The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (31 page)

…The patterns exist in our mind’s eye, in our human calculating consciousness. Yes, but: they do exist, they are quite real, one is surely not deluded in assuming that seashells do have exquisite patterns. And what is their purpose? Not for camouflage, certainly. In fact they stand out, their colors and designs are so striking.

…A tentative conclusion: all of nature, all of the given “world,” is in fact a work of art. Only the human consciousness can register it. But all of creation participates. Is this a sentimental notion, is it perhaps romantically far-fetched? I really don’t think so: it’s the only possible conclusion. And that certain creatures evolved their forms of beauty before the world actually had eyes…before it had any “eyes” at all…seems to me evi
dence (poetic if nothing else) that evolution, or whatever is meant by evolution, already included the highest form of consciousness at the very start: anticipated it, I mean.

[…]

December 31, 1977.
…A slow calm dazzling ecstatic feeling: finished
The Evening and the Morning
at 9:45
P.M.
, New Year’s Eve. So much for 1977…!

Am very pleased with the novel in its final stages. Now the re-working re-visioning, re-imagining: which should be enjoyable.

Of course it’s “experimental” in a way Vanguard wouldn’t be interested in, or most readers….

[…]

…Can life be finer, sweeter? The entire day was glorious: went out to Birmingham to see art, looked at lovely photographs (Weston, Adams, etc.) in the Halsted Gallery, some strained, odd work at Suzanne Hilberry’s […] and bought a beautiful watercolor by Donald Evans, whose work I have liked for years. […] The dismaying thing is, Donald Evans died at the age of thirty-two, in a hotel fire in Amsterdam. Which I hadn’t known about. A pity. A terrible loss…. There is something about Evans’s work that appeals very much to me

[…]

…How lovely, to end 1977 like this! A perfect day, the purchase of a very special work of art, the completion—or anyway the completion of the first draft—of a most troublesome novel. Onward, now, to 1978—

I
n 1978 Oates turned forty, and the year marked a milestone in other respects as well. In addition to enjoying a very positive reception for her new novel,
Son of the Morning,
she was elected to the distinguished American Academy of Arts and Letters, cementing her place as part of the “establishment” in contemporary American literature. This year she also served as a judge for the National Book Awards and participated, in New York, in a conference that brought together American and Soviet writers and literary critics. This latter experience was an exhilarating one for Oates, inspiring new fiction and giving her a broader sense of her place in the world community of letters.

During the spring and summer, especially, Oates became deeply involved in her “amateur” piano playing, taking lessons with a teacher in Windsor and devoting herself particularly to the works of Chopin. This interest is reflected substantially in the journal entries of this year, as is her interest in contemporary art: she and Smith were slowly acquiring a collection of artworks for their home, and they frequently visited galleries and museums both in Windsor and when they traveled.

In August, the couple moved to Princeton, N.J., where despite her anxiety over leaving a beloved circle of friends in Windsor, Oates quickly
made new friends, among them the poets Charles Wright, Stanley Kunitz, and Maxine Kumin, and the fiction writers Reginald Gibbons and Edmund “Mike” Keeley. She and Smith had, with relative ease, found their “dream house” in Princeton, an unusual) glass-walled structure located in a secluded, leafy area several miles from the university.

As always, however, Oates’s primary energies went into her writing, and after a long period of gestation during which she wrote many short stories, poems, and essays, and several shorter novels, she finally began, in the fall, her most ambitious work to date,
Bellefleur.
Though the planning and thinking-out of the novel had been arduous and elaborate, involving more than 1,000 pages of notes, charts, maps, and family trees as she plotted her vast tapestry of interlocking tales of the Bellefleur clan, this groundwork had been more than worthwhile, and the writing itself she found “entirely engrossing” and “mesmerizing.” As she noted on December 12, “nothing is more richly, lavishly, lushly rewarding” than her absorption in the novel.

Another milestone in 1978 was her change of publishers: after fifteen years with the medium-size Vanguard Press, which had launched her career but which, despite her dramatically increased fame and stature, had continued to offer modest and finally unacceptable contracts to their star author, Oates decided to move to a much larger house, Dutton, in order to work with Henry Robbins, whom her friend Joan Didion had called “the best editor in America.” Robbins immediately began immersing himself in Oates’s writing. Vanguard refused to relinquish
Unholy Loves,
which the house published in 1979, her last Vanguard title.

