The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (11 page)

Perhaps those who are sympathetic with ill health or neurosis are more likely to succumb. But such conditions are merely boring. There is nothing to be said about them—they are boring.

Donald Barthelme telephoned, wants to add my name to a kind of committee—literary arts, NY State I think—sounded funny, friendly, human—evidently our “feud” is over, and thank God: I reject those former selves of mine that said blunt things, however sincerely. Sincerity is the first refuge of the evil-doer. Still, Barthelme was rather mean to me in
Newsweek
and we are guarded about each other’s work.
*
I try to read it, I really try…!

June 20, 1975.
…Slowly, in pieces, as if constructing a mosaic…or making a quilt of many colors…I am putting together
Broken Reflections
.
^†
A novel that draws me into it almost unconsciously. Began to realize one day that it was far more ambitious than I had thought: three generations, five fairly complex characters, the evocation of ways of life I had known or had known about which are, perhaps, fading from America. And yet—maybe not. America is far more complicated, more dense, than one suspects. Small towns and rural neighborhoods are still there, their patterns of life still there…though television, shopping centers, the fluctuating economy are very real facts of life. Sometimes I am convinced that really nothing changes much. People aren’t being altered. “Change” is on the surface, almost a public relations or media invention. The mood of America and of most countries (most people?) is deeply and profoundly conservative; there is almost an inertia of the spirit, in terms of the collective. One of my students a few years ago, a volunteer worker for McGovern, said: “A man told us he knew Nixon was a crook
but he was going to vote for him, instead of for McGovern with his strange ideas….” At least the man was honest. Americans tolerate and even encourage “change” which is superficial, like fashions in clothes or music, perhaps in order to maintain the status quo on another level. The sexual revolution is a disaster for many people, judging from evidence I have encountered. Girl students are as apprehensive, as miserable, as worried about “not being loved” as ever before, and perhaps things are even worse now: the offer of marriage still remains the token of esteem, no matter if they’ve been living with a young man or not. The emotions seem unchanged, entirely. There is a premature growing-up of a sexual or physical nature, though. Maybe it isn’t “premature” but part of a general acceleration of growth in the species. On the other hand, it is said that precocious sexuality is a mark of relatively uncivilized cultures…and constitutes, in species other than man, an evolutionary finesse of some kind. (Reproduction by organisms not fully adult, thereby eliminating the unproductive or self-defeating subtleties of the adult organism. I don’t think we can be accused of “subtleties” in our civilization, though…. )
Broken Reflections
breaks into five points of view certain preoccupations of my own, merged with certain personalities deserving of study, of exploration. But how will it end…? The ending of
The Assassins
was not the ending I had originally hoped for.

Henry James, in the Preface to the NY edition of
The Princess Casamassima
:
*
“…this fiction proceeded quite directly…from the habit and the interest of walking the streets (of London). I walked a great deal—for exercise, for amusement, for acquisition….; and as to do this was to receive many impressions, so the impressions worked and sought an issue, so the book after a time was born.” How beautifully James puts it! I felt a kinship with him at once. […] The greatest influence for such writers (I hope I am one of them) isn’t literary, but life itself, the more unfamiliar the better, the more jumbled the impressions the better…because they do insist upon being given a structure of some kind, eventually.

July 26, 1975.
…Traveling isn’t an American invention, but future generations may claim it as one; somehow it feels so specifically American.

Returned from three weeks on the road: Toronto; Montreal; Quebec City; Bar Harbor, Maine; Boston; Lake Placid; and then straight across hilly light-stricken Ontario to home. Our heads are ringing with sights and sounds. So much beauty! It becomes diffuse, irretrievable. Watercolors running together. Dream-visions piled atop one another. Stop! Halt! But the stream of images cannot stop. And so most of it is lost, truly irretrievable, as emotional encounters with other human beings usually are not.

