The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

by Joyce Carol Oates

  February 13, 1982.…Finished a very short story, “Sonata…” the other day; have been reworking & revising my essay on Modernist images of women; the peculiar and probably quite shameful delights of that kind of writing.* (Where one simply talks. Argues. And has no need to evoke.)

  …Hobbling about, as a consequence of a minor foot operation of yesterday. We’re such delicate clockwork organisms, one small thing thrown off causes another to be unbalanced, and so on and so forth, until the very soul is hobbling. Suddenly it’s too much painful trouble…to go into the distant “new” room to get a book. And our St. Valentine’s cocktail party tomorrow….

  …Lovely evening at Lucinda and Bob Morgenthau’s, Thursday. The Goldmans were also there, looking fine. The six of us get along splendidly together; and if the Showalters had been there, it would have been an incomparable evening. […] The promise of more warm evenings, dinners & luncheons, to come….

  …Taking notes on Winterthur. Slowly, slowly. My vision of Xavier keeps shifting. Now I “see” him as much more uncertain, even shy, than I had originally anticipated. I don’t yet have the voice—but I’ve decided not to be upset—“it is a small issue after all”—these things take time. If I have learned one small thing from journal-keeping it’s that I might as well be tolerant of myself…the slowness of certain procedures, the bone-laziness at the core…. (Odd that I should present to the world an evidently intimidating image of industry & achievement; but know that my true self is staggeringly indolent…for which I sometimes feel genuine shame, & sometimes amusement, bemusement…. )

  …A life-in-the-making. But isn’t it always. People die, they say, in a kind of haze…feeling neither terror nor regret…a kind of mistiness over all…similar to being born…hence, why fear “death,” isn’t it simply a spectre?…The reply, of course, is that one doesn’t—I don’t—fear death, but the atrophying of life, and actual pain…being a physical coward as I am. And boredom, inactivity, emptiness, the void in the companionable shape of a teacup you’ve lifted too often to your lips, the same mouthful of lukewarm tea: one gets the picture quickly.

  …February is all that January wasn’t: sunny, crowded, altogether lively: most of all moving quickly […]. A party at the Showalters’ last Friday; divers luncheons during the week (with Walt Litz, Jerry Charyn, Stephen K., Bob Patton—a visiting scholar from Rice, Victorian studies, very nice); drive to NYC (the last meeting of the committee for literature at the Academy, thank God, though in truth I enjoyed the meeting—Bill Heyen finally to be given an award, after I have tried so hard, presented his case so clearly, many times, only to draw forth Howard Nemerov’s skeptical smile & curt headshake no…Howard having looked into the Swastika poems a long time ago, and formed a quick inaccurate opinion most difficult to dislodge. But I did dislodge it. Finally.) & Robert Stone who has already received many honors but deserves another. (Do I feel disappointed that my novels are always invariably crowded out by others’…year after year? I suppose so. In truth yes. For a while anyway, when the lists are first published. But I don’t so much mind losing to a writer of genuine seriousness and achievement like Stone, at any rate. & Updike. & all the rest…. ) Self-pity: is it always, or in fact never, misplaced?

  February 15, 1982. […] Mysteries of Winterthur. This entry is a record of…that bleak tepid frustrating trance-like state of mind that goes nowhere…& on the desk here piles of crazy notes…parallel instructions for scenes that may never be written…three & four versions of the same event…shrill, awkward language(s)…one narrator competing with another…but I can’t seem to find the narrator with whom to begin this journey…whom to trust, entrust….

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  …My loneliness, my stasis. Drear thoughts of a story to be called “In Parenthesis.”* But I am too inert, too paralyzed, or too lazy to imagine it into being. I sit here, in parenthesis. Perhaps I will sit here forever.

  February 24, 1982.…Working on “Last Things.”* Painful & slow. Why I return to this (old) subject I can’t say…but I seem to yearn for it, to write about it more intimately, with more knowledge and sympathy than I did in 1966. (These paradoxes not to be explained…. At the age of forty-three, an evident “success,” I feel an uncanny identification with my old, former, long-dead student, Richard W.; a more powerful identification than I felt at the age of twenty-seven.) Of course this story is “familiar”…but I must write about it again…I must write it, imagine it, again…from the inside this time…. I don’t know why. Should I know why? I don’t.

