The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (57 page)

…Elsewhere, too, a virtually idyllic (if o’er-busy) existence these days & weeks. Tennis lessons twice weekly, at the Hopewell Valley Club, which see both Ray and me (surprisingly) improving almost between
sessions—getting stronger, cannier, even more graceful. And a little jogging, and extensive walking, and working on a new Chopin nocturne, and reading Justin Kaplan’s marvelous biography of Walt Whitman, and preparing for tomorrow’s reading at NYU.

[…]

March 1, 1981.
…A sun-bathed afternoon. Three-thirty. In this white, spacious, airy, altogether beautiful new room…sun pouring through the windows, the sky visible through the skylight…. We have just returned from a walk in Hopewell; later today a few people will be coming over for a cocktail party; I have been working on my little essay for the
NY Times
, on “violence” (“Why Is Your Writing So Violent?”),
*
and
A Bloodsmoor Romance
, which moves along by inches, by painful inches…. Finely-honed prose, polished, fastidious, in the service of…? I scarcely know what, being so caught up in rhythmic patches of words; semi-colons; colons; commas.

…Shillington, PA & Millersport, NY traveling by taxi down Broadway, last Thursday, after our committee meeting at the American Academy-Institute. John Updike saying with a melancholy smile that, at a somewhat premature age, he’s a “father-in-law widower” […]. John’s next novel will be
Rabbit Is Rich
. Frugal, rural, John & Joyce…. I should have alighted with him at Knopf/Random House, and gone to visit Oxford U. Press, but, in utter truth, I never think of Oxford when I’m in the city—it completely slips my mind that I have another publisher. (
Contraries
arrived in yesterday’s mail, and looks handsome enough, though surprisingly slender. Publication date is actually April.)

…The pleasant unreality of “JCO” in public. Reading my poems and presenting a sort of “self-portrait in reflecting surfaces” at NYU; the amazing interest and enthusiasm a number of people expressed…which I must make a real effort to recall, and to record, because these experiences evaporate almost immediately: I find that I’m much more caught up in the logistics of getting about the city, meeting Ray, trying to work in a movie or a museum…. This is my “real life,” my private life, and the other
(“JCO”) is some sort of creation; not an imposture, but partaking of the airiness of imposture. I can’t
experience
myself as others evidently do.

[…]

March 15, 1981.
…Here in our “new room”…early in the morning…7 a.m…. a long white counter, which is also a desk; tall windows; sunlight; blue sky; the Swedish horse (of a peculiar blue-mottled glass) on the windowsill in front of me, a gift from an “admirer” of my work, in Stockholm…. Books, papers, notes, pertaining to the talk I am scheduled to give this afternoon, at the public library in Philadelphia. Having finished
A Bloodsmoor Romance
at least temporarily I have time, a kind of exhilarant time, for this kind of thinking…. Images of women in twentieth-century literature. Beginning with the nineteenth century…and then Yeats, and Lawrence, and Faulkner, and Updike, and one or two others…briefly Mailer (whom I am supposed to meet this evening, at Dotson Rader’s home: but perhaps the evening won’t actually transpire. […])

…Waking early, running outside, the extraordinary physical pleasure of feeling one’s legs, ankles, feet, so wonderfully
alive
…. A curious ineffable sensation,
to be in motion
. The sense of “control” gradually dissolving, so that one’s legs, one’s being, the very motion itself—controls. And the sudden startling beauty of the familiar landscape, our birch clump, our evergreens, the cul-de-sac at the end of Honey Brook…. Mourning doves fluttering up, juncos, titmice….

[…]

…
Angel of Light
. Assassination. Terrorism…. Real terrorism is the privilege of governments…. Sudden violence, “assassination,” the expression of despair…no way out…no way out…“a three-sided cage & no way out….” Why I should be visited with such curious jarring and
impersonal
feelings I don’t know…. Since I am free, I am not terrorized by our American government, I don’t even feel the admittedly commonplace frictions of contemporary life—living in cities, being afraid of violence (male) directed toward women, worrying about money, a professional future, and so on, and so forth. This strange perplexing sympathy for…. An odd nagging sense
of…identity?…identifying with…. Are our lives epiphany-centered; image-centered; wonderfully static; jewel-like; pristine, sacred in timelessness?—or are they vast contours—hills, hillocks, plains, declivities, mountains, trenches, ruts, meadows, woodland—to be traversed, in time, in motion, in
plot
. I am propelled forward by my own effort, yet would be propelled forward in any case. The exhilarating completion of
A Bloodsmoor Romance
—ah, to bask in the radiance of
that
sun, for a while longer!—before surrendering it to another person. The hard jewel of a
work
, done.

