The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982

  …Shaking hands with John Ciardi, another participant.* My distress at seeing him again: he has become mammoth!—and his face is creased, ravaged, a horror. Yet he was smiling. And seemed very friendly. (Poor man. Does he know the worst about himself?—that he has no reputation whatsoever now?—and has he given up in every way?—surely he has given up on himself as a physical being.) Exchanging a few words with Helen Vendler, who seemed nervous, edgy, tired; for some reason (why?) she had arrived two days early; her paper won’t be given until tomorrow. Shaking hands warmly with James Baldwin (who kissed my cheek); and with Edward Albee, who surprised me by giving me a copy of The Lady from Dubuque—a mimeographed working copy, not a published book, inscribed to me. Signing books, interviewed by countless reporters, even by a television interviewer. Vertiginous. All very breathless. I can’t think of myself as famous but in Newark, yesterday, for a while, in a certain part of the city, I certainly seemed to be.

  …Working today on Angel of Light. Kirsten meeting Di Piero in the city. Page 138. Reading Susan’s very moving reminiscence/elegy on Roland Barthes (which inspired me to try, again, to read Barthes. I have never found him more than diverting.) Walking in Princeton: magnolia trees, forsythia, tulips, daffodils: sheer beauty: all that Newark is not. Alas, Newark—America—all that Princeton is not.

  …To celebrate. Here. Now. To express gratitude. For life? For being alive.

  […]

  April 24, 1980. […] Construction has started on our garage—our “guest suite” or “recreation room” or whatever it is. $35,000 exclusive of lighting, plumbing, etc. And we leave May 12 for Europe…. A messenger came from Washington yesterday with our passports, visas for Poland and Hungary, and a thick wad of plane tickets. Because we are cultural emissaries we are allowed more luggage than other passengers; and for some reason I don’t know we’ve been granted a higher payment per day than others…I really don’t know why. A trip for which I must prepare psychologically. I must determine precisely what I will do in terms of writing for those six weeks. Journal entries, poetry…. But the novel will come to a rest. Obsessive Kirsten and Owen…. thinking of Ibsen, and his obsessive and doomed characters. The spectacle of energy simply running out…devouring itself. Nineteenth-century expansiveness turned on its head. And twentieth-century expansiveness in terms of control. Dominion over the earth and all the creatures on it…. Tragedy…farce…. Reading Othello the other day. The spirit, the bitter energy! Iago’s plot. Othello’s nobility which depends upon his opacity. But the language, the language! It is always there…our unaging monument which, when touched, beats and gives off warmth.

  April 28, 1980. […] The rewards of failure. A topic I should write about someday. The “failure” of Faulkner to successfully imitate Huxley or Hemingway; so that he had to press forward, to discover his own voice. If he had been acclaimed for Mosquitoes or Soldier’s Pay it’s difficult to see how he could have resisted repeating and refining one of those modes…. The “failure” of Joyce with Dubliners (which was shredded in Dublin) and Stephen Hero (which wasn’t published). So that he could exile himself and work for ten years…not only on the masterpiece A Portrait…but on the plans for Ulysses…. And Wilson too, perhaps. Finding himself unable to control his faculty at Princeton as he had wanted to control them, he struck out for political office (governor of NJ)…and then for President. Too easy and too immediate success must have compensatory problems. Susan Sontag said of her friend Don Barthelme that in the short run his being taken up by The New Yorker was certainly good for him (he had an income), but in the long run it has been damaging (he has been able to repeat himself for years and can’t in any sense really outgrow the fastidious and mandarin confines of that magazine)…. A fertile subject, failure. But of course there are intermediate, temporary failures…weeks and months when nothing happens…when one is left, miraculously, alone. And out of bitterness and envy and self-loathing can’t an extraordinary art emerge? (One thinks of the great haters of literature—Céline, Dostoyevsky, Lawrence; and on a lesser scale Evelyn Waugh—who perhaps hated too energetically and loved too little.)

