The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (13 page)

H
aving completed
Childwold
in the fall of 1975, Oates enters the year 1976 with her characteristic mix of projects: short fiction, critical essays (including one on the author she mentions in the journal more than any other: James Joyce), and book reviews. During such times when her mind was not moored by a novel-length project, she often reflected backward, as she does now, to recall her youth, especially her immersion in the life of the intellect in her early twenties.

Soon enough, however, she became involved in a novel, albeit a minor one: the academic satire
Unholy Loves,
which Vanguard would publish in 1979. The journal has relatively little to say about this project, musing instead about such bedrock issues as self-identity—in her case, the difference between the public “Joyce Carol Oates” and the private “Joyce Smith”—and writing as a vocation. In the spring, another long project beckoned, a novella-and-stories to be called
All the Good People I’ve Left Behind,
though again Oates noted that this was a “minor” effort. In retrospect, everything she did this year came to seem a prelude, a kind of waiting-for, the major novel that was simmering in her imagination, the work she called her “religious novel” that would bear the title
Son of the Morning.

In the spring, Oates and Smith enjoyed another trip to upstate New York and New York City, again meeting with some well-known writers, this time Donald Barthelme and Gail Godwin. Oates had had a prickly relationship with Barthelme, who had publicly expressed a distaste for reading her work, but Godwin was already a longtime friend; the two had been corresponding for several years, as they would continue to do for many more.

Late in the spring, Oates is already thinking ahead obsessively to
Son of the Morning
but, as she noted on May 28, she couldn’t “possibly start writing for a while. Too much to sift through, too much to absorb.” One way she prepared for the novel was by conducting a slow, thorough rereading of the Bible, a book she found “mesmerizing” as literature but very troubling in its characterization of Jesus Christ, in whom she found little to admire, and in its influence on millions of people. As a guide to moral conduct, in fact, she found the Bible “almost worthless,” and if anything these months of meditation confirmed her distaste for organized religion and its effect upon the masses.

In July the couple made another lengthy car trip, during which she attended her twentieth high school reunion in Buffalo and caught up with some of her old friends from Williamsville Central High School. The trip also included a stop in Massachusetts to visit John Updike and his wife, a cordial meeting that seems to have affirmed the two writers in their respect for each other and for each other’s work.

As Oates records her various external activities, however, she constantly reverts to a more philosophical, reflective mode, focusing especially on the writing life, its travails and pitfalls. These include the impact of negative reviews
(The Assassins,
in particular, had received harsh treatment in the press) and occasional instructions to herself, as in this passage on July 29: “The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you’ve done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well.”

Finally, just as the fall semester is getting under way, Oates notes on September 14 that she has begun
Son of the Morning.
Once launched into the project, she worked with her usual speed and intensity, and though this is one of her longer novels, it is finished by mid-December. As she writes on December 6, in composing this novel she “seems to have been
exploring certain obsessions of my own, and certain possibilities. The draining away of the personal into the impersonal; the loss of ‘concrete, finite’ life for the sake of one’s goal or mission or art.”

Though she immediately begins taking notes for yet another novel—the completed but never-published
Jigsaw
—and continues tinkering with
Son of the Morning,
the year ends on a note of triumph: “What a great abyss of time! Freedom.” She became absorbed, once again, in relatively minor projects, but it would be more than a year before she would make herself vulnerable to another huge invasion of her imagination—namely,
Bellefleur,
a novel that would not be published until 1980. Enormous changes, however, would soon be in the offing, in both her professional and personal lives.

January 1, 1976.
…A near-eventless New Year. Several years ago, when my introversion was at its deepest, I was visited with amazing dreams…really quite frightening dreams. Since then I’ve been moving steadily away from that sort of experience. My personality is more or less the same, I suppose; I doubt that it has changed much since I’ve been about fourteen. But my psychic experiences have certainly changed. I remember being convinced that the processes of the unconscious were incredibly enchanting and powerful, and that the “external world” was a paltry experience compared to them. I suppose this is still true—or would be. But, in fact, my inner experiences are now quite ordinary, and have been for many months. Not that I’m extroverted: not really.

