed into meanings, the miracle of all languages: how on earth is it possible? I glance over the page of words and marvel at it. I did not create this. What god presided over the birth of language in our brains…? There is no true isolation, then, so long as one has language…. )

[…]

May 24, 1976.
[…] Finished “All the Good People I’ve Left Behind” tonight. 104 pages, a surprise. Could have been longer. In the end I became rather attached to these characters, especially Fern. Bits & pieces of myself everywhere.

[…]

May 26, 1976.
…Rereading a few earlier entries in this journal.

I am struck by the general tone of “otherness”…of an alien sensibility. I write these entries, of course, but the “I” isn’t recognizable.

[…]

Does anything I write ever represent me….

It is a continuous but not necessarily evolving process. I feel myself at the center of a multitude of “selves,” of voices. I can be anyone, I can say anything, I can believe literally anything. Whatever lends itself to belief…on the realistic or mythical level…how can one resist? I can’t help honoring the naivete of others by accepting their inclinations, if not their beliefs in fact. The truth is that I believe nothing: which is to say, everything.

I believe in the believers. They are, after all, irrefutably true.

[…]

May 28, 1976.
…Vanguard re.
Childwold
when I spoke of it as being a kind of prose poem: “But we mustn’t say that!”

Have begun thinking of
Son of the Morning
again but can’t possibly start writing for a while. Too much to sift through, too much to absorb. Nathan’s physical self isn’t yet clear. I want to express such very intimate feelings and thoughts in this novel…seek analogies for experiences…and…and a great deal more: everything. The flight upward, the plunge downward, the suspension & sinking into human life. So much…. I should structure this as a large ambitious novel like
The Assassins
but it seems to be demanding a briefer, more poetic shape. (Not another prose poem, Vanguard would cry. I suppose I can’t blame them since
Childwold
is hardly commercial…. No, I don’t blame them. No one owes a writer anything; publishers are not meant to coddle us, to be condescending or charitable toward us.)

No appetite today. Woke feeling…feeling what?…lazy, listless, slightly disgusted. (With what?) Each summer a reaction against the mild ceaseless predictable idyllic character of our days. A pastoral life: just outside this window, shrubs filled with warblers. Even a hummingbird. Ray is working on his Churchill manuscript
*
& the magazine. (The magazine is disappointingly slow in coming from the printers out in Victoria. We wait, and wait, and wait. Promised for early May…now it’s May 28 and the issue still hasn’t arrived. Perhaps it’s partly this that discourages me.)

A slight sense of dread. For what reason…? Last night, thinking or half-dreaming of some private catastrophe. We must assume something will happen someday to destroy our idyllic lives. Our life. It’s possible that no
two people have had so satisfactory a marriage or relationship as we have…which makes it…which introduces the…

???

Remember now a possible cause of my disgust. Skimming through Capote’s “Answered Prayers” in
Esquire
yesterday. What surprised me was Capote’s style, so pedestrian in the story, so flat and…unmagical…ordinary…skimmable. I had been impressed with
In Cold Blood
. But his more intimate voice is prosaic, reductive, empty, ultimately a little silly. Not the ornate self-consciousness of a Humbert Humbert, for instance, or the passionate self-loathing of Dostoyevsky’s underground man; not even the quickness of Roth’s characters contemplating themselves. All so empty, banal. The roman à clef nature of the work doesn’t bother me as much: I assume the real Katherine Anne Porter was quite different, the real Tennessee Wms., etc., and Capote has simply used look-alikes for his fiction. But he shouldn’t compare himself to Proust, who writes so beautifully. “Answered Prayers” (which I keep wanting to type as “Unanswered Prayers”) is barely mediocre as a narrative…. Capote presents himself in a strange way. Self-loathing yet a certain measure of pride. Others, like Gore Vidal, have commented on Capote’s youthful comic appearance but he seems to have felt he was attractive. His cruelty, self-promoting, egotism: as qualities in a fictional character they don’t seem so excessive. One reacts more passionately against virtue…especially in a journal of the kind I am writing. (Unlike Capote I have nothing to confess. And I feel nothing much about that state of affairs—neither satisfaction nor embarrassment. Nor do I intend to apologize.)