The Barnes & Noble Review
On April 3, 1975, Joyce Carol Oates spotted a small mention of herself in a New York Times article on women "workaholics." She was dismayed to note that the writer failed to mention that, in addition to her writing, Oates also taught at the university. She protests in her journal: "But that's half my life!...maybe more than half. If I had nothing to do but write, I would write constantly and would be what is known as 'prolific.' Which of course, I wouldn't want."
It's probably safe to say the writer is being ironic. More than three decades later, if you Google the phrases "Joyce Carol Oates" and "prolific" the search engine will return 46,900 entries.
When the author began to keep a journal on New Year's Eve, 1973, at 34 years old, she certainly had some inkling that at least one purpose would be to preserve her thoughts for posterity. At that time, she had published six novels (one of which, them, was the winner of a National Book Award), four short story collections, three books of poetry, and one book of criticism. Ten years later -- the end date of the first volume of her collected journals, released this week -- she had written by my calculation eight novels, nine short story collections, one novella, three books of poetry, four plays, and three books of essays and criticism.
What to do with these thoughts, culled by editor Gregory Johnson from more than 4,000 single-spaced typewritten pages now housed in the Syracuse University Library, is an open question. (The author herself preferred not to re-read her work before publication. In her introduction, she writes: "[R]evisiting the past is like biting into a sandwich in which, you've been assured, there are only a few, really a very few, pieces of broken glass.") With any other writer of Oates's admittedly high caliber -- and despite her uneven output, much of her work is strong enough to merit her often-mentioned presence on the shortlist of contenders for the Nobel Prize -- it would be relatively simple to map the author's private thoughts alongside the work produced during the time period, and deliver a tidy thesis on how each informed the other. In this case, that's work best left to a grad student willing to spend more than a dozen years ABD. (One exasperated critic, Chauncey Mabe, from the South Florida Sentinel, threw up his hands and substituted a "to-do" list for Ms. Oates in lieu of a review).
Nor is this diary of much use for someone looking for salacious literary gossip. Invoking journal writers, such as Sylvia Plath, who "use their writing skills as scalpels to cruelly cut up anyone who comes into their paths" Oates refuses to use her journal as an instrument to vilify others. "If the reader is looking for 'cruel' -- 'malicious' -- 'wickedly funny' portraits of contemporaries, he/she is not likely to find them here." The cast of distinguished literary characters who meander through the journal is staggering: A partial list includes John Updike, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick, Anne Tyler, Philip Roth, and Anne Sexton. But Oates's good manners keep most of these portraits perfunctory at best. Often, she's simply too shy or socially disengaged to interact at all: She chastises herself several times for failing to call Lillian Hellman, and, when told by Donald Barthelme in 1976 that she "would like" Susan Sontag, she thinks, "No doubt, but she wouldn't like me!" (When the two women finally meet in 1979, they become good friends and bond, among other things, over Sontag's experience with cancer and Oates's tachycardia, a lifelong heart problem.)
In fact, the subject most dissected and lacerated by the journal writer's scalpel is "Joyce Carol Oates" or "JCO," a "persona," most often referred to in the third person, whom the journal writer -- however she cares to refer to herself -- tends to observe from a considerable distance, with a mixture of bemusement, frustration, skepticism, and incomprehension.
On reading the galleys of her manuscript The Triumph of the Spider Monkey, she writes that she is not sure what to make 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." When looking at a list of publications on the author's page of the 1979 Franklin Library edition of them, she is flabbergasted. "The list of books is overwhelming! So many books! So many! Obviously, JCO has a full career behind her, if one chooses to look at it that way; many more titles and she may as well…what?..give up all hopes for a 'reputation'?" And when asked by a friend, the critic John Gardner, to write a family novel in which things go well for a change, she replies, " 'I,' Joyce Smith, Joyce who is his friend, Joyce the conscious being, would gladly write such a novel for the edification of all; but unfortunately, that self does not handle the writing and will accept no assignments."
All this literary shadowboxing makes the relationship between the self who does handle the writing, and the private person who writes the journals, the "conscious" person who attends dinner parties with John Gardner, murky at best. (At times, she even suggests that stories are literally the product of her unconscious self: a weeping teenage girl appears in one dream and later becomes a character in her short story "Honeybit"; and her characters Jack and Elena from Do With Me What You Will appear in a dream to argue for their right to a more peaceful ending.)
Oddly enough, the private person is frequently referred to by her married name, Joyce Smith, which may -- or very well may not -- suggest that "Joyce Carol Oates" finds her dark material in the past, whereas "Joyce Smith" is the woman who survived that past and became a different person upon her marriage, at age 22, to Ray Smith. Indeed, the portions of the journal devoted to her marriage, her teaching, and her daily life are consistently positive, even idyllic. Again and again, she describes waking early, writing until 1:30 or 2:00 (at which point she eats an apple and drinks tea, seemingly her only daytime sustenance), taking long walks and bicycle rides with Ray, the thrill of teaching young students (which doesn't seem to interfere with her output at all) and sitting down to dinner, usually something meaty for her husband and a lighter dish for herself. "We get along so well, it's like a honeymoon," she writes of her husband. "One wonders if such good fortune can last." Still, she despairs of the "very real difficulty of suggesting a good marriage in fiction" and at one point actually denies a similar union to her character Marya Knauer. ("I can't have her meeting and marrying someone like Ray…I can't hand her over to that 'happy' resolution, which would end, in a sense, her struggle as Marya.")