  May 1, 1980.…Having finished Part II of Angel of Light…contemplating Part III. (Mt. Dunvegan Island; the Martens family place; Nick and Maurie’s fiancée Isabel strolling along the beach; time curiously telescoped for them, though not for Maurie; etc.) Five and possibly six days of rain, gloom, chill, depressed spirits….

  …Though hardly consistently depressed. Yesterday, the last day of class, and possibly my last day at Princeton University (since Jim Tuttleton’s offer came on Monday evening),* I walked about in a virtual aura of contentment and even elation: most things were beautiful but I can give them up readily enough. Two years at Princeton, teaching undergraduates…well, I can give anything up, provided I feel I have acquitted myself respectfully at it.

  …Lunch with Victor Brombert on Monday; Bob Fagles yesterday. I will miss them and Prospect. But….

  …Preparing for the trip to Europe. Systematically. Now it is only eleven days away. So much to do, one becomes paralyzed…. And tomorrow Lucinda Franks is coming out, to interview me for the NY Times Magazine; Sunday Ed and George are having a party; Monday Suzanne McNear is coming out to interview me (for some newspaper column?—which is syndicated); Tuesday we have dinner with the Showalters; Wednesday, to NYC, to meet with Leif [Sjoberg] at five, and dinner later with Mike [Keeley] and some others, after the PEN reception; Thursday morning/noon a luncheon meeting at the American Academy, the committee on literature. Then Friday, Saturday, Sunday…and we leave on Monday. Ray gives off a kind of radiant quivering heat, he’s so busy with copyediting, reading galleys, making telephone calls, etc.

  […]

  May 9, 1980.…Negotiations with NYU (which is to say Jim Tuttleton) about the possibility of my coming there as director of the creative writing program. And Princeton would like to be allowed the courtesy of having enough time to make a counter-offer. So my head is filled with such things, and Angel of Light is pushed aside…and I regret having become embroiled in the NYU business at all. My distressing “interest,” at bottom social and even conversational, in friends’ activities…!

  …Working on “Schoolboys,” or thereabouts, with so many interruptions I can scarcely think. The phone must ring seventeen times a morning. (For instance, one of the calls was from Sophie Consagra of the American Academy in Rome, offering me a writer-in-residency there, for next year. Which I declined.)

  …Apart from the distractions of the NYU-Princeton negotiations (which one would imagine had some significance, judging from their effect upon my sleep) this has been an extraordinarily rich week. A lovely evening with Elaine and English on Tuesday; on Wednesday, a meeting with Jim Tuttleton at NYU at four; drinks with Leif Sjoberg at five; PEN at six (where Mike, in accepting a translation award, gave a wonderfully witty but also serious little talk about the state of translations in the US); then dinner with Mike, and Eleanor and Michael Goldman, afterward…. Eleanor, just finished with her movie, said she was tired but did in fact look radiant. On Thursday: breakfast with Blanche at the Gotham; meeting-and-luncheon at the American Academy (John Updike chaired our committee with his usual grace, but seemed reluctant to curtail the garrulous and irrelevant ramblings of certain members…like Peter DeVries, for instance, who surprised me by being so talkative and so unfunny); the movie The Tin Drum with Ray in the afternoon (in all, a disappointing film); drinks with Karen and Michael Braziller at 5:30 (Karen showed me the elegant jacket design for A Sentimental Education, we talked generally of Persea Press/Ontario Review Press plans); then a good long evening with Stephen Koch (his thirty-ninth birthday) and his friend Peter Hujar, the photographer. Any one of these events might have been enough to absorb my interest, and my imagination (and possibly my sense of humor: the Swedish alliances and old feuds Leif hinted at are positively dizzying: must one care, if one is not Nobel-anxious, about Per and Olof and Sven and Lars and the many, many others?)—but they came so quickly, i
n so condensed a period of time, what on earth am I to think? That I rather doubt I will survive six weeks in Europe?

  …I must write a letter to Jim, declining the offer. I can’t see myself heading a creative writing program, even though I am very fond of Jim Tuttleton and would like to work with him.

