The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (70 page)
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Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
…Lovely quiet days lately. I’ve had time to work for hours on end…short stories primarily…some pen-and-ink drawings (particularly relevant to these stark black-on-gray-on-white winter days: winter trees, winter pond, and the like). It seems to me that I have been inactive, even rather lazy, but it’s that time of year […].
…Shopping at the Pennington Market. Late-afternoon customers, drivers, a sense of impatience, pre–New Year’s Eve suspension. Ray’s bad cold of two days has lifted at last. My near-flu lifted without actually descending. (Thinking of Elaine and Stephen and other friends, and their diverse ailments, I’m forced to conclude that thus far Ray and I are amazingly healthy people. Colds, mild cases of the flu…. No days lost re. teaching in how many years?…probably about fifteen. Which is remarkable considering that one really
ought
to have sick-days now and then: there’s something zealous and Girl Scoutish about not.)
…Nice letter from Robert Brustein of the American Repertory Theater. “I admire
your
work extremely,” he says. Is he serious? What work? Surely
not plays…. I admire your work extremely, Mr. Brustein, what I’ve seen of it in
TNR
: brilliantly savage reviews, the kind of throwaway lines (Stanley Kauffmann displays them too) other writers presumably struggle over…. Preparing copy, etc., for
The Profane Art
. A book which quietly pleases me. No prizes in store, no awards, modest readership indeed; not even many reviews (which can be a blessing for me, these days); but it’s a solid enough book, assembled over a period of years, much of it rewritten. There is comfort, solace, satisfaction in small things. (After the relative disappointment—commercial, I mean; Karen’s and Dutton’s and to some extent my own—of
Bloodsmoor
. Which hit the market at about the drear hour the market began to sink. Will it rise again? Poor Ontario Review Press! Poor “literary magazines”! With libraries closing…bookstores closing or struggling to stay open…. The end-of-1982 isn’t a very cheery time for literary-oriented people but, well, we shall celebrate nonetheless tonight. Simply to
step foot
in 1983 is a great privilege.)
*
This uncollected story appeared in the fall 1982 issue of
Antioch Review
.
*
This story, “The Witness,” appeared in the spring–summer 1983 issue of
Antaeus
and was collected in
Last Days
.
*
This uncollected story appeared in the winter 1983 issue of
Northwest Review
.
*
The uncollected story “Sonata Quasi una Fantasia…” appeared in the winter 1985 issue of
Fiction
; the essay “‘At Least I Have Made a Woman of Her’: Images of Women in Yeats, Lawrence, Faulkner” appeared in the spring 1983 issue of the
Georgia Review
and was collected in
The Profane Art
.
*
This uncollected story appeared in the October 1985 issue of
Chelsea
.
*
Re-titled “Last Days,” this story appeared in the summer 1983 issue of
Michigan Quarterly Review
and was reprinted in
Last Days
. Itdealt with Oates’s experiences in her University of Detroit days with a troubled graduate student, ultimately a suicide, named Richard Wishnetsky. Her early story “In the Region of Ice” had also dealt with her relationship with Wishnetsky.
*
This poem appeared in the spring 1983 issue of
Southern Review
and was reprinted in the volume
Luxury of Sin
(Lord John Press, 1984).
*
This story appeared in the winter 1983 issue of
Massachusetts Review
and was collected in
Raven’s Wing
(Dutton, 1986).
†
This story had appeared in the summer 1965 issue of
Kenyon Review
and was reprinted in
Upon the Sweeping Flood
(Vanguard, 1966).
*
This idea would culminate in two volumes of what Oates called “miniature narratives”:
The Assignation
(Ecco, 1988) and
Where
Is
Here?
(Ecco, 1992).
*
This uncollected story appeared in the summer 1982 issue of
Shenandoah
.
*
The editor and poet Theodore Weiss and his wife, Renee, were friends of Oates and Smith at this time.
†
The writers Paul and Betty Fussell were also friends of theirs at this time.
*
Eventually, Oates changed the novel’s title to
Mysteries of Winterthurn
.
*
This is the collection that was later retitled
Last Days
.
*
James Wolcott’s extremely negative review of
A Bloodsmoor Romance
, “Stop Me Before I Write Again: Six Hundred More Pages by Joyce Carol Oates,” appeared in the September 1982 issue of
Harper’s.
*
Diane Johnson’s review, “Balloons and Abductions,” appeared in the September 5, 1982, issue of the
New York Times Book Review
.
