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September 22, 1976. […]…There are times, like now, when I feel as if I might drown in the mystery, the riddle, of existence. That I am not capable of grasping anything, not even the “point” of my own life. I know only that I have certain strong emotional attachments to certain people and that I must honor them, must continue to love them, value them—what else is there? My writing, which is so important to me, isn’t somehow myself. It seems to be something I do, something that is done; and then pushed aside, with care no doubt, yet irrevocably pushed aside, so that something else may arise. And that in its turn is dealt with, imagined, completed. So a work of art proceeds out of a kind of mystic, nebulous world of shadows that is as much impersonal as personal, and is filtered through consciousness, transformed into something communal. It takes its place, hopefully, in a certain cultural context; but is it in any meaningful way one’s own self…? Are human relationships the only reality?
The yoga that is the “way of love” would be, then, the highest pathway to Enlightenment.
The personalities and disparate destinies of my students and friends seem overwhelming to me at the present time. It’s the acceleration of the early weeks of autumn…. I seem to feel, not merely to know, that we are all deeply and profoundly related, even in a way the same person…close as identical twins, more intimate than mere lovers. Hopefully this conviction will pass…it leaves me almost breathless, speechless, with awe. There is no need even for love in such a world, since we are all joined by love anyway…since, somehow, we are love.
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September 28, 1976.…Worked yesterday and Sunday on the novel; finished the third chapter; am going slowly and gropingly, feeling my way along. The nobility of Stoic atheism…the intense, overwrought, passionate certainty of Christianity; an inevitable struggle with an inevitable outcome.
Truth, says William James, is what works…. Truth is that which releases energy. No sane person can accept this, no more than (I suspect) James himself accepted it; nevertheless “truth” is that which survives and in order to survive it must triumph against its enemies…must defeat them. So the passionate irrationality of the Christian faith sweeps away all dissenters.
Sherry Beckhl, of Toronto, is coming this afternoon at one to interview me for Weekend Magazine. She sounds quite intelligent and sensitive, and Weekend is, surprisingly, a quite good magazine of its type.
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October 5, 1976.…Spent most of the morning doing proof for The Triumph of the Spider Monkey: The First-Person Confession of the Maniac Bobbie Gotteson As Told to Joyce Carol Oates. Eyes watering with laughter, pain, embarrassment, surprise…it occurred to me midway into the novel that it was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever read, and yet I wrote it myself; I wrote it. Thank God it will have a quiet publication at Black Sparrow. Perhaps no one will take notice….
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October 9, 1976. […] Talked on the phone yesterday with James Tuttleton of NYU: so I will be teaching summer school there, a graduate seminar in “creative writing,” June 13 to July 22, Tuesdays & Thursdays from 10–12; a handsome salary and an apartment in the bargain—the apartment on Washington Square being, really, the only reason I accepted the offer. (Money means nothing, or has a negative meaning—what with my tax situation; but a marvelous apartment in Greenwich Village, a short walk from NYU’s beautiful new library—! It’s so generous of the Administration there, I am truly pleased & delighted & grateful.)
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October 20, 1976.…Finished Part I of Son of the Morning; have arrived at a sort of resting-place; am wondering whether to proceed in a more or less naturalistic fashion, or move into the frankly surreal…. Angels, clouds, demonic presences, overwhelming signs & wonders: how odd they seem, how curious and pathological, when we are in one phase of personality (as I appear to be in now). It’s difficult to remember, to believe, in the power of the psyche, once one swings into the extroverted phase.
For the past two or three years I seem to be in this phase: extroverted. The amount of time I spend with others, talking, chattering, gossiping, frankly & shamelessly wasting time…. A journal can’t begin to show such moments; all that’s recorded are moments of introspection, of re-thinking and re-imagining. Yet apart from the deep intensity of the novel (which is all I’ve been writing now for months, I believe) some of my most absorbing times are those spent in conversation. […] For approximately a week after the wisdom teeth extraction I was unusually tired, and thought obsessively of sleep; but not really of dreams and dreaming. Perhaps if I had simply allowed myself to get a little more than the usual 5–7 hrs. sleep I would have felt better: but my puritan sense of morality forbids such luxury. The numinous power of the psyche obviously comes and goes, like grace. It cannot be coerced.
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October 25, 1976. […] Heard again from A.K. today. Odd, that he pursues me. He imagines that a story not yet published (it will appear in Playboy)* is about him and threatens to take the issue “to the courts”—whatever that means; he hasn’t even read the story, which in any case isn’t about him. So strange, so strange.