  …Odd that, in the midst of note-taking for this story, I gave a lecture (“Failure”) at Princeton, in the auditorium of the Woodrow Wilson school, and twenty minutes into the talk was interrupted by a madwoman…a local personage…not raving mad but not sane either…white-faced, visibly trembling, dressed in a long black coat…her hands thrust deep in her pockets…so distracting the audience that it scarcely mattered what I said. She stopped the lecture by approaching me: “This has gone on long enough. We came here to hear the poet, not you. To hear Professor Oates, not you.” I tried to explain that I was “Oates” but she said: “This introduction has gone on long enough. We came here to hear the poet…” etc.

  …Late winter, filling up with episodes, events, queer phases of (half-familiar, half-foreign) emotion. Like Whitman I haven’t the least idea of who or what I am; like Whitman I suppose I must live with it. A secret sly agreement with the madwoman’s accusation: “This has gone on long enough….” (Did I half-want her to pull out a gun and begin shooting? Was I “mildly disappointed” when she simply left…? Everyone in the audience, Elaine says, was apprehensive, watching her from the moment she came in (she’d come in late, obtrusively) because she had her hands so deep in her pockets, and naturally they were thinking, speculating, waiting, fantasizing…. )

  …I could die as a “sacrificial victim,” as a public event, even a public spectacle: but I doubt that I can “die” with much style on my own. Hence the inarticulate half-buried wish that the episode had turned out differently. (“This solves the vexing problem of how to write my next novel,” I might have said, sinking into lethal unconsciousness.)…Wit requires a public forum; strength requires a public forum; “JCO” is somehow a public persona and flourishes best there. But I’m not particularly eager to give a talk or a reading soon again….

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  March 4, 1982.…Voluptuous hours of work: my prose poems (most recently a revising of “Self Portrait as a Still Life”),* my projected novel (scraps & notes & the beginning of Miss Georgina’s Morning…an overabundance of material). Mysteries of Winterthur comes slowly, slowly. As yet there’s no voice. No key & consequently no way in…. But the prose poems are wonderfully engrossing. The form itself is endlessly pliable, suggestive. Something about the very look of the poems on the page. They aren’t quite poems and they aren’t quite prose….

  Luncheon with Julian Jaynes yesterday. He told Stephen and me the bizarre tale of Einstein’s brain. (A “Princeton” story.) He told us also, sadly, that he didn’t believe his colleagues in psychology had troubled to read his book—that they didn’t consider him seriously—didn’t think of him as being in the “mainstream” of his field. (Though he certainly thinks that he is. His stress is upon the empirical…. The empirical, the empirical: a catchword, doubtless, in psychology.)

  This afternoon Elaine and I plan to attend a lecture at Princeton, on the subject of “Theories of American Literature & Why They Exclude Women.” (My solace is to imagine that, if I am excluded, it’s because I haven’t yet worked hard enough. For this is, after all, a condition I alone can remedy.)…Teaching yesterday & Monday: vaguely surprised at how well, how generally smoothly, everything is going. I come home not fatigued in the slightest after these 1 ½-hour seminars & office-hour conferences, not to mention animated gossipy luncheons w/Bob Fagles or Stephen or XXXX.

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  March 9, 1982.…Completed “Harrow Street at Linden”* and am staring out the window at several ro
bins eating berries in one of the holly trees. A gray unpromising day. Snow flurries. And we must leave in twenty minutes for New York City…Richard Moore is reading at Books & Co. tonight…we are having dinner with him, X. J. Kennedy, Bob Phillips, others. These glowering-gray featureless indeterminate days…no doubt in sympathy with inner weather….