  …I would like to decline, too, the committee on literature: how odd a way to waste time! There is Howard Nemerov touting his friends (again) and dismissing mine (he simply can’t or won’t read Bill Heyen);* there is Peter DeVries rambling on about some writer of the 30’s who hasn’t even been nominated for an award. “X is rather academic but quite a good poet,” I said, and Howard N. cupped his ear and said, “…Epidemic? What?” And so on, and so forth.

  May 11, 1980.…A lovely cool spring day: and we are preparing for our massive six-week voyage into the unknown. Frankfurt to Mainz to Antwerp to Liege to Berlin (June 15) to Hamburg to home. Amazing! The planning, packing, thinking, are less burdensome than I had anticipated, though it’s a surprise to discover that I will be responsible for sixteen “talks” or presentations of one kind or another. (Ray has approximately nine.)

  […]

  …Working on Angel of Light, completed the chapter “Tower Rock,” on, and now I suppose I must stop work for a while. On my trip I think I will concentrate on poetry…perhaps prose poems…journal entries. When I return to the novel, if I return to the novel, what disconnections will have occurred!…it’s difficult to believe I will be away from its rhythms for so long. And perhaps I will be incapable of picking them up again.

  […]

  June 25, 1980.…Delight of: being on the ground; being home; not being transient; not being JCO.

  …Working with enormous pleasure on poems, and “Our Wall.”* Going through molehills of mail. And books. And galleys. The obligations I seem to have accumulated—! And so innocently.

  …Immense satisfaction simply to be here. Ray and I remarking a dozen times a day: Isn’t it wonderful to be home! Not harassed, not shaking hands, not trying to sleep under dismal circumstances (the Baseler Hospiz was certainly one of the worst hotels we’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter…but I almost liked, I almost enjoyed, those very late nights propped up in bed reading Doutine and Brontë and H. James. And the last night I didn’t undress, since it was already late and we were getting up at six and the place was so noisy I wanted to be able to leave the room and wander through the corridors if necessary, for sanity’s sake). The odd abrasive rather wonderfully crazy things one does, on “vacation.”

  …My intense interest in The Wall. The way the Berlin Wall continues to haunt—! Not just the wall itself but the checkpoint…the incongruous pansies…the blank-faced guards…the pert woman who checked our passports…the peculiar buildings just inside, on the East side, into which the wall runs perpendicularly. And the bombed-out look of the West side, the depressing half-razed buildings, vacant lots, dumps…. Might one invent a sequence of tales that deal with “walls.”…

  …The visible symbol of the invisible condition. The Wall. Barriers. Death if one violates….

  …Riding our bicycles through dreamy idyllic surroundings. Sunlight, shade, a pleasant wind. Ray’s garden. Going to a nursery and buying more things, mainly flowers: impatiens, coleus, snapdragons. My renewed love of the earth. By which I mean both the earth itself, the smell (in the sunlight and heat), and the sheer weight of one’s body on it. To be on the earth and not flying above it. Airplane travel did not unnerve me in the least (but then it never did: I simply disliked it) but the intellectual fact of being above the earth, flying, plunging, being hurtled through space and time, strapped in a seat, my legs aching, my head eventually aching, confined…this did turn out to be fairly unpleasant. But perhaps it was just the length of the last flight: 7 hours 50 minutes, and a frustrating delay before we could leave the place, and a madhouse scene at Customs. (In sharp contrast to the efficiency of European airports, namely Frankfurt.)

  […]

  …Slipping back into our real lives…. These walls, these mirrors & windows. Perfection. And a curious sort of anonymity: I need not be JCO for a long time…. Yet the trip was, in retrospect, magnificent. On that both of us agree.

  […]

  July 6, 1980. […] Daily life, a matter of “and so on, and so forth,” and one must force oneself to consider, to examine, to see, the person with whom one lives and blunders through these adventures.

