The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (49 page)

H
aving completed
Bellefleur,
Joyce Carol Oates was “between novels” in early 1980, and instead of immediately beginning a new long work she turned to a genre she had not attempted since the early 1970s: playwriting. She took several of her earlier short stories, such as “Night-Side” and “The Widows,” and attempted to render them into dramatic form.

Soon enough, however, she became immersed in a new long project called
Angel of Light,
a return to psychological realism in the form of a political novel based on the ancient Greek tragedy by Aeschylus,
The Oresteia.
Though this novel was typically difficult to begin—she had many weeks of false starts and constantly revised the opening pages—the manuscript accumulated quickly enough and was completed by the fall. Its progress had been interrupted during the summer, however, when Oates took a six-week trip to Europe sponsored by the United States Information Agency. This tour inspired many of the short stories about East-West relations that would appear in her 1984 collection,
Last Days.

In the meantime,
Bellefleur
had been released by her new publisher, Dutton, to wide acclaim, including a front-page review by her old friend John Gardner in the
New York Times Book Review.
To Oates’s surprise,
Dutton’s industrious marketing of the book resulted in her first best-seller, an experience about which she had mixed feelings. Like any writer, she liked the idea that large numbers of people were actually reading her work, but the demands of publicity—which diverted her from her writing to some extent—could be unpleasant.

Oates found ballast to the public side of her career in her rich personal life—her enjoyment of her “idyllic” Princeton surroundings, the continuing sustenance of her marriage, and her wide circle of friends in the Princeton–New York community.

As always, however, work came first, and by the end of the year, in addition to her usual teaching during the fall term, she became involved in a new long novel,
A Bloodsmoor Romance,
which would become the second in a series of “postmodernist Gothic” novels she would produce during the 1980s. Much of the journal in the later months of the year is taken up with her planning and plotting of this immense work, which she approached with her usual “flood” of creativity and imaginative energy.

January 2, 1980.
…Completed the essay on the “image of the city” in contemporary literature.
*
And questions for Leif Sjoberg’s interview.
^†
Inspiring me to an idealism I didn’t know I quite felt: yet I must acquiesce to it. My cynicism is a social gesture at bottom…a way of assuring others
I’m not
really
so happy or confident: consider my worldliness!

…But my “worldliness” tends to be a carapace. A habit. A vocabulary.

…Still, the spiritual side of my nature is largely in eclipse. The turn of the year, two nights ago, and no extraordinary dreams or convictions. Where has this side of my soul gone?—did it ever exist? Have I imagined everything?

…The ferocity of the Unconscious. Its gravitational pull, its demands. A vocabulary (largely visual) of its own. But I can only remember it; I can’t retrieve it. I am absolutely powerless.

…Like Nathanael Vickery, who lost everything. But of course I didn’t lose “everything” because both my feet were solidly in this world. The other world never held me as fast as it held Nathan. And I am not lonely for it…not really.
This
world, the world of the ego and its constant stratagems, certainly holds me. I could spend the rest of my life in it. I suppose.

…Odd physical symptoms, which I won’t enumerate. The lesson of the body is this: you press an ear against your own chest cavity and hear a quite
other
, quite
anonymous
murmuring. Someone in there—something—that hasn’t the faintest interest in you on the outside. Or faith in you. Or pity…. Shall I go to a doctor? (But that’s unfair—Ray and I just went to the dentist today.) What is the opposite of hypochondriasis? I hate the possibility of illness, hate the boring tedious
impersonal
process….

…Not much spiritual elation, either, from the “fasting.” (Which I can’t really do, not as I would like—Ray would be too distressed—and it’s impractical, self-indulgent anyway. Asceticism as a form of gluttony.) No appetite, but then again no sense of not-having-eaten. My body carries on exactly as always. Eating soup…eating fruit and yogurt…. The impulse is almost angry: I catch myself thinking
I will starve you into submission!
Not to punish the body, or to become unnaturally thin; but simply to exert one’s will. And then, having exerted it, to relent. To “return to the world again”….

…How odd, I sometimes feel that a “shadow-self” has taken me over. A superficial though charming—I
suppose
charming!—“social” personality. But the deeper person, the spirit, the psyche, remains stubbornly hidden. Severe fasting might bring it forth…erode the inconsequential dirt and debris away.

