The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates
Page 55
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May 25, 1982.…Quiet, late-afternoon sunshine, sifting through my mind amid the convolutions & meanderings of Winterthur’s long sentences…the outrageous (though always understated) record of the “wrongs of women.”…Mid-way in “The Keening.” My method is to go very slowly, one page at a time, then go for a walk, or a bicycle ride, or play piano…return, & rewrite the page…then again, usually rewrite it again…this novel being a matter (I begin to see) not of writing at all, but of rewriting. All of which is fine with me; suits me perfectly; prevents over-excitement & strain & insomnia…since nothing has to be right the first time, in fact nothing is right the first time. (Winterthur may prove a novel that will never end. Because, now that I’ve found the voice, now that I begin to feel comfortable with my alter-ego hero, why should I ever want to break it off…?)
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…The almost sybaritic pleasure of a slow, quiet, insular, eventless day. A measure of good news (John Gardner has chosen “Theft,” of all odd stories, for The Best American Short Stories 1982) in a very slim pile of letters…but not too much good news…one telephone call (a gossipy chat with Elaine) worth a dozen calls…an hour’s intense reading in the sunny courtyard & note-taking for Winterthur…a hike to the lake; a brief bicycle ride to Bayberry Hill; modest plans for tonight’s dinner (though immodest prices—fresh flounder from Dockside); nothing more exciting for the evening than reading; plotting out further episodes for Xavier; the utter exquisite bliss of…whatever it is, that constitutes our “life.” And nothing, virtually nothing, of a professional nature, until June 17, when I give a paper (of sorts) in Hartford, Connecticut…. “I haven’t any interest in sex or sexual activities, except as ‘literary’ or ‘psychological’ material,” an acquaintance says, rather reasonably I thought. It’s not unlike a consuming interest in money, class distinctions, crime, etc., as emblematic of Society, but dull in themselves.
May 31, 1982.…For days I have been sifting through, eliminating, revising, rewriting, the various pieces in The Profane Art…certain short stories in The Rose Wall*…both these manuscripts being due at Dutton next week. For some reason it’s like pulling teeth (as the saying goes) for me to turn my attentions away from Winterthur, though the publication of that novel, that project, is decidedly fuzzy…and onto these more immediate concerns. The law of inertia operates powerfully with me…by which I mean, whatever I happen to be doing, I want to continue doing; wherever I am; which schedule, which friends, which students…. Inertia means motion too. (“Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop.”) It may mean not being paralyzed by a sudden attack of malaise (not out of the blue,—indeed, in 1982, not ever out of the “blue”—but directly out of the New York Times: U.S. Defense Sets Forth Plan for Prolonged Nuclear War.)
…My writing is usually political. Yet I can’t be “political” each day, each hour. That too is paralyzing. That too is the wall—the metaphor-of-concrete—the unspeakable unshakable end. Just as one must live as if immortal, one must (I suppose) grant some sort of immortality to the species…or to the culture, the language. These beliefs, illusions, delusions, hard nuggets of “truth.”…
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…This quartet of American “genre” novels absorbs me nearly every minute. It has become a mild obsession. (Navigating an outer life while sunk in Bellefleur, Bloodsmoor, Crosswicks, Winterthur…a bracing challenge. My fascination for the inner world vies with my admittedly ingenuous fascination with the outer: sometimes the one triumphs, sometimes (but I think less rarely now: could I ever “fall in love,” as the expression would have it, again?) the other…. But there is an unstated fallacy in all this, or, in any case, something not considered: the companionable support of my husband, the playfulness, love, loverlike moods…. Hearing Elaine describe Ray as “handsome”…hearing of him, seeing him, by way of others…as if in a three-way mirror, that unsought image…. He is remarkably handsome, though not photogenic, invariably stiffening when his picture is taken…. After twenty-one years one is in danger of not seeing the other, not actively seeing…recording…two people dissolved in a sense into one…it isn’t the phenomenon of trust or faith or compatibility, but the gradual growing-into, one into the other, or into that curious third entity—the “marriage”—like realizing you require oxygen only when it isn’t available.
