…A lovely evening, the other day, at the Bromberts’. Victor and I talked […] passionately of attitudes toward art: should one live only for one’s art (in which case “life” is subordinate to art)…or should one live so that the art is part of “life”? I told Victor that one cannot choose his nature. It’s like our fingerprints—the personality with which we’re born. (Or do I exaggerate? I can’t say that my “high modernist” attitude toward art—the Flaubertian/Joycean/priestly attitude—was always so powerful in me. This is a sentiment, very nearly a religious credo, that has impressed itself upon me with the passage of time. I was always serious about writing…but now I am deadly serious.)
…These long bouts of writing, which should leave me exhausted: yet after a half-hour’s rest I feel almost recovered. How long can I continue? More or less indefinitely? At my weakest I feel curiously immortal…which is a sure symptom that something is wrong.
…Beautiful day. Dazzling blue sky, snow, firs, red dogwood berries outside the window. Glorious weather. Ray and I have been working on the Tom Wayman manuscript, for Ontario Review Press. (Introducing Tom Wayman. Next fall.) And on John Reed’s ms. Both very interesting poets—and quite different. Now that I’ve revised Spider Monkey it can be fitted into the ms. of my “selected” plays for publication next fall.
…Am I in love? I suppose. With the products of the imagination. With Spider Monkey in particular. I could revise that play endlessly, if I allowed myself such self-indulgence.
…The irresistible force: my burning eagerness to work. The immovable object: social commitments; my job; my marriage. I require these objects to stop me…to halt the avalanche…. A tumult of ideas, plots, plans, hopes, projects…. A veritable fountain…. I could begin in the next five minutes on another play: The Enchanted Isle, for instance. But I must try to rest…. I must make a gesture toward…normality.
…“Normality,” a form of contemporary virtue.
January 9, 1980.…Recovered from my spell of…whatever it was (what was it?—the flu?—a headachey malaise of a kind new to me entirely)…and have been working steadily on plays…converting “The Widows” into something meant to be dramatic; revising “Spoils”; reading (without a great deal of enthusiasm) “the best of Broadway” anthologies […]
January 13, 1980.…Exquisitely lovely, rich days: almost too marvelous to be altogether real: the intensity of work here at my desk (I am midway in The Widows, which I find absolutely haunting—mesmerizing), the hilarity and liveliness of “social life” (which I find a continual surprise—in its complexities, I mean, its varieties). […]
…My fascination with The Widows, and with the dramatic form. A few weeks ago I hadn’t any use for “drama” in my own life…now, suddenly, with these modest ventures, I feel altogether bewitched. (The fact that they are modest ventures—like the Phoenix workshop production—makes all the difference.) I can see why people become infatuated with the theatre…with the process of the theatre…its spontaneity, its life…. Yet to avoid any kind of “commercial” project seems imperative. I must be thinking of these plays as I once thought of short stories…. Vehicles for expression and invention that are absolutely unrelated to “commercial” success (or failure). Consequently—a necessary purity.
[…]
…The constant unfolding of “daily life.” Its surprises that would seem (on paper) unspectacular: yet in the flesh—in the spirit—so wonderful. How to praise, how even to approach, friendship?
January 20, 1980.…Incalculably rich, lovely days. How to believe that one deserves such happiness…!
…Working on “The Changeling.” Hour upon hour. And now, today, I have completed a very messy first draft, and am eager to go through it again, re-imagining every line, every gesture. Where originally I saw Judge Urstadt as a comic-grotesque figure of satirical proportions, I now begin to see him as tragic…though still “comic”…and of course grotesque. I must re-cast him as King Lear. In a manner of speaking. And begin the play over again….
[…]
…A long conversation with Susan Sontag this morning. Since she has finished her essay on “Our Hitler” she has been feeling restless…a reaction I understand completely. The queer blend of euphoria and emptiness: what shall I do next? Will I ever do anything again? Susan works for hundreds of hours, she says, on her essays; and doesn’t feel that she has enough to show for all her effort. (I’m not sure I agree.) […] I like Susan immensely: she is not only brilliant, as everyone knows; and widely-read; she is also wonderfully warm…unpretentious…frank and funny and not too virtuous to gossip…while admittedly puritanical, like most interesting people. We will meet for lunch next week.
