The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (50 page)

[…]

…The bliss of an evening ahead of quiet; solitude; reading in the living room…the Georgia O’Keeffe biography, the new O. Henry Prize stories. There are moments when I’m afraid I will wear out, simply wear out, with this pace…with the projects I am working on…even the books I should or want to read…the people I should or want to see. And yet: the weeks pass, the years pass, and nothing changes greatly so far as intensity is concerned. Content, yes. But form, rarely. My life is a roller coaster over an abyss. My “public” life, I mean. (But is the abyss a helpful metaphor? Abysses are deep, very deep…but not bottomless. They too can be fathomed.)…My feelings of “kin” re Susan Sontag, which don’t surprise me. The theme of morality…the aggressive intellect (which loves a fight)…the temperament that thrives upon analysis, explication, refutation. My tachycardia is a mild analogy to Susan’s terrible bout with cancer. I make no claim to be her equal in suffering…but perhaps…philosophically…I have put in “equal” hours contemplating death; my own, that is; and others’. For it began, after all, when I was eighteen. And I am now forty-one.

January 29, 1980.
[…] A tentative dust jacket for
Bellefleur
here on my desk. Dusty-rose, “pretty,” rather romantic…hardly
my
Bellefleur
. What to do? How not to hurt feelings? And I suspect that Dutton has spent a great deal of money on this project…commissioning an “artist” to paint a large canvas! (If we’re neglected we naturally react; if we’re overwhelmed with attention it can sometimes—indeed, frequently—be attention of an unwanted sort. Vanguard with its modest budget usually came up with good covers, except for
Childwold
—painful even now to recollect; now Dutton, with an immense budget (at least for
Bellefleur
) has placed me in an uncomfortable position. For I
don’t
want to hurt the artist’s feelings, or annoy Karen Braziller unnecessarily. And then again Karen may be right—the jacket may be beautiful—who knows?)

…What to do, what to do. I can’t take myself this seriously but, it seems, I must. Answering Leif Sjoberg’s endless questions!…a dish served up to the Swedish Academy (I assume) by my “champions”…whoever they are. The guiding principle of my life, as of my art, should be the principle of good music interpretation: EVERYTHING SHOULD BE REGARDED AS IMPORTANT. Every note, every…pause. Every silence.

…I will go outside, in the sunny cold, and contemplate the frozen pond. And immerse myself in silence. The trees, the sky, the fresh chilly air, in which “Joyce Carol Oates” does not exist.

February 3, 1980.
…Working steadily on “Presque Isle” [the play version] after some days of being unable to start. Note-taking, brooding. The usual. But the story blossoms as the characters talk, and I feel abashed at the thinness, the perfunctoriness, of the original story. Would everything—
everything
—open up in this manner, translated into drama?

…Saw the McCarter production of
The Miser
a few days ago, with Michael Goldman.
*
Michael becomes the most easy-to-talk-with, the most-respected and-liked of our Princeton friends. His balance between wit
and intelligence (“intellectual talk”), between a critical objectivity and warmth, is wonderful.

…Very cold days at last. Low temperatures (fifteen degrees)—low at least for Princeton. I alternate between feeling quite enthusiastic about my play and feeling rather bad about another problem…a problem too trivial to recount…though I suppose I should recount it, for the record. So that, in glancing back, perusing these years, I can see precisely the sort of trivia that
did
trouble me.

…Simply this: the oblique, indirect, gracious, and cunning pressure X is putting on me, to assist in the promotion of a certain book. Which isn’t a bad book—not at all. Though not a particularly good book either…. My headachey sense of being manipulated. I know fully well what is happening: every move: yet I acquiesce, or seem to. One can give quick, cheap advice: Just tell this person you’re too busy. Tell this aggressive person you haven’t time…. Yes, but in fact, in actual fact, it isn’t possible. It simply isn’t possible. This morning a call came and the question was put to me (gracefully enough, even with some hesitation—though of course the entire conversation was planned): Did I think the book had any merit?—did I
really
think it had? And of course I heard myself saying Yes, yes, of course. (What else can one say? A ridiculous situation!)…I even received a telegram from the obnoxious editor! Have you read X’s book, have you anything to say about it, etc., etc. This editor, whom I have never met, addresses me as “Joyce.”

