The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (9 page)

Now writing a novel is a process. It is an experience that evolves. The novel is its own experience and its subject is always the evolving of consciousness…that of the reader, the author, the characters…the world itself. Art that is less than this is no longer interesting to me. In
Wonderland
I was dictated to by an organizational clarity that forbade expansion…wanting the work to be “perfect” in its form…to possess a structure I had worked out in advance. Its curve is tragic. It was a deliberate tragedy, worked out in detail, structurally meticulous. Much more, but that formal rigor was the mistake; I must have been listening to or reading old-fashioned critics…really can’t remember the genesis of the formal aspect of that novel…though it might have been simply that I saw, in those mid-and late 60’s, that certain American pathways were tragic and those who took them lived out a tragic curve, a tragic destiny. I don’t disagree with that judgment even now. It is quite right. What I might have considered was the ahistorical transcendence of the historical-local…in which (as an artist) I of course believed and lived anyway. I did not, therefore, allow my characters the vision I myself had and used all the time, like a fish in its element, largely unconscious. But the next novel, and all the writing that follows, assumes a vantage point of total transcendence, the liberation from blindness, freedom from snarls, restraints, ignorance, sin, whatever it might be called (mortality?) and begins at that point, with everything accomplished. The blundering of time is over; there is a timeless or ahistorical vision; and the main characters sense but do not know this. This is analogous to our own lives; we sense salvation from blindness
but do not, and cannot, know it. We are in time and in eternity, at once. We know the one and sense the other. We believe in the one because it is obvious (or is it?) but we must have faith in the other because, apart from a few visionary dreams or odd experiences, there is nothing religious about this certainty; it is a fact of our human psychic life. It is an attribute of the soul. It is our humanity…. So the novel is a dreaming-back and dreaming-forward. Time is broken, fluid, miraculous. The first syllable assumes the last. It is not poetry, not lyric, because it is historical also and deals with human beings in society, as well as in their own heads. There is beauty in creating it though I might know beforehand that critics will be hostile on other grounds or positive on other grounds…seeing as “formless” what is necessarily free, fluid, and determined only by the evolution of the characters’ souls. Death is not a defeat. Not in my world. Death is an event, one event of many. Destinies are worked out, certain limited visions are necessarily jettisoned (as Plath and Berryman and my own suicidal characters and Eugene O’Neill and Hemingway and Faulkner, etc., etc. gave up on their evolutions, having gone too far in the wrong direction), but this is not a defeat: it is a recognition. How clear it is from Anne Sexton’s last poems that she recognized and welcomed her impending death…. An elegant beauty in that gesture, no matter what people say, misreading style for content….

So the end is in the beginning. Time is honored, but not allowed to smother us. We live in time and breathe eternity. Which is why I can read only those who love both time and eternity, not disparaging time (as Eliot did) or eternity (as so many of the “hard-headed cynics” do). Art is a celebration and a furthering of one’s psychic development. It is never totally personal and never impersonal. It is, finally, only itself: a supreme experience.

[…]

January 20, 1975.
A friend teaching James Joyce…commenting on his ambivalence regarding not Joyce but the idea of Joyce…coinciding with my own doubts about a too-finely-constructed novel. At what point does the craftsmanship or genius simply become fussing…? Had one sixteen or even seven years to work on a book, at what point
would the passion, the book’s initial energy, fade, and a newer, more cold and cunning consciousness take over…? Now that I write in a different way, different to me, I am always tempted to revise. I sit at the desk and instead of plunging into the next chapter, dealing with the next scene, I reread and decide that a certain paragraph could be improved, so I rewrite the page, and am led then into rewriting the next page…putting in inserts and expanding and revising and clarifying and making more graceful the prose…. I look up and find that hours have passed. I have “moved”. And I am really.

…The only woman writer included in
Playboy
’s big twentieth anniversary anthology and very, very doubtful of my deserving to be there, in any sense of the word deserve.
Playboy
has been so much maligned, misunderstood…but had it not been misunderstood, it might have the circulation of
Harper’s
, perhaps…. Interesting to read in the little introduction to the story of mine they included (“Saul Bird…!”—ubiquitous brat)
*
about myself
as others see me
. This is the image that has got loose in the world, the story itself seems to deny its basic psychological assumptions: a pale, thin woman so shy as to be “almost withdrawn”…“terrified” at the idea of flying. Remarks made about my writing are fine, quite appropriate, but remarks about my image are extraordinary…. Not only did I fly a great deal until the age of twenty-two, but my father flew small two-passenger planes for fun, and I often accompanied him. At the age of twenty-two, after a horrible trip from Buffalo to Madison, Wisconsin, when probably everyone thought we would crash and the stewardesses looked green, I decided quite rationally not to fly again for a while. But I could very easily take a plane anywhere this evening; I am not “terrified” in the slightest.

