The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (45 page)

[…]

July 11, 1979.
[…] This journal, I suppose, doesn’t give an adequate account of my life, my interior life; the way in which my day unfolds; the odd ways in which it is variously interrupted. To say that I am “always” writing the Marya story is poetically though not literally true…and when I am thinking about it, rather than actually working on it, I feel oddly uneasy, guilty, incomplete. Yet the pondering-upon Marya is certainly as important as the actual writing…. I would think, at the age of forty-one, that I might have come to a kind of ceasefire agreement with myself…or one of my “selves”…that
thinking
is not only equal to
working
but necessary, passionately necessary; that it must precede the actual writing. Yet I am touched with guilt…not greatly…I suppose mildly…it annoys me the way a mosquito’s whining would annoy…not serious, certainly not profound, but distressing; vexing. I want, yet do not want, to finish with Marya. To rid my imagination of her. Yet I feel that, in a sense, I should stay with her more or less permanently…fusing her life with my own. (But I can’t. It wouldn’t work. Shouldn’t. For Marya and I are not the same person.)

July 14, 1979.
…The headachey delirium of one day (yesterday, for instance, when I wrote hour upon hour upon hour, all day long, until 10
P.M.
), the detachment of the next (today, for instance, when I revised and coolly rearranged what I’d done in yesterday’s debauch)…. Quite clearly I require the poor struggling creature who writes until her head swims and her eyesight blotches and she can barely remember who she is…though I much prefer the activity of today…sorting things out, retyping pages, Xing out passages, in general having a thoroughly enjoyable time with Marya and her fate.

[…]

…Marya’s house, Marya’s fate. A frenetic outburst of ideas. One after another after another. Yesterday, absolutely drained; today, totally revived; and now it is late afternoon and the manuscript is more or less complete…350 pages approximately…the trajectory of a life-in-progress…quite unlike anything I’ve done before. Marya creates herself, she isn’t passively created by others. (As one might predict for her, given the sordid background of her life: the father’s death, mother’s drunkenness,
etc.) It isn’t simply that I believe that one can create one’s life—I have
done
it myself—I am a witness. The will doesn’t reside in everyone, of course, and many are broken, but there is the possibility…the glorious hope…the “fate” that is self.

July 18, 1979.
…Sitting at the glass-topped dining room table, signing colophons for Herb Yellin. “Queen of the Night,” which I still like very much. Outside it is raining. The pond is immense once again, the mewing catbirds are temporarily stilled (what a contingent of them!—waking us up early each morning), exquisitely beautiful music on the phonograph: Mendelssohn’s Seven [Characteristic] Pieces…played by Rena Kyriakou; and then Ravel’s
Valses nobles & sentimentales
played by Abbey Simon; and some Chopin selections, a new recording by one Yakov Flier (a Soviet pianist, the name unknown to me). Lovely heartbreaking Polonaise #2. I find that I’ve stopped signing “Joyce Carol Oates” and am only listening, staring sightlessly at the table.

…Yesterday, immensely active: to New York City on a morning train, delivered the revised manuscript of
Bellefleur
to Henry, walked uptown to 58th St., had lunch at Thursdays, walked then to the Metropolitan, saw “Treasures from the Kremlin” and nineteenth-and twentieth-century landscape drawings (in the beautiful Herbert Lehman wing: so beautiful that when we entered it, coming out of the dim, rather dank medieval hall in the old building, our hearts soared—and then the skylight, the glass roof, my God!)…and some lovely paintings…
House Behind Trees
of Braque’s which I would have sworn was a Matisse…and a beautiful Matisse nearby…and, and…! So much, so very much. After the museum, walked back to 666 Fifth Ave., where we had a leisurely and very chatty and relaxed two-hour cocktail visit with Bob [Phillips] at the Top of the Sixes […].

