The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (63 page)

T
he early months of 1982 found Joyce Carol Oates in a characteristic predicament: she had recently completed a major novel but was blocked in beginning a new one. The work she had tentatively entitled
Mysteries of Winterthur
refused to come alive in her imagination; or, more precisely, she was unable to find the right “voice” for the novel despite the many notes she had taken. As always, she used this interim period to write shorter pieces, including short stories she would include in her volumes
Last Days
(1984) and
Raven’s Wing
(1986), and essays for her collection
The Profane Art
(1983).

By the spring, however, she had found her way into the new novel, and much of the year was spent in contemplating and writing this dense, difficult work.
Mysteries of Winterthurn,
as it would finally be called, was “enormously difficult to think through,” she later said, because as a combined detective–mystery genre novel and serious literary work it required extraordinary discipline and concentration. After completing her series of postmodernist genre novels, however, she would later come to view
Mysteries of Winterthurn,
partly because of her identification with its detective-hero, Xavier Kilgarvan, as her “favorite” of the group.

As the journal shows, her absorption in the novel did not prevent her from enjoying her many close Princeton friendships or from giving occasional readings and lectures. In all, the year proved to be one of the most “idyllic”—to use one of Oates’s favorite words—of the decade covered in the present journal. Though she was now, as she acknowledged, a world-renowned author, this last set of entries shows that Oates was as enamored as ever of her privacy and her life of the mind, which the journal continues to record eloquently, day by day, moment by moment.

January 2, 1982.
…Midway in the story “Magic.”
*
Walking along the canal in Yardley this afternoon, wintry sunshine, thoughts of renewal, the New Year, ice and mud underfoot, exquisite silhouettes of trees, etc., against the sky…the proposition suggests itself, why not take up the visual, the world out there, I mean really and precisely “out there” and not a representation in words…however hypnotic that is. (Fatally, at times. Obsessively, at times.)

…To introduce into my life not simply a diversion or a hobby but an actual channel of working thought, taking photographs, tramping about on foot, really looking, calculating, brooding…no language intervening, no need to aspire to professionalism or even competence. If I made it a resolution, a genuine proposition…?

…Marvelous party New Year’s Eve, at the D’Ivilliers, in honor of Chantal and John Hunt. (Who owned this house before us. John has been assistant director of the Institute for the past few years and is now moving on to a similar position in Boston.) And then a leisurely-long New Year’s Day interrupted only by a long talk with Elaine on the telephone and a breezy hike to the lake and back with Ray. The story “Magic” exerts a tremendous spell. It’s pointless to attempt to explain or even to suggest just how extreme the emotions were, yesterday afternoon at about this time (dusk shading into dark), partly the enigmatic nature of Stryker’s experience,
partly the unnerving structure of the story itself. Now it is under control but yesterday it wasn’t. And I was flooded with the most extraordinary sense of “freedom” of a not altogether benignant nature…the freedom that is a slash in the fabric, the tapestry, of organized life…. But it’s impossible to explain. Stryker must do that for me if I can summon forth the language to express it.

[…]

January 7, 1982.
…Working on the prose poems, hunger & desire, recalling Simone Weil…thinking of yesterday’s so varied events…. The paradox of the journal (of journal-keeping) is that I must make the attempt each time I write to tell no lies…but if I can’t, or won’t, tell every aspect of the truth, isn’t this the equivalent to a lie….

The mind’s slow turning upon itself, obsessed with its own motions. In the long run what
does
remain is the product of those motions: otherwise these brilliant insights, these startled outbursts of euphoria, despair, anger, whatever, simply dissolve into the air…which is where they belong. In art, however imperfect, there is at least a measure of permanence—
attempted permanence
. Consequently it’s in art we must, etc.