[…]

January 28, 1975.
[…] Vanguard is working on
The Poisoned Kiss: Stories of Portugal
. What a continuing headache that book gives me…! The writing of those stories was so odd, awkward, inexplicable…my
embarrassment over them still very real…for though years have passed now I am now more unable to understand the book than I ever was. It is not a fraud; it is not a work of the imagination in my sense of the imagination; it is only itself, isolated, connected with nothing that precedes or follows. My interest is in American life, in the various strata of power…the interplay of personalities…the places at which temporal and eternal aspects of the self touch, wed, part, return.

[…]

All creative work is mysterious, not just my experience with Fernandes.
*
[…] I remember writing and rewriting, abandoning the project and then returning, exasperated in a way that I rarely am with my own work. My own work!—that is what calls me, always. And Fernandes was not my own, was not I. Yet if not I, who?—for I can recognize certain cadences, now, certain preoccupations of my own, in his prose.

Why inspiration comes, why inspiration disappears…who knows? Why do we love violently and then stop loving? Violence, violent emotions: always temporary? Or are they meant to be transformed into something more lasting, more intelligently human? A great deal of “inspiration” comes to me while I am teaching. I love the interplay of the students’ minds with my own, I love their unpredictability, their occasional outrageous questions—which show me how wildly different we all are, though ostensibly “united” in a classroom situation. […] A teacher, perhaps even more than a writer, requires humility…not the experience of being humbled, still less of being humiliated; simply humility. It keeps us all sane.

February 1, 1975.
…Dinner with friends last night, here; speaking of many things but quite incidentally of “spirits”…“spiritualism”…about which one supposes there is a sane, rationalist consensus of opinion…astonished to hear that our friends have had experience with such things, on a minor scale; are not committed to “believing” or “disbelieving.” Despite the Fernandes incident, or incidents, which belong to
some years past and consequently to another, former self, there is something in me quite hesitant to want to believe in a continuity of life beyond the body…one life, one body at a time!…one life is quite enough to deal with.

We seem to swing back and forth between believing that life has “meaning” and that it is “meaningless.” At times one belief is utterly convincing, at other times the other. Useless to attempt to reconcile the two certainties. Concepts are concepts, mere words…life is life, the present moment…trouble begins when we confuse the two. The idea of “death” is terrifying, but the “event” of death is neutral, not experienced as a concept, hence devoid of its emotional aura. However, it is quite legitimate to fear pain. It seems to me only intelligent, only human, to wish to be spared pain—whether “unnecessary” or “necessary” (and the concept of “necessary” pain is dubious), without a theological assumption of rewards for suffering and martyrdom, pain of any sort takes place in a vacuum and is a waste.[…]

February 11, 1975.
…Dinner the other evening with John Gardner and his wife. Hours of conversation. He imagines we are antithetical and perhaps we are…he believes that art can be “directed” far more than I allow; he believes one can more or less determine, program, what one will write. Perhaps. Possibly. It has not been my experience, however, that anything valuable (to me) has ever come out of a highly conscious, highly deliberate act of writing. He tells me to write a story about a family—in which things go well, for a change. “I,” Joyce Smith, Joyce who is his friend, Joyce the conscious being, would gladly write such a novel for the edification of all; but unfortunately, that self does not handle the writing, and will accept no assignments. Would that it might…. John seems not to understand or to allow that he understands (the two being quite different) that none of us “direct” our lives, really; our lives, our destinies, direct us. The ego is consciousness; the self or soul is consciousness and unconsciousness both, past and present and future in one essence. I know this, without being able to explain it. Explanations sound flat. All right: let there be no explanations. Let there be only the continuity of domestic miracles we call our lives….
If I could direct my writing, I would not be having such difficulties with
The Assassins
. One more chapter to go, the concluding chapter. […] I am angry—for the moment. It is 5:59 on a dark dreary February day and I must think about dinner soon (dinner? food? real life?) and I must think about reading Anne Sexton’s
The Awful Rowing Toward God
(which I am reviewing, I hope, for the
New York Times
)
*
but I am afraid to read the poems because I am afraid of missing her too much and more than that (to be honest) I am afraid of the death in the poetry, the death-knowledge…but I must also think about tomorrow’s classes, tomorrow my longest, fullest, most draining day (from 11 to approximately 6
P.M.
)…the cat outside on my windowsill trying to get my attention so I will let her in…and then she will want to go out again, and again she will want to be let in…and all this makes me angry, the novel makes me angry, when I think of former selves of mine giving interviews and remarking that it is “easy” to write (which it never was, but I didn’t remember the difficulties) I am angry at those former selves and disown them and feel the exasperation other people say they feel for me, sometimes; I don’t blame them. And now it is 6:05. And nothing has changed—except the light outside—it’s almost dark, sub-zero weather, thankfully no wind from the river, my anger is abating but only (I know well) because I’m about to retreat for the night. I must record and remember these hours of befuddlement and rage and nullity.