…My anger is as much for my own docility as for the impetuousness of the writer & the editor. I know that if I speak frankly, or even in a roundabout manner, I will make an enemy for life…. […] But I resent—how I resent!—being coerced into doing anything! My head pulses with all sorts of angry emotions that are being translated into “Presque Isle” almost by accident…though there, at least, they are appropriate…and may have some validity.

…Tomorrow, the “spring” semester at Princeton. Very good! My marvelous students once again, and the queer warm soothing bath of academic life.

February 7, 1980.
…Revising “Presque Isle.” First week of “spring” classes: as lively, warm, provocative as ever.
Teaching
has become synonymous with simply
being
…at Princeton.

[…]

…Luncheon with Bob Fagles on Monday. A long discussion of drama. Tragedy. (Bob is translating Sophocles. Has done a marvelous translation of the
Oresteia
, which I read back in Windsor and admired so much.) All that Aeschylus and Sophocles possessed, and we don’t!—the “naturalistic” and the “poetic” combined; the “archetypal” and the “individual” (think of Oedipus, of Medea, of Clytemnestra and Orestes). A playwright today begins with the merely individual and must labor to convince an audience that this individual is, or represents, something beyond himself. The religious assumptions are all gone, though one
can
assume (as I do) their frayed cobwebby peripheral memory. To want to write tragedy, and to be forced to write parody!…Though this isn’t inevitable. My otherwise doomed character Eunice Lehner complains along these lines, in my place. What to do, except continue…?

February 8, 1980.
[…] My life consists of one problem-solving crisis after another. A building-up of tension, and sometimes (though rarely) alarm or panic; the solution to the problem; the ease and excitement and
extreme
pleasure of writing; the extreme pleasure of rewriting, revising, fixing things up; the milder pleasure of rereading afterward…and a little more revising; and then…and then the work is surrendered. And I begin again, caught up in the same cycle. The problem, the crisis…which has descended upon me now, with more dismaying weight than usual.

…Thinking over
Bellefleur
. And trying to make sense of
Night-Side
[the stage version]. (That title should be changed…. ) It comes to me that one of the secret themes of
Bellefleur
is something very simple: class warfare. Not class struggle, but warfare; actual war. And
Night-Side
too, in a sense…for the Orr family is impoverished (I halfway imagine the father as one of the Bellefleur workers or serfs…laboring in a feudal situ
ation…but I don’t want this to be so blatant). The invisible undeclared war…but a war not as Marx imagined it, or hoped for it…a war of voracity…insatiable greed…in which individuals (the proletariat) work their way free of their condition…but carry with them, deeply buried in them, the scars of the struggle and the curious lusts…the indefatigable energies of war.
Bellefleur
is all that the enemy might be, an enemy that swallows up all possible emotion: for one can’t really
hate
such powerful, charming, doomed people…. […]
Bellefleur
, and many of the other novels…in part…in secret…Marxist parables. But critiques too. (For my cynicism—or is it merely playfulness?—makes me no kind of Marxist; any more than I could be a Freudian at this point, with a straight face.)

[…]

February 16, 1980.
[…] Working on galleys for
Bellefleur
. I feel rather numb, can’t assess the novel; wonder at my ever having written it last year, under so much pressure. I don’t feel I could ever do anything like that again.

…Hurtling in a cab down Broadway, then 9th Avenue, with John Updike yesterday. We went to the Central Falls Gallery on West Broadway, to see Jill Krementz’s […] photography exhibit (authors—among them John and me). Very nice to talk with John at some length, about various things. The photographs were marvelous: Capote, Nabokov, Mailer, Vonnegut (naturally), Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Hardwick (whom we’d just let off farther uptown, on our way back from the Academy-Institute), Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Singer, etc., etc. Some stunning compositions. (The photograph of me was taken in London, 1971. My long and somewhat curly hair…. The photograph of Updike was a trilogy, John skipping rope with comic determination, getting all twisted up in the rope.)

…
Nosferatu
, Wednesday evening, with Michael Goldman (who is a delight to be with: bright, quick, funny, extremely warm and intelligent); last night,
My Brilliant Career
, in New York, with Stephen Koch (and then we went out to dinner afterward in the Village, and had a quite hilarious time—as we always do with Stephen).

…A visit with Ann Cattaneo and Meryl Streep, at Ann’s Chinatown flat. Meryl Streep is perhaps less stunningly beautiful in person than she is on the screen—but who
could
be that beautiful? The three of us had a great deal to say to one another, and Meryl seems interested in
The Widows
.