…With “Magic” I seem to have crossed over one of the numerous little streams of my psychic, I mean psychological, life…for what it’s worth to observe (the other day, when I did finish it, I felt, “My God, I have saved my own life”—but that’s melodrama, my life was never in danger of being lost or even misplaced—who is “Stryker” after all?—I seem to have been besotted with the idea of transcribing [S.R.’s] experience, that emblematic horror-experience, into other terms): with the Anatomy pieces I keep a pace so leisurely it can’t evoke tension or alarm…. I must reread Simone Weil to discover why I seem to dislike her so much. Or to disapprove of her. To disapprove of her admirers…? (Susan Sontag surprised me by her discipleship of Weil. But, curiously, unexpectedly, Susan
is
a born disciple. A brooding shadowy-eyed likeness of Simone Weil is tacked to Susan’s wall, above her desk: Weil who was anti-Semitic, Weil who turned Catholic in a most unstable way…. ) Thus, “Magic” is completed; mailed out; it
was
a form of magic for the writer, which I must not allow myself to forget.

…Who is this “I” that writes? Who is this “I” deluded into taking her subject so
very
seriously?…“Well, that’s life,” is the rejoinder. “You must fill your hours with activities, you must eat, and sleep, and do any number of ‘ordinary’ but altogether gratifying things, not as bridges to the sanctity of ‘artistic activity’ but as islands…in the great heaving general sea of…” But here we trail off into discreet silence. (Yesterday I received a packet of letters I had written to Kay, the earliest dated 1970, the most recent very near her death, ending with the feeble plea,
We hope you will be out of the hospital soon
. Opening the envelope I felt at first a real sense of vertigo. And for hours I was queerly disoriented, exhausted…. Reading the letters I’d written, recalling so much that is past…absolutely and uncategorically past…and not particularly lamented…and yet,
at the time
, how happy we were, how totally absorbed in that-which-will-be-past…. Discovering too that while I never lied to Kay, while I don’t (I think) lie to any of my correspondents, I don’t tell the truth in any wide, significant sense…the fictitious “I” I invent necessarily alters itself in terms of the context, who is going to read the letter, will it be “overheard” by another, etc.; in Kay’s case I seem to have invented an earnest, industrious, very nice, very courteous,
very
busy personality (the emphasis on the busyness as a consequence of our wish not to be invited out a great deal)…which I don’t particularly recognize. Not lies, yet a kind of lie. Or am I being too harsh? Too censorious?…If I wonder
where
my personality really exists, in what form it best expresses itself, the answer is obvious: in the books. Between
hard
covers. Hard covers. The rest is Life, wonderful surely but not to be preserved or especially lamented. Its agreeable evenings (dinner last night with Elaine and English); its not-contemptible triumphs (
Esquire
has bought the third and most difficult of my Berlin Wall stories;
MS
. a section of
Bloodsmoor
) notwithstanding.

January 12, 1982.
…Very cold sun-struck days. Temperatures near zero, most unusual for this part of the world. I have been working very slowly and (perhaps) reluctantly on a short story meant to be lyric…the girl who “sees” a crime…a sexual assault…at Waterman Park….
*
(Atwater
Park, in Lockport. Marian Mattiuzzio spoke of girls who “got bad reputations by going with boys down the slope toward the canal” (?). What can I summon back from so many years ago?…thirty-one, thirty-two years ago…remarkable!…have I really lived so long? But I have only to shut my eyes and “see” Atwater Park with such extraordinary vividness. And smell the dressing-rooms, the girls’ changing rooms…where (small) children…though older children too…changed into swimming suits etc. And there is Main Street, and there is the bridge, and…. I’m overwhelmed by a sense of loss. But if I investigate this loss without sentiment I discover it to be a nostalgia for time itself, a regret that
time
has passed…bringing me along with it…bringing me
here
: to this queerly eventless idyll, a long placid lazy January,
Crosswicks
behind me and
Winterthur
so vaguely assembled…assembling…perhaps it will never come to anything…perhaps I will/will not regret it…. The elegiac tone of the short story. But how to convey it.
How
to strike the right tone, acquire the right voice….

[…]

…Working on isolated prose poems.
An Anatomy of Hunger
. Reading sporadically, desultorily…an Evelyn Waugh fling of a week (
Brideshead
, which is elegant soap opera, very nicely written though finally silly: its climactic moment being the old codger’s
crossing of himself on his deathbed
, hilarious to a former Catholic like myself;
Pinfold
, an excellent idea but sketchily and, it seems, hurriedly executed, as if Waugh really couldn’t face the circumstances of his own dissolution into madness, hence resolves it as comedy;
A Handful of Dust
, comic-book depth, characters given names but hardly any more qualities;
Put Out More Flags
which I gave up on after a few pages…“well-written, but…” who cares); beginning Bellow’s slow, morose, ponderous, didactic, unfailingly intelligent and arresting
The Dean’s December
; have given up on a four-book review for the
NY Times
, short story collections too slender and weak to require my judgment; look forward to V. Woolf ’s diary, third volume, just acquired…there, an unfailingly intelligent presence.

