March 30, 1982.…My father’s birthday, & everything seems well at home. For which, thank God; & I feel halfway ashamed at having made the call with such trepidation. (Not having heard from Mom and Dad for a while.)
[…]
…A large party at Elaine & English’s last week, where I met Maureen Howard for the first time; & liked her enormously. Unpretentious, intelligent without being annoyingly “bright,” funny but not obtrusively witty…. A very nice person indeed.
[…]
…Working on Winterthur. I must have amassed some 75 pages by now. Of which how many are halfway decent?—50, 30, 10, 1—? On Sunday, a crisis of sorts: I was making myself almost literally sick with driving, forcing, insisting upon trying to organize this recalcitrant material…and Ray talked quietly with me, reasoned with me, joked me out of my obsessive cul-de-sac…whereupon I saw that of course he was right…with his common sense, his wisdom…all the things I know (such as, one doesn’t live for writing, one isn’t justified by writing) but had forgotten in the exigencies of the moment. A novel can’t be forced. There’s simply no voice, no texture to it. But since I want to write this novel, since nothing else seems worthwhile at the present time, all I can do is hack away at it…chisel away…typing up notes…rearranging notes…none of it very good, or any good; and maybe it never will be any good; maybe I’ll end up by throwing it all away…. Still, some instinct leads me to work on it. And to take my time. Winterthur must be invented, or dreamed into being, as an alternative world. But the issue can’t be forced. Can’t be forced.
[…]
…Lengthy runs & walks these days. A balmy sunny Tuesday on the Delaware. For two hours we strode along the canal north of Washington’s Crossing. Running in our magic shoes; walking; looking for birds (the other day we saw our first bluebirds—ever); a moderately good lunch at the Washington Crossing Inn; conversation re. our future—how gracefully things are taking shape, financial, professional, otherwise…. In all, a lovely day. Amen.
[…]
April 13, 1982.…Handsome seductive mellifluous Ned Rorem speaking at Westminster Choir College on composing & other mysteries. Ned the “nominal Quaker” attracted to “sensuous” music. The paradox of Silence/Sound. Ned’s beautiful music & ugly prose. Ned himself graceful and almost too articulate: he knows the answers to questions not yet phrased…. It shocked me to hear him remark that he hadn’t made $20,000 on his songs in all his years of composition. Can this be true?…whereas performers can make that much money in a single evening…performing, in fact, Ned’s very music.
…Working much of the day on “The Bat.”* My sympathy for Carroll. The love of, the infatuation with, girl-children of a particular sort. Surely the prurient misread Dodgson/Carroll…? I’ve come to loathe the trendy tyranny by which romantic motives are reduced to Freudian simplicities…all is repressed, denied…all is in disguise. In truth, not all human beings are fueled by sexual energies; many are asexual by temperament and genetic disposition, if not actual choice. And then again, many have become asexual, or non-sexual, as a consequence of too much sexual activity…. But “The Bat” is about surprises primarily. Forgotten patches of childhood/personality. (How much of ourselves is lost, denied, squandered, misread, given fictitious dimensions…. Once these anecdotes are constructed, whatever remains of the truth is overlaid with invention. Metaphors entrance. Structures impose their own logic. I see “Joyce” emerging out of…whatever it is I was…but whatever it is I was is already given a fraudulent meaning by dint of “JCO” and a sense of spurious necessity/inevitability. Even modesty in such terms is outrageous.)
[…]
…Literature as ingenious verbal structures that preserve certain experiences…these experiences locked within the structures…released, decoded, by (future) readers…if there are any. Hence, the inviolability of art. But it is only as permanent as the language; only as living as readers will grant it. Let’s see: literature as a series of stratagems by which experience is preserved…. But no, “stratagems” is absurd…how to account for beauty, fatality, utter charm…. Then I’m forced to admit that I don’t know. That everything is improvised, haphazard…. The gauze-and-wire bat emerging out of the drawer….
