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November 10, 1978.…Working on Bellefleur. About to begin “Nocturne.” Another Indian summer day, lovely & mild. Life seems so…so accelerated….
[…]
…I can’t, for some reason, seem to get hold of life here. Of a reasonable schedule here. I seem to want to write at all times. To write at Bellefleur continuously. Continually. It spills over onto everything, into everything, a nagging tugging sensation…that I should be working on the novel while in fact I am doing a dozen other things. But I can’t write all the time. I shouldn’t write all the time. I shouldn’t even think of such a bad thing.
…When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)—then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly—why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.
…Complaints of loneliness at Princeton. Students isolated, under pressure, as guilty as I (evidently) if they “enjoy” themselves for very long. An interview in the newspaper, various articles, and my own students’ comments…. But perhaps loneliness is the human condition. Broken intermittently by flashes of something else: camaraderie, friendship, “love.” Too much social life & one hungers for seclusion. Too much seclusion & one hungers for social life. A pendulum back and forth. No rest, no stasis. At the age of forty I really don’t know…do I need people very much, or is it all a kind of illusion, surrounding oneself with friends, imagining needs, connections, exchanges…? The work, the work, everyone thinks here at Princeton, the work is permanent; or nearly so. Everything else quickly fades. And that is true. The present tense in which we live is, paradoxically, misted over with a sense of the unreal. Can anything that passes by so swiftly be less than unreal?—fiction?…But it is also the case that the meditating, brooding, ceaselessly rummaging consciousness isn’t the entire person, and perhaps knows very little of the entire person. I “think” I might be autonomous, like the defiant young Henry David Thoreau; but I may very well be, like David Henry Thoreau (the young man’s real name), presenting an unreal, wished-for persona, to myself if not to the world. How does one know the first truth about oneself…?
…Bellefleur is going to be long. Very long. It moves slowly, despite the “pace” of its narrative, its storytelling quality. Slowly slowly slowly. Calmly. For, after all, there is no hurry.
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November 19, 1978.…A quiet weekend. Working on the novel, on Jedediah’s chapter (“The Vision”), which went rather smoothly. Am now. It goes slowly, slowly. But I begin to feel more confident about it: the vastness of it, I mean. Reading & rereading the notes gives me an almost clear sense of its shape….
…Why do I take on these quixotic, “ambitious” schemes? After Bellefleur I promise myself easier, scaled-down novels, realistic novels of the sort I love to read; and to write also. (How I enjoyed Unholy Loves, particularly the last revision!)…A series of human, very human, short stories.
…Yesterday, what should be our last bicycle ride of the season. To Princeton and back, by way of Pretty Brook Lane; about twelve miles; idyllic for the most part, except, on the return home, the day grew suddenly cold and a November wind blew…. Marvelous exercise. Left us both somewhat shaky-kneed for a while.
…The pleasures of solitude. In such severe contrast with my week at the University: MondayTuesdayWednesday jammed together. I don’t get home until after five—until after dark. And then Thursday we are invited to Thanksgiving Dinner at Charles and Holly Wright’s (along with Mike and Mary Keeley), an evening I am looking forward to. And Friday we drive to Boston for the conference, at the Sheraton-Boston. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Returning home Sunday afternoon.
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…Many hours at the piano. Playing the Eleventh Nocturne, an exquisitely beautiful piece which haunts me. Listening to Nikita Magaloff playing the fifty-one mazurkas, a London album I bought some weeks back and have nearly worn out…. What is there to say about such music! One can only listen, and listen…. Perhaps the entire human condition is expressed by Chopin. But no: he goes beyond it: there simply isn’t anything one can say about certain of his compositions. To listen to them is extraordinary enough, but to attempt to play them…. To feel the melody, the texture of the sounds, flowing through one’s fingertips, as if one were somehow Chopin, a vessel, a vehicle, for the remarkable compositions that sprang from his imagination and were tempered so rigorously by his skill…! Well, there’s no point in talking about it. It would be easier, really, to capture the essence of our hearty bicycle ride yesterday, or our cheerful, intimate dinners (I am beginning to enjoy cooking again, in a modest way) and evenings, lazily reading, a fire in the fireplace, kittens on our laps, etc. The most domestic of lives: the most blessed. And Bellefleur is a strategic balance lest things seem to be too placid.
November 30, 1978. […] Flannery O’Connor’s disappointing orthodoxy. Which the fiction doesn’t exactly defy, if one investigates it carefully enough. There is a superficial rebelliousness which might be misread by those who would save her from her own Catholicism.
…In essence, what is wrong with the “Christian” position is that it denies evil in creation & in the creator. Hence it refuses to recognize evil’s reality, evil’s energy, as well. Other religions of course aren’t so naïve…or so self-righteous. The Christian too readily projects his own evil out onto someone else; or the Devil. A silly position psychologically since evil—what passes for evil—is usually far more interesting, more inventive, than “good.”