*
The uncollected story “Improvisation” appeared in the winter 1983 issue of
New Letters
; “Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.” appeared in the autumn 1983 issue of
Queen’s Quarterly
and was collected in
Last Days
.
*
In fact, Oates decided to keep
Crosswicks
back for the time being.
Mysteries of Winterthurn
appeared in 1984.
*
The uncollected story “For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry” appeared in the summer 1984 issue of
Michigan Quarterly Review
.
*
This story appeared in the fall 1983 issue of
Ploughshares
and was reprinted in
Prize Stories 1985: The O. Henry Awards
(Doubleday).
A
Adams, Ansel
Adler, Rabbi
Aeschylus
A.K.
Akhmadulina, Bella
Akhmatova, Anna
Albee, Edward
Aleichem, Sholem
Algren, Nelson
Allen, A. A.
Allen, Woody
Ammons, A. R.
Anthony, Carol
Antonioni, Michelangelo
Archer, Elise
Arendt, Hannah
Aristotle
Arlen, Michael
Ashbery, John
Atkinson, Colin
Atkinson, Jo
Auden, W. H.
Augustine, Saint
Aurelius, Marcus
Austen, Jane
B
Bach, Johann Sebastian
Baker, Carlos
Balakian, Nona
Baldwin, James
Banks, Russell
Barth, John
Barth, Shelley
Barthelme, Donald
Barthelme, Marion
Barthes, Roland
Baskin, Leonard
Bauer, Jerry
Beckett, Samuel
Beckhl, Sherry
Beethoven, Ludwig van
Bell, Quentin
Bellamy, Joe David
Bellow, Saul
Bennett, Arnold
Bergstein, Eleanor
Berlioz, Hector
Bernhardt, Martha
Berryman, John
Bettelheim, Bruno
Bixby, George
Blackmur, R. P.
Blake, William
Bloom, Harold
Blotner, Joseph
Bly, Robert
Bogard, Herb
Boland, Eavan
Borden, Lizzie
Borges, Jorge Luis
Bosch, Hieronymus
Boswell, James
Braque, Georges
Braziller, Karen
Braziller, Michael
Breslin, Jimmy
Britten, Benjamin
Brodsky, Joseph
Brombert, Victor
Brontë, Anne
Brontë, Branwell
Brontë, Charlotte
Brontë, Emily
Brown, Deming
Browning, Robert
Brustein, Robert
Buckley William
Buddha
Budgen, Frank
Burchfield, Charles
Burgess, Anthony
Burhman, Madge
Burke, Kenneth
Burnett, Patricia
Burroughs, William S.
C
Cage, John
Calisher, Hortense
Callaghan, Barry
Camus, Albert
Capote, Truman
Carroll, Lewis
Carter, Billy
Casnoff, Philip
Cattaneo, Ann
Cavafy, Mike
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand
Cervantes
C. (friend)
Charyn, Jerry
Chase, Calvin
Chaucer, Geoffrey
Cheever, John
Chopin, Frédéric
Churchill, Charles
Ciardi, John
Clark, Kenneth
Clemons, Walter
Coles, Robert
Collier, John
Cone, Ed
Conrad, Joseph
Consagra, Sophie
Coover, Pili
Coover, Robert
Copeland, Anne
Copland, Aaron
Cortázar, Julio
Cousins, Norman
Crane, Stephen
Cromie, Bob
D
Davidson, Peter
Debussy, Claude
de Kooning, Willem
Deleuze, Gilles
Descartes, René
DeVries, Peter
Dickens, Charles
Dickey, James
Dickinson, Emily
Didion, Joan
Dietz, Paula
Dike, Donald
Ditsky, John
Doctorow, Ed
Doctorow, Helen
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Doutine, Heike
Drabble, Margaret
Dreiser, Theodore
Duchamp, Marcel
Dürer, Albert
E
Edel, Leon
Edwards, Thomas R.
Einstein, Albert
Eliade, Mircea
Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans)
Eliot, T. S.
Elkin, Stanley
Ellison, Ralph
Ellmann, Richard
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Emmanuel, Pierre
Engel, Marian
Erdman, Nikolai
Ernst, Max
Evans, Donald
Evans, Walker
Ewert, William
F
Fagles, Lynn
Fagles, Robert
Faulkner, William
Fauré, Gabriel
Fedorenko, Nikolai
Fiedler, Leslie
Field, Andrew
Field, John
Fielding, Henry
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Flaubert, Gustave
Flier, Yakov
F. (near-fiancé)
Ford, Kristina
Ford, Richard
Fowles, John
Frank, Joe
Franks, Lucinda
Fraser, Phil
Frazer, Russ
Freud, Sigmund
Freudenberger, Daniel
Frost, Robert
Frye, Northrop
Fuentes, Carlos
Fussell, Betty
Fussell, Paul
G
Gallagher, Tess
Gallant, Mavis
Gardner, Joan
Gardner, John
Gass, William
Gibbons, Reginald
Giroux, Bob
Gleasner, Gail
Godwin, Gail
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Goldman, Eleanor.
