[A colleague] tells me that nowhere in the Detroit area, in the Dalton or Hudson bookstores, even, is Childwold available. Nor has it ever been available since its (secret) publication back in October. I told John apologetically that my books have never sold well, and he said, “Don’t you think that’s because of Vanguard’s poor distribution?” and I said I really didn’t know. Vanguard is certainly poor about distribution, I wouldn’t argue that, but they have been awfully nice to me re. publishing my books. […] In my heart I have so little certainty…or faith…or, what?…hope…about my own writing…and no ability (or wish) to evaluate it objectively. As my books get more complex and please me more, the “literary world” values them less. Which is sad but not paralyzing.
January 9, 1977.…Completed “First Death” (name changed from “Miss Lerner & Me”) and feel fairly satisfied with it.* The frightful vulnerability of young people…of children and adolescents…the memory of it returned to me during the writing of the story and I felt, almost, a sense of terror…for what might have been my life. In my own case the business with the gym outfit and the teacher’s relentless persecution of me for weeks (at one point I went into her office to tell her I’d been looking everywhere, and she had the kindness—or the madness—to say that she was pleased with the effort I was showing!) combined with a freakish incident (I missed the school bus one morning when I was scheduled to do something important, I forget what, at school, and my homeroom teacher and my English teacher never “forgave” me for that, as if it had been deliberate) to make my eighth grade experience a sort of nightmarish delirium for months…. Evidence seemed to be piling up against me, without my having any power to defend myself, or even explain; how can a twelve-year-old explain anything convincingly to adults? Now so many years have passed and I have been autonomous for so long, it takes an effort to remember the queer terrifying vulnerability of the young, who are continually being judged and manipulated by the adults around them. To placate those in authority by any means possible—isn’t this simply our instinct for survival? To humor them until one is free of them? And then to go beyond them?…But the tragedy is that there are many who won’t or can’t placate others. A certain violent sullenness lies in us all, awaiting release. I could easily have crossed the line…drifted into simply not caring about my teachers’ trivial expectations and their “likes” and “dislikes,” their “favorites” and non-favorites. Fortunately I kept on making the effort to be a “good girl” (i.e., to be obedient, to accept nonsense, to continue working hard while my life seemed—I’m not exaggerating—in ruins about me, hoping that someday I would be forgiven for my sins and welcomed back into the magic circle of the Honor Society or whatever it was called…and this did finally come about in ninth grade, after my sad silly outcast year, so I promptly forgave my persecutors and it hasn’t been until decades later that my anger surfaced…though considerably altered by the necessities of fiction).
[…]
January 15, 1977. […] What is the value of teaching? At the very least one has the sense of awakening ideas…feelings…glimmerings of sentiment…in students. One needn’t be idealistic to see this; it’s quite evident. Beyond that there is the stimulation, the stirring-up, of the experience. One never gets so close to a text, for instance, as one does while teaching it to a responsive class. The adventitiousness of the academic world appeals. (The madman did not appear yesterday. I had nearly forgotten him. Our long cavernous caliginous hold-of-a-ship environment with its air of being a kind of hatchery—re. Brave New World—as well would have accommodated a bit of normal madness.) My frustrations are comic, rather than depressing. It turns out that everyone in the department has similar experiences—or nearly. Freed of this routine which is by turns exhilarating and simply silly I would have altogether too much time to focus upon my writing, and my own subjectivity. The claustral nature of our life here, my own seclusion in this study, would become too appealing…. So one reels from one tragicomic incident after another hoping not to be mowed down in the process.
[…]
January 16, 1977.…The religious commitment of the writer, the novelist especially. Commitment in and commitment to. The external world honored no less than the inner. One must be willing to be misread and misunderstood and misrepresented (though—admittedly—it sometimes hurts quite badly).
My bouts of discouragement, dread. Bewilderment. What is the point of a life’s-work when it can bring upon the writer such obloquy…cruelty…. The average, private individual will never open a journal or a book to read vicious things said against him, nor will he come across seemingly “objective” vindication of his life: he will never see his reflection in the aleatory confusion of the public world. (Aleatory? Accidental music? I think so, yes—a valid metaphor for the unharmonic world of strife.) But of course the writer must not expect, must not depend upon the public world. The writer must draw his strength from within; or from a few close friends and loved ones.
Sometimes the world, quite frankly, appalls. It’s too floridly cruel & zestfully mad. (For instance, the eleven-year-old friend of [a colleague’s] daughter Kate, recently assaulted & murdered. Her face blown off by a shotgun blast at close range. The murderer not yet apprehended.) It isn’t to keep pace with it that I write such brutal extravaganzas as The Triumph of the Spider Monkey but to register my astonishment…my stunned sorrow…my anger as well, for satire is a form of anger, a very stylized formal form. Yet at times it’s the only outlet.
As complexity wanes the satiric spirit emerges. As sensitivity is of necessity muffled or numbed the satiric spirit blooms. (For one can feel too much. One can be hurt too fatally into poetry—and when the poetry stops, so does the will to live.)