I crave travel. Anonymity. Not necessarily beauty—though we experienced much beauty on this trip—but new landscapes, change, surprises. […] Travel is so addictive, we are reluctant to come home. The house is beautiful. The river is beautiful. Today is gusty, light-filled, lovely. Everything has grown: grass, roses, weeds, flowers. There is beauty here, I recognize it clearly enough, yet I really didn’t want to come home this time. The anonymity of travel beckons to me. No mail! No telephone calls! No constant restriction to a few cubic feet of consciousness: Joyce Carol Oates. Now that I am back, I am fated to spend hours as a kind of secretary to that person, answering her mail, turning down requests politely. Though some of them are, I know, very casually made, and will be made to others after me, with no sense of loss, nevertheless I feel I should reply. As Oates’s public fortunes rise, mine must necessarily fall; as hers level off or decline, I gain. What a trap fame must be, the mind-boggling media-inflated international kind….

[…]

…Taking notes for
Childwold: A Romance for Five Voices
, as we drove along. A prose-poem it seems, but perhaps I can disguise it as a novel; no one would want to read a prose-poem. But perhaps it will stretch itself back into being a novel again, once I get working on it. At this point it’s the voices that haunt me. Voices. Not even words so much as voices. Laney, her grandfather, Kasch, Arlene, Vale. Five people, five voices. Perhaps
they will all be absorbed into one, into the landscape of Eden County itself.
*
At this point I feel and have felt for days almost lost, almost bewildered. Today wasn’t bad, but yesterday I felt the sour certainty that it would not work, would never shape itself into a novel. I know enough, however, to trust the passage of time. A night’s sleep and much is changed in my interior landscape. I don’t have to think…don’t have to consciously plan certain things. They will evolve by themselves. The difficult part is to trust that evolution, to have faith in it. A bad hour is so uniquely convincing…. Recall with a curious affection the story I wrote just before leaving home, three weeks ago: Daisy and Bonham and their strange relationship.
^†
The afterglow of the story is still with me. How snarly that seemed when it was in first-draft form, how complex and difficult…and then, after a few days’ meditation, it worked out fairly well. Perhaps it is my best story, so far as “best” goes…. Certainly it’s close to home, the artist’s relationship with his or her alternate self…the ego’s tense relationship with the pure, uncivilized forces of the imagination. I wonder if anyone will notice the James Joyce parallel. Like him, I am a joyce crying in the wilderness; unlike him, I tend to mistrust word-play, puns, arabesques of pure language.

Well, Joyce was an egotist; but is that necessarily bad? My periods of egolessness don’t strike me as having been superior to anyone else’s periods of egotism, really. What difference does it make? I know people who lust for fame, who would exchange friendships for some free publicity, but are they necessarily evil…?
What I do I am
, as Hopkins’ poem claims. For this I came.
^‡
The preachy self-righteous egolessness of certain nature writers and would-be mystics, who present themselves as panes of glass before nature and its wonders, is really a form of egomania, however disguised.
I find it appalling. I find it tiresome. Better Joyce’s attitude, or Nabokov’s, or Roethke’s.

In a way I don’t mean that. I am exaggerating. The nature-mystic offends other people by claiming that his or her pathway is the pathway, that an intense interest in flowers, algae, trees, clouds, and insects is superior to an intense interest in, say, the stock market. The egomaniac offends for obvious reasons (though some people, born disciples, rather like egomaniacs—there is such a simplicity of response required in their presence). Certainly both ego and anti-ego are self-indulgences, and people mainly do what they want; what gives them pleasure. For this I came.

A slight tendency to be saddened, returning from a trip. Must resist. Must plunge into work of some kind. The galleys for
The Assassins
are due soon, and other material connected with that novel; I try not to have any expectations about it, having learned from the past that one’s hopes, even moderate hopes, are apt to be frustrated.

