The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (21 page)
Read The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates Online
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
One wonders what the next liberation can possibly be. People talking openly of their greed, their jealousy, their spite, their inferiority…? Their pettiness? Silliness?
[…]
Looking back over my own career, the odd objectivity, the detachment now possible. In terms of both professional and private life. Is it the case that a writer simply spends more time than most people in contemplation or meditation…? Hence the world is mysterious, never at rest, always opening to new and unexpected revelations. The past too yields revelations. To re-enter the past and re-imagine it from another viewpoint…. Nathan’s celibacy, his puritanical commitment to his work. It was Donald Dike,
†
and possibly another professor, who told me I shouldn’t go to graduate school but should return home and concentrate on my writing. Only think, if I had followed their advice—! A monastic life. A too-intense,
too-feverish life in the imagination, to the exclusion of a life in society. There wasn’t much chance of my following that advice because I had no inclination toward the Flaubertian ideal…but if I had….
[…]
December 5, 1976.
…Reached of the novel, the end of Part III. The end of the novel per se. Now the epilogue of sorts,
The Sepulchre
. In which Nathan Vickery returns to the sphere of the human, through a relationship with a woman, and the “washing in the Blood of the Lamb” in its witty denouement. A considerable feat…the novel mesmerizing, utterly consuming…practically every minute for the past several months is spent either in it, or near it, in silent contemplation of it…! How marvelous, to have imagined a living metaphor for what one is actually doing
at the moment of doing it
. For Nathan’s obsession with God is my own obsession with the novel, with him and God both. And so I not only sympathize with him, I
am
him…. How will I survive the completion of the work, then!
Does my studied and protracted life of normality compensate an interior wilderness…does it disguise an other-than-normal imagination? Perhaps so; but I don’t
feel
it. The “I” that is in charge can move effortlessly from one sphere to the other, one language to another. Tending the wild creatures who might at any time turn against me, and stepping through a doorway into a pleasant, sunny, airy home (this very house in fact) with hardly a memory of that other world. This, it seems to me, is normality. And is the normal human condition.
[…]
Does a normal, ordered, tidy life compensate an interior life of the bizarre, the flamboyantly imaginative? Perhaps, perhaps. Who can tell. We inhabit a world of ostensibly closed surfaces which, nevertheless, can slide open at any moment, like panels in a wall. We can’t anticipate the sliding-open, the revelation, but we can have faith in it.
Jung speaks of the fright of being seized in the grip of the “living god.” The direct experience of the archetypes, which usually come to us filtered through consciousness and through tradition. Hence the archetype of Je
sus Christ in our culture sucks into it individual “archetypes” of the Savior, which otherwise would jam the airways and make civilization impossible. This is an attractive theory; who can know if it’s accurate or not…?
[…]
December 6, 1976.
In
Son of the Morning
I seem to have been exploring certain obsessions of my own, and certain possibilities. The draining-away of the personal into the impersonal; the loss of “concrete, finite” life for the sake of one’s goal or mission or art. Is this a danger, in fact, for all human beings? The sacrifice of one’s personal life in favor of an abstract, collective good. (Which of course exists very precariously.) Religion…politics…the frenzy of sacrifice…too much “love” forced down others’ throats…as destructive in a way as explicitly destructive behavior.
The Bible as poetry is haunting, and heartbreakingly beautiful. The Bible as a guide for moral conduct, or (god save us!) as history: almost worthless. For it’s jumbled, scrambled, rather demented, a cacophony. When I finish this novel I doubt that I’ll even glance at it again for many, many years.
[…]
December 7, 1976.
…Approaching the completion of the first draft. Only three more chapters to write, each of them short. A queer, dismaying, rather upsetting novel; by no means so programmatic as I had originally intended. It goes its own way now, squirming loose of the design…. Yet nothing at all like Joan Didion’s description of her experience of writing (re.
A Book of Common Prayer
, where she seems to have begun with a visual image, an airport, and put a woman into it, and described the woman, and branched out to include other characters and eventually the novel itself: amazing! But far too unstructured for my temperament.)
Some excellent classes at the University these days. An enjoyable class, like an enjoyable party, is an existential experience that can’t be retained, and can’t even be described afterward. Discussion of
Crime and
Punishment
. And of Lawrence’s short stories. My sense this year of the students’ involvement in their work, the graduate students especially.
[…]
December 13, 1976.
…Taking notes for another novel, a slighter & more domestic sort, The Game of——; or Funerals & Weddings.
*
Centered around games. What began a while ago as an interest in Lewis Carroll seems to have branched out into an interest in a small circle of friends who play “games” with one another. […] An ideal setting for The Game would be New York City, the area where I’ll be living this summer. Unfortunately I won’t be going there for another six months. & the novel will probably get under way before then….
Thinking of
Son of the Morning
w/some excitement, last night found it difficult to get to sleep, obviously I miss Nathan already and the highly-charged
significant
world in which he moved. A kind of magical, taboo’d world where the least gesture is important because it is ordained by God. So long as Nathan is “divine” he can’t be anything else but swallowed up in
otherness
…. My instinct is to write & rewrite countless pages. To insert new sections. Given the structure I have fleshing-out would be a delight; but I have to curb the instinct or the novel will swell out of proportion. Ah well: there are other things to contemplate, after all.
