The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (54 page)

…Rereading Blake. Book of Thel, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Songs, some of the Jerusalem book.

[…]

July 25, 1980.
…“That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want anyone to know or than we know ourselves.”—Scott Fitzgerald.

…Yet the irony is this: I don’t feel “queer” at all. The person others see, refracted by my books, is a person I hardly recognize. Which isn’t to say that I don’t recognize the books. I do. But the author, the “personality” behind them…? Certainly there must be something “queer,” there is something demonstrably “queer,” about anyone who has written as much as I have…and on the subjects I have chosen. This is a conclusion I wouldn’t seriously challenge…if I were someone else, someone at a distance. But the ongoing puzzlement in my own life (which would be Ray’s too if he read my writing) is how and why the portrait suggested by the books is so utterly at odds with the person I inhabit.

…Introspection nets me very little. I am nonplussed by the “normality” that gives rise to such apparent (and public) “abnormality.” The opposite is generally true: one assumes people are relatively normal, judging from their public or social lives; one hears odd disquieting rumors that they are really quite strange. But with the Smiths the only feasible rumors are that we are as…as unobtrusive as we are…that I really
am
the person I seem to be with my students and friends and acquaintances…. I talk about this at such length because things are being published about me at the moment, in connection with
Bellefleur
. John Leonard’s perceptive review, a surprisingly academic and intelligent review in the Washington
Star
, and the piece by Lucinda Franks which is scheduled for Sunday’s
Times Magazine
…about which Karen Braziller has just been speaking with me, on the phone: all these odd disjointed public “selves” which may be authentic, for all I know, but leave me curiously untouched.

(Do we
ever
know anyone, then? Does reading about anyone—anywhere—in the newspapers, in biographies, in history books—ever mean anything at all? For the “Joyce Carol Oates” in the press, the stories about her people presumably scan, bears so little relationship to me that it’s probably a waste of time for anyone to read them; or so it strikes me at the
moment. Comments on the books are, of course, something different—John Leonard’s insights are excellent—and there are many reviewers and critics who seem to understand my intentions: but the books are not “Joyce Carol Oates.”)

…Warm, sunny afternoon. Ray has driven off to New Brunswick to his long evening class (four hours—from 6:30 on)
*
and I am alone, browsing through notes for my next
Angel
chapter (“Research”)…excited and pleased by the “Uruguayan Carpet” chapter…resisting the impulse to plunge wildly into the next. Should I, shouldn’t I, should I go forward or resist…and read Matthiessen on the James family (wonderful reissued book)…or go for a bicycle ride…or what. (Yesterday we bicycled into Princeton. Almost unwisely, because of the heat. But it wasn’t bad, it was in fact idyllic 90 % of the time, and now that I lose Ray for so many hours three times a week I value those excursions all the more. How sad, to surrender our lazy afternoons…our self-indulgent outings…. )

July 30, 1980.
…Suspension for the past two days. Awaiting news of my father’s tests in Buffalo.

…Possible blood clot in the lungs, or a heart condition.

…My precarious sense of everything, most things; yet I am so infrequently tearful (like “Queen of the Night” I seem to know that tears are pointless); it’s a mask, a cuticle…like Brigit Stott
^†
…her curt brisk blunt rather ugly name…stoic, inward, secretive…but aren’t we all.

…Working, however, on
Angel of Light
. The tragedy evolving. Step by step, slowly, inevitably…so horrible…inescapable. Owen is now with Ulrich May (“The Convert”) and it would all happen precisely as it is happening, perhaps it has already happened, different people, different causes for rage…. Immersing myself in the revolutionary (that is, terrorist) mentality I do find their arguments very convincing. We are at war, the world is divided,
the United States is hopelessly corrupt…. (Consider the recent Republican convention. In Detroit. And the ongoing clown show in Washington—at the moment, Billy Carter & Libya & The President. If I rarely say anything about the larger world in this journal it’s because, here, I can escape it. A journal can be unapologetically introspective, inward, brooding…yet it’s worth remarking from time to time, I suppose, that I feel a real malaise emanating from Washington…from most facets of government in fact…we simply cannot trust our “leaders”…who tell such lies…lie upon lie upon lie.

