Some of us are too normal, too healthy, to comprehend—that is, to really comprehend, for as a novelist I haven’t any difficulty—the despair that drags one to death. Anne Sexton in her letter to me spoke of my ability to deal with this anguish. Yet it isn’t me. Yet, in a way, it must be me, for who else could it be? It might reside simply in the Unconscious, in the transpersonal psyche…if one believes in such a phenomenon. (Sometimes I do, at other times I don’t.) Or it might be invented, imagined. For shouldn’t a novelist work at the effort of imagining…?
[…]
August 22, 1977. […] Fascinating, to read Dostoyevsky’s Notebooks for The Possessed. The difficulty he had in imagining the novel as we know it…the tortuous slowness with which Stavrogin emerged, and the political theme itself; how close, I wonder, did Dostoyevsky come to giving up and writing the romantic near-formless novel he had envisioned? How inferior it would have been to Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Notes from Underground….
Mystery of the “creative process.” What an insipid term! Means nothing, really. Creative process.
Dostoyevsky’s pathetic suffering re. fits, headaches, indigestion, etc. A wonder he was able to write at all, let alone to write masterpieces.
Enigma. Utter mystery. He, perhaps, is more truly inexplicable than even his characters.
[…]
…A query Dostoyevsky makes to himself early in the notes for The Possessed: N.B. Is this novel necessary?
Interesting to note that Dostoyevsky in talking to himself, in thinking aloud re. his projected novel, is rather like Henry James talking to himself; and rather like me. Do all authors sound alike? In their notes? What happens, then, between the notebooks and the completed book…?
…Impressed w/the sluggish, painful evolution of the novel, of the characters, plot, controlling ideas, etc. Is such labor justified? Who would work so very hard if he knew ahead of time all that he would suffer (through frustration, despair, and actual physical discomfort)? Of course the finished work justifies itself. It always does. Or usually. (Though I recall Joyce putting the first copy of Ulysses beneath his chair, in a restaurant where he and his family were celebrating its publication. Looking deflated, or somehow tired. According to Ellmann. The pity of it, yet the naturalness. What has the author to do with the material product that comes at the very end of his labor…. )
…Query: Can an author actually read his own work? And if so, how? With what interior “voice”? Must he have forgotten it (more or less) before he can read it? A necessary but perhaps impossible detachment.
“The madness of art”—James’s phrase.
Graywolf: His Life and Times. I think I will scrap the whole thing.
August 23, 1977.…Mom and Dad visiting this week. Yesterday, marvelous weather: we sat for a while in the courtyard, then down at the beach; went for a long walk to dinner in Windsor; walked along the riverfront admiring the Detroit skyline. Windsor must be, for its size, one of the most attractive cities in North America. One sees it through the eyes of visitors. Of course everyone complains here, it is the policy, the convention, to complain; “intellectuals” above all like to complain, to show their dissatisfaction with all things above and beneath. But, still. Compared to expensive trash-strewn New York City and grim drab dangerous Detroit with its ludicrous contrasts of Poverty & Wealth….
Feeling quite good. The visit is going well. In fact I was nonplussed for a few minutes yesterday when my parents arrived—looking so very good, so (almost) glamorous. One could never guess at the lives they once led…the backgrounds they rose from…the handicaps, the stupid twists of luck, fate…. My mother with her curly hair, red slacks and a very pretty white blouse with a bow; a silver bracelet I once gave her; attractive white opentoed shoes. My father with handsome trousers and a rather stylish sports coat, not quite so heavy as I remembered (though since he stopped smoking he seems to have gained weight permanently). At home they swim nearly every day, my mother 1/4 mile, my father 1/2 mile, which is to my thinking considerable. (I doubt that I could make one lap, without gasping and flailing about. I haven’t swum in years, in years.)…My mother brought jam, peaches, tomatoes, a cantaloupe, a kitchen towel, a sweater for Ray she had knitted. A very pleasant visit, in fact delightful. And today looks clear also. (We are going to Liz and Jim’s this evening, then out to Jim’s golf club for dinner.)[…]
August 24, 1977.…Delightful evening, yesterday. Took my parents to the Renaissance Center, then out to Birmingham; to Quarton Lake; to the Grahams’, and then to the Kingsley Inn; returned home after midnight. A long day. Everything went well, in fact splendidly.