…Melville: “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.” But was this written to Hawthorne with an air of childlike glee, or faint guilt, or wonderment, or…? If I feel that I have written a “wicked” story (or in the case of Wonderland a wicked novel) it must be because…well, why?…it can only be because I haven’t brought the fictional characters round to my own position…haven’t “resolved” their fate as I suppose I seem to be resolving my own, as it unfolds. I can imagine a psychologically & socially healthy life for myself, or seem to be imagining it, in fact without much strain; but I don’t always imagine this wholeness for my fictional people.
…Why should I? I do what I will.
…Melville’s & Ahab’s pact with the Devil. Since there is no Devil, but there are certainly devilish human beings, and parts of human beings, one must assume that Melville like Ahab felt he had entered into a kind of communion with the secret, repressed (?) aspects of his own soul. Ahab’s monomania, his hatred for God. His hatred for Life itself. (How inconvenient, that Moby Dick isn’t female!—the allegory would be even more fascinating.) Hatred…vanity…egoism…crippledness…stuntedness…half-man…impotence…absurd inflation of one’s importance…recklessness instead of reasoned courage…. Hubris; the tragic “hero”; the doomed totemic hero. If I were to descend into my own self, there to ruthlessly seek out buried, secret, “forgotten” images, would this be a wise, even a pragmatic undertaking, or would it be psychologically dangerous…? Bellefleur is saved from being unsettling because it is so much a story or stories. It remains in motion. At the moment Raphael II is squatting by Mink Pond, watching a marsh wren; and at other points in time, decades earlier, other Bellefleurs are doing other things. I must begin thinking about “The Walled Garden.” (How odd, that the scene in the garden was the first scene I’d imagined, for this novel. The baby Germaine and her mother…the high stone walls…. And now I am and this opening scene is just beginning!)
…Melville’s depths. Profundity. One cannot exhaust him, one must return to him.
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December 12, 1978.…Working on Bellefleur, hour upon hour, and nothing suits me better; nothing is more richly, lavishly, lushly rewarding. Have just finished a minute ago the chapter “Paie-de-Sables” and now it is almost 11 P.M. and apart from an afternoon at the University [
…] I have been working on the novel all day. It is so entirely engrossing, so mesmerizing…. Why, I wonder, don’t we all sink into our obsessions, and disappear from view?
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December 16, 1978.…A flurry of days. Conversations, impressions, snatches of thought; working on Bellefleur; but going with unprecedented slowness…nagging myself about it, thinking almost ceaselessly about it (I must begin Jedediah’s little chapter, “The Holy Mountain,” in a few minutes) though I haven’t been able to get to this desk to actually write a word.
…End-of-semester parties. […] Christmas wreath on the door, decorated w/my mother’s ornamentation; Christmas greens in the living room, and some small pink-red lights; outside, twined about a tree in the courtyard, some white lights, also small. No snow yet, but the pond is frozen over. Lovely place. Lovely world.
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…End-of-the-year thoughts. Plans for the future, which we mull over endlessly. To stay here…or to return, eventually, to Windsor…. I signed the contract w/Dutton yesterday & feel spotless as a lamb: perhaps because the prospect of so much money hasn’t sunk in yet…. This has been, in outward ways, a VERY NICE year; and inwardly too. Happy 1978…!
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Christmas, 1978…Blissful day, utter solitude: Ray and me, and the menagerie. (Misty, Miranda, Muffin, Tristram, and the parakeet Ariel. How do people become eccentric? Quite by accident!—we never intended to have four cats.)
…Exchanging presents last night: a woolen plaid muffler for Ray (who has a cold at this very moment), a ceramic ashtray for the living room (and very handsome it is), a bottle of cologne for me (a beautiful scent which Ray chose, he said, with care). A veal and eggplant dish for dinner, and a salad with every conceivable ingredient; and tonight steak for Ray and fish for me, and baked potatoes and so forth, and so on. Later this week things will become fairly hectic, but at the moment we are idyllically happy; this part of the world, this house, radiate calm.
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…Working on Bellefleur & feeling marvelous about it. The relaxation of telling a story…of being frankly melodramatic…of working at that slightly stilted, old-fashioned style…. How much freer and easier (at least at the moment) Bellefleur is than The Evening and the Morning (which Henry Robbins wants to re-name Graywolf!) was…. Looking back, leafing back through this journal (which I haven’t read since coming to Princeton) I was disturbed to see, and to recall, how intensely troubled I was for a while—for quite a while—over the writing of that novel. I remember how stubbornly it shaped itself…how I despaired…how angry I was…and how my anger took the form of an intense, perhaps exaggerated self-criticism. […] It strikes me as strange, now. And I would certainly have forgotten it completely—if I hadn’t recorded it in this journal.
…The fascination of a journal: one “hears” one’s past self, recognizes the time by certain landmarks, identifies once again yet not entirely…there is always something left over…and that something is one’s growth, one’s alteration. Yet I see by reading through the journal of past years that I’ve always been perfectly content with Windsor: with the job, the setting, friends, opportunity to write, etc. So my emphasis this fall on needing to stay here…here in Princeton…has been so strong precisely because there isn’t much behind it…because I want to convince myself. But the droll dry unexciting truth is that I was happy there, I am happy here, it won’t really matter where we live.