[…]

August 9, 1975.
…My fascination with
Childwold
grows, undisciplined. Many notes. More than enough for a novel, I’m afraid, and yet the material is nowhere near exhausted…. Still, I recognize this procedure as the identical procedure by which I managed
The Assassins
, though it wasn’t a very easy novel to write…or a very enjoyable one much of the time. Curious to know what people will think of it. Detached now, no longer emotionally involved with it, I think it is probably the best novel I have ever written or will ever write;
Childwold
can’t possibly be as “interesting” in a dramatic sense, since it will be primarily lyric. I don’t care: I want to write what I want to write. The work will be dense, will focus upon interior realities, will deliberately slight the external world. I think. But I won’t really know until it is written.

Childwold
: the name itself is richly suggestive to me. Came across it on our trip, driving along a mountain road, don’t remember where. The name stung, stayed, grew, demanded room in my consciousness…supplanted the other title,
Broken Reflections
.
Childwold Childwold Childwold
.
A disturbing dream last night, in which “childhood” figures and I participated in the same reality. Two girls, one of whom had been a very close friend, Jean Windnagle, a year older than I; one of five children in the impoverished, rather miserable family who lived next door to us. The father unemployed, often drunk. Abusive. […] Nelia Pynn, a girl one year younger than I, not a close friend at all, but a country neighbor, appeared and I asked her about her family and she seemed rather envious of me, wouldn’t answer my question. […] The Pynns were a nice family, unlike the other families I often brood upon, who will figure in
Childwold
…. So many brutal, meaningless acts…incredible cruelty, profanity, obscenity…even (it was bragged) incest between a boy of about thirteen and his six-year-old sister…things done to animals…stones and rocks and green pears and apples thrown in spontaneous yelping battles…. Retarded children grown big and nasty. The extraordinary things they would say on the school bus, to very young children, about sex, sexual behavior…giggling, gloating, rolling their eyes. Only by focusing upon the stupidity (and inaccuracy) of such things have I been able, over the years, to draw out the poison drop by drop by drop; for this was an underworld, a child’s world (wold?) of which my parents knew nothing. Even when I and a few others were tormented at school, our fears were disregarded by adults who simply didn’t know….

September 28, 1975.
…Have been revising, revising.
Childwold
, meant to be less than 200 pp. long, has grown now to approximately 300 pp. Some revisions are lavishly expansive, others are cuts, condensings. The “prose poem” form evolved into a novel of a kind with a plot, or at least with a certain forward movement in time; one can’t, after all, keep human beings from their lives…! It’s certainly less difficult than
The Assassins
, both to read and to write, and to rewrite. Thank God I have that novel behind me…. Like
Wonderland
, it seemed to hurt, to be hurting as it was done, the pain of it almost physical, something to be done cautiously, at as much distance as possible (though in the end no distance at all was possible).
Childwold
is liberating in the older, more modest sense of the word: it traces my own background, finds metaphors for certain events in my own life, fictionalizes a great deal in order to express what should be a simple truth. Not until midway into it did I realize the ulti
mate shape it would take—the liberating of one, the confinement of another (though Kasch’s fate is not truly confinement;
*
it is spiritual “liberation” of a mystical sort, which, at the moment, I don’t quite believe in—though perhaps I will again, someday: I seem to have thrown my lot in with history, for better or worse, and transcendence must come in flashes but must not be allowed to seem the goal—), an exchange of positions, a quite literal exchange of settings. Kasch buries himself in the country, Laney leaves the country to explore the world. That Laney is a form of myself is altogether obvious, and isn’t meant not to be, but I stressed her interest in art and biology rather than in literature, and that very little, very lightly, for fear of seeming too heavy-handed. What I did not want was “a portrait of the artist”…and, even so, the novel is longer than I wished. It could be 500 pages so easily; it could be 800 pages! But I wanted, this time, to write something small, scaled-down, subtle, even slight. A long prose poem. A dramatic prose poem. The form is so delightful, the demands so stimulating, I could happily begin again another “Childwold”…but must resist such temptations.

…A story written and sent out under a pseudonym wound up being accepted by a distinguished literary journal that had just, a few days before, accepted one of “my” stories, sent to the editors by Blanche.
^†
Had I known she sent them a story, I wouldn’t have sent them the other…! A coincidence; how interesting it would be if both appeared in the same issue.
^‡