The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (23 page)

Still, creation comes to an end; writing comes to an end. But then that too must someday…come to an end.

The conflict in me between a queerly urbane & detached (& even perverse) stoicism…& my more characteristic enthusiasm & curiosity. & energies re. the future.

What, however, is stoicism?—the stoic spirit? Is it genuine; or is it a helpless reaction against Fate? (Not against Fate but against the helplessness itself.) Do I appear to be accepting of my fate because I truly am accepting, or because I know there’s nothing I can do?…Ah, but there’s a great deal I can or could do. My life threatened, I could do a number of things. I could stop teaching for a few weeks, I could go away, I could even hire a bodyguard […]. Is Stoicism possibly a conspiracy with death? With the death of the spirit? I honestly don’t know. Embracing one’s fate is poetic but what about running to embrace it…? No, I can’t see this; I can’t accept it. If my instinct is to do nothing but return on Monday and teach as usual (and this jinxed class has been moved to an ugly room in the basement of ugly Memorial Hall: a physics classroom!) it isn’t because I wish to die but simply because I foresee that nothing will come of the threat, and that any precautions I take will come to seem unnecessary.

[A colleague] tells me that nowhere in the Detroit area, in the Dalton or Hudson bookstores, even, is
Childwold
available. Nor has it ever been available since its (secret) publication back in October. I told John apologetically that my books have never sold well, and he said, “Don’t you think that’s because of Vanguard’s poor distribution?” and I said I really didn’t know. Vanguard is certainly poor about distribution, I wouldn’t argue that, but they have been awfully nice to me re. publishing my books. […] In my heart I have so little certainty…or faith…or, what?…hope…about my own writing…and no ability (or wish) to evaluate it objectively. As my books get more complex and please me
more, the “literary world” values them less. Which is sad but not paralyzing.

January 9, 1977.
…Completed “First Death” (name changed from “Miss Lerner & Me”) and feel fairly satisfied with it.
*
The frightful vulnerability of young people…of children and adolescents…the memory of it returned to me during the writing of the story and I felt, almost, a sense of terror…for what might have been my life. In my own case the business with the gym outfit and the teacher’s relentless persecution of me for weeks (at one point I went into her office to tell her I’d been looking everywhere, and she had the kindness—or the madness—to say that she was pleased with the effort I was showing!) combined with a freakish incident (I missed the school bus one morning when I was scheduled to do something important, I forget what, at school, and my homeroom teacher and my English teacher never “forgave” me for that, as if it had been deliberate) to make my eighth grade experience a sort of nightmarish delirium for months…. Evidence seemed to be piling up against me, without my having any power to defend myself, or even explain; how can a twelve-year-old explain anything convincingly to adults? Now so many years have passed and I have been autonomous for so long, it takes an effort to remember the queer terrifying vulnerability of the young, who are continually being judged and manipulated by the adults around them. To placate those in authority by any means possible—isn’t this simply our instinct for survival? To humor them until one is free of them? And then to go beyond them?…But the tragedy is that there are many who won’t or can’t placate others. A certain violent sullenness lies in us all, awaiting release. I could easily have crossed the line…drifted into simply not caring about my teachers’ trivial expectations and their “likes” and “dislikes,” their “favorites” and non-favorites. Fortunately I kept on making the effort to be a “good girl” (i.e., to be obedient, to accept nonsense, to continue working hard while my life seemed—I’m not exaggerating—in ruins about me, hoping that someday I would be forgiven for my sins and welcomed back into the magic circle of the Honor Society or whatever it was called…and this did finally come about in
ninth grade, after my sad silly outcast year, so I promptly forgave my persecutors and it hasn’t been until decades later that my anger surfaced…though considerably altered by the necessities of fiction).