[…]
Irony. My father was very amusing, telling Liz and Jim and Liz’s mother about his comic-grotesque experience raising pigs many years ago (both Liz and Jim had relatives who raised pigs, or lived on farms themselves—I’m not sure which): the pigs burrowing under the fence, running out onto Transit Road, his catching them by hand after much difficulty, and throwing each of them (large creatures) back over the fence so that they landed heavily on their sides and the “earth shook.” Shortly afterward he killed them, and slaughtered them, and “cured” them with some sort of salt-gun injection; and hung the meat up in the barn; and the meat rotted. (Which makes a very funny story, especially as he tells it, with his understated manner and his expression of profound, almost quizzical disgust, as if the memory of the incident still baffled him—and this bafflement is part of the anecdote.) I know, however, that the situation wasn’t funny. He tried to raise pigs because we were very poor. It was poverty behind the desperation…and it was a sort of tragedy that, after all the humiliating effort, the meat rotted. How interesting it is, then, that thirty or more years later the incident can be retold, perhaps even re-imagined, as an anecdote. A story. A story meant to amuse. For now their lives have changed considerably—completely. There’s no danger of a repetition of the poverty of decades ago, or the fear and bitterness that attended it. So, sitting in the elegant living room of a $200,000 home in Birmingham, Michigan, telling his story to a vice president of one of the most wealthy of contemporary “companies” (or is Gulf & Western a sort of empire?—“company” sounds so feeble), he can be, in a way, elegant himself: a storyteller confident of his audience and of his own ability (which turns out to be considerable) to entertain. I think this is all profoundly, profoundly interesting…and enigmatic only to me…. There was talk, too, of a kind one never experiences in a family, but only in the presence of others: about ancestors, backgrounds, etc. It turns out that my mother’s father’s name was Bus (Hungarian—and changed by immigration authorities to Bush) and that he was the first Hungarian to come to the Buffalo area; my father’s father’s name was James, and he and his brother Patrick came to the Lockport area from Ireland (exactly where he doesn’t know), and from the two of them are descended a number of Oateses in that area. (Yet I’ve never come across an Oates anywhere—not even in Joyce’s Ulysses.) Hungarian, Irish, and a mixture of French, German, and English: my background. Which seems lavish enough.
August 28, 1977. […] Query: why is it that when communication becomes blunt, lucid, simple, it inevitably becomes the means by which falsehoods are conveyed? And why is it that when communication is subtle, complex, deep, agonizingly thorough, it cannot be translated into any terms other than its own original terms?…By which I mean that Proust and Henry James and Joyce and Faulkner etc. cannot be dealt with except through their languages, their specific languages. There are no referents for their words. The words are. The subtlety of a Jamesian “thought” is one w/the Jamesian sentence. So it is futile (as well as irresistible!) to attempt to discuss these works at all. It is especially futile to discuss “character.”…
The artist is one who makes “much” of life—but not quite as much as life justifies.
One can see at least two kinds of writing. The high “literary” work in which content is rigorously shaped, and subordinated to language. And the “vulgar” in which conten
t is everything. (Non-fiction, above all.) But the word “vulgar” is a poor one…I don’t like it….
Why do we read? Why do we tolerate, for instance, James Joyce’s finicky preoccupation w/his background, the names of neighbors, cricket players, old priests, etc., etc., memories of a boyhood in Dublin that are no more valuable, in themselves, than anyone else’s memories? Yet one must master, or at least learn to deal with, all this dreck. Otherwise Joyce is lost: there isn’t any Joyce…. With Lawrence, however, one need know very little that is extrinsic. The English language, to start with: a modest enough demand. Some knowledge, perhaps, of England. (Though Lawrence spells things out clearly enough through his characters’ debates.) If literature is a kind of game…. But then no, it is a visionary experience; and the “game” is simply the network of rules that the artist seizes upon in order to communicate his vision. One can use certain rules, or other rules, or still others; but some rules must be used. And they must be maintained for the whole of a work. Otherwise the art-work is destroyed.
