The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (3 page)
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Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
We saw at Tassajara and Esalen people grimly hoping to find something to believe…
something
meaningful. It’s touching, it’s not an impulse anyone should wish to criticize, let alone ridicule. The only story I could write about either place would be satirical, so I’ll let the whole experience pass.
Marvelous simplicity & anonymity of travel. Taking notes in small towns across America. So many people…!
Meditation. Paring-back of self. & the realization that while I’d conquered certain impulses toward destruction, I hadn’t conquered certain equally annoying impulses toward being
good
.
[…]
Dreams of my Grandmother Woodside.
*
“I don’t mind,” she said, dying. To comfort me. “All religions are the same,” she had said once, years ago…. Selfless love, uncomplaining, all-forgiving. My facial structure is hers; my eyes; certain traits of personality. (Sense of humor from my father; satirical & artistic interests. A certain silly playfulness. From my mother patience, affection, energy, absorption in other people…. ) In my dreams my grandmother, both dead and “alive,” is always silent. I wake from these dreams with a terrible sense of loss…also with a sense of being loved, cherished, valued…of having a definite place in the universe.
(A pity that the recording of essentially happy events seems, in a journal, self-congratulatory.)
September 7, 1973.
…Excitement of new semester. The usual difficulties with the bookstore…too many students in one class…exhilaration, tending toward mania.
At home, an attack of tachycardia that left me breathless and exhausted. It lasted more than an hour, during which I had plenty of time to think of…of the usual things…of having lived, of being prepared to die, of being thrust out of the temporal dimension altogether as if thrust out of the body…. Saw splashes of light, mainly orange. Vivid visual “memories.” A peculiar sort of euphoria. (As if already dead…?) At thirty-five I feel ready to die, to pass on to another plane of existence; but I’m fully aware of how absurd this sounds. When I had my first attack at the age of eighteen, at Syracuse, I was terrified; I didn’t want to die; I struggled against it, nearly suffocating. The second attack took place in a gym class—a girl had run into me, hard, while we were playing basketball—and was so bad I had to be taken to the infirmary. I remember turning the pages of Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
, trying to read. Tears in my eyes because, while I wasn’t in pain, I thought I might die…. The next attack was easier emotionally and psychologically. An attack I had at Wisconsin, once, while coughing violently, left me exhausted and drained and other-worldly. (A girl who thought I was going to die, was so
upset herself that she fainted…. ) Now the attacks are as surprising as always, but not as frightening. I lie down and wait for them to pass. They are quite infrequent—once a year, perhaps—and no longer have the power to terrify. If you imagine you’re going to die once, and give up, the second time you give up immediately, and without a struggle there’s no terror.
Curious sort of euphoria. I wonder if others have experienced this….
Afterward, very tired; but a sense of peacefulness, satisfaction.
September 10, 1973.
…Excitement of new classes seems more intense than usual in the dept. We are all children….
[…]
(Days filled with “new” people, mainly students. Their focus on me as “Joyce Carol Oates”—circus-like atmosphere. Oddly draining.)
[…]
October 27, 1973.
…Joint professorships offered Ray and me by Syracuse;
*
sad to be forced to decline them.
Do With Me What You Will
published. Quite a risk, offering myself like that; a work so intimate in terms of feelings, experience. Never again, probably. Not worth it.
[…]
To be unmoved by excellent reviews: this isn’t normal. I can see that this past year of meditation is having the result of diminishing my emotions generally. Whether it’s good or bad or merely necessary I can’t know…. Detachment from “maya.” Danger of no return.
(Comparable to the detachment from one’s own life experienced during tachycardia. The queer euphoria that arises when one
gives up.)
The person one
is
, one would not wish to write about. As a novelist one must value eccentricity, passion, paradox, nuisance, surprise, reversals, exasperating pity…. Anyone in whom the life-force is lovely & criminal. Gathering to frenzy.
Victims of their own passion?—saviors of others? Unclear.
November 10, 1973.
…Disturbing “anticipatory” dream re. Gail Godwin, whom I’ve never met. Uncanny; almost unpleasant. I had the dream, and her letter came the next day.
Well….
What is one to conclude? Sheer coincidence; or, one can somehow “see” into the future; or, time is already complete and we merely remember; or, telepathy. (?) (She had so disturbing a psychic experience that I somehow registered it. But how likely is this “explanation”…or any explanation?)
