The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982 Read online

  Our society is mistaken: the experience of maturing is infinitely more delightful than “perpetual youth.” In youth one is likely to wish to be experienced (especially if one is an attractive woman)—that is, to be watched, listened to, admired; in maturity one is far more interested in experiencing—in living. The acute self-consciousness of the attractive woman is crippling. Wishing to be viewed, the woman surrenders her own vision; she sacrifices herself to her own image.

  Reading Eliade.* The depth of the man’s knowledge and wisdom—! Amazing. Delightful. It’s interesting to learn that he spent so much time in India, and feels that his intellectual and spiritual self was formed there.

  […]

  June 27, 1973. Returned from a brief trip. Elsewhere, another personality travels in utter freedom, not bound by the myriad responsibilities here.

  Perpetual dissatisfaction, perplexity. Seeking an image or images that will do justice to…to whatever it is I wish to say.

  Someday: an immense novel dramatizing the interlocked passions of love, the wish to destroy, the impulse toward tenderness. Mystical experience “from the inside”: a sympathetic characterization. Immense, melodramatic, unresolved.

  (At the same time I discover that all struggles are concluded—the victory is won, there is no opposition, no strife. Perhaps this is a result of my age: the mid-point of life, approximately. From the age of thirty-three onward, a sense of the inevitable gravitational pull downward. There is difficulty in surrendering to gravity, perhaps—acquiescing to fate. The ego is gradually washed away by the Spirit. Is this death, or a dissolving into something wider and deeper….

  Curious, to want nothing special from the future. To sense that it is already contained in the present. So different from my attitude toward the past, especially as an undergraduate, when the future was completely questionable…anything could happen…could be made to happen.)

  August 27, 1973.…Returned from a month’s traveling, out West. Esalen Institute. Tassajara.* Canadian Rockies. Both Esalen and Tassajara somewhat disappointing. (Such foolish, exhibitionistic people at Esalen!—and the stilted formalities of the Zen Center, where earnest young people wore heavy black Japanese-style robes in ninety-five-degree heat, in a stifling canyon. A pity, that the devotees’ obvious desire to acquiesce to Zen discipline has blinded them to the fact that Zen as such should transcend local, limiting rules of conduct. What is appropriate for a Zen monastery in Japan simply isn’t appropriate in California in mid-summer…. Also, because the Zen Center is deep in a canyon, accessible only by a narrow, dangerous road, the group is very dependent upon the telephone. And their pickup truck, which is always going into town for supplies. Back & forth constantly. I was disillusioned by seeing on their bulletin board the notice that zazen sittings would be cancelled one day because it was a holiday…. I had always believed that to the Zen student zazen was a joyful experience, not a task; evidently I was mistaken.)

  We saw at Tassajara and Esalen people grimly hoping to find something to believe…something meaningful. It’s touching, it’s not an impulse anyone should wish to criticize, let alone ridicule. The only story I could write about either place would be satirical, so I’ll let the whole experience pass.

  Marvelous simplicity & anonymity of travel. Taking notes in small towns across America. So many people…!

  Meditation. Paring-back of self. & the realization that while I’d conquered certain impulses toward destruction, I hadn’t conquered certain equally annoying impulses toward being good.

  […]

  Dreams of my Grandmother Woodside.* “I don’t mind,” she said, dying. To comfort me. “All religions are the same,” she had said once, years ago…. Selfless love, uncomplaining, all-forgiving. My facial structure is hers; my eyes; certain traits of personality. (Sense of humor from my father; satirical & artistic interests. A certain silly playfulness. From my mother patience, affection, energy, absorption in other people…. ) In my dreams my grandmother, both dead and “alive,” is always silent. I wake from these dreams with a terrible sense of loss…also with a sense of being loved, cherished, valued…of having a definite place in the universe.

  (A pity that the recording of essentially happy events seems, in a journal, self-congratulatory.)

  September 7, 1973.…Excitement of new semester. The usual difficulties with the bookstore…too many students in one class…exhilaration, tending toward mania.

  At home, an attack of tachycardia that left me breathless and exhausted. It lasted more than an hour, during which I had plenty of time to think of…of the usual things…of having lived, of being prepared to die, of being thrust out of the temporal dimension altogether as if thrust out of the body…. Saw splashes of light, mainly orange. Vivid visual “memories.” A peculiar sort of euphoria. (As if already dead…?) At thirty-five I feel ready to die, to pass on to another plane of existence; but I’m fully aware of how absurd this sounds. When I had my first attack at the age of eighteen, at Syracuse, I was terrified; I didn’t want to die; I struggled against it, nearly suffocating. The second attack took place in a gym class—a girl had run into me, hard, while we were playing basketball—and was so bad I had to be taken to the infirmary. I remember turning the pages of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, trying to read. Tears in my eyes because, while I wasn’t in pain, I thought I might die…. The next attack was easier emotionally and psychologically. An attack I had at Wisconsin, once, while coughing violently, left me exhausted and drained and other-worldly. (A girl who thought I was going to die, was so upset herself that she fainted…. ) Now the attacks are as surprising as always, but not as frightening. I lie down and wait for them to pass. They are quite infrequent—once a year, perhaps—and no longer have the power to terrify. If you imagine you’re going to die once, and give up, the second time you give up immediately, and without a struggle there’s no terror.

