[…] My brain is so blank, my thoughts rattling like peas. Harmless. Idiotic. Went where—?
…Kay died at 3 P.M. on Thursday, Oct. 30. She had entered the hospital on Oct. 2…. She began getting seriously bad on Oct. 12…. Unable to speak, but evidently she could understand most of what was said to her. (Liz visited constantly, and talked to her and touched her even when it became obvious that Kay was sinking into a coma…simply growing weaker, passing away.)
…I feel so angry about this. Numb, and angry. For God’s sake why hadn’t she seen a doctor, though everyone begged her! The waste, the loss, the stupidity…or was it simply a sense of fate…. […] I can’t think, can’t even type. Inchoate emotions. Numbed half-thoughts.
[…]
November 13, 1980.…The mesmerizing mad language of A Bloodsmoor Romance. An utterly fascinating experiment…though it isn’t, I suppose, an experiment entirely; I can see myself (and others) in the Zinn sisters, and surely in John Quincy the “native American genius.”
…The bliss of hour upon hour of work, uninterrupted; and yet a very leisurely work too, reading the dictionary, answering the telephone (a woman named Michael Wiseman is interviewing me for the insatiable NY Times—what is my study like? the view from my window? etc.), daydreaming, doodling, reading Howard Mumford Jones’s The Age of Energy, skimming through Mrs. Southworth’s supremely awful The Rejected Bride…which almost reads like parody.
…My interest in “native American materials.” After this romance, a Wieland/Poe/Hawthorne sort of extravaganza…ghost stories…perhaps the eerie notion of “our” ghosts returning…a curse upon a group of people who start to see their dead…their particular dead…or, perhaps, their own dead selves….* I like the idea of a curse; a community; a group of (American) people bound by some sort of violation of nature, or of human morality…. (Yet it’s perverse to be thinking of the next novel, midway in A Bloodsmoor Romance. About 200 pages in it, I would estimate. Though I haven’t been numbering pages.) […]
…Love and work, work and love, an idyll, a true “romance,” yet who (reading the books of JCO) would believe?—for where, precisely, is JCO? A vision on the page; the works’ integrity; allowing me constantly to change form—and to slip free. My salvation.
November 28, 1980.…Lovely quiet productive days: yesterday chill & sunny, today misty, blurred, soft, rainy…raining much of the night. The tranquility of the house this morning; the serenity of this room; two lights burning (though it is still morning), one of the cats sleeping in the green chair…. Writing & revising A Bloodsmoor Romance as I go along. Sometimes with painful slowness (yesterday), sometimes with actual amusement and grace and a sense of forward-motion—the fluidity of language itself, to express itself (today—Grandmother Sarah Kiddemaster’s demise & her “atrophied inner organs.”)
[…]
…The greater leisure of this novel, in contrast to the murderous Angel of Light. My insomnia has vanished; I feel no compulsion to always, always, attend to the novel’s “voice” (as I did with Angel); there is no need to dread any inevitable violence, because this is a romance, and there is no violence; or anyway not much. (That the disingenuous narrator should pass fairly lightly over the Yankee pedlar’s hideous death, I certainly intend: yet even she could not fail to be moved by it.)
…Thank God for romance; for Bloodsmoor; for the fun of Malvinia, now “the toast of New York City.”…It is 1881 or thereabouts, I am on, and though the progress seems rapid (dizzyingly rapid, in fact) since I began the novel, not many weeks ago, it doesn’t feel rapid…or out of proportion. I seem to have more than enough time for my reading (all these books on my shelves), and for my teaching (the 301 workshop was particularly good on Wednesday […]; etc.) and for entertaining and social life and chatting on the telephone (last Sunday’s dinner went very well, I thought—Lucinda Franks and Bob Morgenthau, and Michael and Eleanor Goldman; and Tuesday we give a sort of farewell buffet dinner for Ed Doctorow, about ten guests invited; and I enjoy fairly lengthy telephone conversations with Stephen K. and Elaine S. once or twice a week).
