The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982
…Bicycle riding along the ocean in Cape May. Very hot, but breezy; fresh air; an (enforced) laziness. Ambitious windy walk along the edge of the ocean. Very queer jellyfish…some sort of tentacled creature…for my poor Puss Adelaide: of course. (Her predicament is “haunting” to me. Yes indeed. I see now the ways in which I relate to her, and she to me. In code. In code.)
[…]
July 11, 1981, 3:00 to approximately 5:30 P.M.—
How to evoke, how to “explain,” how even to approach—
a spiritual and emotional retreat of such profundity—
(less dramatic and violent than the experience I underwent in December 1971, but more human, more protracted, more convincing—)
“It isn’t time yet, you can’t return, you will forget”
The Guide: the consoling voice of wisdom
“Joyce”: this touching individual!—whom I had to see, to like and forgive—to find human—fallible—finite—sacred—
my own consciousness—this “I” who gropes for speech—the passive recipient of the Guide’s reiterated, patient, mesmerizing instructions: Sleep, rest, heal. Sleep, rest, heal. “Joyce.” The ways in which we are not perfect, the ways in which we are, then, “sacred”—
Love, a bond of (involuntary) emotion—reaching out to imperfection—pretension—foolishness—“silliness”—not pathetic, as one might harshly think, but sacred, as a consequence of these “failings”!
(The underlying calm. The certainty. “I” am not alone, “I” am not even in control. As if a radio’s volume were suddenly turned up, and now we can hear what has been there all along!—Sleep, rest, heal. Heal. Heal. The Soul’s patient instructions, to the Ego. And the “personality”—the third person—at yet another angle to both. The Soul is the Guide, the “parent” of the “personality.” But loving, forgiving. This is “The Kingdom Within.” As for “I”—my wisdom is to listen; to go very still. Thus, my salvation.)
July 27, 1981.…Lovely quiet days. Undisturbed work, hour upon hour; am so mesmerized with the narrative, and the peculiar language, of Crosswicks, I have to force myself to stop at the end of a chapter, a full break, and not continue into the next episode. A story that tells itself…unfolds itself…within the contours of the plot, which is tyrannical. The parable’s simplicity; allegory; the “war of the worlds”…class struggle; the projection of the Devil (evil); and, within this, a weaving of narratives.
[…]
Last week, an eventful day in New York City: luncheon at the Book-of-the-Month Club’s headquarters on Lexington, in regal surroundings; signing 100 or so copies of Angel of Light, for (I think) Brentano’s; an interview for public radio with “Bob Cromie,” who was amiable enough […]; a long walk through Central Park etc.; dinner with Lucinda and Bob Morgenthau, at a crowded, and very noisy, Italian restaurant on 83rd Street. (…A most enjoyable day, considering our general dislike of the city. The only overshadowing being, a dull ache in my right ear, dull and then sharp, throbbing, dull, vague, faint, piercing, itching, and so on, and so forth, I’ve suffered from this for five weeks…Dr. Sheeran of the Princeton Medical Center being unable to find anything wrong, with his instrument. I can’t guess if it is serious, or soon to prove nothing at all. Mastoiditis? Infection?…An appointment with a specialist this Wednesday, Dr. Haroldson, should help. In the meantime, when it doesn’t hurt I feel deeply relieved, and grateful; when it hurts, I put ice against it. I seem to have forgotten what it is like not to have a queer disagreeable pressure on that side of my head…. But no more of this, it’s tiresome, who can possibly care? When the pressure lifts I try to forget.)
[…] I passed [last] evening in a pocket of quiet…thinking about the novel, and about my ear, and about life passing, the summer passing, one thing or another, how happy I am, how resolved, how content, how much it really means to me (I can’t deny it), that I have completed Angel of Light, and A Bloodsmoor Romance, and am halfway through Crosswicks. I love these novels, I should be ashamed to admit it, and I love Bellefleur too, and much of A Sentimental Education, and, here and there, isolated passages in Contraries. Elsewhere, my “public career” rattles along, without me, so to speak. To have had the pleasure of the writing seems all, or nearly. A luxury one can scarcely speak of to anyone else, for fear of seeming…seeming what?…too removed from the world of reviews, sales, delirium, hurt, blood, handshakes, congratulations, commiserations.
