The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (4 page)

November 15, 1974.
Lunch at a local pub-restaurant with R. and friends—members of the department—following a departmental meeting. Ungodly boredom of the meeting—yet fascinating, that others should be so absorbed, so vitally connected. Thirty or more intelligent men and women—seated in a windowless room—fluorescent lighting—curriculum report dutifully presented—one’s mind tempted to wander,
to flee—and yet the presence of others (seated beside my friend C.) argues that one could take these things
seriously
. But—at what price?

Do I differ from my colleagues at all? But how? In degree? In kind? Am I simply more scrupulous, or less?

Jammed together at lunch. Not a drinker, nevertheless I experience a distinct alteration of consciousness in the presence of others—socially, but even in the classroom or seminar—a heightening, livening, intensifying sensation—a kind of euphoria. (Would the drinkers attain the same heights, without drinking? But they never make the experiment.) The process is deceptive: one feels oneself fulfilled, with these shreds and bits of other people, but at the same time one is being drained.

The temptations of the world: to go on forever
out there
.

Recognition of excellence in a young student—twenty-three-year-old from the East—pleasure, awe, some little envy for his material (ah, what I could do with it!—but it isn’t mine). For some writers, mere existence—survival—will assure them success of a kind. They are born writers, they cannot miss. For others, “success” must be forced—each story or poem or novel worked at—worried and teased into being—for they sense, quite correctly, that they have no natural destiny, they will have to create it…. Joy certainly belongs to the former; they have merely to live their art. The latter—? Joy may be forced, perhaps. I wouldn’t know.

In offering all of oneself, one of course disappears. The perfect disguise: transparency. In clumsier terms, promiscuity of a physical sort allows anonymity, refuge, a possible sanctity. But it is undiscriminating: therefore unintelligent. One chooses, chooses constantly, one is always choosing, one cannot not choose, for the pose of helplessness, of inertia, is also a choice. My “choice” is the transparency of an “I” predictable in the social context in which it is found—therefore disguised, camouflaged against the landscape. People call this “the personality”—but of course it is a form of behavior, conscious in some, in others unconscious. Most people indulge in apotropaic ritual-behavior: this, they call socializing. And imagine
it is only a habit, a way of passing time—when in fact it is time itself. Nor are we generally out of it.

Returned from the University in the late afternoon, exhausted. Already it is winter—the roses in our back garden covered with snow—everything harsh, dripping, unfamiliar. Only mid-November…. To fight fatigue, went to work on my novel at once: but little progress. The narrator, who must die, does not want to die—keeps talking, dancing about, begging for life—but who will win? But I have already won. I have won innumerable times. The struggle should get easier, but in fact it gets more difficult: my characters too have grown, are more sophisticated, more cunning and inventive. They do not always want to be folded into an art-work, into a tapestry. They want their individual lives. And yet—without the tapestry to present them, to define them, they would not exist at all. The crucial fact of art.

November 15, 1974.
A Friday, a single class at eleven—fifty intense minutes circling about Kafka’s “The Hunter Gracchus” and our views generally of death—then lunch in Detroit, introduced to Elizabeth Janeway
*
by my friend Kay Smith. A dismally cold, wintry, windy day—Detroit at its worst—luncheon on the twenty-sixth floor of a downtown building—my astonishment as always upon meeting someone whose work I have read: we are all so different from our prose….

Misrepresented? No. Not represented at all.

Elizabeth Janeway warm, articulate, efficient; accustomed to travel, television shows, panels, public speaking. Promoting a recent book. A brief lunch, much to say, little time in which to say it—then Kay and Elizabeth left, Kay to drive her to the airport, I sitting on alone for ten minutes, drinking tea, staring at the snowstorm outside. Sense of envy, for lives or ways of life—living—inaccessible to me; but inaccessible, after all, because I have chosen my own life and of necessity cannot choose another.

Balance between private, personal fulfillment (marriage, friendship, 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.

Live like a bourgeois, according to Flaubert. Don’t we all? Most of us, at least? Survivors.

