The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (61 page)

[…] The notion of grace, undeserved. Felicity from above. What would it matter, really, to be so honored, so proclaimed on the front page of the jealously-prized book review, if one hadn’t anyone to share it with? Is this sentimental, is this maudlin, or simply and irrefutably true…? More tragic than being unrecognized would be the predicament of being recognized, being in fact greatly honored, but having no one who cared; no one who truly cared.

…Reading Russ Frazer’s disturbing, but very well written, biography of that piteous genius, R. P. Blackmur. It’s always the case, as Kenneth Burke has said, that the brilliant who are unhappy confuse their unhappiness with their brilliance, as if there were any connection. But there isn’t. Emotions dictate, not ideas. I am suspicious of pessimism that blames the world simply for being there. A disagreeable man, Blackmur, who was a “great man” to his students and young colleagues; but whose “greatness” can hardly be communicated to the rest of us.

August 27, 1981.
[…] Into the home stretch, as it were, of the novel. And the fall semester fast approaching. But nothing is so glorious, nothing so ecstatic, as the concluding of a long, complex, “snarled” work…the very work that had seemed, months ago, one’s possible undoing.
How
these problematic things really get accomplished, I don’t know, for, in truth, the thought of rewriting it from scratch—the manuscript being lost, that is—fills me with sickened horror: of course I couldn’t do it; couldn’t begin to do it. Would not even try. O God…. Which casts back upon the labor of writing, day by day and page by page, a curious sort of glowering light, as if the person who wrote it, blind to the difficulties that lay ahead, is, in a way, someone other than the person who has these thoughts.
These
are Olympian notions, the kind one only has at the summit of a long task; earlier, they are impossible—unimaginable. The road dips and deepens and veers through a tunnel, and only very gradually climbs; and the view from the first substantial hill is enough to knock one’s eye out. (Not that I am talking about that elusive quality known as
literary merit
. I am not. I am talking about something fundamental, an almost biological, and surely spiritual phenomenon, quite apart from merit—though, as to that, one always has small thrills of
hope
.)

September 8, 1981.
…Shaken, but I think instructively, by some “happenstance” of yesterday…in regard to
Crosswicks
…and my sickened reluctance, or dread, or fatigue, or revulsion, or whatever, about beginning the chapter dealing at last with Mandy and the Count. The novel is like
Bellefleur
, though perhaps worse, in that it seems to involve for me a continuous sifting through the earth, a continuous upturning of relics…images…shards of half-forgotten dreams and memories…. One might express surprise, that the final version of this intense and very disturbing activity is something so distant, so arch, so “chill,” as “The Sole Living Heir of Nothingness”—or, indeed,
Crosswicks
itself, which is first and finally a kind of parody of a defunct literary genre. But the point is that I couldn’t approach this material, explosive to me, in any other way. To go directly and forthrightly and “realistically” to the subject…. I would be devastated; paralyzed; I couldn’t even consider it…. Staring at photographs of Kay yesterday. Working with “Mandy” today. My identification, my helpless sympathy, but my anger too…continued perplexity: why, why? The incubus who is Death; but also a figure of immense attraction.
Why
does one of us succumb, and another not….

…Riddles, riddles to break one’s head over, or one’s heart….

…In any case, the novel is so obsessive, I must make a vow to change my life, when it’s over. No more long, “ambitious,” “allegorical” works…for a while. Short runs, stories and essays and…plays?…Fortunately classes begin next Monday. I want to alter my life in some substantial, yet not overwhelming, way. Not to work so very close to the bone for a while…not to alarm myself…. A novel that is “about” madness isn’t exactly the most comforting thing to undertake, and it matters not in the slightest (though who would believe it?) that the tone is so arch and classical, and the structure that clockwork Dickensian apparatus, that aided me so much with
Bellefleur
…well, that
is
Bellefleur
.

…I want to immerse myself in my teaching, very seriously. And perhaps record the experience in this journal. I’ve been so negligent about that entire side of my life, which is considerable, and which can’t be entirely
without interest…negligent, I mean, about recording it. Which is strange, because it accounts for so many years of my life….

