The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates
Page 45
…Susan Sontag telephoning. And sounding, as she frequently does, rather melancholy…alone…over the phone. A few days later Stephen and I laughed fondly over her predicament: Now that she has at last plugged in her telephone no one has called. Or so she says. Three weeks of near-isolation…she has gone out a total of five times…she is trying to write fiction fueled by the same puritanical energies that have driven her to write her elegant hectoring critical essays…she seems sad, subdued, vexed…but that stasis is probably necessary for her. My liking for Susan is immense. I feel a kinship that isn’t so much professional as sisterly. No, more than that, a kind of…physical identity. Though we’re much different (to observers) I seem to think we’re alike in certain surprising ways. At any rate I feel no rivalry with her but feel, on the contrary, a quickened sense of hurt when she is maligned or even criticized…because, despite her intransigence in print and even in person, she is a very vulnerable woman; and very womanly too.
…The womanliness which is not “feminine.” Which doesn’t even have to strive to subdue or reject the “feminine.”
…Feminine/female. The one is social, acquired, rehearsed, sometimes a considerable strain; a masquerade. The other is…simply given. One is female the way one has brown eyes, brown hair, a tall thin frame, a certain voice.
…Susan and I are in our forties, she a few years older. I don’t remember how many. Her impulsive girlishness…a tomboyish manner…quick rich premeditated laughter. I sense in her a woman who has carried her physical attractiveness about her as an undeclared (an “innocently” unacknowledged) weapon. She has been, and continues to be, physically arresting; she is certainly photogenic; but all this is in opposition to her defiant sense of herself as primarily an intellectual and an artist. (The shapeless clothes, the trousers, peculiar haphazard jackets, boots.) While I dress in a more conventional feminine style, partly because I want to…blend in with the scenery.
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…As for the soul, the psyche…who can tell? The two (body and soul) are not separate. And then again, yes they are.
August 13, 1980.…The placidity of a long day at home. Completing Part VII of Angel of Light. Imagining the next section…Maurie’s last day alive…which I want to be so very good, so very strong and tense and compelling…and awful…I’m afraid to begin. To write the first sentence, the first word. A sacramental act I draw away from.
…How do you feel about the commercial success of Bellefleur, interviewers ask me […] and I have to think for a moment: How do I feel? And what, precisely, are “feelings”…? To say that I am emotionally and spiritually immersed in the destinies of Maurie, Isabel, Nick, Kirsten, and Owen, and that I must shake myself free of that mesmerizing world (with its powerful gravitational pull, I feel almost literally sucked into it) is to sound unnecessarily obdurate, even mystical; to say cheerfully that I feel very “happy” about Bellefleur’s current success (which might change at any time, the book market being what it is) is to too simply state the case. (Yet I can’t tell the truth to “close acquaintances.” Consider X, who telephoned me the other evening, brimming with congratulations and praise and chatter, asking me almost reproachfully, But aren’t you pleased that your writing is getting a wider readership?—and I said faintly, falteringly, all the while wishing this troublesome person would hang up and leave me alone, since I was in the midst of important work, Why yes of course, of course…certainly.)
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…To my astonishment the novel is #9 this week in the Publishers Weekly best-seller list. #5 on the Walden list (national); #3 Barnes and Noble (national); #10 Dalton (national); #2 in Philadelphia. All of which is a testament, I must say, to Dutton’s industry. For though the novel is more accessible than my others, and more fun, if it had come out with Vanguard it would have slowly sunk, as usual. A few enthusiastic reviews, possibly a few more sales; and then nothing. And one’s usual (rather tiresome?) resignation…. (Ah well, such things don’t matter, isn’t “high regard among one’s peers” more significant…and the usual things one tells oneself.) I fully recognize that Bellefleur is the one-in-a-decade novel…or one-in-a-lifetime…that I’ll be “allowed,” and intend to enjoy its comparative success as much as possible. Because the books to follow are, to put it mildly, not commercial. So I should enjoy this while it lasts…why not?
