The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (30 page)

August 28, 1977.
[…] Query: why is it that when communication becomes blunt, lucid, simple, it inevitably becomes the means by which falsehoods are conveyed? And why is it that when communication is subtle, complex, deep, agonizingly thorough, it cannot be translated into any terms other than its own original terms?…By which I mean that Proust and Henry James and Joyce and Faulkner etc. cannot be dealt with except through their languages, their specific languages. There are no referents for their words. The words are. The subtlety of a Jamesian “thought” is one w/the Jamesian sentence. So it is futile (as well as irresistible!) to attempt to discuss these works at all. It is especially futile to discuss “character.”…

The artist is one who makes “much” of life—but not
quite
as much as life justifies.

One can see at least two kinds of writing. The high “literary” work in which content is rigorously shaped, and subordinated to language. And
the “vulgar” in which content is everything. (Non-fiction, above all.) But the word “vulgar” is a poor one…I don’t like it….

Why do we read? Why do we tolerate, for instance, James Joyce’s finicky preoccupation w/his background, the names of neighbors, cricket players, old priests, etc., etc., memories of a boyhood in Dublin that are no more valuable, in themselves, than anyone else’s memories? Yet one must master, or at least learn to deal with, all this dreck. Otherwise Joyce is lost: there isn’t any Joyce…. With Lawrence, however, one need know very little that is extrinsic. The English language, to start with: a modest enough demand. Some knowledge, perhaps, of England. (Though Lawrence spells things out clearly enough through his characters’ debates.) If literature is a kind of game…. But then no, it is a visionary experience; and the “game” is simply the network of rules that the artist seizes upon in order to communicate his vision. One can use certain rules, or other rules, or still others; but
some
rules must be used. And they must be maintained for the whole of a work. Otherwise the art-work is destroyed.

[…]

My interest in children, in the boy of “Honeymoon” and the girls of “Softball” and
Graywolf
and other recent stories;
*
and of course
Childwold
. Not an interest I would have predicted for myself, given my “self” of some years ago. (Altogether bored by children.) Which points toward a distinct reorganization of the psyche…a shifting-about of unconscious inclinations….

Women have children, sometimes, to locate themselves. Hoping for girls, that is. To relive, to re-awaken something utterly mysterious. It’s deep, deeply embedded in us, almost irretrievable…. (What is this, that we wish to grasp once again? The lost self? The childhood self? The childhood that appeared to surround us?—or the one that actually did surround us? The powerful, almost drugging sense of the past…“nostalgia” (an in
adequate term)…a wish to re-experience, to re-exist (might there be a word for this in another language: we have none in English that is quite right). A riddle, a mystery, plunging us deeply into the very core of ourselves, from which we return dazed and shaken but, oddly, knowing no more than we did before.

…I will never be able to translate into fictional terms, into
Graywolf
and
Bellefleur
, all that I feel. All that I
know
. It simply eludes me, it’s too intangible, too painfully subtle to be expressed in dramatic terms. There are some thoughts, then, that can only be private. One can brood upon them, mull over them, only in a journal. (And then only in a journal open to no one else.)…The realm of the un-written, the un-imagined, the never-conceived. Think of the para-Hamlet, the para-Ulysses, the great flood of emotion that did
not
find itself into Virginia Woolf’s novels….

[…]

don’t know. I don’t know.

[…]

September 16, 1977.
[…] One of my misfortunes is the fact that, increasingly, I have no one to talk to.

To talk with.

…Except of course Ray, and in a marriage one must often soften one’s own discomfort, or misrepresent it entirely; for, in intimate relationships, to profess unhappiness of any sort, however temporary, however absurd, is to suggest that the other person has failed, somehow, to
keep one happy
. I reject this notion, I know that it’s preposterous, and yet it’s so: if Ray were terribly troubled about something I would feel a sense of helplessness, and dismay, knowing that my love for him, my attentive concern, really wasn’t enough…. The delicacy of intimate relationships, the equilibrium, balance, of marriage….