…Completed
Marya: A Life.
And now I am excluded from it. Rewrote a few pages this morning, worked on a new scene between Marya and Ian, decided suddenly that I didn’t want it, the novel (or book: it isn’t precisely a novel nor is it a collection of stories) doesn’t require it…so I threw it away…. And now my mind is drifting about. Wondering in which direction to plunge. The
vast amounts of time, sheer time, one has when not furiously writing…! And I suppose turning
Bellefleur
in yesterday marks the end of another small epoch. (I have been revising that novel too, intermittently. A page here, a few pages there. Crossing things out. Tightening. Rewriting. And, alas, expanding…in places.) Now it’s over, delivered, and
Marya
too is over for the time being. Someday I will do a few things with the manuscript, blend in some facts, some information, the narrative in its present state could not accommodate; but my intuition tells me that, for the time being,
Marya
is completed and I am excluded and my imagination must swing elsewhere.

[…]

July 19, 1979.
[…] Since finishing
Marya: A Life
and delivering the manuscript of
Bellefleur
and rearranging some of the stories for
Sunday Blues
I seem to be inordinately “free”…my mind drifting here and there…unhurried, not exactly aimless…not yet uneasy with guilt…though certainly that will be coming. Such a vast world, unstructured, cheerfully gregarious, noisy, crowded, unpremeditated…. I open my mail, read a few lines in letters, let them fall, pick up another envelope and open it, what a babble, who are all these people! […]

…Walking about Princeton in the warm sunny air. Well—this is it. One comes to the center, the still point, and it’s as likely to be Princeton on July 19, 1979, as anywhere, any time. My mind darts about restlessly…here and there…poking into corners…prying…curious…inquisitive…insatiable…coming up with very little…but the process is fascinating. […] If I write the kind of story that interests me, it’s rather more like a novella than a story, and no magazine would be interested; and my mind irresistibly leaps to a larger structure: how would this fit into a more ambitious narrative, how would its subordinate characters manage in fictions of their own? And so one is confronted with a novel…another novel. And I can’t begin writing one, I simply can’t, not so soon after
Marya
, not so soon….

[…]

July 21, 1979.
…Thinking & taking notes…brooding…daydreaming (as we walked briskly across the bridge over the Delaware, at Wash
ington Crossing; and later through Titusville) about a possible new novel.
Angel of Light.
(The allusion is to John Brown, and to Ashley Nichol’s “presence” in Maurie Halleck’s life after he saves him from drowning when they are both seventeen…and to Kristin Halleck’s role as angel/avenger in Ashley’s life.) The problem is of course that I have too many novels, too many books on the shelf now…jammed up like logs…ah well! Re-arranging
Sunday Blues
yesterday. Revising a few stray pages in
Marya.
(Adding background information for several of the stories, which should read more like “chapters” than independent “stories.”) But of course I am excluded from those worlds now. And must devise another.

[…]

…Thinking & brooding & speculating upon the possible structure of
Angel of Light.
(And the title. Is that a title I can live with for the next year or so?) I like the idea of a strict chronological development…a sequence in which causality functions with great and obvious power. That is, the novel begins with the words, “The accident occurred on the ninth day of the trip…” and the entire novel evolves from that statement. Yet I want too, or seem to want, an ethereal sort of novel as well…the interlocking lives, souls, consciousness…touching upon one another year after year…. The “voice” may be “voices” out of necessity; I must see.

[…]

…Slowly. I must work slowly. Allowing the personalities of the people to evolve. Their physical beings as well. Not to push to “gestalt” too quickly—! As good a definition of genius as any…. One must go slowly, tentatively, gropingly.

[…]

July 29, 1979.
[…] Baby frogs, down by the pond and brook. Ray holding one in his hand: an exquisite little thing, emerald-green, great unblinking eyes, perfectly formed arms and legs. (Ray had captured it away from Miranda, who was playing with it. But it was unharmed—returned to the pond, it swam away.)…Last night two deer emerged from
the woods. We sat with our guests on the terrace, before dinner. One deer, and then another. At dusk. Yet you could see their lovely russet coats, the rich summer coats. Exquisite, beautiful…impossible to describe their grace…the uncanniness of their movements, their being. One of those “perfect moments.”

…“Is language the adequate expression of all realities?” asks Nietzsche.

…Friday evening, Berlioz’s Requiem performed by the Robert Shaw Choir and musicians from Westminster Choir College. At the University Chapel. A “Dies Irae” of extraordinary power. Tears flooded my eyes, I felt almost alarmed, upset, it was rather like that experience in St. Paul’s, London, so many years ago, hearing the Verdi Requiem. One doesn’t really want to feel so strongly…. After that it was almost a relief that the music went on too long, that the “Agnus Dei” was fairly anemic (after a beautiful “Sanctus”), everything wound down, simply ended. But I was still somewhat disoriented by the power of the music; my head throbbed violently for an hour or more.

