The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (14 page)

[…]

Am I completely normal, and the “Joyce Carol Oates” of the books is a persona…or am I deceiving myself, am I the person, and “Joyce Carol Oates” is the reality? Or is there no distinction, really? I have so little to do with the apparent worldview of Oates’s fiction that it doesn’t engage my thoughts in the slightest. I know, as does Oates, that to create art one must deal with conflict; to create serious art one must deal with serious subjects; drama arises out of tragic actions and misunderstandings, not out of serenity. The mere gesture toward art is a gesture that will involve, and perhaps evoke, unrest. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that one believes that unrest is the basic law of the universe. (Someone said that detective story writers were the most cheerful people imaginable. Manipulating deaths & mysteries. Good for the soul? Crossword puzzles. Superficial. Gardeners also—optimistic.)

[…]

…Finished temporarily with
Soliloquies
, will wait a few weeks or months to reread & revise. A sense of loss, though not so powerful as usual. Stories to write…a story about sickness, first…a poem to type out…nothing urgent…thirty-seven years old and called “almost too prodigious” by a friendly critic…I write only because I want to, because I enjoy it; my “reputation” for better or worse is established. It may fade, it may disappear, it may get better, in a public sense, but in a narrower sense it is established, I think…. So there is no urgency. Though in truth I can’t
remember that there ever was. My image is of someone obsessively writing and producing and publishing feverishly, but my experience of myself is quite different. I am inclined toward laziness…. Reading, walking, staring out the window. Up this morning early to read while Ray slept, sitting on the sofa near the terrace window, distracted by the blue jays & doves & lovely blue sky, daydreaming, slothful, utterly content. […]

March 28, 1976.
…Rereading
Alice in Wonderland
after many years. A sense of disorientation. Pleasure interspersed with alarm. This was the first book I read, but I hadn’t “read” it as I read it now.

Do we ever “read” the same book twice? Do we “read” the same book others read?

Wonderland
a world of pleasurable metamorphoses. Contrary to what some commentators have said, Carroll’s world isn’t really nightmarish. It is very verbal. It is sensible in its own way and not terrifying, never violent, never sadistic. An ideal book for a child. Ideal for me: teaching me the essential harmony of the universe, the possibility of triumph if one simply keeps going, never forgetting one’s basic self. (It isn’t the case in
Wonderland
that Alice really forgets who she is. The “Who am I?” of
Wonderland
is merely verbal, merely playful. It is quite sane. It is a game with a solution.)
Through the Looking-Glass
is rather different. Here, nightmare is possible. “Jabberwocky” is fearful though the words, grown frantic, try to dissuade us. And that catastrophic ending…! (I believe it did frighten me as a child. I had dreams, even, that mimicked the changingness of that ending…. )

Wonderland
: triumph of fantasy, play, good humor, wit, civilization. Alice is civilized. Alice is a very nice girl, but not too nice. She is every little girl, perhaps: she was certainly me for some time.

Was I Alice, as a girl?

Am I still…?

[…]

April 1, 1976.
[…] Someone told me that I was the “most hated” of contemporary writers. I can’t believe this. I don’t even know very many people…! I have stayed away from NYC, away from the literary world, I have declined being a judge for the NBA, I really lead a quiet and almost secluded life…. The resentment that others feel toward me is an exaggeration, surely; if they could see me sinking beneath innumerable student papers perhaps they would take pity on me.

[…]