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  …How I long for the absorption, the tyranny, the anxious intensity of a novel…ambitious, complex, even (defiantly) clotted…. The short stories which I had hoped would be “easy” have turned out in fact to be difficult. All that has happened, I suppose, is that I’ve transferred the intensity of chapter-writing to that of story-writing, but can’t rely upon any continuity, can’t of course “know” my characters until several problematic days have passed…. And then again I think suddenly: Why write at all? Why, when no one, or virtually no one, cares? And if, as I’ve just done this morning, I type and type and type a single page over until in my lunacy I believe I have it “perfect,” who among even my “admirers” will notice…. In glancing back at “Funland” and “Magic,” let alone stories of other years (do I dare reread “At the Seminary”?),† I can pick out the passages that gave me so much spurious anguish…and even reading them again disturbs me as if the words themselves contained…what?…invisible barbs, hooks…sickly insinuations…. But no one else in this supremely indifferent world would pause for a moment; and why should they…? I may be mad, then again I am probably not mad enough.

  Mike [Keeley] has returned from Greece & Italy, so we are having lunch tomorrow. An ambitious party here on Friday evening, Ray’s 52nd birthday; theatre & dinner Saturday with Elaine & English; and next week our spring break in theory…. I love this life but need to “see” it as of course I rarely can, breaking my head over problems of syntax & sounds. Pleasures are so habitual & private & unavailable for translation, simply to list them is absurd. And now it has begun to snow fairly seriously. And now we must drive to NYC.

  March 20, 1982.…An utterly inconsequential day. Which should/should not be recorded. We have just returned from a brisk run-and-walk to Honey Lake; the sun is shining; the air is cold; we each feel invigorated; and back to our desks for an hour and a half of work before lunch…. It seems to me important to record these trivial events, these non-events. Spaces of time in which nothing happens. This is the texture of our lives, impossible to communicate to a third party, of no value really…words can’t express what is not “worthy” of expression or permanence…and yet, and yet: this is our life.

  …Ray had a thorough physical examination yesterday, the first time he’s ever had certain tests. And now we await the results.

  …Last Friday, Ray’s 52nd birthday. A dinner here, with Betty Fussell (who brought one of her magnificent gourmet-chocolate mousse desserts); George Pitcher (Ed was still in the hospital following his prostate operation); Mike Keeley (newly back from Greece, very much the same); Elaine and English; the Fagles; the Morgenthaus. A lovely evening, in fact memorable, but I seem to have drained my capacity for playing hostess for some time.

  …Working on Mysteries of Winterthur. I keep experimenting with the style, the voice. Impossible to begin to write until I have the voice. Yet it’s impossible to hold back. These stories that want telling…! Everything else pales. I can’t even make myself think of a short story, a prose poem…. All is Xavier, mystery, Winterthur, Winterthur. But I don’t have the voice, the thread that leads to the center, I can’t find the way in but mustn’t despair…it’s enough to write notes & snatches of scenes…type up provisionary material…for, after all…after all…The Crosswicks Horror is finished; and I must assemble a collection of short stories for 1983; and a collection of essays also.

  …Human beings, variations of mood. Now one is up; now down. The spirit bloweth where it will. And yet when something real threatens—physical illness of a “loved one,” as the saying goes—all this meretricious nonsense is pushed impatiently aside.

  …The novel, the imaginative enterprise, as one’s closest friend. One’s most intimate advisor. Is it counter-productive, then, to have an actual friend, an intimate advisor, a lover, a spouse…? Logically this should be the case; in reality, no.

  …Approaching my 44th birthday. In June. What does it “feel” like…? In truth it “feels” like nothing. I don’t seem inwardly to have changed a great deal. Outwardly…? These changes are gradual, therefore kindly. I study myself in the mirror and have the idea that I’ve looked worse—far more drawn, tired, dazed—in my twenties. And that curious inexplicable period in my early thirties when I weighed sometimes as little as 98 pounds. While now I must weigh…but I don’t know: 106, 108, not long ago 102. My sense of my “physical” self is spotty and inclined to be rushed, embarrassed. Which is why writing, running, walking have their appeal…one is simply not there. The social voice is stilled. The insomnia voice silenced.

  …Mysteries of Winterthur. An inexpressible sweetness laced with terror. The very fact, the feel, the aura of…Winterthur, which means mystery, which means Xavier, that fragment of my soul. Growing up in Winterthur; being expelled from Winterthur; outliving Winterthur…. “The blessed day is imminent. My faith shall never slacken. God have mercy on us all.”

