The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (67 page)

[…]

So these large-scale bizarre allegories are forged in a climate of emotional stability and control. Lacking that, they should have to fight for their life.

June 10, 1982.
…Long lovely workdays: immersed in
Winterthur
&
Winterthur
’s haunting voice: progress very slow indeed (I seem to be on about page 133—faltering, groping, rewriting, recasting—doing sometimes three or four versions of a single page, before moving on: have I become one of those fated “bleeders,” at last?) but at any rate certain; and at any rate it is all being done with immense pleasure. No matter how dissatisfying the first scribbled “draft,” I can at least build from it, a page, a paragraph, a long Gothic sentence at a time.

…Yesterday, sunshine at last. An ambitious ride, some miles, around Bayberry, down to Old Mill Road, and into Pennington, and back: sunny, gusty, marvelous: and today the overcast malaise has returned, a dirtied-cement sort of sky, ceiling very low. But we had a farewell lunch with Mike Keeley, who is off to Greece (again) and promises to write. (Last week, a splendid evening on the Delaware, with Mike, and Richard and Kristina Ford; at the somewhat overpriced but certainly beautiful Chez Odette, a table overlooking the river at sunset; excellent conversation—funny, probing, moving. Now Mike is leaving, and the Fords are leaving, for Morocco.)

…Funny letter from John Updike, that most witty of men, seeming to underscore an invitation to visit him and Martha, that he had (I thought tentatively) extended a while back: but we can’t bring ourselves to accept, much as we would like to, for, surely, he can’t mean it…? He and Martha have just moved, to a place called Beverly Farms, Mass., and can’t possibly want visitors so soon.

…A journal must record warts & embarrassments. Though I would rather forget. My foolery, in just a few minutes ago telephoning London, England, to talk to Elaine, and
getting a recorded message
. (English had
told me that Elaine could be reached at that number, between 3
P.M.
and 4, at the home of Clancy Siegal; and so I dialed; and went through some difficulty; with the consequence that the call did go through, and the phone was lifted—and a recorded message played, Clancy Siegal explaining that he wasn’t home, etc. What an idiot I am, what misguided notions…. ) Also, yesterday, at the end of an hour’s generally congenial and rewarding interview, with Bill Robertson of the Miami
Herald
, Bill asked me to respond to the fact that virtually everyone he knew in Miami
believed I was insane
. I asked him to repeat the statement; stared; blinked; must have looked uncommonly baffled; and murmured something about that being rather…well, rather…odd, surely?…since I have been teaching at universities since 1961…and have published so many books…and…well…surely…. “It’s like being asked if you’re syphilitic,” I said, feeling both hurt and angered, “or what you think about the ‘fact’ that people imagine you’re cross-eyed….” Bill apologized at once; wondered if he’d actually phrased the statement correctly: people wanted to know, it seems, whether I was
sane
.

…So, I thought, it all goes for, what?—nothing? The image of myself in the world isn’t the too-conventional, too-literary, academic-bred intelligence I suppose I (really) am; but a raving madwoman…. Hearing voices, transcribing gibberish, doubtless running about the streets in my night-clothes, hair a-tumble down my back, like any Gothic victim. For this, so many hours of diligent labor; of exacting craftsmanship; of (let’s say) rarely missing a day of teaching in twenty years; of living what I had imagined to be a resolutely “sane” life. (How do I account for it? I told Bill. They must be unusually stupid, your friends.)

…My immersion in Xavier, the (novelist)/detective. Slated to marry Therese in five giant steps, he now seems to be destined to marry Perdita, in three. Perdita, the dark one, the murderess, the lovely death angel…. But I can’t, and shouldn’t, see into the future. The future is some day’s present, which I can’t usurp.

…The impulse for nightmare
exaggeration
. Gothicism writ large, that the intolerable is, oddly, tolerable. (Because it is finally exaggeration, and
not “real.”) Never could I approach Kay’s death head-on; or my intermittent melancholy about my parents’ aging, Ray’s & my aging, etc.; but I can deal deftly with these issues by way of a distanced narrative…I can even deal playfully with them. Everything is codified, altered. My shameless penchant for romance (isn’t every novel a new romance? a new infatuation?) can be exercised by way of actual romance—by way of “literature.”

…Hawthorne: “I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of everyday life.”

(But Hawthorne’s people are too frequently spiritual “mechanisms.” They don’t breathe—except perhaps for Hester, and one or two others. But the short stories, the allegories, are like chopping wood…. Clockwork grown slightly rusty though still “working.” Poor man: how he wound down!—all the zest for life, which he’d found past his first youth, in fact—burnt out. (He died, a biographer has surmised, of a brain tumor. Which explains a great deal, if not everything.)

