The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates
Page 56
…But I have no resources except the uncertain memories of others; and the dimmest of reflections, of my own. If only, someday, Imagination might answer my prayer. If Imagination were God, indeed….
…But the visit was lovely. Entirely pleasant. Much society, laughter. (For these people, Caroline and Frederic, are no longer those people: they’re a retired couple extremely grateful for their belated good fortune: and touchingly proud of their daughter and son-in-law.) They arrived on Monday; on Tuesday we had dinner here, with Elaine and English; on Wednesday we drove to the Delaware, for lunch on the canal, and a walk along the sunny canal bank, and, in the evening, an open-air concert at the Graduate College (where that lovely heartbreaking Ravel quartet was played); on Thursday we went to Princeton, visited with Ed and George, in order to be shown George’s splendid garden, saw the art museum, etc., and went out to dinner—to a Chinese banquet of sorts—my mother girlish and funny, my father very funny—the happiest they have been—and (so it seems) the healthiest in some years. My father playing piano, “St. James Infirmary,” Hoagy Carmichael pieces, etc., etc., but all this is jumbled and unclear…. We spent a fair amount of time working outside in the flower beds (my father helped Ray nail up trellises for the roses); we commented often on the melodious house finches at the feeder; and the idyllic quiet; the beauty of the pond, the woods, the weather…. I wish I could somehow keep them here, yet allow them their own life; which is, I suppose, what they wish for me. But at least…at least we’ve had these days, and others…. Sharing adulthood with one’s parents is so sacred…I had never imagined…but I can’t express what I feel…it’s all awkward, banal, haphazard, jumbled…I am inarticulate, I feel as if my outer skin were missing, peeled off, and the slightest breath causes pain…yet I want the pain…yet I’m terrified of (worse) pain. […] I am so vulnerable, I feel…I feel that…. But I don’t know: perhaps it’s sheerly inventive: I can’t stop crying or wanting to cry: but isn’t that the way it always is…. All emotion, a flood, unstoppered, unorganized. I’ll never be able to reread this, so why am I writing it?…as fast as I can type…. All a great mass of confused wayward thoughts. What I would like to do (dear God, how I would love this) is to write a novel about these people…beginning with my grandmother Blanche as a girl of, say, sixteen or seventeen…and somehow give them that life again…and see the world by way of them…. But how to get the proper distance, the necessary detachment…? All this authorial coolness, this pitiless abstraction—making Xavier Kilgarvan speak for me, but so obliquely, around so many corners—a veritable maze: the challenges are all cerebral, since the passions are all suppressed or rerouted. But to write directly…forthrightly…. Something along the lines of a memoir…. But…. I suspect it is an impossibility…. Emotion can’t carry me very far; and think of the anguish, in exposing so personal a document to strangers…. In re-creating my grandmother and my parents I would be falsifying them, not only explicitly, but by the sheer imposition of language; a voice. It’s only a feeling I have…so poignant…melancholy…. And then to realize that of course I didn’t know my grandmother—not really: that she was my “grandmother” blocked any objective sort of knowledge or sympathy, for many years: and now my curiosity, though insatiable, must depend upon so many secondary & peripheral observations…. Yet, I suppose, I should be content, as Ray says, in knowing that I’ve made them immensely happy: that I’ve made them incredulous, even, with “my” success in the visible world: that somehow, magically, impossibly, I’ve vindicated them, and made their long years of deprivation seem worthwhile…perhaps part of an ongoing incomprehensible but utterly mesmerizing narrative….
June 29, 1982.…Pelting rain; work on Winterthur; the exhilaration of nearing the end of Part I (midway in “At Glen Mawr Manor: The Attic”), qualified by a very real, very tangible desire not to finish…but to stay with congenial Xavier forever. Wherever will I find a character quite like my “detective” after this?…It occurs to me that I always live in several tenses: the present, the past, the future-in-terms-of-a-book. Melancholy re. the inevitable & ineluctable passage of time is always assuaged by my sense that this passing is necessary so that a book can be brought to completion…. I look forward to this fall because of Bloodsmoor (not because I want the lovely summer to pass by); and to 1983 because, if all goes well, Crosswicks should appear. Thus I have a kind of investment in the very passing of time…. This state of affairs has been operant since approximately 1963. I halfway wonder—what is Time apart from this peculiar process? Someday I shall find out.