Unwritten, untouched: the temptations of teaching, of giving oneself so completely to the vital immediacies of the classroom that nothing else remains. Commonplace but misleading, the skeptical attitude toward teaching. I can’t understand it. From the first, at the University of Detroit—eleven years ago!—the temptation was to lose myself in the teaching, in the fascinating complexities of the students, in the oddly jovial, frantic social context of the college. Very real temptations, these, because the rewards are so immediate—so emotional. After a long exhausting day—at the University from ten until after six—little spirit left for what is private (my own writing), yet much left for a continuation of the same bright rapid flow of consciousness. Euphoric, could teach hour after hour. And—?

Goethe: “People go on shooting at me when I am already miles out of range.”

Some of us are never in range: never totally represented by any work of art. By the time of publication, already detached—absorbed in something else—a “stranger”—vulnerable to personal hurt but not to artistic censure.

Is this a strategy? No. One does not choose one’s nature, though perhaps the habits, the adaptations of one’s nature are freely chosen….

Destiny casts a shadow backward, even upon our anatomy: upon the images we have developed of our own “anatomy.” The feminine as a habit, an illusion, a lazy means of adaptation…to protect one’s vitality, to withdraw from a tedious surface immediacy (departmental meetings) in order to meditate upon something permanent (the novel I am struggling with right now): how best to be protected from that surface immediacy? Withdrawing
behind the image, behind the mask of the feminine. Of course it helps to have those inclinations: to actually be fairly quiet, soft-spoken, unaggressive, unambitious, undominant….

Lawrence says the artist is a liar. Very well. Perhaps. But if we lie, it is out of politeness—or unconsciousness. Who would lie when he could tell the truth? But the truth is so rarely accessible….

November 17, 1974.
Sunny, briskly mild, like a day in late March. Many birds, primarily juncos, feeding on our terrace. A rabbit appears—and then disappears. The river is placid and very blue.

Unless one makes a conscious effort—almost, an effort of the muscles, the muscular cords that control the eyes—very little of the physical world is allowed into one’s written recording of a life. Why is this?—that the interior world, the preoccupations of one aspect of consciousness, should crowd the exterior world out?—when in fact (as we all know, Samuel Beckett no less than Arnold Bennett) the world that surrounds us most immediately is the world we look to, and which shapes our imaginative worlds to a far greater degree than we might admit. […] Life here in Windsor, on the banks of the Detroit River, in relatively tranquil surroundings—though a short fifteen-minute ride from the University—has allowed me to develop aspects of myself that would not have been activated back in Detroit: absolutely futile to deny this. There, our house was broken into one day when we were gone, we returned to a mess—bureau drawers yanked out, clothing tossed onto the floor—my modest jewelry strewn about (and very little taken: the thief’s shrewd judgment), curious bloodstains on the parquet floor of the dining room. The psychological shock of having one’s house burglarized…of seeing one’s possessions and intimate things thrown about…a very real experience, unforgettable, yet I’ve only approached it in a poem so far. Perhaps it is, or was, too powerful…? Then there was the riot of 1967—the riots—fires a few blocks away on Livernois, looting and general panic, and National Guardsmen stationed nearby: valuable to have experienced, no doubt, and yet hardly the sort of thing one would want to re-experience. Worse, we were in New York City when it began, and heard rumors that the mayor and the governor had been killed, and that Detroit was going up in flames…. So we
returned as quickly as possible, felt the need to return, and drove east into the city along Seven Mile Road, astonished at the familiarity of it all—the placidity—the sunshine—the neat trim green sprinkled lawns of northwest Detroit—only when we approached Livernois did things seem more grim, more sensational. Home owners, we felt the riots as threats, necessarily; but the rioters themselves must have felt a marvelous exhilaration, a sense of sudden, absolute, unguessed-at freedom—the freedom to destroy, which is usually the privilege of the ruling classes. Had I been “Jules” of
them
, would I have behaved as “Jules” did…?
*
The answer is: Of course. So would everyone. But we are not “Jules,” and cannot judge.

Still, judgments must be attempted. It is wrong to kill, it is “wrong” to be violent. But it is even more wrong, more reprehensible, to put human beings into the position—psychologically and morally—where their life’s energies can be expressed only in destruction, in killing. Violence is an admission of impotence. Violence is a kind of impotence. But who has brought the impotence about, who is to blame…?

