January 27, 1981.…Lovely days. Solitude & work in the mornings; a startling air, these days, of spring…elusive, premature, utterly captivating. To be lied to!—to be convinced!…The company of friends; preparing meals; playing tennis (but twice weekly) in Pennington…and that is a fascinating experience, simply the exuberant physicality of it, and the environment, the surprising awakening of long-forgotten (one might almost think, long-atrophied) skills…. & work on A Bloodsmoor Romance, which moves with glacial slowness, as I accumulate pages, pages, pages of revised material…scattered about the desk, & eventually thrown into the wastebasket. The queer exciting precision of these overblown “romantic” sentences!—which give me the most extraordinary kinds of trouble, impossible to explain, impossible even to comprehend, apart from the actual writing. Rather like trying to play a piano piece gracelessly, yet with a coy deliberate grace. & there is the challenge of telling a story by way of a narrator, through a narrator, behind the back of a narrator…a story she doesn’t altogether grasp; and which is all the funnier, for her not grasping it. (But will anyone take note of these scruples? Will anyone read…? The exercise is bracing in itself, like our bouts of tennis, which leave us tired, aching, often light-headed, but immensely pleased with—with the fact that we have done it—the fact that something disciplined and even, at times, artful, has been performed. Beyond that—one has hopes—one must have hopes: but it’s folly, to brood overmuch, upon the reception, intelligent or otherwise, of one’s fiction…. )
…Last night, a wonderfully warm evening: Mike [Keeley], and Lucinda Franks, and Bob Morgenthau; one of the easiest, and most pleasurable, dinners in recent memory. Lucinda and Bob had given me a delightful book, The Ladies’ Wreath (1847–8), for our wedding anniversary (they gave Ray a companion-book, to do with gardening), which I’ve read with fascination, and from which I have taken one or two surpassingly silly, and poignant, poems, for Bloodsmoor…. Sweet funny bright brilliant Lucinda…a young woman who exerts a considerable charm…and who is, like her marvelous husband, absolutely unassuming, and unpretentious, for all her accomplishments. And Mike was at his best: anecdotal, witty, warm, lovable….
[…]
…A marbled sky, and, again, that tantalizing scent of spring: Spring! Romance! Renewal! Fond foolishness! Shall we live it all again, as if ’twere now? Indeed yes…. Have just completed Part VIII of the novel:, & am utterly, utterly pleased. Proportion, cadences, convoluted syntax, outsized characters, Little Godfrey & Pip in their death-struggle in the well…. This too is a codified autobiography, but less intense, less exhausting, than Bellefleur. & with none of the hurt, of Angel of Light.
February 15, 1981.…Completed the first draft of A Bloodsmoor Romance the other day; have begun rewriting…not knowing whether to be sickened, or amused, or vex’d, or simply (simply!) obsessed, with the task of recasting the entire first book—some ninety unacceptable pages…. The voice isn’t right, isn’t the genuine voice, not the voice I came to love, with all its quirks & convolutions, as the novel evolved.
…The hollow dull thud of the wrong rhythms. A voice straining, and failing, to become unique. How laborious a task, this recasting…how slow, painful, frustrating, maddening…after the fairly idyllic pleasures of the past few months; the past weeks especially. And I should, I must, be cutting the novel, if I can, for at 834 pages it is too long: not for its story, I suppose, or stories, but as a commercial venture. An unrealistic length for these easily-distracted times….
[…]
…Writing and ambition, and a “sense of competition.” What is ambition? How measured? What is “competition,” precisely. Talking, last night, with Elaine and English [Showalter], and Michael and Eleanor [Goldman], here, after dinner. (A dinner, I am relieved to say, that went remarkably well—I mean the food—which I prepared lovingly, much of the afternoon, as a reward to myself for having toiled, so thanklessly, on the d——d Bloodsmoor Romance, all the morning. Chili-corn chowder, a “mildly ambitious” recipe; and coq au vin; and vegetables; and lemon-coconut cake; and a loaf of Ray’s bread…. ) Elaine speaks frankly of being concerned with the hierarchy of Victorian specialists, and her probable ranking therein. To get to Harvard!—to get to the top! This seems to me a pleasantly optimistic, because rational notion of why she writes, why she works so hard, why she loves her field. English too spoke of ambition, and the desire for power, underlying writing…. But it seems to me that, lacking any real grasp of why we write, or teach, or, in fact, do anything beyond minor things, we simply invent stories to “explain” our actions. That every one of us feels a passionate love, and deep commitment, to language; to literature; to certain humanistic values; and even to one another, in our work—this is disturbing, and unsettling, and cannot be articulated. “We must love one another in our Art, as the mystics loved one another in God”—as Flaubert said. But Art and God are not mutually exclusive; and may be, in fact, one.
