The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (65 page)

March 24, 1982.
…These queer harshly-bright days when one isn’t equal to the sunlight. Isn’t equal to the mind’s rhythms. I feel so stalled; balked; worthless; a sort of faint carbon copy of whatever I am supposed to be, or was…. The interior ticking, far too loud. I have thrown myself into
Winterthur
with such disappointing results. The first chapters emerge in a styleless bland recitation of Facts…far too long…far too diffuse, confused…but I seem not to care…my strategy is not strategy at all…simply to keep laboring at it…chipping away…but is it purposeful?…is it going anywhere?…is it another detour?…cul-de-sac?…and if a “success,” what does
that
mean…. At lunch today with several colleagues […] Mike commiserating w/me (I think sadly) he must have been thinking of his own relative failure: a novel he’d been working on for a year or more has been rejected virtually everywhere; he is “known” as a translator when he wants to be a novelist, to
be
a good novelist; he feels the academic world has drained him of his energy.

[…]

…Perhaps I require a change: perhaps the “romance” with Princeton is dwindling to an end. I should be working with better students if I’m going to work with writing students at all. (By better I mean only graduate students—Princeton has an undergraduate program solely—my students are bright enough, rather wonderful really for their age, but the writing isn’t polished, isn’t “writerly”…I suppose I am condescending without meaning to be, but then one can’t apply genuine critical/professional standards to undergraduates…. However, the prospect of moving from Princeton is daunting. I really don’t think I would be capable of it. We’re in love with this house, with the landscape, we’ve acquired such valuable marvelous friends…. To give up all this for the sake of an abstraction (working with “better” students) would be folly.

[…]

March 28, 1982.
…“The love of children is a fleeting thing,” says Lewis Carroll in a letter.

…Typing out notes for
Winterthur
. My need to “write”…at odds with the fact that, at the present time, I’m not ready to write a novel; not
this
novel. So I must content myself with typing out notes, scribbling ideas,
snatches of dialogue. The “mild depression” writers sometimes feel after having finished a work is perhaps with me on a subliminal level. (I mean, as a consequence of having completed
Crosswicks
.) But the “mild depression” is soluble in society (many parties of late), teaching, long walks & runs, dinners alone with Ray, evening reading. (At the present time I am reading in forensics, and the $1000 edition of
Alice in Wonderland
, the Pennyroyale, which I am supposed to review.)

[…]

…I must write some very short stories. A challenge, to compress them into four or five pages.
Can
I do it…? But why not…!
*
The notion of mysteries plagues me. These tiny mysteries. Xavier’s focus upon puzzles, riddles, mysteries, the unfathomable & the insoluble. But for something very brief the same focus would work, perhaps very well.

…
Winterthur
, my Wonderland. Through the looking-glass. But I can’t (yet) transmute it. I am hobbled by realism, naturalism, even “history.” (The ahistoric doesn’t interest me.) I must wade through so much exposition to get to the parts that excite me, the parts that come alive and matter terribly…why this is I don’t know. Last night, lying awake at two o’clock, at three, my heart accelerating with the thought, excitement mingled w/dread, of writing this morning: how the chapter (I am still dragging through “The Toymaker’s Son”) will turn out. And then, an hour’s worth of writing, and I saw it went very badly indeed. But I can’t despair. I have been here before, haven’t I…? Groping, crawling on hands and knees, I don’t really know where I’m going, haven’t a voice yet, a styleless novel is an impossibility…but I can’t think of this as a “novel,” only the notes for a novel, then I feel somewhat calmer…. The night before last, unable to sleep, a feverish sort of insomnia, dread & a wish that morning would come swiftly; so I worked on the novel for an hour…assembling notes, brooding, trying to figure out an arrangement…went to sleep, finally, feeling vaguely optimistic; then, in the morning, I saw it wouldn’t work; went flat; everything is a jumble; too many “notes” and not enough action;
and Xavier only at the periphery of the novel; and I am balked, stalled, frustrated, even a little frightened. But, still, I suppose it is the usual. I suppose I will survive. (The obstacles grow ever more formidable, the chance for “success” more remote. In the meantime, these very short stories might be refreshing and even therapeutic.)