December 18, 1973.
…Planning
Ontario Review
.
*
Someone asked me re. Publications & I’m astonished at the number, all in a brief period of time.
Do With Me What You Will; The Hostile Sun
†
; “Miracle Play” at the Phoenix off-Broadway; stories, poems, etc. in
Sparrow, Partisan, Hudson, The Critic, NYTimes Book Rev., Remington Review, Southern Review, Journal of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, Literary Review
, and even
Viva
…. (This is really too much. When did I write all these things…?)
December 29, 1973.
…MLA convention at Chicago;
‡
busy, enjoyable. I was “used” by a Feminist group without knowing it until it was too late—but don’t much mind. (Scheduled to be the second of four
speakers, I was moved to the fourth slot. Nearly two hours passed before I was allowed to give my talk; and of course everyone was bored and restless by then. Still, I
think
I was effective—I gave up on the idea of an academic talk and simply conversed.)
A.K. showed up & thrust something at me, a tiny package. A razor blade in it, I’m led to believe.
*
But I shrank away, surprised, and dropped it, and never did retrieve it.
He looked pale, haggard, bitter. Murderous. (Five minutes afterward Leslie Fiedler
†
showed up to warn me about A.K. He should be considered “dangerous,” evidently.)
I can’t believe, though, that he would really try to hurt me…in a physical way….
Would he?
A waste of his energy, hatred for me. It disturbs me to learn he wishes my death but it really doesn’t interest other people, nor does it help A.K. much with his life.
Embarrassing, to be the object of someone’s obsessional hatred. As much a nuisance of being over-loved.
Love/hate. But I don’t think the man ever
loved
me. That’s unlikely.
*
Black Sparrow Press published several of Oates’s more experimental, less commercial books in the 1970s. As it happened, however,
The Poisoned Kiss
would be published by Vanguard in 1975.
†
Jules Wendall was a major character in Oates’s novel
them
(1969), which had won the National Book Award in 1970.
*
The story “Honeybit,” inspired by Oates’s dream, appeared in
Confrontation
in fall 1974 and was collected in
The Goddess and Other Women
(Vanguard, 1974).
†
“The Golden Madonna” would appear, in fact, in
Playboy
, in the March 1974 issue. Oates collected the story in
Crossing the Border
(Vanguard, 1976).
‡
Stephen Dedalus is the hero of James Joyce’s novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916).
*
Walter Pater (1839–94), an essayist and philosopher who helped promulgate the idea of art and aesthetics—“art for art’s sake”—as a primary goal in human life.
†
When Oates had her “peculiar” mystical experience in December of 1970, she and Smith had been on sabbatical from the University of Windsor and had spent the year in London.
‡
Oates had recently been working on a novel entitled
How Lucien Florey Died, and Was Born.
Though she did complete the novel, it was never published except for an excerpt, entitled “Corinne,” in the fall 1975 issue of North American Review. The only extant manuscript of this novel is now in the Joyce Carol Oates Archive at Syracuse University.
*
Charles Ives (1874–1954) and John Cage (1912–92) were both experimental composers Oates admired.
†
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was strongly influenced by German Romanticism; in general Oates had limited admiration for Romantic poets because of their intense absorption with the self.
‡
Oates and Smith had been married on January 23, 1961.
*
The critic Alfred Kazin (1915–98) published
Bright Book of Life
, a survey of American writers, in 1973; he had depicted Oates as a “Cassandra” who was absorbed in her own visions. Oates also had not cared for his interview/essay on her, “Oates,” which had appeared in the August 1971
Harper’s
.
†
Donald Barthelme (1931–89), William Gass (b. 1924), and William S. Burroughs (1914–97) were experimental American fiction writers whom Oates admired, with some reservations.
‡
Her problems with a person here called “A.K.” were particularly acute during this year, as this and subsequent journal entries show.
*
Evelyn Shrifte, Oates’s editor at Vanguard Press.
*
Jack Morrissey and Elena Howe were major characters in Oates’s novel
Do With Me What You Will
, published in the fall of 1973 by Vanguard.
*
Oates’s essay “Is This the Promised End?: The Tragedy of
King Lear
,” appeared in the fall 1974 issue of the
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
and was collected in her volume
Contraries: Essays
, published in 1981 by Oxford University Press.
†
John Berryman (1914–72), American poet (and suicide) in the “confessional” mode.
