The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

by Joyce Carol Oates

  …Bly’s fiery expansiveness, his audience-loving manner. He was on for 21/2 hours—amazing. And seemed untired at the end. (He is fifty-two years old.) Though many people dislike him, and ridicule his “leaping poetry” esthetics, and criticize, rather cruelly, his translations, I wonder if he isn’t quite simply a major American poet: or force in poetry: a presence too forceful to be discounted. How superficial, how feeble, the New York poets appear, set beside him. (It’s too easy to forget Bly’s humor. He’s wonderfully funny. Because, I suppose, his “mysticism” allows him that…his centeredness…not unlike my own. People like us cannot be budged from our positions.)

  …The sanctity of the body, its privacy, need for aloneness; secrecy. How ugly it would be, to be exposed to strangers’ eyes…to be naked in front of someone who didn’t love me…. (The other evening, Max and Bob Fagles and someone else were talking about swimming in the nude, mildly contemptuous of those who were uneasy doing it, or refused to do it.) Worse than appearing naked in front of other people is the fact of their appearing naked in front of me. Who, for God’s sake, wants to look upon less-than-beauty, bare!—and my middle-aged acquaintances wouldn’t, I imagine, fare especially well. The most significant thing about a naked person is his or her face.

  …Telephone call from Blanche. She likes Bellefleur very much. And I’ve agreed to be a monthly reviewer for Mademoiselle.

  May 14, 1979.…Yesterday, telephoned home; hadn’t been feeling quite well for most of the day—dizzy, fatigued, baffled; my father answered, and said sadly that Mom is sick: had an attack of extreme dizziness and nausea, and was lying down. Her high blood pressure…? Or thyroid condition…? She was fearful of a stroke….

  …Worried. Thinking: But what if…? Oh yes. What if.

  …Telephoned today, and Mom herself answered. She is feeling better, but will be entering the hospital for tests on Saturday, for two or three days. And their visit, planned for the 24th–28th, must be postponed.

  …How lucky I’ve been, my mother kept saying, all these years. I’ve really been very lucky, she said. And sounded almost cheerful.[…]

  …Completed “Theft,” after many days’ concentration.* Writing, transcribing, translating a great mess of notes. Starting a page, and beginning it again; and still again; and again; again. My reputation notwithstanding I do find certain sessions laborious…which might have accounted for my lethargy yesterday…since I don’t want to claim some sort of ESP connection. (Yet, oddly, Sunday night as I was about to fall asleep I thought quite clearly: You are going to die.) Today I feel much better, fortunately. And so does my mother.

  …Invemere. Port Oriskany. (Which, in the final draft, in the novel draft, I must flesh out…a city that both is and is not Syracuse, NY. A city not unlike Buffalo in some respects; with a waterfront; trainyards, factories, foundries, etc. Hilly terrain, however…. ) The queer minor satisfactions of poking about in the past. In landscapes and cityscapes I might have thought I’d lost forever.

  …Marya’s next adventure? I have no idea. Really none. My mind is quite blank. She has a “perfect” record…will obviously go to graduate school, in triumph…yet there we must part company in any external way since I can’t have her meeting and marrying someone like Ray…I can’t hand over to her that “happy” resolution, which would end, in a sense, her struggle as Marya.

  …Lois [Smedick] will visit tomorrow. Lunch, perhaps at an inn on the Delaware.

  May 19, 1979.…Dreary rainy days. But everything is lushly green and casts an undersea tint to the ceilings and walls. All our glass…immense windows facing the lawn, and the pond, and the woods….

  …Working on the lurid Triumph of the Spider Monkey play. My heart beating with Bobbie’s absurd voice, his doomed ambition…. Not a hair’s-breadth of space between us! Poor little fated honey-monkey.

  …Lovely visit from Lois; Tuesday; and a drive up along the Delaware, to lunch at the Stockton Inn; then back down to New Hope; a leisurely walk along the canal; talking of innumerable things, sighting birds (the most flamboyant being a Baltimore oriole), enjoying the sunshine and premature summer. Then Lois drove back to Jenkintown, and will be leaving for Windsor in a day or two. Everything seems placid there: exactly the same: very little news. […]

  …Movers came w/boxes of books, art, some stray items of furniture (including the immense bedroom bureau which looks, to our surprise, absolutely beautiful in the large bedroom here) and we’ve been unpacking…unpacking…laboriously & tediously going through the motions of setting up house again, again…again. Have ordered more bookshelves. The house, which had looked comfortable enough before, now looks strikingly beautiful…or so it seems to me…. How much we feel at home here….

