The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (2 page)

The hubris of “accepting” the universe.

What am I, finally, but a field of experiences…a network of events…? They are held in suspension, in a sense, so long as “I” exist. When “I” am dissolved they too are dissolved. (Except of course for those that have been recorded in print.) Even so….
Harmony. Disharmony. Chas. Ives. John Cage.
*
The “music” of all noises. Reading Ammons’
Collected Poems 1951–1971
[…]. Reading Neumann’s
The Origin and History of Consciousness
, an ambitious book if ever there was an ambitious book. Turgid prose, however; my eyelids grow heavy. Some Rilke poems, unevenly interesting. I have a suspicion that Rilke is vastly overrated. Mystic?—or narcissist. I have no sympathy for him.
^†

Building the structure for Corinne Andersch & Jacob Florey; a mandala. The center is the birth of Lucien Florey. Many cardinal points to be filled in slowly. Back & forth in time. Could take years. The only redemption is the intensity of occasional drama. Otherwise—a mosaic, a vast tapestry.

February 21, 1973.
Read of Jung’s strange injunction to “formulate a hypothesis concerning the possibility of an after-life.”…But what of those who hope for extinction? Dreadful thought, perpetual identity. Unthinkable. Reincarnation, Eternal Return: dismal. But whatever is, is right. (A bland, demonic statement.)

February 23, 1973.
Anniversary; twelve yrs. one mo.
^‡
Cold & brightly blue & very icy. Red berries just outside the window. A male pheasant the other day—lovely surprise.

[…]

February 26, 1973.
Lovely sunny sky-blue days. Immense heaps of snow. Great ice-chunks floating down the river. Warnings of possible flooding. (If you love the river when it’s tame, you are obliged to love it when it’s violent.)

Reading Alfred Kazin’s
The Bright Book of Life
.
*
Much that’s intriguing here, but all of it is slapdash and journalistic and arbitrary. Why is Updike merely “a professional”? Why am I merely a woman writer?—a “Cassandra”? Kazin’s literal-mindedness, his penchant for interpreting works that deal with naturalistic subjects as if they were necessarily naturalistic in vision, makes him a clumsy critic for our times. He obviously can’t think of much to say about Barthelme or Gass or Burroughs….
^†
When he came to Windsor to visit, he seemed quite nice; we had a pleasant conversation for several hours; we served him a drink or two, and then made the mistake of declining his invitation to lunch. Evidently this hurt his feelings. He left shortly afterward, and when he published his essay on me in
Harper’s
, he mentioned in passing that I had not smiled at him once during our visit…. Of course that’s false, I certainly smiled, but if he remembers me as being cold and unapproachable there must be truth of a sort in it, from his point of view; I’m not inclined to think he deliberately lied.

He really didn’t understand what I was telling him about my writing—he nodded, took notes, but had an
a priori
conception of what I was doing. Mixed up, I think, with leftover ideas of his from previous studies of writers of the 30’s. He tries to see writers of the 60’s and 70’s in terms of the 30’s, which is a terrible handicap for a critic…. Still, he’s very good at times. Very good. Though he rather disappointed me, and in a way, I supposes, insulted me (and my husband), he’s still a very intelligent and thoughtful person—thoughtful, I mean, in the sense of being committed to thought. What he says about Hemingway and Faulkner, though not entirely original, is nonetheless perceptive.

February 28, 1973.
Have been informed that A.K. is still trying to exploit me.
^‡
Attempt to sell my letters.

How could I have known it would be such a mistake, to offer that man advice on his manuscript…to introduce him to my agent…to supply a blurb when the novel appeared…? It’s a familiar story among writers and poets. Ugly and familiar. I helped him to begin with, and it wasn’t enough; he had hopes of becoming a best-seller (erroneously thinking that I had the power to make him famous when I don’t have the power to make myself famous); now he hates me bitterly and has written several stories about his feelings toward me, one of them with the title “How I Killed Joyce Carol Oates.” Sad.

