The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (60 page)

…I’m conscious of the irony, that the more “successful” I am, the more invitations I will receive: and the more excuses I will have to make. And why? So that I can absorb myself in my work; so that the new novel doesn’t get lost.

…“Success” in a public sense is a punishment, not a reward. For it drains our energies, diffracts our attention. What I want to do is write: to write something strong, lasting, surprising, original…something that is, in any case, my own. My own language. Clearly, novels like
A Bloodsmoor Romance
and
The Crosswicks Horror
are not for everyone; I would not have liked them, perhaps, at an earlier stage in my own life. But I can’t help that. That isn’t my concern. I must follow the riddle, the koan, to its completion; no deliberate labyrinth, but a necessity—and I can’t accomplish this by flying to Paris and answering questions. Yes of course I like
Bellefleur
, I love
Bellefleur
, but going on French television in October is only a means of selling books, in Paris, for Editions Stock, not a means of making
Bellefleur
better, or continuing with
Crosswicks
. And so, and so…. Well, I must exaggerate my difficulties with travel…. Something in me is repulsed, by the very notion of invalidism, but I have no choice, really; I have to protect myself, my freedom.

[…]

July 3, 1981.
…The discipline of
Crosswicks
: that grid of peculiar skewed language, that doesn’t inhibit the flow of the story, or the pressure of “inspiration” from the unconscious, but, in a way I could not have anticipated, seems to stimulate it. The
icy
heart of the stylist—! So very different from my former, my old, my abandoned way of writing; but then I am a very different person.

…Though of course I am not: I never will be.

…The ease of lazy summer days. Yet I work from about 8:30 until 1:30 every day, before stopping (for breakfast); then we take the afternoon off—usually a long bicycle ride. (Today we rode from Harrison Street out to Kingston, and to the Delaware-Raritan Canal, which we took around the far shore of Lake Carnegie; then back by way of Harrison. The canal banks are lush with vines, unusual birds, the very air seemed altered, as I rode along I experienced a minor pang of—might it have been regret?!—that nothing in my life now is against the grain of what I want to do; I do only what I want; yet I seem at times to be pushing myself too severely, straining at the limit of what I can bear, as if observing myself, testing, experimenting…. To be here, yet there; in one place, and in another; it must be the novelist’s magical “objectivity.”)

…Pascal’s idea of God: the center everywhere, the circumference nowhere. But this impresses me as common sense.

…Now I find myself so suddenly on of
Crosswicks
. And Josiah’s section is longer than I had anticipated. Storytelling means telling a story to oneself. And surprising oneself. But the grid is always there, the yoga of narrative movement, the
plot
—an absolute structure. And the bizarre language which isn’t my own, but Pearce van Dijck’s. All this is immensely, immensely interesting; and surprising. I’ve come 180 degrees around to a kind of allegorical fiction I couldn’t have read, let alone written, twenty years ago. Yet I suppose the “themes” are similar—for whatever that insight is worth.

July 8, 1981.
…Ninety-four degrees today, working on
Crosswicks
; now in the utterly engrossing chapter of Adelaide’s—“The Cruel Hus
band.” Yesterday, a very long (too long) drive to the Jersey shore—Cape May—Cape May City—Ocean City—back very late at night—seven hours driving—so that we were both fatigued with the experience
yet at the same time
near-exhilarated with relief to be home, that, in a peculiar way, it was well worth it: for it makes me realize that we hadn’t better attempt the drive to Washington. (The
Washington Post
would like me to come down in August, or July, for an interview/story connected with the publication of
Angel of Light
. But I shall pass this “golden” opportunity…. )

…Bicycle riding along the ocean in Cape May. Very hot, but breezy; fresh air; an (enforced) laziness. Ambitious windy walk along the edge of the ocean. Very queer jellyfish…some sort of tentacled creature…for my poor Puss Adelaide: of course. (Her predicament is “haunting” to me. Yes indeed. I see now the ways in which I relate to her, and she to me. In code. In code.)

