In Rough Country Read online

  In Rough Country

  Essays and Reviews

  Joyce Carol Oates

  For Barry Qualls

  Contents

  Preface: In Rough Country

  I. Classics

  A Poe Memoir

  The Woman in White: Emily Dickinson and Friends

  Cast a Cold Eye: Jean Stafford

  The Art of Vengeance: Roald Dahl

  Revisiting Nabokov’s Lolita

  Shirley Jackson’s Witchcraft: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

  “As You Are Grooved, So You Are Grieved”: The Art and the Craft of Bernard Malamud

  “Large and Startling Figures”: The Fiction of Flannery O’Connor

  Boxing: History, Art, Culture

  II. Contemporaries

  Remembering John Updike

  Homer & Langley: E. L. Doctorow

  In Rough Country I: Cormac McCarthy

  In Rough Country II: Annie Proulx

  Enchanted! Salman Rushdie

  Philip Roth’s Tragic Jokes

  A Photographer’s Lives: Annie Leibovitz

  “The Great Heap of Days”: James Salter’s Fiction

  Margaret Atwood’s Tales

  In the Emperor’s Dream House: Claire Messud

  After the Apocalypse: Jim Crace

  The Story of X: Susanna Moore’s In the Cut

  “It Doesn’t Feel Personal”: The Poetry of Sharon Olds

  Too Much Happiness: The Stories of Alice Munro

  III. Nostalgias

  Nostalgia 1970: City on Fire

  The Myth of the “American Idea”: 2007

  “Why Is Humanism Not the Preeminent Belief of Humankind?” Address upon Receiving the 2007 Humanist of the Year Award

  In the Absence of Mentors/Monsters: Notes on Writerly Influences

  Revisiting Lockport, New York

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Joyce Carol Oates

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PREFACE

  In Rough Country

  The “rough country” of my title has a double meaning: it refers to both the treacherous geographical/psychological terrains of the writers who are my subjects—Flannery O’Connor, Shirley Jackson, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, Margaret Atwood among others—and also the emotional terrain of my life following the unexpected death of my husband Raymond Smith in February 2008 after forty-eight years of marriage.

  As literature is a traditional solace to the bereft, so writing about literature can be a solace to the bereft as it was to me during the days, weeks, and months when the effort of writing fiction often seemed beyond me, as if belonging to another lifetime when I’d been younger, more resilient and reckless. Overnight everything seemed to change for me, and inside me—the death of a “loved one” is a universal experience yet, to the bereaved, it is singular as a mountain thundering downhill in an avalanche that swallows you up utterly, batters your brain and fills your mouth with rubble. I could compose short stories—slowly and painstakingly—with perhaps one-tenth of the efficiency I’d formerly taken for granted—bizarre and surreal stories about loss, grief, “surviving”—but I have not been able to imagine anything so ambitious as a novel, even a short novel. Like a person whose vision has become blurred following a blow to the head, I can’t seem to see beyond the relatively brief span of the short story.

  Reading and taking notes, especially late at night when I can’t sleep, has been the comfort for me that saying the rosary or reading The Book of Common Prayer might be for another. Immersing myself in the imaginations of other writers, constructing a line of argument which is the structure of a literary essay—in contrast to the less calibrated and predictable swerves and leaps of fiction—has been a lifeline. Reading, which had always been, in my former life, my reward for a full day of writing, became, in my new, uncharted life as a widow, an end in itself of almost mystical significance. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”—this line from T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” echoed obsessively in my thoughts. I came to feel that I was making my way word by word, sentence by sentence, across something like a narrow swaying footbridge above an abyss—this footbridge wasn’t my construction but comprised of others’ work, for which I was infinitely grateful. Working into the early hours of the morning—as I’d never done when I was married and our lives adhered to a conventional and commonplace domestic routine—reading in bed still partly dressed amid a nest of pillows, my mother’s knitted quilt, papers, books, and bound galleys, and when I was very lucky one or another of our two cats—who were slow to forgive me for the abrupt and mysterious disappearance of the individual who by custom fed them their breakfast each morning as well as “talked” to them through the day as required—became the new center of my life, an oasis of quiet in contrast to the nightmare cacophony of daytime: the phone ringing, ceaseless e-mails, “death-duties” to be executed ad infinitum. Days were filled with other people and none of them my missing husband: people in whose eyes I saw sympathy, pity, uneasiness, concern. By night, I was an avid reader and writer; by day, a widow.

  What a widow is, is defined by an absence.

  What a widow is not, is a whole/unmaimed individual.