[…]

January 15, 1977.
[…] What is the value of teaching? At the very least one has the sense of awakening ideas…feelings…glimmerings of sentiment…in students. One needn’t be idealistic to see this; it’s quite evident. Beyond that there is the stimulation, the stirring-up, of the experience. One never gets so close to a text, for instance, as one does while teaching it to a responsive class. The adventitiousness of the academic world appeals. (The madman did not appear yesterday. I had nearly forgotten him. Our long cavernous caliginous hold-of-a-ship environment with its air of being a kind of hatchery—re.
Brave New World
—as well would have accommodated a bit of normal madness.) My frustrations are comic, rather than depressing. It turns out that everyone in the department has similar experiences—or nearly. Freed of this routine which is by turns exhilarating and simply silly I would have altogether too much time to focus upon my writing, and my own subjectivity. The claustral nature of our life here, my own seclusion in this study, would become too appealing…. So one reels from one tragicomic incident after another hoping not to be mowed down in the process.

[…]

January 16, 1977.
…The religious commitment of the writer, the novelist especially. Commitment
in
and commitment
to
. The external world honored no less than the inner. One must be willing to be misread and misunderstood and misrepresented (though—admittedly—it sometimes hurts quite badly).

My bouts of discouragement, dread. Bewilderment. What is the point of a life’s-work when it can bring upon the writer such obloquy…cruelty…. The average, private individual will never open a journal or a book to read vicious things said against him, nor will he come across seemingly “objective” vindication of his life: he will never see his reflection in the aleatory confusion of the public world. (Aleatory? Accidental
music? I think so, yes—a valid metaphor for the unharmonic world of strife.) But of course the writer must not expect, must not depend upon the public world. The writer
must
draw his strength from within; or from a few close friends and loved ones.

Sometimes the world, quite frankly, appalls. It’s too floridly cruel & zestfully mad. (For instance, the eleven-year-old friend of [a colleague’s] daughter Kate, recently assaulted & murdered. Her face blown off by a shotgun blast at close range. The murderer not yet apprehended.) It isn’t to keep pace with it that I write such brutal extravaganzas as
The Triumph of the Spider Monkey
but to register my astonishment…my stunned sorrow…my anger as well, for satire is a form of anger, a very stylized
formal
form. Yet at times it’s the only outlet.

As complexity wanes the satiric spirit emerges. As sensitivity is of necessity muffled or numbed the satiric spirit blooms. (For one can feel too much. One can be hurt too fatally into poetry—and when the poetry stops, so does the will to live.)

The harmonic balance of a life of sensations, emotions & thoughts. The danger of unbalance. I’ve thought somewhat uneasily for months that my emotions have been deadened…or flattened…yet events of the past week and my response to them indicate that this isn’t the case at all. In my heart there dwells the still hopeful, uncertain fourteen-year-old who observed the world with scrupulosity, infatuation & awe. And fear. For the world is a brutal place, regardless of what the poetic or the religious imagination would insist.

[…]

…The novelist works with the particular individual, building up to something beyond the particular. Perhaps. Hopefully. The novelist doesn’t begin with an idea and work backward. (Ah but why not?—surely there are many different sorts of novels and yours isn’t the only one.)

The richest of novels, then. The most pleasurable of novels.
The novels I like
.

Any statement about “the world” is a defending of the self’s current preoccupations. Isn’t this fair to say? But as soon as it’s stated, it becomes someone else’s history. The mind swoops onward, restless and playful.

Why I am so unserious. So playful.

Why nevertheless I am so dedicated to writing.

The fear of being, in the end, too serious. Too seeming-serious. The curse of a certain kind of English novel—wishing to be fluttery, unserious, lightweight in mind & heart. One needs courage to be absolutely serious. To risk seeming absurd. Or being absurd.

[…]

January 23, 1977.
…Our sixteenth wedding anniversary today: amazing! We celebrated by going to Archibald’s for lunch & visiting galleries in the Birmingham area. (The Klein-Vogel, the Yaw, the Hilberry.) It seems incredible that we’ve been married sixteen years. Or were those other people who got married back there in Madison…? (Married on a Monday just before my Old English exam.) Ray and I are so close that I suspect neither of us can guess how utterly dependent we are upon each other….

Unfathomable, marriagelessness. The “freedom” of non-love. What would one do with such infinite “freedom”…?