August 10, 1981.…Lovely sleepily-still summer’s day; luncheon on the terrace, a bicycle ride out to the Bayberry Road & back; the cats—our former kittens—greeting us; examining the frog pond—into which dozens of brisk green creatures wildly leap, as we approach; thinking but not, for the moment, brooding, on the chapter of Crosswicks in which I am involved…for Adelaide’s voice is so clear to me, I “feel” her so effortlessly from the inside, the act of writing is scarcely a chore: as, I must say, it seemed yesterday morning for a while. (Completing the footnote drudgery of “My Precious Darling….” Which indeed it was, and is, and will be, for anyone else to read.)…How easy life is, how magical, how filled with pleasant surprises, how extraordinary, a process of unceasing discovery: this thought came to me a minute ago, while I was feeding the cats (yet again): and I felt I should record it…for the moment isn’t likely to last, is it?
…Yet Crosswicks goes along harmoniously, and doesn’t interfere with my sleep, as Angel of Light did. The trick is, to distance the Horror sufficiently, from the various actual manifestations it had, and has, in my own life. Thus, Kay’s death (the “demon” gnawing away at her from the inside) is metamorphosed into very nearly the entire novel: the sense of Horror imminent, Horror absolutely mysterious, Horror that, for all our good intentions, cannot be stopped. The Count naturally “is” death but he’s a playful nineteenth-century sort of fictitious personage as well, whose effect on others may be real enough, but he is not. And so on, and so forth. Heading into the novel’s second half, with the pull of gravity to help me, and a certain amount of momentum, I don’t believe I will feel that queer half-panicked sensation I had from time to time, before—the sense that I was “coming too close to the fire” (to use Goethe’s phrase), and risked madness, by writing of mad and terrifying things.
…But we shall see.
[…]
…My sweet husband, funny and warm and gracious and kindly, and quick-witted, and somewhat shy…who often surprises me, at odd unexpected moments, by looking—that is, being—so handsome, still; in ways that the camera can’t record. His graying hair—but not really graying yet—still very dark—his smile, his freckles, his air of easiness and calm: one judges a man by how carefully, how gently, how intelligently he approaches his garden, or his pets, or his financial snarls (which, as our “fortune” swells, swell also), or the inevitable problems with one printer or another, one bookstore or another. Love love love & twenty years & more: it is really quite remarkable: but who has the audacity to take credit—?
August 19, 1981.…To elucidate. To “bear witness.” To integrate fragments of the self. What a task! Quixotic, euphoric, irresistible….
…Yesterday, warm and really very wonderful “social occasions”: a luncheon in SoHo with Karen and Mike [Braziller] ( just back from their two-week vacation in Maine), whom we like immensely; dinner in Cold Spring, at the rented summer house of Stephen Koch, with Stephen and Angeline [Goreau] (touching domesticity—I felt suddenly more hopeful for Stephen, and for the two of them: perhaps it will work out: and Stephen will finish that accursed novel). A taping at the Today show that went quickly, and effortlessly; a lengthy but quite interesting interview with a literary journalist from the Los Angeles Times; the long drive up the Palisades Parkway, to Cold Spring…. Returning around midnight and I felt less exhausted than I had felt at 4 p.m…. or, for that matter, at 6 A.M., when we’d awakened.
…Today has been the reverse. Many hours on Crosswicks; and pondering over the Night Walks anthology;* a modest bicycle ride in the neighborhood (the weather
has turned almost autumnal—chilly, windy, but very clear and exhilarating). Angel of Light sold to Warner Books for $125,000. A number of people calling, still, to congratulate me on the review of Angel of Light in the New York Times Book Review, the other day.† (Thomas Edwards’s remarkably generous piece is probably the critical high point of my life—and will remain so. Yet I don’t know whether I feel any sort of euphoria, or only relief, at not having been shredded in public.)