*
Mircea Eliade (1907–86), Rumanian philosopher and novelist.
*
The Esalen Institute, founded in 1962 and located in Big Sur, California, promulgated a blend of East/West philosophies, held “experiential workshops,” and served as a meeting place for philosophers, psychologists, artists, and religious thinkers. Tassajara was a Zen Center located in rural California.
*
Oates had been extremely close to her paternal grandmother, Blanche Morgenstern Woodside, who died in the summer of 1970.
*
Oates had attended Syracuse University as an undergraduate, 1956 to 1960, and maintained friendly relations with some of her former professors.
*
Oates and Smith began publishing a biannual literary magazine,
Ontario Review
, in 1974.
†
Oates’s study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry,
The Hostile Sun
, was published in 1973 by Black Sparrow Press.
‡
During the 1970s, Oates occasionally spoke, or was the subject of panel discussions, at the annual conventions of the Modern Language Association.
*
“A.K.” had continued to shadow Oates’s life. According to him, the “package” had been a packet of condoms.
†
Leslie Fiedler (1917–2003), American critic and novelist, and a professional acquaintance of Oates’s.
:
1974
Balance between private, personal fulfillment (marriage, work at the University) and “public” life, the commitment to writing. The artist must find an environment, a pattern of living, that will protect his or her energies: the art must be cultivated, must be given priority.
T
his year finds Joyce Carol Oates characteristically engaged in an ambitious project: the planning and writing of her longest novel to date,
The Assassins,
which would be published in 1975. Her journal records her daily struggle to find the right balance between “private, personal fulfillment” and the demands of her art.
Though often focused on her writing life, Oates also describes lively social gatherings with her Detroit-area friends and with her University of Windsor colleagues; her travels to the Humanities Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where she read from her work, and to Yale University for a two-day stint as a “Visiting Writer”; her interactions with other well-known writers such as Philip Roth, Anne Sexton, and Stanley Elkin; and her teaching, which gave vent to the gregarious, sociable side of her personality and which served as an important counterweight to the necessary isolation of her life as a writer.
Though she continued to brood upon her problems with “A.K.” and about the philosophical issues that haunted her daily life, this year’s entries suggest a relatively fulfilled and well-balanced artist whose essential seriousness was leavened by her gift for irony and humor. As she noted on
November 23, she made “a point of telling my students regularly: mankind’s talent for humor, for laughter, is possibly our highest talent.”
January 4, 1974.
Dreams at the turn of the year: disturbing as always. Paralysis, nightmare. Forcing myself to wake—and then the relief as consciousness floods in. Without consciousness (control of the mind, the muscles, perception) we are in a kind of infantile hell.
New class—“Literature & Psychology”—many students, some of them lively & provocative. Teaching is a kind of intellectual feast. A kind of party, circus, carnival; sense of motion; pleasantly crowded; filled with voices, faces, intense young minds. So many questions…! Fascinating. I can see why certain friends […] can’t write while they teach. They
teach
their very selves and nothing is left over. It’s a temptation.
[…]
February 3, 1974.
…Finished “Black Eucharist,” absorbing to write but not very likeable.
*
A quite impersonal tale.
“A man is what he is thinking all day long”—Emerson.
A night of many dreams. In one, an angel falls to earth…touches me…frightens me with his/her terrible reality. I had been thinking to myself, like a good Zen student, that the dream-image was only an illusion in my brain, nothing to be concerned about, and the angel responded by nudging me. “It’s only a spectre” I said but the spectre rebelled against being so categorized.
A haunting dream. Many possible meanings. Complete & lovely as a poem.
February 28, 1974.
…Wrote “The Spectre,” poem re. angel & dream.
*
The reality of psychic powers.
Have been informed of A.K.’s continued harassment. O well: silly stuff indeed.
April 11, 1974.
…“Seizure” chosen by Borestone Awards, Best Poems of 1973.
†
Based on the heart seizure & related observations.
April 12, 1974.
…Visited Kalamazoo College. Conrad Hilberry & Herb Bogard, and others; extremely congenial, pleasant.
May 15, 1974.
…Met Philip Roth. Went to his apartment, then out to lunch. Attractive, funny, warm, gracious: a completely likeable person. We talked about books, movies, other writers, New York City, Philip’s fame (and its amusing consequences), his experiences in Czechoslovakia meeting with writers. Ray and I liked him very much. His apartment on 81st St. is large and attractive, near the Met. Art gallery. He has another house (and another life, one gathers) in Connecticut.