…Reading of Emily Dickinson & her love for several women. Reading her letters. My God, such intimate, revealing, tender, beautiful letters, now exposed in print, for anyone at all to read: what cruelty! There is no
privacy
. If the poor woman could have foreseen…. (Not that she would have been ashamed of her “homoerotic” love itself. But the exposure, the relentless systematic digging-out of every secret by “scholars” and “critics” and voyeurs, is appalling.)

Even more appalling is the prospect of future treatment by one who has no secrets. For surely former friends and acquaintances and students and strangers will simply invent whatever they wish.

September 19, 1977.
[…] Notes for “The Doomed Girl.”
*
Wrote a first draft in pen, want to wait a while before revising. Odd that this story should come so easily, and with such interest (for me), when the
Graywolf
materials were blocked for so long.

…Robert Lowell’s death. Sixty years old. And Nabokov, months ago. The masters, the Nobel Prize–aspirants. Who next?

…Working on
The Evening and the Morning
.
^†
A loose shapeless experimental first draft. […] Beginning a new novel, I return to zero: I know nothing: nothing seems to help. Only the writing of the novel will “help” me into it. I want to record the dismal stretches honestly, for they do exist, dear God they do exist, forgetful as I will be when the thing is completed….

[…]

September 24, 1977.
[…] Dreary rainy days, one following another. Unusual for this time of year. I am reading
The Sacred and Profane Love
Machine
without quite as much enthusiasm as I had hoped for…it doesn’t seem as engaging as
A Word Child
.
*
A mistake to be teaching it, I suppose; but too late; I’ll make the most of it.

…Successful people tend to confuse their image, their persona, with their true selves. A fact that must be remembered at all times. When I am “Joyce Carol Oates” or “Joyce Smith” in public I am not the person I am now, or at home, or in any private situation; and there should be no uneasiness about this split, if it can be called a split. Spontaneous reactions and emotions are perfectly all right provided they are not self-indulgent and don’t upset others. The self is protected by the persona, but the persona also protects other people from the self. Which means that I have a responsibility as an image-bearer in the minds of certain people, particularly students, and I should respect this at all times. The destructive psychologies and theologies of the 60’s attempted to break down all barriers between people, and between parts of the personality, and the results were catastrophic. I’ve never felt the need to defend my desire for privacy, my need for a certain measure of secrecy. This journal comes as close as I care to go in terms of laying “bare” my heart. The 60’s were based upon false premises, in fact. There is no “collective,” there is no happiness in numbers, no definition of the self in terms of a crowd. Promiscuity isn’t liberation but simply a failure to discriminate, a failure to make intelligent choices. My inclination toward chastity, my prolonged (one can only call it that, in 1977!) virginity
as a matter of conscious principle
weren’t, aren’t, symptomatic of the morality of the 50’s but symptomatic of my own morality, my own self. Exogenous pressures mean so little, the soul is embedded so very deeply….

October 12, 1977.
…Warm, funny letter from John Updike; he and Martha were married Sept. 30. (A pleasant coincidence: I taught his “Giving Blood” in class yesterday.) It seems odd to me, and even outrageous, that
The New Yorker
should reject anything of his at all. But they did reject his beautiful, moving elegy for L. E. Sissman, and so he was
kind enough to send it to
Ontario Review
.
*
…How dare they reject Updike, really? I can’t comprehend it. And the poem is good, very good, very moving. Perhaps
The New Yorker
shies away from genuine emotion….

I remember with warmth our luncheon at a quite totally deserted restaurant outside Georgetown (The Chanticleer); it was as if I’d known John and Martha for years, and Ray too felt a most unusual rapport, unstrained and unartificial. We talked of various things, literary matters […]. Updike is a thoroughly first-rate intelligence, but he is amazingly modest; what is astonishing is that he seems to believe his modesty…. Like John Fowles. How odd, how very odd…when a much lesser talent like Stanley Elkin is so unpleasantly egotistical. But then, of course, it makes sense.