I suppose his behavior is explicable: he seeks to find, in my fiction, his own image; a justification for his own existence. And that’s absurd since he needs no justification for his life. Why doesn’t he merely live it, and forget about me? Instead he appears to be obsessed. His latest letter, written just last week, is tremulous with all the old emotions of six years ago. It’s all so perplexing, so dismaying…. He hopes to find by scanning my fiction traces of himself, and by doing so (or by imagining he has done so) he experiences a sort of emotional charge. Unfortunately I haven’t written about him at all. I’ve written about people who were homosexuals, but not about him. In our relationship his homosexuality wasn’t an issue; it was his attempt to coerce me into praising his book in print, and my refusal to do so. A strange, sad, warped man who wishes ill for so many others…. “Love. Friendship” was based on the hurt I felt at his treatment of Ray and me, being otherwise completely fictional.* (Though I wonder why A.K. doesn’t read himself into that story.) I wonder where it will all end?
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November 20, 1976.…Worked on Son of the Morning; went out to the library; spent an hour or two looking through magazines like Ms. and Psychology Today and even the dreary Saturday Review…not altogether a waste of time, since I came away fascinated by the emphasis placed now on the self, not the “self” in terms of personality so much as in terms of the body. Narcissism: giving people instructions in self-love, as if they really need it rather than instructions in the love of others. So the political concern of the 60’s withers back to a moronic concern for one’s own physical pleasure. What does it matter if the world is disintegrating, if people are starving to death, so long as industrious young women with subscriptions to Ms. learn how to induce physical spasms in their bodies…and declare their gleeful independence of men.
One wonders what the next liberation can possibly be. People talking openly of their greed, their jealousy, their spite, their inferiority…? Their pettiness? Silliness?
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Looking back over my own career, the odd objectivity, the detachment now possible. In terms of both professional and private life. Is it the case that a writer simply spends more time than most people in contemplation or meditation…? Hence the world is mysterious, never at rest, always opening to new and unexpected revelations. The past too yields revelations. To re-enter the past and re-imagine it from another viewpoint…. Nathan’s celibacy, his puritanical commitment to his work. It was Donald Dike, † and possibly another professor, who told me I shouldn’t go to graduate school but should return home and concentrate on my writing. Only think, if I had followed their advice—! A monastic life. A too-intense, too-feverish life in the imagination, to the exclusion of a life in society. There wasn’t much chance of my following that advice because I had no inclination toward the Flaubertian ideal…but if I had….
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December 5, 1976.…Reached of the novel, the end of Part III. The end of the novel per se. Now the epilogue of sorts, The Sepulchre. In which Nathan Vickery returns to the sphere of the human, through a relationship with a woman, and the “washing in the Blood of the Lamb” in its witty denouement. A considerable feat…the novel mesmerizing, utterly consuming…practically every minute for the past several months is spent either in it, or near it, in silent contemplation of it…! How marvelous, to have imagined a living metaphor for what one is actually doing at the moment of doing it. For Nathan’s obsession with God is my own obsession with the novel, with him and God both. And so I not only sympathize with him, I am him…. How will I survive the completion of the work, then!
Does my studied and protracted life of normality compensate an interior wilderness…does it disguise an other-than-normal imagination? Perhaps so; but I don’t feel it. The “I” that is in charge can move effortlessly from one sphere to the other, one language to another. Tending the wild creatures who might at any time turn against me, and stepping through a doorway into a pleasant, sunny, airy home (this very house in fact) with hardly a memory of that other world. This, it seems to me, is normality. And is the normal human condition.
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Does a normal, ordered, tidy life compensate an interior life of the bizarre, the flamboyantly imaginative? Perhaps, perhaps. Who can tell. We inhabit a world of ostensibly closed surfaces which, nevertheless, can slide open at any moment, like panels in a wall. We can’t anticipate the sliding-open, the revelation, but we can have faith in it.
Jung speaks of the fright of being seized in the grip of the “living god.” The direct experience of the archetypes, which usually come to us filtered through consciousness and through tradition. Hence the archetype of Jesus Christ in our culture sucks into it individual “archetypes” of the Savior, which otherwise would jam the airways and make civilization impossible. This is an attractive theory; who can know if it’s accurate or not…?
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December 6, 1976. In Son of the Morning I seem 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. Is this a danger, in fact, for all human beings? The sacrifice of one’s personal life in favor of an abstract, collective good. (Which of course exists very precariously.) Religion…politics…the frenzy of sacrifice…too much “love” forced down others’ throats…as destructive in a way as explicitly destructive behavior.
The Bible as poetry is haunting, and heartbreakingly beautiful. The Bible as a guide for moral conduct, or (god save us!) as history: almost worthless. For it’s jumbled, scrambled, rather demented, a cacophony. When I finish this novel I doubt that I’ll even glance at it again for many, many years.
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December 7, 1976.…Approaching the completion of the first draft. Only three more chapters to write, each of them short. A queer, dismaying, rather upsetting novel; by no means so programmatic as I had originally intended. It goes its own way now, squirming loose of the design…. Yet nothing at all like Joan Didion’s description of her experience of writing (re. A Book of Common Prayer, where she seems to have begun with a visual image, an airport, and put a woman into it, and described the woman, and branched out to include other characters and eventually the novel itself: amazing! But far too unstructured for my temperament.)
