The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

by Joyce Carol Oates

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  July 24, 1976.…Still answering mail. […] No end to letter-writing? No end to polite letters declining “the honor of” giving a talk, a lecture, a reading. Eventually I may stop replying altogether, as I gather others have done. My scrupulosity may be misguided: some of these invitations might not be really issued with me in mind. Nevertheless…. I gather that Donald Barthelme and John Gardner and Philip Roth don’t answer much of their mail.

  Depressing item: four Catholic cardinals ruled that abortion was prohibited under any circumstances at all. Even to save the life of the mother—since it was possible, they said, that the fetus could be male.

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  The Catholic Church. Its beauty. And then the Cardinals with their ruling, their brutal diminishment of woman. The stupidity of these “great” religions. Apart from forcibly organizing chaos, they are cruel in senseless, inhuman ways. One can understand and even appreciate their civil function, but unfortunately human life is lived in the interstices of the state. Thank God (sic) I was never able to believe in the old patriarchal personal God, all huffy and irascible and silly. That God should ever have been conceived of as a He—!

  “Pantheism”: is this a term that can suggest my own sense of the world?

  A conviction now and then that death isn’t a state but a process, a passing-over, a continuation of one’s consciousness in some other form. In which case “death” or “dying” is transitional; it isn’t final.

  Do I believe this? Do I “believe” anything?

  With my sense of humor I find it difficult to take anything seriously except perhaps personal experience, and of course literature.

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  July 26, 1976.…We returned home about 10 P.M. tonight to find that the house had been broken into. A small cupboard usually kept locked was broken open but nothing taken. (There was nothing in the cupboard and the burglar didn’t seem to be interested in anything else.) A policeman came within a few minutes; he and Ray are discussing the incident. It’s strange that the burglar didn’t ransack our drawers or closets…. He missed two or three hundred dollars in cash, and didn’t bother with the two typewriters.

  Worked on “The Mime” yesterday and a little today. A fairly interesting story which should get better as it’s sharpened.

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  We were very fortunate that the burglar didn’t vandalize the house, in his frustration at finding nothing. When our house was broken into in Detroit, some years ago, the burglar or burglars tossed clothing around, yanked out drawers, left a general mess; still, they didn’t smash things or vandalize anything. Thank God.

  A lovely day otherwise. Before we realized the house was broken into, we went for a walk up the river…to the pier at the end of St. Rose…stood out there watching the lights on the water, holding hands, rejoicing in the cooled-off weather. Windsor is lovely. It really is. And with the parks downriver being planted it will be more lovely still by the end of the summer. We’re so fortunate to live here….

  Did some tentative pen-and-ink drawings of yew branches, for Childwold. I feel shy about drawing, as I certainly don’t about writing.

  The police are in the other room, the police radio or walkie-talkie is in operation. Break-ins, prowlers, dogs barking, etc., a constant stream of petty crimes, no end to it. Must be discouraging to be a policeman. Whoever broke into our house had “large hands” according to the detective who dusted the windowsill, and made quite a mess. An adult. He had a drill and went directly to the cupboard and broke the lock open, didn’t bother with anything else, except about $5 worth of stamps from my desk drawer. What a peculiar combination of boredom and danger burglary must be. Constant danger, of course, and yet an infinite underlying monotony….

  Working on poems begun during our vacation. Satirical, rather cynical. Do such poems reflect my deepest feelings, or is it the necessity of art itself, to push matters to extremes? If one is going to be satirical at all one must, it seems, be cruelly so. Otherwise why bother?

  July 29, 1976.…Working on “The Mime,” typing and retyping difficult sections. Would like to do another story re. theft, breaking and entering, the sense of psychological loss, violation, etc.* In fact I don’t feel very upset by the burglary; the detectives made more of a mess than the burglar. Two break-ins in fifteen years of marriage don’t seem excessive.

  Had lunch out in Birmingham at the “Midtown Café,” with Kay, Marge, Sue Marx, Madge Burhman. An atrocious place, too noisy, crowded, serving mediocre food. But the drive was pleasant and before lunch I parked by Quarton Lake and walked around. An idyllic world, really. Black swans, Canada geese, ducks, ducklings, willow trees, children quietly fishing. Marge Levin with her new, costly ring, diamonds and emeralds in a complex gold setting, a gift from Herb […] Perhaps I have missed a great deal by not having been a more conventional wife—by which I mean a mother—but I don’t really think so: the thought of having children, while not repulsive, simply doesn’t interest me at all. It’s like learning to play golf or bridge, or becoming a really good gardener. Such skills are admirable, and one might wish to possess them, but the process of attaining them would be laborious. And one ought not to have children simply to express oneself, to “fulfill” one’s own personality. The life-force moves independent of individuals and individual considerations.

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  The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you’ve done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well. Not indifference, not apathy—but self-containment is the result.