Having finished
Childwold
a while ago, having taken notes on one or two novels, nothing that compels me, here I am, on a freezing evening in the New Year, perfectly at rest. I can move in one direction…or in another…or in none. Utter peace.

[…]

Thirty-seven years old. A sense of having lived for 100 years. Lifetimes, lifetimes. The pleasure of writing. It hardly matters, at times, what one
writes. As much pleasure out of those superficial satires
*
as out of laboring through
The Assassins
. Is it worth it, after all, to labor at anything in life…? One naturally wishes, then, to be rewarded. But the reward will never compensate the effort. Thus bitterness follows.

Well, I have never really labored. Not as others claim to have done. What doesn’t come easily ought not to be attempted at all…something is wrong, the unconscious isn’t cooperating…. The imagination between novels: curiously at peace, yet restless too. A “religious” novel beckons. People seem to have tired of my serious novels, my big novels, and I don’t blame them, there is something terrible about a deathly serious novel…especially when it follows another deathly serious novel. Still, a work must be granted its own autonomy. The characters will insist upon their lives….

[…]

January 8, 1976.
…The need to resist theorizing. If an artist is a theoretician, his art will be subservient to his theory; it will exist to demonstrate theory. […]

The need to channel into one’s art all that is serious in one’s life. Life can be playful enough, accidental in every way. It should be life—merely! Art, however, is a serious matter. The artist’s essential nature—whether easygoing or difficult—should not have much to do with the art itself. “Joyce Smith”: the process of living with as much pleasure as possible. “Joyce Carol Oates”: the process that exists in and through and because of the books. No reason that “Joyce Smith” should feel obligated to “Joyce Carol Oates” in any way—to be “intellectual” or “mysterious” or “artistic.” One’s life is one’s own business.

[…]

February 29, 1976.
…Sick for the first time in nine years but didn’t miss a day of teaching; not that I felt puritanically bound to teach but (I think) I wanted to see if I could impersonate myself…. I seem to have been successful. Went out to dinner with two other couples Saturday
night, in even worse condition (the disease wasn’t infectious) and impersonated myself again. A fascinating experience.

What is illness…? Retreat from the world. Descent into the self. A totally different consciousness. All values upset, all emotions altered.

The atrophying of the senses: merciful. If we must die, we don’t at all mind dying from a body that has ceased to be fully alive; and we don’t know, we aren’t conscious, of the gradual deterioration of that body and of the senses…. Slowly, subtly, the universe alters; it does not suddenly reject us but it is we who reject it, though not dramatically.

Aches in every joint & muscle. Eyes watery. Piercing pains in head. Jaw. Hearing affected. No sense of smell or taste. No appetite at all. Uncanny. Talking too much effort…therefore communication dies down…therefore other people don’t matter. At least, not as much as they once did. Lethargy of the soul. Head ringing. (Auditory hallucinations—buzzes, whistles, electronic-music-like, electric organ-like; reminds one forcibly that the head is encased in bone and that bone is, well, hard. Ringing noises mainly. Not too loud, any of this—just distracting.)

Illness: the cocoon protecting us from our caring about the world we can’t, for the duration of the illness, have. A certain tolerance, an easygoingness. Which I feel right now. Quite different from the world of the “healthy” & as legitimate as that world, in my opinion.

Still, I’m relieved to be better.

[…]

March 7, 1976.
…Completed my essay “Jocoserious Joyce”
*
…written with great delight…a sense of Joyce’s marvelous vitality, his celebration of life and art…though I know from the letters that life was rather difficult for him, and
Ulysses
wearying at times: still, what triumph!

