A Garden of Earthly Delights Read online

  ALSO BY JOYCE CAROL OATES

  NOVELS

  With Shuddering Fall (1964)

  Expensive People (1968) them (1969)

  Wonderland (1971)

  Do with Me What You Will (1973)

  The Assassins (1975)

  Childwold (1976)

  Son of the Morning (1978)

  Unholy Loves (1979)

  Bellefleur (1980)

  Angel of Light (1981)

  A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982)

  Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)

  Solstice (1985)

  Marya: A Life (1986)

  American Appetites (1989)

  You Must Remember This (1987)

  Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990)

  Black Water (1992)

  Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993)

  What I Lived For (1994)

  We Were the Mulvaneys (1996)

  Man Crazy (1997)

  My Heart Laid Bare (1998)

  Broke Heart Blues (1999)

  Blonde (2000)

  Middle Age: A Romance (2001)

  I'll Take You There (2002)

  “ ROSAMOND SMITH ” NOVELS

  Lives of the Twins (1987)

  Soul/Mate (1989)

  Nemesis (1990)

  Snake Eyes (1992)

  You Can't Catch Me (1995)

  Double Delight (1997)

  Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon (1999)

  The Barrens (2001)

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  By the North Gate (1963)

  Upon the Sweeping Flood (1966)

  The Wheel of Love (1970)

  Marriages and Infidelities (1972)

  The Goddess and Other Women (1974) The Poisoned Kiss (1975)

  Crossing the Border (1976)

  Night-Side (1977)

  A Sentimental Education (1980)

  Last Days (1984)

  Raven's Wing (1986)

  The Assignation (1988)

  Heat (1991)

  Where Is Here? (1992)

  Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (1993)

  Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994)

  Zombie (1995)

  “Will You Always Love Me?” (1996)

  The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque (1998)

  Faithless (2001)

  NOVELLAS

  The Triumph of the Spider Monkey (1976)

  I Lock My Door upon Myself (1990)

  The Rise of Life on Earth (1991)

  First Love: A Gothic Tale (1996)

  Beasts (2002)

  POETRY

  Anonymous Sins (1969)

  Love and Its Derangements (1970)

  Angel Fire (1973)

  The Fabulous Beasts (1975)

  Women Whose Lives Are Food,

  Men Whose Lives Are Money (1978)

  Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems, 1970–1982 (1982)

  The Time Traveler (1989)

  Tenderness (1996)

  PLAYS

  Miracle Play (1974)

  Three Plays (1980)

  Twelve Plays (1991)

  The Perfectionist and Other Plays (1995)

  New Plays (1998)

  ESSAYS

  The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature (1972)

  New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (1974)

  Contraries (1981)

  The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews (1983)

  On Boxing (1987)

  (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (1988)

  George Bellows: American Artist (1995)

  Where I've Been, and Where I'm Going: Essays,

  Reviews, and Prose (1999)

  FOR CHILDREN

  Come Meet Muffin! (1998)

  YOUNG ADULT

  Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (2002)

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  Joyce Carol Oates, one of America's most versatile and prolific contemporary writers, was born in the small town of Lockport, New York, on June 16, 1938. She grew up on a farm in nearby Erie County and began writing stories while still in elementary school. As a teenager she devoured works by Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Thoreau, Hemingway, and the Brontës, and soon moved on to D. H. Lawrence, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka. Oates graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Syracuse University in 1960 and was awarded an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. During the 1960s and 1970s she taught English at the University of Detroit and the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. In 1974 she cofounded the Ontario Review with her husband, Raymond Smith. Oates was named a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1978, the same year she became writer-in-residence at Princeton University, where she is currently the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor in the Humanities.

