The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (22 page)

T
he year 1977 was a transitional one for Oates, both as a person and as an artist. She had been offered a one-year teaching job at Princeton University for the academic year 1978–79, and though she knew she would miss Windsor and her friends there, she had decided to accept: the journal hints at her essential loneliness in Windsor, the lack of a stimulating intellectual community, and when she and Smith did finally move to Princeton in the summer of 1978, she would find exactly that.

Oates did seek out a kind of community with other artists whenever she traveled, and this year she visited Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, where she socialized with John Barth and Anne Tyler, both of whom she liked a great deal. She also gave a dinner party, recorded memorably in the journal, for her friend John Gardner, who was going through some life changes that were far more melodramatic than her own.

Artistically her transition involved a kind of waiting for the “immense” novel that was already teasing her imagination, the postmodernist Gothic
Bellefleur,
ideas for which attracted her strongly but which she wasn’t yet ready to write. Instead she worked on more decidedly minor projects, completing a short novel entitled
Jigsaw
and a somewhat longer effort, based on a series of child murders in the Detroit suburbs, called
The Evening and
the Morning;
eventually she would decide not to publish either novel. This year she also wrote a novella, “A Sentimental Education,” and her usual assortment of short stories, essays, poems, and book reviews.

Though Oates was flattered that the Modern Language Association Convention had devoted a session to her work in December 1976, there were other “rewards of fame” that were disconcerting. At several points during 1977 she found herself the victim of random cranks and stalkers who would either show up at the university or write her disturbing letters. So it’s not surprising that she frequently meditated on the disparity between her public image as “Joyce Carol Oates,” the internationally famous novelist, and “Joyce Smith,” who simply wished for what she often called a kind of “invisibility” that would allow her to pursue her writing and teaching careers in peace and anonymity.

Despite some negatives in her life, however, it is striking how often the journal speaks of her personal happiness: her sense of fulfillment in her teaching job, in her marriage to Ray, and in her daily absorption in writing.

January 1, 1977.
…Returned last night from a ten-day vacation in New York City. Drove for hours across New York State through a blizzard; quite by accident I did two-thirds of the driving and used the opportunity to plan Claude Frey’s novel…. Our car was blown about by the wind, visibility was poor, the snow drifting across the road was mesmerizing & exhausting…semi-hallucinatory…. Mile after mile, hour after hour, yet when we approached Windsor I felt almost a sense of disappointment….
The Masquerade
, a possible title. In structure (and I hope in pleasure & ease of composition) resembling
All the Good People I’ve Left Behind
.

Notes for a poem, “Night Driving, New Year’s Eve 1976.”
*

A series of warm, very pleasant visits. My parents are in excellent health…my father is taking art lessons at the University of Buffalo, has done some surprisingly good things…my mother busy as always. Drove on from East Amherst to Woodstock where we took Gail Godwin and Robert Starer
*
out to lunch at an attractive pub-restaurant in a nearby village. They are both marvelous people, charming & stimulating, an ideal couple. They’ve bought a house set back from the road (the Glasgow Turnpike), formerly owned by an artist, with high windows & an enormous fireplace. Gail is completing a novel about an artist, evidently types on “good” paper once past the first sixty pages or so, doesn’t feel the need for much revision. Interesting to learn since I’ve gone in the other direction…a first draft in longhand and numerous small revisions. Gail seems in temperament very much like myself, and her early snapshots resemble my own…her mother even resembles my mother, in those snapshots at least…! I hope to see more of her and Robert when we’re living in New York City next summer.