And yet, the very real difficulty of suggesting a good marriage in fiction. Normal healthy love, a mixture of high romance and camaraderie and the very practical…. It can be presented, perhaps, at the end of a narrative (like
Son of the Morning
) but it can’t very well be part of a narrative. Fiction demands conflict; harmony is unconvincing. What I live in my daily life I can’t transcribe into fiction…. Perhaps we need to write of what we don’t possess, what is distant & strange; we need to be dependent upon the imagination; otherwise there is little stimulus to write.

Odd that I felt discouraged by reviews the other day. I’d been told there was an “appalling” review in
The New Yorker
…but when I looked it up, it didn’t seem especially critical…not at all cruel, surely. The reviewer, Susan Lardner, simply didn’t understand
Childwold
and her presentation of it had little to do with the novel itself.
*
A kind of ninth grade book review, expressing bewilderment. But I’ve come to expect this sort of thing, especially from
The New Yorker
, and it’s illuminating in a way to see how obscure my writing seems to other people—to reasonably intelligent and sensitive people. Am I truly that difficult, or is it a result of their own perfunctory reading…? Certainly there’s no difficulty in my own sense of what I do, and no obscurity.
Childwold
was a very straightforward novel and each of the characters completely realized and very real—to me at least. Yet I would not expect it to be popular or much-liked.

Death of Anaïs Nin. A pity. But then she did live to see herself a success…excellent reviews in the
Times
and elsewhere. (I have been invited to participate in a memorial service for her, in Los Angeles, but it isn’t possible for me to get there.) Nona Balakian spoke of the intense dislike for her expressed by certain members of the
NYTimes
staff…men, mainly. But that’s the fate of the “controversial” writer. I can’t escape it myself. Because some readers hate my writing so vehemently, others feel they should defend it. And because some like it, others feel they should attack it. An accidental fate. Anaïs Nin was badly hurt by the cruelty of reviewers, their viciousness re. her novels most of all. But who hasn’t been hurt. And who hasn’t done his or her share of hurting…?

[…]

My faith in certain processes despite my own intellectual doubts. The intellect is shallow, obviously…. Reading Harold Bloom & impressed by the man’s wide knowledge in one sense, his naivete in another. The “anxiety of influence.” Stevens read Whitman read Wordsworth. But so what? Stevens read many other people as well, and talked with people, and was “influenced” by his own liver, the moon’s tugging, the quality of breakfast.
One is left with stray pickings, a word here and there, ostensibly linking Stevens with Whitman. The shallowness of the intellect when it is primarily a passion for simple connections. Games. Are all critics lovers of games…. In a game someone is “it,” someone wins & someone loses. Life is reduced to a game board, possibly a pair of dice, or cards, or black-and-red squares. A diversion, a way of killing an hour. I would hope that literary criticism is something more than this….

Ideally it honors, expands our knowledge of & sympathy with the work, serves as interpreter. Ideally it is humble. But the deconstructionist critics are impatient, or despairing, with criticism as it has been practiced…for their roles as “servants” are degrading. They want to be poets and philosophers but have no subject matter. Hence they turn to real poets and philosophers and try to weave a sort of web of words about them, a fanciful concoction that is sometimes pleasing and sometimes boring but at all times expendable. One misses very little by not reading a critic of Whitman…one misses half the globe by not reading Whitman.

Envy & spite of certain criticism. (I am thinking of Bloom primarily—his envy disguised as a rationalist desire to de-mystify. Hence Stevens and others are deconstructed. Dethroned. It’s the psychoanalytical wish-fantasy that other human beings be reduced to impersonal drives so that the psychoanalyst can govern w/out fear of rebellion. Human beings = non-human drives. Explicable in terms of biological dynamics. That it’s unconvincing has not impeded its progress in certain quarters for many decades now.)

[…]

January 25, 1977.
[…] My dis-interest in what people speak of as “women’s problems,” “women’s literature.” Have women a special sensibility? No. There are individuals uniquely talented & uniquely equipped to interpret the complex symbolism of the world but they are certainly not determined by gender. The very idea is astonishing.