March 30, 1982.
…My father’s birthday, & everything seems well at home. For which, thank God; & I feel halfway ashamed at having made the call with such trepidation. (Not having heard from Mom and Dad for a while.)

[…]

…A large party at Elaine & English’s last week, where I met Maureen Howard for the first time; & liked her enormously. Unpretentious, intelligent without being annoyingly “bright,” funny but not obtrusively witty…. A very nice person indeed.

[…]

…Working on
Winterthur
. I must have amassed some 75 pages by now. Of which how many are halfway decent?—50, 30, 10, 1—? On Sunday, a crisis of sorts: I was making myself almost literally sick with driving, forcing, insisting upon trying to organize this recalcitrant material…and Ray talked quietly with me, reasoned with me, joked me out of my obsessive cul-de-sac…whereupon I saw that of course he was right…with his common sense, his wisdom…all the things I know (such as, one doesn’t live
for
writing, one isn’t justified
by
writing) but had forgotten in the exigencies of the moment. A novel can’t be forced. There’s simply no voice, no texture to it. But since I want to write this novel, since nothing else seems worthwhile at the present time, all I can do is hack away at it…chisel away…typing up notes…rearranging notes…none of it very good, or any good; and maybe it never will be any good; maybe I’ll end up by throwing it all away…. Still, some instinct leads me to work on it. And to take my time. Winterthur must be invented, or dreamed into being, as an
alternative world
. But the issue can’t be forced. Can’t be forced.

[…]

…Lengthy runs & walks these days. A balmy sunny Tuesday on the Delaware. For two hours we strode along the canal north of Washington’s
Crossing. Running in our magic shoes; walking; looking for birds (the other day we saw our first bluebirds—ever); a moderately good lunch at the Washington Crossing Inn; conversation re. our future—how gracefully things are taking shape, financial, professional, otherwise…. In all, a lovely day. Amen.

[…]

April 13, 1982.
…Handsome seductive mellifluous Ned Rorem speaking at Westminster Choir College on composing & other mysteries. Ned the “nominal Quaker” attracted to “sensuous” music. The paradox of Silence/Sound. Ned’s beautiful music & ugly prose. Ned himself graceful and almost too articulate: he knows the answers to questions not yet phrased…. It shocked me to hear him remark that he hadn’t made $20,000 on his songs in all his years of composition. Can this be true?…whereas performers can make that much money in a single evening…performing, in fact, Ned’s very music.

…Working much of the day on “The Bat.”
*
My sympathy for Carroll. The love of, the infatuation with, girl-children of a particular sort. Surely the prurient misread Dodgson/Carroll…? I’ve come to loathe the trendy tyranny by which romantic motives are reduced to Freudian simplicities…all is repressed, denied…all is in disguise. In truth, not all human beings are fueled by sexual energies; many are asexual by temperament and genetic disposition, if not actual choice. And then again, many have become asexual, or non-sexual, as a consequence of too much sexual activity…. But “The Bat” is about surprises primarily. Forgotten patches of childhood/personality. (How much of ourselves is lost, denied, squandered, misread, given fictitious dimensions…. Once these anecdotes are constructed, whatever remains of the truth is overlaid with invention. Metaphors entrance. Structures impose their own logic. I see “Joyce” emerging out of…whatever it is I was…but whatever it is I was is already given a fraudulent meaning by dint of “JCO” and a sense of spurious necessity/inevitability. Even modesty in such terms is outrageous.)

[…]

…Literature as ingenious verbal structures that preserve certain experiences…these experiences locked within the structures…released, decoded, by (future) readers…if there are any. Hence, the inviolability of art. But it is only as permanent as the language; only as living as readers will grant it. Let’s see: literature as a series of stratagems by which experience is preserved…. But no, “stratagems” is absurd…how to account for beauty, fatality, utter charm…. Then I’m forced to admit that I don’t know. That everything is improvised, haphazard…. The gauze-and-wire bat emerging out of the drawer….