See
Bergstein
Eleanor
Goldman, Michael
Gordimer, Nadine
Gordon, Mary
Goreau, Angeline
Goreau, Stephen
Goyen, William
Graham, Jim
Graham, Liz
Green, Ashbel
Gregory, Blanche
Grumbach, Doris
Guston, Philip
Guttfreund, Andre
H
Hammett, Dashiell
Hansell, Betsey
Hardwick, Elizabeth
Harnack, Curt
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Hayman, Geoff
Hazzard, Shirley
Heaney, Seamus
Hecht, Anthony
Heidegger, Martin
Heller, Joseph
Hellman, Lillian
Hemingway, Ernest
Heyen, William
Hilberry, Conrad
Hilberry, Suzanne
Hippus, Zinaida
Hitler, Adolf
Hoffman, Dan
Hollander, John
Holmes, David
Homer
Hopkins, Gerard Manley
Howard, Maureen
Howard, Richard
Howe, Irving
Howells, William Dean
Hughes, Ted
Hujar, Peter
Hume, David
Humphrey, Bill
Humphrey, Dorothy
Hunt, Chantal
Hunt, John
Huxley, Aldous
Huysmans, Georges
I
Ibsen, Henrik
Irving, John
Ivanov, Vyacheslav
Iverson, Brad
Ives, Charles
J
Jaffe, Anielea
Jaffee, Annette
James, Alice
James, Henry
James, William, xiv
Janeway, Eliot
Janeway, Elizabeth
Jarrell, Randall
Jaynes, Julian
Johns, Jasper
Johnson, Diane
Johnson, Greg, xii
Johnson, Samuel
Jones, Howard Mumford
Jong, Erica
Joyce, James
Joyce, Lucia
Jung, Carl
K
Kabir
Kafka, Franz
Kant, Immanuel
Kaplan, Justin
Kaufmann, Hazel
Kaufmann, Stanley
Kaufmann, Walter
Kavan, Anna
Kawabata, Yasunari
Kayatev, Valentin
Kazin, Alfred
Keeley, Bob
Keeley, Edmund “Mike,”
Keeley, Mary
Kennedy, Edward “Ted,”
Kennedy, John F.
Kennedy, X. J.
Khodasevich, Vladislaw
Khrushchev, Nikita
Kierkegaard, Søren
King, Stephen
Klebnikov, George
Kline, George
Koch, Stephen
Kollwitz, Käthe
Krementz, Jill
Kumin, Maxine
Kunitz, Stanley
Kusnetsov, Felix
Kyriakou, Rena
L
Laing, R. D.
Langdon, Helen
Lardner, Susan
Laurence, Margaret
Lawford, Pat Kennedy
Lawrence, D. H.
Lebowitz, Fran
Legler, Philip
Lem, Stanislaw
Leonard, John
Levin, Herb
Levin, Marjorie “Marge,”
Levine, George
Lincoln, Abraham
Lindberg, Stanley
Lish, Gordon
Liszt, Franz
Litz, Marion
Litz, Walt
Lodge, David
Lodge, Mary
Lowell, Robert
L.S.
M
MacLeod, Alistair
Macrae, Jack, III
Magaloff, Nikita
Magritte, René
Mahler, Gustav
Mailer, Betsey
Mailer, Norman
Mailer, Norris
Malamud, Ann
Malamud, Bernard
Mandelstam, Osip
Mann, Thomas
Manson, Charles
Márquez, Gabriel García
Martin, John
Marx, Karl
Marx, Sue
Matisse, Henri
Matthiessen, Peter
Mattiuzzio, Marian
Max (teaching assistant)
Mayakowsky, Vladimir
Mazzaro, Jerry
McCarthy, Mary
McGovern, George
McNamara, Gene
McNear, Suzanne
Melville, Herman
Mendelssohn, Felix
Merwin, W. S.