[…]

July 11, 1981,
3:00 to approximately 5:30
P.M.
—

How to evoke, how to “explain,” how even to approach—

a spiritual and emotional retreat of such profundity—

(less dramatic and violent than the experience I underwent in December 1971, but more human, more protracted, more convincing—)

“It isn’t time yet, you can’t return, you will forget”

The Guide: the consoling voice of wisdom

“Joyce”: this touching individual!—whom I had to see, to like and forgive—to find human—fallible—finite—sacred—

my own consciousness—this “I” who gropes for speech—the passive recipient of the Guide’s reiterated, patient, mesmerizing instructions: Sleep,
rest, heal. Sleep, rest, heal. “Joyce.” The ways in which we are
not
perfect, the ways in which we are, then, “sacred”—

Love, a bond of (involuntary) emotion—reaching out to imperfection—pretension—foolishness—“silliness”—not
pathetic
, as one might harshly think, but
sacred
, as a consequence of these “failings”!

(The underlying calm. The certainty. “I” am not alone, “I” am not even in control. As if a radio’s volume were suddenly turned up, and now we can hear what has been there all along!—Sleep, rest, heal. Heal. Heal. The Soul’s patient instructions, to the Ego. And the “personality”—the
third person
—at yet another angle to both. The Soul is the Guide, the “parent” of the “personality.” But loving, forgiving. This is “The Kingdom Within.” As for “I”—my wisdom is to listen; to go very still. Thus, my salvation.)

July 27, 1981.
…Lovely quiet days. Undisturbed work, hour upon hour; am so mesmerized with the narrative, and the peculiar language, of
Crosswicks
, I have to force myself to stop at the end of a chapter, a full break, and not continue into the next episode. A story that tells itself…unfolds itself…within the contours of the plot, which is tyrannical. The parable’s simplicity; allegory; the “war of the worlds”…class struggle; the projection of the Devil (evil); and, within this, a weaving of narratives.

[…]

Last week, an eventful day in New York City: luncheon at the Book-of-the-Month Club’s headquarters on Lexington, in regal surroundings; signing 100 or so copies of
Angel of Light
, for (I think) Brentano’s; an interview for public radio with “Bob Cromie,” who was amiable enough […]; a long walk through Central Park etc.; dinner with Lucinda and Bob Morgenthau, at a crowded, and very noisy, Italian restaurant on 83rd Street. (…A most enjoyable day, considering our general dislike of the city. The only overshadowing being, a dull ache in my right ear, dull and then sharp, throbbing, dull, vague, faint, piercing, itching, and so on, and so forth, I’ve suffered from this for five weeks…Dr. Sheeran of the Princeton Medical Center being unable to find anything wrong, with his instrument. I can’t guess if it
is serious, or soon to prove nothing at all. Mastoiditis? Infection?…An appointment with a specialist this Wednesday, Dr. Haroldson, should help. In the meantime, when it doesn’t hurt I feel deeply relieved, and grateful; when it hurts, I put ice against it. I seem to have forgotten what it is like not to have a queer disagreeable pressure on that side of my head…. But no more of this, it’s tiresome, who can possibly care? When the pressure lifts I try to forget.)

[…] I passed [last] evening in a pocket of quiet…thinking about the novel, and about my ear, and about life passing, the summer passing, one thing or another, how happy I am, how resolved, how content, how much it really means to me (I can’t deny it), that I have completed
Angel of Light
, and
A Bloodsmoor Romance
, and am halfway through
Crosswicks
. I love these novels, I should be ashamed to admit it, and I love
Bellefleur
too, and much of
A Sentimental Education
, and, here and there, isolated passages in
Contraries
. Elsewhere, my “public career” rattles along, without me, so to speak. To have had the pleasure of the writing seems all, or nearly. A luxury one can scarcely speak of to anyone else, for fear of seeming…seeming what?…too removed from the world of reviews, sales, delirium, hurt, blood, handshakes, congratulations, commiserations.

August 10, 1981.
…Lovely sleepily-still summer’s day; luncheon on the terrace, a bicycle ride out to the Bayberry Road & back; the cats—our former kittens—greeting us; examining the frog pond—into which dozens of brisk green creatures wildly leap, as we approach; thinking but not, for the moment, brooding, on the chapter of
Crosswicks
in which I am involved…for Adelaide’s voice is so clear to me, I “feel” her so effortlessly from the inside, the act of writing is scarcely a chore: as, I must say, it seemed yesterday morning for a while. (Completing the footnote
drudgery
of “My Precious Darling….” Which indeed it was, and is, and will be, for anyone else to read.)…How easy life is, how magical, how filled with pleasant surprises, how extraordinary, a process of
unceasing discovery
: this thought came to me a minute ago, while I was feeding the cats (yet again): and I felt I should record it…for the moment isn’t likely to last, is it?