Windsor too has its problems, its urban difficulties, pollution falling from the skies (blown across the wide river from Detroit’s factories, primarily from Detroit Edison), and a considerable drug problem, so it is said. But there is not the air of defeat here, or dismay. The problems are large enough to draw interest to them, small enough to seem soluble. Of course they will not be solved—it is not in the nature of most problems to be “solved”—but in the meantime no one despairs.

Found a letter of Anne Sexton’s mailed on June 4, 1973.

She committed suicide not long ago; carbon monoxide poisoning at her home in Weston, Massachusetts.

The shock of finding the letter—And the mingled fear, dismay, excitement in rereading it—The wish that I could write to her again, as I did
then, and she would write back—and again, and again—in this way mortality defeated, destiny thwarted—

Strange that I did not notice, or at any rate take seriously, certain remarks in her letter that were very, very sad, in a helpless way. My tendency to interpret other people as if they were myself speaking…and their words only expressions of my own. Very true it is (and who escapes it?) that we experience the world through the filter of our own personality; or, in the psychological terms of one school of psychology, we “project” our own traits onto others, and rarely experience people as they are in themselves….

And yet? How could anything other be possible?

Anne Sexton: “Yes, it is my nature to be apprehensive almost constantly, and my hunger for love is as immense as your eating people in
Wonderland
.
*
When I feel the antithesis, I do not know how to get enjoyment out of it, although it is part of life and as a writer I should enjoy being in touch with agony.”

Incomprehensible differences of personality. Early childhood? Biochemical destiny? “Roles”…? For a suicidal person like Anne Sexton to have survived to the age of forty-five, seems to me an achievement, a triumph. Virginia Woolf, living to the age of fifty-nine, is even more extraordinary. Suicides are always judged as if they were admissions of defeat, but one can take the viewpoint that their having lived as long as they did is an accomplishment of a kind. Knowing herself suicidal as a very young girl, Virginia Woolf resisted—made heroic attempts to attach herself to the exterior world—as did Anne Sexton—as do we all. Why not concentrate on the successes, the small and large joys of these lives, the genuine artistic accomplishments? After all, anyone and everyone dies; the exact way can’t be very important.

“In all that you do or say or think, recollect that at any time the power of withdrawal from life is in your hands.”—Marcus Aurelius

Many individuals, many possibilities of “ways out.” To each according to his taste, his choice, his intellect…his courage. But at bottom the taboo of suicide is, I suspect, merely irritation and resentment on the part of those left behind. Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.

November 19, 1974.
Fragments of past selves, unbelievable in the present. Not recallable. Where is the person—loosely known as “me”—who played piano for so many hours?—daily? A kind of pleasantly demonic sinking into it—into that elusive “it” of music—which unfortunately evaporates as soon as one ceases to concentrate. And the frustrations, the desire for technical perfection—perfection!—one would have liked simply a casual kind of proficiency—unoffensive to the ear and the brain. But music was ultimately elusive, immediately elusive, and as the years passed I worked at it less and less, till finally not at all, not even once with any seriousness since we’ve moved here to Windsor…and the good trim handsome neat proper piano remains in the corner of the living room, forever silent…. How to believe that I had really worked at it so hard…how to accept the fact that that “self” is gone forever…that I am able to listen seriously, with concentration, to so few composers now…as if music, musics, were an island being nibbled at by the sea, worn away constantly, till all that remains is music of what might be called a higher consciousness…. Ravel and Debussy, of course, always, but apart from them it’s primarily religious music we listen to, and listen to, without being aware of this music being “religious” and perhaps not knowing what that term really means. All the works one might expect—Bach, Fauré, Mozart, Beethoven (though less of Beethoven than once), etc., etc., and unusual works like Rachmaninoff’s “Vespers.”…This is the music I could never have played, could never have attempted; perhaps I gave up playing piano because it was totally beyond me, the sounds I really wanted to hear, and the necessity for my creating them not very important. After all, when there are so many gifted musicians…?