[…]
April 19, 1982.…All of life, or nearly, goes well…in fact beautifully. But I sit here staring at these unseemly piles of notes for something called Mysteries of Winterthur and wonder if I should get rid of them all, if I should throw away the wretched 65–70 pages I’ve written…a preposterously “rough” first draft…a narrative that is clotted, stalled, balked, thwarted…that refuses to come alive…(the cliché “come alive” is appropriate here)…I haven’t felt like a “failure” for some days, however, possibly because I’ve been working on other, more finite, more practical things. I like “The Bat”…it’s the sort of thing one can do…whereas Winterthur…. Writing these words, typing them brightly out, doesn’t express the discontent I feel. And my sense too that the “discontent” is all very familiar. But at the same time…impossible to convey through this medium the gravity, the heaviness of heart, the stupor, resentment, impatience, dull anger…whatever it is I feel…my disgust with myself…. The language that won’t live on the page; prose that isn’t prose but mere words typed out; but it’s all I can do to instruct myself to type (I am religiously “typing out notes”—transferring the chaos of scribbled notes into something fraudulent resembling a first draft…but it’s all ridiculous…the “novel” in its present form could no more lift into flight than a dirigible made of lead…concrete, rock, lead…. The entire performance is ridiculous.)
…How odd, then, that, undeserved, life goes well. (A Jamesian sentence. All the commas, the constraint, the hiccupping “forward motion.”)…Lunch today w/Elaine, Helen Langdon (Margaret Drabble’s charming sister, an art historian), an Englishwoman from Southamptom University called Isabel (?—her name has been displaced)…here to give a lecture at Princeton on some aspect of Browning. Yesterday, running & walking at great length…all’s sunny, tulips & daffodils & jonquils…the very heart of spring…. Dinner at the Keeleys’ last week & a sense of the “gang” being reunited […]. The queerness of my outer life going so smoothly, with such unfeigned pleasure, and certain minor things too—these short stories, etc.—while the novel doesn’t evolve at all…. I “feel” Xavier so keenly, but it’s from the inside. I am as balked and mystified as he.[…]
…Has it always been so difficult, at the start of a novel…? I should reread my journal; but wouldn’t really believe it…the opacity of this moment, this afternoon’s sluggish work, couldn’t possibly have been matched in the past. Yet the prospect of giving up certainly doesn’t appeal. “Giving up”…surrendering….
…I am not working from the unconscious, perhaps; it’s all forced, willed, deliberate, intellectual…no music to it…no special language. Programmatic…. I’ve grown too postmodernist-clever; but I had thought language might redeem the effort before now…. However, I will continue; I haven’t any intention of giving up. What has (evidently) happened is that the “mystery” Xavier can’t solve has become the “mystery” for the author of why the novel won’t come into life…like Leah with her mad mystical unattainable Empire…which was Bellefleur itself. (But I did conquer Bellefleur eventually. And I have no faith that the same thing will happen with Winterthur…. )
April 24, 1982.…Shirley Hazzard at Thursday’s Gauss Seminar, infinitely gracious, serene, attractive, beautifully informed…her talk being “The Lonely Word: Virgil and Montale.” But the seminar wasn’t well attended…. We had gone to dinner with the Keeleys beforehand. Sitting in the audience (a comfortable little amphitheatre in the Architecture Bldg.) I thought…how has it come to this, that I’m here; that Victor Brombert (introducing Shirley with his impeccable style) is a friend; and Mike; and the Weisses;* and the rest…. How, really, has it come about; and am I intelligently/properly aware of my good fortune…. I think I must be. But Winterthur hurts. The placidit
y and richness of the “external” life (our dinner party last night, for instance—Ed and George, Elaine, Paul Fussell:† it seemed to me a distinct privilege to be setting the table, preparing food, for these particular people. But if we dare to suppose we’ve earned our friends, must we admit we’ve earned our enemies…?)—this gregarious world which others (one must suppose) look upon with envy—a queer balance with my “internal” world—which is rarely in control, problematic, difficult—the social persona is no less real than the other—where am I, in fact?—but it seems less real because (though, like Mrs. Dalloway and the occasional Virginia Woolf, we love parties) it is so ephemeral. This moment, being recorded, for all its paltriness (am I angry at myself, or have I sunk into a kind of quiet bemused despair…) is less ephemeral.
