The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (8 page)

T
he beginning of 1975 finds Oates absorbed in completing her longest novel to date,
The Assassins.
What is particularly interesting about the journal at this point is her awareness that she now writes in a “really new way” and that, as she notes on January 12, “Now writing a novel is a
process.
It is an experience that evolves. The novel
is
its own experience and its subject is always the evolving of consciousness.” Though Oates continued with her occasional book reviewing, her immersion in
The Assassins
precluded any other writing until she completed the novel in mid-February.

Characteristically, she plunged immediately thereafter into new projects: a series of short stories that dealt in part with “spiritualism” and would be collected in her 1977 volume,
Night-Side;
and notes for her next novel,
Childwold
(1976). She even had the notion that she would like to write a biography, though nothing ever came of this idea.

In the spring, Oates and Smith took a long car trip from Windsor to Washington, D.C., where she read at the Library of Congress; to New York City; and to various points in New York state, including her parents’ home in Millersport. The social, gregarious side of her personality always came out during such trips, and in addition to various writing-related public
appearances she was able to meet fellow authors such as the Texas-born novelist William Goyen and the celebrated playwright Lillian Hellman.

Another trip, this one lasting three weeks, came in July, when the couple traveled to various Canadian cities—Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City—and other points in Maine, Massachusetts, and New York. Oates noted on July 27 that “I crave travel,” again showing her intense enjoyment of these breaks from her rigorous solitude and writing discipline. In a sense, however, she was always writing, even while on the road, continuing to take notes for the new novel and for short stories.
Childwold
(she “found” the title during her travels, the word posted somewhere along a mountain road), she knew, was to be one of her most experimental and least commercially viable projects. It would be, as she notes here, a novel in the form of a “prose poem,” though she would try to “disguise it as a novel,” and certainly her publisher, Vanguard, by the time of publication, shied away from the idea of mentioning that the novel was a prose poem.

The dogged intensity with which Oates worked at a novel, once it came together in her mind, is illustrated by an unusual gap in the journal between August 9 and September 28. During this roughly six-week period she wrote over 300 pages, essentially completing and revising the novel to her satisfaction. She found the experience “liberating” in its wedding of naturalistic detail (the book is set in her native area of upstate New York) and a symbolic mode of expression, reflected through the voices of five distinct characters. (A working title for the novel had been
Broken Reflections
.)

With the novel completed, she turned as usual back to short stories (including some published under a pseudonym, “Rae-Jolene Smith”) and book reviews; and, as always, that fall she was also absorbed in teaching, an element of her life to which the journal frequently pays eloquent homage.

January 4, 1975.
[…] Reading with amusement a colleague’s poems about his past love affairs, some nine of them, or so he hints; thinking at once of other poets’ similar poems […]; wondering if the poet as poet speaks here, not the poet as human being, still less as man…must they
compete, and this is simply a gesture of brotherhood? (“I too have had these affairs…I too am a poet”). Then reading and being astonished by the revelations of a much younger poet (born in 1943!—and these other poor old boys born many years before) complete with photographs of his lovely, in fact remarkable girls, several of whom were or are models, actresses, of moderate renown…one of them dead, even, at the age of twenty-five, evidently suicide. Does one value the “revelations” when they involve genuinely striking people, and feel only slightly embarrassed amusement when they involve quite ordinary people with ordinary domestic problems and ailments of various unromantic kinds…not to mention delinquent taxes, and small neurotic anxieties? If so, one is more of an elitist than one would like to admit…. To respect someone’s love poems, one must not meet the person to whom they were originally written. The aesthetic impulse seems to work best at a distance…perhaps we require formality, coolness, impersonality…if we are to believe in violent passion.

And yet…how I love biographies and letters and journals!…more and more all the time, I think. Like Auden. I forget most of what I read in such works (diaries are, unless aphoristic, eminently and necessarily forgettable)…but I devour them with great pleasure.

[…]

January 9, 1975.
The New Year begun with less difficulty than ever before…not quite so much draining of the spirit as I am accustomed to experiencing, in meeting large (fifty-five students), new classes. Reading in biographies, autobiographies, autobiographical (“thinly disguised,” as they say) poetry these days, allowing me to guess or to know that the life is approximately the same for us all; no one, however spectacular his fame or social connections or public image, seems to experience much beyond the range of what is available in a relatively civilized, amiable, coherent little world…. Teaching experiences at several universities and innumerable readings and talks and visits seem to indicate that, frankly, apart from dismal non-intellectual centers like Beaumont, Texas (Lamar State College where Ray taught for eight dreary months when
he first received his Ph.D.; and I wrote my first book),
*
students as students are remarkably alike. There are brilliant students floating around everywhere, in the most unlikely places…“on probation,” even…“temporarily admitted” to a university…there are superficially clever, rather bewildered and perhaps even victimized young people everywhere, whose minds but not their hearts are in what they are doing: who can parrot certain words, but with a hideous glassy stare. As Joan Didion said in a letter, written after I had corresponded to her in regard to our mutual feelings about a visit at Yale, one can sit and listen to highly-regarded and no doubt quite intelligent young literary intellectuals discuss seriously and even passionately whether Joseph Conrad
could possibly have known
what he was saying in his Preface to
The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’
…the point being, generally, in such situations, that anyone with the ability to arrange certain words in his head, and then to utter these words, is necessarily
superior
to the great geniuses with whom those words might deal…. Hah. One feels the instinct to laugh, but perhaps it is not amusing; perhaps it is merely terrible…?

