The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (35 page)

…Kurt Vonnegut, walking out of the conference when Fedorenko spoke of the dissident writers as ordinary criminals. “Why do you Americans want to tell us what to do?” he asked in his calm, reasonable, steely voice. “Why do you even want to tell other people what to do….” I was tempted to leave also. But of course I wouldn’t: the other Soviet delegates were so congenial. (Except perhaps for Felix Kusnetsov, a high-ranking official in the Moscow Writers’ Union.) Politics, diplomacy vs. literature, literary people. Odd. Tiring. Yet I rather liked the several days of the conference and suspect that I will remember them for a very long time.

[…]

May 3, 1978.
…Working on “Détente,” which goes slowly despite my emotional involvement.
*
The other day I was lying on the bed with a headache, still baffled, befuddled, by my experience w/the Russians…. At heart it’s an old, elemental paradox: how can people whom you like, for whom you feel actual affection (as I felt for Yassen, without doubt), not be people of whom you approve…. How can you
like
someone who is, or might easily be, repressive, cruel, even murderous…. (I keep hearing Yassen say that the “dissidents” aren’t really writers, that they are involved
in “anti-Soviet”—i.e., illegal—activities.) Perhaps because I want the story to solve these paradoxes for me it goes slowly, very slowly. Also, to put it mildly, I have many distractions.

For instance: warblers just outside this window. Flitting about in the berry bushes. A myrtle warbler…what looks like a Canada warbler…. Also, earlier, there were cedar waxwings. And, yesterday, a vigorous bright thrasher kicking about in the leaves beneath the bushes. And two black squirrels nearby.

…Have been going for long walks. Grateful for sunshine, spring, despite the incessant northwest wind. Flowers are out: forsythia, tulips, daffodils, jonquils, hyacinth. Lovely time of year. Changeable skies, however: as changeable (to use Simon Dedalus’s expression) as a baby’s bottom.

[…]

…The new issue of
Ontario Review
is out! Beautiful cover, graphics by George O’Connell. Fiction by Anne Copeland, Gene [McNamara], Greg Johnson, poetry by Tess Gallagher, who is so fine, and Barry Callaghan, etc., etc. We’re both quite pleased with the issue; Ray has been receiving compliments….

[…]

…Wrote “Forgetful America”
*
…looking through innumerable notes from the Conference…sifting impressions through my mind again, again, again. Meeting with the Russians has certainly made a strange impact on me and I don’t think I’m able, really, to gauge it…. Also, meeting Edward Albee and liking him…and Elizabeth Hardwick, and liking
her
…and Styron, William Jay Smith, Arthur Miller, Harrison Salisbury, Kurt Vonnegut…. The contrast between reputation and image, and the individual himself. Always dramatic. Though I know as well as anyone the distortions of the image yet I am surprised, nevertheless, when people turn out (as they most often do) to be so warm, congenial, reasonable, likeable…even lovable. (Jill Krementz said that Kurt came home and told her
about meeting me: “But she’s so nice!” Which indicates, doesn’t it, that he had expected someone quite different…?)

May 7, 1978.
…Working on “Détente.” Most of it is completed; now I am rewriting scenes, pages. The experience of writing the story was almost as profound as the experience of certain intense moments of the conference itself. Though sometimes more profound, since Vassily was closer to Antonia, emotionally, than Yassen to me. And the “infatuation” that was so touching was Mykolas Sluckis’s for me, not Yassen’s—Yassen not being quite so demonstrative. But I felt very little for Mykolas…it was more embarrassing than flattering, and a bit of a nuisance, particularly at the Doubleday dinner where I was stuck with him, and Felix K., neither of whom speak English.

[…]

The long walk w/Yassen, conversation about American culture, thinly veiled dialogue about America, Russia. In the background, on all sides, like a movie set, the sunny variety of Central Park…. You must come visit us in Windsor, I said, and he said with an embarrassed smile, Our government and the Canadian government are not friendly these days…. (Incident of a spy ring, rather clumsy spies too, in Ottawa; the Ambassador among them; evidently a friend of Yassen’s.) Yassen wanted to interview me in one of our hotel rooms; Ray objected; I said to him, Yassen is too old to be thinking of such things—whereupon Ray said angrily (and I suppose not unreasonably): “He’s only a year older than I am!”