  Working late into the night was a melancholy sort of pleasure but when I did sleep, in the way of the insomniac’s sudden stuporous coma-like sleep like a précis of death, it was very difficult to wake up—to wake fully—in the morning—whatever “morning” was. Where getting out of bed had once been effortless, unthinking, now the very concept getting out of bed acquired an almost supernatural significance: fraught with danger, terror, dread. What is more awful than waking, getting up?—when you want so very badly to sleep; when your brain aches for the extinction of all thought, especially the awareness of time. Sleep becomes if not happiness, a reminder of happiness; a respite from the duties of daylight that involve memory, thinking, making decisions and actions. There were mornings in the late winter and early spring of last year when it seemed to me that the very air of my bedroom had turned viscous and heavy; that gravity exerted some sort of new, palpable pressure, as if I were lying on the bottom of the ocean. My brain was a kind of cotton batting which deep-ocean-thoughts of menace could make their way only slowly and what a risk, to disturb this paralysis! Nothing is so exhausting and daunting to the insomniac as getting out of bed and so my remedy was to forestall this by propping myself up against pillows and returning to whatever I’d been doing when I’d finally turned out the light and tried to sleep a few hours before. In this way though I had committed myself to opening my eyes yet I need not yet complete the ordeal of getting out of bed. I recalled that Edith Wharton famously wrote her novels in long-hand in a similar posture in her enormous canopied bed, tossing sheets of paper onto the floor for a maid to gather up. I had no maid, nor did I toss my notes onto the floor, but I quite understood Wharton’s instinct in this case to forestall contending with whatever—in Wharton’s case house-guests, “social life”—awaits beyond one’s bed.

  During these months, and well into this new year of 2009, Robert Silvers of the New York Review of Books has been my cherished friend. Like his late co-editor Barbara Epstein, my beloved editor for more than twenty years at NYR, Bob is the most exacting of editors as he is a warmly encouraging and thoughtful reader. There is something thrilling—if also daunting—about undertaking to review a book one hasn’t yet read and assessed; if your inclination is, like my own, to wish not to publicly criticize any work of art, in acknowledgment of the difficulty of creating anything whether meritorious or otherwise, it’s an endeavor in which the reviewer risks exposure, as in a fun house mirror. T
he most painful of the essays included here is “Boxing: History, Art, Culture” for this was undertaken in February 2008 before my husband was stricken with pneumonia and hospitalized at the Princeton Medical Center; during Ray’s week in the hospital I worked on the essay in frantic bursts in the interstices of driving to the hospital, teaching my classes at Princeton University, and dealing with household duties; at night, after visiting hours at the hospital, I researched and worked on the essay until 2 A.M. or so—I was proud of myself in the small ridiculous ways in which we are proud of ourselves at such desperate times; my husband, who did not usually read my fiction, was looking forward to reading this essay, or so he said. No one could know the effort that went into this single “review” that would appear in a May 2008 issue of NYR—out of all proportion to its length and significance as a text; no one could guess that there is a break in the essay between the second section and the section that begins with the words “From the bare-knuckle era of John L. Sullivan”—the pages before were written by a woman with a husband, the pages following were written by a woman who had lost her husband. It was Nietzsche who said Between one and none there gapes…an infinity.

  After my husband’s sudden death, of what was called a hospital infection, only a few hours after we’d been discussing his discharge within a few days, I could return to this essay only sporadically, with a residual sort of excitement, as there might be observed, in the waning light of the iris of the eye of a decapitated beast, some residual alertness to stimuli, but it was not revised and completed for some time. Yet in the immediate aftermath of my husband’s death, in a kind of vigil that night, when several friends of ours came to stay with me, stunned as I was, and tenderly solicitous, it happened that—for something to say of an abstract and impersonal nature, I suppose—I spoke about the essay I was writing, the ambitious scholarly book I was reviewing, and of the very long history of boxing—how what seems to us recent may in fact have its roots in antiquity, in almost pre-history. How minuscule, how finite, how fleeting the individual. Whatever else I managed to say that night, I don’t remember, and I have little memory of what my friends said, but this “profound” thought remains. There is pathos here, but perhaps a kind of beauty as well. Ideas, literature, art remain after much else falters and falls away. It is not a permanent victory by any means, but it is a victory of a kind and it is a victory we all share.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  June 1, 2009

  I.

  CLASSICS

  A POE MEMOIR

  Here was a mystery!—in our near-bookless farmhouse in upstate New York twenty miles north of Buffalo and approximately that distance south of Lake Ontario, in the region known stoically by its inhabitants as the Snow Belt, there was a book—battered as if water-stained, aged-looking, austere in its dark binding—intriguingly titled The Gold Bug.

  The Gold Bug!—my childish imagination was stirred by this intriguing image. Of bugs—insects of all species, especially flies and mosquitoes—we had many, in the country; on a farm, especially. But a gold bug, what could this be? The author’s name—EDGAR ALLAN POE—was striking, “poetic”—but unknown to me, a child of ten with a precocious interest in books and storytelling and all that was not-real but imagined, as a kind of waking dream.