…Then again, when these things abruptly happen (by which I mean the sudden cessation of an old pattern, an old habit), one doesn’t often miss them anyway; something new intrudes. I hardly miss teaching at Windsor, I hardly miss most of my old acquaintances, just as I hardly miss my “former” self, residing there in the Midwest. Perhaps Aristotle’s law of X & non-X….
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July 13, 1982. […] Lovely absorption in Winterthur. And now the wrenching part—the conclusion of a section—and the groping plans for Part II. My great pleasure in life is to always be in medias res; never finished; never expelled from the Paradise of—what can it be called?—language-in-motion. The process, the invention. A ceaseless weaving.
…One glances up, after all, to see an entirely alien landscape. (Word is out that Harper’s has commissioned a “hatchet job” on me.* Odd in that Harper’s published a long poem of mine some months ago…in fact, two poems, in different issues. Lois S. says I should be “flattered” by the attention; but I believe I would rather be spared, all things considered.)
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…Many parties of late. I begin to feel like Professor St. Peter who wants only to be alone. Still, I am alone a great deal of the time; by now the rhythm must be established.
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August 7, 1982. […] Marvelous pleasure re. Winterthur. If only one could be midway in a novel (or so) forever. If only, if…. The storytelling impulse, the language exactly so, what one wants immediately translated into what one gets…albeit I am fixated upon revision & feel an actual thrill of pleasure at the thought of doing a page again, & then again…for the fourth or fifth time it is so intricately & ingeniously “right”…whereas the first or second time it is only just almost…. Revision is self-indulgence & why not?—I have forever.)
…The turning point for me must have been, now that I think back upon it, a few years ago…in Windsor…when I received notice of the election to the American Academy: a kind of stunning “immortalization”…which I don’t suppose I deserve, but then, who does?…just like the modest income the books have made & continue to make…& the amazing nomination for the Nobel Prize…. All very dazzling, improbable, perhaps even impossible; but there you are; one feels (looking up from the immediate exacting task) “home free.” That much of this is frankly undeserved should worry me & perhaps one day will but I make the attempt daily hourly minute by minute to at least pretend that it isn’t: for after all if I must be, am fated to be, “Joyce Carol Oates,” & no one else—if in truth “JCO” cannot come again on this earth,—am I not obliged to enjoy her/it/this/whatever this time around?
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…God culminates in the present moment, and the universe will never be more perfect.—As Thoreau (whom I read in the evenings) has so powerfully seen. (& I am also reading Maxine Kumin’s wonderful poems; & beginning Stevie Smith’s very intriguing Novel on Yellow Paper; & poking about, doubtless to no purpose, in Susan Warner’s life & letters; & then there’s the delightful distraction of our seven-week-old ginger tomcat Ginger, all innocence, claws & teeth…the sweetest of little demon-dynamos.) Ah, to live like this forever…to be at this, in space, forever.
August 26, 1982.…So enamored have I become of Winterthur, I can’t seem to bring myself, when seated at this desk, to think of anything else, let alone to write; I’m behind on my correspondence; and this journal; and feel quite guilty about not seeing certain people, returning telephone calls, etc
…. When I’m not writing I am reading & preparing for my “genre” course…at the moment rereading the marvelous Jane Eyre…when neither writing nor reading I seem to be outside; or visiting with friends. Today, for instance, we had a magnificent small outing to Whitehouse, NJ…luncheon at the Ryland Inn (an old country inn—eighteenth-century perhaps—splendidly decorated—gracious—excellent food & service—how like an advertisement I sound, yet how justified it all is!—& altogether fortuitous, our discovering the place)…and a long bicycle ride through Whitehouse…out into the country…the wildflower season (loosestrife, chicory, Queen Anne’s lace, some sort of lush yellow flower the name of which I’ve forgotten, & diverse purple or lavender thistle-like blooms…. ) My usual infatuation w/August; our perfectly-paced life; fairly intense work in the morning, every morning almost without fail; then a break until four or four-thirty…then work again until seven, or so…then dinner (all sorts of wonderful garden things: zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, roquette, even grapes…and the flowers, marigolds, snapdragons, zinnias, are abloom, ablaze, as well…).