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So these large-scale bizarre allegories are forged in a climate of emotional stability and control. Lacking that, they should have to fight for their life.
June 10, 1982.…Long lovely workdays: immersed in Winterthur & Winterthur’s haunting voice: progress very slow indeed (I seem to be on about page 133—faltering, groping, rewriting, recasting—doing sometimes three or four versions of a single page, before moving on: have I become one of those fated “bleeders,” at last?) but at any rate certain; and at any rate it is all being done with immense pleasure. No matter how dissatisfying the first scribbled “draft,” I can at least build from it, a page, a paragraph, a long Gothic sentence at a time.
…Yesterday, sunshine at last. An ambitious ride, some miles, around Bayberry, down to Old Mill Road, and into Pennington, and back: sunny, gusty, marvelous: and today the overcast malaise has returned, a dirtied-cement sort of sky, ceiling very low. But we had a farewell lunch with Mike Keeley, who is off to Greece (again) and promises to write. (Last week, a splendid evening on the Delaware, with Mike, and Richard and Kristina Ford; at the somewhat overpriced but certainly beautiful Chez Odette, a table overlooking the river at sunset; excellent conversation—funny, probing, moving. Now Mike is leaving, and the Fords are leaving, for Morocco.)
…Funny letter from John Updike, that most witty of men, seeming to underscore an invitation to visit him and Martha, that he had (I thought tentatively) extended a while back: but we can’t bring ourselves to accept, much as we would like to, for, surely, he can’t mean it…? He and Martha have just moved, to a place called Beverly Farms, Mass., and can’t possibly want visitors so soon.
…A journal must record warts & embarrassments. Though I would rather forget. My foolery, in just a few minutes ago telephoning London, England, to talk to Elaine, and getting a recorded message. (English had told me that Elaine could be reached at that number, between 3 P.M. and 4, at the home of Clancy Siegal; and so I dialed; and went through some difficulty; with the consequence that the call did go through, and the phone was lifted—and a recorded message played, Clancy Siegal explaining that he wasn’t home, etc. What an idiot I am, what misguided notions…. ) Also, yesterday, at the end of an hour’s generally congenial and rewarding interview, with Bill Robertson of the Miami Herald, Bill asked me to respond to the fact that virtually everyone he knew in Miami believed I was insane. I asked him to repeat the statement; stared; blinked; must have looked uncommonly baffled; and murmured something about that being rather…well, rather…odd, surely?…since I have been teaching at universities since 1961…and have published so many books…and…well…surely…. “It’s like being asked if you’re syphilitic,” I said, feeling both hurt and angered, “or what you think about the ‘fact’ that people imagine you’re cross-eyed….” Bill apologized at once; wondered if he’d actually phrased the statement correctly: people wanted to know, it seems, whether I was sane.
…So, I thought, it all goes for, what?—nothing? The image of myself in the world isn’t the too-conventional, too-literary, academic-bred intelligence I suppose I (really) am; but a raving madwoman…. Hearing voices, transcribing gibberish, doubtless running about the streets in my night-clothes, hair a-tumble down my back, like any Gothic victim. For this, so many hours of diligent labor; of exacting craftsmanship; of (let’s say) rarely missing a day of teaching in twenty years; of living what I had imagined to be a resolutely “sane” life. (How do I account for it? I told Bill. They must be unusually stupid, your friends.)
…My immersion in Xavier, the (novelist)/detective. Slated to marry Therese in five giant steps, he now seems to be destined to marry Perdita, in three. Pe
rdita, the dark one, the murderess, the lovely death angel…. But I can’t, and shouldn’t, see into the future. The future is some day’s present, which I can’t usurp.