[…]
…The days, the marvelous rich days…passing…accumulating. If ever I look back upon this phase of my life I will have to admit: that was as close to heaven as one might reasonably expect.
January 26, 1980. […] Yesterday, luncheon at a seafood restaurant on 22nd Street, Susan Sontag and our mutual friend Stephen Koch, and of course Ray.* Celebrating our nineteenth wedding anniversary. Susan and I have a great deal to say to each other. Perhaps we were almost rude—excluding Stephen and Ray once or twice. But she is intense, and I become easily so, taking on the coloration (the accent, the impulsiveness) of my associates. We talked about emotions (Stephen claims to experience “mild anxiety” at least every hour; intense anxiety every day…Susan and I “experience” emotion in a detached way because we can’t quite credit it with much reality or worth…. Ray claims to be somewhere in the middle)…methods of work (I saw, on a sofa in Susan’s attractive study, some 250–300 pages of early drafts of her essay on “Our Hitler.” It would be difficult to believe if one hadn’t actually seen it: so many pages, heavily annotated and marked, to be channeled finally into a 30-page essay!)…“philosophies of life.” Susan, like me, “transcends” personal experience by simply reaching out to others’ experience: reading, listening to music, trying to write. Coming to grips with “Our Hitler,” for instance, or photography, or “illness as metaphor.” Plunging into the alien voices of yet another novel, another play…. Susan’s apartment, the top two floors of a private home on 17th Street, is one of the most interesting apartments I have seen in the city. The “dining room–living room” is one long—very long—room, with polished hardwood floors; shelves of books rising to the ceiling on two sides; very attractive; and as neat as my own. (Susan claims to be messy but she really isn’t.) Downstairs, the study (her desk—a small desk—faces the wall, and a four-by-four bulletin board on which are tacked little yellow slips); her quite large bedroom; a bathroom; and a room belonging to Susan’s au pair boy Michael, a quiet young man who waits on tables for a living and is (I think?) somehow literary, or interested in literary things…. Susan, contrary to her image, isn’t a native New Yorker. She was born in Verona, New Jersey; moved with her family to the West—California (she went to North Hollywood High), Arizona (near Tucson). A New Yorker by choice, very deliberate choice. […] Susan took her first novel manuscript, The Benefactor, to Farrar, Straus, at the age of twenty-eight, knowing no one there, and no other Farrar, Straus authors; and she has been there ever since. No agent. She hasn’t any savings—knows that Farrar, Straus pays “ridiculously low” advances—suspects (quite correctly) that she would make more money elsewhere: but she adores Bob Giroux, who I’m sure is worth her adulation, and hasn’t any interest in leaving. (All of which reminds me of myself, and Vanguard. Fifteen years of loyalty and inertia. But no regrets, really.) It’s somewhat distressing, though, that she hasn’t any savings…none at all. And only rents that attractive apartment. I couldn’t live like that…and Susan feels vaguely apprehensive about it, herself. After all—as Stephen said—one might as well be interested, however mildly, in money. (Or did I say that? I know I said that it takes a puritanical strain to force oneself to think about money, that boring subject. We pay for not having to think about money…as I suppose I should have told Susan. “We pay for the
luxury of not having to think about $$$$$.”)
[…]
…The bliss of an evening ahead of quiet; solitude; reading in the living room…the Georgia O’Keeffe biography, the new O. Henry Prize stories. There are moments when I’m afraid I will wear out, simply wear out, with this pace…with the projects I am working on…even the books I should or want to read…the people I should or want to see. And yet: the weeks pass, the years pass, and nothing changes greatly so far as intensity is concerned. Content, yes. But form, rarely. My life is a roller coaster over an abyss. My “public” life, I mean. (But is the abyss a helpful metaphor? Abysses are deep, very deep…but not bottomless. They too can be fathomed.)…My feelings of “kin” re Susan Sontag, which don’t surprise me. The theme of morality…the aggressive intellect (which loves a fight)…the temperament that thrives upon analysis, explication, refutation. My tachycardia is a mild analogy to Susan’s terrible bout with cancer. I make no claim to be her equal in suffering…but perhaps…philosophically…I have put in “equal” hours contemplating death; my own, that is; and others’. For it began, after all, when I was eighteen. And I am now forty-one.
