[…]
…Today it’s unusually cold, twenty-five degrees, very bright, sunny, windy. I hope to spend the entire day at home; and tomorrow as well. We arrived home last night at 11 P.M. and I was so exhausted I went at once to bed…and this morning I was (almost) refreshed; and the prospect of being alone, of having no interruptions, is wonderfully invigorating. Simply to sit at this desk and stare out the window…. (Where a gray squirrel with a white belly and chest is crawling about our bird-feeder, hanging upside-down.) Susan’s life in Manhattan is only nominally in Manhattan. Her old and rather dignified building is in an extremely quiet neighborhood or corner; one could hear traffic only at a distance. She claims to go out rarely—to rarely be invited anywhere—which I can’t quite believe—but certainly she lives a near-monastic life at the present time. I had the impression of a wonderfully warm and gracious and vulnerable person—not the “Susan Sontag” the photographs (and the elegant, mannered prose) suggest. But the impression I give to others is equally erroneous. (Don Barthelme told Susan something about my going to accept an honorary degree […] in his “sly, slightly mocking” way—which annoys me, mildly at least; but then—what can one expect from Don? And I must admit that I’ve told tales about him as well. Though my tales tend to be authentic…turning about his abrasive, funny personality…which is a consequence I think of simple shyness. But I do want to see Don and Marion again, perhaps soon.)
[…]
December 21, 1979.…The shortest, darkest day of the year; but it hasn’t been especially gloomy; and how very lovely to simply be at home…working all morning here in my study…without even the telephone to interrupt.
[…]
…Nearing the completion of Constantine’s little book.* Or is it “little” now? And I should begin thinking about a play. (Should I?) The actress Meryl Streep is interested in my writing one for her. Which is all very possible at the moment…since I can’t bring myself to begin another novel…another novel!…at this point. (With so many books at Dutton and on hand. And I haven’t even the pleasure of rewriting them—they’ve all been rewritten. Except of course for Perpetual Motion…and even much of that has been laboriously rewritten as I went along. Too many books in a logjam!)
…I have the pleasure of noting my own name, Oates, in the Book Review’s Christmas crossword puzzle. UNHOLY WRITER. OATES.—So is that my identity??? Yet Unholy Loves is my nicest novel, obviously. Normal and harmonious and positive…with no treasons or betrayals…or almost none.
…The puzzle of identity and personality! There isn’t any adjective that I can apply to myself, or to anyone, with confidence. “Adjectives” are simply fractured viewpoints…expressing only the viewer’s response…. Shyness, boldness; indifference, warmth; vivacity, passivity; etc., etc. A veritable logjam of selves, and how to maneuver through them…how to navigate…negotiate….
December 24, 1979. […] Working on Perpetual Motion. “Deathbed.” In which I must cram a great deal…as Constantine’s life-in-art draws to a close…. I could work on this novel for years, I know: braiding into “Constantine’s” experience my own experience and my own impressions. For he’s as close to myself as I can get. (Closer, even, than Marya. Which might seem odd.) Dear, marvelous Constantine…not so much an alter ego as, simply, an ego.
…Thinking, almost constantly, of Spider Monkey.* Running through the scenes in my mind’s eye. I am haunted by it, or anyway by the Phoenix workshop presentation. As if it were a koan I should grasp…I know I should forget it, and turn to other work; I must do my essay for the Conference on Urban Literature at Newark, which is due in February; but at the same time I am so very interested…moved, I think, by something I saw there…. Impossible to express. The actors’ vitality; Dan Freudenberger’s concern; Philip Casnoff’s “Bobbie”; the small theatre, the receptive audience, the snow that fell so dismally all that day, making a visit to the theatre an actual achievement. Almost immediately, when Philip began the first “song,” I felt as if I were embarking upon one of the uncanny “perfect” experiences of my life—which is to say, an experience not whole and rewarding and perfect in any plausible sense, but simply profound. (To me. Obviously—not to anyone else! Even Philip, who put so very much of himself into the role, can’t possibly identify with it.) I keep thinking of it, and thinking of it, and wish I could preserve it somehow…apart from sudden vivid moments…nuggets of memory…. I didn’t feel this way about my other plays, or at least I can’t recall feeling this way.