…Yesterday, out hiking, the “doubling” structure for Winterthur struck me as necessary…but since I’ve used it before, in Bellefleur, why did it take so long?…This time it must be shorter, tighter, compressed, enigmatic…. If my will had its own inspirational energy, its own vigor, I would write for hours, for hours…I would rush into and through Xavier’s story…but I’m unable to. I type a page or two, I scribble notes, drift out into the living room, work on my Bach two-part invention (Number 8—which, oddly, I seem able to play before having read it through: but I’m certain I’ve never played it before)…. The peculiar recalcitrance of the material. I suppose I should give up. Begin again. Begin something new. I sense this “failure” as a punishment of sorts. But do I dislike myself; do I want to be hurt; on the contrary, I can see that I might even deserve a reward now and then…for having taught a class, for having finished a short story, for existing…. The immanence of the Divine, not the transcendence. (We were talking of this last night. But no one at the table seems to have thought I might be right…. Logic instructs us that if there is a “divine element” to the universe or the world, then this element is in us and through us and by way of us. A distant, detached, absurdly patriarchal phantom is highly unlikely…though my deluded characters pray to no one else but this Daddy. However, beyond the logic of the “if”…?)
…Reading Sylvia Plath’s journal, and W. S. Merwin’s memoir, Unframed Originals. Thus far, oddly, I feel a stronger kinship with Merwin; and the prose is far richer…though of course he is writing self-consciously and Plath is, or was, writing for no one’s eyes but her own. (One wonders—why didn’t the unfortunate woman destroy her journals before attempting suicide? She seems to have been completely incapable of projecting into the future—the future that would exclude her while including, for the benefit of Ted Hughes […], every page and scrap of her writing. The cruelest and in a way the most stupid of fates.)…
…Just now, bicycling in Pennington. Always more cheerful & hopeful about the novel (chap., “The Diamond-Etched Love Letter”) when I return from one of our energetic outings.
May 7, 1982.…Working off & on all day, and have written the first five pages of Mysteries of Winterthur…about which I feel tentatively pleased: but, at least, I know I am headed in the right direction, and have stopped groping piteously about for the way in. As for the voice—it is almost in focus (or should I stay in tune)—and should gradually accommodate itself to the story.
…Days, a week, of unusually interesting adventures. Dinner with Anne Tyler and her husband Tighe, in Baltimore, on Sunday […]. My feeling for Anne is very strong, immediately & deeply sympathetic…despite her reputation as a “recluse” (she isn’t even reading reviews for Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, let alone venturing forth for readings and publicity) I find her marvelously “normal” in every respect…quick-witted, funny, intelligent, totally without pretension. And she is a superb, unfussy cook as well. If only we lived closer to each other, I’m confident that we would be friends—perhaps even intimate friends—which is the way I feel about Gail Godwin as well.
…Washington, a morning in the East Wing of the National Gallery, azaleas, blossoms, remnants of tulips, a long hike in the National Arboretum, Tuesday’s luncheon at the Library of Congress in honor of outgoing consultant in poetry Maxine Kumin and incoming consultant debonair Tony Hecht […]. Washington traffic was fatiguing, and the nexus of streets no less bewildering than we’d remembered them, despite our good intentions, & my steering us about with a somewhat crude map…hence we are not eager to return to that city, or, in truth, to any city…. Spent two idyllic days along the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay (a night at St. Michael’s, a fishing village of sorts) qualified only by the fact that I’d brought along the weighty galleys/page proofs of A Bloodsmoor Romance which I actually tried to read & to correct. (At times, queer times, I felt intimidated by the authority of that novel—its voice, its structure, its amazing assurance. How can I possibly do anything like that again? Or have I, in Crosswicks…? Whereas, by contrast, the tone of Winterthur seems so tentative.)
…(Did in fact visit the Du Pont gardens & museum at Winterthur, Del. But found the experience only—enjoyable; agreeable; a pleasant two hours; not very helpful or informative. All I want, after all, is the haunting name Winterthur. A Swiss word evidently—a Swiss town or region—pronounced “Winter-tur.”)*
…Returned home to a cardboard box of mail. & last night’s elegant dinner at the Bromberts’ (Shirley Hazzard & Francis Steegmuller the guests of honor), and Shirley’s impressionistic, marvelously informed, inimitable Gauss seminar (the topic being, last night, literary posterity…about which Shirley and the Princetonians had a great deal to say, but never touched upon the—perhaps too obvious?—point that one doesn’t write primarily, or even secondarily, to shore up one’s ego against the ravages of time, but in order to communicate with one’s contemporaries…and to work, to play, with language…to investigate the mysterious “integrity” of whatever it is that demands to be written). Set beside these eloquent and unfailingly genial mandarins, I felt both sly and crude, like a proletarian spy, a Bolshevik, in the stronghold of the bourgeoisie.