  Oates's first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), the story of a destructive romance between a teenage girl and a thirty-year-old race car driver, foreshadowed her preoccupation with violence and darkness. Her next novel, A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), is the opening volume in a trilogy about different socioeconomic groups in America that incorporates Expensive People (1968) and them (1969), for which she won the National Book Award. Throughout the 1970s Oates pursued her exploration of American people and institutions in a series of novels that fuse social analysis with vivid psychological portrayals. Wonderland (1971) exposes the shortcomings of the medical world; Do With Me What You Will (1973) centers on the legal profession; The Assassins (1975) attacks political corruption; Son of the Morning (1978) tracks the rise and fall of a religious zealot; and Unholy Loves (1979) looks at pettiness and hypocrisy within the academic community. “Like the most important modern writers— Joyce, Proust, Mann—Oates has an absolute identification with her material: the spirit of a society at a crucial point in its history,” noted Newsweek. Novels such as Childwold (1976) and Cybele (1979) showcase what Alfred Kazin called “her sweetly brutal sense of what American experience is really like.”

  “Joyce Carol Oates is a fearless writer … [with] impossibly lush and dead-on imaginative powers,” noted the Los Angeles Times Book Review. During this same period she secured her reputation as a virtuoso of the short story with eight acclaimed collections: By the North Gate (1963), Upon the Sweeping Flood (1966), The Wheel of Love (1970), Marriages and Infidelities (1972), The Goddess and Other Women (1974), The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (1975), Crossing the Border (1976), Night-Side (1977). “In the landscape of the contemporary American short story Miss Oates stands out as a master, occupying a preeminent category of her own,” said the Saturday Review. “[Oates] intuitively seems to know that the short story is for a different type of material from the novel: a brief and dazzling plunge into another state of consciousness,” remarked Erica Jong. “Miss Oates [is] our poet laureate of schizophrenia, of blasted childhoods, of random acts of violence.” Her stories have been widely anthologized, and she is a three-time winner of the O. Henry Continuing Achievement Award as well as the recipient of the PEN/ Malamud Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Short Story.

  “Joyce Carol Oates is that rarity in American fiction, a writer who seems to grow with each new book,” said Time. She set out in new directions in the 1980s with an acclaimed series of bestselling novels that exploit the conventions of Gothic literature: Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984). In addition she wrote Angel of Light (1981), Solstice (1985), Marya: A Life (1986), You Must Remember This (1987), and American Appetites (1989): a succession of works that make it clear why Commonweal deemed her “the most relentless chronicler of America and its nightmares since Poe.” “Oates's best novels are strongly reminisc
ent of Faulkner's, especially in their uncompromised vision of the violence her characters visit upon one another and themselves,” said The Washington Post Book World. “Even her humor— and she can be hilariously funny—is mordantly ironical.” Using the pseudonym Rosamond Smith she began writing a series of psychological suspense novels: Lives of the Twins (1987), Soul/Mate (1989), Nemesis (1990), Snake Eyes (1992), You Can't Catch Me (1995), Double Delight (1997), and Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon (1999). Her compilations of short stories continued with A Sentimental Education (1980), Last Days (1984), Raven's Wing (1986), and The Assignation (1988). In addition she enjoyed great success with On Boxing (1987), an eloquent meditation on prizefighting.

  “Oates's unblinking curiosity about human nature is one of the great artistic forces of our time,” observed The Nation as her output proliferated throughout the 1990s. Her novels further examined the violence underlying many realities of American culture: racism (Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, 1990), alienation (I Lock My Door upon Myself, 1990), poverty (The Rise of Life on Earth, 1991), the interplay of politics and sex (Black Water, 1992), feminism (Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, 1993), success (What I Lived For, 1994), serial killers (Zombie, 1995), family disintegration (We Were the Mulvaneys, 1996), outlaw cults (Man Crazy, 1997), criminality and greed (My Heart Laid Bare, 1998), and fame and celebrity (Broke Heart Blues, 1999, and Blonde, 2000). “A future archaeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America,” said Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “No one knows the darkness of our age, of our own natures, the prison of our narcissism, better than Joyce Carol Oates,” wrote The Washington Post Book World. Her volumes of short stories dating from this period include Heat (1991), Where Is Here? (1992), Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994), “Will You Always Love Me?” (1996), and The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque (1998). “Oates has imbued the American short story with an edgy vitality and raw social surfaces,” stated the Chicago Tribune, and Alice Adams deemed her short fiction “immensely exhilarating, deeply exciting.” In 1994 she received the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in Horror Fiction.

