The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (48 page)

…Long hikes these days. Walking along the Delaware, walking through our favorite fields, around Lawrenceville (the school is deserted, of course, for Thanksgiving vacation)…. Thanksgiving we spent alone. The previous evening’s dinner party went well, and was a sort of Thanksgiving for us.

[…]

December 2, 1979.
…Cannot get “The Sunken Woman” into focus.
*
Hour upon hour half-thinking of it. Staring resolutely to the side; the art of self-delusion. Drowsy. Angry. Bored. Indifferent. Yet it has been a lovely slow idyllic day, a Sunday of utter solitude…during which (I suppose) my soul mends itself…. Does that sound extreme, sentimental, or implausible? Yet it’s true. Mending, “knitting up,” becoming whole again, after the fracturing—the highly pleasurable fracturing—of last week.

…What a puzzle, life! Sometimes it seems impossible that one can walk from point X to point Z. Yet I lie about and watch the hour-hand move. And listen to our two antique clocks ticking—marvelous comforting sound—though why comforting?—it should be alarming. Yet I lie about, or accompany Ray on a leisurely drive through the hills west of here, conscious of time passing and “The Sunken Woman” not getting written…. Awed by the cold slanting sun. Slanting so early. (It’s almost dark now. 4
P.M.
) I seem to want to waste time…savagely waste time…throw it away in handfuls…in order to realize suddenly (I always begin realizing when the sun sets) how terrible it is, how irrevocable, what I am doing.

…Why can’t I write “The Sunken Woman,” with all these notes? A hideous inertia. Laziness. I can’t get the story into focus though I can see the first scene…. But the words won’t come, or at any rate I don’t like the words that are coming. Several false starts! Nothing is more humiliating
than false starts…falsity…blundering groping language that goes nowhere.

[…]

December 17, 1979.
…Yesterday evening, the surprise—though should it have been a surprise?—of Susan Sontag’s extreme warmth. I liked her immensely at once: appearing with her hair still damp (she had been working for three days straight, hadn’t left her apartment, seemed extremely distracted and halfway nervous at our arrival—and we were ten minutes late), in a brown turtleneck sweater, brown slacks. She inscribed a copy of
I, etcetera
to us before we left her apartment to drive to Chinatown. (What a handsome apartment it is—two floors at 207 E. 17th Street, near a large park or square; white walls, thousands of books, bare hardwood floors; a long table with narrow benches; a unique atmosphere—almost impersonal, but immensely attractive.) “Every time I go back to the hospital for a checkup—I was just there yesterday—the doctor looks at me and says, ‘I can’t believe you’re still alive!—it’s a miracle,’” Susan said. “Which makes me feel—rather strange.” (I had not known that Susan hadn’t been expected to live more than two years. Or that the poor woman had had five operations.) We had dinner at a fairly informal, inexpensive restaurant in Chinatown, where Susan often goes with friends. A memorable occasion, I think. I did like her very much and hope that—when she’s finished with a long essay on a German filmmaker she’s been working on for a year—we will see each other again…. I was surprised at her interest in my work. At her evident familiarity with it. And her interest, too, in my life—my approach to my craft—what sorts of problems did I have, how did I manage to solve them, etc. We talked for some time about sheer “writerly” matters—of no interest to anyone else—which makes me think that Susan’s true love is fiction; and the essays, which have made her famous, are just something she has done to ease the tension of “real” writing. (
I, etcetera
is a favorite book of hers—or did she say it was her favorite?)…Susan seemed particularly struck by my “method” of composing: which, she says, is exactly the method filmmakers use to edit film. Very good, then. Very good indeed. I am glad this all makes sense to at least one other person.

[…]

…Today it’s unusually cold, twenty-five degrees, very bright, sunny, windy. I hope to spend the entire day at home; and tomorrow as well. We arrived home last night at 11
P.M.
and I was so exhausted I went at once to bed…and this morning I was (almost) refreshed; and the prospect of being alone, of having no interruptions, is wonderfully invigorating. Simply to sit at this desk and stare out the window…. (Where a gray squirrel with a white belly and chest is crawling about our bird-feeder, hanging upside-down.) Susan’s life in Manhattan is only nominally in Manhattan. Her old and rather dignified building is in an extremely quiet neighborhood or corner; one could hear traffic only at a distance. She claims to go out rarely—to rarely be invited anywhere—which I can’t quite believe—but certainly she lives a near-monastic life at the present time. I had the impression of a wonderfully warm and gracious and vulnerable person—not the “Susan Sontag” the photographs (and the elegant, mannered prose) suggest. But the impression I give to others is equally erroneous. (Don Barthelme told Susan something about my going to accept an honorary degree […] in his “sly, slightly mocking” way—which annoys me, mildly at least; but then—what can one expect from Don? And I must admit that I’ve told tales about him as well. Though my tales tend to be authentic…turning about his abrasive, funny personality…which is a consequence I think of simple shyness. But I do want to see Don and Marion again, perhaps soon.)