The shallowly witty professor-critic (Roger Sale most readily comes to mind, though he is perhaps less intelligent than most)
^†
imagines that since he believes he can, in words, point out where Shakespeare or Tolstoy or Lawrence or Hemingway or Bellow “went wrong” or was “confused” or “failed to” do something presumably crucial to the art-work, he is therefore
superior
to his subject in a manner of speaking…such audacity, such blindness, a very nearly psychotic confusion of reality…which, perhaps, really must begin from a position of utter humility. So too the novelist, confronting his or her oceanic material, and the living, breathing, stubborn characters who step out of that material and claim their own interpretations of it. Humility, and then a plunge into audacity (for the novelist, at least; otherwise nothing could be written), and a great deal of toil which no one can explain or even hint at and which is always unconvincing when recounted (Joseph Heller and
Something Happened
: what
did happen there, and why did it take so long…?)
*
but then a kind of humility again, a quietness, passiveness, non-judgmental, as one moves away from the work and begins to lose possessiveness, attachment…begins, I suppose, to surrender it to the culture, to history, to time. It helps me to deal with the nuisance of figuring out Stephen Petrie and his relationship to Yvonne when I remember that at one time, in plotting and dreaming about
them
(which assuredly did not write itself, as my Author’s Note thought it interesting to claim), Jules Wendall was imagined as Maureen’s father, not her brother. But the novel could not move along those lines, it was not the legitimate novel, not the relationship that demanded articulation. Yes, there was a “Jules” and a “Maureen,” as presumably there was a “Madame Bovary” and perhaps even a “Mickey Mouse” parent to the image, but the relationships, the dense clotted maddening unpredictable
structures
, those must be labored over…giving these people room to breathe, hoping not to be smothered in the process.

January 10, 1975.
Chosen for a “Lotos Club” literary award. Had not heard of the Club, must confess. Honored, I suppose, though saddened…and even naively surprised…by a brochure the Club puts out, explaining that all members are male, that there is “of course” a ladies’ dining room but “of course” “they” are not allowed in certain areas. The Club was founded in 1870…5 East 66th Street, very English-like façade, undeniably handsome, and no doubt (it is always the case) a very pleasant place. If Lillian Hellman accepted one of their awards, who am I to decline, uneasy at the Club’s masculine world and worldview…? But perhaps I will not go to the luncheon after all; I will make no special effort to get there; if they change the award to another date, fine; if not, no loss. I suppose
The New Yorker
is well represented…. It is egoistic to decline certain honors, as much as to accept. One’s self is not that important.

Will read at the Library of Congress, April 28.

Gradually, more social life…but with a very few people. Cannot handle crowds, not even in theory. Companionship, friendship, relationships of any kind are demolished in crowds, no matter how gay and riotous they are. […]

January 12, 1975.
A lazy thought-filled Sunday. Having finally begun the third part of
The Assassins
, having figured out the personality of the narrator, so far as possible, now the organization of scenes is all, the texture of the revelations, not exactly familiar territory but no longer as maddening and frustrating and dismal-seeming as it was only yesterday. The break must have come during the night but if so, it was symbolic, an odd refraction of consciousness with no specific content involved. Of course this is
everything
; yet one cannot speak of it, or even point to it.

Now that I write in a new way, in a really new way, I wonder that I ever had the patience to write in any other way.