[…]

…The busyness of
Bellefleur
’s publication. I am thankful that this will happen only once. Best-sellerdom would be a unique experience, and
probably
…probably…I should hope for it, and try to do some of the less silly things Lois Shapiro [Joyce’s publicist] has suggested…but…on the whole…well…it’s like the Nobel Prize: if I never win, I win: the luxury of anonymity, privacy, a restoration of my sense of myself as an outsider, even an outcast…. (Exactly how essential is this to my self-mythologizing, I wonder. If I were undergoing analysis like [X] the subject would surely arise. I need to grasp “Joyce Carol Oates” as basically a failure…all the while trying to realistically absorb evidence that suggests otherwise…like money, for example; the Princeton appointment; the prizes I have won; and so forth. If other people seem to think of me as a “success” I can tell myself that their estimates are simply myopic…they really don’t
know
. And this is true enough, or is it…. )

[…]

August 1, 1980.
…Placidity. Quiet. Solitude. (Ray worked for most of the day in his study, preparing for tonight’s Rutgers class; and proofreading galleys for our fall issue.) Early this morning I made up a revised outline for the rest of
Angel
which I hope will prevent the novel from expanding uncontrollably…. When I begin, unbelievably, I am afraid I won’t be able to sustain any length at all. And then, midway, it begins to seem ominously that the reverse is true.

…At least
Angel
causes me very little of the psychic unease, now, and the obsessive concern of
Bellefleur
. It isn’t that I cannot ever write a novel
quite like that again…but rather that I don’t intend to. The cost was too great…or so it seemed…in the short run at least. The gravitational pull of the unconscious was too mesmerizing. I don’t want to visit “Bellefleur” again—that seductive region of the soul.

[…]

…My father is feeling much better. (Though how could he, in all honesty, have felt much worse?) And his condition is being controlled, at least temporarily, by medicine—five kinds of medicine. So I feel less apprehension. Or at any rate it has lifted. Friends’ comments on an unfavorable review of
Bellefleur
by Walter Clemons stirred me to a hurt, an anger, more disappointment, resignation…that in a way was absorbed by the worry over my father…a sense, inexplicably bittersweet, that “failure” is my lot; that I feel more comfortable with it; more myself.

[…] Other reviews come in, wonderfully generous, and I hold my breath and think, Why do I feel so public
this time?
Why so exposed? I think it’s because
Bellefleur
is going to be the only one of its kind, the only novel I care to think of as a candidate for “popularity”…i.e., commercial success…and I can retire…not only from the queer stress of writing something so mesmerizing but from the strain of a “big” novel in the sense of Dutton’s promotion campaign ($35,000)…requests for interviews…and all that. It jeopardizes too my sense of myself—as I explained earlier, and to Stephen K.—of being a failure, a loner, an outcast, so particularly necessary for the writing of
Angel of Light
. However—I needn’t worry, perhaps, for Walter’s review might have killed sales just enough. The other day the book was number twenty-two on a best-seller list (I hadn’t known the list extended so magnanimously far) and who knows its fate at the moment….

[…]

…A placidity that will probably shade into restlessness in another day. Or later tonight. But who knows, who knows…perhaps the function of art
for the artist
is to bring him or her to such mountain-peaks of calm. One feels, perhaps inexcusably, that everything in the service of art has been correct…bringing the artist to such a mood! And this means the career as
well. The nagging sense, now and then, that being a woman has decidedly handicapped me…not in terms of my actual writing but in terms of its reception. (I recall Walter Clemons’ enthusiasm for
Unholy Loves
. My best novel in years. But of course it isn’t…it is only my most “feminine” novel…which struck Walter as being, consequently, my “best.”) If I were a man, the fantasy runs, if only I were a man, the voice speculates, wouldn’t I be taken…more seriously? Is my work in its scope and ambition and depth and experimentation really less impressive than that of, say, Bellow or Mailer or Updike? Yet I don’t find the brooding productive; and in any sense I have to conclude that being a woman, and consequently handicapped in this culture (as I would be, most likely, in any—including England and France), has had a salutary effect upon me. I have had to work very hard, I have had to be bold and to take risks and to take the inevitable abuse one gets for being ambitious in this delirious profession. (Where, at times, one gets to think that the only woman writer who is
really
beloved by men is Jane Austen: precisely because she is so deliberately minor; so “feminine.”) These convictions meld with the sense too of an economic fluke—being fairly poor at one time, and from a family that had known real poverty; easing, along with my parents (that is, my UAW-father), into a sort of part-middle-class as a consequence of that great force, the American labor movement (God bless it!—my Wobbly grandfather above all); easing then by way of friends and social contacts into a genuine upper-middle-class & “lower-upper” (the half-dozen millionaires of my acquaintance, in Detroit—or is that mid-upper?!—absurd terms) to provide me with a Proustian overview and a Fitzgerald sense of romantic nonsense…though always qualified by the tough proletariat background. Hence I am not only American but…a kind of cross-section of America…barring the real wealth and the real poverty. Which is most authentically myself I can’t know but would guess…judging from the odd jarring sympathies I feel for even monsters like Manson…that I place myself psychologically
even below
the decent respectable working-class background of my childhood.

