The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (47 page)

…Like my other novels this wants to be image-centered. I would like to begin with “Night-Blooming Cereus.” But then the flashback, so many years…. A broken-up narrative…. On the other hand I also want a swiftly-moving story, which begins quite properly with the boys in Ontario; the accident; Nick saving Maurie’s life. Nick’s and Maurie’s story is obviously at odds with Kristin’s. But I want both…. How to maneuver the passing-over from one generation to another without the novel feeling broken-backed?

…I am preparing myself for the fall semester, and am looking forward to our first day, meetings, luncheon, etc., next Thursday, the 13th. And Monday my first class, at 1:30. And then again Wednesday at 1:30. Everything will be much easier this year, much calmer, with only two days at the University.

[…]

…The nut, the knot, the riddle of this new novel. Though I have given myself plenty of time to consider it I really don’t anticipate breaking through…. The “naturalistic” dimension could become too tempting; I might end up writing a “Washington” novel; which I don’t want…. Then again I don’t especially care to be misunderstood, to be thought to have tried for a Washington novel, without success.

…Very nice early reviews, previews, of
Unholy Loves
.
Publishers Weekly
and
American Library Journal
. But I feel more or less defeated beforehand…I know the novel won’t be popular, with either critics or readers…and must accept this as a consequence, in part, of my dismaying proliferousness. Dismissal, indifference, even abuse won’t matter so much in terms of
Unholy Loves
, which is certainly a modest, low-keyed novel, but it will matter with
Bellefleur
…. Yet I have no choice but to publish it…I think…. My odd “problem,” when so many of my friends and acquaintances, at least those back in the Midwest, can’t even get
their first genuine books published! I’m conscious of a certain absurdity. Yet there is the sense of obligation, almost a moral obligation, to the works not yet written…or to
Angel of Light
at least…that I must plunge into that novel as if I’d never written a novel before, and everything lay ahead.

September 9, 1979.
…Working for the past several days on a little essay on Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
.
*
Wilde and the artist; the artist’s destruction of his subject; the Fall from innocence into self-consciousness (Dorian seeing himself for the first time, in Basil Hallward’s painting). I am very excited about this essay…and about the prospect of assembling a book on the subject…. Images of the artist. Self-images. My mind flies ahead to Mann, Flaubert, Hawthorne, perhaps Melville again….

…Someone has told me that I have been nominated for a prominent prize. But since it isn’t for the first time, there is no point in my worrying about winning…. Not winning is so easy; one does it, more or less, daily; but winning…winning imposes an entirely new awareness of one’s self…. It’s like poor Dorian staring at his portrait and seeing for the first time “Dorian Gray,” where beforehand he had inhabited that person quite naturally. My God, is there anything more mind-boggling—!

…Lovely evening, last Wednesday. Ed Cone playing the Fifteenth Prelude as rain pelted the roof and windows. (That night the hurricane swept upon Princeton, and a small tornado hit Alexander Rd. and part of the campus. Magnolia trees and other, larger trees shredded…. It’s sickening to look at. Had the tornado come out our way, this glass house would be flattened. As it is debris lies everywhere…Ray has been picking it up a little at a time…. )

[…]

September 17, 1979.
…A lovely autumn day, the first day of classes at the University. I met my 201 workshop (which looks as if it is composed of exceptionally nice students), then Ray and I went for a long walk afterward, dazed by sunshine, autumn flowers, Lake Carnegie, our own ecstatic well-being.
Angel of Light
seems frozen, immobile; but I can’t allow myself to be discouraged; after all I’ve been this way before.

…Friday, luncheon in New York: Jack Macrae III (president of Dutton), Karen Braziller (Henry’s assistant), and Blanche. […] And then to 11th St., to Don and Marion Barthelme’s, and out to dinner at a 6th Avenue restaurant the Barthelmes like. Don was in fine form: looking trim, handsome, healthy, cheerful: though we frequently seem unable to say anything to each other I’ve come to think that we are fond of each other…sort of.