[…]
My interest in children, in the boy of “Honeymoon” and the girls of “Softball” and Graywolf and other recent stories;* and of course Childwold. Not an interest I would have predicted for myself, given my “self” of some years ago. (Altogether bored by children.) Which points toward a distinct reorganization of the psyche…a shifting-about of unconscious inclinations….
Women have children, sometimes, to locate themselves. Hoping for girls, that is. To relive, to re-awaken something utterly mysterious. It’s deep, deeply embedded in us, almost irretrievable…. (What is this, that we wish to grasp once again? The lost self? The childhood self? The childhood that appeared to surround us?—or the one that actually did surround us? The powerful, almost drugging sense of the past…“nostalgia” (an inadequate term)…a wish to re-experience, to re-exist (might there be a word for this in another language: we have none in English that is quite right). A riddle, a mystery, plunging us deeply into the very core of ourselves, from which we return dazed and shaken but, oddly, knowing no more than we did before.
…I will never be able to translate into fictional terms, into Graywolf and Bellefleur, all that I feel. All that I know. It simply eludes me, it’s too intangible, too painfully subtle to be expressed in dramatic terms. There are some thoughts, then, that can only be private. One can brood upon them, mull over them, only in a journal. (And then only in a journal open to no one else.)…The realm of the un-written, the un-imagined, the never-conceived. Think of the para-Hamlet, the para-Ulysses, the great flood of emotion that did not find itself into Virginia Woolf’s novels….
[…]
don’t know. I don’t know.
[…]
September 16, 1977. […] One of my misfortunes is the fact that, increasingly, I have no one to talk to.
To talk with.
…Except of course Ray, and in a marriage one must often soften one’s own discomfort, or misrepresent it entirely; for, in intimate relationships, to profess unhappiness of any sort, however temporary, however absurd, is to suggest that the other person has failed, somehow, to keep one happy. I reject this notion, I know that it’s preposterous, and yet it’s so: if Ray were terribly troubled about something I would feel a sense of helplessness, and dismay, knowing that my love for him, my attentive concern, really wasn’t enough…. The delicacy of intimate relationships, the equilibrium, balance, of marriage….
We outgrow love, like other things
And put it in the Drawer—
Till it an Antique fashion shows—
Like Costumes Grandsires wore.
…Reading of Emily Dickinson & her love for several women. Reading her letters. My God, such intimate, revealing, tender, beautiful letters, now exposed in print, for anyone at all to read: what cruelty! There is no privacy. If the poor woman could have foreseen…. (Not that she would have been ashamed of her “homoerotic” love itself. But the exposure, the relentless systematic digging-out of every secret by “scholars” and “critics” and voyeurs, is appalling.)
Even more appalling is the prospect of future treatment by one who has no secrets. For surely former friends and acquaintances and students and strangers will simply invent whatever they wish.
September 19, 1977. […] Notes for “The Doomed Girl.”* Wrote a first draft in pen, want to wait a while before revising. Odd that this story should come so easily, and with such interest (for me), when the Graywolf materials were blocked for so long.
…Robert Lowell’s death. Sixty years old. And Nabokov, months ago. The masters, the Nobel Prize–aspirants. Who next?
…Working on The Evening and the Morning.† A loose shapeless experimental first draft. […] Beginning a new novel, I return to zero: I know nothing: nothing seems to help. Only the writing of the novel will “help” me into it. I want to record the dismal stretches honestly, for they do exist, dear God they do exist, forgetful as I will be when the thing is completed….
[…]
September 24, 1977. […] Dreary rainy days, one following another. Unusual for this time of year. I am reading The Sacred and Profane Love Machine without quite as much enthusiasm as I had hoped for…it doesn’t seem as engaging as A Word Child.* A mistake to be teaching it, I suppose; but too late; I’ll make the most of it.