…Why Kafka exhausted himself in his fiction; why Proust almost literally died into his great novel; why Chopin wrote the Preludes; why Blake wrote his prophetic books; why Lawrence wrote and rewrote The Rainbow…. How crude, to reduce such commitment to “ambition,” or a drive for “power.”…No, people are afraid to admit that they don’t know why they feel love, for certain individuals, for certain areas of work, for art. And this mystery frightens them—the loss of control, the realization that there is no control. Better to reduce the complexity of strife to a desire for “riches, power, honor, fame, and the love of women”—in whatever order the simplistic Father of Psychoanalysis arranged them.
February 25, 1981.…Working on revisions for Angel of Light, these past several days. In the sunny airy white “new” room. Hour upon hour…. The infinite pleasures of rewriting, re-imagining…. I see now that I could rewrite the entire novel, from start to finish, simply for the pleasure of sifting the language through my head…recasting the chapters, the sentences, letting Isabel speak more, doing more with the “radical history.” But enough, the novel is due at Dutton tomorrow, publication is scheduled for August, my obsession with it must come to an end.
…Elsewhere, A Bloodsmoor Romance proceeds along, now more smoothly than a few days ago. In talking today with Stephen [Koch] I said that our lives are like pathways in which, from time to time, something large, hideous, and seemingly insurmountable is dropped, and if we can’t get around it we can’t live—we can’t continue to live. When I break through these blockades I generally forget the anguish they have caused, the petty self-absorbed head-rattling teeth-chattering pain, about which it seems an exercise in self-pity merely to muse, though, at the time, the pain is real enough—my God, is it real enough. To think I can’t live the rest of my life; I can’t get to it; I will have to die. To realize that nothing will be possible—nothing. Stephen claims to have been in this state, more or less, for six terrible years. But I couldn’t deal with it for six days. Hence my fury, my frenzy, my work hour upon hour, simply to get through the blockade, or around it, over it, under it, any direction!—any direction, in order to live.
…Elsewhere, too, a virtually idyllic (if o’er-busy) existence these days & weeks. Tennis lessons twice weekly, at the Hopewell Valley Club, which see both Ray and me (surprisingly) improving almost between sessions—getting stronger, cannier, even more graceful. And a little jogging, and extensive walking, and working on a new Chopin nocturne, and reading Justin Kaplan’s marvelous biography of Walt Whitman, and preparing for tomorrow’s reading at NYU.
[…]
March 1, 1981.…A sun-bathed afternoon. Three-thirty. In this white, spacious, airy, altogether beautiful new room…sun pouring through the windows, the sky visible through the skylight…. We have just returned from a walk in Hopewell; later today a few people will be coming over for a cocktail party; I have been working on my little essay for the NY Times, on “violence” (“Why Is Your Writing So Violent?”),* and A Bloodsmoor Romance, which moves along by inches, by painful inches…. Finely-honed prose,
polished, fastidious, in the service of…? I scarcely know what, being so caught up in rhythmic patches of words; semi-colons; colons; commas.
…Shillington, PA & Millersport, NY traveling by taxi down Broadway, last Thursday, after our committee meeting at the American Academy-Institute. John Updike saying with a melancholy smile that, at a somewhat premature age, he’s a “father-in-law widower” […]. John’s next novel will be Rabbit Is Rich. Frugal, rural, John & Joyce…. I should have alighted with him at Knopf/Random House, and gone to visit Oxford U. Press, but, in utter truth, I never think of Oxford when I’m in the city—it completely slips my mind that I have another publisher. (Contraries arrived in yesterday’s mail, and looks handsome enough, though surprisingly slender. Publication date is actually April.)