  The other great books of my childhood were Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Superficially very different, yet Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allan Poe would have understood each other perfectly, I think. Both wrote surreal/nightmare/“gothic”/fairy-tale-like stories to be read, if not fully comprehended, by children as well as adults.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t the overwrought, maddeningly slow-moving long story “The Gold Bug” that turned out to be one of my favorite Poe stories but other, shorter tales like “The Black Cat,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” that most captivated me and were deeply imprinted on my memory, always with admiration, wonderment, and trepidation. (Especially since, as a child, I wasn’t altogether certain that these strange short stories with their elevated language, so very different from the plain, vernacular English spoken by the inhabitants of Millersport, New York, and their bizarre nightmare plots weren’t “real”—in the way that events described in newspapers were “real” though wholly beyond my ability to comprehend as beyond the perimeters of Millersport, New York.)

  Of the great, classic stories of Poe, it was “The Tell-Tale Heart” that exudes the most immediate and sheerly visceral power. Here we find the fated/doomed/ecstatic/quintessential voice of Poe:

  True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them.

  In this very short masterpiece, Poe evokes the “voice” of interior madness, as it is a voice that is speaking to us with disturbing intimacy if not complicity. A crime has been committed—a terrible, unspeakable crime—parricide?—the senseless murder of an elderly, unnamed man with what the narrator believes to be an Evil Eye. In order to protect himself from this Evil Eye, the narrator has to exorcise it, for otherwise he will succumb to abject terror:

  Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, [terror] has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me…

  As in most stories by Poe, terror precedes any object: terror simply is, as primordial as life itself. Yet in a most bizarre ritualistic fashion the elderly man must be murdered—improbably smothered, or crushed, beneath a bed.

  “I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done.”

  So a younger generation hopes to exorcise and replace their elders. But no story of Poe is lacking in recrimination and punishment. And so the gloating murderer is betrayed by what he believes to be the amplified beating of the (murdered) old man’s heart—which is in fact the murderer’s own heart—the “tell-tale heart”—growing louder and more accelerated when police officers come to investigate: “a low, dull, quick sound—much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.” (How typical it is of Poe, a navigator of Gothic landscapes that have no physical existence, to so carefully describe the sound of this runaway ghost-heart!) Soon then, the murderer is driven mad and confesses to the crime:

  “I admit the deed!—tear up the planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of his hideous heart!”

  When I first read this eerie, fluent story, I was very young and hardly not a conscious, still less an analytical reader. What a story is about would have seemed to me precisely what it seems to be about, and nothing more. In later years, rereading Poe, often teaching Poe—as I teach exemplary stories of Poe to my writing students at Princeton University—I came to see the subtlety of effects in this brief story, the mastery of the madman’s lurid reasoning, the quick setting of the scene, the rapid development of “plot,” the abrupt denouement as final and irrevocable as the slamming of a door. Now, first-person narrations by the eloquently deranged are hardly novelties, but in the mid-nineteenth century, when literary English was stately, formal and unfailingly elevated, as if statues were speaking in echo-laden marble halls, Poe’s voice of scarcely suppressed hysteria would have been astonishing—if not repellent—to most readers.

  It was only a coincidence, but “Edgar Allan Poe” was also a character in his own right, in a card game called Authors, popular in the 1950s in that bookish/literate era when television was only just beginning its conquest of American households. Poe’s somewhat effeminate deathly-pale “poetic” face framed by very black curly hair was reproduced on playing cards in the company of such staid luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving. While Hawthorne was the most conventionally handsome of the Authors, and Emerson the most sternly Transcendental, it was Poe who exuded the air, both melancholy and menacing, of the glamorously doomed writer/poet—it was Poe for whom a l
iterary-minded girl might feel some tug of (innocent? precocious?) infatuation.

  One day I would learn that, in fact, Poe is perhaps the most mysterious of our classic American writers, along with his younger contemporary Emily Dickinson with whom he shared a number of writerly obsessions—mortality, loss, death above all. Like his similarly gifted/accursed twentieth-century counterpart H. P. Lovecraft, another doomed purveyor of “weird tales,” Poe led a life beset from the start by misfortune and nightmare, as in one of the darker of Grimms’ fairy tales: his actor-father abandoned his mother when Poe was an infant, and his mother died when he was three; he was rejected at the age of nineteen by the well-to-do Richmond merchant who’d adopted him; prone to gambling and alcohol he was “withdrawn” from the University of Virginia and expelled from West Point; his cousin-bride Virginia whom he’d married when she was fourteen—and he was twenty-eight—collapsed of a “burst blood vessel” while singing, at the age of twenty, never regained her health and died a few years later. His great achievements—Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque and The Raven and Other Poems (1845)—sold poorly. Though Poe’s work is far from realistic in any external way its Gothic excess is surely a psychological mirror of his beleaguered personal life.