But if "Joyce Carol Oates" draws upon at least some memories of childhood trauma while living in rural poverty in upstate New York to inform her dark, often violent work, she is loath to admit a biographical connection. Although several passages allude to witnessing the consequences of violence outside her home, her memories of her parents and immediate family are as warm as her feelings for her husband. This façade slips a bit when she recounts an episode when her parents, now bursting with good health, come for a visit. Over dinner at the house of a wealthy friend, Joyce's father tells a "comic-grotesque" anecdote about the difficulty of raising pigs, which ends with him slaughtering the pigs, only to see the meat rot:
I know, however, that the situation wasn't funny. He tried to raise pigs because we were poor. It was poverty behind the desperation and…it was a sort of tragedy that, after all the humiliating effort, the meat rotted. How interesting it is, then, that thirty or more years later the incident can be retold, perhaps even re-imagined, as an anecdote. A story. A story meant to amuse. For now, their lives have changed considerably -- completely. There's no danger of the repetition of the poverty of decades ago, or the fear and bitterness that attended it. So, sitting in the elegant living room of a $200,000 home in Birmingham, Michigan, telling his story to a vice president of one of the most wealthy of contemporary companies...he can be, in a way, elegant himself: a storyteller confident of his audience and of his own ability (which turns out to be considerable) to entertain. I think this is profoundly, profoundly interesting, and enigmatic only to me…
His daughter, equally confident as a storyteller, would have no doubt cast the same story as a tragedy. But it's profoundly interesting to note that this last summer, almost exactly thirty years after that conversation in the wealthy friends' living room, Oates published
The Gravedigger's Daughter, a novel based in part on re-imagining the life of her paternal grandmother. The protagonist, Rebecca Schwart, is born into poverty, survives a violent marriage, and reinvents herself. At the end, Rebecca ends up happily married to a good man, a man that the author -- in interviews with me and others -- conceded had much in common with her own husband, Ray Smith. For that, we presume "Joyce Carol Oates" has Joyce Smith -- or whomever that person behind the persona is -- to thank. --
Amy Benfer
Amy Benfer has worked as an editor and staff writer at Salon, Legal Affairs,
and Paper
magazine. Her reviews and features on books have appeared in Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, The Believer, Kirkus,
and The New York Times Book Review.
From the Publisher
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, edited by Greg Johnson, offers a rare glimpse into the private thoughts of this extraordinary writer, focusing on excerpts written during one of the most productive decades of Oates's long career. Far more than just a daily account of a writer's writing life, these intimate, unrevised pages candidly explore her friendship with other writers, including John Updike, Donald Barthelme, Susan Sontag, Gail Godwin, and Philip Roth. It presents a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young woman, fully engaged with her world and her culture, on her way to becoming one of the most respected, honored, discussed, and controversial figures in American letters.
Publishers Weekly
Writing is... a drug, sweet, irresistible, and exhausting," writes Oates in this fascinating and significant record of an artist's life. She was 34 when she began this "experiment in consciousness," which follows the gestation and writing of many of her most important works. Oates, readers come to realize, is intensely disciplined, exquisitely sensitive, unflaggingly-almost morbidly-introspective, concerned with philosophical issues, attuned to mysticism and acutely responsive to the natural world. Although she abhors being described as prolific, she writes daily, with feverish energy; she herself uses the word "obsessed." If a day or two passes when she isn't writing, she feels "profound worthlessness." Teaching, she reveals, is a vital component of her well-being, although it often leaves her exhausted. The journal records her relationships with contemporary authors, including Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Gail Godwin, Stanley Elkin, John Gardner and Donald Barthelme. She is candid about her "intensely" intimate marriage to Raymond Smith, her lack of maternal instinct and the hours she spends at the piano, an obsession almost equal to her writing. Overall, this journal immerses the reader in a complex, searching, imaginative personality-an artist who continues to refine her search for literary expression. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Oct. 2)
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Kirkus Reviews
Tensions between public image and private self are engagingly acknowledged and analyzed in illuminating excerpts from journals begun during the second decade of this prolific author's remarkable career. Their emphases are predictable: the flood of writing Oates produced then and now (The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense, 2007, etc.); speculations about the nature of the artistic process and the ways in which art has shaped her character and personality; family, friends and colleagues whose empathy and affection anchor her in a vividly experienced, evidently cherished everyday world. Readers who perceive Oates as a workaholic automaton may be surprised to encounter an author who, though formidably successful even this early in her career, felt unworthy of the acclaim lavished on her. Oates waxes rhapsodic about the sustaining pleasures of marriage (to her colleague and soul mate Raymond Smith), domestic routine (she's a conscientious if unadventurous cook and hostess), her teaching duties and burgeoning friendships with such notable contemporaries as John Updike, Gail Godwin, the late John Gardner and Susan Sontag, Anne Tyler, even the eternally prickly Norman Mailer. It's nice to know that she derives so much pleasure from teaching Alice in Wonderland to her Princeton students and from the experience of playing the piano and listening to her beloved Chopin. Naturally, she also chronicles her work: stories, poems, essays and reviews completed almost daily (or so it seems); wearying searches for appropriate form and rhetoric for the ambitious novels (The Assassins, Son of the Morning and Angel of Light) that many critics consider her weakest work; and a somewhat surprisingcommitment to reviving traditional narrative genres in her Gothic Quintet, which includes Bellefleur, A Bloodsmoor Romance and The Crosswicks Horror, the last-named long since completed but as yet unpublished. "Love. Friendship. Art. Work. These are my values," Oates says. Watching her juggle them in these replete pages is a stimulating experience.
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