…The pleasant unreality of “JCO” in public. Reading my poems and presenting a sort of “self-portrait in reflecting surfaces” at NYU; the amazing interest and enthusiasm a number of people expressed…which I must make a real effort to recall, and to record, because these experiences evaporate almost immediately: I find that I’m much more caught up in the logistics of getting about the city, meeting Ray, trying to work in a movie or a museum…. This is my “real life,” my private life, and the other (“JCO”) is some sort of creation; not an imposture, but partaking of the airiness of imposture. I can’t experience myself as others evidently do.
[…]
March 15, 1981.…Here in our “new room”…early in the morning…7 a.m…. a long white counter, which is also a desk; tall windows; sunlight; blue sky; the Swedish horse (of a peculiar blue-mottled glass) on the windowsill in front of me, a gift from an “admirer” of my work, in Stockholm…. Books, papers, notes, pertaining to the talk I am scheduled to give this afternoon, at the public library in Philadelphia. Having finished A Bloodsmoor Romance at least temporarily I have time, a kind of exhilarant time, for this kind of thinking…. Images of women in twentieth-century literature. Beginning with the nineteenth century…and then Yeats, and Lawrence, and Faulkner, and Updike, and one or two others…briefly Mailer (whom I am supposed to meet this evening, at Dotson Rader’s home: but perhaps the evening won’t actually transpire. […])
…Waking early, running outside, the extraordinary physical pleasure of feeling one’s legs, ankles, feet, so wonderfully alive…. A curious ineffable sensation, to be in motion. The sense of “control” gradually dissolving, so that one’s legs, one’s being, the very motion itself—controls. And the sudden startling beauty of the familiar landscape, our birch clump, our evergreens, the cul-de-sac at the end of Honey Brook…. Mourning doves fluttering up, juncos, titmice….
[…]
…Angel of Light. Assassination. Terrorism…. Real terrorism is the privilege of governments…. Sudden violence, “assassination,” the expression of despair…no way out…no way out…“a three-sided cage & no way out….” Why I should be visited with such curious jarring and impersonal feelings I don’t know…. Since I am free, I am not terrorized by our American government, I don’t even feel the admittedly commonplace frictions of contemporary life—living in cities, being afraid of violence (male) directed toward women, worrying about money, a professional future, and so on, and so forth. This strange perplexing sympathy for…. An odd nagging sense of…identity?…identifying with…. Are our lives epiphany-centered; image-centered; wonderfully static; jewel-like; pristine, sacred in timelessness?—or are they vast contours—hills, hillocks, plains, declivities, mountains, trenches, ruts, meadows, woodland—to be traversed, in time, in motion, in plot. I am propelled forward by my own effort, yet would be propelled forward in any case. The exhilarating completion of A Bloodsmoor Romance—ah, to bask in the radiance of that sun, for a while longer!—before surrendering it to another person. The hard jewel of a work, done.
March 22, 1981.…Revising, with unlook’d-to diligence, A Bloodsmoor Romance. So long as I delude myself, that I need only do a few more trifling pages, I do them; and, out of sheer momentum, and pleasure, in the old, old craft of juggling language, I find myself drawn onward—and onward—and onward. An amazing energy, for a task I hadn’t thought so compellingly necessary: but if it is a form of self-indulgence, so be it: thus the “great stylists” of tradition. (But when is the novel finished?—when is the last comma truly in place? I see a vertiginous fate, pages written & rewritten & rewritten, with the same head-on energy I believe I enjoyed, at one time, in plunging into new material…. Though perhaps I am mistaken. One can’t know.)
…A severe head cold, coughing, Bufferin & a sense of exhaustion, light-headedness, seemingly endless bouts of blowing my nose, difficult to keep a sense of humor, or proportion. “The dark night of the Soul”—perhaps it’s simply a sinus condition, or always was? When the malaise lifts, as it occasionally does (this began last Sunday, when we walked about windy Philadelphia, before my lecture at the Free Library), I feel marvelously rejuvenated, and energetic; unfortunately, the cloud then descends…. Food hasn’t much taste, sleep past 7 A.M. is impossible, but the condition is (isn’t it?) not fatal.