February 18, 1975.
[…] Reviewed the Sexton book today (
The Awful Rowing Toward God
); had reread her earlier books and was struck by the sameness in her poetry. From the very first poem in the very first book (
To Bedlam and Partway Back
) Anne Sexton knew her “subject” as well as she would ever know it. Powerful, sad, disturbing…occasionally witty…but so limited, so painfully limited! In
The Awful Rowing Toward God
there are echoes of Plath and Berryman and Roethke, sometimes direct borrowings (the maggots like “pearls,” an image of Plath’s; and “Ms. Dog,” rather like Berryman’s “Mr. Bones”), but I didn’t want to mention such things in the review. Anne Sexton had talked of having a posthumous book, thinking perhaps of Sylvia Plath’s achievement and
acclaim, and so she has one—a considerable accomplishment in its own right, I believe, though why must one die to underscore the authenticity of one’s pain???? What Anne Sexton means by “God” I can’t imagine. Her “God” has masculine characteristics. I think it was simply death she wanted, and “God” was a word or concept she invented to use in place of the cruel word “death.” Surely God or the God-experience is available in everyday life, at any moment…it seems implausible to plunge into death in order to achieve “God.”

February 20, 1975.
…With the novel completed and mailed out, a wonderful sense of freedom and tranquility; sense that nothing needs to be done immediately. (In fact I have many obligations and chores…but they don’t seem to press at all upon me.) At the same time I am thinking about the next novel and about a possible short story, “A Middle-Class Education”
*
…so my interest in short fiction hasn’t exactly died out. […] An interesting day, very quiet. Ray went to the University and I was at home entirely alone for the first time in many, many weeks…. The experience of being alone in the house is, strangely, one I have so rarely now. I am never alone!…Amazing, to think of it. I am no longer alone for very long and haven’t been now for years. Of course I am “alone” at my desk, when working, as Ray is at his desk…but I am not alone in any larger sense. People who are lonely because they are “alone” would find it difficult to believe that the state of aloneness is in itself something precious…which married people surrender…at least people who are so closely, intensely married as Ray and I are. (We have not spent more than two or three nights apart from one another in over fourteen years.)…Alone for three hours this afternoon, the house absolutely silent, outside snow and vivid blue sky and sunshine, and my mind drifting free…realized I had not daydreamt in months…that I no longer “daydream” as I once did…. Consciously thought of the places of my childhood: tried to imagine in my mind’s eye the old farmhouse, my old room, the kitchen, living room, parents’ bedroom, the one-room schoolhouse and the cinder
playground outside and the lane with the mud puddles and the house next door, where that unfortunate family lived…the father abusive, an alcoholic, the mother a factory-worker (he was unemployed)…five children…one of them, a girl, a year older than I and my best friend for years…. The memories sprang into my mind so vividly!…it was astonishing. I could “see” the room I’d had as a child…could see the old bureau, the linoleum floor, the shelves with glass figurines on them…could “see” these sights though I could not have recalled them consciously or intellectually. A remarkable experience. There is so much there in the mind…. As in
Wonderland
Jesse’s earlier memories are closer to him, more deeply imbedded, than anything he has experienced as an adult…so this must be true for us all…. The earliest sights, the earliest rooms and playgrounds and backyards and the houses of relatives (like my grandmother’s) seem to fix themselves in the brain far more powerfully than anything afterward. I think we deceive ourselves if we believe otherwise. In my case, I have no desire to return to childhood in any sense…would not want to relive even a day…have no sentimental yearnings along those lines; perhaps it is only unhappy childhoods that make one wish to re-live certain events?…in order to make them right the second time. I don’t know. I begin to see as I grow older how very fortunate I was in my early years: a mother, a father, a grandmother (my paternal grandmother) who loved me very much. And rural surroundings, beautiful surroundings…beautiful in their simple way…. This reservoir of visions or memories surrounds me, I suppose, at all times; the “unconscious” of my personal life buoys up the consciousness of everyday life, feeds it, and is rarely experienced. Very interesting, very!…fascinating. A kind of laboratory experiment today with my own consciousness the subject. Everyone is like this: of that I am certain. These early memories ought to be the subjects of deliberate, conscious meditations from time to time. It was like a journey and yet there was nothing odd or hallucinatory or even very emotional about it. Somehow I feel refreshed, strengthened….