In the past, I wrote a first draft straight out, laboring and blundering through difficult scenes, passages, transitions…going from Chapter 1 and to the last chapter and the last page. Often the last page had been written in some vague form, the last paragraph generally known or sensed (which is still the case: but there are so many “last” paragraphs now, so many possibilities!). Then, with the first draft completed, I went through it with a pen and X’d things out and wrote in the margins and added extra pages and plodded and toiled and made my way through what I believed to be (but I was deceived) my final vision of the novel. If my more informed consciousness was impatient with anything, I simply re-wrote passages, expanded and contracted and edited, as all writers do, I suppose, not always liking the sense of heaviness, density, the sense of doing
combat
…. What I did not know at the time was that any newer, more developed consciousness (even if it is only a week’s development, or a day’s) finds it naturally very difficult to accept the old limits and expectations, let alone the accomplishments, of the old. So I did battle with the “old” and, once again, got through the entire manuscript to the end, often with innumerable inserts and paragraphs crossed out and question marks in the margins and tiny notes (often so tiny I could hardly read them, the
next time through) to expand a point, to describe more fully…. The manuscript at this point looked like a hideous conglomerate of hieroglyphics, codes in red and blue pen, frantic notations and indecipherable queries…but it was there, and accomplished, a mission accomplished temporarily. Then I set it aside, usually for weeks, and worked on stories or poems…all the while thinking at the edges of the novel, or contemplating it directly, and taking out the ms. to make still more notations…always more, more…until after six months or so (really can’t remember now; and of course there were one or two novels I never bothered to rewrite, being caught up with the excitement of something new, and I threw the first drafts away after a few years, no longer interested in them…. ) I began the not-always-very-interesting process of rewriting and revising (but never extensively, since I had already done that—or so I believed) and completing a final draft. With the first novels I was almost religiously faithful to the early draft, changing only words here and there, usually shortening, condensing. And I went through in chronological order, working. It was enjoyable but at the same time work. Then, with the completed manuscript, it was
complete
in my imagination…whatever it was, to me. A series of events, a single large and encompassing and profound experience, a group of people, a setting (usually imagined as part of the characters, with its own role to play, subtly)…and thematically intelligible. No confusion about that, ever. I
knew
what the novels meant or what they meant to mean. The characters were sometimes partly real, partly fiction…they did exist, in their own beings…but they also participated in a larger context, which had meaning, which was meaning.

Hence the concern for the traditional appearance or “feel” of the work, no matter that (even in
With Shuddering Fall
,
*
the most clearly thematic) its propositions are ultimately non-naturalistic, non-realist, perhaps even anti-realist in the Howells sense of that term.
^†
I wanted the tone of naturalism, believing that the improbable, introduced into such a world, would itself be believable and hence not improbable. Hume disclaims miracles
for if the miraculous should happen—it won’t be miraculous any longer.
*
This method is fine, I love the feel of naturalism, the clarity of details…infatuation with the physical, sensuous world…I am impatient with people like Beckett who don’t even bother to begin with that world…as James Joyce did, and Proust…writers who are loving, lovers…faithful to the primary world. (And Lawrence also, of course; and Faulkner.) For this I had to accept being classified as a “naturalistic” writer in the tradition of Dreiser (whom I have, alas, never read…and must someday read, before it is too late; I must read
Sister Carrie
and
An American Tragedy
) though it was only the material of “naturalism” that interested me, not the treatment of it. “Gritty realism” and that sort of thing. “Uncompromising.” “Lifts the lid off.” Etc. One does want that—but more, far more. The eternal and the temporal are one. The naturalistic novel and the parable are one…though with some technical difficulty. All is style: all human endeavor is stylistic. “God” is not an entity but a process or an experience or an unfolding, a “God-evolution,” always a movement, a fluidity, a way of perception, a kind of style. Content is nothing, except as it is perceived, conceived, expressed through style. Our subject matter is always style itself. This is obvious, and yet so many artists go berserk when they discover it…and can create only parodistic art after experiencing their revelation. They mock, they defile, they go against content. But one is always “against” content in the sense of knowing himself superior to it (in a way). A pious little short story exclaiming the bliss of conventional married love is as much a creation of words, a process of words, as are Borges’ more abstract inventions, or Joyce’s…. There is nothing inherently better about writing against instead of for (Gass vs. Bellow, for instance), and it is even more sophisticated to be for since that is difficult and will not seem, to shallow people, sophisticated at all. Which is why I want to be “traditional” as long as possible, for if I become abstract, I will have a very difficult time going back again. The challenge is to wed the naturalistic and the symbolic, the realistic and the abstract, the utterly convincing story and the parable…that is, to bring together the psychological and the mythic in one character at all moments…and to wed time and eternity in a seamless whole. So it is rather like walking a tight
rope. One does want surface realism, but one wants just as much an allegorical or mythic universality, relating not to surfaces but to the inner experience, the life of the soul itself. Those who do not believe in the “soul” will hate this kind of writing, not knowing what it attempts; those who do not believe in the “world” (because they are very religious, or politically conservative, or neurotic) will detest the naturalism, the feel of “gritty reality” even when it isn’t gritty but is rather attractive. Only those readers who are, somehow, in the center…as I am…who share my vision, however unclear it is…necessarily unclear…will be able to respond to my work without distorting or misreading or rejecting it. This is a risk I take gladly. Though perhaps I have no choice.