…The impulse for nightmare exaggeration. Gothicism writ large, that the intolerable is, oddly, tolerable. (Because it is finally exaggeration, and not “real.”) Never could I approach Kay’s death head-on; or my intermittent melancholy about my parents’ aging, Ray’s & my aging, etc.; but I can deal deftly with these issues by way of a distanced narrative…I can even deal playfully with them. Everything is codified, altered. My shameless penchant for romance (isn’t every novel a new romance? a new infatuation?) can be exercised by way of actual romance—by way of “literature.”
…Hawthorne: “I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of everyday life.”
(But Hawthorne’s people are too frequently spiritual “mechanisms.” They don’t breathe—except perhaps for Hester, and one or two others. But the short stories, the allegories, are like chopping wood…. Clockwork grown slightly rusty though still “working.” Poor man: how he wound down!—all the zest for life, which he’d found past his first youth, in fact—burnt out. (He died, a biographer has surmised, of a brain tumor. Which explains a great deal, if not everything.)
…Part of the house is being painted. This cloying sickish odor. White paint on the overhang outside; a very pale yellow in the kitchen, for a “sunny” effect…. Housewifely instincts. The solace, the simple pleasures of “keeping” house. (Talking with Mike this noon re. children. […] I feel odd, almost apologetic (though why?), because I have never wanted children…. Have never wanted to have a baby; or to have grown children; or any sort of large, bustling family. Though, if I think about it, I don’t not want a more conventional sort of life…. The maternal instinct seems lacking in me. Or has been satisfied in other ways—through marriage, probably. My talent for tenderness must be qualified by a certain limited patience…. After a period of time, in the presence of children or inordinately simple-minded people, I want to escape to my own privacy, to my own thoughts…I find the task too tiresome, too unrewarding, to pretend to be more congenial than I am. Overhearing mothers talking baby-talk in the A & P (or, almost as frequently, scolding), I think—how can they keep it up? Days, weeks months? Years?…But then of course they don’t all keep it up. Having children doesn’t confer blessings of any sort; doesn’t make one “normal.” Consider Plath, Sexton, et al. If anything, such added responsibilities, such added burdens of thought and worry, must have made things worse for these unhappy women.
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June 19, 1982.…That exquisite time of evening (7:15) when everything seems suspended; perfect. Today, which began with a sense of confused grief (a dream of remarkable clarity about Death: an image of Kay’s usually so impeccable household fallen into disorder, slovenliness: then the dismay of reading in the morning’s paper that John Cheever had died, at the relatively young age of seventy) seems to have expanded by degrees into a wonderfully long, full, productive, restful, and even enjoyable day…after the crowdedness of our trip to Hartford, last night’s marathon drive home (to bed at 2 A.M., to sleep at 3…), the usual cornucopia of thoughts and impressions following a venture out….
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…Yesterday, driving at a leisurely pace through the hills of Western Connecticut. Farms, rolling countryside, meadows, fields, wooded “mountains” (all less than 1500' high); a walk in a small town called Kent; surpassingly beautiful sights, smells…clover of several kinds, fresh-cut hay, grass…daisies, wild chive, God knows what all else. Then, driving along the Hudson, south of Newburgh…a long walk near the river…winding back through the Palisades Park…down via 202…to Morristown (dinner at the Inn there, but awfully late—10 P.M.)…to home, dazed and really too tired. My Versailles, my India and Japan, these homey, idyllic, slow-paced, meditative drives through unspoiled countryside….
…Working today, most of today, very slowly, w/much rewriting, in “The ‘Little Nun’” of Winterthur. Alternating this painstaking work with house-cleaning. (My parents arrive on Monday; tomorrow, Elaine & English, & Angeline Goreau, drop by for drinks etc.) A bicycle ride along Bayberry. This journal. Dragging melancholy thoughts re. last night’s dream, this morning’s news of Cheever. (For Kay lived in Cheeverland, of sorts. In writing Expensive People I ventured into that territory—in my own fashion. Shall I “rewrite” that novel somehow? Because of course it was a record of my own romance with that phase of (my own) odd quirky unpredictable life. And Kay’s death, half-suicide, half-“natural,” remains a mystery…. Though one might see it too as murder of a kind: murder of a marital kind: unconscious, unpremeditated, an act of complicity, so braided together with AMERICA of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, it is very nearly a self-declared Allegory…. But I dare not think of it prematurely.)
