The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (19 page)

August 7, 1976.
[…] Desultory notes on
Son of the Morning
. The first chapter: Ashton Vickery and the wild dogs. Am in no hurry to begin the novel, however. Nathan continues to shape himself out of chaos…out of shadow.

Overcast, chilly days. More like autumn than summer. This morning a colorful regatta on the river—sailboats with colored sails—quite astonishing. Dream-images, moving along in perfect silence. (Yet their apparent effortlessness is the result of arduous skill and many years’ practice. Thus with us all.)

Vague notes on a story about an unnamed man, a father, who has traveled around the world & seen many sights, too many sights; now he prowled through the darkened rooms of his own home, studying his sleeping children. The story doesn’t quite spring clear…. Thinking also of “The Tattoo.”
*

[…]

August 12, 1976.
[…] Working with “The Tattoo,” thinking of the transformation of private images into a more public structure. Experimental work is the result of a deliberate decision to limit the transformation—a refusal to make it completely public and therefore accessible. An experimental “Tattoo” would not have fleshed out the image in personal terms; there would have been no Gerry Lund, no Ellen Proctor, no setting, no drama, no anguish, no plot, and certainly no conclusion. One can see the delights of deliberately thwarting the transformational process…yet when I work along those lines […] I never feel satisfied with the work. It can be finished, polished, every word and every punctuation mark in place, yet it doesn’t seem complete to me…. I wonder why: it’s a problem that leaves me baffled.

Temperamentally and intellectually I’m sympathetic with experimental writing but I don’t
like
to do it the way I like, or perhaps love, more traditional work. At the same time, the traditional work has to have risks within it, odd little flights, otherwise it doesn’t interest me. But the mixture is a dangerous one, since no one seems to have understood
The Assassins
, and not a few people really disliked it. (I think about four or five people liked it, fortunately including Evelyn Shrifte.) Is it worth it to labor at such an immense thing, knowing that most people (by which I mean most intelligent people, not the non-reading public) won’t care for it at all….

Dreadful “experimental” work at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The now-obligatory all-white canvases; squares of paper, rather. Nine of them in a
row. One painting that covered three walls and was called “Green Focus”: two immense white canvases, one immense white canvas with a small green rectangle at the center. Yet if one objects to such boring, derivative work, he or she is automatically called “reactionary.” I very much dislike [R’s] attempt to push aside my objections to minimal art by saying that there is always a resistance to new work; consider Picasso, Monet, Van Gogh, etc., etc. Certainly that’s true. But this isn’t new work any longer. Duchamp began the playful anti-art business decades ago; the all-white canvases are routine in 1976, as are all-black, all-red, and all-green canvases. Yet the curator at the Institute called the exhibit “A New Decade.”

[…]

Now that I write everything by hand first, the experience of typing it is almost like a new creation—a new invention. The handwritten versions are sketches, light enough to be only suggestive, not binding. Once something is typed out, however, it acquires a certain annoying permanence.

Inconceivable to type poems out directly—to write poems on the typewriter. For some reason poems demand handwritten homage.

The novels of the past, written by hand, must have had a distinctly different flavor in their creators’ imaginations…. There’s something about handwritten work that tends toward the romantic, the lush, the prodigious, the flamboyant; whereas print has a more classical texture, its spirit is economic, spare. The pleasure of writing, these days, for me at least, is the process of transcribing the handwritten work…transforming it into printed, “permanent” work. Though I’m very dependent upon the sketchy notes, a single page of these notes expands to a twenty-page story; and the first draft of
All the Good People
…was only about four pages, while the second and final draft ran to over 100. Of course there’s much rewriting, revising, erasing, re-imagining involved…. But I don’t think I can write any other way now. At one time, when I first began writing, I wrote out a complete first draft—then went back with a pen and made corrections—and then typed the work out, without changing very much. Now, that would be impossible; I’m incapable of typing the
same sentence twice. Everything yearns to be expanded or contracted or switched around or erased. I could no more dutifully type out a ms. without changing every line than I could give a lecture from notes or a prepared speech. Whether this is good or not, whether it’s crippling, or in fact quite provocative, I don’t know. But I feel the urge to revise almost constantly. […]

