Joyce: my own predilection for the wedding of the “classic” impulses and the “romantic.” Difficult terms but they indicate simply that one imposes the rigors of the “naturalistic” world on one’s imagination, and one’s imagination upon the world. The documentary-as-vision, the vision-as-history. And of course he’s right about all mythical structures and all techniques—they are simply ways of getting his story told. Bridges for his troops. And afterward—what does it matter if the bridges are destroyed?
March 13, 1977. […] Very happy these days. Why? The absence of the divine that is almost a kind of presence. Even the god “within” can disappear from experience…. Greatly concerned with the world. Caught up in it, carried from hour to hour and day to day, enjoying it immensely, though not much deceived. It is not I who do these things but another, another fulfilling her responsibility, and why not with as much enthusiasm as possible? The burden of teaching so many students in an uncongenial atmosphere simply evaporated a few weeks into the semester and we are all having a good time: all of us, that is, who are passing the course. On the periphery are those who should not be in college, those who have been exploited along the way, given falsely inflated grades; the intellectual life will not have much appeal for these…. The dailiness of teaching. The day-liness of it. Round and round. Fascinating. The spinning of a wheel. Blurred motion. Hypnotic—unless one has been there before and recognizes the symptoms. All this will pass, I think contentedly, all this is passing, has passed. Which does not in the slightest alter the fundamental worth and pleasure of the experience.
March 15, 1977. […] A fairly good day yesterday at the University. Writing workshop lasted longer than usual; we have so much to talk about, not only their writing but other books…Joan Didion, John Cheever, John Gardner, Philip Roth, Simone Weil. This will be the group […] whom I will probably miss the most. Teaching The Luck of Ginger Coffey in my first-year class with a fair amount of success:* not exhilarating classes, not disappointing. Brief troubling incident with a “writer” from Detroit who has published a book with a vanity press. He had telephoned me for advice a few weeks ago, I talked with him, he wrote a letter and I replied, and yesterday he turned up just before my seminar wanting to talk to me…and I told him I hadn’t time. He was smiling, very courteous, and abruptly changed: became quite angry. Stalked away. He went to the chairman’s office and complained, saying that he and I were equals, really, and that I should have talked with him. When John Sullivan pointed out that I could not accommodate strangers who simply appear in the hall, he said that in a short while he would have to put up with that too—he’d be famous too. Evidently John did not satisfy him (did he want me fired?) because he left his office saying he would go to the Dean.
One more crank in the area, seething with hatred for me. It was amazing how his smile vanished and a look of murderous rage appeared. Is my life to dwindle into a bad television melodrama…? The English Department must be tiring of these people who show up and harass, if not me, the secretaries and Dr. Sullivan. Meager, too, the literary material one can get from such experiences….
March 20, 1977.…More snow. Great heaps and banks of it. The rose garden I worked in the other day, gingerly clearing away debris from jonquils’ and tulips’ shoots, is now completely covered. Snowfall all night. Electricity out for a while. Wind. The river slate-colored and choppy and directionless. Immense still immobile eternal winter. Stasis. No time at all passes in this silence.
Working on Jigsaw.
Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. And rereading Nathanael West for my undergraduate course.
Query: Does writing in a journal stimulate thoughts of a minute, precise nature that are already in the mind…or does it artificially create those thoughts…. All journal-keepers become sensitive to their own experiences; and it may even be the case that they set down feelings they don’t really have, or would not have apart from the necessity of keeping the journal. Hence the “narcissism” certain diarists are accused of, for instance Anaïs Nin. Yet if the journal is about oneself one must necessarily and inevitably write about that self…though aspects of private life, especially the routines of that life, are not very interesting. Do I care that I am, in fact, working on a new novel…. In all honesty I don’t care. I work, I work in frustration and bewilderment and occasionally with pleasure, but I don’t truly care about the frustration and the bewilderment and the pleasure, all I ultimately care about is the writing itself, the finished product. A writer’s diary, therefore, is a record of a process, a way of getting to an end, and since it is the end that the writer really values, the entire process is a kind of invention…that is, one’s concern for it is an invention. (Yet it interests me to look back to the days when I was writing The Assassins, if only to discover that things were as frustrating then, or worse. That does give me a kind of hope. A fraudulent hope?)
The tragic & comic truth of life: that one shares so very little of the great concerns of the day. Political fervor, an awareness of the injustices of the world, hopes for improvement, fears, terror, dread, etc., etc…. evaporate before the ferocious heat of one’s concern for his daily routine life. My country must be important because it belongs to me, Stephen says. Very well: but is it important apart from belonging to Stephen? Apart from being transformed in Joyce’s mind? So far as I can judge people seem primarily concerned about their families, their salaries, their “recognition” in the world. If love goes wrong nothing goes right. Isn’t that so? If love goes right other things pop to the surface to irritate and frighten. Salary. Career. Respect. All very dimly narrow, yet very human. One might imagine that the saint or mystic transcends the personal…but perhaps he merely obliterates it, erases it. And then? Naturally the void is enchanting. While acknowledging the very real pleasures of mysticism for the mystic himself I seem to have lost faith, I seem to seriously doubt, the mystic’s connection with or superior awareness of the universe. The worker bitterly upset about his salary vis-à-vis our endlessly inflating economy seems to me no less legitimate, no less admirable, than the “saint” who has simply turned aside from such ostensibly trivial concerns. We are all equal. The universe, the human universe at least, is remorselessly democratic.
