The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (42 page)

…Working, working, working on the novels: a few hours on
Bellefleur
, alternating with a few hours on
Graywolf
. Yesterday it began to wear upon me that I was grateful, exceedingly grateful, to be drawn away from my study to Maxine’s reading. (Her poise, her sense of humor, her solid, technically precise poems.) […]

April 8, 1979.
…Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at the University chapel, a deeply moving occasion; at the very beginning I felt almost shaky…apprehensive…not simply because of the music (the beginning is so uncannily lovely) but because of the setting…. […]

…Yesterday, a long drive in the chilly sunshine along the Delaware River, as far north as Upper Black Eddy; then to Stockton; then home. Gusty, sunny…daffodils everywhere…the river blue and glinting…the trance of idyllic immobile beauty…the enchantment of what is silent.

…Palm Sunday. What thoughts?…Many, but inchoate; inarticulate.

…Revising
Bellefleur
today. Hour upon hour. The mind feeds greedily upon its own images. And then, afterward, what seems to excite me is, oddly enough, the verbal structure…the self-conscious
arrangement
. I fear the frenzy of the initial inspiration more and more. Revision is fine: a highly engrossing occupation which one might carry on to infinity: but it doesn’t excite, it certainly doesn’t
frighten
.

…Can I undertake another long work? I sometimes feel…not that I am “wearing out”…though sometimes my eyes burn and my brain feels seared…but that…that…how to express it…I owe myself an oasis of calm…an interlude…solitude…time to exist in my own conscious life,
not beset by the delirium of the
other
consciousness. To revise, and revise, and revise…to return to the books already published, even, and revise
them
…anything to keep myself occupied and safe from the unhealthy (but it isn’t always unhealthy!) excitement of the initial onslaught…. What is called a “first draft” when the images, the words, the scenes, the
voices
come halfway unbidden, and must be dutifully transcribed.

…My courage, years ago, was a function of my relative ignorance. Now I know more, and now I am inclined to be more apprehensive…. How safe is this sort of activity, one wonders. “Safe” emotionally rather than psychologically. (For I rather doubt that I could ever slip into insanity. I don’t seem to be that sort of person.)

[…]

April 9, 1979.
[…] One lives an entire life, no doubt, uneasily wondering at the relationship between the “dreaming” self and the “conscious” self. For surely there
is
a profoundly intimate relationship…yet at the same time such peculiar elements are introduced, such extra-personal things…. A mystery that refuses to resolve itself, even with the passage of time. At the age of forty I know as little as I knew at the age of twenty-six; though at the age of twenty-six I probably believed that in a brief while I
would
know.

…Man can embody truth, Yeats said, but not know it.

…As I move out of the remote world of
Bellefleur
and come back to
this
world, which I’ve never left, I see quite clearly how the creative experience (which is often a creative frenzy) does several things for the artist—

…The desire to be “utterly normal” and even conventional on the one hand; and to be absolutely free, inventive, wild, unrestrained in the imagination. So that the two worlds appear incompatible. There is no point of contact…. But the unrestrained world is
within
the “normal” world; it is the normal world’s untold secret.

April 11, 1979.
…A painted wooden Easter egg: rich colors of orangered, maroon, cream, turquoise, gold, green, red…. Intricate little flowers & designs. Exquisitely beautiful. (A gift, probably from a student, left in my mailbox this afternoon.)…The lovely scent of hyacinth: a cream-colored flower in a wineglass on my desk here…. Evening, 7:20, and my reflection has taken its usual shape in the window before me: black sweater, gold chain, my hair parted in the center, my features indistinct.

…Tomorrow, a drive to Wesleyan College. Middletown, Conn. Workshop in the afternoon…reception…dinner…reading…another reception: and so another visit will be over. It should be highly enjoyable if the weather holds. (Today was lovely. We walked for two hours…along Mercer, up Springdale, to the Institute, the pond, and back along Battle Rd…. in time for my 3:30 class.)