…Part of the house is being painted. This cloying sickish odor. White paint on the overhang outside; a very pale yellow in the kitchen, for a “sunny” effect…. Housewifely instincts. The solace, the simple pleasures of “keeping” house. (Talking with Mike this noon re. children. […] I feel odd, almost apologetic (though why?), because I have never wanted children…. Have never wanted to have a baby; or to have grown children; or any sort of large, bustling family. Though, if I think about it, I don’t
not
want a more conventional sort of life…. The maternal instinct seems lacking in me. Or has been satisfied in other ways—through marriage, probably. My talent for tenderness must be qualified by a certain limited patience…. After a period of time, in the presence of children or inordinately simple-minded people, I want to escape to my own privacy, to my own thoughts…I find the task too tiresome, too unrewarding, to
pretend
to be more congenial than I am. Overhearing mothers talking baby-talk in the A & P (or, almost as frequently, scolding), I think—how
can they keep it up? Days, weeks months? Years?…But then of course they don’t all keep it up. Having children doesn’t confer blessings of any sort; doesn’t make one “normal.” Consider Plath, Sexton, et al. If anything, such added responsibilities, such added burdens of thought and worry, must have made things worse for these unhappy women.

[…]

June 19, 1982.
…That exquisite time of evening (7:15) when everything seems suspended; perfect. Today, which began with a sense of confused grief (a dream of remarkable clarity about Death: an image of Kay’s usually so impeccable household fallen into disorder, slovenliness: then the dismay of reading in the morning’s paper that John Cheever had died, at the relatively young age of seventy) seems to have expanded by degrees into a wonderfully long, full, productive, restful, and even enjoyable day…after the crowdedness of our trip to Hartford, last night’s marathon drive home (to bed at 2
A.M.
, to sleep at 3…), the usual cornucopia of thoughts and impressions following a venture out….

[…]

…Yesterday, driving at a leisurely pace through the hills of Western Connecticut. Farms, rolling countryside, meadows, fields, wooded “mountains” (all less than 1500' high); a walk in a small town called Kent; surpassingly beautiful sights, smells…clover of several kinds, fresh-cut hay, grass…daisies, wild chive, God knows what all else. Then, driving along the Hudson, south of Newburgh…a long walk near the river…winding back through the Palisades Park…down via 202…to Morristown (dinner at the Inn there, but awfully late—10
P.M.
)…to home, dazed and really too tired. My Versailles, my India and Japan, these homey, idyllic, slow-paced, meditative drives through unspoiled countryside….

…Working today, most of today, very slowly, w/much rewriting, in “The ‘Little Nun’” of
Winterthur
. Alternating this painstaking work with house-cleaning. (My parents arrive on Monday; tomorrow, Elaine & English, & Angeline Goreau, drop by for drinks etc.) A bicycle ride along Bayberry. This journal. Dragging melancholy thoughts re. last night’s dream, this
morning’s news of Cheever. (For Kay lived in Cheeverland, of sorts. In writing
Expensive People
I ventured into that territory—in my own fashion. Shall I “rewrite” that novel somehow? Because of course it was a record of my own romance with that phase of (my own) odd quirky unpredictable life. And Kay’s death, half-suicide, half-“natural,” remains a mystery…. Though one might see it too as murder of a kind: murder of a marital kind: unconscious, unpremeditated, an act of complicity, so braided together with AMERICA of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, it is very nearly a self-declared Allegory…. But I dare not think of it prematurely.)

June 25, 1982.
…The flood of emotion I could barely keep back, at the Princeton airport, seeing off my parents. Again. “I love you so much,” my mother murmured, embracing me, each of us trying not to cry…. But I can’t not cry…. I think of: those young, attractive, somewhat glamourish figures ( judging by the old snapshots)…and of my (young) grandmother too…. Many years my junior. In the snapshots. Then, in the flesh, so changed…not unattractive, certainly not: but changed: changed…. My mind fixes upon old memories. Snatches of conversations. A mystery about to be revealed. The glimpse of a backyard from a forgotten window or doorway…. Living on Main Street, Lockport. Visiting my grandmother (now married to one “Bob Woodside”) on Grand Street. Then elsewhere. Always rented flats, apartments. Woodframe houses. By no means impoverished yet not comfortably middle-class…. And the failing, failed farm in Millersport…. All the emotion, all the passion, I want so badly to convey but can’t…simply can’t. I stare at these old snapshots and go blank. My handsome father with his head of thick black hair, leaning against a glider in some forgotten meadow, on some forgotten festival Sunday afternoon. They’ve all been drinking beer or ale, the mood is gay, reckless, certainly not contemplative…yet I sit here in Princeton, NJ, a “world-renowned” author, a descendant, a forty-four-year-old woman, staring and contemplating and blinking tears from my eyes…. Why, I don’t know: isn’t it the perennial tale, the only tragic tale, our human desire for permanence and the (in)human necessity of change…. Time passes through us but doesn’t carry us along. Or if it “carries us along” it’s only to drop us unceremoniously in a place we have never anticipated…. (I can’t even type. I can’t, can’t, can’t organize these thoughts. I feel as if my
skin had been peeled from my body. My outer skin. All prickling painful sensitivity—but without language. I can’t express what I feel. I
feel
so much!—my heart is fairly pounding—my pulses—my wrists—but I can’t articulate these emotions—everything dissolves to tears, to helpless sobbing.)…“If any man had done to my mother what your father did to your mother,” someone told my father when he was a teenager in Lockport (and his parents long divorced—his father moved away to Buffalo), “—I would kill him. I’d look him up and kill him.”…But what precisely did my grandfather Oates do to my grandmother Blanche?…and why wasn’t my father ever able to find out? (The reticence of the Morningstars—my grandmother’s family; the pride.) (That harmful pride, with which, I suppose, I can sympathize: she wouldn’t accept child support or alimony, so she and my father lived with great difficulty, she did maid’s work for a while in Lockport, worked in factories in Lowertown; my father quit school, worked where he could…. Consequently he hadn’t a chance. No possibility of college; even of graduating from high school; with his intelligence…! And my mother, the last-born of nine children, given away, in a manner of speaking, to her mother’s (childless) sister and brother-in-law…. Yet they were such hardy, spirited, handsome people…my mother extremely pretty (though most of the snapshots don’t show it—that ethereal quality I remember), my father somewhat dashing…. Gideon Bellefleur in remote essence…. Dear God, I think, I
wish
I could think, if only I could be transported to their world, their time!…when they were, say, nineteen & twenty years old; had just met; the extraordinary resiliency of their characters even then…. And my grandmother’s world; Blanche Morningstar (Morgenstern); that shadowy young woman whose features I seem to have inherited, in part…the slightly sunken eyes, the quizzical expression, the sobriety, stubbornness, penchant for secrecy…the love of books…the love of libraries…. If I could wish for a dream, I would wish to be transported somehow to that time; to (say) 1936 or ’37; or, earlier, 1914—onward, when my grandmother was young. Dear God, how badly I wish for it.