A delirium of activity in NY. […] Sunday evening at the first of the sessions
^†
I sat and listened to papers on my work, which didn’t truly interest me very much though I appreciated the critics’ efforts & their obvious sincerity. They are all such nice people, it’s difficult to know what to say, but at least I had the sense to decline the moderator’s request that I comment on each of the pqapers as it was presented; that would have been grossly unfair and would probably have rattled the critics. […] I felt of course a sense of unreality as the session continued. All these people gathered together in an overheated room in the Americana Hotel because of me. Because of my writing. A fictional character might have found it unnerving but I must confess that I’ve grown quite accustomed to such things and experience them now as social events mainly. People need to come together frequently, and they need to be fed ideas; they need one another for intellectual and spiritual nourishment. It’s a pleasing thought to know that I have become, for some people, a source of such nourishment…a stimulating presence in their worlds. And the intellectual activity of the several
critics was impressive indeed. I fear that in the general atmosphere of the MLA such genuinely brilliant work might go unheeded….

[…]

Walked great distances despite the cold & bitter winds. Through Central Park, up and down Park Ave., 3rd St., 6th Ave., 5th Ave. Breakfast in delis, dinner in Chinese, Hungarian, Italian restaurants, not too expensive though over-priced by Windsor standards. Our room at the Americana was completely satisfactory, on the fiftieth floor with a view of the Hudson River, extraordinary at dusk and at night. I find that I’m very much attracted to city life…the busyness, the spectacle, the congestion, the sounds of taxi horns & sirens…the sense of a ceaseless drumming life. What effect such a life might have on my writing I don’t know, but I hardly think it would injure it. Stimulations…distractions…. A morning spent on 57th St. looking into galleries (particularly the Kathe Kollwitz exhibit at the Kennedy, which was overwhelming, and the Christopher Pratt exhibit at the Marlborough) leaves me drained of emotion in one sense, but inspired in another.

[…]

Still somewhat melancholy re.
Son of the Morning
. But I will have the fastidious pleasure of revising a few more pages this weekend. And then I will really be finished with it, I suppose…and forced to plunge into
The Masquerade
and one or two short stories that await composition.

[…]

January 4, 1977.
…Completed the story “Gargoyle” which isn’t altogether satisfactory but which does, in its own trim, mean, scaled-down way, bring together a number of things I must deal with.
*
Rereading
Dubliners
and Ellmann’s biography of Joyce for my seminar tomorrow. Reading Margaret Laurence for my “Literature and Society” course. (A packed room yesterday at eleven—ninety students or more—how am I to deal with so many people?) Reading Walker Percy’s new novel
Lancelot
, for review at
New Republic
.
^†

Percy: people are no longer horrified or moved, they are merely interested or not interested.

Well….

Found a “Love Poem to Joyce Carol Oates” on my office door yesterday. Read it hurriedly, without much interest. The letters that come in—most of them enthusiastic, a very few critical—don’t exactly interest me any longer. I seem to be detached from myself. What is the self…. I suppose I am detached from my finite, personalized self; I identify with another, deeper region of being.

Or do I…?

What is this business, after all, of “personality”? Of being obliged to care passionately about the personal appearance and the status and the ego-inflation of a particularized self? […] All I seem to care about while at the University is the particular work I am teaching (how I love Joyce!—and how I delight in introducing him to sensitive students) and certain of the students. I happen to be a full professor w/tenure but were I passed over for promotion year after year, I doubt that I could force myself to care. It seems so futile, somehow, to
care
about one’s status in the competitive world….

Must write a story about Miss Lerner and Edith, the twelve-year-old who is victimized, none-too-subtly, by her. A fictionalization of an event that happened to me in seventh grade…or was it eighth…at North Park Junior High. Touched upon it lightly in
Childwold
. And elsewhere, possibly in
them
. The noose-like situation of a child manipulated by an adult whom she can’t begin to understand. The gym teacher’s name…I have forgotten…but I remember her so clearly: a spiteful, smiling, somehow teasing and accusing look…dark skin, dark eyes, dark curly or kinky hair…. She said to me once, “You seem so alone,” when in fact I was not alone at all: but she must have wished to see me that way. For a while she favored me, then she began to harass me. How helpless a child is…! I remember my sickened feeling of guilt and unreasonable terror re. the authorities of that absurd little school, inflated out of all proportion to reality (for there were
really vicious children in the school, even a heroin addict or two!—back in the early 50’s—and grotesquely precocious, prematurely developed girls […] who must have been a little crazy as well). I was such a good, studious, hardworking girl…a perfect victim, being shy, and over-scrupulous. It seems absurd now but at the time the woman’s persecution of me was a nightmare. (As another teacher, Miss Smith, tormented me re. a secretary’s notebook—which was in fact blank—I lost somehow on the bus. Poor silly helpless Joyce! Nearly as bad as Maureen Wendall.)