  …Finished “Theft,” and mailed it off to Blanche. Am feeling lazy these days. Yet I seem to have been working hard…seem to have done a great deal…the Marya stories, and the various reviews, and finishing up the semester at Princeton. (Where, unfortunately, I think I will have to fail at least one student. Perhaps two.) But in my innermost heart I know better: for when I actually look forward to preparing dinner (veal tonight, an Italian dish, spinach, green noodles) I must certainly be underworked.

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  May 24, 1979.…Ned Rorem, newly inducted into the Academy-Institute, handsomely dressed in a (could it have been?) midnight-blue velvet jacket; younger and more attractive than recent photographs suggested; talking with me…in some detail…about a story of mine originally published in Partisan R., many years ago…“Fan Mail”…but I think there was another title…“Passions & Meditations”…?* The man has a remarkable memory; and Elizabeth Hardwick came by, and we talked about other things, and it turned out that Ned had read her new novel Sleepless Nights, but recalled having read parts of it earlier in Prose, that passages or phrases had been eliminated…. An extraordinary memory, or so it struck me, especially in the genial half-crazed hubbub of noises that is the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters at such times. […]

  …Chatting with John and Martha [Updike], but not for long; even briefer conversation with the Barthelmes; trying to make conversation at lunch with Wendy and Robert Pirsig (he wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) but since they spend most of their time living on a sailboat, which evidently involves a great deal of sustained effort, and they haven’t much time (or, it seemed, inclination for) reading, it was difficult to find things to talk about. […] Downpour, flooding down the precarious slopes of the canopied tent-roof. The brick floor extremely wet. A nice lunch—in fact very nice—if one could taste it over the uproar of rain and raised voices and general commotion. What a queer ritual this is! […] Jim Dickey pursuing me, and I trying to elude him, because I mistakenly thought he might be angry about my reference to The Zodiac in a recent review…but it turned out he was awfully grateful for my long essay on him in New Heaven, New Earth.† “The most perceptive thing on my work I’ve ever seen,” he said, almost humbly, and I found myself feeling guilty and sorry and…because I had harshly criticized his most recent poem…or whatever the Zodiac is…and then it occurred to me that Dickey has been so incredibly cruel and mean-spirited and selfish and arrogant, in the past, to other people, why on earth should I feel guilty about having made a small, quite sincere statement about his book…?…John Cheever looking natty and youthful in a three-piece beige suit, with a red bow tie. Funny man: “Since I’ve given up drinking, these big parties are terrible,” he said, though he hardly looked as if he were having a terrible time. Tom Victor, angelically smiling, photographed us together. Failed to speak with Eudora Welty, even for a moment. Or with William Gass, receiving an award, looking older and old-mannish, than I had recalled. Nice conversation with Anthony Hecht—as if we were old friends!—so I seem to have been, I really don’t know how, taken up into the fold of the establishment—spoken to easily and companionably by people like Hardwick, Peter Taylor, Cheever, Updike, etc., etc., and it seems to have happened, in a sense, in my absence. Am I now part of
the “Establishment”?

  May 27, 1979…. 6 P.M. & premature gloom. Bizarre weather for days: rain, downpours, fog, wind, cold temperatures. A few minutes’ sunshine and we run outside, giddy, grateful…but deceived…. Long drive, yesterday. Up the Delaware…to the west, to Plumsteadville…staring at the river & the sky of immense banked clouds…thinking…“we live in the mind”…or at any rate someone lives in the mind…someone is doing the living, the thinking…ceaselessly…. All this freedom as a consequence of the completion of Spider Monkey [play], which has been mailed off to Blanche; and the completion of the Jung review-essay, which involved a few days’ intense rereading…and thinking…brooding…well, whatever.* Jung’s mythography, his myth-making instinct. Memories, Dreams, Reflections both is and is not an “autobiography.” What relationship does the “myth” have with one’s true self? Is there a true self? I feel, at times, so unutterably bewildered…! It isn’t simply that I do not know the first fact about my past life, I don’t know the first, the crucial, fact about this present life. And I am not naïve enough to believe that someone else could supply “facts”…any more than he could supply myths.