…Reworking pages of
Bellefleur
once again. Eliminating some material—the chapter “Veronica,” for instance—expanding others. Revising too (I scarcely know why) the ending of “Haunted Houses” and working on a new story, “The Mirror,” which I’ve brought to in a burst of inspiration this morning
*
…knowing, I suppose, that I had to teach a class at 1:30. (There is nothing like the marvelous unbearable pressure of knowing that one must be somewhere to teach at a certain time, to inspire one’s writing. Faster and faster the thoughts fly, and one can scarcely keep up.)

[…]

September 28, 1979.
…These extraordinary autumn days! A godlike beauty to the countryside that cannot be described, and very nearly cannot be experienced—it is so amazing. One walks or rides along in a veritable daze. Surely there is no season quite like this…. The dogwood that had been so whitely beautiful in the spring is now red-brown-orange with small red berries, exceedingly red, very red…and these trees, these small shapely trees, are virtually everywhere. (One is behind me, in our courtyard. The berries are bright as flowers.)

…The social season has begun with great verve, will we survive it? […] Lovely Princeton. Busy Princeton. One gets up earlier and earlier as a consequence, to come to one’s desk with hours ahead, before even the telephone will begin ringing. Well—“this looks a lot like life!” as a close friend has said, in another context.

[…]

October 1, 1979.
…Rainy, prematurely chilly. An exhausting and exciting day. At lunch at Prospect today […] I learned that the Swedes who are coming to visit on Wednesday, coming in fact for lunch, are vegetarians and non-drinkers, and have other important little quirks. I may as well record the fact that I am on the “short list” for the Nobel Prize this year. And so is Carlos. (Which I knew, more or less. Though I didn’t realize he knew about me.) Carlos Fuentes…handsome, dandyish, extraordinarily nice. How very good of him to tell me about the Swedes and their vegetarianism….

…The whole situation is faintly absurd. Not only do I not deserve the Nobel Prize, especially at mid-career; I really think I wouldn’t want it. Imagine the injury to my ordinary life…daily life…the alteration of others’ attitudes toward me…the inevitable consequences.

(One can never anticipate consequences except to guess that they will be troublesome.)

…However, there is little chance of my winning since the “strong” contenders are said to be Nadine Gordimer (who should win) and someone else—perhaps Octavio Paz. (Can that be right? I may not have heard correctly.)

[…]

October 2, 1979.
…Walking in Pennington, and a bicycle ride out to Honey Lake. So the hours pass. My imagination is stuck w/
Angel of Light
and has not budged for days or weeks. “The Man Whom Women Adored” must have drained a great deal out of me though I can’t imag
ine why.
*
I think of Flannery O’Connor who said in a letter, “I work from such a basis of poverty that everything I do is a miracle to me.” But then she went on to say, rather oddly, I think, and arrogantly: “Don’t think I write for purgation. I write because I write well.”

…But how could she have been certain that she really wrote well? Her pristine art is, after all, so very limited. From one point of view she hardly tried: she stayed well within the range of what she could manage, and that was largely caricature; “serious” feelings—the heartbreak of love—the ongoing matter of daily, domestic, scaled-down life—these things she discreetly avoided.

…The impulse toward risk, involvement, the possibility of hurt and rejection; the counter impulse toward self-protection, the fastidious husbanding of the self. This tension is never resolved, it seems to me. Even with genuine adulthood. Even with marriage.

[…]

October 19, 1979.
…Driving along Broadway, southward, with John Updike (in Updike’s blue Audi, which had just been ticketed at 155th St.), talking casually of poetry (John says he has given up writing poetry because no one wants it—“I can’t expect
Ontario Review
to keep publishing me forever”)…and various mutual acquaintances (Vonnegut, Herb Yellin)…. Elizabeth Hardwick and Howard Nemerov in the backseat. (Elizabeth looks marvelous, and Howard too—far more genial and smiling and healthy than I’d seen him in years.)

[…]

…Trying to think of the form my novel will take. But I can’t, I can’t get anything into focus. […] The story I want so desperately to tell is formless and voiceless at the moment. But I sense its presence, its imminence…its energy. Yet I can’t get started. I simply can’t get started. My mind veers from side to side…. Could anything be more frustrating!
Helpless, directionless, “voiceless.” The unconscious wants a form, a direction, an image, a way, and I cannot supply it. One would think my dreams would help, but of course they don’t.