April 3, 1976.
[…] My birthplace. Strange fascinating eerie dreadful yet plausible. (“Erie” County I always puzzled over. Erie, eerie. Transmuted to Eden. Eden County. But the entire geographical area shifted some hundreds of miles to the east, mythically set north of Albany, in the general area of the Adirondack Mountains. I felt the need to deal with “Eden County” and not with “Erie County” and would have been too restricted, in terms of naturalistic detail and historical event, had I written directly about my own background. By transferring certain incidents of my childhood to “Eden County” I saw them transformed in various astonishing and unpredictable ways; shaped more naturally into art, given a resonance and a peculiar dignity that would not have been theirs in “real life.” Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County is evidently a quite authentic representation of Faulkner’s home county; Jefferson is Oxford (but minus the university)…. His leaving out the university is, however, significant. He shifted it elsewhere, he simply didn’t care to deal with it. “Sole Owner & Proprietor.” The impulse of every writer is to create a fictional world that represents the “real” world in abbreviated, heightened, poetic fashion. Thus Bellow creates Bellow’s Chicago which he calls “Chicago,” but which is nevertheless Bellow’s Chicago (and not Nelson Algren’s, or Studs Terkel’s). Philip Roth’s New York is his own no less than Beckett’s interior landscapes are his own. Otherwise there would be little pleasure in art: it would be a mere attempt at reportage.

[…]

April 6, 1976.
…Great success with
Alice in Wonderland
. Students react imaginatively to it, love Carroll’s subtleties & jokes. Unfortunately the semester ends in two days. So very much has been left unsaid….
The world of childhood. Not childhood that fascinates me so much as the kinds of perception childhood necessitates. A child is physically small…fairly powerless…knows so very little but feels so very much…has no money, no freedom, no protection from adults (hopefully the adults close to him like him)…no clear sense of the future. A child exists in a nexus of invisible rules that become visible only when broken.

[…]

I can’t remember my childhood. It is lost.

Memories come back spottily, disjointed, confused in time. I don’t remember so much as see. Images, scenes without people, intensely-felt sights of the old farmhouse, my old room, the dressing table Daddy made for me, the mirror, the various knickknacks and figurines my grandmother gave me, the glass shelves, the little window above my bed, the linoleum, the dresser/wardrobe, the rug, the folding door. Some of these things I have given to Laney of
Childwold;
but Laney is not me, of course; Laney is someone quite other…. Memory of measles & a very high fever & my parents sitting beside my bed, worried that I might die. I was very sick, very sick. Fever. They really thought I might die; there was that possibility; how horrible for them…. My mother was so young then, only about twenty-five. Think of it! So much younger than I am now! A very pretty woman, and my father of course an exceptionally handsome man as the snapshots show…. The fascination of one’s parents.
*
Undeniable fascination. How unfortunate it would be to have parents who are in some ways disappointing…or absent…or determinedly ordinary.

Memories attached to locations. The creek, the creekbanks, the various paths beaten through the fields, certain enormous trees…bushes…the old Weidenbeck (pronounced Weeden-beck) house…used for “The Giant Woman”
^†
…the pear orchards, apple orchards, scattered cherry trees, the field where we grew potatoes…the vegetable garden…the old
barn…the blacksmith’s equipment…the chicken coop & the chickens & the ritual of feeding them…the innumerable cats…our two or three dogs. So much more real, once I apply my mind to it, than the “reality” of the present time. Within a few minutes I can transport myself to that world, Millersport when I was about five or six, but I can’t recall myself in it, very little dialogue, few meetings with other people. It’s all a scene, a setting, a landscape awaiting population. Which perhaps accounts for my conviction that in most good writing the setting is one of the characters, one of the most important characters. It speaks. It lives. It makes its presence felt…. The old schoolhouse! So many memories & emotions attached to it. A place of infinite mystery for me which I must have loved, though I and the other smaller children were routinely teased and sometimes terrorized by the older boys. Books…maps…spelling bees…the fascination of the dictionary I won in some contest or other (
Buffalo Evening News
spelling bee!)…the feat of memorizing 300 Bible verses so that I won a week at Bible Camp (dreadful place: the other children weren’t very Christian. Religion always embarrassed me)…my parents’ and Grandmother Woodside’s surprise at my accomplishments, and eventual pride….

[…]

April 26, 1976.
…The public side of the utterly private act of writing: always jarring because unexpected. One does write to communicate, primarily, but what is communicated often seems beyond the writer’s control…. An uncomprehending and rather chilly review of my books of criticism in the
New Statesman
, by my acquaintance Tony Tanner, who seems to resent the fact that I’ve written criticism at all.
*
It hurts, it baffles, it temporarily depresses…the misunderstandings that seem willful, especially when they are those of acquaintances who should (granted, even, the cruelty of the literary world) be at least open-minded. What hurts most is Tony’s offhand remark that I probably wrote the essays “without any revision”—which is of course absolutely false, and yet I can’t very well defend myself. I had not remembered Tony’s manner as so petulant, so suspicious.