March 22, 1981.
…Revising, with unlook’d-to diligence,
A Bloodsmoor Romance
. So long as I delude myself, that I need only do a few more trifling pages, I do them; and, out of sheer momentum, and pleasure, in the old, old craft of
juggling language
, I find myself drawn onward—and onward—and onward. An amazing energy, for a task I hadn’t thought so compellingly necessary: but if it is a form of self-indulgence, so be it: thus the “great stylists” of tradition. (But when is the novel finished?—when is the last comma truly in place? I see a vertiginous fate, pages written & rewritten & rewritten, with the same head-on energy I believe I enjoyed, at one time, in plunging into new material…. Though perhaps I am mistaken. One can’t know.)

…A severe head cold, coughing, Bufferin & a sense of exhaustion, light-headedness, seemingly endless bouts of blowing my nose, difficult to keep a sense of humor, or proportion. “The dark night of the Soul”—perhaps it’s simply a sinus condition, or always was? When the malaise lifts, as it occasionally does (this began last Sunday, when we walked about windy Philadelphia, before my lecture at the Free Library), I feel marvelously rejuvenated, and energetic; unfortunately, the cloud then descends…. Food hasn’t much taste, sleep past 7
A.M.
is impossible, but the condition is (isn’t it?) not fatal.

…A very simple truth about life: we swerve between being
too sensitive
, and
too callous’d
. It isn’t difficult to achieve the “correct balance”—it’s impossible.

…Ordinarily, one has about himself or herself a kind of protective coat, a barrier, an ozone layer, through which not a great deal can penetrate; not
impersonal catastrophes, news of disaster elsewhere, statistics re. starvation etc., the divers woes of the world, which are no worse now, than at the time of Chaucer…or Homer…or Swift…. This protective coat is emotional and psychological, but I suppose also, to some extent, physical; one must be in good health to withstand certain things. And it’s economical…political…. To the extent to which one is blissfully happy, one is certainly “ignorant” of the astounding conditions of life; yet knowledge without power, as Rochester (awful man) said, is hopeless. So I swing back and forth between too much awareness of certain insoluble problems (I mean on a larger scale—society, the world, Reagan, our new mood of meanness and suspicion in America), and what must be too little. My emotional
strength
determines the degree of reality I can absorb. A physical debilitation, even something so presumably mild as this cold (but God!—it feels like death, sheer concrete in the head), exposes me to any number of wayward profitless thoughts. “My actions are controlled and shaped to what I am, and to my condition of life. I can do no better. And repentance does not properly apply to things that are not in our power, though regret certainly does.”—Montaigne. Whose voice I very much like, and seem to need, these days.

…Elsewhere, have read stories by O’Hara, Saroyan, Calisher, and a few others, of what might be called an “older” and somewhat “forgotten” or neglected generation, and was very impressed indeed. Each generation’s discoveries are inflated with a sense of newness, but there isn’t anything new about quality, the uniqueness of the voice, the quirks & unpredictable nuggets of language that constitute art.

[…]

March 27, 1981.
…Some elation, at finishing the revisions of
A Bloodsmoor Romance
; and, yesterday, bringing the manuscript to Blanche. Now I have that luxuriant “freedom” I had so much wanted…. But such a sense of loss, of bewildered idleness, and then again a moment later a sense of gratification…. Montaigne speaks of the mind, left to itself, embarking on all sorts of unproductive fancies: do I feel this more than most people, or is it perfectly normal? For all I know, I feel it
less
.

…I don’t know.