  July 30, 1976.…A rainy day. Everything quite still. Ray is at the university working on the Churchill book; I’m at home alone. The pleasures of solitude (at least in contrast to companionship) are very great. Yesterday I finished “The Mime”: an experimental work in a sense. Behind it, beneath it, a fairly conventional story wanted to assert itself…but I was more interested in the ways by which the story was distorted, as in a mirror only slightly off.

  Wrote the poem “American Independence”* which turns out to be more satirical than comic.

  Reading John Cage. Whimsical and touching and, no doubt, refreshing in contrast to other more pompous men of genius. Like Duchamp, whom he honors constantly. At the same time one prefers Gilles, Bach, Mozart, and, yes, Beethoven (whom Cage most foolishly denounced) to Cage’s variations, his indiscriminate “indeterminacies.” The noises of nature are lovely indeed, much of the time, but what’s wrong with the artificial, the art-ful?—the elaborate organization of a Mozart symphony, for instance. This too is “natural,” one might argue. Everything that arises from the mind of humanity is “natural” in a sense.

  I am beginning to see, however, that the post-Dadaists (and I include Barthelme among them, since his affinities are obviously with the artists, with Ernst and Duchamp and Warhol and Rauschenberg and Johns, etc., etc.) are in reaction against a tradition and can only be understood and appreciated in that context. Barthleme goes against the conventional best-selling novel or story, he’s sprightly and playful and satirical but requires a convention to work in opposition to; otherwise his imagination flags. But in order to create under these circumstances one must spend a great deal of time foraging through the debris of a trashy culture, like Tinguely in a city dump, seeking broken-off parts of wholes, fragments of things once vital. If the impulse to create is strong, but the artist has nothing to say, he can always persuade himself that his “art” is genuine simply because it reacts against others’ art. In fact there is only one standard, in my opinion, and that is that the art be interesting. Theories rarely are, after a certain point.

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  Did the galleys of Childwold the other day. Became quite involved, quite moved. The novel means a great deal to me, so much more than Crossing the Border (which continues to receive pleasant “positive” reviews—what a surprise), but I suppose the presence of the short story collection, I mean its b
eing reviewed now, in July, will rather spoil the novel’s chances. Irony. In the long run, however, I’m so pleased and hopeful about Childwold and its inner meaning…. But it’s not a good idea, maybe, to go on about it. One can only be disappointed.

  Cleaning the house, the kitchen, with steel wool cleaning the stove and the cupboards, and thinking about Son of the Morning: A Romance, which I should begin sometime next month. There is no hurry, of course, since Soliloquies and Night-Side and Sunday Blues and All the Good People are book-length mss. ready to be published, or almost; and there is still How Lucien Florey Died, and Was Born, which seems to have been permanently displaced.* (A pity, since I liked the novel so much when I wrote it. But as it recedes into the past, and as the religious experience the novel approximated has been assimilated more and more into my life, it’s quite likely I will never feel the urgency to have it published that I feel for the other books. I almost don’t dare reread it, for fear I will come to like it again, violently, and will want to displace one of the newer works with it…. )

  Just the same, Son of the Morning is very appealing. I foresee a first-person narration, a doubling-back, with the frame set in some very ordinary place (the ordinary and the extraordinary will be contrasted here throughout, sometimes ironically), and Nathan Vickery gradually metamorphosing into an “ordinary” human being. Hence the novel is a romance, not a tragedy. He plunges deep into the divine—but is hauled out again, gasping and floundering but alive.

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  July 31, 1976.…Worked in the rose garden, and finished cleaning the house. Guests tonight for cocktails. Received a special delivery letter from Town & Country asking me to do an essay for a feature on “Fathers and Daughters”—distinguished fathers and distinguished daughters, that is. My first reaction was one of dismay; then anger; then a kind of resigned irritation. I replied to a Mr. Kagan that the feature was unwittingly cruel and that the mothers of those girls would be very badly hurt. How can people be so ignorant of others’ feelings…?

  It’s like Wilfrid Sheed (who in person is a lovable man) blandly stating in the New York Times Book Review, in an essay about writers-at-work, that the advantage of the interview is that one gets to see glimpses of the “great man” practicing art. Oh yes? And is he invariably “great”?

  There’s no doubt in my mind that depression is suppressed anger. Perhaps there is no such thing as “depression” at all. One feels profoundly and deeply wounded, threatened, paralyzed…simply because the natural emotion, anger, has been blocked. Mr. Kagan’s letter depressed me for some minutes before I realized that I was really angry. Once I realized my anger I wrote him a letter, polite enough, and civil, and not at all sarcastic (as I was tempted)—and the emotions lifted. This is the therapeutic value of expressing oneself either in person or by way of writing. It cannot be over-estimated.

  John Updike, half-serious and half-sly, saying he admired my willingness to write letters in defense of myself or in objection to others’ statements. Which, of course, he would never do. But I replied seriously enough that I wrote these letters even when I didn’t feel much outrage, as a kind of exercise. One should assume an emotion if he hasn’t it, at the moment. A bland acceptance of others’ judgments may be the way of the Tao, but it isn’t for most of us.