In all, then, 1978 was a bracing, exhilarating time for Oates, and despite all her activities she was perhaps more attentive to her journal this year than in any other. She had acquired Virginia Woolf’s
A Writer’s Diary,
and Oates’s own journal certainly began to bear comparison with Woolf’s in its notation of the dailiness of her existence (observations of the natural world, deft sketches of people she met, economical descriptions of the places she visited) and of the travails and rewards of the writing life.

January 8, 1978.
…First week of classes, and everything seems to be going well, in fact excellently. Not so fatigued as I remember being in the
past. A promising group of about fifty in “Literature and Psychology”: talkative, lively, even willing to challenge one another and me. […] We begin with
The Great Gatsby
…and how impoverished, how ghastly-gaudy Fitzgerald’s people all seem, in the somber light of 1978. That anyone should
care
about such things is the puzzle. (Daisy, trapped at eighteen in her femininity; her daisiness; the bright money-tinkling charming wan gay fascinating murmurous Female whom Fitzgerald clearly adored, at least in essence, but isn’t able—at the present time—to make quite credible. I dread the reactions of my “liberated” women students…. One, chunky and assertive and articulate, in jeans, plain shirt, plain face with glasses, destined to be a favorite of mine, I suspect, telling the class how she’d had a baby at 6:30
A.M
. and by 8:30 was doing something quite different and had forgotten the pain (in response to some subtle point about male and female pain, withstanding of, etc.)….

…Working each day on
The Evening and the Morning.
Deliberately keeping the revisions down to an hour or two hours a day. My impulse, of course, is always to plunge deeply into something, and stay there until it’s finished, as close to “perfection” as I can get…so I want to resist, I want to take my time with the revisions, and see what evolves by April. The last day or two was feverish, almost too “inspired”; working at such intensity almost frightens me.

[…]

Read and was sharply disappointed in Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia.” He sets the scene so well, then ruins it all with heavy-footed and wrong-headed “interpretations.” He seems to understand mourning well enough but hasn’t a clue to melancholia. Certainly someone has died in either case! Certainly there is grief. But not in the terms Freud sets forth…. He hadn’t any ear, really, for the music of the psyche. He really was tone-deaf. (Oddly, to make the metaphor literal, so was Faulkner—uninterested in music, unable to read it, respond.)

…Have wanted for years to write a story of some kind, a fantasy perhaps, about Freud and Anna O. The situation…fascinating….
Went out to dinner with Lois the other evening, the Chinese restaurant. And to lunch with Kay, Liz, Marge, on Friday, in Detroit. […] Now that classes have begun I miss the long blissful placid eventless days of late December when the hours stretched out before me, undisturbed, utterly open, marvelous. When I’m with people and at the University I seem to be quite happy, I am in fact caught up with what I’m doing, but my deepest inclination seems to be toward privacy, placidity, unbroken calm. I wonder if my personality is changing or whether it was always this way…I suppose so, there is evidence to think so.

I love to wake up early and begin to read. While the house is absolutely silent—Ray still asleep, nothing in motion. And then, after he’s awake, work at my desk. Until 1:30 or 2. Then have breakfast (apple & cottage cheese). Then return to my desk…. Anything, everything, charms me at such times. Working on
The Possessed
,
*
or my own novel; dreamily shuffling through my old notes for stories or for
Bellefleur
; writing letters, postcards; staring out the window (at the perpetually falling snow—and occasionally cardinals, and often sparrows, in the berry bushes; today it’s snowing so thickly that the river is invisible); thinking about the University; about students, classes, colleagues, things I must do, books I must read; day-dreaming; doodling; rewriting a brief chapter in
Evening & Morning
; browsing through things that have found their way onto my desk, for some reason; thinking vaguely ahead, as the afternoon darkens, to dinner…to what I should prepare for dinner. (Chicken with wild rice. Or a steak for Ray and tuna fish for me. Salads. Vegetables: carrots, or brussels sprouts, or broccoli, or spinach et al. Salmon, baked. Shrimp Creole, so to speak. Baked potatoes. Recipes of my own invention, elaborate, slapdash. Scrambled eggs. Etc., etc. Making dinner should be monotonous since I’ve done it thousands of times, and nearly every evening we have approximately the same salad—with everything in it; but for some reason it’s a pleasant half-hour or so, a kind of ritual that is entirely agreeable. Though if I weren’t married I halfway think I would never bother with a real meal, a formal meal, I would probably eat at my desk
or read while I ate, or try to eat infrequently…. Eating is one of those things that has no pleasure, indeed it seems to have no meaning, if one is alone. Food doesn’t even taste like food: it’s just a process, a necessary activity. A bore. Meals, even the simplest, are rituals, and must be shared; otherwise they aren’t even “meals”…they’re just periods of eating….