[…]
March 24, 1977.…Working on Jigsaw. Absolutely enchanted with the development of the characters’ relationships. […] Life not fragmented but multi-faceted. Life in the round. In many dimensions. Living, we are forced to live out one role; give energy to one viewpoint. Which is why art is so seductive. The novelist fleshes out many viewpoints, and these viewpoints grow heads, arms and legs and bodies, take on life, take on life sometimes greedily and brutally…. The possibility of having lived my life without being a writer is one that leaves me nonplussed. Whatever would I have done…? How could I have endured a narrow tunnel-like self-preoccupied (or family-preoccupied) existence, all my intimate feelings channeled into and through what is merely personal…family or career….
[…]
March 29, 1977.…Working on Jigsaw, pressing on to 100 pages. The method would appear to be easier than it really is. When I’m done I will be forced to redo it all. Or take on another novel, one truly organized around images and not around a plot.
Good news: “In the Region of Ice” won an Academy Award last night. People have been telephoning, and my parents sent a telegram. Since Ray and I didn’t bother to watch the broadcast (I assumed anyway I would not win, and the Academy Award ceremony doesn’t interest me) the first we learned of the award was this morning when Gene McN. called to congratulate me.
A lovely warm day though somewhat windy. We went for two walks, morning and afternoon.
Four more teaching days at the University. Tomorrow I begin The Day of the Locust, which should interest the students. In my seminar continuing with Joyce. (“Nighttown.” Have been reading about Dada.)
[…]
Dada: the short-lived nature of all that is reaction, all that is anti. Hence my own lack of enthusiasm for
“the literature of exhaustion” and for most parody.
Doing galleys for “Daisy.”* Would like to write more on that subject—the enigmatic relationship between genius in father and madness in daughter. What is willed in one is unwilled in another and totally uncontrolled. The pity of it…. Joyce and Lucia. One’s daytime and nighttime self. What is the connection, after all? We know ourselves so slenderly: a mob inhabits our sleep, dimly remembered. Very little of it is us.
10 P.M. Have been writing for most of the day. Must quit; must do a little reading. Writing is like dancing to my doomed heroine Rhoda: a drug, sweet and irresistible and exhausting.
[…]
April 5, 1977. […] Licking about the edge of my vision like gay golden crazy flames are the people of my next novel.* Giants, seen from a child’s point of view. The child Crystal is born and observes certain bizarre things…grows to be about six or seven years old…loses her extraordinary powers (a kind of playful clairvoyance, ability to foresee the future)…and the novel ends. It should be immensely enjoyable to write…! Last night I worked on it, sketching the elaborate plot, and decidedly preferred it to Jigsaw…which is too cool for my taste, too deliberate.
[…]
April 8, 1977. […] A very long day on Wednesday, the last teaching day of the year. The “Literature and Society” class went well, finishing Day of the Locust w/a Spenglerian flourish. Then a seminar from two to five on Ulysses. Quite exhausting, to put it mildly. I disconcerted some of the students by criticizing Joyce: which one must do, after all, eventually. Is it inevitable that Ulysses should have been so fanatically structured, so many things imposed upon the stream of experience that by rights belongs to the characters…? Molly, for instance, is a gorgeous creation and one honors the life in her. But Joyce interferes by introducing, for instance, the animals of the zodiac or the tarot into her soliloquy…cerebral bits that are foreign to her nature. And then one must acknowledge that a closed system in which everything is accounted for belongs to pathology more than to health. For the essence of sanity is an ability to tolerate openness, doubt, ambiguity….
[…]
April 11, 1977.…Working steadily on Jigsaw. Enjoying it more than previously. Will have completed it by about. Which will make it my shortest novel: for me, something of an accomplishment.
Two days of extraordinary weather. Easter Sunday in the high seventies and today just as warm, though windy. Sighted several kinglets. Could not see the ruby crowns but assume they are kinglets since they don’t resemble any warblers likely to come through here. Forsythia blooming everywhere. Daffodils out back. Tulips slower, not yet blossoming. Hyacinth very pale, sluggish, slow. A lovely, enchanting time of year…yet only three days ago it was so cold we could barely enjoy our walk.
[…]
Thinking of my next novel, taking notes. Bellefleur. A handsome family name which might function as a good title. Bellefleur. Radiating out around the baby Crystal Bellefleur who possesses “clairvoyant” powers that gradually (or abruptly?) wane. The novel can end when she’s about six or seven though the time-span of the novel can be more than seven years—can encompass a century if I go about it adroitly enough.