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September 1, 1980.…The euphoria of work: finished Angel of Light yesterday at 5:30. And began to rewrite immediately this morning. The first seventy-five pages are most unsatisfactory; the voice isn’t right; the tone isn’t there; Kirsten and Owen aren’t Kirsten and Owen; Isabel isn’t fully developed. And so on, and so forth. Spent the entire day rewriting the first chapter (“The Children of Morris Halleck”). Now everything is falling into place, everything makes sense….
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…Bicycle ride at 6:30 this evening, to Pennington. Oldmill Road. Cows and horses grazing. Black-eyed susans, goldenrod, bright purple weed-flowers, thistles…an extraordinary beauty…. We ride along in a sort of dream, immensely grateful for this lovely part of the world and for our ease in acquiring it.
…Bellefleur is #11 on this week’s New York Times best-seller list. The competition, however, is crushing. Competition!—novels by people no one in the “literary” world has ever heard of, except Irving Stone, perhaps. Stephen King with a novel about an eight-year-old who sets things on fire with his eyes. (The most remarkable best-seller at the present time, however, is “How to Flatten Your Stomach.” It’s thirty-seven pages long. Has been on the list for over a year. Yes, it consists of exercises we all know…. How can one underestimate the intelligence of the American public?)
…The pleasure of rewriting. Re-imagining. Now the novel is evolving in precisely the correct way…and the old ending, the original ending (the ending I seem to have craved!) was of course abandoned. It was finally unworkable and anyway undesirable—Kirsten has to be truly in exile, at a distance, “unimaginable.” And Nick, broken and made human, achieves a humility and tenderness I would not have thought possible.
…So the days pass. Humid and extremely hot. (Ninety-five degrees today.) The marigolds are blossoming in the garden, bronze and yellow and red-orange, the melons are ripening beautifully, and Angel of Light eases into its final rhythm. I can’t allow myself to think beyond its completion.
September 7, 1980.…Where Angel of Light is intense and obsessive, and its delight (for the novelist) primarily that of refining language as if pouring it back and forth, back and forth, from one vial to a smaller vial to a still smaller vial, the next novel should open outward…I can see the balloon’s approach…the silence, the eerie calm…over a river, or a great meadow that is like a river, its grasses blown in the wind…I can see its shadow…its descent…. The “rescue” of the youngest girl.
…(One of those mildly astonishing coincidences that have cross-hatched my life: after I had sketched out a small note re. the balloon, a few hours later a balloon did appear above our woods…one of the helium-filled flame-empowered passenger balloons we first noticed two years ago when we came to Princeton, over Lake Carnegie. Drifting overhead as everyone stares…on the road, cars slow…children are fascinated. One is arrested by an image sailing silently out of the imagination, the unconscious, needing no gloss, no elaboration. There it is!—done.)
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September 25, 1980. […] Thinking, dreaming, taking notes on the new long romance-novel. Which takes shape very slowly, very slowly. I have six feet of notes spread out on the new white table in the other room…. An American Idyll. The Bloodsworth Romance. A Stoningham Romance. The first chapter/story will have the black balloon descending…to carry poor Deirdre away. An image that struck me so powerfully a month ago…when the two balloons appeared north of Pennington…and the other Sunday, here, the handsome red-and-green balloon soaring over our woods…near-silent…. The eeriness of the balloon’s appearance, the rightness…. But first I must set the stage; and before I can set the stag
e I have to imagine the entire novel, or nearly; and one character reaches out to touch another, and that character touches another, and so….
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October 5, 1980.…Blissful crowded productive days. Have begun A Bloodsmoor Romance which takes up most of my hours…my head is crammed with Zinns and Kiddemasters…adventures, exploits, melodramatic scenes, dreams of reform, democracy, Transcendentalist Utopia, “mass” man as an ideal and not an obscenity…. For days I have been working and re-working the first chapter, “The Outlaw Balloon.” And today, Sunday, I should complete it.