  …Brooding upon the next Marya story. And perhaps a play…teleplay…someone from Channel 13, NYC, has asked me to write an “original teleplay”…which doesn’t exactly interest me…but…perhaps I shouldn’t draw back from a new project, a new challenge…. My mind in a leisurely cascade. Thoughts tumbling on all sides. Looking through old books (Marriages & Infidelities, Upon the Sweeping Flood, etc.), casting about for something suitable to “dramatize.” But really it’s a search for a pattern, a myth…a former voice…an identity. Who is the person who has written all these books! I know it is “myself,” and yet…. When leafing through The Poisoned Kiss I am appalled at how little I remember of that book. I haven’t any idea how the stories end…! At least with the others I do remember…I remember details, even…and conclusions…. Most of the time.

  …Broken-off fragments of a life. How to assemble…re-assemble…. It’s quixotic; it’s absurd; it never can be done, and would be falsifying if it were. The continual raking and reraking of the past doesn’t interest me in itself but…but I halfway think it should…for I lose myself daily…hourly…it simply flows away…I know it should flow away since that is the nature of the universe as I understand it: flux, with tiny oases of “permanence” within them, and then flux again: again again.

  …Too much brooding, thinking, working, writing of Spider Monkey hour upon hour until my head rang…. The sense of wanting to get something completed, not for its own sake, or for other people (no one else even knew I was writing the play) but to prevent its being stillborn…. The initial frenzy, the fear that the imagination won’t be able to translate images into words quickly enough…some disaster is impending…but then no disaster strikes…years & years of leisure…surface leisure…years in which nothing has happened that would warrant the slightest apprehension of abrupt, radical change. (And then there is good news: my mother’s illness was diagnosed and is being treated: an infection of the inner ear which can be controlled by medicine, despite its violent onslaught…. “Labyrinthitis.”…Terrible dizziness and nausea. My poor mother! How frightened she must have been, and Daddy too. And though it has a happy ending…we are all shaken, humbled…grateful…until the next time.)

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  May 31, 1979.…Two days ago I was a 500-pound jellyfish unable to get to this desk, let alone write; slithering, centerless, appalling, jelly. Yesterday and today I have been working hour upon hour upon hour at “The Cure for Folly”*…wondering what it will lead me into…for the notes and the outline seem to be pointing toward a story other than the one I am writing. Marya at the age of twenty-three…in love for the first time…. Or so she fears….

  […]

  …Long bicycle ride in the sunshine: out to Carter Rd., to the ETS woods and park (where ducklings and goslings abound—lovely Princeton!), and out to Rosedale, and back along Province Line and Pretty Brook and Carter and Bayberry: what more wonderful way to spend an afternoon? I might worry about becoming spoiled, but I recall (without even troubling to glance through this journal) that we’ve always led a fairly self-indulgent life, at least in these mild matters, and nothing disastrous has happened…. And yesterday a very long walk in Princeton, out toward the Institute. Talking over the magazine. My parents’ postponed visit. Our love for this area. Well—you’ve brought me to a wonderful part of the world, each of us routinely tells the other.

  …Encouraged, indeed emboldened, by the success of the Swedish dish, perhaps I will try something even more ambitious next time. Perhaps I have broken through my indifference to…my dislike for…an emphasis upon food and cooking that others find so pleasurable. Surely it is, at its worst, a harmless pastime…. At its best, generous, warm, a sort of ritual of friendship, affection, even love. And it’s interesting too how the generosity of others (our Princeton acquaintances primarily) stimulates a counter generosity.

  …Dubious good news from the Franklin Library: 2000 more people have subscribed to them than they had anticipated, so now I must sign 2000 more sheets! Astonishing. I can’t believe that so many people (this would make an improbable 7500 for a limited edition) bought the book when it was first published…. What monkeyshines. What American highjinks.