…Revisions, earlier, on
Graywolf
.
Bellefleur
now beginning to recede. I feel…or think I
should
feel…its loss. But perhaps because I am so uncommonly busy I really don’t.

[…]

…Finished
Sister Carrie
. Which, surprisingly, is a romance! I had not anticipated
that
. Hardly a “naturalistic” work—what on earth do critics
mean? Compared to Crane’s
Maggie
, or
George’s Mother
…. Not at all, not at all. It’s sheer romance, fantasy, a fairy tale. A mild “moral” indeed. Am reading Joe Frank’s excellent essays, some for the second or third time, in
The Widening Gyre
. And Cortázar’s
Hopscotch
(at Joe’s suggestion)—which doesn’t especially impress me, at least initially.
*
[…]

April 16, 1979.
[…] Finished revisions on
Bellefleur
. But continue to pick about here and there. Embroidering. Fussing. Will be taking the manuscript, and
Graywolf
, to NYC next Wednesday, to deliver to Blanche. Should hire a U-Haul trailer…. Feel somewhat lonely. Restless. Or do I exaggerate? The vampirish experience of
Bellefleur
isn’t one I really want to repeat. But then…. I see how so many vignettes in
Bellefleur
are analogues, somewhat exaggerated, of my own predicament. “The Bloodstone,” “The Clavichord”—an obsessive infatuation which leads one away from life, and yet it’s far more fulfilling and exciting than “life” itself. Veronica’s relationship (though comic, campy) with Ragnar Norst: the realization that she loves him, that her life is centered upon him, and to hell with “normality.” One goes where excitement leads….

…Thinking wanly about some stories. But my heart isn’t exactly in them…. A new long novel. Marya Knauer. Her coming-of-age, her maturation, her fulfillment as a whole person…triumph over thievery, the wretchedness, the failure of her past. But it’s all so frustratingly vague. Five or six pages of incoherent notes so far. I
see
Marya and I hear her voice and I feel her restlessness, the muscular tension of her shoulders and legs. A strong sullen girl.

…Easter Sunday, yesterday. Went to the Fagles’s for drinks. Good conversation. Bob will be flying to Wesleyan next week, to see a production of “his”
Oresteia
. Lynn an exceptionally friendly, attractive person. […]

April 22, 1979.
…Working on the second Marya Knauer story, “Schwilk.” Finished & revised “Sin.”
^†
[…]

…Marya Knauer. Marya Knauer. Marya Knauer.

…This past week, hours & miles of walks. Walks along the Delaware River. Through Titusville. In Princeton—around Lake Carnegie. In Hopewell. Walking, walking, walking against the stiff northeast wind. Inhaling the marvelous sunny-chilly air, grateful for spring. And the novel’s completion. And revision. And
Graywolf
too. Thank God! Thank God. To have come through…. Ray and I walking, one of our greatest pleasures. And over in Cranbury too, though it was fairly cold that day.

…Reading more of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. For poor doomed Mr. Schwilk, who recites it on the bank of the Invemere Canal.

…Tomorrow, New York City: 10:30 our NBA committee meeting, the last, at which Michael Arlen and I hope to convince Kenneth Clark of
The Snow Leopard
’s worth;
*
and then luncheon for all the judges; and then a press conference; and then, at five, a photography session with Jerry Bauer, an acquaintance of Henry Robbins’; 5:30 a cocktail party at the Biltmore, for judges and nominees and winners (should be fairly embarrassing—and there’s Alfred Kazin, nominated four times for an NBA, and not to win it now either; but perhaps if we’re lucky he won’t be there); Ray will join me at the Biltmore and then we’ll slip away to dinner, earlier; and then at 8:00 Seamus Heaney reading his poems at the 92nd Street “Y.” An ambitious day. But then it will be good to let “Schwilk” rest for a while, so that I can contemplate it, and Marya within it.

…Heidegger: To think is to confine oneself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world’s sky.

…The telephone rang, and Gail Godwin was on the line. Warm lively conversation, half an hour’s worth; a pity we don’t talk more often, and see
each other so rarely. Gail has been writing novellas. I, with an 800+ page novel behind me, feel like a glutton. Jaded, reckless, shamed, dazed. Insatiable, the imagination’s appetite! I am both vampire and victim.