  “Joyce Carol Oates belongs to that small group of writers who keep alive the central ambitions and energies of literature,” said Newsweek. Though best known for short stories and novels, she has also won acclaim for her poetry, essays, and plays. “The best of Miss Oates's poems create a feeling of controlled delirium, verging on nightmare, which is a lyrical counterpart of the rich violence of her novels,” wrote The New York Times Book Review. Her volumes of poetry include Anonymous Sins and Other Poems (1969), Love and Its Derangements (1970), Angel Fire (1973), The Fabulous Beasts (1975), Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money (1978), Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems (1982), and The Time Traveler (1989). As George Garrett noted: “The bright center of all Joyce Carol Oates's art and craft has always been her poetry.” Her several collections of essays—The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature (1972), New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (1974), Contraries (1981), The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews (1983), (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (1988), and Where I've Been, and Where I'm Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose (1999)— display a range of knowledge and interests that explain why she numbers among America's most respected literary and social critics. Oates made a name for herself as a dramatist early in her career with plays such as The Sweet Enemy (1965), Sunday Dinner (1970), Ontological Proof of My Existence (1972), and Miracle Play (1974). During the 1990s she resumed writing plays and turned out In Darkest America (1991), I Stand Before You Naked (1991), Gulf War (1992), The Secret Mirror (1992), The Perfectionist (1993), and The Truth-Teller (1993), which have been performed Off-Broadway and at regional theaters across the country.

  “Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most audaciously talented writers,” judged Erica Jong. “Her gift is so large, her fluency in different genres—poems, short stories, novels, essays—so great, that at times she seems to challenge the ability of readers to keep up with her. In an age of specialization she is that rarest of generalists, a woman of letters. She gives her gifts with such abundance and generosity that we may pick and choose, preferring this Oates to that, quibbling about which of her many talents we like best.” John Updike concurred: “Joyce Carol Oates was perhaps born a hundred years too late. She needs a lustier audience, a race of Victorian word-eaters, to be worthy of her astounding productivity, her tireless gift of self-enthrallment. Not since Faulkner has an American writer seemed so mesmerized by a field of imaginary material, and so headstrong in the cultivation of that field.” The New York Times Book Review concluded: “What keeps us coming back to Oates Country is her uncanny gift of making the page a window, with something happening on the other side that we'd swear was life itself.”

  CONTENTS

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  A GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS

  I. CARLETON

  II. LOWRY

  III. SWAN

  AFTERWORD

  by Joyce Carol Oates

  For my husband, Raymond

  I.

  CARLETON

  1

  Arkansas. On that day many years ago a rattling Ford truck carrying twenty-nine farmworkers and their children sideswiped a local truck carrying hogs to Little Rock on a rain-slick country highway. It was a shimmering-green day in late May, the Ford truck ended up on its side in a three-foot drainage ditch, and in the hazy rain everyone milled about in the road amid broken glass, a familiar stink of gasoline and a spillage of hog excrement. Yet, among those who hadn't been hurt, the predominant mood was jocular.

  Carleton Walpole would long remember: the skidding on the wet blacktop, the noise of brakes like a guinea hen's shrieking, the sick weightless sensation before impact. The terrified screams of children and women, then the angry shouts of the men. By the time the truck overturned into the ditch most of the younger and more agile of the farmworkers had leapt clear, while the older, the slower, most of the women and younger children, struggled with the tarpaulin roof and had to crawl out on their hands and knees like beasts onto the soft red clay shoulder. Another goddamned “accident”: this wasn't the first since they'd left Breathitt County, Kentucky, a few weeks ago, but it wasn't the worst, either. No one appeared to be seriously injured, bleeding or unconscious.