August 13, 1976.
[…] In glancing through earlier pages of this journal, back in 1973, I am troubled by the “inner” quality of the entries. All seems to be swallowed up in subjectivity. In fact, however, my days were so taken up with teaching that I took for granted my intense involvement in the world—one hardly wishes to record the clever remarks of one’s students, in retrospect. So the journal is often misleading. Not misleading exactly—since a journal is meant to be intensely self-analytical, unlike a log—but it doesn’t express my life in its fullness and complexity. But the experience of keeping a journal is paradoxical. Hours of excellent conversation—such as we enjoyed today at lunch—are lost forever, as are stimulating and rewarding classroom sessions. Small observations, however, which one finds for some reason tantalizing and provocative, are worried over and expanded into paragraphs, or into pages—thereby squeezing out references to the extroverted world. Having lived a full, busy day, one doesn’t really wish to repeat it by recording it; one turns with relief to the subjective mode…. So a journal by its very nature is not representative of its author’s life. It represents its author’s thoughts—the process of
thinking
itself.

[…]

August 17, 1976.
…Planning
Son of the Morning
. Studying St. Matthew; am rather discouraged by the fundamental silliness of the Christ story: Christ’s intolerance (threatening people with hell who merely don’t listen to his disciples), his predilection for flattery (it’s because Peter says “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” that Peter is given the keys to the kingdom of heaven), his ruthless sense of his own righteousness (“He that is not with me is against me”), his childlike insistence upon the identity of wish and action (“Whosoever looketh on
a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart”—etc.—a psychologically invalid theory, to say the least), his general obnoxious zeal, his intemperance re. giving advice (“Take therefore no thought for the morrow…”) that will only cause trouble for others. Again and again whole cities are threatened with destruction, with being “brought down to hell.” The tenderness, the faith-hope-charity, etc., forgiveness of enemies, are really quite subordinate to this dictatorial person, who says at one point that he comes not to destroy but to fulfill, and then says, at another, that he brings not peace but a sword; “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother….” Such is Christ’s unchristliness that one is forced to interpret everything as symbolic, as pointing toward meanings other than the literal. But it seems clear that he really wished his “enemies” (those who don’t care to follow him) in hell, where they would suffer terribly; he lusted after complete dominion over men’s minds.

I had intended to trace the means by which Nathan becomes the Devil…it hadn’t been my intention to show that Christ isn’t very different from any inspired hypermaniacal bully with a few good ideas that others must drop everything and listen to….

However….

And so out of the New Testament, a hodgepodge of unlikely miracle stories not very different in quality from those circulated about hucksters like A. A. Allen and Oral Roberts and The Perfect Master, there grew, slowly and then violently, the great Christian religion: trillions and trillions of people who, encountering Christs in their own lifetime, recognize them as busybodies whose capacity for exciting mobs makes them dangerous…whose possession of an incontestable good idea or two makes them attractive.

It isn’t that revival preachers are perverting Christ’s message, or Christ: the fact is that they
are
Christ. With the difference that they would not
wish to be crucified. (Though if they were convinced they would rise on the third day, no doubt they would eagerly arrange for their crucifixion.)

All this is distasteful, and disappointing. It wasn’t my intention—it never has been—to ridicule beliefs that others take seriously. So long as anyone believes anything, that belief should be respected.

Or should it?

Jesus of Nazareth suffered what Jung might call an “invasion” from the Unconscious: from that archetype that involves a sense of one’s limitless capacity for being
right
, for telling others what to do, for saving the world. The Savior complex, in short. Nothing is so dreadful as an invasion from the Unconscious when the ego is poorly formed, or somehow incomplete. Christ’s “crucifixion,” then, may have been a psychosis—a destruction of the integrated personality.