[…]

July 31, 1979.
…Just returned from a drive to Upper Black Eddy; the telephone ringing; Ray hurries inside—and it’s for me: a call from Dutton informing me that Henry Robbins is dead.

…Fifty-one years old. Heart attack, on the subway; died in the hospital; and we’ll never see him again.

…The pointlessness of it, our activities: writing, the “literary” life; Henry so suddenly wiped out, erased, “he died in the subway on the way to work” and that’s it…. The last time we saw him, in his office at Dutton, July 17, exactly two weeks ago, he looked absolutely healthy…cheerful…we squeezed hands in parting…I asked him to telephone me sometime, just to say hello; and he said he certainly would…. Our luncheon here at the house, June 28. A lovely day. Lovely in every respect…. I can’t believe I’ll never see him again.

…(But at the back of my mind it doesn’t seem improbable. As he told us about his several heart attacks, minimizing them, smiling, making a sort of anecdote out of them—his response had been irritation, rather than fear, at the thought that he would be wasting time in the hospital—I thought quite clearly, quite distinctly, that his life was precarious; that he had come close to losing it, and would again; and in that instant I suppose I loved him—or felt a queer suffocating panic for him—for what he wasn’t acknowledging. It was like seeing a small child too near a busy street, or on a ledge, near the railing—a shock of fear, pity, a sickening sense of imminent loss—but helplessness too. So that I wanted to say something utterly banal and hopeless, please take care of yourself, absurd words like that. Maybe I even did, I don’t remember…. Yes, it had crossed my mind more than once that this might happen. But at the same time I thought, and so did Ray, that we would be friends for many years, that this was the start of a long relationship…. )

…It can’t be exaggerated, or said too often: he was simply a wonderful man: gentlemanly, intelligent, funny, soft-spoken, warm, sweet, with a lightly ironic sense of humor at times, “attractive” in every way (for whatever that is worth)…. The only blessing is, Henry Robbins was wonderfully successful: he certainly didn’t die a bitter failure: he appeared to enjoy life, and to enjoy, quietly, his success.

…Driving along the Delaware, thinking my heavy thoughts about a story, a novella, another story, another novella, having done proof for “Cybele” last night (and a depressing story that is) while Henry was dying in the hospital, or already dead. The pointlessness of it. The sheer—silliness. I had wanted to dedicate
Bellefleur
to Henry but was thinking that perhaps it would be too theatrical a gesture, too sudden, impetuous, why for God’s sake hadn’t I made that gesture while he was alive!—for whatever it was worth. (I can’t think it was worth much.)…Henry’s sweet smile, Henry’s characteristic expression: intelligence, reserve, a look of contemplation: and now it’s gone, erased. I can’t be angry, I can’t even be surprised. It seems inevitable. “The universe unfolds as it must.” “The inhuman universe unfolds as it inhumanly must.” Pointless even to observe the pointlessness. I only know that I want him back and this won’t happen and…. How crushed his children must be. His eighteen-year-old daughter who looks so much like him. And
the people at Dutton. And, my God, poor Joan Didion! And John Irving, Stanley Elkin, Doris Grumbach, Fran Lebowitz…. “He had a heart attack on the subway, he died in the hospital….”

August 1, 1979.
…These were my meetings with Henry:

1. Lunch at Lahiere’s, our first meeting, where we discussed
   Graywolf
   , then walked across campus to Prospect
   
2. When I brought the carbon copy of
   Jigsaw
   to Dutton (on my way to the American Academy)
   
3. At the Princeton Club […]
   
4. The Fawcett party at the St. Regis, in December
   
5. A luncheon, with Blanche and Ray, at that restaurant on 3rd & 23rd
   
6. After the NBA awards, when we went together to the cocktail party, and met so many people (Doris Grumbach, Fran Lebowitz, Henry’s “friend” Vicky, Peter Davison, John Irving…)
   
7. Luncheon here, a lovely day that went flawlessly…
   
8. July 17, at Henry’s office, when I handed him the revised ms. of
   Bellefleur