  Curious sort of euphoria. I wonder if others have experienced this….

  Afterward, very tired; but a sense of peacefulness, satisfaction.

  September 10, 1973.…Excitement of new classes seems more intense than usual in the dept. We are all children….

  […]

  (Days filled with “new” people, mainly students. Their focus on me as “Joyce Carol Oates”—circus-like atmosphere. Oddly draining.)

  […]

  October 27, 1973.…Joint professorships offered Ray and me by Syracuse;* sad to be forced to decline them.

  Do With Me What You Will published. Quite a risk, offering myself like that; a work so intimate in terms of feelings, experience. Never again, probably. Not worth it.

  […]

  To be unmoved by excellent reviews: this isn’t normal. I can see that this past year of meditation is having the result of diminishing my emotions generally. Whether it’s good or bad or merely necessary I can’t know…. Detachment from “maya.” Danger of no return.

  (Comparable to the detachment from one’s own life experienced during tachycardia. The queer euphoria that arises when one gives up.)

  The person one is, one would not wish to write about. As a novelist one must value eccentricity, passion, paradox, nuisance, surprise, reversals, exasperating pity…. Anyone in whom the life-force is lovely & criminal. Gathering to frenzy.

  Victims of their own passion?—saviors of others? Unclear.

  November 10, 1973.…Disturbing “anticipatory” dream re. Gail Godwin, whom I’ve never met. Uncanny; almost unpleasant. I had the dream, and her letter came the next day.

  Well….

  What is one to conclude? Sheer coincidence; or, one can somehow “see” into the future; or, time is already complete and we merely remember; or, telepathy. (?) (She had so disturbing a psychic experience that I somehow registered it. But how likely is this “explanation”…or any explanation?)

  December 18, 1973.…Planning Ontario Review.*

  Someone asked me re. Publications & I’m astonished at the number, all in a brief period of time. Do With Me What You Will
; The Hostile Sun†; “Miracle Play” at the Phoenix off-Broadway; stories, poems, etc. in Sparrow, Partisan, Hudson, The Critic, NYTimes Book Rev., Remington Review, Southern Review, Journal of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, Literary Review, and even Viva…. (This is really too much. When did I write all these things…?)

  December 29, 1973.…MLA convention at Chicago;‡ busy, enjoyable. I was “used” by a Feminist group without knowing it until it was too late—but don’t much mind. (Scheduled to be the second of four speakers, I was moved to the fourth slot. Nearly two hours passed before I was allowed to give my talk; and of course everyone was bored and restless by then. Still, I think I was effective—I gave up on the idea of an academic talk and simply conversed.)

  A.K. showed up & thrust something at me, a tiny package. A razor blade in it, I’m led to believe.* But I shrank away, surprised, and dropped it, and never did retrieve it.

  He looked pale, haggard, bitter. Murderous. (Five minutes afterward Leslie Fiedler† showed up to warn me about A.K. He should be considered “dangerous,” evidently.)

  I can’t believe, though, that he would really try to hurt me…in a physical way….

  Would he?

  A waste of his energy, hatred for me. It disturbs me to learn he wishes my death but it really doesn’t interest other people, nor does it help A.K. much with his life.

  Embarrassing, to be the object of someone’s obsessional hatred. As much a nuisance of being over-loved.

  Love/hate. But I don’t think the man ever loved me. That’s unlikely.

  * Black Sparrow Press published several of Oates’s more experimental, less commercial books in the 1970s. As it happened, however, The Poisoned Kiss would be published by Vanguard in 1975.

  † Jules Wendall was a major character in Oates’s novel them (1969), which had won the National Book Award in 1970.

  * The story “Honeybit,” inspired by Oates’s dream, appeared in Confrontation in fall 1974 and was collected in The Goddess and Other Women (Vanguard, 1974).

  † “The Golden Madonna” would appear, in fact, in Playboy, in the March 1974 issue. Oates collected the story in Crossing the Border (Vanguard, 1976).

  ‡ Stephen Dedalus is the hero of James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

  * Walter Pater (1839–94), an essayist and philosopher who helped promulgate the idea of art and aesthetics—“art for art’s sake”—as a primary goal in human life.

  † When Oates had her “peculiar” mystical experience in December of 1970, she and Smith had been on sabbatical from the University of Windsor and had spent the year in London.

  ‡ Oates had recently been working on a novel entitled How Lucien Florey Died, and Was Born. Though she did complete the novel, it was never published except for an excerpt, entitled “Corinne,” in the fall 1975 issue of North American Review. The only extant manuscript of this novel is now in the Joyce Carol Oates Archive at Syracuse University.

  * Charles Ives (1874–1954) and John Cage (1912–92) were both experimental composers Oates admired.

  † Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was strongly influenced by German Romanticism; in general Oates had limited admiration for Romantic poets because of their intense absorption with the self.