…A quietly lush season: would that it would never end!—& neither of us would, in fact, ever tire of it—ever.
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September 5, 1982.…Lovely visit with my parents: five perfect days, or five and a half: a trip to Philadelphia to the art museum; our usual walks & outings in the vicinity (an ambitious hike in Watersheds, a visit to Terhune Orchards, strolls around Princeton, Hopewell—the antique shops—etc.): and now the house feels incomplete, part empty: and, if I allow myself (but I should know better by now) I can become quite….
But nothing could have been more perfectly timed, than Diane Johnson’s remarkably generous review of Bloodsmoor, in the Times—just the thing for my parents to read, and to rejoice in—and the Chicago Book World piece—as Walter Kaufmann once said, the people who really take pride in your success are your parents.* While I am apt to feel mainly relief (the hatchet not thrown, bouquets of roses instead, this time one is spared all the nastiness one probably deserves, in secret truth) my parents are genuinely delighted. So, thank God.
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…Finished the trial: Valentine’s ludicrous “defense”; reluctant to continue (and complete the novel today????); but reluctant too to think seriously about the academic semester…though I have just typed out my syllabus for 301, and must do 340 tomorrow…. (How odd I must be, to feel such queer excitement re. the opening of school…having taught for twenty-plus years…well, twenty…. A faint sensation of actual chill, as if I were about to undertake a considerable adventure, and not the familiar, and always highly enjoyable, experience…. The camaraderie; the good sense of the students; the actual place…everything so wonderfully agreeable…. But I feel, I suppose, an unwelcome tug upon my concentration: I want to stay in Winterthur, and have a horror of leaving prematurely; I want also to return to Princeton, to my amiable teacher-self, not to mention to the company of my delightful colleagues….
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September 18, 1982.…A week of extraordinary intensity & activity. Here at home, my counter/world, my anti/world…writing & revising page by page most painfully and deliciously and slowly two stories…the laconic “Improvisation” and the longer, more risky, probably quite hopeless “Night. Death. Sleep. The Stars.”* Away from home, away from the “new room” where I’ve been working, as an anti/world of sorts from this room (which belongs by rights to Winterthur)…away from the house entirely were the University & virtually hundreds of people, many of them new to me, wonderfully fresh new faces, and intriguing old faces…our first week of classes which went, as usual, very well; though I was carried along on the same wave-upon-wave of nervous excitement and exaltation as everyone has been…which lasts until this very moment (Saturday, 6 P.M.) in fact. Lovely idyllic strophe & antistrophe…. I feel that I can wander a great distance psychically because at home, here, my imagination is rooted in an actual structure of language: I may move along slowly enough (it took me a full week to write “Night….,” in fact, working fairly intensely every morning, and for an hour or two every afternoon) but at least I am moving…that consolation![…]
…Well. My “vacation” from Winterthur ends. Tomorrow morning I shift operations back into this handsome though less spacious study, and begin revising Part II; and must think seriously about plotting out Part III, at this point only clouded, prickly, quizzical, problematic…though I know now the wonderful ending: Xavier (diminished) and Perdita (diminished) at last happily wed; and Therese wed as well—to a gentleman deserving of her. Thus the ending of so much grotesque sorrow is All Right; an ironic fate, for a detective to marry a murderess; though—what more appropriate fate, after all?
September 21, 1982.…Utterly blissful days. Today, for instance, an oasis in the midst of activity: the entire day spent at home…revising Part II of Winterthur (much more thoroughly—in fact, word for word—than I had anticipated: but what a pleasure it is)…and thinking ahead, jotting down notes, for Part III…which should convey the success-wearied & world-sickened Xavier to a resolutely happy ending…no less satisfactory (in psychological/secret terms, at least!) for being ironic, ironic, bitterly & funnily so, one hopes.
