…A positive review in the Times is analogous to, what?—being told that one hasn’t got cancer. The relief is overwhelming. Elation, gratitude, simple happiness come later if at all. For it isn’t reviewers’ opinions (except in the case of a very special reviewer like John Gardner) that matter to us in the slightest—it’s the public nature of the review. One simply cannot hide from the Times, it is ubiquitous in this part of the world, and a bad review means primarily that one’s friends debate whether to offer condolences or to say absolutely nothing at all; in any case, one becomes a burden—temporarily. But so long as I live in Princeton I will have to accommodate myself to this extraordinarily public fishbowl translucent life, and try to make myself genuinely (genuinely!) happy about “good” reviews. For the bad will come soon enough, never fear. One must make an effort to enjoy the good….
[…]
July 14, 1980.…Finished “My Warszawa.” Revised pages, etc. Am fairly pleased with it. I think. Many notes left out….
…Have been thinking not of Angel of Light (which I seem to have abandoned) but of a new long dense multi-layered novel about five or six sisters…in texture and freedom of movement rather like Bellefleur* (whose gravityless air I miss so badly!)…perhaps it will be “historical” as well. I envision these young women growing into young women at different paces. Different rhythms. Last night I awoke from a complicated dream that seemed to be about this novel…though “novel” is a rather solid noun to affix to something so nebulous. I imagined the most beautiful of the sisters being punished for her vanity (or her beauty?) by a skin rash that begins with a single coin-sized scaly itch. Which she scratches half-consciously and heedlessly. Until of course it spreads. Even then she doesn’t take alarm until it spreads to her arms and neck and finally to her face. (Such is her indifference to the private aspect of herself.)…But I envision too a “return” for her, normality & even more…. Does any of this make sense?????
…A blazing white mist. Which I can’t penetrate.
…Midsummer, and I shall work on a new story (the poet & his mistress/secretary/bookkeeper) and perhaps after that “My Budapest” which exists, in a rudimentary form, in my blue journal.† And then back to Angel of Light. This new long novel has no name…no focus…I will come to think of it as a certain gravitational pull (like Bellefleur: when did I come upon the name Bellefleur?)…rather than a coherent idea. A texture of language, a slanting of light, different from, other than, foreign.
[…]
July 15, 1980. […] Self-analysis, self-scrutiny. Seeing ourselves “objectively.” The public person enjoys (enjoys!) the opportunity of “seeing” himself in so many mirrors, in so many distorting mirrors, that the selves available are positively staggering. And if I sit and meditate upon myself, my emotions, my motives, I seem to see right through the person I inhabit—I mean the personality. One might well inquire, Is this wise? One might well inquire, Is this the best possible use of time?
For instance, I receive a letter from X. A literary friend. He isn’t, I am fairly certain, being altogether honest with me about something—and the matter is minor. He mentions “love.” He states again that he thinks I am so very, very talented—the foremost writer of the 70’s, in fact. All this would be flattering except it’s absolutely hollow, and false, and self-serving (the self it serves isn’t my own, unfortunately); and the nonsense about “love”—! Cheap, sentimental, absolutely absurd. The most embarrassing sort of 60’s rot….
Now the hypocrisy of the letter angers me, and in my mind I write letters in response. Five or six versions. The essence of the activity is to allow myself to know that I know X’s game—and I am cautious enough (I think it is caution, perhaps it is cowardice or cynicism) to keep the letters to myself, not to trouble writing even one of them and mailing it out. My motives are fairly clear. 1) I don’t want to make an enemy—another enemy! 2) X seems unconscious of his hypocrisy, and seems to mean the pap about
“love”—to criticize him for paying homage to love might be cruel, and in any case would inspire his immediate hatred; 3) he is trying to manipulate me for future use, and I suppose I can’t blame him—Bellefleur just being launched, my position in the American Academy-Institute, my reviewing work, etc. 4) I might be mistaken about the letter—it sounds hollow because he wrote it quickly, he really doesn’t think I would believe he loves me, etc…. and on and on. I see myself as reacting to another’s dishonesty as if every transaction I make, and have made, has in fact been honest. As if everyone with whom I deal is absolutely honest too.