[…]

December 21, 1979.
…The shortest, darkest day of the year; but it hasn’t been especially gloomy; and how very lovely to simply be at home…working all morning here in my study…without even the telephone to interrupt.

[…]

…Nearing the completion of Constantine’s little book.
*
Or is it “little” now? And I should begin thinking about a play. (Should I?) The actress Meryl Streep is interested in my writing one for her. Which is all very possible at the moment…since I can’t bring myself to begin another
novel…another novel!…at this point. (With so many books at Dutton and on hand. And I haven’t even the pleasure of rewriting them—they’ve all been rewritten. Except of course for
Perpetual Motion
…and even much of that has been laboriously rewritten as I went along. Too many books in a logjam!)

…I have the pleasure of noting my own name, Oates, in the
Book Review
’s Christmas crossword puzzle.
UNHOLY WRITER. OATES
.—So is that my identity??? Yet
Unholy Loves
is my nicest novel, obviously. Normal and harmonious and positive…with no treasons or betrayals…or almost none.

…The puzzle of identity and personality! There isn’t any adjective that I can apply to myself, or to anyone, with confidence. “Adjectives” are simply fractured viewpoints…expressing only the viewer’s response…. Shyness, boldness; indifference, warmth; vivacity, passivity; etc., etc. A veritable logjam of selves, and how to maneuver through them…how to navigate…negotiate….

December 24, 1979.
[…] Working on
Perpetual Motion
. “Deathbed.” In which I must cram a great deal…as Constantine’s life-in-art draws to a close…. I could work on this novel for years, I know: braiding into “Constantine’s” experience my own experience and my own impressions. For he’s as close to myself as I can get. (Closer, even, than Marya. Which might seem odd.) Dear, marvelous Constantine…not so much an alter ego as, simply, an ego.

…Thinking, almost constantly, of
Spider Monkey
.
*
Running through the scenes in my mind’s eye. I am haunted by it, or anyway by the Phoenix workshop presentation. As if it were a koan I should grasp…I know I should forget it, and turn to other work; I must do my essay for the Conference on Urban Literature at Newark, which is due in February; but at
the same time I am so very interested…moved, I think, by something I saw there…. Impossible to express. The actors’ vitality; Dan Freudenberger’s concern; Philip Casnoff’s “Bobbie”; the small theatre, the receptive audience, the snow that fell so dismally all that day, making a visit to the theatre an actual achievement. Almost immediately, when Philip began the first “song,” I felt as if I were embarking upon one of the uncanny “perfect” experiences of my life—which is to say, an experience not whole and rewarding and perfect in any plausible sense, but simply profound. (To me. Obviously—not to anyone else! Even Philip, who put so very much of himself into the role, can’t possibly identify with it.) I keep thinking of it, and thinking of it, and wish I could preserve it somehow…apart from sudden vivid moments…nuggets of memory…. I didn’t feel this way about my other plays, or at least I can’t recall feeling this way.

…Idyllic quiet, here. Nothing to do today but work, and go out grocery shopping. The snow has melted, the day is misty and dripping and not very Christmas-like, but how marvelous, this calm—! This privacy. I wrote a letter to [a University of Windsor colleague], having thought of that for a few days; but my thoughts are really with Constantine, and “Bobbie Gotteson”; it’s alarming how swiftly the past falls away, how truncated my “years at Windsor” have already become. Teaching and acting must be similar in this respect: you can have wonderful experiences, minute by minute, hour by hour, semester by semester; experiences when everything feels so right—so perfect; and everyone involved (or nearly everyone) shares this sentiment: but then the occasions pass, and you can rely only upon memories (or upon journal entries, like this one—but who has time, absorbed so deeply in the passions of acting and teaching—the give-and-take of the real world—to record these passions?)…the bliss of the present moment is always lost. (Except of course when it is made permanent, or halfway permanent, in art.)