My Life as a Man
: irresistibly engaging.
‡
But one wonders at Philip’s pretense that it isn’t autobiographical….
May 20, 1974.
…Fake suicide note from A.K.; caused me a few minutes’ upset before Ray discerned it was fictitious. A pathetic hoax…. Still, it might mean he’s decided to leave me alone. The suicide note blamed me for his death, then went on to berate me for not having written a review of his book, etc., etc. I wrote back to him saying I was sorry, very sorry, but couldn’t he leave me alone—couldn’t the two of us forget about each other? Don’t expect any reply.
Why would a homosexual care so much about a woman?—his homosexuality is so brazen, so self-congratulatory. Perhaps he dreads being a latent heterosexual….
May 23, 1974.
…Anniversary; wine & cheese party at school; pleasant conversation with the usual people: Gene Mc. N., Al MacL., Colin A., etc.
*
I live in an easygoing masculine world at the University. My closest friends are men and have been for the past fourteen years, with the exception of Liz Graham and Kay Smith, whom I like very much;
†
but they’re not “colleagues.”
“Suicide hoax” in “Paradise: A Post-Love Story.” Also, the general emotional field of the proposed novel,
Death-Festival
.
‡
(The sense that someone wants me dead…fantasizes my death. Chilling. Crazy.)
May 28, 1974.
Death-Festival
taking form slowly; people emerging. Yvonne changes shape & character. Hugh the surprising one. Stephen still shadowy. Andrew becoming more and more witty, amusing.
§
Read Bell’s
Virginia Woolf
.
¶
Fine book.
How fortunate for Virginia that she had Leonard—! Without him, who knows?
[…]
July 7, 1974.
…Out West to Aspen, Colorado, to the Humanities Institute. 8000' above sea level. Many fascinating people; music festival; mountain climbers; physicists. I think this will be my last public reading since it went so well: I’ll quit while I’m ahead.
August 7, 1974.
…
Death-Festival
now called
The Assassins
. Gradually taking shape. A small mountain of notes…. Hugh Petrie, cruel at first then, gradually, sympathetic. I hadn’t wished to put so much of myself into him.
Synthesis of realism, symbolism; the mas. & the fem; Marxist-socialist-protest critique & depth psychology. Experience of art as religious revelation. Otherwise of no interest.
Art as the highest activity of the Soul.
September 15, 1974.
School year, as always, tumultuous. Conrad—Lawrence—Faulkner seminar looks challenging. (Too many students, however.)
First issue of
Ontario Review
out soon. Ray has worked very, very hard.
An avalanche of work: people: impressions: stimuli. Day following day, blending dizzily into a kind of seamless expansion of time. Timelessness? Immersed in life, one simply loses track of details.
October 15, 1974.
Returned from two days at Yale. “Visiting Writer.” Guest of Calhoun College—R. and I in rooms above the Master’s residence—in signing the guest-book, were impressed (as one must be) by previous guests: W. H. Auden, Stanley Kunitz, Northrop Frye, Norman Mailer, acquaintance Tony Tanner of Cambridge; and others. What was not impressive was the place itself—the incessant banging overhead, noise on the stairs and in the courtyard—endearingly drunken undergraduates—phonographs turned up high (classical music, at least, but militaris
tic and thumping). Is this the reward of a kind of fame? And how did Auden like staying here?
Moved to the Sheraton-Hilton after a miserable, sleepless night. I, who feel uneasy with luxury, who prefer “simple” surroundings, am continually moving to a Sheraton-Hilton, moving out of guest accommodations and the presumably simple surroundings others like. Would have felt apologetic about it, but why?
Though we live in jest, we die in earnest.
A year ago, R. and I drove to Washington, D. C., to participate in a conference sponsored by the Kennedy Foundation. Stayed at the Sheraton-Hilton. Many floors up, but still noisy. Washington itself far more attractive than we had dared hope. Nixon in the White House then: but the “White House” of tourist experience is just a museum crammed with odds and ends, some very bad art, a few surprises (a Monet above a fireplace, John F. Kennedy’s gift to the White House). In a VIP group, taken for an endless tour by an automaton-like guide, smiling and chattery. I could have endured it, but R. gave out suddenly; insisted that we slip beneath one of the velvet ropes and escape, which we did. The joys of sudden liberation…. Suddenly, unexpectedly, to slip free of a tedious obligation, to hurry out into the (autumnal) sunlight, hand in hand…. Romantic lovers fleeing legitimate pain, the real thing, are not so joyfully liberated as R. and I are commonly, one might almost say
daily
.