…Working on Crosswicks. Which I want never to end, for I can’t imagine anything so utterly engrossing in the future. Somehow, as in Bellefleur (though not in Bloodsmoor and Angel of Light) this activity stimulates an indefinable fusion of the plotting “rational” self and the groping, dreaming, inchoate “night” self…. Yet I am thinking airily of a “casebook of murderesses” for the next long project…some sort of quirky memoir…a self-styled amateur detective (?) who embodies (?) American optimism…. Lizzie Borden, Emily Dickinson, a woman who murders her sister-in-law; babies in the attic—their preserved corpses, that is; the schemer/authority who gets everything wrong; always arrests the wrong “murderer,” or hounds him or her to death, or collapse.
[…] The notion of grace, undeserved. Felicity from above. What would it matter, really, to be so honored, so proclaimed on the front page of the jealously-prized book review, if one hadn’t anyone to share it with? Is this sentimental, is this maudlin, or simply and irrefutably true…? More tragic than being unrecognized would be the predicament of being recognized, being in fact greatly honored, but having no one who cared; no one who truly cared.
…Reading Russ Frazer’s disturbing, but very well written, biography of that piteous genius, R. P. Blackmur. It’s always the case, as Kenneth Burke has said, that the brilliant who are unhappy confuse their unhappiness with their brilliance, as if there were any connection. But there isn’t. Emotions dictate, not ideas. I am suspicious of pessimism that blames the world simply for being there. A disagreeable man, Blackmur, who was a “great man” to his students and young colleagues; but whose “greatness” can hardly be communicated to the rest of us.
August 27, 1981. […] Into the home stretch, as it were, of the novel. And the fall semester fast approaching. But nothing is so glorious, nothing so ecstatic, as the concluding of a long, complex, “snarled” work…the very work that had seemed, months ago, one’s possible undoing. How these problematic things really get accomplished, I don’t know, for, in truth, the thought of rewriting it from scratch—the manuscript being lost, that is—fills me with sickened horror: of course I couldn’t do it; couldn’t begin to do it. Would not even try. O God…. Which casts back upon the labor of writing, day by day and page by page, a curious sort of glowering light, as if the person who wrote it, blind to the difficulties that lay ahead, is, in a way, someone other than the person who has these thoughts. These are Olympian notions, the kind one only has at the summit of a long task; earlier, they are impossible—unimaginable. The road dips and deepens and veers through a tunnel, and only very gradually climbs; and the view from the first substantial hill is enough to knock one’s eye out. (Not that I am talking about that elusive quality known as literary merit. I am not. I am talking about something fundamental, an almost biological, and surely spiritual phenomenon, quite apart from merit—though, as to that, one always has small thrills of hope.)
September 8, 1981.…Shaken, but I think instructively, by some “happenstance” of yesterday…in regard to Crosswicks…and my sickened reluctance, or dread, or fatigue, or revulsion, or whatever, about beginning the chapter dealing at last with Mandy and the Count. The novel is like Bellefleur, though perhaps worse, in that it seems to involve for me a continuous sifting through the earth, a continuous upturning of relics…images…shards of half-forgotten dreams and memories…. One might express surprise, that the final version of this intense and very disturbing activity is something so distant, so arch, so “chill,” as “The Sole Living Heir of Nothingness”—or, indeed, Crosswicks itself, which is first and finally a kind of parody of a defunct literary genre. But the point is that I couldn’t approach this material, explosive to me, in any other way. To go directly and forthrightly and “realistically” to the subject…. I would be devastated; paralyzed; I couldn’t even consider it…. Staring at photographs of Kay yesterday. Working with “Mandy” today. My identification, my helpless sympathy, but my anger too…continued perplexity: why, why? The incubus who is Death; but also a figure of immense attraction. Why does one of us succumb, and another not….