[…]

September 24, 1981.
…Marvelous days! For some reason the onset of classes and the fall term hasn’t been overwhelming, I can’t imagine why, just sheer delight…perhaps because (well, doubtless because)
The Crosswicks Horror
is nearly exorciz’d, at last…and I feel that I am “finding the world again”…“and the world comes back to me”…that queer wonderful ineffable unmistakable sense which impresses itself upon me from time to time that everything is here, now, wondrous & miraculous & altogether blessed…. “Finding the world again, and the world comes back….”

[…]

September 29, 1981.
…Yesterday, finished a first draft of the final chapter of
Crosswicks
(“The Convenant”); today, revised it considerably; and seem to have…well, dare I say it…
completed the novel
.

…In a sense.

…What did Conrad say, having finished
Nostromo
? “My friends may congratulate me, on having recovered from a disease.” I don’t feel quite that melodramatic about it. I don’t know what I
do
feel. Or that I
feel
at all….

…Stunned; dazed; blank; intimidated by the thought of reading it again, and revising it (again: but surely not every page); intimidated by the mere thought of being JCO and having JCO’s unnatural accomplishments…which, if I were not JCO, I should find very strange indeed. And resent. Or wish to derogate. Or wish to look past, as if the very existence of such a bulk of material were…I don’t know: what
is
it?

…The queer passionate impulse that overtakes me, as I write, to tell the story; to complete an emotional or psychological or narrative unit; to finish something that is begun with the first sentence, when I get that sentence
right. None of this can be unique to me but must reside very deeply in us all. Telling stories, telling truths by means of fictions, trying to plumb some ineffable center, some essence, the more profound for being so very secret.

…But now I must experiment:
is
writing addictive to me?
is
it a habit so deeply engrained in the blood, that I won’t be able to leave the novel alone for more than a day? (But already the thought surfaces,
why
leave it alone? Is the remainder of life—making red-cabbage-and-apples, for instance, preparing for tomorrow’s seminar on J[ames] J[oyce], quickly sending off a note to Bob Phillips, vacuuming the house—is this really so very superior to the writing of a novel?—I mean for my peace of mind, for the peace of my soul. Locked obsessively in the writing of a long work of fiction I seem to romanticize “real life”; to sentimentalize the very rhythms of life other people find the stimulus for art…!

…Not simply to
be
myself, but to
know
myself.

…I have wanted to be a model wife; and a model daughter; and a model professor; and a model friend (this, in limited doses); and a model writer (in the sense that my writing doesn’t drive me mad, or turn me away from others, or become the very means by which I am laid waste). I wanted all along to lead a
model life
by my own standards of fairly conventional morality…a combination of what Flaubert calls the “bourgeois” and what might be called the stable, the old-fashioned, the orderly, the predictable. To know more or less what tomorrow’s emotions will be; not to be surprised (at least, not disagreeably) by my friends, or by my husband, or by myself in relationship to them; not simply to “find the world” but more importantly
never to have abandoned it
. The amazing thing is, I seem to have succeeded at these goals; at least, not to have failed at them; and so much of life lies ahead to be lived, and to be explored.

[…]

October 3, 1981.
…Wild, windy, sun-splotched day. Very quiet. Revising
Crosswicks
: did four pages, and feel very noble! (It was strangely hard work. Only four pages?)

[…]

…The pleasures of revising & recasting. My ridiculous delight, in having trimmed seven pages out of the manuscript so far. Would that I might be able to continue at that pace….

…Invisibility. Visible to others; invisible to ourselves. Our paradox. What is indecipherable to us may be readily available to others, even to strangers…. The rare pleasure of a Saturday evening at home!—sitting cozily in our “new” room reading. And the
Horror
set aside for another twelve hours.

October 14, 1981.
[…] The remarkable energy and passion of these autumn days: simply, a feast for the eye…almost dazzling, such beauty…maples, and ashes, and dogwood (dogwood in particular)…. We’ve gone on long hikes to Bayberry Hill, and through Titusville, along the Delaware; and in fields around Hopewell. Why is my wish always, always and forever,
if only this season would never pass
.