  “Don’t get mad, get even” seems to me an unhealthy admonition. “Getting even” is childish and will only lead to further troubles. Getting mad, however, provided one gets normally “mad” and doesn’t fly into a rage, is rather natural; and then everything blows over. “It is inhuman to bless when one is being cursed,” Nietzsche says, and I believe it’s equally inhuman to accept certain things stoically.

  August 1, 1976. […] In that restless yet lazy period when I’m not ready to begin a novel but don’t wish to work on a short story. Sense of idleness, drift. I want Son of the Morning somehow complete before me so that I can rewrite it and enjoy the refashioning of each sentence. At the same time…the main pleasure is the invention, the surprise…my not understanding quite everything that unfolds.

  August 3, 1976.…Finished “Casualties,” which was begun yesterday; worked up from notes taken in Maine.* A blending of certain vivid and painful images. Will send out to Blanche tomorrow. […] Came across my “Speculations on the Novel,” an essay written some time ago for the National Book Awards ceremony, or perhaps it was something else, and was puzzled at the persona I encountered. The voice both is and isn’t my own. I can remember having written parts of it, but not all; and the “sacred” business is mildly embarrassing. Still, I suppose it’s true enough. True somehow.

  What relationship between the power of art and the quirks of personality and personal experience?

  None.

  A great deal?

  The most egotistical people, Randall Jarrell pointed out, are probably people no one knows about, non-verbal people, unexceptional and unheralded. But they radiate certainty. They are never in doubt of their high worth. The writer, however, draws others’ attention and therefore is a candidate for egotism, by which I mean the accusation of; the condemnation. In glancing through another’s diary or journal one cannot help but be struck by the often mundane quality of the entries. Are these things important enough to have been experienced even once, let alone twice?—yet of course they constitute the diarist’s life. And it’s a commonplace of spiritualist literature that the dead are insatiably curious about trivial matters. It would please me very much to know what sorts of things my parents and I said to each other, what clothes I wore, what meals I ate, what sort of homework I did, which pet cats were living at the time, back in, say, 1953: but that information is lost forever. Yesterday, however, Ray cooked a steak for himself outside and I had sole, we had an enormous salad with fresh garden tomatoes, and later in the evening, for dessert, I had fruit and cottage cheese, and Ray had peanuts and beer. Tonight we’re going to the McNamaras’ and then to Joe Muer’s in Detroit. I will wear an orange dress with white polka dots and white shoes, and a long string of white pearls, utterly and perfectly disguised as—as myself. The evening will be easy and effortless and enjoyable, like other, similar evenings. Outside, at the moment (5:55 P.M.), the river is lovely, the back lawn is sunny, the roses are blooming, everything is really quite idyllic. Surely this is paradise, and I am rarely out of it. And it has no connection that I can gauge with my writing—no connection at all. The biographical “science” is a lie.

  August 7, 1976. […] Desultory notes on Son of the Morning. The first chapter: Ashton Vickery and the wild dogs. Am in no hurry to begin the novel, however. Nathan continues to shape himself out of chaos…out of shadow.

  Overcast, chilly days. More like autumn than summer. This morning a colorful regatta on the river—sailboats with colored sails—quite astonishing. Dream-images, moving along in perfect silence. (Yet their apparent effortlessness is the result of arduous skill and many years’ practice. Thus with us all.)

  Vague notes on a story about an unnamed man, a father, who has traveled around the world & seen many sights, too many sights; now he prowled through the darkened rooms of his own home, studying his sleeping children. The story doesn’t quite spring clear…. Thinking also of “The Tattoo.”*

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  August 12, 1976. […] Working with “The Tattoo,” thinking of the transformation of private images into a more public structure. Experimental work is the result of a deliberate decision to limit the transformation—a refusal to make it completely public and therefore accessible. An experimental “Tattoo” would not have fleshed out the image in personal terms; there would have been no Gerry Lund, no Ellen Proctor, no setting, no drama, no anguish, no plot, and certainly no conclusion. One can see the delights of deliberately thwarting the transformational process…yet when I work along those lines […] I never feel satisfied with the work. It can be finished, polished, every word and every punctuation mark in place, yet it doesn’t seem complete to me…. I wonder why: it’s a problem that leaves me baffled.


  Temperamentally and intellectually I’m sympathetic with experimental writing but I don’t like to do it the way I like, or perhaps love, more traditional work. At the same time, the traditional work has to have risks within it, odd little flights, otherwise it doesn’t interest me. But the mixture is a dangerous one, since no one seems to have understood The Assassins, and not a few people really disliked it. (I think about four or five people liked it, fortunately including Evelyn Shrifte.) Is it worth it to labor at such an immense thing, knowing that most people (by which I mean most intelligent people, not the non-reading public) won’t care for it at all….