The harmonic balance of a life of sensations, emotions & thoughts. The danger of unbalance. I’ve thought somewhat uneasily for months that my emotions have been deadened…or flattened…yet events of the past week and my response to them indicate that this isn’t the case at all. In my heart there dwells the still hopeful, uncertain fourteen-year-old who observed the world with scrupulosity, infatuation & awe. And fear. For the world is a brutal place, regardless of what the poetic or the religious imagination would insist.
[…]
…The novelist works with the particular individual, building up to something beyond the particular. Perhaps. Hopefully. The novelist doesn’t begin with an idea and work backward. (Ah but why not?—surely there are many different sorts of novels and yours isn’t the only one.)
The richest of novels, then. The most pleasurable of novels. The novels I like.
Any statement about “the world” is a defending of the self’s current preoccupations. Isn’t this fair to say? But as soon as it’s stated, it becomes someone else’s history. The mind swoops onward, restless and playful.
Why I am so unserious. So playful.
Why nevertheless I am so dedicated to writing.
The fear of being, in the end, too serious. Too seeming-serious. The curse of a certain kind of English novel—wishing to be fluttery, unserious, lightweight in mind & heart. One needs courage to be absolutely serious. To risk seeming absurd. Or being absurd.
[…]
January 23, 1977.…Our sixteenth wedding anniversary today: amazing! We celebrated by going to Archibald’s for lunch & visiting galleries in the Birmingham area. (The Klein-Vogel, the Yaw, the Hilberry.) It seems incredible that we’ve been married sixteen years. Or were those other people who got married back there in Madison…? (Married on a Monday just before my Old English exam.) Ray and I are so close that I suspect neither of us can guess how utterly dependent we are upon each other….
Unfathomable, marriagelessness. The “freedom” of non-love. What would one do with such infinite “freedom”…?
And yet, the very real difficulty of suggesting a good marriage in fiction. Normal healthy love, a mixture of high romance and camaraderie and the very practical…. It can be presented, perhaps, at the end of a narrative (like Son of the M
orning) but it can’t very well be part of a narrative. Fiction demands conflict; harmony is unconvincing. What I live in my daily life I can’t transcribe into fiction…. Perhaps we need to write of what we don’t possess, what is distant & strange; we need to be dependent upon the imagination; otherwise there is little stimulus to write.
Odd that I felt discouraged by reviews the other day. I’d been told there was an “appalling” review in The New Yorker…but when I looked it up, it didn’t seem especially critical…not at all cruel, surely. The reviewer, Susan Lardner, simply didn’t understand Childwold and her presentation of it had little to do with the novel itself.* A kind of ninth grade book review, expressing bewilderment. But I’ve come to expect this sort of thing, especially from The New Yorker, and it’s illuminating in a way to see how obscure my writing seems to other people—to reasonably intelligent and sensitive people. Am I truly that difficult, or is it a result of their own perfunctory reading…? Certainly there’s no difficulty in my own sense of what I do, and no obscurity. Childwold was a very straightforward novel and each of the characters completely realized and very real—to me at least. Yet I would not expect it to be popular or much-liked.
Death of Anaïs Nin. A pity. But then she did live to see herself a success…excellent reviews in the Times and elsewhere. (I have been invited to participate in a memorial service for her, in Los Angeles, but it isn’t possible for me to get there.) Nona Balakian spoke of the intense dislike for her expressed by certain members of the NYTimes staff…men, mainly. But that’s the fate of the “controversial” writer. I can’t escape it myself. Because some readers hate my writing so vehemently, others feel they should defend it. And because some like it, others feel they should attack it. An accidental fate. Anaïs Nin was badly hurt by the cruelty of reviewers, their viciousness re. her novels most of all. But who hasn’t been hurt. And who hasn’t done his or her share of hurting…?
[…]
My faith in certain processes despite my own intellectual doubts. The intellect is shallow, obviously…. Reading Harold Bloom & impressed by the man’s wide knowledge in one sense, his naivete in another. The “anxiety of influence.” Stevens read Whitman read Wordsworth. But so what? Stevens read many other people as well, and talked with people, and was “influenced” by his own liver, the moon’s tugging, the quality of breakfast. One is left with stray pickings, a word here and there, ostensibly linking Stevens with Whitman. The shallowness of the intellect when it is primarily a passion for simple connections. Games. Are all critics lovers of games…. In a game someone is “it,” someone wins & someone loses. Life is reduced to a game board, possibly a pair of dice, or cards, or black-and-red squares. A diversion, a way of killing an hour. I would hope that literary criticism is something more than this….
Ideally it honors, expands our knowledge of & sympathy with the work, serves as interpreter. Ideally it is humble. But the deconstructionist critics are impatient, or despairing, with criticism as it has been practiced…for their roles as “servants” are degrading. They want to be poets and philosophers but have no subject matter. Hence they turn to real poets and philosophers and try to weave a sort of web of words about them, a fanciful concoction that is sometimes pleasing and sometimes boring but at all times expendable. One misses very little by not reading a critic of Whitman…one misses half the globe by not reading Whitman.