June 25, 1982.…The flood of emotion I could barely keep back, at the Princeton airport, seeing off my parents. Again. “I love you so much,” my mother murmured, embracing me, each of us trying not to cry…. But I can’t not cry…. I think of: those young, attractive, somewhat glamourish figures ( judging by the old snapshots)…and of my (young) grandmother too…. Many years my junior. In the snapshots. Then, in the flesh, so changed…not unattractive, certainly not: but changed: changed…. My mind fixes upon old memories. Snatches of conversations. A mystery about to be revealed. The glimpse of a backyard from a forgotten window or doorway…. Living on Main Street, Lockport. Visiting my grandmother (now married to one “Bob Woodside”) on Grand Street. Then elsewhere. Always rented flats, apartments. Woodframe houses. By no means impoverished yet not comfortably middle-class…. And the failing, failed farm in Millersport…. All the emotion, all the passion, I want so badly to convey but can’t…simply can’t. I stare at these old snapshots and go blank. My handsome father with his head of thick black hair, leaning against a glider in some forgotten meadow, on some forgotten festival Sunday afternoon. They’ve all been drinking beer or ale, the mood is gay, reckless, certainly not contemplative…yet I sit here in Princeton, NJ, a “world-renowned” author, a descendant, a forty-four-year-old woman, staring and contemplating and blinking tears from my eyes…. Why, I don’t know: isn’t it the perennial tale, the only tragic tale, our human desire for permanence and the (in)human necessity of change…. Time passes through us but doesn’t carry us along. Or if it “carries us along” it’s only to drop us unceremoniously in a place we have never anticipated…. (I can’t even type. I can’t, can’t, can’t organize these thoughts. I feel as if my skin had been peeled from my body. My outer skin. All prickling painful sensitivity—but without language. I can’t express what I feel. I feel so much!—my heart is fairly pounding—my pulses—my wrists—but I can’t articulate these emotions—everything dissolves to tears, to helpless sobbing.)…“If any man had done to my mother what your father did to your mother,” someone told my father when he was a teenager in Lockport (and his parents long divorced—his father moved away to Buffalo), “—I would kill him. I’d look him up and kill him.”…But what precisely did my grandfather Oates do to my grandmother Blanche?…and why wasn’t my father ever able to find out? (The reticence of the Morningstars—my grandmother’s family; the pride.) (That harmful pride, with which, I suppose, I can sympathize: she wouldn’t accept child support or alimony, so she and my father lived with great difficulty, she did maid’s work for a while in Lockport, worked in factories in Lowertown; my father quit school, worked where he could…. Consequently he hadn’t a chance. No possibility of college; even of graduating from high school; with his intelligence…! And my mother, the last-born of nine children, given away, in a manner of speaking, to her mother’s (childless) sister and brother-in-law…. Yet they were such hardy, spirited, handsome people…my mother extremely pretty (though most of the snapshots don
’t show it—that ethereal quality I remember), my father somewhat dashing…. Gideon Bellefleur in remote essence…. Dear God, I think, I wish I could think, if only I could be transported to their world, their time!…when they were, say, nineteen & twenty years old; had just met; the extraordinary resiliency of their characters even then…. And my grandmother’s world; Blanche Morningstar (Morgenstern); that shadowy young woman whose features I seem to have inherited, in part…the slightly sunken eyes, the quizzical expression, the sobriety, stubbornness, penchant for secrecy…the love of books…the love of libraries…. If I could wish for a dream, I would wish to be transported somehow to that time; to (say) 1936 or ’37; or, earlier, 1914—onward, when my grandmother was young. Dear God, how badly I wish for it.