[…]
December 7, 1980. […] The enormous pleasure of working on A Bloodsmoor Romance. The “romance” of words…syntactical structures…the fluidity of a dense, opaque, orotund language that twists & coils back upon itself, amid much parenthetical qualification. Now I am on, and must conclude the section “The Wide World,” today, tomorrow, Tuesday. I anticipate three more sections: one dealing with Deirdre and Constance Philippa; another dealing with Octavia and Malvinia; the last, “The Will,” bringing the sisters back home, for a romantic conclusion.
[…]
…We gave a dinner party last week, for Ed and Helen Doctorow […]. It was probably one of the very nicest evenings in recent memory, and I quite enjoyed all the preparations; though I was greatly rushed for time, having made an appointment to have my hair cut that morning. (This hair—hairdo—is so remarkable a thing, I have only to glance in the mirror to lose all sense of personal identity, and be amused. Very short, very curly, frizzy…. Everyone exclaims over it […] and in the midst of all this I feel simply befuddled: if they like this, how on earth did I look before? It doesn’t bear contemplation!…My vanity is so diminished now, my sense of pride so meager, I can’t even be alarmed at the frizzy stranger in the mirror; amusement seems more appropriate, and in any case more available.) […] Classes end on Wednesday of this week. And so a placid month awaits, during which I should accomplish a great deal, or at any rate a great quantity, on my Bloodsmoor extravaganza.
[…]
December 17, 1980.…At home alone. Working on the novel: Deirdre’s balloon ascension, the Landesdown Valley episode, Madame Blavatsky…the exhilaration of long sentences!…arcane diction!…circumlocutious thought…and, indeed, tergiversations of all kinds.
…Slow motion, the process of writing. Yet the pages add up rapidly; or so it seems:…. One falls in love anew, anew. With the mere fact of telling a story. Though of course a long novel like this is many stories, braided together.
…Telling a story in language. Skeins of words from one side to another…dazzling, utterly mesmerizing…. Yet the act of reading (if, for instance, I read Joyce) is necessarily far removed from the act of writing, as playing tennis is from watching a game of tennis played…. The melancholy tepidness of life, if one is condemned to being a mere spectator.
[…]
December 23, 1980.…Completed Part VI of A Bloodsmoor Romance.
…The trajectory of a myth, a buried fable; given flesh, drama—with what prodigious results! 500 pages. One grows to love, in such extravagant ventures, the irremediable sense of the Absolute: a duration of such time, and such experience, that, while it cannot be relived (what can?), it cannot be lost or erased either.
…One of the reasons, no doubt, for art: for the artist’s patient submergence in his art: the minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day contentment in “absolute” detail.
…The Romance being set, I have now to struggle with the exact organization—the concluding sections. Three hundred pages at the most. The last part, “The Will,” is more or less in place. But now there is Constance Philippa and the West; and Octavia’s queer marriage; and Samantha; and, and…. So very much remains: including Deirdre’s collapse.
…Yesterday, an extremely interesting luncheon with Walt Litz, at Lahiere’s.* During which we talked of innumerable things, and people; but mainly books—writing—the process of writing (he is working on Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, William Carlos Williams—such familiar territory!—but I don’t doubt that he will bring something new to it, and approach the old from another angle).
…The weekend’s parties went far more smoothly than one might have anticipated. The social possibilities here are vertiginous, for one is confronted not simply with crowds of people, which would have no attraction, but crowds of interesting and estimable and talented people…. And so little time. So little time.
* This essay appe
ared in the anthology Literature and the Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature and was collected in The Profane Art.
† This interview appeared in the summer 1982 issue of Contemporary Literature.
* The writer Stephen Koch was a friend of Oates and Smith at this time.
* The actor and writer Michael Goldman, and his wife the film director Eleanor Bergstein, are close friends of Oates and Smith.
* Julian Jaynes was the author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind; Jerome Charyn (b. 1937), American novelist.