January 29, 1980. […] A tentative dust jacket for Bellefleur here on my desk. Dusty-rose, “pretty,” rather romantic…hardly my Bellefleur. What to do? How not to hurt feelings? And I suspect that Dutton has spent a great deal of money on this project…commissioning an “artist” to paint a large canvas! (If we’re neglected we naturally react; if we’re overwhelmed with attention it can sometimes—indeed, frequently—be attention of an unwanted sort. Vanguard with its modest budget usually came up with good covers, except for Childwold—painful even now to recollect; now Dutton, with an immense budget (at least for Bellefleur) has placed me in an uncomfortable position. For I don’t want to hurt the artist’s feelings, or annoy Karen Braziller unnecessarily. And then again Karen may be right—the jacket may be beautiful—who knows?)
…What to do, what to do. I can’t take myself this seriously but, it seems, I must. Answering Leif Sjoberg’s endless questions!…a dish served up to the Swedish Academy (I assume) by my “champions”…whoever they are. The guiding principle of my life, as of my art, should be the principle of good music interpretation: EVERYTHING SHOULD BE REGARDED AS IMPORTANT. Every note, every…pause. Every silence.
…I will go outside, in the sunny cold, and contemplate the frozen pond. And immerse myself in silence. The trees, the sky, the fresh chilly air, in which “Joyce Carol Oates” does not exist.
February 3, 1980.…Working steadily on “Presque Isle” [the play version] after some days of being unable to start. Note-taking, brooding. The usual. But the story blossoms as the characters talk, and I feel abashed at the thinness, the perfunctoriness, of the original story. Would everything—everything—open up in this manner, translated into drama?
…Saw the McCarter production of The Miser a few days ago, with Michael Goldman.* Michael becomes the most easy-to-talk-with, the most-respected and-liked of our Princeton friends. His balance between wit and intelligence (“intellectual talk”), between a critical objectivity and warmth, is wonderful.
…Very cold days at last. Low temperatures (fifteen degrees)—low at least for Princeton. I alternate between feeling quite enthusiastic about my play and feeling rather bad about another problem…a problem too trivial to recount…though I suppose I should recount it, for the record. So that, in glancing back, perusing these years, I can see precisely the sort of trivia that did trouble me.
…Simply this: the oblique, indirect, gracious, and cunning pressure X is putting on me, to assist in the promotion of a certain book. Which isn’t a bad book—not at all. Though not a particularly good book either…. My headachey sense of being manipulated. I know fully well what is happening: every move: yet I acquiesce, or seem to. One can give quick, cheap advice: Just tell this person you’re too busy. Tell this aggressive person you haven’t time…. Yes, but in fact, in actual fact, it isn’t possible. It simply isn’t possible. This morning a call came and the question was put to me (gracefully enough, even with some hesitation—though of course the entire conversation was planned): Did I think the book had any merit?—did I really think it had? And of course I heard myself saying Yes, yes, of course. (What else can one say? A ridiculous situation!)…I even received a telegram from the obnoxious editor! Have you read X’s book, have you anything to say about it, etc., etc. This editor, whom I have never met, addresses me as “Joyce.”
…My anger is as much for my own docility as for the impetuousness of the writer & the editor. I know that if I speak frankly, or even in a roundabout manner, I will make an enemy for life…. […] But I resent—how I resent!—being coerced into doing anything! My head pulses with all sorts of angry emotions that are being translated into “Presque Isle” almost by accident…though there, at least, they are appropriate…and may have some validity.
…Tomorrow, the “spring” semester at Princeton. Very good! My marvelous students once again, and the queer warm soothing bath of academic life.