  June 6, 1979. […] Working on “The Cure for Folly.” Sometimes it goes smoothly, sometimes miserably. Inching along, inching along; and in the evenings reading for my Mademoiselle column—reading, reading, reading—enjoying most of all Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, another of her sensitive, intelligent, deeply thoughtful novels. If there is any justice she should be awarded a Nobel Prize someday.*

  …Bicycle rides. Walks. Ray working in the garden. (Which is beginning to look wonderful. The lettuce(s) especially; and the marigolds; tomato plants; poppies.) These should be lazy idle days but they seem to be power-driven. Signing 2000 sheets for the Franklin Mint wasn’t a bad pastime…it slowed me down, allowed me to listen more closely to Chopin once again, and Rachmaninoff (études), and John Field, and Fauré (for piano and orchestra—gentle melodic little piece)….

  …One fairly certain judgment about life: however it is lived, hour by hour by hour, we have only ourselves for company, and it probably doesn’t matter very much about the things we think we’re failing to do.

  …The dim shock of realizing that others think of me as “successful.” Imagine!

  …Studying Bosch. Bosch, again. After so many years. The fanciful machine-devils. Endless riddle. The artist’s delight in his own creation is obvious…yet, creating it, might he have been sloughing it off…? And the canvas, which is all that remains, is a sort of anti-self, anti-Bosch. So that it never represents the artist himself, only his art; his art-process. In that way the artist constantly eludes definition, and history, like a snake wriggling out of his skin…if we can imagine that a snake is honored and even paid for wriggling out of his skin…something he’d quite naturally be doing anyway, and hardly could not do.

  […]

  June 7, 1979.…Working, working on “The Cure for Folly.” Yesterday, most of the afternoon, until I finished the penultimate “chapter” and felt almost sick…reeling with fatigue…my head pounding as Marya’s (and Fein’s) head pounded. How odd, how mysterious, the relentlessness of…hour upon hour upon hour…why I do these things, why anyone would…until a kind of abyss of exhaustion opens…and the dim “demonic” perceptions force themselves through. The ugly little demon jumping about, dancing on Marya’s back—Hey nonny nonny—one can be ridden about the four corners of the Void, driven by such a creature. Why, I haven’t the faintest idea. One certainly gives one’s consent.

  …Fein’s risk: to deny the power of the Unconscious: to attempt to trivialize it. Hence his fate.

  …And now that it is almost completed, and I can stand back from it, what is it? The pattern of survival in Marya…the strength of will in Marya…

  …Haunt
ed by an account I read in the Times of a seventeen-year-old girl pushed off a subway station, onto the tracks, her right hand severed…she remained “conscious,” it was said…screaming for her mother, and that she had to go to college. (She had been accepted at Tufts. An excellent student, a flutist as well.)…The assailant was a black boy of about fifteen. Not apprehended.

  …Such an incident is not more “real” than this Princeton idyll. The scene outside my window…the pond and the woods on the other side of the house…. It is not more “real” but it is certainly more profound. And art must encompass profundity, no matter how ugly it is.

  …Long walk around Princeton today; a visit to the art museum: Hans Moller, Charles Burchfield, some photographs by Walker Evans. Reunions at the University. (1922, 1932, 1954.) Aging gentlemen in orange blazers, orange trousers, some of them carrying straw hats. Lovely Princeton. Idyllic Princeton. Who, being sane, would prefer the 50th St. subway (where the girl was attacked) to Nassau and Washington Rd.?

  …“I turn, I perish into work.” (Stanley Kunitz, “The Man Upstairs.”)

  …The panicky sickish head-pounding of yesterday. Marya’s sense of danger…. Thinness of sanity: a playing-card held sideways: so easily flicked aside! Why one consents to such experiences I can’t guess…. I think it is a free choice…. I think, at my age, after having played so long at this game, that it is a free choice. There is no need, no compulsion, to take such risks with health and sanity and “cheerfulness”…but once the choice has been made, one really can’t control the emotions that arise. One chooses to walk out upon the ice…or the tightrope…with some degree of rationality. But once out there, away from safety, one cannot choose or control the existential experience; worst of all, one can’t scurry back to safety again. (As if I could abandon Marya in her state of terror. Which was, curiously enough, very close to being my own, as I wrote that scene. But today, on the other hand, all day long, from the very moment of waking, I have felt enormously good—in control—myself again—calm and ready to enjoy the day—which was lovely—and if I didn’t recall yesterday’s experience I would be inclined to doubt it.)