* This uncollected novella appeared in a special limited edition published by Croissant Press in 1985.
* Oates’s review of Anna Kavan’s Asylum Piece and Other Stories, “People Have Always Hated Me,” appeared in the June 1, 1980, issue of the New York Times Book Review.
* Gail Gleasner was one of Oates’s closest friends in high school.
* Oates and Smith were preparing for a six-week European tour sponsored by the United States Information Agency.
* John Ciardi (1916–85), American poet and critic.
* Tuttleton had offered Oates a position as the director of the Creative Writing Program at New York University.
* William Heyen (b. 1940), American poet and a long-time friend of Oates and Smith.
* This story, inspired by Oates’s visit to Berlin, appeared in the winter 1982 issue of Partisan Review and was collected in Last Days.
* This story appeared in the fall 1981 issue of Kenyon Review and was collected in Last Days.
* Gardner’s review, “The Strange Real World,” appeared in the New York Times Book Review on July 20, 1980.
* This is the journal’s first reference to what would become A Bloodsmoor Romance, published in 1982 by Dutton.
† This story, under the title “Old Budapest,” appeared in the fall 1983 issue of Kenyon Review and was collected in Last Days.
* At this time, Ray Smith was teaching at Rutgers.
† Brigit Stott is a character in Unholy Loves.
* Oates’s longtime close Detroit friend Kay Smith was dying of cancer.
* The next in Oates’s series of postmodernist Gothic novels would be Mysteries of Winterthurn (Dutton, 1984).
* Litz was then chairman of the English Department at Princeton and an internationally renowned scholar.
nine: 1981
The queer passionate impulse that overtakes me, as I write, to tell the story; to complete an emotional or psychological or narrative unit; to finish something that is begun with the first sentence, when I get that sentence right. None of this can be unique to me but must reside very deeply in us all. Telling stories, telling truths by means of fictions, trying to plumb some ineffable center, some essence, the more profound for being so very secret.
The year 1981 saw Joyce Carol Oates immersed in a Gothic world. She was embarked upon possibly the most ambitious task of her career: a series of what would be five lengthy “postmodernist Gothic” works that attempted, as she would later write, to view America “through the prismatic lens of its most popular genres.” Since Bellefleur had become a best-seller, she and her publishers naturally hoped that the series as a whole would strike a chord with a larger readership than she had enjoyed for her previous novels.
In early 1981, Oates was completing the second novel in the series, A Bloodsmoor Romance, as well as putting finishing touches on her political novel, Angel of Light. Soon enough, she was thinking ahead to the third novel in the Gothic quintet, The Crosswicks Horror, a work of more than 800 pages that she would complete in a feverish few months over the summer. Oates’s usual logjam of manuscripts was such, however, that this novel would remain unpublished (the manuscript is in the Joyce Carol Oates Archive at Syracuse University). By 1983, she would decide that she preferred the fourth novel, Mysteries of Winterthurn, to Crosswicks, and it was Winterthurn that appeared in 1984 as the third installment of the Gothic series.
As always, Oates was likewise engaged in teaching, to which she dedicated herself this year with renewed vigor. On the whole, 1981 seemed to be an extraordinarily happy year, the only negative being the occasional attacks of tachycardia that still plagued her. Early in the year she took tennis lessons; she continued her work on the piano, devoted especially, as always, to Chopin; and in addition to her novels she continued producing stories, poems, criticism, and reviews in a steady stream.
January 1, 1981.…A Happy New Year’s: no party last night, a domestic brunch this afternoon, a long hike through a field outside Hopewell (during which, along with thoroughly enjoying the exercise, I made resolutions to deal as firmly, yet as diplomatically, as possible, with the utterly trivial but vexing problem of L.S.: a local acquaintance who, while congenial enough, and certainly intelligent enough, nonetheless focuses upon me strictly in terms of what I can do for her—for her unflourishing career as a novelist, primarily—inviting me to her home expressly to ask for favors, and even to ask of Ray—poor dear courteous Ray—that our press bring out a novel of hers, that has been rejected by all the NYC publishers, and for good reason too!—all very trivial, certainly, yet troublesome, forcing me to think, as I rarely want to do, of past incursions on my legendary “generosity” which resulted in unfortunate misunderstandings, and a great expenditure of time & spirit)—amidst snow flurries, snowy stubble, cornstalks, juncos & chickadees & small unidentified birds—swinging our arms against the cold, our faces going numb—all very salubrious, and more pleasurable than it sounds.
