Soul at the White Heat
Page 37
My sense of myself was shrinking like a light made dim, dimmer—about to be extinguished. In a panic I thought, Not here! I can’t faint here.
Somehow I made my way outside, into fresh air. Or maybe the tour was ending now. I was careful not to trip and fall, lose my balance and fall, for I did not want to attract attention, and I did not want to be “weak.” It was my impression that the women in the group did not want to appear “weak.” We had managed to get through the tour, and we were all still standing, though exhausted, and light-headed. A prison facility will suck the oxygen from your brain: you are left dazed and depleted and depressed, and the depression will not lighten but in fact increase for several days as you think back over the experience; then, the depression will begin to fade, as even the worst memories will fade.
The execution chamber was the last stop at San Quentin. The lieutenant led us around a maze of buildings to the inner checkpoint (where we were as carefully monitored as we’d been on our way in; and where our signatures in the logbook were checked against our previous signatures) and through the courtyard where the American flag flew at perpetual half-mast and so to the first, outer checkpoint (where we were again as carefully monitored as we’d been on our way in) and to freedom outside the gates. We dispersed, we were eager to be free of one another, hurrying in the parking lot to our vehicles, wind whipping our hair.
I felt the surge of relief and joy I’d felt in Trenton, exiting the much smaller prison there after what had seemed several hours of misery but had been only a little more than a single hour. Never again!
On San Francisco Bay sunlight glittered in dazzling ripples in slate-blue water. In the distance was the great city like a vision or a mirage you might hallucinate from within the walls of San Quentin, improbably beautiful.
Acknowledgments
These essays and reviews have appeared previously in a number of publications, often in different forms, and with different titles. To all the following, acknowledgments and thanks are due.
I am particularly grateful to Robert Silvers, for whom the time-worn epithet “legendary” would seem to have been coined, of the New York Review of Books, who invited me to write on most of these subjects and whose encouragement has been inestimable.
“Is the Uninspired Life Worth Living?” was delivered, in a shorter form, as the Robert Silvers Lecture at the New York Public Library, December 2014, and subsequently appeared in New York Review of Books.
“This I Believe: Five Motives for Writing” appeared in Kenyon Review.
“The Writing Room” appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
“J. M. Coetzee: The Childhood of Jesus,” “My Life in Middlemarch,” and “Edna O’Brien: The Little Red Chairs” appeared in the New York Times Book Review.
“My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz” appeared in Times Literary Supplement.
“Two American Prose Masters: Ellison, Updike” appeared in a work edited by Andre Dubus III.
“A Visit with Doris Lessing” appeared in Southern Review.
“Storyteller of the ‘Shattered Personality’: Patrick McGrath” is the introduction to Collected Stories of Patrick McGrath (Centipede Press).
“Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin,” “The King of Weird: H. P. Lovecraft,” “The Detective as Visionary: Derek Raymond,” Catastrophe into Art’: Julian Barnes,” When the Legend Becomes Fact: Larry McMurtry,” “Paper Losses: Lorrie Moore,” “Emotions of Man and Animals: Karen Joy Fowler,” “Wiindigoo Justice: Louise Erdrich,” “In Other Worlds: Margaret Atwood,” “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?: Jeanette Winterson,” Diminished Things: Anne Tyler,” “The Inventions of Jerome Charyn,” “London NW: Zadie Smith,” “Joan Didion: Risk & Triumph,” “Unflinching about Women: Lucia Berlin,” “Disputed Truth: Mike Tyson,” “The Fighter: A Film by David O. Russell” appeared in New York Review of Books.
“Smiling Woman: Margaret Drabble” and “After Auschwitz: Martin Amis” appeared in the New Yorker.
“A Visit to San Quentin” appeared in Better Than Fiction: True Travel Tales (Lonely Planet).
“The Mystery of Muhammad Ali” appeared in the New York Times.
About the Author
JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2016, she was inducted into the American Philosophical Society.
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Nonfiction by Joyce Carol Oates
The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature (1972)
New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (1974)
Contraries (1981)
The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews (1983)
On Boxing (1987)
(Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (1988)
George Bellows: American Artist (1995)
Where I’ve Been and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose (1999)
The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art (2003)
Uncensored: Views and (Re)views (2005)
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates 1973–1982 (2007)
In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews (2010)
A Widow’s Story: A Memoir (2011)
Credits
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Copyright
SOUL AT THE WHITE HEAT. Copyright © 2016 by The Ontario Review, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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*In 2003, after having earned between $300 and $400 million, Mike Tyson declared bankruptcy with $23 million in debt and $17 million owed in back taxes
†Replicating the infamous “No mas” of the boxer Tyson most admired, Roberto Duran, who quit in mid-fight when losing badly to Sugar Ray Leonard in 1980, Tyson abruptly quit before the seventh round of a fight with the undistinguished boxer Kevin McBride, and retired soon afterward.
*“[An attorney] asked me about the Spinks fight payment and I told him I couldn’t recall if I had been paid. When Puccio showed him that I had been paid my twelve million dollars, I couldn
’t recall what I did with the money. I didn’t even have my own accountant at the time; I was just using Don’s. I didn’t have anyone to tell me how to protect myself. All my friends were dependent on me. I had the biggest loser friends in the history of loser friends.”
*Arturo Gatti (1972–2009) was the contemporary boxer who most resembled Micky Ward in ring style, talent, and ambition. As prone to injuries as Ward, Gatti had a slightly more successful career, winning championships in three weight divisions (super featherweight, lightweight, and junior welterweight), always at considerable physical cost. Near the end of his career, Gatti acquired Micky Ward as his trainer, but he did so poorly in a comeback in 2007, he retired abruptly. Gatti was a “warrior” whose post-fight photographs frequently depicted a badly bruised, battered face, both eyes swollen near-shut; his hands were often injured, requiring surgery. His mysterious death in Brazil in 2009, ruled “suicide” by Brazilian authorities, was allegedly caused by strangulation with the strap of his wife’s handbag and is being investigated, by Canadian forensics specialists, as a possible homicide.