Eunice and Sargent Shriver were our hosts, the conference itself quite interesting, though the panel—eight or nine “experts”—was too large. Had the good fortune to meet Robert Coles, however.
*
Marvelous man. The trip to Washington was not a loss. We were gathered together to discuss the ethics of government interference with private life (attempting to control population growth among the poor or retarded), one of the very few points at which orthodox Catholicism might touch upon the standard issues of civil liberties. Discuss it we did, some of us sympathetic with the
poor and deprived; others (awkwardly, they tended to be those who dealt with the poor and deprived!) more sympathetic with the welfare institutions and workers, whose problems are evidently insurmountable. Eunice Kennedy harassed but friendly; gave me a quick galloping tour about the Kennedy Center, like the White Queen pulling Alice around, hair flying. At this time, in fact this very night, Ted Kennedy’s son was hospitalized and his leg amputated; so the “promise” of our group meeting the Senator could not be fulfilled. How strange the experience was…. Politicians might be fascinating; politics never. Or is it the other way around? One conservative economist from MIT […] gave a bullying passionate speech in favor of government controls rather like those Hitler might have liked. The poor? But one must have television sets; one must have material goods. The poor can only be given what’s left over, [he] said.
November 13, 1974.
Teaching all day—first-year class at eleven—student-writers and others in for conferences in the afternoon—brief visit from a professor of religious studies (who, attending a conference recently in Washington, D.C., was astounded at the references made to my work by American professors of religion and theology!—as I am also astounded)—my writing seminar from four to six—nighttime suddenly upon us. The satisfactions of teaching once one is beyond being judged—in this era of unemployment, especially—once one can express oneself openly, honestly—but does anyone do so??? Long-distance call from the producer of William Buckley’s show—inviting me to Florida for one of their shows, this weekend—rather short notice?—unfortunately unable to accept. Have not been on television for years, for many years—no interest in it—though perhaps my disinterest is no virtue.
There is a certain kind of woman—a certain kind of man also?—who attempts to create virtue out of a disinterest in the energies of vice. I am guilty of no vices, but certainly guilty of having explored no vices. As for sinning, my characters can do that for me—! They plunge in, they suffer, occasionally they learn, occasionally they survive. Their methods of salvation are largely their own choice, despite my obvious “omnipotence.” The reader of a novel cannot guess the extent to which the novelist is also a reader…a reader first, and then a recorder. The art-work labors to create
itself; one must only not interfere. The first rule of medicine: Do no harm. But if one must harm, then do so with grace…!
The spirit moves where it will. Boredom is not possible, but the absence of “spirit” is. Difficult to speak of such things, especially to people who are embarrassed at the very terms—
spirit
,
soul
,
psyche
.
Mind
they will allow (imagining one is speaking daintily of “brain”), but the other terms are confusing. And yet—there are people near me, students more than others, stricken by the approach of “spiritual” contents far more than I: the difference between us being that I am not frightened of such contents, but in fact thrive on them, while they are intimidated, alarmed, baffled. Of course I too have been frightened in the past…and will probably be frightened again…there is the danger of complacency, of forgetting the immediate, overwhelming nature of the psychic contents. “Dreams,” people say, thereby attempting to dismiss these visions; but the word “dreams” is not appropriate when one suffers a sudden visitation from the unconscious…. But the Spirit moves where it will. Biblical wisdom, commonsense psychology. One cannot force oneself to write: and I haven’t written a poem or a story for weeks. Nor do I miss this kind of writing. All my energies go into the novel, and there are none left over. Is this conscious choice? No. One could speak of it as a choice—emphasizing the fact that the novel is “more interesting” at this point in my life—but that is ego-rationalizing, not convincing. The Spirit moveth where it listeth…. We fall in love, we fall out of love: the experience of “love” overtakes us, conquers us, and occasionally (though not always) drifts away. It can’t be retained, called back. It may come back of its own accord—but it cannot be called back, certainly not forced back. Emphasis upon the will, upon the activities of the ego, is misplaced in things of the spirit, though probably relevant in life. I don’t “believe” in my own “beliefs”—does anyone?