[…]

April 19, 1982.
…All of life, or nearly, goes well…in fact beautifully. But I sit here staring at these unseemly piles of notes for something called
Mysteries of Winterthur
and wonder if I should get rid of them all, if I should throw away the wretched 65–70 pages I’ve written…a preposterously “rough” first draft…a narrative that is clotted, stalled, balked, thwarted…that refuses to come alive…(the cliché “come alive” is appropriate here)…I haven’t felt like a “failure” for some days, however, possibly because I’ve been working on other, more finite, more practical things. I like “The Bat”…it’s the sort of thing one can do…whereas Winterthur…. Writing these words, typing them brightly out, doesn’t express the discontent I feel. And my sense too that the “discontent” is all very familiar. But at the same time…impossible to convey through this medium the gravity, the heaviness of heart, the stupor, resentment, impatience, dull anger…whatever it is I feel…my disgust with myself…. The language that won’t live on the page; prose that isn’t prose but mere words typed out; but it’s all I can do to instruct myself to
type
(I am religiously “typing out notes”—transferring the chaos of scribbled notes into something fraudulent resembling a first draft…but it’s all ridiculous…the “novel” in its present form could no more lift into flight than a dirigible made of lead…concrete, rock, lead…. The entire performance is ridiculous.)

…How odd, then, that, undeserved, life goes well. (A Jamesian sentence. All the commas, the constraint, the hiccupping “forward motion.”)…Lunch today w/Elaine, Helen Langdon (Margaret Drabble’s
charming sister, an art historian), an Englishwoman from Southamptom University called Isabel (?—her name has been displaced)…here to give a lecture at Princeton on some aspect of Browning. Yesterday, running & walking at great length…all’s sunny, tulips & daffodils & jonquils…the very heart of spring…. Dinner at the Keeleys’ last week & a sense of the “gang” being reunited […]. The queerness of my outer life going so smoothly, with such unfeigned pleasure, and certain minor things too—these short stories, etc.—while the novel doesn’t evolve at all…. I “feel” Xavier so keenly, but it’s from the inside. I am as balked and mystified as he.[…]

…Has it always been so difficult, at the start of a novel…? I should reread my journal; but wouldn’t really believe it…the opacity of this moment, this afternoon’s sluggish work, couldn’t possibly have been matched in the past. Yet the prospect of giving up certainly doesn’t appeal. “Giving up”…surrendering….

…I am not working from the unconscious, perhaps; it’s all forced, willed, deliberate, intellectual…no music to it…no special language. Programmatic…. I’ve grown too postmodernist-clever; but I had thought language might redeem the effort before now…. However, I will continue; I haven’t any intention of giving up. What has (evidently) happened is that the “mystery” Xavier can’t solve has become the “mystery” for the author of why the novel won’t come into life…like Leah with her mad mystical unattainable Empire…which was
Bellefleur
itself. (But I did conquer
Bellefleur
eventually. And I have no faith that the same thing will happen with
Winterthur
…. )

April 24, 1982.
…Shirley Hazzard at Thursday’s Gauss Seminar, infinitely gracious, serene, attractive, beautifully informed…her talk being “The Lonely Word: Virgil and Montale.” But the seminar wasn’t well attended…. We had gone to dinner with the Keeleys beforehand. Sitting in the audience (a comfortable little amphitheatre in the Architecture Bldg.) I thought…how has it come to this, that I’m here; that Victor Brombert (introducing Shirley with his impeccable style) is a
friend; and Mike; and the Weisses;
*
and the rest….
How
, really, has it come about; and am I intelligently/properly aware of my good fortune…. I think I must be. But
Winterthur
hurts. The placidity and richness of the “external” life (our dinner party last night, for instance—Ed and George, Elaine, Paul Fussell:
^†
it seemed to me a distinct privilege to be setting the table, preparing food, for these particular people. But if we dare to suppose we’ve earned our friends, must we admit we’ve earned our enemies…?)—this gregarious world which others (one must suppose) look upon with envy—a queer balance with my “internal” world—which is rarely in control, problematic, difficult—the social persona is no less real than the other—where am I, in fact?—but it seems less real because (though, like Mrs. Dalloway and the occasional Virginia Woolf, we love parties) it is so ephemeral.
This
moment, being recorded, for all its paltriness (am I angry at myself, or have I sunk into a kind of quiet bemused despair…) is less ephemeral.