[…]

May 10, 1978.
…Have condensed all of the Preludes, that hopelessly ambitious project, into one single poem. One single poem, after all the planning!
*

Still, it’s a solid poem, I like it well enough, I can’t make it any better. I have such a
headache
from this poem, and from the past two hours at the piano, going through again and again the E-minor Nocturne, hearing it as it should be played and as I am forced to play it….

[…]

“Prelude.” Tall coffin. Chopin. Valdemosta. His relationship w/George Sand interests me not at all: garish and improbable and mad. But not really interesting. Not as art.
His
art is the only reality. Hers was craftsmanship of a sort (so I gather, I haven’t read her novels), directed toward a definite end, that of making money; his was art, and therefore impersonal. How the Preludes were composed is fascinating, of course—the bizarre circumstances, Chopin’s ill health, etc.—but ultimately irrelevant. If they had been composed in a comfortable drawing-room by a man in excellent health they would be no less prodigious.

My brief poem “Prelude.” Chopin’s imagined voice. Not much but all I have to “set against the tall coffin.”…There are times when one feels close to drowning in the mystery of life itself. Why, why!—I can’t explain. I am so deeply touched by the music I’ve been struggling with and by this poem and by Chopin’s genius…. That he was as frail as I, and even weighed a bit less, makes the mystery all the more profound.

…Reviews and criticism: to avoid. Nevertheless I opened the Spring 1978
Virginia Quarterly Review
to read this amazing review (in its entirety): “One of the great contemporary literary giants of North America, who has previously intrigued us with her novels, plays, critical essays, and poetry, has now successfully turned her imaginative pen to the realm of the short story. This anthology is a haunting collection of 18 separate gems, each of which deals with that eerie borderland between reality and the paranormal. It seems almost unfair for one person to have such a rich and diverse talent.” (
Night-Side
)

Literary giant! Now turned her hand to the short story! My God.

…Taking notes for Kristin’s novella.
*
The kidnapping & death of Moro, reported coincidentally. I had originally wanted, some months ago, to do this story by way of a man who assassinates someone like Mayor Daley; odd how it’s evolved. Can I be sure it’s for the best?…Kristin, an un
likely assassin. But I need to get close to her, I need to get inside her. So far she resists me.

Working outside, planting seeds. Ray has spaded up the rose garden and it looks marvelous…. Warblers in the bushes; cedar waxwings. Catbird this morning briefly. Went for a long sunny windy walk, feeling quite good. With “Détente” off in the mail I feel airy and free and unpremeditated.

May 12, 1978.
[…] Yesterday, home alone for many hours, thinking very intensely. Very intensely. One feels almost a thrill of panic at the prospect of what might await…in utter isolation. I have all I can do to contend with the images that rush forth, in the fullness and complexity of my ordinary days.

…The fascination of the doll’s house. Leaning over it. Roofless. One wall missing. A crude psychoanalytic approach would destroy the story which I want to be a parable, not a narrowly psychological work.
*

[…]

May 20, 1978.
Princeton. Long walk through campus.

Looked at houses (rentals) w/charming Willa Stackpole of Calloway Realtors. Depressing. One tacky, crowded place for $650; another, for the same price, owned by an egocentric professor of geology w/a grizzled beard and an awfully young, subdued wife. (He said he’d lock his “rare books” up. Seemed doubtful about us, as if he suspected we had never seen books before.)

Decided suddenly to buy a house instead of renting.

Met Richard Trenner, who befriended me by mail. Dark-haired, w/glasses, tall, attractive, about twenty-two or twenty-three, uncannily close to the person I had envisioned. How very odd…. He will be entering the doctoral program at Columbia this fall.

Dinner at Renee and Ted Weiss’s, on lovely Haslet Ave. Neighbors of Joseph Frank. Bill and Dorothy Humphrey the other guests—seemed rather hypercritical—possibly due to Bill’s relative lack of recognition as a novelist. A very pleasant evening, however. Renee is pretty, funny, warm, intelligent…Ted is extremely witty, and sweet…. Their mahogany-haired cat Hoppy is twenty yrs. old.

Exhausted by the end of this long, long day….