  …Surely the danger is universal, and many have succumbed: to assimilate one’s husband or wife so seamlessly into one’s self that virtually nothing remains that is “other” and can be witnessed. This is called “taking for granted” but it has subtle and corrosive aspects, almost too many to be defined. It isn’t an exaggeration—or is it?—to observe that the pleasures of existence that appear to be effortless and given (our bicycle rides through this beautiful countryside, for instance; reading a good book; writing; meeting with friends) are supported invisibly by love…by the stability and permanence of marriage…or anyway this marriage, this relationship. (For I have no doubt but that a rotten marriage could poison everything—even the landscape.) To look, and to look again. To actually see. See. To realize one’s ongoing good fortune without being absurd about it or lapsing into sentimentality….

  …Dinner tonight at the Fagles’.

  …(What have I been brooding upon lately?…a minor obsession. The Wall. But as I explore it The Wall isn’t only what I have been thinking…it’s also, to be very specific, to be absolutely specific, the fact of the Germans—i.e., the Nazis—having poisoned the twentieth century. Is this it? Is this it, so bluntly? I keep thinking and thinking and…my mind turns…turns upon the fact which is inescapable, and indeed a wall, that people like Bob and Lynn Fagles, and Eleanor and Michael Goldman, people of incalculable worth and personal charm and intelligence…would have been, if the Nazis had their way, “exterminated.” Now all this is obvious, all this is “history,” but I keep thinking about it in specific terms…in very local terms. The Wall is, among other things (and there are many things of course—the East/West paranoia for one), simply this fact. This ugly fact. Which no German, however humane and liberal and “guilt-burdened,” can alleviate. Hitler & the Nazis & the articulated wish of the “Teutonic” people—not only to commit genocide but, in a sense, to destroy the world—to almost literally poison the world, and the future. This is the wall I keep banging my head against…. Was there ever so futile an exercise!…and so commonplace as well. Not a predictable subject for me, for my “brooding.” And what can be done anyway…?)

  July 7, 1980. […] Working on “My Warszawa.”* Hour upon hour upon hour. So much comes spilling and bubbling out, so much am I Judith and Susan Sontag combined and a fictitious other, a third woman….

  …Yet it’s Germany, the hateful Wall, hateful German history that stays with me. Instead of dissipating as the days pass this uncanny mood expands and deepens. What to make of it! I feel trapped in a fate not (by heritage) my own.

  […]

  …Warsaw, the “occupied” zone, a place of subtle and not-so-subtle poisons. To work the three or four threads, the motifs, without allowing any to predominate…. The “Jewishness” of one’s spirit in such parts of the world is a queer, queer thing. Certainly I have never experienced it before.

  …Will this heavy mood lift?—will “Germany” ever evaporate?

  July 12, 1980.…6:10 P.M. Have been working most of the day on “My Warszawa.” Reliving, seeing again, walking along certain streets…hearing again certain voices.

  …Always, the instinct: I don’t want to hurt anyone, my fiction will hurt, cannot escape hurting, it is in the very nature of “fiction” to strike deeply and to hurt…but, still, I don’t want to hurt anyone; our Polish friends, guides.

  …These days pass, and are exquisitely beautiful. I can’t believe that I have ever been so happy. The vastness of the day, the promise, the solitude, the hours of work in the morning; luncheon on the terrace; a bicycle
ride or a walk (yesterday to Titusville, our first visit in a long time, and we went to the antique clock shop, and Ray bought me a German 400-day clock, a belated birthday present); sometimes we read in the afternoon […]. It seems a marvelous gift, the possibility of my preparing our own dinner. After so many weeks of eating out, sitting through banquets in our honor. And so on, and so forth. To do anything, however menial, for oneself. To clean the kitchen cupboards, to vacuum, to go through the usual batch of submissions for the magazine…a rare privilege. To be home, to be responsible, to have an identity, to be an adult. Not waited on, made much of, driven about in limousines and vans, honored, toasted, flattered, admired…. The impersonation of the “distinguished American writer Joyce Carol Oates” is an act I find uncomfortably easy to do.

  …With all these blessings, and the telephone rings yesterday, and Karen Braziller informs me (in a wonderfully breathless girlish voice) that Bellefleur has received a front-page review in the Sunday Times for July 20; that it is very positive; by John Gardner.*