* Oates was writing an essay called “Tragic Rites in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed,” which appeared in the fall 1978 issue of the Georgia Review and was collected in Contraries.
* The poet Howard Moss was at this time the poetry editor at The New Yorker.
* Oates is here planning for her novel Cybele, which Black Sparrow published in 1979.
* This uncollected story appeared in the March 1980 issue of Penthouse.
* John Gardner’s much-discussed On Moral Fiction had just been published.
* Oates’s editor at the New Republic was Roger Rosenblatt. Her review of Howard Nemerov’s Figures of Thought: Speculations on the Meaning of Poetry, and Other Essays, appeared in the April 8, 1978, issue.
* “Snowfall” appeared as a limited edition broadside from Lord John Press in 1978 and was collected in Invisible Woman “Small Miracles” appeared in the spring 1981 issue of Paris Review and was collected in Season of Peril.
* Byron Rourke, Carolyn’s husband, was a colleague of Oates’s at the University of Windsor.
* The uncollected story “Night Song” appeared in the winter 1978–79 issue of the Greensboro Review.
* At this time Oates was reading intensively in Soviet literature in preparation for the Soviet-American Writers’ Conference, held by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation on April 25–27, 1978.
* This poem appeared in the spring 1979 issue of Paris Review.
* The story “Détente,” inspired by Oates’s involvement in the conference, appeared in the summer 1981 issue of the Southern Review and was collected in Last Days (Dutton, 1984).
* This poem appeared in the spring 1981 issue of the Hudson Review.
* The poem “Prelude” appeared in the spring 1980 issue of the Southern Review.
* “Kristin’s novella” is a reference to a work Oates was planning that eventually became the full-length novel Angel of Light (Dutton, 1981).
* Oates was planning her story “The Doll,” which appeared in the winter 1979 issue of Epoch.
* The story Oates was currently working on, “Queen of the Night,” appeared in a special limited edition from Lord John Press in 1979 and was collected in A Sentimental Education.
* “The Precipice” appeared in the winter–spring 1979 issue of Mississippi Review and was collected in A Sentimental Education; the review of Murdoch’s novel appeared in the New Republic on November 18, 1978.
* This uncollected story appeared in the summer 1979 issue of New England Review.
* This uncollected story was retitled “Scherzo” and published in the winter 1979 issue of Ohio Review.
* This uncollected story appeared in the winter 1980 issue of Kansas Quarterly.
† Edmund “Mike” Keeley was one of Oates’s colleagues in the Creative Writing Department at Princeton.
* Walter Kaufmann and the poet Stanley Kunitz were Princeton colleagues.
seven: 1979
The desire to be “utterly normal” and even conventional on the one hand; and to be absolutely free, inventive, wild, unrestrained in the imagination. So that the two worlds appear incompatible. There is no point of contact…. But the unrestrained world is within the “normal” world, it is the normal world’s untold secret.
During the winter and spring of 1979, Joyce Carol Oates remained immersed in her most ambitious novel to date, Bellefleur. The journal includes a fascinating, almost daily recounting of her absorption in this “lush” work of the imagination. Later in the year, having completed the novel, she turned to more modest but equally absorbing works, both of them novels told in the form of linked short stories, a genre she had emulated in one of her apprentice novels as a young girl after reading Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time. These novels were Marya: A Life, which would not be published until 1986, and Perpetual Motion, whose stories were published in magazines but which never appeared in book form. As usual, what Oates called the “logjam” of her proliferating unpublished manuscripts inevitably meant that some projects were consigned to the drawer.
Now settled comfortably in Princeton, Oates tried hard to balance her rigorous work schedule with Princeton’s equally rigorous social calendar. She bemoaned her disinclination to “entertain,” noting the number of unrequited dinner invitations she and Smith were accumulating. What is astonishing, however, is the amount of social life, including dinner parties given by the couple, she managed to fit into her schedule. She also continued to visit New York regularly, where she socialized with such friends as Donald Barthelme, Susan Sontag, and John Updike. At the same time, she enjoyed the Princeto
n area’s picturesque natural surroundings, and nature description continues to be one of the journal’s prominent features.
Oates had made peace with her decision to change publishers, and was looking forward eagerly to working with Henry Robbins, one of the most distinguished and celebrated book editors in New York. Among the most notable passages in this year’s entries, then, are those that record Oates’s shock and grief when Robbins died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-one. These passages meditate not only on Robbins and her handful of extremely cordial meetings with him, but also on mortality in general and on the relative meaninglessness of literary “industry” in the face of such an irreparable loss.
What Oates once termed her “tiresome resiliency” served her well, however, and despite Robbins’s death she continued to work doggedly on her manuscripts. Toward the end of the year, she is pondering, with some frustration, a new work to be called Angel of Light, the frustration arising from the fact that she couldn’t seem to find the right focus or “voice” for the novel. Soon enough, however, her perseverance would be rewarded.
In all, 1979 is a relatively low-keyed year, but one that found Oates typically enjoying her work life of discipline and restraint even as she indulged with typical abandon in the “unrestrained world” of the imagination.
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates Page 33