…The delightful immersion in A Bloodsmoor Romance. The texture of language, words…filtering & refiltering…refining…revising. My progress is somewhat alarming (I am now on, approximately), the more so in that, from hour to hour, it feels so slow, so sluggish & painful…. Typing a page over, and over, and over; scrapping the first paragraph, or completely reimagining it. And so the hour ekes itself out, and now the sun has set, and everything is a lovely undefined bluish melancholy heartrending motionless exquisite calm…snow in a coarse powdery layer outside the window, the sky opaque, soulless, dead, yet perfect…no allegory here, no nagging hieroglyphics…not the ABC’s of noon nor any perplexing cadences: only the present moment, complete in itself. The wheel turning, turning, its circumference too vast to be absorbed….[…]
January 14, 1981.…“Perfection” is no virtue—but it may disguise the fact of the absence of virtue.
…Haunted by the figure, the voice, of Mark Twain. Mr. Clemens. “Pity is for the living, envy for the dead….” The obsession with twins. Demonic doubles. Boys. & it is quite by accident (though who would believe it?) that Twain’s infatuation with the Paige typesetting machine, and with machines in general, fits in so beautifully with John Quincy Zinn & the Machine God of the nineteenth century…. Not to mention the extraordinary coincidence of the crazed monkey Clemens sees in Jan. 1867, on board the ship America (America—!)…so very like the Zinns’s Pip. & the voice of Twain, his bleak cruel nihilism, contrasting so powerfully with that of Emerson…his idealism (bleak in its own way; vapid; cruel too). Pre–Civil War, post–Civil War. Operatic.
…“The dream goes on, and on, and on…” as Twain/Clemens observed.
…Cold but beautiful days here. Driving along Pretty Brook Road, returning from the University, 4:30 P.M., a remarkable orange-glowing sky…woods, fields, farmland…. The grace of “beautiful scenes,” “beautiful moments,” at all times, in this locality. One’s consciousness seeming to expand…to encompass everything…. The eerie ageless moment of which Zen speaks….
…Tomorrow, a “literary” tea party here, for women: while Ray is in the city. […] I shall prepare a real tea: cucumber sandwiches, watercress sandwiches, a pound cake, a chocolate crumb cake, other small ladylike delicacies….
…Our most ambitious dinner party, this past Sunday. Which went quite well, considering the number of people, and our limited resources. […] Shrimp and scallops, in a complex sauce, which didn’t taste (to my way of thinking) as complex a
s it should have, considering the labor that went into it…. Last week, Lois [Smedick] visited, and we had a lunch here; and dinner at the Showalters’…it’s always superb at the Showalters’…. Very cold weather. Siberian. Glacial blue skies. Frost on the windows.
…Lazy days, really. Despite my hour-upon-hour work on A Bloodsmoor Romance. (And now I find myself on page…on, evidently.) What greater, keener pleasure than to be so immersed in this novel, as to not know within two hours what time it is…? The elasticity of the language; the quirkiness of the style; so deliberately clumsy at times, but I hope the “deliberate” aspect of it will show.
[…]
…Oddly depressed the other day. An entire morning—sluggish, vapid. Reading about anti-Semitism in Toronto, Long Island, elsewhere. My God, anti-Semitism! In 1981. & drab feelings of hopelessness re. being a “woman writer.” […] On the “political” level everything does seem hopeless, and always has. But we don’t, after all, live on that level. The “political,” the “social,” the “ethical”…arenas of suicidal despair.