  “Pearl? Where the hell are you?”—Carleton had been one of the first to jump from the truck, but he was anxious about his wife; she was pregnant, with their third child, and the baby was due soon. “Pearl! Pearl!” Carleton yelled. His heart was beating like something trapped in his rib cage. He was angry, excited. Always you feel that mean little thrill of relief, you aren't hurt.… Though once Carleton had been hurt, the first season he'd gone out on the road, his nose broken in a similar crash and the truck driver who was also the recruiter had set it for Carleton with his fingers—“See, a nose will begin healing right away it's broke. It ain't bone it's cart'lige. If you don't make it straight it will grow in crooked like a boxer's nose.” Carleton had laughed to see his new nose grown in just slightly crooked at the bridge, but in a way to give his face more character, he thought, like something carved; otherwise, he thought he looked like everybody else, half the Walpole men, long narrow faces with light lank hair and stubbly bearded chins and squinting bleached-blue eyes that looked as if they reflected the sky, forever. When Carleton moved quickly and jerkily his face seemed sharp as a jackknife, but he could move slowly too; he had inherited someone's grace—though in him it was an opaque resistance, like a man moving with effort through water. Not that Carleton Walpole gave much of a damn how he looked. He was thirty, not a kid. He had responsibilities. With his broke nose, people joked that Carleton's looks had improved, he had a swagger now like his hero Jack Dempsey.

  This time, Carleton hadn't been hurt at all. A little shaken, and pissed as hell, his dignity ruffled like a rooster that's been kicked. He'd been squatting on h
is heels with other men at the rear of the truck chewing tobacco and spitting out onto the blacktop road that stretched behind them like a grimy tongue. Where were they bound for?—Texarkana. That was just a word, a sound. A place on a map Carleton might've seen, but could not recall. How many days exactly they'd been on the road, he could not recall. How many weeks ahead, he'd have to ask. (Not Pearl. Used to, Pearl had kept track of such details, now she was letting things slide as bad as the other women.) Well, there was paperwork—somewhere. A contract.

  Carleton wasn't going to think about it, not now. It was enough to console himself I have a contract, I can't be cheated because there'd been a season when he had not had a contract, and he had been cheated. Enough to think I have a savings account because it was true, alone of the sorry bunch of bastards in this truck Carleton was certain he was the only one with a bankbook, issued from the First Savings & Loan Bank of Breathitt, Kentucky. Not that Carleton needed to speak of it, he did not. He was not a man to boast, none of the Walpoles were. But there the fact was, like an underground stream.

  Waiting for local law enforcement, waiting for a tow truck to haul the truck out of the ditch, goddamn. Everybody was excited, talking loudly. Where the hell was Pearl? Carleton was helping women climb up out of the truck. A woman looking young as a girl herself handed him her two-year-old; with a laugh and a grunt he swung the kid over the side like she weighed no more than a cat. Carleton's upper arm muscles were ropey, and strong; his shoulders were narrow, but strong; his back and his neck were starting to give him trouble, from stoop-picking, but he wasn't going to give in to moaning and groaning like an old man. “Pa, hey.” There were Carleton's kids, banged up but O.K. Sharleen, shoving and giggling. Mike, only three, was bawling as usual, but he didn't look as if he'd been hurt—his face wasn't bleeding. Carleton picked him up and swung him around kicking, set him down out of harm's way by some women who could tend to him. There was a smell of spilled whiskey mixed with the smells of gasoline and hog shit and mud and it was like you could get drunk just breathing, feeling your heart beat hard. Carleton touched his face, Christ he was bleeding, some. Was he? He clambered down into the drainage ditch to wash his hands, and wet his face. Maybe he'd banged his lower lip. Bit his lower lip. Most likely that's what he had done, when the brakes began to squeal, and the truck went into its skid, those seconds when you don't know what the hell will happen next.