[…]

January 13, 1978.
…A blue-white day, freezing, with a very fine dry powdery snow falling, falling, falling. For the past twenty-four hours or more. Yet it’s been lovely at home: truly lovely. Working on my essay on
The Possessed
. Reading & rereading Dostoyevsky.

[…]

Some very welcome news the other day, and I must say it was totally unexpected: I’ve been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

…It
was
welcome. It made me feel less of a…do I want to say failure?…no, not really: I hardly consider myself a failure. But…. It made me feel less quixotic, then. Yes: quixotic. I might have speculated that if the invitation to join that slightly ridiculous group ever came I would have rejected it: but I would have been quite mistaken, since the letter, from Ralph Ellison, or at any rate signed by him, did delight me. I opened it in the English Department office, and was quite amazed. Even though I can see by skimming through the names of the members that many of them are “distinguished” without being very distinctive, or even remarkably talented, and I can figure out certain connections (so many of them are
New Yorker
writers, and Howard Moss is the president of the literature group),
*
it still is a very welcome thing and I find myself happily pleased that I am made happy by it. After all—I’m so frequently perverse—it might have had, on another day, very little effect.

[…]

January 29, 1978.
…More revisions on
The Evening and the Morning.
But I must let it go soon. It’s time, it’s time….

Thinking over the outline for a novella, rough notes typed out on November 6. That
would
make a fairly engrossing story (the worship of Cybele, in secret; in the unconscious)…but perhaps I would rather do a more serious, longer work.
*

[…]

Reading Henry James. “The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant—no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.”

Of course there is a limit. What we
do
is limited by what we
are
. James’s voice is not Fielding’s voice, Virginia Woolf’s voice is not Dorothy Richardson’s. But in essence James is right. And one novel more or less expands outward into another…. The myriad forms evoked by one chosen form always beckon. I mean—the form eventually given to one novel has displaced a variety of other forms, which then demand expression. (Which is why, I suppose, one keeps writing, one likes to begin planning for a new novel immediately upon finishing a novel.) (And there’s a certain sentimental homesickness for the community of a novel.)

…James: “experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.”

…James’s life-long commitment to his art. How many volumes? 35? 60? I wonder, did his passionate commitment to his vocation annoy people as mine seems to annoy certain people?—critics, I mean, and reviewers. And rivals—“rivals.” I have noted in certain reviews an exasperated, angry tone, as if the reviewer disliked me personally. But no one needs to read my writing or even to comment on it. A baffling thing…. It’s as if I were resented for my very seriousness, the obvious
depth
of my commitment. While they are alive the frivolous seem to be most generously received,
after their deaths the “serious” are more likely to be honored. But “serious” people are so often embarrassing….

[…]

February 3, 1978.
[…] Did galleys for
Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money
. A curious thing, to be shy of one’s own work—convinced it isn’t first-rate, I have not
dared
to examine some of the poems for a long while; consequently I was surprised at times, and even pleased, that certain of the poems
do
work. At least I think that if they belonged to another poet I would admire them. But since they’re my own, and I know my limitations as a poet, how
can
they be particularly good….

…My strategy, which began as simple modesty, a painful sort of modesty, of not seeing and not contemplating what is both disappointing and beyond alteration. Though “disappointing”—what does that mean, really? If I didn’t even turn to my own story in
Penthouse
, not wishing to leaf through that absurd magazine, was it out of shyness or “disappointment” or sheer good sense…?

Blanche’s curt statement that it is “impossible” to take back “Friday Evening” from
Penthouse.
*
Very well, then—I suppose my request was annoying to her. And having had one story in
Penthouse
, why not another—the damage, if damage there is (and I doubt it), has already been done. Someone said that Barthelme had a story in recently too. So we’re all guilty, of indifference if nothing else. (But Don needs the money. And I don’t.)

…Working on
The Evening and the Morning
, still. An endless pleasure in revision.

Have been asked by an editor of the
New Republic
to be a Contributing Editor; have accepted. It’s the most consistently
intelligent
magazine published today.

[…]

Without the novel’s momentum guiding (or dominating) my life, my life is a simple, clear affair…a series of events…so easily managed. Teaching, for instance: isn’t it marvelous? And yet one is paid. After a novel is completed I am on holiday. But a
little
melancholy. Or do I just say that, out of a conviction that I should be melancholy…?