…Yesterday, the busyness of teaching etc.; tomorrow, the double busyness of the University & NYC…which, far from looming large & repellent, actually seems inviting, for some queer reason. Our schedule is: I shall take Ray to the bus at 10:10 A.M.; get to school to prepare Turn of the Screw for a blissful hour or so (I want to think hard about James’s Preface, which I hadn’t actually read in its entirety before this morning: his remark re. “cold calculated” writing, or something to that effect…odd that I’d once written a story disingenuously called “The Turn of the Screw”: what fun); go to lunch w/Angeline Goreau, & most likely Stephen […] & Russell Banks & one or two others […]; then my long, long class, which ought to be rewarding (bright students reading papers on Screw…some of them, I hope, in James’s own convoluted language, as I’d suggested…or from the point of view of other characters in the novella: the felicity of teaching at Princeton amidst brilliant & imaginative young people); then a limousine of sorts will arrive to take me to Manhattan…to the Union League Club…where a publication party will be held, partly for Bloodsmoor but mainly for the new Obelisk paperback series (in which A Sentimental Education has been beautifully presented); then, dinner at a reputedly exquisite French restaurant w/Mike & Karen Braziller; then, home again by way of the limousine…. As full & complex a day as someone of my character & temperament can handle, & then some; but, having days like today & days like Thursday ahead (another oasis of calm, work, introspection, reading, puttering about the house, jogging down to the lake) make such manic celebrations not only possible, but even agreeable.
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September 29, 1982.…Yesterday, the completion (the “revised” completion) of Part II; and now some space, spaciousness…. Otherwise, a jammed-in life: in an hour I must leave for the University and for my to-boggan-slide of a day (the long seminar, and my introduction of Stephen Koch at 4:30, and a reception afterward, and a dinner); and early tomorrow morning we drive out…headed for Boston College and an impersonation, I hope amiable and convincing, of JCO. After that, a visit with the Updikes in Beverly Farms […]. And all the while my head is abuzz with thoughts of Winterthur, and Bloodsmoor, and prospective employment (it seems to be the case that I misunderstood, or, what’s more likely, had never been precisely told, that I might stay at Princeton as long as I might wish, in this informal part-time way…) and a dozen other matters, all of them trivial.
…Rereading James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. And forced to realize how far I’d come…that is to say, how radically I’ve swung away from…a sense of that “mystic/cosmic unity” I once seem to have had, circa 1971–72 and for some years following. Now that I don’t believe in that state of consciousness as a very real human possibility; I know it’s real enough; as “real” as the altogether disheartenin
g front page (what do I mean?—all the pages) of the NY Times; but it simply isn’t accessible to me any longer. Now, reading through this marvelous book, I seem to feel that each of the headings—“The Healthy Soul”—“The Sick Soul”—“The Divided Soul”—“Saintliness” etc.—vies with the others in its own right, with its own integrity; one might opt for any position or “state of consciousness,” since they are more or less all equal….
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October 25, 1982.…Lovely fruitful days, alternately crowded & serene. Today, all day, I am working on Winterthur. (A cold dreary rain. But everything outside—I mean the leaves, the moist melancholy air, the solitude.) If I feel tension about the novel it’s because, so unavoidably, so characteristically, it grows too long; yet the story demands its own space and shape, its own rhythms…. But all this is obvious. All this has been said before.
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…All very quiet & merciful this year, re. the Nobel Prize: no rumor save one fairly predictable one (CBS inquiring by way of the Dept. whether I’d be available for a press conference, if…). Otherwise nothing; and I’m quite pleased at the choice of Marquez, if Nadine Gordimer must again (because she is female?) be overlooked. It all begins to seem increasingly preposterous that my candidacy was ever taken seriously—that, last year, I was said to have been runner-up. Dear God, what a storm of protests and cruel blasts would ensue, if I had won this problematic award, for I am nothing if not a “controversial” writer…. Which means that a good many people heartily dislike my writing; and among these people are some very bright, intelligent, articulate, and influential critics.