[…]

May 5, 1979.
…Sunny chilly day. Revising poems. Thinking of Marya. (Marya at Port Oriskany. Befriended by a girl named Imogene. I see the final scene clearly: Marya with Imogene’s earrings, confronted at 9
A.M.
on the windy quadrangle in front of the University chapel, in full view of students hurrying to classes, Imogene accuses Marya of theft, slaps her, and Marya responds with a hard straight blow, a punch, to Imogene’s face. Two tall girls, their cheeks flushed with cold and passion, their eyes wild…while everyone stares.)

…Last night, at Newton, Pa., Robert Bly in a completely successful ecstatic reading. His own poems, and Kabir’s, and two other Indian poets’. Remarkable performance. He was accompanied, and very beautifully and hauntingly, by two musicians (Minnesota boys, training in India), one of them playing the sitar, the other a sort of drum. Robert came up into the audience to speak with us. I was surprised he recognized us—I hadn’t especially wanted to be noticed—but he was very friendly, very much at ease, expansive, enjoying himself, “high” on poetry or anyway
his
kind of poetry, which was entirely convincing. He’s an amazing combination of Midwestern mysticism and flat skeptical good humor. Without the skepticism he’d drift off into space…without the mysticism he’d be sour and tired and depressing. Many poems about the body; the body in an Indian sense; the body’s ineffable energies. (“I’m tired of St. Paul bitching about the body,” he says suddenly, as if spontaneously, evoking startled laughter from the audience.)

…The other day, luncheon at Richard Trenner’s (at the house he is staying in, on Hunt’s Drive), Maxine Kumin also, talking of the “poetry mafia” (Richard Howard, John Ashbery, the New York people primarily—though Stanley Kunitz isn’t in that circle […]). Maxine’s uneasiness re. Bly. Though I tried to dissuade her. (They will be meeting at a conference in Washington next fall.) Maxine congenial, funny, easygoing, friendly,
someone I wish badly I had had time to know, but now the semester has gone and she has gone; and anyway she hadn’t time for me—not much time. The fact is, we never spent a minute alone together, and there must have been time for that: a lunch here, even breakfast across the street from 185 Nassau. Now too late.

…Bly’s fiery expansiveness, his audience-loving manner. He was on for 2
¹
/2 hours—amazing. And seemed untired at the end. (He is fifty-two years old.) Though many people dislike him, and ridicule his “leaping poetry” esthetics, and criticize, rather cruelly, his translations, I wonder if he isn’t quite simply a major American poet: or
force
in poetry: a presence too forceful to be discounted. How superficial, how feeble, the New York poets appear, set beside him. (It’s too easy to forget Bly’s humor. He’s wonderfully funny. Because, I suppose, his “mysticism” allows him that…his centeredness…not unlike my own. People like us cannot be budged from our positions.)

…The sanctity of the body, its privacy, need for aloneness; secrecy. How ugly it would be, to be exposed to strangers’ eyes…to be naked in front of someone who didn’t love me…. (The other evening, Max and Bob Fagles and someone else were talking about swimming in the nude, mildly contemptuous of those who were uneasy doing it, or refused to do it.) Worse than appearing naked in front of other people is the fact of
their
appearing naked in front of me. Who, for God’s sake, wants to look upon less-than-beauty, bare!—and my middle-aged acquaintances wouldn’t, I imagine, fare especially well. The most significant thing about a naked person is his or her face.

…Telephone call from Blanche. She likes
Bellefleur
very much. And I’ve agreed to be a monthly reviewer for
Mademoiselle
.

May 14, 1979.
…Yesterday, telephoned home; hadn’t been feeling quite well for most of the day—dizzy, fatigued, baffled; my father answered, and said sadly that Mom is sick: had an attack of extreme dizziness and nausea, and was lying down. Her high blood pressure…? Or thyroid condition…? She was fearful of a stroke….