…How tiresome, by contrast, certain conversations of late. Sexual anxiety amongst gentlemen of a certain age, whose names I won’t list, the other evening at the Keeleys’: jousting, strained witticisms, allusions, asides: a familiar subject, therefore a contemptible one. These jokes center upon what one must assume is the men’s dwindling sense of manhood; or, in fact, their dwindling manhood. What a woman can’t exactly know is whether the presence of women (in this case, tolerant “amused” wives) provokes this sort of display; or (thank God) inhibits it…. Sadly boring, because it is so familiar; because it thwarts serious conversation; because it is a cry from the heart,
we are growing old, we are fearful of death
, couched in such silly adolescent terms, a sympathetic response is impossible.

…Dinner Sunday evening, at Ed’s and George’s. And then we listened to a taped radio interview with Ed, and two of his remarkable piano compositions. Haunting, beautiful, alarmingly difficult pieces, which Ed had played himself. The tragedy is, these superb compositions for piano haven’t been recorded; and Ed thinks that probably no one has played them, apart from him.

…A brief respite from the intensities of
The Crosswicks Horror
. But I miss those intensities…! I don’t
want
the leisure of a normal freedom; but I don’t
want
the frightening experience of being so absorbed in a book, my soul is drained from me…. Teaching
The Picture of Dorian Gray
this afternoon. The “novel” interests me only minimally, the “ideas” interest me greatly. That particular novel is only a sort of cocoon, or husk, for its ideas. Wilde as helpless and uncanny prophet….

…Dinners, luncheons, parties. Shall I list them? No. And even the temporary pleasures, the hilarity, the intellectual satisfactions—these are too transient to be mentioned. Our own party for Bob was quite a success, last Friday. A kind of landmark for us: as much as I care to do all autumn…. N.B.: The mortal man, the immortal soul. Conversely, the “immortal” (youthful) man, and the “mortal” soul.

October 15, 1981.
[…] Yesterday, a most rewarding & fascinating seminar on
Picture of Dorian Gray
. I think it’s simply that I adore these students […] and I adore teaching…talking with them, comparing Wilde & Hemingway. […] Discussing French symbolists, Pater, Huysmans…. My elder-sisterly and/or maternal instincts toward these young people, the oldest of whom is about thirty. Next week, magisterial Nabokov.

…Rewriting
Crosswicks
is absorbing but not unnerving. If I can stay with this for months and months, I can avoid the extraordinary tension that seems to overtake me, in writing something new and feeling, half-consciously, that I won’t live to “perfect” it…. Today the Nobel Prize was announced, but I don’t know who won, only who didn’t: rumor has it (rumor always has it!) Carlos [Fuentes] might win; or Nadine Gordimer; or Arthur Miller; or—but this was a fairly local rumor, by way of Richard Howard—JCO; and numberless others. This year, fortunately, I am spared the awkwardness of the AP news release, that I was “the leading contender.”
*

…Reading Alice James’s marvelous diary. “L’inertie de la bête devant
l’irrevocable
a presque toujours l’aspect du courage.”—So the inert &
doubtless courageous Alice remarks of herself, & her various ailments. A magnificent voice, not unlike Flannery O’Connor. And how very queer, that I have already completed Adelaide Bayard’s diary chapters…and see in Alice’s acerbic voice a bit of Adelaide…. “I shall proclaim,” says Alice, “that anyone who spends her life as an appendage to five cushions and three shawls is justified in committing the sloppiest kind of suicide at a moment’s notice.”…Wonderful, how the ghostly & unfailingly amiable
Harry
appears in these pages. What might it have been like, or be like, to have so remarkable a brother!…I can’t share, of course, in Alice’s predilection for death and her fairly obscene glorying in growing “old” (when she is forty-one, she yearns to be sixty-one), but, how dear, how assertive, how
sisterly
and invaluable a voice: “I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn’t happen, I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and isolation which abides with me.”…“…scribbling at my notes and reading, [that I might clarify] the density and shape the formless mass within…. Life seems inconceivably rich.”