(This was an instinct shared by other women graduate students of my acquaintance. We were not living in convents exactly, but the qualities of personality cultivated by the convent were desirable—docility, obedience, self-effacement, acquiescence to authority. For years I would publish critical/scholarly articles in academic journals under the gender-neutral names “J. C. Oates” and, my married name, “J. Oates-Smith.”)
Sometimes wandering in Barnard Hall at night I would see a band of light beneath a door. Could this be a sister insomniac, or just a young woman working late? If I longed to knock gently at the door, and meet a sister-insomniac, or an individual as intensely engaged in her work as I was, of course I never dared. Nor did I seek out the room’s occupant in the daytime.
By day the obsessions of the insomniac fade like screen images when the lights come on.
But in the night, you can hear, you can feel the very wings of madness beating near . . .
Downstairs in the twilit foyer with its sharp ammoniac smells of newly scrubbed floors and scoured ashtrays—(yes, this was an era in which even sensible, bright young women academics smoked, and sometimes chain-smoked)—I once found on a nubby old sofa the paperback Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin. This was not a book I might have read ordinarily, concentrating as I was on early centuries of English literature; how it came to be in this place, at this time, would be a mystery to me. In heightened states of consciousness we become superstitious, and seek out “signs”: I spent the remainder of the night avidly reading not about ecclesiastical controversies of England in the mid-1500s but a contemporary black American’s eloquent and deeply disturbing memoir, the first of this great writer’s work I would read, with the insomniac’s rapt concentration and sense of fatedness.
All of my father’s texts and songs, which I had decided
were meaningless, were arranged before me at his death
like empty bottles, waiting to hold the meaning which life
would give them for me.
(Baldwin was speaking of his estranged, emotionally unstable father who had been a Christian minister; he was mourning the man’s death, and trying to comprehend his tragic life.) Though I was a young and inexperienced “white” woman whose skin had granted her privileges through her lifetime of which, like most “whites,” I’d been unaware, I was thrilled by the beauty, calm, and certitude of these words, and by their prophetic truth as it might apply to me. The meaning which life would give them for me. I was filled with a sense of mission that had no immediate object, like one on the verge of mania. I believed that my hateful insomnia had granted me this revelation for a reason and I would not have traded a full night of sleep for this revelation.
Next day I returned Notes of a Native Son to the lounge where I’d found it. For a while I lingered in the vicinity hoping that I would see who came to pick it up—but no one came while I was there, and when I returned later in the day the book had vanished.
SOMETIMES, I WENT OUTSIDE. My most thrilling bouts of insomnia were outside. If it wasn’t bitterly cold, or freezing-rain, or snowing, or so windy it took my breath away. Most nights I would have an evening meal with my fiancé and he would walk me back to Barnard Hall at about 10:00 P.M. I would lie on my bed and work until midnight and then I would try to sleep and by 4:00 A.M. often I’d given up on sleep in dismay or disgust and decide to get up, to dress, and begin the day early as I’d begun many days in my life in Millersport, in darkness. If you live on a farm the darkness before dawn is a familiar darkness and seems to bleed into the darkness after sunset as if daylight itself were but an idle interruption. Rising early in the dark, in fiercely awful weather, was routine in Millersport. Before I’d been transferred to city schools, and was picked up a short distance from our house by a school bus, I would walk on foot to the one-room schoolhouse across the creek, and did not think this was a terrible hardship since everyone walked to school in any sort of weather. Twenty years before, my mother had walked to the school and would not have thought of complaining.
My breath steamed as I walked quickly on University Avenue, and on Park Street, to the foot of Bascom Hill; and up the steep, wind-whipped hill until my legs began to cramp. It seemed urgent to be in motion—to appear to have a destination.
Under the gradually lightening sky I would continue past Bascom Hill in the direction of the observatory; my destination was a State Street diner that opened early, but I forestalled arriving there too soon, before the front door was unlocked and the lights on. In these long-ago years a dense gathering of trees, both deciduous and evergreen, bordered the hill; beyond that was slate-dark Lake Mendota. Eventually I would return, down the long hill, passing the State Historical Library and the mammoth Memorial Union, not yet open; if it wasn’t too cold or windy, I would walk along the lakefront; I would pause on the terrace, to stare at the lake; here, I was nearly always happy; freed from the confines of my over-heated room and from the rampage of my thoughts; I was both exhilarated and comforted by the lapping waves, and Lake Mendota was often a rough, churning lake; in the twilight of early morning it appeared vast as an inland sea, its farther shore obscured by mist. On such mornings, which were common in Madison, the lake’s waves emerged out of an opacity of gunmetal gray like a scrim; there was no horizon, and there was no sky, and it would not have surprised me if when I glanced down at my feet there was no ground.