…But I have no resources except the uncertain memories of others; and the dimmest of reflections, of my own. If only, someday, Imagination might answer my prayer. If Imagination were God, indeed….

…But the visit was lovely. Entirely pleasant. Much society, laughter. (For these people, Caroline and Frederic, are no longer
those
people: they’re a retired couple extremely grateful for their belated good fortune: and touchingly proud of their daughter and son-in-law.) They arrived on Monday; on Tuesday we had dinner here, with Elaine and English; on Wednesday we drove to the Delaware, for lunch on the canal, and a walk along the sunny canal bank, and, in the evening, an open-air concert at the Graduate College (where that lovely heartbreaking Ravel quartet was played); on Thursday we went to Princeton, visited with Ed and George, in order to be shown George’s splendid garden, saw the art museum, etc., and went out to dinner—to a Chinese banquet of sorts—my mother girlish and funny, my father very funny—the happiest they have been—and (so it seems) the healthiest in some years. My father playing piano, “St. James Infirmary,” Hoagy Carmichael pieces, etc., etc., but all this is jumbled and unclear…. We spent a fair amount of time working outside in the flower beds (my father helped Ray nail up trellises for the roses); we commented often on the melodious house finches at the feeder; and the idyllic quiet; the beauty of the pond, the woods, the weather…. I
wish
I could somehow keep them here, yet allow them their own life; which is, I suppose, what they wish for me. But at least…at least we’ve had these days, and others…. Sharing adulthood with one’s parents is so sacred…I had never imagined…but I can’t express what I feel…it’s all awkward, banal, haphazard, jumbled…I
am
inarticulate, I feel as if my outer skin were missing, peeled off, and the slightest breath causes pain…yet I want the pain…yet I’m terrified of (worse) pain. […] I am so vulnerable, I feel…I feel that…. But I don’t know: perhaps it’s sheerly inventive: I can’t stop crying or wanting to cry: but isn’t that the way it always is…. All emotion, a flood, unstoppered, unorganized. I’ll never be able to reread this, so why am I writing it?…as fast as I can type…. All a great mass of confused wayward thoughts. What I would like to do (dear God, how I would love this) is to write a novel about these people…beginning with my grandmother Blanche as a girl of, say, sixteen or seventeen…and somehow give them that life again…and see the world by way of them…. But how to get the proper distance, the necessary detachment…? All this authorial coolness, this pitiless abstraction—making Xavier Kilgarvan speak for me, but so obliquely, around so many corners—
a veritable maze: the challenges are all cerebral, since the passions are all suppressed or rerouted. But to write directly…forthrightly…. Something along the lines of a memoir…. But…. I suspect it is an impossibility…. Emotion can’t carry me very far; and think of the anguish, in exposing so personal a document to strangers…. In re-creating my grandmother and my parents I would be falsifying them, not only explicitly, but by the sheer imposition of language; a voice. It’s only a feeling I have…so poignant…melancholy…. And then to realize that of course I didn’t know my grandmother—not really: that she was my “grandmother” blocked any objective sort of knowledge or sympathy, for many years: and now my curiosity, though insatiable, must depend upon so many secondary & peripheral observations…. Yet, I suppose, I should be content, as Ray says, in knowing that I’ve made them immensely happy: that I’ve made them incredulous, even, with “my” success in the visible world: that somehow, magically, impossibly, I’ve vindicated them, and made their long years of deprivation seem worthwhile…perhaps part of an ongoing incomprehensible but utterly mesmerizing narrative….