[…]

October 26, 1979.
[…] Yesterday’s reading went well, though the Voorhees Chapel (at Douglass College) was a queer, cold, austere, forbidding place, totally filled, pew upon pew to the very back of the building, and (so chill and distant did it seem) quite impersonal. Elaine Showalter gave a fine introduction,
*
and when I came to the podium to speak I was struck by the remote, mechanical sound of my voice over the microphone. (In a sense I couldn’t “hear” my own voice.) I seemed to be performing in front of a pane of glass, an impermeable barrier. Yet I read as usual, and said necessary things between poems, and after a while there was some human response…though not much; and so it went, and so it was completed, an hour’s reading. People congratulated me as usual—members of the audience came forward to talk with me, to ask me to sign books, etc.—but it all seemed distinctly unreal. Only at the reception, talking with “older” graduate students (all of them women) did I begin to enjoy myself; and then, because I didn’t need to talk about myself or my writing. A buffet dinner […] was lively and jolly, and I talked with some extremely interesting Rutgers people, but the noisy, boisterous atmosphere was too much, and Ray and I slipped away without eating, and had dinner in Princeton by ourselves. Elated, relieved, exhausted…. My relationship to “JCO” is a tenuous one. I am really quite bored with the whole enterprise. The reading of certain poems, particularly the newer poems, continues to excite me; but otherwise…. How has it happened, and when did it happen, that I should feel so indifferent to “praise” of this kind?—or any kind? It isn’t a supreme confidence—perhaps it is the opposite—not low self-esteem but no self-esteem at all—or no interest in it. Any topic interests me so long as it isn’t “JCO”—and yet, in that person, wearing that sandwich board, I am supposed to be an enthusiastic expert. In fact I am paid for my specialty.

[…]

November 22, 1979.
[…] For much of my adult life, my life as a “writer,” I seem to have been searching for someone with whom I might discuss serious issues; mainly literary; but philosophical as well. I’ve never found this person. He or she, or they, would have to be writers too…or poets…. But it’s clear that they don’t exist. Joyce’s “community” is an empty category, a mere sentimental ghost. […] Of course it’s necessary, it’s marvelous, simply to be with people. “Relating”—an awkward term. And my intimacy with Ray is life-giving. But beyond this there should be a dimension of sheer intellectual and literary and philosophical intensity: for what else matters? A queer loneliness overtakes me in the midst of the most hilarious evenings—when I myself am contributing to the hilarity. Only the writing, only art, penetrates that dimension; and then not always; for art (unlike conversations!) cannot afford to be deadly serious all the time. My non-existent community, my absurdly sentimental vision of “friends” both like-minded and contradictory, warm and generous and yet combative. Perhaps I instinctively identify with Andy Warhol not just because of his father’s death (cf. my grandfather’s) but because he has insisted upon superficiality while others, as they suggest depth, in fact are willing to present only surfaces to other people. “I love plastic, I like to be plastic,” says Warhol—wistfully? One must suppose so…. And it’s interesting too (to continue Warhol & me—who are antithetical) that Warhol, according to [a colleague], never had an idea of his own. They were all “given.” Whereas I invent everything—or nearly everything. The artist as vacuum. Why is that so intriguing?

November 24, 1979.
[…] Yesterday, the nineteenth anniversary of our engagement. Since we had been seeing each other every day for a month, having meals together, studying together in Ray’s apartment, we came to the conclusion that we might as well get married: which necessitated becoming engaged. It all happened rather quickly, yet not dizzyingly, I had anticipated from the first that we would be married—though perhaps not so quickly—we planned originally for June, when my semester was over and I had my M.A. But it soon came to seem impractical. And so January—January 23—and that was it. (And I went about afterward thinking, and occasionally even saying aloud, how marvelous marriage was—how one couldn’t imagine, beforehand—simply couldn’t
imagine. The transition from “I” to “we.” No, one simply can’t imagine…. And I rather doubt that I can imagine the reverse, either.)