…And what
do
I know? What
does
one know? “We must demand a logical consistency,” one of my doomed characters once boldly stated. But no, but no, we can’t, but we must, but we want to, but what is our lot? Vertiginous rumors, tilting shadows, slanted walls, comical mirrors, the gay imbalance of the inner ear, the wish to
know
and the dread of knowing, that is,
knowing too much
.

…So my stray thoughts flit about, in a vague assemblage of the next project. Which is (or so I think) going to be a revisionist “Gothic.”…
*
Now what I want to do, what I must do, is convert certain half-buried and half-inarticulate ideas, feelings, and images into coherent, but “other-worldly” terms. So that the apparatus of the novel serves as a way by which the unthinkable is actually experienced…. Fiction that deals with horror specifically must, I suppose, allow us some queer technique for
rehearsing death
. As, more generally, all fiction does (how to live, how to die, how to die nobly, how to suffer with grace, how
not
to suffer, how
not
to die, mistakes
not
to make—that sort of thing: the presumably “moral” dimension of all art). That there is a great deal of interest in death and dying seems to me absolutely natural, perhaps even salutary. For, after all…. Yet it isn’t really death so much as mystery; obdurate mystery; the stymied soul; the knots that cannot be unknotted, yet
must
….

…Fiction that adds up, that suggests a “logical consistency,” or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery…however we abhor the mystery, and wish it solved, so that we can control it. (What do people say about us? What do they really say? What do words “really” mean? Isn’t there a code? Yes there is a code—sometimes. But not all the time. All right, yes, but when? When is the code in effect, and when not?—My voice on the telephone, a false enthusiasm, greeting someone I can’t seem to like, to the degree to which I am liked. Yet my words are encouraging, my words are…words…. The unmistakable, the
incontestable
, deciphering of the code, on some level…. Why my friend K[ay Smith] died, and allowed herself to die, why
does anyone die, why does anyone allow himself to die, why do they elude us, why the torment, the teasing, why can’t we absolutely know, for the last time!—Thus the child’s mind works, and it is altogether respectable, and I very much doubt that any of us, however “mature,” transcends this bewildered groping.

…Luncheon with Karen and Mike Braziller, midtown yesterday; then a two-hour walk up to the park, in the sunny but rather brisk wind (and I am so slowly recovering from a cold—why do I feel, at times, invincible?—when all the evidence is otherwise); then, a meeting with Blanche, at the almost too sumptuous Palace Hotel, at 51st & Madison; then a reading at Brentano’s, with Annette Jaffee
*
(which went well—though I’ve come to dislike reading prose: it cuts me off from the audience, as poetry never does); then dinner at a Japanese restaurant; then home. Yet, this morning, I felt unaccountably fresh and, I suppose, “normal” enough. In itself very suspect.

April 2, 1981.
…Working with painful slowness on “Old Budapest.” Going through my journal of last spring. Slow, slow, frustrating, slow, remembering, hearing again, seeing, but so slow, so slow….

…Finished revisions on
A Bloodsmoor Romance
, finally. Under 900 pages. How I did it I can’t know, how I got through it, endured it, did not collapse, maintained some sort of good humor throughout, or so I think, or so I tell myself, but in any case it is finished!—and delivered to Blanche. A day or two of wistful cheerfulness, cheerful melancholy, the usual, mild withdrawal symptoms, but so much social life of late, and the sudden eruption of spring (long walks, bicycle rides) the transition was less evident than usual.

[…]

April 17, 1981.
…A lovely free morning. Revising poems, working on “Presque Isle” which I like better all the time, thinking about the long
gothic novel, how to construct it, how vast to make it, how to possibly begin…. The great relief, of having Monday behind me—that is, the long day at Columbia, the photography session with Jerry Bauer, the reading at Lincoln Center (so poorly organized by Mrs. Pat Kennedy Lawford and Dotson Rader), the party afterward at the Kingsleys’ (on Central Park West)…. Quite deliberately I chose to read a very difficult story, but then any prose, for me, is difficult to read, poetry is so much more engaging and appealing, but I thought, why not—why not give myself a considerable workout, and my audience too—why not read something so new to me, it still frightened me—assuming that the very weight of the words will prevent me from any expression of uncontrolled emotion.