February 7, 1980.…Revising “Presque Isle.” First week of “spring” classes: as lively, warm, provocative as ever. Teaching has become synonymous with simply being…at Princeton.
[…]
…Luncheon with Bob Fagles on Monday. A long discussion of drama. Tragedy. (Bob is translating Sophocles. Has done a marvelous translation of the Oresteia, which I read back in Windsor and admired so much.) All that Aeschylus and Sophocles possessed, and we don’t!—the “naturalistic” and the “poetic” combined; the “archetypal” and the “individual” (think of Oedipus, of Medea, of Clytemnestra and Orestes). A playwright today begins with the merely individual and must labor to convince an audience that this individual is, or represents, something beyond himself. The religious assumptions are all gone, though one can assume (as I do) their frayed cobwebby peripheral memory. To want to write tragedy, and to be forced to write parody!…Though this isn’t inevitable. My otherwise doomed character Eunice Lehner complains along these lines, in my place. What to do, except continue…?
February 8, 1980. […] My life consists of one problem-solving crisis after another. A building-up of tension, and sometimes (though rarely) alarm or panic; the solution to the problem; the ease and excitement and extreme pleasure of writing; the extreme pleasure of rewriting, revising, fixing things up; the milder pleasure of rereading afterward…and a little more revising; and then…and then the work is surrendered. And I begin again, caught up in the same cycle. The problem, the crisis…which has descended upon me now, with more dismaying weight than usual.
…Thinking over Bellefleur. And trying to make sense of Night-Side [the stage version]. (That title should be changed…. ) It comes to me that one of the secret themes of Bellefleur is something very simple: class warfare. Not class struggle, but warfare; actual war. And Night-Side too, in a sense…for the Orr family is impoverished (I halfway imagine the father as one of the Bellefleur workers or serfs…laboring in a feudal situation…but I don’t want this to be so blatant). The invisible undeclared war…but a war not as Marx imagined it, or hoped for it…a war of voracity…insatiable greed…in which individuals (the proletariat) work their way free of their condition…but carry with them, deeply buried in them, the scars of the struggle and the curious lusts…the indefatigable energies of war. Bellefleur is all that the enemy might be, an enemy that swallows up all possible emotion: for one can’t really hate such powerful, charming, doomed people…. […] Bellefleur, and many of the other novels…in part…in secret…Marxist parables. But critiques too. (For my cynicism—or is it merely playfulness?—makes me no kind of Marxist; any more than I could be a Freudian at this point, with a straight face.)
[…]
February 16, 1980. […] Working on galleys for Bellefleur. I feel rather numb, can’t assess the novel; wonder at my ever having written it last year, under so much pressure. I don’t feel I could ever do anything like that again.
…Hurtlin
g in a cab down Broadway, then 9th Avenue, with John Updike yesterday. We went to the Central Falls Gallery on West Broadway, to see Jill Krementz’s […] photography exhibit (authors—among them John and me). Very nice to talk with John at some length, about various things. The photographs were marvelous: Capote, Nabokov, Mailer, Vonnegut (naturally), Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Hardwick (whom we’d just let off farther uptown, on our way back from the Academy-Institute), Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Singer, etc., etc. Some stunning compositions. (The photograph of me was taken in London, 1971. My long and somewhat curly hair…. The photograph of Updike was a trilogy, John skipping rope with comic determination, getting all twisted up in the rope.)
…Nosferatu, Wednesday evening, with Michael Goldman (who is a delight to be with: bright, quick, funny, extremely warm and intelligent); last night, My Brilliant Career, in New York, with Stephen Koch (and then we went out to dinner afterward in the Village, and had a quite hilarious time—as we always do with Stephen).
…A visit with Ann Cattaneo and Meryl Streep, at Ann’s Chinatown flat. Meryl Streep is perhaps less stunningly beautiful in person than she is on the screen—but who could be that beautiful? The three of us had a great deal to say to one another, and Meryl seems interested in The Widows.
[…]
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates Page 41