…Riddles, riddles to break one’s head over, or one’s heart….
…In any case, the novel is so obsessive, I must make a vow to change my life, when it’s over. No more long, “ambitious,” “allegorical” works…for a while. Short runs, stories and essays and…plays?…Fortunately classes begin next Monday. I want to alter my life in some substantial, yet not overwhelming, way. Not to work so very close to the bone for a while…not to alarm myself…. A novel that is “about” madness isn’t exactly the most comforting thing to undertake, and it matters not in the slightest (though who would believe it?) that the tone is so arch and classical, and the structure that clockwork Dickensian apparatus, that aided me so much with Bellefleur…well, that is Bellefleur.
…I want to immerse myself in my teaching, very seriously. And perhaps record the experience in this journal. I’ve been so negligent about that entire side of my life, which is considerable, and which can’t be entirely without interest…negligent, I mean, about recording it. Which is strange, because it accounts for so many years of my life….
[…]
September 24, 1981.…Marvelous days! For some reason the onset of classes and the fall term hasn’t been overwhelming, I can’t imagine why, just sheer delight…perhaps because (well, doubtless because) The Crosswicks Horror is nearly exorciz’d, at last…and I feel that I am “finding the world again”…“and the world comes back to me”…that queer wonderful ineffable unmistakable sense which impresses itself upon me from time to time that everything is here, now, wondrous & miraculous & altogether blessed…. “Finding the world again, and the world comes back….”
[…]
September 29, 1981.…Yesterday, finished a first draft of the final chapter of Crosswicks (“The Convenant”); today, revised it considerably; and seem to have…well, dare I say it…completed the novel.
…In a sense.
…What did Conrad say, having finished Nostromo? “My friends may congratulate me, on having recovered from a disease.” I don’t feel quite that melodramatic about it. I don’t know what I do feel. Or that I feel at all….
…Stunned; dazed; blank; intimidated by the thought of reading it again, and revising it (again: but surely not every page); intimidated by the mere thought of being JCO and having JCO’s unnatural accomplishments…which, if I were not JCO, I should find very strange indeed. And resent. Or wish to derogate. Or wish to look past, as if the very existence of such a bulk of material were…I don’t know: what is it?
…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.
…But now I must experiment: is writing addictive to me? is it a habit so deeply engrained in the blood, that I won’t be able to leave the novel alone for more than a day? (But already the thought surfaces, why leave it alone? Is the remainder of life—making red-cabbage-and-apples, for instance, preparing for tomorrow’s seminar on J[ames] J[oyce], quickly sending off a note to Bob Phillips, vacuuming the house—is this really so very superior to the writing of a novel?—I mean for my peace of mind, for the peace of my soul. Locked obsessively in the writing of a long work of fiction I seem to r
omanticize “real life”; to sentimentalize the very rhythms of life other people find the stimulus for art…!
…Not simply to be myself, but to know myself.
…I have wanted to be a model wife; and a model daughter; and a model professor; and a model friend (this, in limited doses); and a model writer (in the sense that my writing doesn’t drive me mad, or turn me away from others, or become the very means by which I am laid waste). I wanted all along to lead a model life by my own standards of fairly conventional morality…a combination of what Flaubert calls the “bourgeois” and what might be called the stable, the old-fashioned, the orderly, the predictable. To know more or less what tomorrow’s emotions will be; not to be surprised (at least, not disagreeably) by my friends, or by my husband, or by myself in relationship to them; not simply to “find the world” but more importantly never to have abandoned it. The amazing thing is, I seem to have succeeded at these goals; at least, not to have failed at them; and so much of life lies ahead to be lived, and to be explored.
[…]
October 3, 1981.…Wild, windy, sun-splotched day. Very quiet. Revising Crosswicks: did four pages, and feel very noble! (It was strangely hard work. Only four pages?)