  March 24, 1982.…These queer harshly-bright days when one isn’t equal to the sunlight. Isn’t equal to the mind’s rhythms. I feel so stalled; balked; worthless; a sort of faint carbon copy of whatever I am supposed to be, or was…. The interior ticking, far too loud. I have thrown myself into Winterthur with such disappointing results. The first chapters emerge in a styleless bland recitation of Facts…far too long…far too diffuse, confused…but I seem not to care…my strategy is not strategy at all…simply to keep laboring at it…chipping away…but is it purposeful?…is it going anywhere?…is it another detour?…cul-de-sac?…and if a “success,” what does that mean…. At lunch today with several colleagues […] Mike commiserating w/me (I think sadly) he must have been thinking of his own relative failure: a novel he’d been working on for a year or more has been rejected virtually everywhere; he is “known” as a translator when he wants to be a novelist, to be a good novelist; he feels the academic world has drained him of his energy.

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  …Perhaps I require a change: perhaps the “romance” with Princeton is dwindling to an end. I should be working with better students if I’m going to work with writing students at all. (By better I mean only graduate students—Princeton has an undergraduate program solely—my students are bright enough, rather wonderful really for their age, but the writing isn’t polished, isn’t “writerly”…I suppose I am condescending without meaning to be, but then one can’t apply genuine critical/professional standards to undergraduates…. However, the prospect of moving from Princeton is daunting. I really don’t think I would be capable of it. We’re in love with this house, with the landscape, we’ve acquired such valuable marvelous friends…. To give up all this for the sake of an abstraction (working with “better” students) would be folly.

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  March 28, 1982.…“The love of children is a fleeting thing,” says Lewis Carroll in a letter.

  …Typing out notes for Winterthur. My need to “write”…at odds with the fact that, at the present time, I’m not ready to write a novel; not this novel. So I must content myself with typing out notes, scribbling ideas, snatches of dialogue. The “mild depression” writers sometimes feel after having finished a work is perhaps with me on a subliminal level. (I mean, as a consequence of having completed Crosswicks.) But the “mild depression” is soluble in society (many parties of late), teaching, long walks & runs, dinners alone with Ray, evening reading. (At the present time I am reading in forensics, and the $1000 edition of Alice in Wonderland, the Pennyroyale, which I am supposed to review.)

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  …I must write some very short stories. A challenge, to compress them into four or five pages. Can I do it…? But why not…!* The notion of mysteries plagues me. These tiny mysteri
es. Xavier’s focus upon puzzles, riddles, mysteries, the unfathomable & the insoluble. But for something very brief the same focus would work, perhaps very well.

  …Winterthur, my Wonderland. Through the looking-glass. But I can’t (yet) transmute it. I am hobbled by realism, naturalism, even “history.” (The ahistoric doesn’t interest me.) I must wade through so much exposition to get to the parts that excite me, the parts that come alive and matter terribly…why this is I don’t know. Last night, lying awake at two o’clock, at three, my heart accelerating with the thought, excitement mingled w/dread, of writing this morning: how the chapter (I am still dragging through “The Toymaker’s Son”) will turn out. And then, an hour’s worth of writing, and I saw it went very badly indeed. But I can’t despair. I have been here before, haven’t I…? Groping, crawling on hands and knees, I don’t really know where I’m going, haven’t a voice yet, a styleless novel is an impossibility…but I can’t think of this as a “novel,” only the notes for a novel, then I feel somewhat calmer…. The night before last, unable to sleep, a feverish sort of insomnia, dread & a wish that morning would come swiftly; so I worked on the novel for an hour…assembling notes, brooding, trying to figure out an arrangement…went to sleep, finally, feeling vaguely optimistic; then, in the morning, I saw it wouldn’t work; went flat; everything is a jumble; too many “notes” and not enough action; and Xavier only at the periphery of the novel; and I am balked, stalled, frustrated, even a little frightened. But, still, I suppose it is the usual. I suppose I will survive. (The obstacles grow ever more formidable, the chance for “success” more remote. In the meantime, these very short stories might be refreshing and even therapeutic.)