Some excellent classes at the University these days. An enjoyable class, like an enjoyable party, is an existential experience that can’t be retained, and can’t even be described afterward. Discussion of Crime and Punishment. And of Lawrence’s short stories. My sense this year of the students’ involvement in their work, the graduate students especially.
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December 13, 1976.…Taking notes for another novel, a slighter & more domestic sort, The Game of——; or Funerals & Weddings.* Centered around games. What began a while ago as an interest in Lewis Carroll seems to have branched out into an interest in a small circle of friends who play “games” with one another. […] An ideal setting for The Game would be New York City, the area where I’ll be living this summer. Unfortunately I won’t be going there for another six months. & the novel will probably get under way before then….
Thinking of Son of the Morning w/some excitement, last night found it difficult to get to sleep, obviously I miss Nathan already and the highly-charged significant world in which he moved. A kind of magical, taboo’d world where the least gesture is important because it is ordained by God. So long as Nathan is “divine” he can’t be anything else but swallowed up in otherness…. My instinct is to write & rewrite countless pages. To insert new sections. Given the structure I have fleshing-out would be a delight; but I have to curb the instinct or the novel will swell out of proportion. Ah well: there are other things to contemplate, after all.
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December 14, 1976. […] What a great abyss of time! Freedom! Despite the fact that tomorrow at 9 A.M. I give an exam and will have eighty-five papers to sort through and grade, and the class list to prepare. Yet my mind is free, freely floating about, nothing seems inevitable, nothing that must be done. Should write a story, I think…more poems…everything has been shoved aside for months…neglected…. I don’t want to plunge into another novel so soon, or even to begin taking notes; I want this period of aimlessness to continue…. One by one the wraiths appear…appear & disappear…the universe in a process of dissemble-ment…reassemblement…everything shuffled & thrown down & begun anew. Shedding one’s skin, snake-like. (Or eel-like, to use a metaphor from Son of the Morning.) The relief of having explored certain vexing questions & answering them, to some extent…. WHY AM I SO REASONABLE, SO EVERLASTINGLY SANE. WHY AM I SO PLACID. The nugget blossoming at the heart of, the brain of, the conscious universe. Stimulating a radical re-arrangement. And the extraordinary chaos of one’s dreams at such times….
* The “superficial satires” to which Oates refers are the stories collected in The Hungry Ghosts: Seven Allusive Comedies (Black Sparrow Press, 1974).
* This essay appeared in the summer 1976 issue of Critical Inquiry and was collected in Contraries: Essays.
* Patricia Burnett was one of Oates’s Detroit-area friends.
* Frederic Oates (1914–2000) and Carolina Oates (1917–2003).
† Oates’s story “The Giant Woman” had appeared in the winter 1976 issue of Kansas Quarterly and was collected in Night-Side.
* Tanner’s review, “Panic Stations,” had appeared in the March 12, 1976, issue of the New Statesman.
* This is the journal’s first reference to Son of the Morning, a novel that Vanguard would publish in 1978.
* This poem, retitled “Abandoned Airfield, 1977,” was published as a broadside by Lord John Press in 1977 and was included in Oates’s collections Women Whose Life Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money and Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems 1970–1982. It was dedicated to her father, Frederic Oates.
† Betsey Hansell, an artist, was one of Oates’s Detroit-area friends.
* Miguel Rodriguez was one of Oates’s former graduate students at the University of Windsor.
† Lois Smedick was a University of Windsor colleague.
‡ “All the Good People I’ve Left Behind” was the title novella of Oates’s collection published by Black Sparrow Press in 1979.
§ Oates had used this quotation from the American philosopher William James (1842–1910) as an epigraph for her novel Childwold.
* The interview appeared in the fall–winter 1978 issue of Paris Review.
* Oates and Sontag did later become friendly acquaintances.
† The Morgans were Fred Morgan and Paula Dietz, editors of the New York–based Hudson Review.
* Smith, a scholar of eighteenth-century British literature, was completing a study of the satiric poet Charles Churchill (1731–64).
* This poem appear
ed in the September–October issue of American Poetry Review and in the collection Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money (Louisiana State University Press, 1978).
* This poem appeared in three of Oates’s poetry collections: Season of Peril (Black Sparrow Press, 1977); Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money; and Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems, 1970–1982 (Ontario Review Press, 1982).
† Oates’s third novel, Expensive People, had appeared in 1968 from Vanguard.
‡ Brother and sister, Jules and Maureen Wendall were major characters in them (Vanguard, 1969).
* Daniel Hoffman’s critical study on Edgar Allan Poe, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, had been published in 1972 by Doubleday.
† This poem appeared in the spring 1978 issue of Missouri Review and was reprinted in Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money.