Envy & spite of certain criticism. (I am thinking of Bloom primarily—his envy disguised as a rationalist desire to de-mystify. Hence Stevens and others are deconstructed. Dethroned. It’s the psychoanalytical wish-fantasy that other human beings be reduced to impersonal drives so that the psychoanalyst can govern w/out fear of rebellion. Human beings = non-human drives. Explicable in terms of biological dynamics. That it’s unconvincing has not impeded its progress in certain quarters for many decades now.)
[…]
January 25, 1977. […] My dis-interest in what people speak of as “women’s problems,” “women’s literature.” Have women a special sensibility? No. There are individuals uniquely talented & uniquely equipped to interpret the complex symbolism of the world but they are certainly not determined by gender. The very idea is astonishing.
If the powerless must claim power, it’s naturally an invisible & incalculable power.
Energy, talent, vision, insight, compassion, the ability to stay with a single work for long periods of time, the ability to be faithful (to both one’s writing and one’s beloved)—these have nothing to do with gender.
The opportunism of contemporary “scholars”—attempting to construct a “women’s literature.” Is it simply because they wish to be published, because they wish to be promoted? Do they believe the far-fetched ideas they advance?…The sensibility of a Virginia Woolf, for instance. It’s her own, it’s uniquely hers. Not because she is a “female” but because she is, or was, Virginia Woolf. Not more sensitive than Henry James or Proust or James Joyce, consequently not more “feminine” in the narrow & misleading sense people use that term today…. But then I suppose critics must have something to write about. The profession demands it.
[…]
January 26, 1977.…Last night saw the film version of “In the Region of Ice” & was very moved by it.* The actors were superb, the photography arresting, even the background music in good taste. Black & white: and so it seemed of the 50’s, remote & sad. I would have preferred the Richard character to have seemed more manic, more dangerous. Not Richard: Allen. Sister Irene was beautifully played…. Beforehand, however, I was extremely embarrassed. Since the film was shown in the Ontario Film series, after a Canadian film (which we didn’t see), the audience was largely university people…but there was no other way for me to arrange to see the movie, and I was committed to seeing it since Andre Guttfreund went to so much trouble to send it. As things turned out it was fine: the experience wasn’t mortifying: Ray and I were both quite moved by what Peter Werner and his actors achieved.
Memories of that phase of my life. At the University of Detroit, a young teacher in her twenties, possibly more adventurous than I am now (or would wish to be); confronted with a brilliant student who gradually, or was it rather quickly, slipped into madness…. What was so alarming about the experience was my own naivete. I kept reading Richard W. as a lively, provocative, intriguingly combative (and obnoxious) student of the sort I should have welcomed in class since he provided a challenge to my authority rather than a demented person who would soon become dangerous. A memory of Richard in my office, sitting at my desk. I returned from class to find him looking through my papers & he turned w/his manic gleeful laugh and said something vaguely intimidating…. But my social instinct was (as it still is, I suppose) to turn such uneasy confrontations into jokes; to exchange nervous pleasantries with the mad. (And then too I was reluctant to believe him “mad.” The very concept struck me as outdated, silly, conservative…and weren’t we studying Dostoyevsky and Sartre and Camus and Céline and Nietzsche in my course? Richard could talk about literature brilliantly if not always coherently and it wasn’t until some months passed that his overwrought appearance and manner and laughter began to frighten me.) So I wrote “In the Region of Ice,” thinking half-seriously of allowing him to read it. I must have thought it would have functioned as a sort of warning to him: look, you’re in danger of committing suicide if you continue as you are! It had been accepted by the Atlantic Monthly when Richard killed Rabbi Adler in full view of his synagogue in Southfield, and then killed himself. I couldn’t have guessed at the extent of his violence, his rage & bewilderment.
…Richard was fond of me but not fond enough of me to want to kill me. Ahead of me on his list, along with Rabbi Adler, was a history professor—or sociology—named Charlotte Zimmerman, his advisor. Who has since left U.D., has disappeared from my acquaintance…. Richard was charming at times, at other times absolutely unbearable. I certainly liked him. He never came to me as he did to Sister Irene, but had he made an appeal what might I have done?—how
could I have responded? After his death his other professors wondered aloud how they might have “saved” him. They spoke of feeling “guilty.” I never did: I hadn’t that much power over him. To save another person from such a fate, to dissuade him from the scenario he has stubbornly created—what a miracle that would be! I hadn’t even the egotism appropriate to youth, or to a fairly attractive young woman only a year or two older than her aggressive and doomed admirer. Now he’s been dead more than ten years. What was the point of his act of murder & his theatrical suicide? Death is merely dead, mute deadness. I hate even the thought of R’s deadness.
January 27, 1977.…Another bitterly cold day. But sunny; rather lovely. Have been working on Claude Frey’s novel, possibly to be called Jigsaw. Notes & tentative scenes in longhand. The novel is growing rather shapelessly about Claude’s personality, which has become more wistful than I had anticipated…. The frustrated yearning of middle age for its own childhood & innocence. More than that: the longing for beauty, the longing to preserve beauty. But as one tries desperately to preserve it, one destroys it.