I was in no danger, I thought. My engagement to be married was like a safety-harness, I could not be swept into the water.
Then there were mornings of stark, eye-aching clarity. A moon, or a remnant of a moon overhead, and isolated mica-bits of light that must be “stars”; tattered clouds blown across the sky like shreds of thought. No sound except the waves of the lake and random cries of those curious nocturnal birds, common in urban areas, unknown in Millersport, called “nighthawks”; nighthawks must have nested beneath the eaves of the Union, or in trees nearby. I liked to feel that, at this hour, alone, anonymous, and unaccursed by gender, I was a nighthawk; a pair of eyes, a skein of brooding thoughts. How beyond mere happiness—or unhappiness—I believed myself. What rang in my head was Walt Whitman’s poem of surpassing strangeness and beauty, “A Clear Midnight”:
This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.
In my circuitous route to the State Street diner I would pass the still-darkened university library, which was one of my places of refuge during the day; I would walk along Langdon Street past fraternity houses with their stolid, impressive facades bearing cryptic Greek letters emerging out of the gloom, and invariably there were scattered lights burning in these massive houses—who knew why? It was gratifying somehow to take note of scattered lights in the windows of apartment buildings and two-storey woodframe rented houses on Langdon, Gorham, Henry streets as the early-morning shifted toward 6:00 A.M.; still darkness, for this was late autumn in a northerly climate, with a wan promise of dawn in the eastern sky. The nighthawk takes comfort in recognizing others, kindred souls, or anyway souls, at a distance: warm-lighted city buses wheezing on Gorham and University bearing a few passengers, and most of them dark-skinned women and men; headlights of vehicles, and (receding red) taillights; occasional pedestrians, alone, swiftly walking and bent against the wind. Among these there had to be some who were morning-insomniacs like me, relieved and grateful for the new day, the new chance, but most were of course workers, custodians, cafeteria staff, attendants at the university hospital, for whom there was no romance to the hour, nor probably any particular significance; beneath their coats they wore the uniforms of routine.
On Gorham Street sometimes I saw a man walking his dog; a man of indeterminate age, perhaps in his late thirties; I would see him leaving one of the sturdy old Victorian houses partitioned into rentals for gr
aduate students, crossing the wide porch and descending, his dog held to a tight leash; the dog was a springer spaniel, buff-colored, thick-bodied but still youthful; my heart leapt at the sight of the spaniel, which reminded me of a dog out of my past, and behaved in a friendly way toward me even as his frowning master tugged him in another direction. On Gorham often I recognized certain lighted windows; I’d noticed glimpses of a couple behind a ground-floor window with a carelessly drawn blind; from less than ten feet away I could gaze into their kitchen, though not very clearly; I felt a stab of envy for to be awake at such an hour does not seem pathetic if there is another with you—if you are talking and laughing together, preparing breakfast. I wondered who this couple was, were they both students at the university, what were they studying, were they in love, were they married—of course they must be in love, and probably they must be married.
On Henry Street lived the man I would marry, by what concatenation of chance and fate I would never comprehend, in January 1961. Raymond lived on the ground floor of an attractively shabby wood-frame house, in a single-room “flat” with its own private entrance; the room was crowded with books, journals, papers—for Ray was completing his Ph.D. requirements in eighteenth-century English literature, writing a dissertation on Jonathan Swift under the direction of the eminent scholar Ricardo Quintana. In this flat, most evenings we prepared and ate supper together, and afterward worked, or read, side by side on a sofa. The little apartment was furnished, with an air of mismatched gaiety; though in retrospect it sounds cramped and dreary, in fact it was a place of coziness, privacy, and contemplation. The man I would marry was not, and would never be, afflicted by insomnia. You would not wish to marry another like yourself: a nighthawk. My predominant feeling for Ray was a powerful wish to protect him—which was strange, and groundless, for there was no reason to feel this way, Ray was demonstrably capable of protecting himself. He was eight years older than I was, a brilliant and bemused veteran of the English graduate program at Madison; so kindly to me, a naïve first-year student, that, on the first evening we met, while having an impromptu dinner in the Memorial Union overlooking Lake Mendota, he led me patiently and painstakingly through the evolution of the “Great Vowel Shift” in the English language; Ray would later indicate to me which titles were really important, and which not so important, on the daunting list of titles on the department’s reading list for master’s candidates. Begun in this way, our relationship was never one (it seemed to me) of “equals” precisely; in such respects our marriage was a union of another era, about which I am still hesitant to speak, for it is really not possible to speak of someone whom you have loved, and who has loved you, for many years. I do recall my initial shyness, even after we were engaged; even after we saw each other each evening without fail; I would not have dared to knock on the door of Ray’s apartment, or tap lightly at the window as I passed slowly by as if enchanted . . .