[…]

February 21, 1980.
[…] What marvelous days! Day after day…. I am very fond of Susan Sontag. I can’t imagine a warmer person—and then, too, she
is
the rather formidable Sontag—and that reputation isn’t unjust or unearned. (She spoke of the fact that a doctor had told her it was very unlikely she’d be alive in two years. Whereupon she and David [Rieff, Sontag’s son] fantasized a trip around the world, a kind of death journey; but then Susan decided to stay home and fight the disease, which she did. “It was the crab that made you stay in the States,” David said with a droll expression…. David is a fascinating person. An editor at Farrar, Straus; easygoing; even languid; very handsome. Strong facial bones, tinted glasses, long jet-black styleless hair which nonetheless flatters him; an understated manner; a great deal of wit. But it doesn’t seem quite believable that he is Susan’s son. He looks somewhat older than twenty-seven, just as Susan looks a bit younger than her age. They are really a couple—beautifully attuned to each other’s conversation; no doubt to each other’s moods as well. Being the son of Susan Sontag would worry most young men, but David’s placidity—he calls himself a “heterosexual faghead”—allows him his own individuality; and then too he has a fine sense of humor; a certain lightly sardonic style. He doesn’t take himself very seriously and seems to suggest—why should anyone take himself seriously? Pateresque in contrast to Susan’s Jewish Calvinism.)

February 28, 1980.
…A cold gunmetal-gray day. But a very nice afternoon, here: Julian Jaynes came out, and I brought Jerry Charyn home from the University, and the four of us chatted about various things, including Julian’s theories of the “bicameral mind.”
*
It’s ironic that Julian should have a reputation as a sort of eccentric because in fact he
isn’t
ec
centric in the slightest: he’s level-headed, soft-spoken, calm, quiet, modest, and doggedly “scientific.” And a very sweet man as well.

…Last night, a party at McLean House, and dinner afterward at a local restaurant with Michael Goldman and Jerry Charyn. I think that we’ll be friends of a rather special sort, Jerry and me. There are curious parallels…near-identical obsessions…unless “obsession” is too strong a word?…though not, surely, for Jerry. As he presents himself, he is the most compulsive writer I have ever encountered; yet he interprets it in a fairly humorous way, recognizing the depth of his own craziness.

…I oscillate between thinking I am crazy, and thinking I am not crazy enough.

…But no: normality is my lot: I may be a maniac disguised as a bourgeois woman, but it is a quite thorough and convincing disguise. […]

March 6, 1980.
…An indescribably lovely late-winter day: sun, chilly blue sky, birds outside the window (I watched a puffed-out female cardinal for some minutes, no more than two feet away—those females are exquisitely marked, their colors so subtle; and the grosbeak so blatantly orange and blunt)…. 8:35
A.M.
Just finishing revisions on “Wild Nights”…which I have been writing and rewriting for what seems a very long time…but now it’s completed: thank God.
*

…And we leave for NYC in fifteen minutes. (Lunch at Entre Nous with Karen, to discuss future plans for my books; a movie in the afternoon, probably
Wise Blood.
Ray is having lunch with Bob Phillips.)…How strong the urgency, the necessity, to write about certain events or near-events of my past, as my life strengthens in its control and stability. Things are such that (for instance) I can forget to mention Fawcett’s “base” bid of $200,000 for the reprint rights to
Bellefleur
…which Leona Nevler made last week; it simply doesn’t seem important at the moment; too much is happening. […]

…Completing “Wild Nights,” and trying to think, trying to think, about
Angel of Light
. It drifts through my mind that the protagonist should be a young man, rather than Kristin. Which would completely upset my plans. I know the curve of the novel…the rescue…the transgression…the punishment…the “forgiveness”…but the voice or voices elude me; and I can’t begin. Kristin’s brother coming to visit her at school…but do I want, can I possibly want, to write about another young girl, so soon after June and Carla…?…The relationship between Nick and Maurie primarily interests me. Or interests me, primarily. The novel is going to be too long…. But then I loved
Bellefleur
. Though it nearly killed me. But then I couldn’t wait to be free of
Bellefleur
—the weight of it, the necessity of working on it every day, and every spare minute of every day
because I was afraid of dying before I finished it.
(An absurd admission. But true. And I don’t want to feel like that again.)