  ‡ Oates and Smith had been married on January 23, 1961.

  * The critic Alfred Kazin (1915–98) published Bright Book of Life, a survey of American writers, in 1973; he had depicted Oates as a “Cassandra” who was absorbed in her own visions. Oates also had not cared for his interview/essay on her, “Oates,” which had appeared in the August 1971 Harper’s.

  † Donald Barthelme (1931–89), William Gass (b. 1924), and William S. Burroughs (1914–97) were experimental American fiction writers whom Oates admired, with some reservations.

  ‡ Her problems with a person here called “A.K.” were particularly acute during this year, as this and subsequent journal entries show.

  * Evelyn Shrifte, Oates’s editor at Vanguard Press.

  * Jack Morrissey and Elena Howe were major characters in Oates’s novel Do With Me What You Will, published in the fall of 1973 by Vanguard.

  * Oates’s essay “Is This the Promised End?: The Tragedy of King Lear,” appeared in the fall 1974 issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and was collected in her volume Contraries: Essays, published in 1981 by Oxford University Press.

  † John Berryman (1914–72), American poet (and suicide) in the “confessional” mode.

  * Mircea Eliade (1907–86), Rumanian philosopher and novelist.

  * The Esalen Institute, founded in 1962 and located in Big Sur, California, promulgated a blend of East/West philosophies, held “experiential workshops,” and served as a meeting place for philosophers, psychologists, artists, and religious thinkers. Tassajara was a Zen Center located in rural California.

  * Oates had been extremely close to her paternal grandmother, Blanche Morgenstern Woodside, who died in the summer of 1970.

  * Oates had attended Syracuse University as an undergraduate, 1956 to 1960, and maintained friendly relations with some of her former professors.

  * Oates and Smith began publishing a biannual literary magazine, Ontario Review, in 1974.

  † Oates’s study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry, The Hostile Sun, was published in 1973 by Black Sparrow Press.

  ‡ During the 1970s, Oates occasionally spoke, or was the subject of panel discussions, at the annual conventions of the Modern Language Association.

  * “A.K.” had continued to shadow Oates’s life. According to him, the “package” had been a packet of condoms.

  †Leslie Fiedler (1917–2003), American critic and novelist, and a professional acquaintance of Oates’s.

  two: 1974

  Balance between private, personal fulfillment (marriage, work at the University) and “public” life, the commitment to writing. The artist must find an environment, a pattern of living, that will protect his or her energies: the art must be cultivated, must be given priority.

  This year finds Joyce Carol Oates characteristically engaged in an ambitious project: the planning and writing of her longest novel to date, The Assassins, which would be published in 1975. Her journal records her daily struggle to find the right balance between “private, personal fulfillment” and the demands of her art.

  Though often focused on her writing life, Oates also describes lively social gatherings with her Detroit-area friends and with her University of Windsor colleagues; her travels to the Humanities Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where she read from her work, and to Yale University for a two-day stint as a “Visiting Writer”; her interactions with other well-known writers such as Philip Roth, Anne Sexton, and Stanley Elkin; and her teaching, which gave vent to the gregarious, sociable side of her personality and which served as an important counterweight to the necessary isolation of her life as a writer.

  Though she continued to brood upon her problems with “A.K.” and about the philosophical issues that haunted her daily life, this year’s entries suggest a relatively fulfilled and well-balanced artist whose essential seriousness was leavened by her gift for irony and humor. As she noted on November 23, she made “a point of telling my students regularly: mankind’s talent for humor, for laughter, is possibly our highest talent.”

  January 4, 1974. Dreams at the turn of the year: disturbing as always. Paralysis, nightmare. Forcing myself to wake—and then the relief as consciousness floods in. Without consciousness (control of the mind, the muscles, perception) we are in a kind of infantile hell.

  New class—“Literature & Psychology”—many students, some of them lively & provocative. Teaching is a kind of intellectual feast. A kind of party, circus, carnival; sense of motion; pleasantly crowded; filled with voices, faces, intense young minds. So many questions…! Fascinating. I can see why certain friends […] can’t write while they teach. They teach their very selves and nothing is left over. It’s a temptation.

  […]

&nb
sp; February 3, 1974.…Finished “Black Eucharist,” absorbing to write but not very likeable.* A quite impersonal tale.

  “A man is what he is thinking all day long”—Emerson.

  A night of many dreams. In one, an angel falls to earth…touches me…frightens me with his/her terrible reality. I had been thinking to myself, like a good Zen student, that the dream-image was only an illusion in my brain, nothing to be concerned about, and the angel responded by nudging me. “It’s only a spectre” I said but the spectre rebelled against being so categorized.

  A haunting dream. Many possible meanings. Complete & lovely as a poem.

  February 28, 1974.…Wrote “The Spectre,” poem re. angel & dream.* The reality of psychic powers.

  Have been informed of A.K.’s continued harassment. O well: silly stuff indeed.

  April 11, 1974.…“Seizure” chosen by Borestone Awards, Best Poems of 1973.† Based on the heart seizure & related observations.