Instead, I walked on.
It was not really “early” any longer. Soon, it would be 7:00 A.M.—at which time normality begins.
At last I headed for the little diner on State Street, which was open now. How warmly lighted it seemed, how welcoming, amid the still-darkened storefronts of State Street at this hour. In this diner I’d become a familiar customer, perhaps, like several others, though we never acknowledged one another or spoke. We were individuals who wanted to read at breakfast. We brought with us books, papers. We were solitary and silent and yet we were companions of a kind like the figures seated at the counter in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, the most poignant and ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness. Like the red-haired woman in the painting I sat at the counter, since I would not have been allowed a booth unless I shared it with someone else. By this time after so much walking, and suffused with the optimism of the new day, I was ravenous with hunger. For no one is so happy, or so famished, as an insomniac who has survived the night.
And I was in love, and loved. I would not torment myself with the riddle—How can he love me? Is his love predicated upon not precisely knowing me?
I have yet to solve that riddle.
MID-MORNING, BASCOM HALL. THERE was “Joyce Carol” among the forty or more graduate students seated in a lecture room in Bascom Hall, in a hallucinatory drowse trying to take notes as the Renaissance scholar Mark Eccles lectured on the Elizabethan-Jacobean (non-Shakespearean) drama, reading from copious notes in a subdued, uninflected voice like that of a hypnotist. Professor Eccles was one of the most renowned of the Harvard-educated English faculty; one of those for whom a literary work exists for the sake of its footnotes, that cover it like barnacles; the more footnotes affixed to a work, the more valuable the work in its providing labor for the earnest scholar, if not exactly illumination. (Yet it was in Eccles’s class that I first read the great tragedies of Marlowe, Middleton, and Webster; years later I would recall this soft-spoken man, and others at Madison, with more sympathy reasoning that they, too, had been trained in a particular sort of pedagogy for whom the “literary work” contained little pleasure; they, too, had been captives of the canon.) And afterward walking back to our residence with Marianna who had seemed increasingly distracted lately, complaining of the cold, worrying about a paper she was writing for Eccles, talking compulsively, very different from the young woman I’d met on my first day in Madison, back in September.
Though I would have been shocked to know it, this would be the last time I spoke with Marianna Churchland. Within a day or two she would have moved out of Barnard Hall and departed Madison, returning to North Carolina without a word of farewell to her friends.
Inside the residence Marianna went immediately to the row of mailboxes to look anxiously for mail though it was too early for mail, as she would have known. She was telling me that she had not heard from her fiancé since she’d been back home to visit at Thanksgiving—“We were talking about our wedding. I told him we need to set a date, next summer. I told him—‘I love you so much! I want to have children with you. I want to live long enough to bury you.’ I told him—”
(But at this point I was too distracted to listen for Marianna’s words seemed uncanny to me, bizarre—I want to live long enough to bury you. Marianna’s manner, her voice, her gaze were too intense. The remainder of our exchange was lost to me as I found myself in a hurry to get away from my friend.)
Not I but another. The wings of madness beating near.
ON JANUARY 23, 1961, at the Catholic chapel at Madison, Raymond Smith and I were married, and I vacated my room on the third floor of Barnard Hall to move my spare possessions of mostly winter clothes and books into a surprisingly spacious and airy five-room apartment on the second floor of a sturdy old Victorian house a mile away on University Avenue.