[…]

March 3, 1973.
Spoke today before the Michigan Association of Psychoanalysts; on “The Visionary Experience in Literature.” Drew parallels between the mystics and everyone else, especially those “in the service of humanity.” I pretended that Freud really assumed all this….

Strange, these ostensible Freudians spoke rather like Jungians. Even like visionaries. (Especially the older analysts.) As soon as one suggests, subtly, that they are—by dint of their difficult calling—among the visionary members of our species, they seem to warm to the whole idea of The Visionary. (Otherwise I’m inclined to think they would irritably reduce it to “oral-regressive” or somesuch jargon.)

[…] A very congenial, lively group. It must be difficult for them—meeting troubled people daily, and being dependent upon these troubled people for their own livelihood.

[…]

March 5, 1973.
[…] How is a writer to contemplate his critics? To ignore them, to take them very seriously, to pick and choose among them? It would be a pity to banish all criticism simply because some of it, or most, is worthless; there are very intelligent, sensitive people writing criticism today. But just as I don’t read student evaluations of my classes at the University (having been astonished and embarrassed at what I did read: praise for all the wrong reasons), I think it’s a good general principle not to read
most of the criticism and reviews written about me. If Evelyn
*
is especially delighted with a review, or if I open the
Times
and come upon a review, naturally I’ll read it; but it’s prudent not to seek out such things.

Invited to become a member of the National Society of Literature and the Arts—but I rather doubt that it means anything much.

March 16, 1973.
It’s easy enough to resist people who dislike you, but difficult to resist those who claim to like you very much, even to
love
you. My God, that word Love! What atrocities have been committed in its name! R.Q.’s devouring, insatiable love for me—incredible. A nightmare. It’s necessary to resist, to struggle as if one were drowning.

The violence of certain projections. A genuine mystery. What is meant by “transference” in psychology.

March 17, 1973.
Flooding along the river. For a while we thought we would have to evacuate the house. Rain, wind, storm, water. Great logs propelled through our backyard. I walked through the rooms of the house wondering what we should do: stay or leave? leave or stay? Should we start to pack? Should we see if the car will start? Should—?

Ray didn’t want to leave, and I began to wonder if maybe we should leave; his sense of calm was unwarranted, his optimism not supported by the frantic storm and the news over the radio that there was very serious flooding a few miles to the east. On the other hand, he believed that I was being unnecessarily cautious…he had no interest in packing or getting ready to abandon ship. I kept telling him that since we couldn’t peer into the future, and therefore couldn’t know whether it would be wise to leave, or unnecessary, we ought to do the safest thing and leave…. In the end, however, we stayed. And the storm abated. And all was well, except for the damage in the backyard. And the rockiness in our heads. We’re both numb, still, a trifle shocked, “unreal,” from the upset of those hours.

There are emergency situations when people escape with their lives only because they’ve acted prudently and over-cautiously. How is one to know what to do, really? I believe that Ray wanted to stay here because he would have been embarrassed to leave, if the house wasn’t flooded. He would rather have stayed and risk danger than leave and risk an insult to his ego.

A peculiar indifference to the house and our possessions, except for things like my grandmother’s ring and a few other pieces of her jewelry.

March 18, 1973.
Terrible fatigue today, after last night. Staggering about the house exhausted. Now I can understand why soldiers fall asleep in trenches….

A mess in the backyard. Waves came within six feet of the house. Many people did evacuate along the river—some needlessly, it turned out. Others were badly flooded.

(Unfortunately, after this near-flood we will never be worried again. The next time there are flood warnings neither Ray nor I will take them seriously.)

My God, the sense of fatigue….

[…]

Another odd dream. A man in his fifties proposes that I write a novel about him, divided into segments that relate to his schedule of some kind—legal matters? I refuse, telling him I’m not interested.

The teasing, playful nature of dreams—not sufficiently understood. Very few of them are really solemn, or even serious.