The problem, the moral problem: Do I refuse to reply to his letter for the reasons above, or because I halfway imagine that I want to manipulate him—at least, sometime in the future? Do I suspect that he might be of “use” to me too? (Admittedly I can be of more use to him than he can to me, but my unconscious machinery can’t grasp such subtleties.) So I am confronted with the pebble-sized ethical issue…should I reply to his letter in precisely the same terms in which I am recording my thoughts (my relentless and systematic thoughts!) in this private journal; or should I do nothing.
By doing nothing I am possibly being dishonest myself. To myself. Because I am fairly certain of X’s dishonesty, and really should not allow him to think that he can impose it on me. On the other hand, by replying to his letter…I am falling into a kind of trap. He will reply, defending himself; I will then wonder if I should reply again, or break off the correspondence. X’s next letter won’t be so friendly, and will certainly not blather about love…. So my feelings will be hurt, as well as my sense of reality. So I will write a letter in defense of my position. And he will then reply. And….
No, it’s obvious: I can’t reply. The friendship—a very remote one, in fact we have never met—must end.
So X will contrive a myth about Joyce Carol Oates, suitable to his (dis)honesty. And this myth will circulate in the world. And there isn’t a thing—not a thing—I can do to stop it, or modify it.
…And so on, and so forth. These are the kinds of thoughts I exercise in “meditation,” “self-analysis.” I do it daily, but I rarely record it, not because I don’t believe in scrutinizing the self more or less fastidiously, but because I don’t believe in recording it. For when I come to my decision (“The friendship must end”) that is the reasoned decision, and already it slips into the past (“The friendship has ended”—when X wrote his letter), and that is that….
…Nietzsche’s merciless analysis of self & others, a suicidal procedure emotionally—for him. Because he hadn’t the ballast one needs to make such an analysis. I suspect I know just what the ballast is, though I arrived at it more or less accidentally, that is to say naturally: normal love, normal life, normal work or anyway a normal dependence upon work, a normal enough role in a normal enough community. Without this ballast one simply can’t risk deep explorations, staring into abysses, courting madness. […] My strategy must be: if I lose this ballast of presumed “normality” I must stop writing about the sorts of things I have been writing about for the past twenty years. Because the past twenty years…and more…have seen me defined and loved and cherished and (yes) overvalued…first by my parents and Grandmother Woodside, then by Ray. I moved without any period of adjustment from being a “daughter” and “granddaughter” to being a “beloved” and “wife.” I might not have known who I was, but I knew what I was: the role was there, and is still here, some of it internalized. With my roots so deep I can risk all sorts of high winds, lightning storms…. If something happens, however, I will have to retreat.
I only hope I understand this utterly obvious fact—when the time comes.
July 21, 1980.…The great relief & excitement of having begun work on Angel of Light again, after so many weeks. Immersed now in Maurie and his infatuation with Isabel…which he doesn’t quite grasp as a stratagem…not only another “way” of loving Nick but an actual means of reaching Nick. Working on “Tower Rock” and “After the Storm.”
[…]
/> …Extremely hot here yesterday, 97 degrees during the afternoon. The main rooms of the house are air-conditioned, but not this study. Still, I could work in bouts…the heat wasn’t absolutely crippling […] turned with great excitement to Angel of Light about which I’ve been thinking for so many weeks, with a sort of yearning melancholy. Rereading the Mt. Dunvegan Island section I felt that I liked the language very much, its queer dipping elusive rhythms, but I can also see—as I had suspected—that the novel isn’t going to be very readable, let alone (to use John Gardner’s term) “semi-popular.”
…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 to
o 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.