The main activity of my life is, more and more, the creation of certain works of art which I know to have value, whether others recognize this value or not. To be a literary personality one must take care not to publish too often: a novel every five or six years, but no more frequently. I seem to be concerned with my actual work more than I am with my public reputation…which I believe to be more or less finished by now. Since about 1970 I’ve given up on that public aspect of “Joyce Carol Oates”; I hope but don’t really expect to be understood or taken seriously except by a very few people. Since I am a woman, and quite realistic, I must accept the fact that in choosing to write about subjects generally claimed by men I will be violently resented by many people—men and women both—and that I will never enjoy the kind of quiet, near-universal acclaim Eudora Welty has earned. It must be nice to have that sort of reputation—to know that when you publish a new book it will be greeted with respect, never mocked or dismissed. However, Eudora Welty is Eudora Welty and I can only be myself; I have no choice but to continue with what I am doing.

[…]

Why did Hemingway feel so strongly and so bitterly about the reviewers…? I wonder if other writers share his sensitivity, or if my placid indifference is more common. (Faulkner certainly didn’t care about critical response.) The advantages of publishing often: one simply can’t take it very seriously year after year. […]

March 17, 1976.
…Taught my “Literature and Psychology” class with some difficulty since working-men were pounding on the roof just overhead. The Administration’s eerie contempt for academic work…! More or less as usual, people said, but I seemed to myself different: hearing my own voice, hearing echoes, losing the thread of a sentence midway through (but completing it nevertheless: the voice just continues). Talking afterward about teaching. One’s personality, persona. Which is the truer self? Alone now I seem to be a certain person but in front of 130 people I am no less real, no less “sincere.” The near, the far, Woolf’s lighthouse seen from a distance and then up close: both visions are of course real. Both necessary…. Thinking of college, undergraduate days, the intense emotional experience of those years. High school seemed silly even at the
time though I was linked to its feverish activities by two or three close friends—ostensibly more “normal” in interests than I. College, however, struck me from the very first as extraordinary…marvelous…intellectually and emotionally exciting…a kind of paradise. […] The desire to learn, to discover, to discover oneself actually in the process of…changing. To read Nietzsche and become a different person, in part, after a mere hour. Have I any longer that capacity for remarkable change? I seem to myself so placid now, so content. It is suspicious, this equanimity. Will it last…? By contrast my adolescence was tumultuous; when not carried out of myself by reading or writing or arguing I was rather subject to moods of one kind or another. Perhaps this was all to the good…is it really such an ideal, to be “free” of moods […]

Life in my early twenties almost exclusively in terms of the intellect. Reading Kant, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Plato, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Beckett…. Life in the world of the sorority was a dull background to the intense, vivid, marvelous foreground of thinking. The joy of writing papers & exams. Not competitive, really: the sense of exploration. Exam questions drawing me out of myself, crystallizing ideas only potential previously…. Difficult to explain but the emotions prevail. A quest, a challenge, a risk, a creation: the next hour can unfold miracles. I suppose I have lost some of this. Philosophy now seems to me philosophizing.

[…]

March 22, 1976.
[…] The childless couple, my friend P.B. said once,
*
can retain romance and love indefinitely, because the sense of being young lovers, still, is never damaged. The couple with children, however, is irreparably altered; one of the issues that contributes to their estrangement is the children—arguing over the children.

[…]

I seem to have never developed a maternal instinct. (If there is such a thing.) Given a doll for a birthday once I cheerfully gave it away to a neighbor girl, unwittingly hurting my grandmother’s feelings. The doll was a very expensive one. I feel tenderness and a desire to nurture, to tend, to
feed, to touch, to caress, to hold—but these feelings have always been directed toward my husband; and I didn’t feel them at all for F., my near-fiancé, or for other young men. I am fond of the cats but surely that doesn’t count for very much—everyone likes pets, pets are easy to like. Imagining myself as a mother: a blank. Maybe I would have enjoyed it. Maybe not. In reading about Sylvia Plath’s odd obsessive desire to have lots of children, though she feared childbirth and seems not to have actually liked children, I am baffled, simply: why did so intelligent a young woman think that marriage and children were not only inevitable, but desirable? Having children is, after all, not something one does for one’s own development, or as a badge of normalcy (in the eyes of others)—it’s for the children only.