Jack and Elena
*
have appeared in a number of dreams, four or five. Usually they appear separately. It’s obvious that their “story” isn’t complete.
Once Elena was crying, appealing to me about something…her life with Jack wasn’t that peaceful, that rewarding. (But whoever said it would be?—she knew very well what she was getting into.)

No, I can’t write any more about these people.

[…]

March 28, 1973.
Teaching
King Lear
in English 115. Must write an essay on that terrifying, and in some ways merely terrible, play; must deal with the disturbing emotions it releases in me.
*
And the poor students!—two or three of the most sensitive ones have been really upset by its implications.

Fantasies of the “retreat.” A character slips into anonymity, in order to explore the world.

Berryman’s myopic self-praise.
^†
His alcoholism and general misery were, he said, “the price you pay for an overdeveloped sensibility.” But I had always believed the man to be underdeveloped, with a very weak sense of others’ existences. The two times we met he seemed already dead—an inert, clayey substance, really quite frightening. He was drunk beyond drunkenness. So deathly, so chilling…. His poetry means very little to me

[…]

The writer’s need to be humble. After all, none of us invented the language.

Read Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
. Unfortunate style, cluttering up a perfectly irresistible tale. I wish she’d written about her own life, though—the life of a nineteen-year-old girl genius.

June 15, 1973.
…Eve of my thirty-fifth birthday. I feel both ancient & very young. A sense that I’ve been this way before.

Our society is mistaken: the experience of maturing is infinitely more delightful than “perpetual youth.” In youth one is likely to wish to be experienced (especially if one is an attractive woman)—that is, to be watched, listened to, admired; in maturity one is far more interested in experiencing—in living. The acute self-consciousness of the attractive woman is crippling. Wishing to be viewed, the woman surrenders her own vision; she sacrifices herself to her own image.

Reading Eliade.
*
The depth of the man’s knowledge and wisdom—! Amazing. Delightful. It’s interesting to learn that he spent so much time in India, and feels that his intellectual and spiritual self was formed there.

[…]

June 27, 1973.
Returned from a brief trip. Elsewhere, another personality travels in utter freedom, not bound by the myriad responsibilities here.

Perpetual dissatisfaction, perplexity. Seeking an image or images that will do justice to…to whatever it is I wish to say.

Someday: an immense novel dramatizing the interlocked passions of love, the wish to destroy, the impulse toward tenderness. Mystical experience “from the inside”: a sympathetic characterization. Immense, melodramatic, unresolved.

(At the same time I discover that all struggles are concluded—the victory is won, there is no opposition, no strife. Perhaps this is a result of my age: the mid-point of life, approximately. From the age of thirty-three onward, a sense of the inevitable gravitational pull downward. There is difficulty in surrendering to gravity, perhaps—acquiescing to fate. The ego is gradually washed away by the Spirit. Is this death, or a dissolving into something wider and deeper….

Curious, to want nothing special from the future. To sense that it is already contained in the present. So different from my attitude toward the
past, especially as an undergraduate, when the future was completely questionable…anything could happen…could be made to happen.)

August 27, 1973.
…Returned from a month’s traveling, out West. Esalen Institute. Tassajara.
*
Canadian Rockies. Both Esalen and Tassajara somewhat disappointing. (Such foolish, exhibitionistic people at Esalen!—and the stilted formalities of the Zen Center, where earnest young people wore heavy black Japanese-style robes in ninety-five-degree heat, in a stifling canyon. A pity, that the devotees’ obvious desire to acquiesce to Zen discipline has blinded them to the fact that Zen as such should transcend local, limiting rules of conduct. What is appropriate for a Zen monastery in Japan simply isn’t appropriate in California in mid-summer…. Also, because the Zen Center is deep in a canyon, accessible only by a narrow, dangerous road, the group is very dependent upon the telephone. And their pickup truck, which is always going into town for supplies. Back & forth constantly. I was disillusioned by seeing on their bulletin board the notice that zazen sittings would be cancelled one day because it was a holiday…. I had always believed that to the Zen student zazen was a joyful experience, not a task; evidently I was mistaken.)