…Yet
Crosswicks
goes along harmoniously, and doesn’t interfere with my sleep, as
Angel of Light
did. The trick is, to
distance
the Horror sufficiently, from the various actual manifestations it had, and has, in my own life. Thus, Kay’s death (the “demon” gnawing away at her from the inside) is metamorphosed into very nearly the entire novel: the sense of Horror imminent, Horror absolutely mysterious, Horror that, for all our good intentions,
cannot be stopped.
The Count naturally “is” death but he’s a playful nineteenth-century sort of fictitious personage as well, whose effect on others may be real enough, but he is not. And so on, and so forth. Heading into the novel’s second half, with the pull of gravity to help me, and a certain amount of momentum, I don’t believe I will feel that queer half-panicked sensation I had from time to time, before—the sense that I was “coming too close to the fire” (to use Goethe’s phrase), and risked madness, by writing of mad and terrifying things.

…But we shall see.

[…]

…My sweet husband, funny and warm and gracious and kindly, and quick-witted, and somewhat shy…who often surprises me, at odd unexpected moments, by looking—that is, being—so handsome, still; in ways that the camera can’t record. His graying hair—but not really graying yet—still very dark—his smile, his freckles, his air of easiness and calm: one judges a man by how carefully, how gently, how intelligently he approaches his garden, or his pets, or his financial snarls (which, as our “fortune” swells, swell also), or the inevitable problems with one printer or another, one bookstore or another. Love love love & twenty years & more: it is really quite remarkable: but who has the audacity to take credit—?

August 19, 1981.
…To elucidate. To “bear witness.” To integrate fragments of the self. What a task! Quixotic, euphoric, irresistible….

…Yesterday, warm and really very wonderful “social occasions”: a luncheon in SoHo with Karen and Mike [Braziller] ( just back from their two-week vacation in Maine), whom we like immensely; dinner in Cold Spring,
at the rented summer house of Stephen Koch, with Stephen and Angeline [Goreau] (touching domesticity—I felt suddenly more hopeful for Stephen, and for the two of them: perhaps it
will
work out: and Stephen will finish that accursed novel). A taping at the
Today
show that went quickly, and effortlessly; a lengthy but quite interesting interview with a literary journalist from the
Los Angeles Times
; the long drive up the Palisades Parkway, to Cold Spring…. Returning around midnight and I felt less exhausted than I had felt at 4 p.m…. or, for that matter, at 6
A.M.
, when we’d awakened.

…Today has been the reverse. Many hours on
Crosswicks
; and pondering over the
Night Walks
anthology;
*
a modest bicycle ride in the neighborhood (the weather has turned almost autumnal—chilly, windy, but very clear and exhilarating).
Angel of Light
sold to Warner Books for $125,000. A number of people calling, still, to congratulate me on the review of
Angel of Light
in the
New York Times Book Review
, the other day.
^†
(Thomas Edwards’s remarkably generous piece is probably the critical high point of my life—and will remain so. Yet I don’t know whether I feel any sort of euphoria, or only relief, at not having been shredded in public.)

…Working on
Crosswicks
. Which I want never to end, for I can’t imagine anything so utterly engrossing in the future. Somehow, as in
Bellefleur
(though not in
Bloodsmoor
and
Angel of Light
) this activity stimulates an indefinable fusion of the plotting “rational” self and the groping, dreaming, inchoate “night” self…. Yet I am thinking airily of a “casebook of murderesses” for the next long project…some sort of quirky memoir…a self-styled amateur detective (?) who embodies (?) American optimism…. Lizzie Borden, Emily Dickinson, a woman who murders her sister-in-law; babies in the attic—their preserved corpses, that is; the schemer/authority who
gets everything wrong
; always arrests the wrong “murderer,” or hounds him or her to death, or collapse.