Though we were married by a Catholic priest, we were not married at the altar but in the sacristy, a sort of storage room at the front of the church; this was a compromise of sorts since Ray was no longer a practicing Catholic, and I had not wanted to upset my parents by being married “outside” the church.
It is true, I had not dared to marry “outside” the church—I had not dared to defy and disappoint my parents who were at this time, however nominally, members of the parish of the Pendleton Good Shepherd Church.
Hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue—as the eloquent La Rochefoucauld once observed.
One sunny morning in May, near the end of the spring term, I was examined for my master’s degree in English, in venerable Bascom Hall. It would be my last visit to Bascom Hall. My examiners were, not surprisingly, all men; two were older professors with whom I’d taken seminars, and who had seemed to approve of my work; the third was a younger professor of American literature, perhaps an assistant professor. My heart sank—(yes, it is a cliché: but how appropriately visceral)—when I saw this stern individual staring at me doubtfully as if thinking—Joyce Carol Smith?—who’d been Joyce Carol Oates? A married woman? A serious scholar? It did seem suspicious, I could not blame him.
In the young man’s unsmiling eyes I saw my fate.
Yet, two-thirds of the exam seemed to go well. I had followed my husband’s advice and memorized sonnets by Shakespeare, Sidney, and Donne which I could analyze and discuss, as he had done three years before in this very room; I could speak knowledgeably of “sources”—“influences.” With feeling, but without an excess of feeling, I could recite the opening of Paradise Lost and key passages in Lycidas, The Rape of the Lock, and The Prelude; I could discuss the close reasoning of Milton’s Areopagitica; but the American specialist was unimpressed, biding his time. When it was his turn to interrogate me, he didn’t ask about primary works at all. I might have spoken knowledgeably about the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, but I wasn’t given an opportunity; as in a courtroom nightmare, I was asked only questions I couldn’t answer with confidence about dates of poems, dates of drafts of poems, publications, editions; for instance, how did the 1867 Leaves of Grass differ from the 1855 edition, and what were the circumstances of the 1871 edition? Some of this I knew, in fact—but I did not know with certainty. (If I were teaching the material, I would simply have looked it up in a reference book.) Through a haze of headache and shame I heard myself murmur apologetically, “I don’t know”—“I’m afraid I don’t know.” The experience brought back my having been interviewed for a Woodrow Wilson fellowship as an undergraduate at Syracuse, at the insistence of my professors; there, I had been virtually tongue-tied with shyness, feeling intrusively brash at having wished to be considered for a fellowship in which, it was mandated, only one in four recipients could be a woman.
Years later I would encounter my relentless interrogator in New York City at occasional literary luncheons and receptions; by this time he’d become a man deep into middle age, no longer a professor in the English Department at Madison but in manner and self-possession scarcely changed. Like torturer and torture victim meeting in a new, neutral environment, in new lives, this individual and I would never acknowledge the circumstances of our first meeting; never would we allude even elliptically to the fact, ironic in retrospect, that this man of no particular talent, distinction, or achievement had once hoped to defeat a young woman at the start of what he would have supposed to be my career as a university teacher. How vulnerable I’d been, that morning in May 1961! How negligible in his eyes, how expendable, a young woman, and married: not a likely candidate for the holy orders of the Ph.D., in which young men were always preferred. And it was so: though my love for literature was undiminished, I had become profoundly disillusioned with graduate study and could not have imagined continuing in Madison for another year, let alone several years; my subterranean despair would have choked me, and undermined the happiness of my marriage; it might have destroyed my marriage. The drudgery of scholarly research and the mind-numbing routines of academic literary study, above all the anxiety about pleasing and impressing one’s elders, never displeasing, never upsetting or challenging one’s sensitive elders, were not for me. My major effort of the year had been a one-hundred-page seminar paper on Herman Melville tailored to fit the expectations of a quirky, very senior professor named Harry Hayden Clark, who had a penchant for massive footnotes and “sources”; as I had learned my lesson in my early encounter with his colleague Merritt Hughes, I had not attempted an examination of Melville’s prose as literature but only as a sort of historic document well rooted in nineteenth-century American whaling lore interlaced with the inescapable presence of Shakespeare. Amid the many footnotes of the paper were a considerable number citing Professor Clark, justifiably; though also expeditiously; the paper was well-received by Professor Clark but so depressed me that I tossed away my only copy soon afterward.
The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age Page 23