…Susan Sontag telephoning. And sounding, as she frequently does, rather melancholy…
alone
…over the phone. A few days later Stephen and I laughed fondly over her predicament: Now that she has at last
plugged in her telephone no one has called. Or so she says. Three weeks of near-isolation…she has gone out a total of five times…she is trying to write fiction fueled by the same puritanical energies that have driven her to write her elegant hectoring critical essays…she seems sad, subdued, vexed…but that stasis is probably necessary for her. My liking for Susan is immense. I feel a kinship that isn’t so much professional as sisterly. No, more than that, a kind of…physical identity. Though we’re much different (to observers) I seem to think we’re alike in certain surprising ways. At any rate I feel no rivalry with her but feel, on the contrary, a quickened sense of hurt when she is maligned or even criticized…because, despite her intransigence in print and even in person, she is a very vulnerable woman; and very womanly too.

…The womanliness which is not “feminine.” Which doesn’t even have to strive to subdue or reject the “feminine.”

…Feminine/female. The one is social, acquired, rehearsed, sometimes a considerable strain; a masquerade. The other is…simply given. One is female the way one has brown eyes, brown hair, a tall thin frame, a certain voice.

…Susan and I are in our forties, she a few years older. I don’t remember how many. Her impulsive girlishness…a tomboyish manner…quick rich premeditated laughter. I sense in her a woman who has carried her physical attractiveness about her as an undeclared (an “innocently” unacknowledged) weapon. She has been, and continues to be, physically arresting; she is certainly photogenic; but all this is
in opposition to
her defiant sense of herself as primarily an intellectual and an artist. (The shapeless clothes, the trousers, peculiar haphazard jackets, boots.) While I dress in a more conventional feminine style, partly because I want to…blend in with the scenery.

[…]

…As for the soul, the psyche…who can tell? The two (body and soul) are not separate. And then again, yes they are.

August 13, 1980.
…The placidity of a long day at home. Completing Part VII of
Angel of Light
. Imagining the next section…Maurie’s last day alive…which I want to be so very good, so very strong and tense and compelling…and awful…I’m afraid to begin. To write the first sentence, the first word. A sacramental act I draw away from.

…How do you feel about the commercial success of
Bellefleur
, interviewers ask me […] and I have to think for a moment: How
do
I feel? And what, precisely, are “feelings”…? To say that I am emotionally and spiritually immersed in the destinies of Maurie, Isabel, Nick, Kirsten, and Owen, and that I must shake myself free of that mesmerizing world (with its powerful gravitational pull, I feel almost literally sucked into it) is to sound unnecessarily obdurate, even mystical; to say cheerfully that I feel very “happy” about
Bellefleur
’s current success (which might change at any time, the book market being what it is) is to too simply state the case. (Yet I can’t tell the truth to “close acquaintances.” Consider X, who telephoned me the other evening, brimming with congratulations and praise and chatter, asking me almost reproachfully, But
aren’t
you pleased that your writing is getting a wider readership?—and I said faintly, falteringly, all the while wishing this troublesome person would hang up and leave me alone, since I was in the midst of important work, Why yes of course, of course…certainly.)