…Successful people tend to confuse their image, their persona, with their true selves. A fact that must be remembered at all times. When I am “Joyce Carol Oates” or “Joyce Smith” in public I am not the person I am now, or at home, or in any private situation; and there should be no uneasiness about this split, if it can be called a split. Spontaneous reactions and emotions are perfectly all right provided they are not self-indulgent and don’t upset others. The self is protected by the persona, but the persona also protects other people from the self. Which means that I have a responsibility as an image-bearer in the minds of certain people, particularly students, and I should respect this at all times. The destructive psychologies and theologies of the 60’s attempted to break down all barriers between people, and between parts of the personality, and the results were catastrophic. I’ve never felt the need to defend my desire for privacy, my need for a certain measure of secrecy. This journal comes as close as I care to go in terms of laying “bare” my heart. The 60’s were based upon false premises, in fact. There is no “collective,” there is no happiness in numbers, no definition of the self in terms of a crowd. Promiscuity isn’t liberation but simply a failure to discriminate, a failure to make intelligent choices. My inclination toward chastity, my prolonged (one can only call it that, in 1977!) virginity as a matter of conscious principle weren’t, aren’t, symptomatic of the morality of the 50’s but symptomatic of my own morality, my own self. Exogenous pressures mean so little, the soul is embedded so very deeply….
October 12, 1977.…Warm, funny letter from John Updike; he and Martha were married Sept. 30. (A pleasant coincidence: I taught his “Giving Blood” in class yesterday.) It seems odd to me, and even outrageous, that The New Yorker should reject anything of his at all. But they did reject his beautiful, moving elegy for L. E. Sissman, and so he was kind enough to send it to Ontario Review.*…How dare they reject Updike, really? I can’t comprehend it. And the poem is good, very good, very moving. Perhaps The New Yorker shies away from genuine emotion….
I remember with warmth our luncheon at a quite totally deserted restaurant outside Georgetown (The Chanticleer); it was as if I’d known John and Martha for years, and Ray too felt a most unusual rapport, unstrained and unartificial. We talked of various things, literary matters […]. Updike is a thoroughly first-rate intelligence, but he is amazingly modest; what is astonishing is that he seems to believe his modesty…. Like John Fowles. How odd, how very odd…when a much lesser talent like Stanley Elkin is so unpleasantly egotistical. But then, of course, it makes sense.
[…]
October 30, 1977.…A Sunday. Drove out to Amherstburg, went for a walk; pleasant autumn day. Workin
g on the novel:. Reread The Picture of Dorian Gray. Have found much to admire in it, despite the fact that everyone appears to look down on Wilde. The novel does address itself to serious questions…though there is something egregiously and sadly silly about Wilde himself, in the end. […] A teasing inner substance to Dorian. Not the obvious moral tale, Dorian’s “selling-of-his-soul,” etc., but the paradoxical relationship between Basil Hallward and Dorian. Basil as the artist who initiates the tragedy by transforming the innocent, natural, boyish Dorian into a work of art: calling Dorian’s attention to his own beauty. A kind of “fall.”…Basil is ultimately destroyed by Dorian, which seems appropriate. Dorian as Anima, Muse; B’s beloved. The homosexual implications are never made explicit. Perhaps they aren’t even “homosexual” in any meaningful way…. What is the relationship, then, between the Artist and his Material, between his Material and his Art?
…Seeing oneself, as Dorian does, as an image. To be a spectator of one’s life. To dominate emotions, to control them, etc. Zombie. Listlessness. The aesthetic ideal: dead-end. Over-analysis of self. The essence of decadence: too much leisure, too much time. A Sahara of time. One feels impatient w/it, & rather quickly too. Though Wilde does write well, no matter what his (envious?) detractors say.
[…]
…What is, though, the relationship between the artist and his art and his material…? I’m not sure that Wilde explores this, but Dorian does suggest it. I must think, think about it. The transformation of the “innocent” self into the “artificial” self. One becomes an artist of one’s own life—& one’s life necessarily becomes an artifice. Death of a sort. Airless. Claustrophobic.