…My life has been too busy lately to record. Between A Bloodsmoor Romance and Princeton social life…. […] Sept. 28, Sunday, we gave a luncheon here—on a lovely sunny autumn day—for Lucinda Franks and her husband Bob Morgenthau (now district attorney of New York City) and Karen and Mike Braziller; Tuesday we gave a dinner here for Ed Doctorow, Mike Keeley, and Eleanor and Michael Goldman (a marvelous evening); Wednesday was luncheon with Stephen K.; yesterday, we drove to New York with the Showalters to attend Matt Phillips’s opening at the Marilyn Pearl gallery, and to see the Broadway play The Suicide by Nikolai Erdman (1902–1970)…“Broadway,” oddly enough…an earnest, spirited, workmanlike production of a fable-like play that might be better served in an off-Broadway theatre. Some good moments in it, and surely one cannot help but be sympathetic with Erdman…though his “satire” is dismayingly mild…. The Playbill sums up his career: “He lived out his life in relative obscurity in Moscow, where he died in the spring of 1970.”
…And now, today, “The Outlaw Balloon”—which I begin writing in my head, while still in bed. An absolutely irresistible sweep…or so it seems to me…carried away into the sky by a sinister black outlaw balloon….
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October 17, 1980.…Golden-hazy idyllic country roads; sere grasses; late afternoon sunshine; tiny white and purple New England asters; a flawless blue sky; bicycling to Pennington along the Oldmill Road…and so on, and so forth: could anything be lovelier?
…Earlier, a luncheon at Lahiere’s with Eleanor and Elaine: very fine indeed, very relaxed. Elaine had just returned from an overnight visit to the University of Delaware, where she lectured and showed slides—“Victorian Women.” Eleanor is to be interviewed (by Rolling Stone) tomorrow. Elaine in a striped blue cotton dress, Eleanor in a wool suit with a turtleneck jersey-sweater, I in my new red blazer, a sweater-blouse with a bow, navy blue slacks. Elaine had just been trying to comfort a friend whose husband had left her, for the classic reasons (he is forty-five years old), and I asked whether Elaine and Eleanor would feel equally distraught if their husbands left them…and, yes, yes indeed, yes they certainly would. And what about you, Joyce, they asked…and I had to think…do I take my own emotions seriously enough to “feel” the classic symptoms…. Can I particularize myself enough, see myself as significantly an “individual” and not one of so many, many women experiencing this almost ritual episode…? If Ray “fell in love with” another woman, could I truly blame him?…would it surprise me?…would it strike me as unjust, un natural?…couldn’t I even, in a way, sympathize…? Yet I couldn’t say these things for fear of seeming very odd, indeed, particularly in the context of my friends’ vehement replies. (And another thing, even less easily explained: I can’t really “feel” emotion for someone who doesn’t reciprocate that emotion. If my husband stopped loving me, I would surely sense it, and stop loving him…perhaps gradually, perhaps abruptly. But it couldn’t fail to happen. One can’t really love another person who fails to return love, otherwise it’s a mirror-infatuation, a desperate greedy projection, a refusal to see from the other’s perspective and to “feel” the very absence of feeling.)
…How cold I sound, even to myself!—how starkly and improbably “rational”! But I can’t not know these things, I can’t return to the young girl I was, so passionately and naively, twenty years ago. Too much has happened, both in private life and in our culture.