January 6, 1980.
…Working steadily for days. For days. A complete page-by-page revision of
Spider Monkey
. And, yesterday and today, a play
called
The Spoils
…transformed from a short story (“Intoxication” in
All the Good People
…. )

Suddenly the dramatic form, the tightness, appeals to me. The
sounds
of voices…people presented “on stage” (in my mind’s eye) rather than in a careful thicket of prose, and the consciousness of prose. In some ways the writing is similar; in other ways quite different. I would never have thought, a week ago, that I’d be writing another play on any subject at all; I could never have anticipated
The Spoils
.

…Thinking too of
The Enchanted Isle
. The “happy” family and the curse upon them.

…Unfortunately I haven’t been altogether well. Yesterday was rather hellish…except for the play…which allowed me to keep going…the thread of the narrative, the drama…the intensity of the characters’ relationships…all the curious magic of “drama”…pulling me out of myself. Then, in the evening, lying on the sofa, reading…rereading
Our Mutual Friend
. Which I admire with as much astonishment as ever.

…A lovely evening, the other day, at the Bromberts’. Victor and I talked […] passionately of attitudes toward art: should one live only
for
one’s art (in which case “life” is subordinate to art)…or should one live so that the art is part of “life”? I told Victor that one cannot choose his nature. It’s like our fingerprints—the personality with which we’re born. (Or do I exaggerate? I can’t say that my “high modernist” attitude toward art—the Flaubertian/Joycean/priestly attitude—was always so powerful in me. This is a sentiment, very nearly a religious credo, that has impressed itself upon me with the passage of time. I was always serious about writing…but now I am deadly serious.)

…These long bouts of writing, which should leave me exhausted: yet after a half-hour’s rest I feel almost recovered. How long can I continue? More or less indefinitely? At my weakest I feel curiously immortal…which is a sure symptom that something is wrong.

…Beautiful day. Dazzling blue sky, snow, firs, red dogwood berries outside the window. Glorious weather. Ray and I have been working on the Tom Wayman manuscript, for Ontario Review Press. (
Introducing Tom Wayman
. Next fall.) And on John Reed’s ms. Both very interesting poets—and quite different. Now that I’ve revised
Spider Monkey
it can be fitted into the ms. of my “selected” plays for publication next fall.

…Am I in love? I suppose. With the products of the imagination. With
Spider Monkey
in particular. I could revise that play endlessly, if I allowed myself such self-indulgence.

…The irresistible force: my burning eagerness to work. The immovable object: social commitments; my job; my marriage. I require these objects to stop me…to halt the avalanche…. A tumult of ideas, plots, plans, hopes, projects…. A veritable fountain…. I could begin in the next five minutes on another play:
The Enchanted Isle
, for instance. But I must try to rest…. I must make a gesture toward…normality.

…“Normality,” a form of contemporary virtue.

January 9, 1980.
…Recovered from my spell of…whatever it was (what
was
it?—the flu?—a headachey malaise of a kind new to me entirely)…and have been working steadily on plays…converting “The Widows” into something meant to be dramatic; revising “Spoils”; reading (without a great deal of enthusiasm) “the best of Broadway” anthologies […]

January 13, 1980.
…Exquisitely lovely, rich days: almost too marvelous to be altogether real: the intensity of work here at my desk (I am midway in
The Widows
, which I find absolutely haunting—mesmerizing), the hilarity and liveliness of “social life” (which I find a continual surprise—in its complexities, I mean, its varieties). […]

…My fascination with
The Widows
, and with the dramatic form. A few weeks ago I hadn’t any use for “drama” in my own life…now, suddenly, with these modest ventures, I feel altogether bewitched. (The fact that
they are modest ventures—like the Phoenix workshop production—makes all the difference.) I can see why people become infatuated with the theatre…with the process of the theatre…its spontaneity, its life…. Yet to avoid any kind of “commercial” project seems imperative. I must be thinking of these plays as I once thought of short stories…. Vehicles for expression and invention that are absolutely unrelated to “commercial” success (or failure). Consequently—a necessary purity.

[…]

…The constant unfolding of “daily life.” Its surprises that would seem (on paper) unspectacular: yet in the flesh—in the spirit—so wonderful. How to praise, how even to approach,
friendship
?