…Idyllic quiet, here. Nothing to do today but work, and go out grocery shopping. The snow has melted, the day is misty and dripping and not very Christmas-like, but how marvelous, this calm—! This privacy. I wrote a letter to [a University of Windsor colleague], having thought of that for a few days; but my thoughts are really with Constantine, and “Bobbie Gotteson”; it’s alarming how swiftly the past falls away, how truncated my “years at Windsor” have already become. Teaching and acting must be similar in this respect: you can have wonderful experiences, minute by minute, hour by hour, semester by semester; experiences when everything feels so right—so perfect; and everyone involved (or nearly everyone) shares this sentiment: but then the occasions pass, and you can rely only upon memories (or upon journal entries, like this one—but who has time, absorbed so deeply in the passions of acting and teaching—the give-and-take of the real world—to record these passions?)…the bliss of the present moment is always lost. (Except of course when it is made permanent, or halfway permanent, in art.)
* The translator Robert Fagles and the scholar Joseph Frank were among Oates’s new colleagues at Princeton.
* Oates’s review “Post-Borgesian” appeared in the New York Times Book Review on February 11, 1979.
* This year Oates was serving as the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories (Houghton Mifflin).
* Hortense Calisher (b. 1911) and Curtis Harnack (b. 1927) were New York–based writers; Irving Howe (1920–93) was a well-known literary critic and the founder of Dissent magazine.
* This poem appeared in the spring 1982 issue of the Southern Review and was collected in Invisible Woman.
* Julio Cortázar (1914–84), Argentine novelist.
† Oates’s new novel-in-progress, Marya: A Life, was composed of linked short stories, most of which she published in literary journals prior to the novel’s publication in 1986. “Schwilk” appeared in the summer–fall 1980 issue of California Quarterly, and “Sin” appeared in the winter 1980 issue of Fiction International.
* They were evidently successful, as The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen (b. 1927), won the 1979 National Book Award for nonfiction.
* “Theft,” one of the Marya Knauer stories, appeared in the fall 1981 issue of Northwest Review and was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 1982.
* “Passions and Meditations” had appeared in the fall 1973 issue of Partisan Review and was collected in The Seduction and Other Stories.
† Oates’s essay “Out of Stone, Into Flesh: The Imagination of James Dickey” had appeared in the fall 1974 issue of Modern Poetry Studies and was collected in New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (Vanguard, 1974).
* Oates’s review-essay on Anielea Jaffe, ed., C. G. Jung: Word and Image had appeared in the August 4–11, 1979, issue of the New Republic and was collected, under the title “Legendary Jung,” in The Profane Art.
* “The Cure for Folly,” another Marya Knauer story, appeared in the winter 1984 issue of TriQuarterly.
* The South African fiction writer Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923) did win the Nobel Prize in 1991.
* “Presque Isle” appeared in the fall 1980 issue of Agni and was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 1981.
† Oates’s review, “Laughter and Trembling,” appeared in the July 8, 1979, issue of the New York Times Book Review.
‡ Ed Cone and George Pitcher were Princeton colleagues of Oates’s.
* This story appeared in the winte
r 1981 issue of Western Humanities Review.
* This Marya Knauer story appeared in the summer 1984 issue of the Southern Review.
* The uncollected story “Minor Characters” appeared in the summer 1981 issue of Massachusetts Review.
* This essay, “The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde’s Parable of the Fall,” appeared in the winter 1980 issue of Critical Inquiry and was collected in Contraries.
* This uncollected story appeared in the spring 1982 issue of South Carolina Review.
* This story appeared in the March 1981 issue of North American Review; was reprinted in Prize Stories 1982: The O. Henry Awards; and was collected in Last Days.
* The feminist scholar Elaine Showalter taught at this time at Douglass College, but she would soon move to Princeton and become one of Oates’s closest friends there.
* This uncollected story appeared in the December 1981 issue of Playboy.
* Oates had been working on a novel-in-stories, Perpetual Motion, about a character named Constantine Reinhart. Though most of the stories were published individually in magazines, the book never was published and is currently held in the Joyce Carol Oates Archive at Syracuse University.
* Oates’s play version of The Triumph of the Spider Monkey had been performed on December 19 by the Phoenix Playworks in New York, directed by Daniel Freudenberger and starring Philip Casnoff in the title role.
eight: 1980
Love and work, work and love, an idyll, a true “romance,” yet who (reading the books of JCO) would believe?—for where, precisely, is JCO? A vision on the page; the works’ integrity; allowing me constantly to change form—and to slip free. My salvation.
Having completed Bellefleur, Joyce Carol Oates was “between novels” in early 1980, and instead of immediately beginning a new long work she turned to a genre she had not attempted since the early 1970s: playwriting. She took several of her earlier short stories, such as “Night-Side” and “The Widows,” and attempted to render them into dramatic form.