[…]
December 14, 1976.
[…] What a great abyss of time! Freedom! Despite the fact that tomorrow at 9
A.M
. I give an exam and will have eighty-five papers to sort through and grade, and the class list to prepare. Yet my mind is free, freely floating about, nothing seems inevitable, nothing that must be done. Should write a story, I think…more poems…everything has been shoved aside for months…neglected…. I don’t want to plunge into another novel so soon, or even to begin taking notes; I want this period of aimlessness to continue…. One by one the wraiths appear…appear & disappear…the universe in a process of
dissemble-ment…reassemblement…everything shuffled & thrown down & begun anew. Shedding one’s skin, snake-like. (Or eel-like, to use a metaphor from
Son of the Morning
.) The relief of having explored certain vexing questions & answering them, to some extent…. WHY AM I SO REASONABLE, SO EVERLASTINGLY SANE. WHY AM I SO PLACID. The nugget blossoming at the heart of, the brain of, the conscious universe. Stimulating a radical re-arrangement. And the extraordinary chaos of one’s dreams at such times….
*
The “superficial satires” to which Oates refers are the stories collected in
The Hungry Ghosts: Seven Allusive Comedies
(Black Sparrow Press, 1974).
*
This essay appeared in the summer 1976 issue of
Critical Inquiry
and was collected in
Contraries: Essays
.
*
Patricia Burnett was one of Oates’s Detroit-area friends.
*
Frederic Oates (1914–2000) and Carolina Oates (1917–2003).
†
Oates’s story “The Giant Woman” had appeared in the winter 1976 issue of
Kansas Quarterly
and was collected in
Night-Side
.
*
Tanner’s review, “Panic Stations,” had appeared in the March 12, 1976, issue of the
New Statesman
.
*
This is the journal’s first reference to
Son of the Morning
, a novel that Vanguard would publish in 1978.
*
This poem, retitled “Abandoned Airfield, 1977,” was published as a broadside by Lord John Press in 1977 and was included in Oates’s collections
Women Whose Life Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money
and
Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems 1970
–
1982
. It was dedicated to her father, Frederic Oates.
†
Betsey Hansell, an artist, was one of Oates’s Detroit-area friends.
*
Miguel Rodriguez was one of Oates’s former graduate students at the University of Windsor.
†
Lois Smedick was a University of Windsor colleague.
‡
“All the Good People I’ve Left Behind” was the title novella of Oates’s collection published by Black Sparrow Press in 1979.
§
Oates had used this quotation from the American philosopher William James (1842–1910) as an epigraph for her novel
Childwold
.
*
The interview appeared in the fall–winter 1978 issue of
Paris Review
.
*
Oates and Sontag did later become friendly acquaintances.
†
The Morgans were Fred Morgan and Paula Dietz, editors of the New York–based
Hudson Review
.
*
Smith, a scholar of eighteenth-century British literature, was completing a study of the satiric poet Charles Churchill (1731–64).
*
This poem appeared in the September–October issue of
American Poetry Review
and in the collection
Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money
(Louisiana State University Press, 1978).
*
This poem appeared in three of Oates’s poetry collections:
Season of Peril
(Black Sparrow Press, 1977);
Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money
; and
Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems, 1970–1982
(Ontario Review Press, 1982).
†
Oates’s third novel,
Expensive People
, had appeared in 1968 from Vanguard.
‡
Brother and sister, Jules and Maureen Wendall were major characters in
them
(Vanguard, 1969).
*
Daniel Hoffman’s critical study on Edgar Allan Poe,
Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe
, had been published in 1972 by Doubleday.
†
This poem appeared in the spring 1978 issue of
Missouri Review
and was reprinted in
Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money
.
‡
Elizabeth Graham and her husband, Jim, lived in an affluent suburb of Detroit.
*
Joe David Bellamy’s “The Dark Lady of American Letters: An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates” had appeared in the February 1972 issue of
The Atlantic
.
*
This story appeared in the literary magazine
Exile
, vol. 5, i–ii, 1977.
*
Thomas Mann’s
Confessions of Felix Krull: Confidence Man
had originally been published in 1954.
*
Oates’s uncollected story “Expressway” appeared in the spring–summer 1978 issue of
California Quarterly
.
†
Oates’s first novel, published by Vanguard in 1964, had dealt in part with the world of stock-car racing.
*
Oates’s uncollected story “The Mime” appeared in the January 1978 issue of
Penthouse
.
*
Oates’s younger sister, Lynn Oates, was severely autistic, and was institutionalized as a teenager.
*
Updike’s first novel,
The Poorhouse Fair
, had been published in 1959 by Knopf; his novel
Marry Me
appeared in 1976, also from Knopf.
†
Oates had published an anthology called
Scenes from American Life: Contemporary Short Fiction
with Random House in 1973. Updike was, of course, already a distinguished literary critic; his collection of essays and reviews,
Picked-Up Pieces
, had been published by Knopf in 1975.
*
Anne Tyler’s review, entitled “Fiction—Trouble,” had appeared in the July 18, 1976, issue of the
New York Times Book Review
.
*
After Oates and Smith’s Detroit house had been broken into, she had published a story (uncollected) called “The Thief” in the September 1966 issue of
North American Review
.
*
This poem never appeared in a magazine but Oates included it in
Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money
.