[…]

January 15, 1982.
…Working on “The Witness.” Knotty & frustrating. What do these queer little stories represent? God only knows; I don’t. Perhaps I don’t wish to know.

…Birds frantic with hunger these glacial snowy days. Powdery snow blown fiercely past the window, arctic pale-pink skies, juncos with their brave gray feathers plumped out to save their lives. The anesthetizing of their hunger, their frenzy. Feed dumped out along the terrace….

…So few thoughts re.
Winterthur
. A paragraph or two, sketchy jottings, I can’t think that anything worthwhile will come of this…. Grading papers at Princeton.

[…]

…The riddle of fiction. All’s surface, skill, design, “tone.” These are the elements the writer concerns himself with, becomes obsessed with. Paragraphs. Sentences. Words. But beyond the page, beyond the story itself,
what is trying to speak?
In a way the long novels were easier on my nerves than these little stories. These rise, emerge, must be dealt with, and then polished, and “polished” some more, and so they are “completed”—at least I know they are completed—and I’m forced to turn to something else. And all without reference to anything external, any demand, however fantastical. (By which I mean—no one cares in the slightest whether I break my head over one of these stories, whether I wake very early in the morning keyed up and apprehensive, whether I’m distracted while with friends, etc., etc., and I’m the first to acknowledge the absolute justice of this. Why on earth should anyone “care”—! It isn’t as if I am a foreign correspondent stationed in Warsaw these days. Yet I’m fascinated with the ways in which they sneak up on me; the blocks of language; the voices. And this fascination carries over into a deep interest in others’ language—Bellow, et al. Become attuned to the rhythms, the cadences, the commas, the brevity or length or simplicity or complexity of the sentences, and you are attuned to the buried self, the real soul. Hence one knows Bellow by reading his prose in his voice. Hence one plumbs another’s depths…. These curious incontestable forms of “immortality.”…)

January 23, 1982.
[…] Our delight today in staying home. All day. Sleet, rain, freezing rain, slush, chill, an opaque white sky, utter comfort within. Much of my affable mood has to do with the low-keyed and unabashedly romantic story I am working on. (Do I believe in “romance”? Yes some of the time for some of the people. Oh yes indeed.) Which is to
say, “Hull & the Motions of Grace.”
*
If only I could keep clear of my problematic stories…those knotty puzzles that obsess me & give me (undeniable) pain…like “The Witness,” “Magic” (God how I struggled over that), “The Victim,” etc., etc., stretching back into the fathomless past. Does a mood calibrate a story or a story the mood? Why, one might similarly wonder, do thoughts of mortality seem so extraordinarily haunting & painful at certain times, and at other times seem mere “thoughts” devoid of emotional content…?

…Can’t know. In any case don’t know.

[…]

…Very few thoughts on
Winterthur
. Will I write this novel, I wonder; or isn’t it (for some reason I can’t determine) coalescing…? Perhaps the form is wrong? The imagined structure wrong? And I don’t have Fergus quite right. Perhaps I must change his name? Something isn’t working…but I don’t want to begin another novel anyway…. I can’t take the pressure of an immense story
insisting upon being told
just now. If I could spend the rest of my writerly life doing trifles like “Hull & the Motions of Grace” what a pleasure that would be…and in fact Hull isn’t altogether a trifle if one considers how much of my winter thoughts I’ve put into it. The amphetamine high is, or was, the curious edgy jittery rush I sometimes get, or got, while writing
Crosswicks
, “Magic,” etc., my “difficult” (or do I mean dangerous) works. Frightening but delicious but awful but…perhaps not healthy? Racing heart, racing pulse, racing brain, floods of images, narrative straining to be told, not enough minutes in the day to get it all down, the only relief (& that considerable) when I am able to revise, to give it all a leisurely coherent structure. Do I want that adventure again? Well no. Well yes. Well maybe. Will I miss it if it never again presents itself? We’ll see….