[…]

October 30, 1977.
…A Sunday. Drove out to Amherstburg, went for a walk; pleasant autumn day. Working on the novel:. Reread
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. Have found much to admire in it, despite the fact that everyone appears to look down on Wilde. The novel
does
address itself to serious questions…though there is something egregiously and sadly silly about Wilde himself, in the end. […] A teasing inner substance to
Dorian
. Not the obvious moral tale, Dorian’s “selling-of-his-soul,” etc., but the paradoxical relationship between Basil Hallward and Dorian. Basil as the artist who initiates the tragedy by transforming the innocent, natural, boyish Dorian into a work of art: calling Dorian’s attention to his own beauty. A kind of “fall.”…Basil is ultimately destroyed by Dorian, which seems appropriate. Dorian as Anima, Muse; B’s beloved. The homosexual implications are never made explicit. Perhaps they aren’t even “homosexual” in any meaningful way…. What is the relationship, then, between the Artist and his Material, between his Material and his Art?

…Seeing oneself, as Dorian does, as an image. To be a spectator of one’s life. To dominate emotions, to control them, etc. Zombie. Listlessness. The aesthetic ideal: dead-end. Over-analysis of self. The essence of decadence:
too much leisure, too much time. A Sahara of time. One feels impatient w/it, & rather quickly too. Though Wilde does write well, no matter what his (envious?) detractors say.

[…]

…What is, though, the relationship between the artist and his art and his material…? I’m not sure that Wilde explores this, but
Dorian
does suggest it. I must think, think about it. The transformation of the “innocent” self into the “artificial” self. One becomes an artist of one’s own life—& one’s life necessarily becomes an artifice. Death of a sort. Airless. Claustrophobic.

…Must write another large novel, w/many people, a great span of time.
Bellefleur,
perhaps. No thoughts on it for months.

[…]

November 22, 1977.
[…] Working on the novel, around. Burrowing & groping. Now it seems one thing, now another. A problem is that new novels or novellas beckon. I want to write the one about the man who is killed, in his pursuit of an erotic ideal; I want to write a long story or a novella about a young girl who represents, for others, an extremity of passion…or behavior…that is dangerous, self-destructive, but ultimately (for them) a kind of fantasy-fulfillment.

[…]

…Plan on writing an Iris Murdoch essay, perhaps over Christmas.
*
Have several of her novels yet to read. Marvelous writer….
Henry and Cato
is my favorite thus far. It’s odd how critics slight her, take her for granted; the fate, no doubt, of the dismayingly “prolific” writer. But she is good. And appears to be getting better.

[…]

December 10, 1977.
…Great avalanches of snow. Windsor is, or was, yesterday, immobilized: we were snowed in for much of the day. Now it’s a blue wild snow-glaring world, with mist rising from the river, really quite beautiful. How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to
look. (At the moment a puffy-feathered female cardinal is picking at the red berries in the bush outside my window. Marvelously subtle gradations of color in her breast alone…and that chunky almost comic-looking “gross” beak…the crest, the black mask, the pert, perky manner, the arhythmically twitching tail…. The male hits the eye like a sudden manifestation of grace, or even of God: but the female is perhaps more beautiful. And now there is a white-throated sparrow. And another.)

Working as usual on the novel. It seems that I have been working on this novel for most of my life. Or is it, in some subtle way, working on me….

(Now the male cardinal has appeared! The two of them are only a few yards away, picking unhurriedly at the berries, their feathers puffed out with the intense cold.)

…Queer, in fact maddening, to think that “beauty” in nature is for us alone: for the human eye alone. Without our consciousness it doesn’t exist. For though the birds and other creatures “see” one another they don’t, I assume, “see” beauty. And what of certain mollusks that secrete extraordinarily beautiful shells which they themselves never see, since they have no eyes; how on earth can one comprehend
that
phenomenon…?