May 21, 1978.
Taken through five houses, the most expensive (a lovely small farm outside Princeton) priced at $210,000, each very attractive in its own way. As soon as we saw the house on Honey Brook Drive we wanted it, despite the ludicrous name…. Owned by John Hunt, a director for the Institute for Advanced Study. A beautiful house, difficult to describe. Asking $163,000, which seems reasonable in this inflated market. Glass walls, modular ceiling, an atrium-courtyard, a flagstone terrace, brook and pond, innumerable trees…an elegant atmosphere altogether. Good setting for art.

Met the French poet Pierre Emmanuel, a house-guest of the Hunts (who said they “recognized” me).

Decided to buy the Honey Brook Drive house. The closing will be Sept. 1…. A delightful place to live in & furnish. Clear, clean lines, much space, airiness, light…. It isn’t unlike our Windsor house, in fact, which is probably why we bought it.

[…]

May 28, 1978.
…Two very young baby birds fell out of a nest high in the evergreens; one was already dead when we found them, the other still alive though very weak…. Pathetically “unfledged.” (Not only un-feathered but, it almost seemed, unformed: when it tried to flap its scrawny wings we could see into its body, into the raw exposed flesh of its back.) The poor thing was covered with lice that ran up our forearms when we tried to feed it.

Lois’s suggestion worked for a while: egg-and-water, a kind of custard, fed to the bird every twenty minutes or so. But it died anyway. After a few hours. So many lice—! And when Ray found it dead there was a large spider on its head….

…Nature is senseless after a point. There isn’t any possible way to see it otherwise. When things go well, they go marvelously; but when something is amiss the entire universe might as well be unhinged.

[…]

…Love. Friendship. Art. Work. These are my values. Not even “community” any longer, not in this phase of civilization. (Who are our neighbors? They keep moving, we keep moving. There’s no continuity, no sense of a whole. And we’re in, after all, a country determined to see itself as foreign to the United States though in every way it is American, and linked to the American destiny. The exhibitionistic hypocrisy of Canada! Making great profits out of the Vietnam War while pretending in public to disapprove of American aggression.)

…Working for much of yesterday on “The Doll,” which is a frightening story to write, for reasons I won’t enumerate. Certain aspects of myself explored. “Ways-not-taken,” etc. And those of a close friend too, with whom I closely identify.

[…]

June 1, 1978.
[…] Brooding upon, thinking on, discussing (with Ray) the relationship of art to life. An old paradox. And yet. Still. Here. In art nearly everything is emblematic: if I write about a doll’s-house it isn’t simply a child’s plaything, it represents much more; if Updike chooses to write on some presumably trivial subject (golf, a professional instructor) it immediately evolves into an emblem of life and of the universe (though in this sketchy story of his it’s playful, undeveloped). (Ray, who is now taking golf lessons, looked up the Updike story to chuckle through it. “The Pro,” in
Museums and Women
.)…Yet in life very little is symbolic of anything. If anyone is crushed or suffo
cated by tons of wheat it would most likely be a totally innocent, totally uninvolved secretary or messenger boy or janitor; the wheat baron himself will die at the age of ninety-two, peacefully, or will die crushed by (let’s say) tons of frozen fish. In those instances in which the symbolic seems to spring dramatically forth from life the principle at work is probably chance. And yet: art, which seeks to mirror life in some respect, is always constructed upon meaningful symbolic relationships. It cannot not be. “Queen of the Night” can’t meander off into a fifteen-year-marriage that works out neither well nor ill…it must select, emphasize, arrange, make dramatic what in “real” life might remain forever inert.
*
And
yet
. If life is random and accidental and refuses to “arrange” itself aesthetically, what relationship has art to it at all? I think of art as a form of communication, the very highest form of communication. One soul speaking to another (as in Chopin’s music). For personal reasons I write because writing is hard work and challenge and all that…. But, still. What is the relationship? The artist imposes his vision on his material, and he necessarily distorts it because he cannot include everything; he must exclude. Rigorously. All this is a means, perhaps, to liberate his deepest self…which is a voice, a style, a rhythm. The “plot” of the novel or story is a structure upon which the writer’s voice hangs, or by which it is given its freedom. Consequently it is a pragmatic thing, a device. But much more: it is emblematic, since it is never realistic. One’s instinct is to experience the highest art in a religious sense, and this instinct though dimly understood is a wise one. As for theory…! We will let the pedants do that for us.