January 20, 1980.
…Incalculably rich, lovely days. How to believe that one
deserves
such happiness…!

…Working on “The Changeling.” Hour upon hour. And now, today, I have completed a very messy first draft, and am eager to go through it again, re-imagining every line, every gesture. Where originally I saw Judge Urstadt as a comic-grotesque figure of satirical proportions, I now begin to see him as tragic…though still “comic”…and of course grotesque. I must re-cast him as King Lear. In a manner of speaking. And begin the play over again….

[…]

…A long conversation with Susan Sontag this morning. Since she has finished her essay on “Our Hitler” she has been feeling restless…a reaction I understand completely. The queer blend of euphoria and emptiness: what shall I do next? Will I ever do anything again? Susan works for hundreds of hours, she says, on her essays; and doesn’t feel that she has enough to show for all her effort. (I’m not sure I agree.) […] I like Susan immensely: she is not only brilliant, as everyone knows; and widely-read; she is also wonderfully warm…unpretentious…frank and funny and not too virtuous to gossip…while admittedly puritanical, like most interesting people. We will meet for lunch next week.

[…]

…The days, the marvelous rich days…passing…accumulating. If ever I look back upon this phase of my life I will have to admit:
that
was as close to heaven as one might reasonably expect.

January 26, 1980.
[…] Yesterday, luncheon at a seafood restaurant on 22nd Street, Susan Sontag and our mutual friend Stephen Koch, and of course Ray.
*
Celebrating our nineteenth wedding anniversary. Susan and I have a great deal to say to each other. Perhaps we were almost rude—excluding Stephen and Ray once or twice. But she is intense, and I become easily so, taking on the coloration (the accent, the impulsiveness) of my associates. We talked about emotions (Stephen claims to experience “mild anxiety” at least every hour; intense anxiety every day…Susan and I “experience” emotion in a detached way because we can’t quite credit it with much reality or worth…. Ray claims to be somewhere in the middle)…methods of work (I saw, on a sofa in Susan’s attractive study, some 250–300 pages of early drafts of her essay on “Our Hitler.” It would be difficult to believe if one hadn’t actually seen it: so many pages, heavily annotated and marked, to be channeled finally into a 30-page essay!)…“philosophies of life.” Susan, like me, “transcends” personal experience by simply reaching out to others’ experience: reading, listening to music, trying to write. Coming to grips with “Our Hitler,” for instance, or photography, or “illness as metaphor.” Plunging into the alien voices of yet another novel, another play…. Susan’s apartment, the top two floors of a private home on 17th Street, is one of the most interesting apartments I have seen in the city. The “dining room–living room” is one long—very long—room, with polished hardwood floors; shelves of books rising to the ceiling on two sides; very attractive; and as neat as my own. (Susan claims to be messy but she really isn’t.) Downstairs, the study (her desk—a small desk—faces the wall, and a four-by-four bulletin board on which are tacked little yellow slips); her quite large bedroom; a bathroom; and a room belonging to Susan’s au pair boy Michael, a quiet young man who waits on tables for a living and is (I think?) somehow literary, or interested in literary things…. Susan, contrary to her image, isn’t a native New Yorker. She was born in Verona,
New Jersey; moved with her family to the West—California (she went to North Hollywood High), Arizona (near Tucson). A New Yorker by choice, very deliberate choice. […] Susan took her first novel manuscript,
The Benefactor
, to Farrar, Straus, at the age of twenty-eight, knowing no one there, and no other Farrar, Straus authors; and she has been there ever since. No agent. She hasn’t any savings—knows that Farrar, Straus pays “ridiculously low” advances—suspects (quite correctly) that she would make more money elsewhere: but she adores Bob Giroux, who I’m sure is worth her adulation, and hasn’t any interest in leaving. (All of which reminds me of myself, and Vanguard. Fifteen years of loyalty and inertia. But no regrets, really.) It’s somewhat distressing, though, that she hasn’t any savings…none at all. And only rents that attractive apartment. I couldn’t live like that…and Susan feels vaguely apprehensive about it, herself. After all—as Stephen said—one might as well be interested, however mildly, in money. (Or did I say that? I know I said that it takes a puritanical strain to force oneself to
think
about money, that boring subject. We pay for not having to think about money…as I suppose I should have told Susan. “We pay for the luxury of not having to think about $$$$$.”)