…A very simple truth about life: we swerve between being too sensitive, and too callous’d. It isn’t difficult to achieve the “correct balance”—it’s impossible.
…Ordinarily, one has about himself or herself a kind of protective coat, a barrier, an ozone layer, through which not a great deal can penetrate; not impersonal catastrophes, news of disaster elsewhere, statistics re. starvation etc., the divers woes of the world, which are no worse now, than at the time of Chaucer…or Homer…or Swift…. This protective coat is emotional and psychological, but I suppose also, to some extent, physical; one must be in good health to withstand certain things. And it’s economical…political…. To the extent to which one is blissfully happy, one is certainly “ignorant” of the astounding conditions of life; yet knowledge without power, as Rochester (awful man) said, is hopeless. So I swing back and forth between too much awareness of certain insoluble problems (I mean on a larger scale—society, the world, Reagan, our new mood of meanness and suspicion in America), and what must be too little. My emotional strength determines the degree of reality I can absorb. A physical debilitation, even something so presumably mild as this cold (but God!—it feels like death, sheer concrete in the head), exposes me to any number of wayward profitless thoughts. “My actions are controlled and shaped to what I am, and to my condition of life. I can do no better. And repentance does not properly apply to things that are not in our power, though regret certainly does.”—Montaigne. Whose voice I very much like, and seem to need, these days.
…Elsewhere, have read stories by O’Hara, Saroyan, Calisher, and a few others, of what might be called an “older” and somewhat “forgotten” or neglected generation, and was very impressed indeed. Each generation’s discoveries are inflated with a sense of newness, but there isn’t anything new about quality, the uniqueness of the voice, the quirks & unpredictable nuggets of language that constitute art.
[…]
March 27, 1981.…Some elation, at finishing the revisions of A Bloodsmoor Romance; and, yesterday, bringing the manuscript to Blanche. Now I have that luxuriant “freedom” I had so much wanted…. But such a sense of loss, of bewildered idleness, and then again a moment later a sense of gratification…. Montaigne speaks of the mind, left to itself, embarking on all sorts of unproductive fancies: do I feel this more than most people, or is it perfectly normal? For all I know, I feel it less.
…I don’t know.
…And what do I know? What does one know? “We must demand a logical consistency,” one of my doomed characters once boldly stated. But no, but no, we can’t, but we must, but we want to, but what is our lot? Vertiginous rumors, tilting shadows, slanted walls, comical mirrors, the gay imbalance of the inner ear, the wish to know and the dread of knowing, that is, knowing too much.
…So my stray thoughts flit about, in a vague assemblage of the next project. Which is (or so I think) going to be a revisionist “Gothic.”??
?* Now what I want to do, what I must do, is convert certain half-buried and half-inarticulate ideas, feelings, and images into coherent, but “other-worldly” terms. So that the apparatus of the novel serves as a way by which the unthinkable is actually experienced…. Fiction that deals with horror specifically must, I suppose, allow us some queer technique for rehearsing death. As, more generally, all fiction does (how to live, how to die, how to die nobly, how to suffer with grace, how not to suffer, how not to die, mistakes not to make—that sort of thing: the presumably “moral” dimension of all art). That there is a great deal of interest in death and dying seems to me absolutely natural, perhaps even salutary. For, after all…. Yet it isn’t really death so much as mystery; obdurate mystery; the stymied soul; the knots that cannot be unknotted, yet must….
…Fiction that adds up, that suggests a “logical consistency,” or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery…however we abhor the mystery, and wish it solved, so that we can control it. (What do people say about us? What do they really say? What do words “really” mean? Isn’t there a code? Yes there is a code—sometimes. But not all the time. All right, yes, but when? When is the code in effect, and when not?—My voice on the telephone, a false enthusiasm, greeting someone I can’t seem to like, to the degree to which I am liked. Yet my words are encouraging, my words are…words…. The unmistakable, the incontestable, deciphering of the code, on some level…. Why my friend K[ay Smith] died, and allowed herself to die, why does anyone die, why does anyone allow himself to die, why do they elude us, why the torment, the teasing, why can’t we absolutely know, for the last time!—Thus the child’s mind works, and it is altogether respectable, and I very much doubt that any of us, however “mature,” transcends this bewildered groping.