If younger writers could anticipate what lies ahead after their years of arduous labor and their hopes and fantasies and sacrifices (if anyone still “sacrifices” anything for their art)…would they believe the effort was worth it? If it weren’t for the satisfaction of writing as an end in itself, apart even from the money involved, I wouldn’t advise anyone to write. Not at all. Therefore I’m at a loss about advising writers who are modestly gifted but who find writing very hard work, not really enjoyable. I really don’t know what to say. I look at them and think, But why do you want to write if, in fact, you suffer so…? The rewards won’t compensate for the suffering. The “rewards” are so mixed, so ironic. Why do you want to write if you really don’t want to write?

[…]

April 29, 1976.
…Lovely spring day though rather chilly. Went for two long walks of several miles. Am trying to think out a voice, a way of seeing, for
Son of the Morning
.
*
If I do the novel in third-person it will be one sort of novel; if I do it in first it will be entirely different. I am reluctant to choose a voice because that voice, once chosen, will exclude all the others….

The pleasures of writing “experimental” fiction are mainly those of the writer. I can write that way, but can’t force myself to read very far in others’ experimental writing. It is so self-conscious, so deliberate, artificial, restrictive…a peculiar sort of puritanism despite its ostensible freedom.

The mysterious element: plot.

How slenderly we understand it. Plot. Is character destiny, so that destiny is an expression of character and not anything so crude as “simply that which happens”?

Plot as the working-out of fate. Uncoiling of individual fate. A determinist universe, then—? No.

[…]

May 1, 1976.
[…] Strange incident: a very young redheaded boy came to our door, knocked, gave to Ray an envelope with “Joyce Carol Oates” written on it, said his father had sent him. Ray brought it to me and I opened it, and it was a clipping of a review from the
Irish Times
(an unusually intelligent and certainly very generous little essay by Eavan Boland, on
The Edge of Impossibility
and
New Heaven, New Earth
). The return address on the envelope had been inked out. So we don’t know who sent it. It’s peculiar, at times unsettling, to think that people around here evidently know us…but, apart from a very few neighbors, we don’t know them. We live in a kind of goldfish bowl, almost never aware of others’ attention or interest…. The
Irish Times
! Amazing.

Went for a long walk east along Riverside Drive, almost got caught in a rainstorm coming home; sky looks malevolent; another tornado…? (There have been tornados sighted off and on for weeks.) Without a cellar we will simply have to brave it out.

…This period of my life is the laziest I’ve been in recent memory. Finished grading at the University yesterday; languidly began a short story (about a man of late middle age whose wife is dying…who wishes desperately to begin a “new” life…but of course cannot); wrote three poems, one of them “Abandoned Airfield, 1976,” which I like quite a bit and which moves me, uncharacteristically, to tears.
*
Otherwise—very little.

[…]

May 6, 1976.
…A day of writing, rain, solitude, quiet. (Yesterday was filled—almost too filled—with people: lunch with B.H.
^†
at the Dominion House, long intense conversation & discovery of many interests in common but many others not in common, therefore stimulating & inviting; conversation with Gene McN. on many topics; a most welcome
letter from Miguel
*
on the road to Algonquin Park, hitchhiking; a surprise gift (a silver letter-opener from Tiffany’s) from a man who attended my reading at Ohio; dinner at the Steak House with Lois Smedick.
^†
[…] Through it all I drove about hither & yon thinking about the long story I’ve embarked upon, knowing the story is at heart not profound but nevertheless worth doing….
^‡
There is pleasure in projects known to be small, sweetly trivial, & patterned upon a design known in advance. However, the story might turn out differently as I continue: my sense of humor might throw all these people up into the air and let them fall where they may.)