…Dinner […] Tuesday evening: in honor of Mary McCarthy and Jim West, visiting Princeton for a few days. I brought Mary a half-dozen roses from our garden, found her friendly, easy to talk with, though (perhaps?) slightly guarded at times…but then she’s recovering from shingles, and evidently very worried about the Lillian Hellman lawsuit…she hasn’t been able to write all summer, under heavy medication…though in fact she looked fine, very Princeton-upper-middle-class, with her hair in a ladylike style, in a pink silky dress, high heels…the uniform I detest, in myself if not in others; and refuse to wear. She did flash that wide tic-like smile about which Randall Jarrell said (in Pictures from an Institution) “animals are dragged shrieking away at sunset”…she did make dogmatic pronouncements very much with the air of one unaccustomed to being contradicted (“Leon Edel is the very worst biographer living…” or words to that effect). […]
…Working on A Bloodsmoor Romance. Rewriting. Page 28. For the second or third time. Slowly, but pleasurably. The first draft was obsessive, my head almost literally rang with the need to push on, to push on, to get everything in, to complete the “chapter”…not knowing that it was not to be a chapter but an entire section, a first movement. Rather compulsive teeth-rattling days. Hour upon hour…and then headachey, forlorn, disoriented. (Late-afternoon exhaustion. A feeling of absolute sickness, in the pit of the stomach; and that headache. No appetite for dinner. And should I record here my “symptoms”…? Or pass by in silence? A considerable weight loss; cessation of menstrual periods; hair coming out rather too freely…so that combing, let alone brushing, is very unpleasant. But I have made a doctor’s appointment with Dr. Reed for next Tuesday…. What else can I do? Eating is a problem when one would rather work; and then I eat so slowly, the process is tiresome…. If I’m with other people (as I almost always am) I would rather talk, or listen, and the food becomes a distraction. Absurd “problem” as I know fully….)
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October 26, 1980.…Sunday. A gusty Novemberish day. A Bloodsmoor Romance mesmerizes & keeps me wholly preoccupied, so that a few minutes’ contemplation of this journal is a strain. Everything—everything—is swallowed up in this novel, as it was in Bellefleur and Angel of Light. So that I have no interest in short stories or poems…no interest at all. And now I wonder how I ever did have the “interest”…the spark of energy required to ignite a week’s strenuous thinking & writing & etc….
…Approximately 117 pages. […] And it’s always like this: I want to record the past week (our committee meeting at the American Academy-Institute: John Updike; John Hollander […]; Hortense Calisher; May Swenson looking elfin & browned & wizened, w/her strong opinions, sunny smile […]; Howard Nemerov in fine form, boyish, funny, no longer shoving Stanley Elkin down our throats & consequently pleasant; Peter DeVries much funnier than before…; and then cocktails with John and Martha in a place on 7th Ave., a delightful conversation […] But the novel draws me unresisting into it. But why should I resist…?
November 1, 1980.…The imminent death of Kay Smith, which I find…unthinkable….* Following me to Brockport, to Rochester, to Fishkill last week…surfacing at odd unexpected times…. When Liz called to say that Kay was in a coma my response was an absurd childish disbelief. For though I knew that Kay was seriously ill….
…But then who can be expected to grasp this death. (Kay […] so vigorously alive; so imaginative; practical-minded too; gifted with a delightful sense of humor…. ) But I can’t write about it, I can’t focus upon it. Stumbling & baby talk & the inadequacy not only of words but of sentiments.
…The long drive to Brockport. And the ceremonial hours there. In the interstices I thought of Kay, and regarded myself with wonder, being myself…saying the right things, behaving like anyone else, grateful and delighted that my parents could be with us…. (But I can’t express anything at the moment. All the emotions, the hour upon hour of astonished brooding, a numbness that isn’t even—yet—mourning—it’s impossible.)
…We drove up from Prince
ton to Ithaca, NY; stayed overnight; drove then through the Finger Lakes district (lovely autumn scenery) to Brockport, where we were joined by my parents (both looking marvelously well!—and very pleased to have been issued an invitation by the Writers’ Forum at Brockport: I told them nothing about Kay, for the news would have totally demoralized them; and astonished them as well—as, indeed, it astonishes us all: for must Kay die?—why didn’t she agree to see a doctor for so many months?—is this a kind of suicide?—but—no—not Kay: not suicide: unthinkable in any form)…and then, and then….