Bellefleur: a child’s-eye vision of the universe. Giants as parents & relatives. Their activities gigantic, exaggerated, florid, dramatic. I want a tornado, a hurricane & flood…several violent love affairs…feuds, duels, deaths…resurrections…the motif of the airplane (my father’s flying & his taking me up)…which crashes at the very end of the novel into the ancestral home. And releases Crystal from her “powers” as she and her brother Brom and her sister drive away into adulthood…leaving the willful Leah behind…. I envision all sorts of garish things. But an essential buoyancy, so that a violent episode will be followed by a heartier one and death will come to seem not morbid but merely an event in a long complex story. What triggered this was strangely enough the idea of a garden wall and a child playing in the garden. But I think in the final version there won’t be a wall…though there might be…the main idea is that to a child the world is enchanted, a magical place. Parents and other adults are giants with remarkable powers. And the child himself is “powerful” in ways not understood…. A voluptuous novel crammed with people and events, quite antithetical to the rigorous structure of Jigsaw and its “cool” air. But Jigsaw too is likable. Is a pleasure to work with. I don’t want it overcome and swept aside by Bellefleur…which is already straining at the gates, wanting to flood my imagination with its oversized people and its improbable adventures…. Telling stories. Read part of the Decameron the other day and wonder why the telling of stories as such has never appealed to me. The penetration of character is fascinating, of course, but storytelling too can be fascinating if I go about it lightly enough…refusing to get snarled in probabilities…maintaining freedom at all times. And who has written a long dense novel with a child at its center who does not age though everyone else ages…. To do justice to a child’s magical vision of the world: a challenge indeed.
April 12, 1977.…Lovely warm day; like summer. Went for a long walk. Reread Unholy Loves. (By deliberately withholding a “dramatic” conclusion I weaken the narrative. It could end otherwise: both Brigit and Alexis are emotional, volatile people. Yet it seems to me the weak, tentative, hesitant conclusion is the most satisfactory one…. )
Hair cut—much too short. The woman asked me if I was still in school, which should have alerted me: she thought I was much younger than I am. Now I have an ideal haircut for a fourteen-or fifteen-year-old. Unfortunately I will be thirty-nine in two months.
More ideas for Bellefleur. Obviously this novel will write itself once it begins; and it will probably be far too long. I don’t care. Jigsaw is too restrained a performance for me, it omits far too much.
Reading magazines at the library—Ms., Redbook, Time, Newsweek. Struck by the banality, the tedious pseudo-profundities; the unoriginal ideas stridently expressed. (Where once I was sympathetic with “feminism” I find it all very tiresome now […]. What has happened to the freshness of the Movement…. Two or three or four “ideas” expressed again and again in different form. That men “colonize” women, that men are imperialists, etc., etc., the dull dead-end of polemics, of insensitive people incapable of registering nuances of feeling and thought…. I had better keep my distance from [the ideologues]: they see only black and white.)
Pheasant in the backyard this morning. Curious sound it made. Many birds—unidentifiable warblers. A few days ago a blizzard, and now summer. Must be difficult for the body to adjust.
[…] Possibility of my going to Princeton for 1978–79. Awfully far in the future. It would be ideal, though: a lovely town, stimulating people, proximity to New York.
The back lawn flooded with sunlight & forsythia. River quite placid. Faint blue sky, summery winds, an air of unearned paradise.
Am I as lazy as I feel myself to be…. Wasted today, practically. Mind idling. Tomorrow the chaos of 120 exams, yet I let today slip by without doing much. Dissatisfied with the poems, really*…dissatisfied with everything…yet inert, indifferent…. That’s an exaggeration, I suppose. The cessation of conflict brings a kind of benign inertia. I wish I valued the emotions more, as I once did. However…. Bleak, economical, precise, pared-down: humanity only between the lines. That is Jigsaw and perhaps its rigors have discouraged me.
[…]
April 26, 1977. […] Unless Virginia Woolf weighed a certain amount, she said, she would see visions and hear voices. Which suggests the powerful link between “madness” and one’s chemical equilibrium; and perhaps the link between fasting and the visions of the saints.
Fasting and meditation certainly bring about an alteration of consciousness. No doubt Simone Weil experienced this and attributed it to divine intervention. At a certain point one feels not only euphoria but a curious, uncanny certainty…and a total suspension of what might be called the skeptical inclinations of more ordinary consciousness. When euphoric we are open to the
very skies: we can believe almost anything, provided it is outrageous enough. By deliberately limiting her consumption of food Simone Weil followed a time-honored tradition and reaped the questionable benefits of visions, dreams, voices, religious certitude. (Which is not to say that the mystic’s beliefs are necessarily false. They are not necessarily anything.)
An image out of the unconscious is always valuable because it belongs to oneself. It may be very important indeed and may partake of a kind of divinity—but there’s no reason to assume that it comes, in fact, from an outside source and that it conveys an objective truth. As euphoria floods the mind speculative ideas crystallize rapidly into dogmatic “truths.” Wishes—for instance, that the universe is governed by love—metamorphose into irrefutable facts. Dreams are “visions” sent from God. Statements told the visionary by other people (parents, priests) metamorphose into the utterances of deities. So inspired, the visionary can talk or write for long periods of time, ecstatically, and his certainty is such that he can overwhelm others’ doubts—temporarily at least. A kind of madness infects everyone. Not necessarily a malevolent madness…but a chimera nonetheless.
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates Page 22