January 6, 1977.
…Finished the review of Walker Percy’s
Lancelot
for the
New Republic.
Truly a disappointing novel; and since I like Percy very much—have liked him, that is—and sense that he is personally a very fine man—it was difficult for me to write that review. I should have sent the book back, maybe. I don’t know. Sending back books is cowardice, but writing negative reviews is cruel. However—he’ll be sure to get many good reviews since his reputation is secure and most reviewers won’t notice how shaky this novel is, or won’t wish to acknowledge it.

Received hardcover of
The Triumph of the Spider Monkey
. Beautifully designed & bound. I don’t know quite what to think of the novella…whether it’s inspired or simply awful…outrageous…a little crazy. I don’t think I would care to meet the author.

Speaking of craziness: a man from Detroit showed up at my eleven o’clock class yesterday. Wanted to talk with me. He had appeared the afternoon before in Kathryn Mountain’s office, saying, “Where the hell is Joyce Carol Oates” and acting very strange. He stuck his head into John Sullivan’s graduate seminar three separate times, asking for me. Very, very odd, with a sniggering mock-intimate voice. I asked him if he was registered in the course and if so, where was his registration slip; he said it was at home; I ignored his attempts to talk to me about other things and said if he wasn’t a student he could not come to the class, he said angrily, “You’re very anti-man, aren’t you,” and left…. Fortunately there were students around. He gave off the unmistakable whiff of madness; the students and I exchanged glances, those looks of false nerved-up amusement…but what else can one do? John S. has notified the cam
pus police. But what can anyone do? There are 104 people jammed in this class now (and no room for them to sit, so they’re standing at the back and sitting on the floor) and certainly no one can police them all. Hopefully the man won’t reappear. He seemed distraught but not really dangerous. Must be suffering a peculiar projection onto me…but God only knows what…odd, that he should think me “anti-man”…must be confusing me with the feminists…. But no, he’s simply crazy, why do I bother puzzling over him.

So my “fame,” such as it is, brings deserved rewards.

[…]

January 8, 1977.
[…] Some commotion yesterday. Arrived at the University but couldn’t teach my eleven o’clock class because during the night Mike Smith, my teaching assistant, had received a telephone call from some man announcing that he was going to kill me. “I’ll kill her, I’ll kill her, I’ll kill her!…She hates us, she hates all of us. I’ll kill her and you’ll help me…” Mike, a former probation officer, had wit enough to transcribe the conversation (such as it was). Why anyone should want to kill me I don’t know, it’s all embarrassing and…and turned out to be a laborious waste of time…being in the presence of police detectives for two hours…questioned closely along with Dr. Sullivan and Mike Smith and Kathryn Mountain about the would-be murderer (who is evidently the same strange man people saw on Tuesday and Wednesday, and who visited my class). Fortunately my other teaching assistant Max could take over the class, and he did a good job, evidently. But I feel so displaced and so…annoyed…. Well, not really: I suppose it was an interesting experience at least at first. But the detectives take down statements in longhand and are very, very slow and legalistic…. Geoff Hayman, Special Investigation Division, is the man I’m supposed to call if the would-be murderer appears. I will crawl bleeding and gasping for breath to the nearest pay phone and dial Detective Hayman, ext. 20.

[…]

The pointlessness of violence…. Not simply for the criminal, but for the victim. I don’t think I will, or could, learn anything from the experience.
Or could I? My curious bemused tolerance. One must, after all, die of something. And then again, perhaps we don’t really “die”…?