May 15, 1982.…This most exquisite of days, which fairly stupefies with its beauty…birds calling to one another back in the woods (among them, among the familiar songs, the purple finches’ warbling—they have built a nest in our “bluebird” house)…a single deer, a doe, picking her way unhurriedly through the backyard…sunlight streaming into this most beautiful of rooms…and on, and on, a cornucopia of marvels & blessings: which must be here recorded, along with the information that, tentatively at least, Mysteries of Winterthur is taking shape…and a certain frenetic busyness of the past several weeks has subsided (to be aroused again, I suppose, by next week—two days in NYC: a poetry reading at NYU on Monday; the American Academy-Institute luncheon & interminable ceremonial on Wednesday, followed by dinner at Bob & Lucinda’s)…. At this moment Ray is in town; everyone except me is sleeping (by which I mean the three cats, lazy in the mild heat); the world is actually on the brink of bursting into…Paradise?…the kind of half-surreal image, idyllic to the point of parody, one cannot very easily or gracefully write about, but must, I think, really must, for the sake of the record, in order to avoid the chief failure of most journals & diaries—including only disasters, complaints, mordant speculations. Yes, there is a Paradise and, yes, sometimes we live in it, with or without deserving it….
…Midway in the second chapter of Winterthur, “Trompe l’Oeil,” and I seem to have the voice I want. Now it seems clear that my original structural plans must be altered—this is a real novel, and not a sketchy “detective-mystery” novella—I can’t possibly fit five of them together, but will try for three, a more practical number. Xavier’s life divided in three?…at sixteen, at thirty-six, at fifty-six…? A possibility.
…The absolute pleasure of such solitude. Because, perhaps only because, it is temporary. Bracketed by marriage, friends, telephone calls, mail, parents who will come to visit in late June…“career”…and all the rest. One really can’t write about such things in any other guise but the diary because they strike the ear as self-congratulato
ry. Knowing oneself blessed is also knowing oneself undeservedly blessed, and others undeservedly damned, but what of it?…what can one do about it?
[…]
May 20, 1982.…Another splendid sunnily warm day; finished the chapter called “Trompe l’Oeil”; have forbidden myself to immediately plan the next…“The Keening”…since I should (shouldn’t I?) allow myself some space…time to breathe. Hours, events, people, snatches of conversation, images, books, pages, unfortunate flashes…tumbling in all directions…. Monday, lunch with Bob [Phillips] at the oldest tavern in NYC, East 18th St.; a quick visit to the Brazillers’, to see the watercolor/dust jacket for A Bloodsmoor Romance…which is attractive enough but which, I suppose, I don’t truly like: it doesn’t express the novel’s ambiguities, and makes no attempt to suggest the masculine presence…JQZ and the increasingly diabolical inventorly “progress.”…And the attractive, in fact pretty, watercolor for A Sentimental Education: what relationship has it with stories like “Queen of the Night,” “A Middle-Class Education,” etc….? But I said very little to Karen of a critical nature since, at bottom, I don’t really care about such things; and perhaps Karen is right—the covers are superb. (Who can be wrong, or right, about anything so essentially minor…. ) Monday evening, my reading at NYU, which went well enough: the usual surprises: disparate enthusiasms that should be, perhaps even are, gratifying in odd angular ways. […] Home at midnight alarmingly exhausted; sank into sleep besieged by those curious, inexplicable, utterly exotic “hypnagogic images” I generally experience when I’m in so drained a state…. And yesterday, alternately bemused & exhilarated, the American Academy-Institute luncheon and ceremonial, lasting most of the afternoon. Nice conversation with Mary Gordon, whom I like immensely (though she has grown waif-like…even younger…since I’d seen her last; she had a baby a few months ago); and Norris Mailer (lovely as a Manet—beflowered, behatted, slender, tall) and of course Norman (uncomfortably warm in a three-piece suit, looking rather more like a successful attorney now than a stockbroker/cleric).
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates Page 54