August 19, 1976.
…Yesterday an idyllic day: Ray and I drove to Grosse Pointe for lunch, then walked along the lake and through the residential neighborhoods. If I can persuade myself that I walk so much and observe so much, tirelessly, because I am storing up visual memories for my writing, I feel a little less guilty; but it often seems that the walking is an end in itself, unrelated to anything that might follow. Houses, streets, lawns, buildings, the Grosse Pointe War Memorial (inside a photograph of a man with shrewd, curly eyes and a subtly depraved face—the Grosse Pointe Women’s Republican Club is bringing a former CIA chief to speak on “the importance of security”), gardens in the forms of mandalas, a Catholic church with kitchen linoleum tile and a general air of diminished splendor. Today I went to 10 Mile & Southfield for lunch with Liz and Kay, and beforehand walked through Huntington Woods for an hour, along handsome shady streets. I am rehearsing the opening chapters of
Son of the Morning
and trying to shake off a sense of defeat, or distaste, or a curious impersonal sorrow evoked by my reading of the Bible and of certain preachers (midway in the chapter on Oral Roberts I lay the book down, not wanting to continue: I don’t want to learn about such nonsense); in today’s mail came an unfortunate book published by
Atheneum, of all places, by Jess Stern,
A Matter of Immortality
. Such nonsense…. To do this book I shouldn’t have to wade through mud and muck, but at the same time I shouldn’t feel that any area of experience is alien to me; I’ve got to shake my sense of disapproval.

[…]

August 30, 1976.
[…] Still reading the Bible. Thinking. Thinking.

The Bible is clearly a work of beauty marred at times by unspeakable ugliness. Or is it a work of madness illuminated at times by flashes of beauty & insight. It is a
human
work—one must keep remembering that. But is it? And what sort of humanity? Beauty ugliness madness insight. I am certain about one thing, however—the Bible is mesmerizing.

Jesus’s personality interests, not because it is “good” but because it is emphatic. His teachings are attractive enough—at least the more famous are—but it’s his obsessive nature, his militant behavior, that interests. In one sense he is the very personification of tragic mystery; he
must
cause the people around him to become murderers. In another sense he is perfectly simple and explicable. He is a nuisance: nuisances must be eliminated.

A surprisingly cool day. Quiet. Sunny. Reread “Lamb of Abyssalia” & will send it to Blanche tomorrow, in Maine. Now there is nothing to think of—nothing. Only
Son of the Morning
which patiently awaits life.

The other day, a near-attack of tachycardia. And tremendous relief that it didn’t happen.

[…]

Pathetic & pointless, basic Feminist concerns. The weakness of Weldon’s novels—men imagined as brainless enemies, as Males.
*
A certain dreadful
resentment
in feminist literature as well: their hatred of women who have succeeded. Perhaps that is the most frightening thing about the
feminists. A wish to reduce everyone to femaleness; a wish for “leaderlessness.” What folly!

The atmosphere of the Women’s Liberation workshop at MLA some years ago: spite, hatred, jealousy, impatience, silliness. Two angry young women were blaming what they chose to call “capitalist society” for the exploitation of women, and when I remarked that non-capitalist tribal societies were often very cruel to women, and severely limited women’s privileges, they had absolutely nothing to say—nothing at all. (I felt, however, that they disliked me intensely.) I sensed that nearly everyone in the crowded, smoky room was personally unhappy—disappointed—somehow unfortunate. And it’s inevitable that the Establishment should be blamed; perhaps quite logical. The Establishment happens to be Male and so Maleness is blamed. Who would dare to point out the delusions of such thinking? It’s a pity that so many women should be unhappy, that they should feel excluded. What can be done. As soon as one becomes relatively successful, her “sisters” turn against her. The ideal is leaderlessness—which is impossible.

As men turn against weak men, as if embarrassed and angered by their existence, so do women turn against strong or successful women. But why? Is it inevitable? I don’t want to think so.