Miller, Arthur
Minaux, André
Mishima, Yukio
Moller, Hans
Molly (Plimpton’s editor)
Monet, Claude
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de
Moore, Brian
Moore, Marianne
Moore, Richard
Morgan, Fred
Morgenthau, Bob
Morgenthau, Lucinda.
See
Franks, Lucinda
Morris, Donald
Moss, Howard
Mountain, Kathryn
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
Muer, Joe
Munch, Edvard
Murdoch, Iris
N
Nabokov, Vladimir
Nemerov, Howard
Neumann, Erich
Nevler, Leona
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Nin, Anaïs
Nixon, Richard M.
Norris, Joan
O
Oates, Carolina (mother)
Oates, Fred (brother)
Oates, Frederic (father)
Oates, Lynn (sister)
Oates, Nancy
O’Connell, George
O’Connor, Flannery
Ogren, Linnea
O’Hara, John
O’Keeffe, Georgia
Olivier, Sir Laurence
O’Neill, Eugene
P
Palmer, Dottie
Pascal, Blaise
Pater, Walter
Patton, Bob
Paz, Octavio
Pearl, Marilyn
Percy, Walker
Phillips, Judy
Phillips, Matt
Phillips, Robert
Picasso, Pablo
Pickering, Samuel F., Jr.
Pirsig, Robert
Pirsig, Wendy
Pissaro, Jean-Paul
Pitcher, George
Plath, Sylvia
Plato
Plimpton, George
Poe, Edgar Allan
Porter, Fairfield
Porter, Katherine Anne
Poulenc, Francis
Pound, Ezra
Pratt, Christopher
Proust, Marcel
Pynn, Nelia
R
Rachmaninoff, Sergei
Rader, Dotson
Rauschenberg, Robert
Ravel, Maurice
Reagan, Ronald
Reed, John
Rich, Adrienne
Richardson, Dorothy
Richard W.
See
Wishnetsky, Richard
Rieff, David
Rilke, Rainer Maria
Robbins, Henry
Roberts, Oral
Robertson, Bill
Rodriguez, Miguel
Roethke, Theodore
Rorem, Ned
Rosen, Carol
Rosenblatt, Roger
Roth, Philip
Rourke, Byron
Rourke, Carolyn
R. Q.
Rubinstein, Arthur
Rudenstine, Angelica
S
Sale, Roger
Salisbury, Harrison
Sand, George
Saroyan, William
Sartre, Jean-Paul
Schoenberg, Arnold
Schopenhauer, Arthur
Schumann, Robert
Schwartz, Delmore
Schwartz, Lynne Sharon
Sexton, Anne
Shahn, Ben
Shakespeare, William
Shapiro, Lois
Sheed, Wilfrid
Shelley, Mary
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Showalter, Elaine
Showalter, English
Showalter, Vinca
Shrifte, Evelyn
Shriver, Eunice Kennedy
Shriver, Sargent
Siegal, Clancy
Simon, Abbey
Simon, John
Singer, Isaac Bashevis
Sissman, L. E.
Sjoberg, Leif
Sluckis, Mykolas
Smedick, Lois
Smith, Kay
Smith, Mike
Smith, Raymond J. (husband)
Smith, Stevie
Smith, William Jay
Sontag, Susan
Sophocles
Southworth, Mrs.
Spinoza, Baruch
Stackpole, Willa
Stalin, Joseph
Starer, Robert
Stearns, Philip
Steegmuller, Francis
Steinberg, Saul
Stern, Dan
Stern, Jess
Sterne, Wesley
Stevens, Wallace
Stevenson, Adlai
Stone, Irving
Stone, Robert
Straus, Roger
Streep, Meryl
Styron, William
Sullivan, Edward
Sullilvan, John
Swedenborg, Emanuel
Swenson, May
Swift, Jonathan
T
Tanner, Tony
Taylor, Peter
Terkel, Studs
Tertz, Abram (Andrei Sinyavsky)
Thomas, Dylan
Thoreau, Henry David
Thurber, James
Tinguely, Jean
Tolstoy, Leo
Trenner, Richard
Tuttleton, James
Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens)
Tyler, Anne
U
Updike, John
Updike, Martha
V
Valéry, Paul
van Dyke, Henry
Van Gogh, Vincent
Vendler, Helen
Vickery, Nathan
Victor, Tom
Vidal, Gore
Vonnegut, Kurt
Voznesensky, Andrey
W
Walton, William
Warhol, Andy
Warner, Susan
Watson, Ed
Waugh, Evelyn
Wayman, Tom
Weil, Simone
Weiss, Renee