Soon enough, however, she became immersed in a new long project called Angel of Light, a return to psychological realism in the form of a political novel based on the ancient Greek tragedy by Aeschylus, The Oresteia. Though this novel was typically difficult to begin—she had many weeks of false starts and constantly revised the opening pages—the manuscript accumulated quickly enough and was completed by the fall. Its progress had been interrupted during the summer, however, when Oates took a six-week trip to Europe sponsored by the United States Information Agency. This tour inspired many of the short stories about East-West relations that would appear in her 1984 collection, Last Days.
In the meantime, Bellefleur had been released by her new publisher, Dutton, to wide acclaim, including a front-page review by her old friend John Gardner in the New York Times Book Review. To Oates’s surprise, Dutton’s industrious marketing of the book resulted in her first best-seller, an experience about which she had mixed feelings. Like any writer, she liked the idea that large numbers of people were actually reading her work, but the demands of publicity—which diverted her from her writing to some extent—could be unpleasant.
Oates found ballast to the public side of her career in her rich personal life—her enjoyment of her “idyllic” Princeton surroundings, the continuing sustenance of her marriage, and her wide circle of friends in the Princeton–New York community.
As always, however, work came first, and by the end of the year, in addition to her usual teaching during the fall term, she became involved in a new long novel, A Bloodsmoor Romance, which would become the second in a series of “postmodernist Gothic” novels she would produce during the 1980s. Much of the journal in the later months of the year is taken up with her planning and plotting of this immense work, which she approached with her usual “flood” of creativity and imaginative energy.
January 2, 1980.…Completed the essay on the “image of the city” in contemporary literature.* And questions for Leif Sjoberg’s interview.† Inspiring me to an idealism I didn’t know I quite felt: yet I must acquiesce to it. My cynicism is a social gesture at bottom…a way of assuring others I’m not really so happy or confident: consider my worldliness!
…But my “worldliness” tends to be a carapace. A habit. A vocabulary.
…Still, the spiritual side of my nature is largely in eclipse. The turn of the year, two nights ago, and no extraordinary dreams or convictions. Where has this side of my soul gone?—did it ever exist? Have I imagined everything?
…The ferocity of the Unconscious. Its gravitational pull, its demands. A vocabulary (largely visual) of its own. But I can only remember it; I can’t retrieve it. I am absolutely powerless.
…Like Nathanael Vickery, who lost everything. But of course I didn’t lose “everything” because both my feet were solidly in this world. The other world never held me as fast as it held Nathan. And I am not lonely for it…not really. This world, the world of the ego and its constant stratagems, certainly holds me. I could spend the rest of my life in it. I suppose.
…Odd physical symptoms, which I won’t enumerate. The lesson of the body is this: you press an ear against your own chest cavity and hear a quite other, quite anonymous murmuring. Someone in there—something—that hasn’t the faintest interest in you on the outside. Or faith in you. Or pity…. Shall I go to a doctor? (But that’s unfair—Ray and I just went to the dentist today.) What is the opposite of hypochondriasis? I hate the possibility of illness, hate the boring tedious impersonal process….
…Not much spiritual elation, either, from the “fasting.” (Which I can’t really do, not as I would like—Ray would be too distressed—and it’s impractical, self-indulgent anyway. Asceticism as a form of gluttony.) No appetite, but then again no sense of not-having-eaten. My body carries on exactly as always. Eating soup…eating fruit and yogurt…. The impulse is almost angry: I catch myself thinking I will starve you into submission! Not to punish the body, or to become unnaturally thin; but simply to exert one’s will. And then, having exerted it, to relent. To “return to the world again”….
…How odd, I sometimes feel that a “shadow-self” has taken me over. A superficial though charming—I suppose charming!—“social” personality. But the deeper person, the spirit, the psyche, remains stubbornly hidden. Severe fasting might bring it forth…erode the inconsequential dirt and debris away.
January 6, 1980.…Working steadily for days. For days. A complete page-by-page revision of Spider Monkey. And, yesterday and today, a play called The Spoils…transformed from a short story (“Intoxication” in All the Good People…. )
Suddenly the dramatic form, the tightness, appeals to me. The sounds of voices…people presented “on stage” (in my mind’s eye) rather than in a careful thicket of prose, and the consciousness of prose. In some ways the writing is similar; in other ways quite different. I would never have thought, a week ago, that I’d be writing another play on any subject at all; I could never have anticipated The Spoils.
…Thinking too of The Enchanted Isle. The “happy” family and the curse upon them.
…Unfortunately I haven’t been altogether well. Yesterday was rather hellish…except for the play…which allowed me to keep going…the thread of the narrative, the drama…the intensity of the characters’ relationships…all the curious magic of “drama”…pulling me out of myself. Then, in the evening, lying on the sofa, reading…rereading Our Mutual Friend. Which I admire with as much astonishment as ever.
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates Page 40