“The novelist is an empiricist, an observer of facts . . . . objective and
subjective ‘reality’ . . . he must guard against the demonic idea of imagining
that he possesses or even can possess ultimate truth. In this way he is like a
scientist, an ideal scientist. Humble, striving for what he does not yet know,
wanting to discover it, not to impose a pre-imagined dogma on reality. The novel
as discovery. Fiction as constant discovery, revelation. The person who
completes a novel is not the person who began it. . . . When one believes he
has the truth, he is no longer an artist. When we finish a great work we should
realize that we know less than we did before we began, in a sense; we are
bewildered, confused, disturbed, filled with questions . . . unsettled by mystery.”
So reads J.C. Oates’s journal entry of March 1975, after she had sent off
the Byronic, devil-drenched manuscript of Son of the Morning. The personality
lying behind her prodigious creations---logorrhea, some have called it---is on
amazing display in the first volume of her journals, running from dismal mid-
decade to mid-decade as she wove together her Bellefleur romances. And if that
personality is nothing more than the roving Monad-eye she flashed at me once
from under her synaptic, squiggly perm---describing how a poem should “never,
ever be larger than a postage stamp,” though a rectangular one, stood on its
end---then it is more accessible than most, more robustly and fearlessly
displayed here than in any contemporary writer’s diary since John Cheever’s.
From someone who attacked probing biographers’ “pathographies” and who
said she “could not create an admirable character” (at a reading for Broke Down
Heart), Oates’s journals reveal surprisingly normal and disciplined work habits:
placid mornings at the Selectric and name-dropper, dream dinner parties at her
Princeton and Ontario homes. [The black and white snapshots of these are alone
worth the price of the book.] So how did the vapors get into the McKeesport
“burb girl” and Berlind Distinguished Professor? How did she get so good at
knowing how maniacs “think”, how it felt to stand with her high school girlfriends
on boulders in the Detroit River while boys they wanted to date shot cans off
their heads with 22s?
Reading, for one. She breakfasts on obsessive Russians (“tragic, or just a
realistic, view of life?”); opium-addled French Symbolists; Romanian murderers
who strangle their landladies like Roskonokov and then really do hide the money
under a flat rock. Secondly, it sounds like she made the pycholanalysis rounds in
those days, though I may be pathographizing:
As in [my] Wonderland Jesse’s earlier
memories are closer to him, more definitely
imbedded (sic) than anything experienced as
an adult . . . so this must be true of all of us . . .
The earliest sights . . . . rooms, playgrounds
and backyards and the houses of relatives . . .
fix themselves in the brain far more powerfully
than anything afterward . . . [and] . . . we deceive
ourselves if we believe otherwise . . .
Or these indecisive, shape-shifting double visions of herself, questioning even
the writer’s authenticity and sincerity:
“Happiness” and its variants---contentment,
well-being, optimism---are exasperating when
they are pushed down our throats. When I read
an interview with myself---which, I confess---
I find hard to do---for good reason---I’m annoyed
at the statements I make as I’d be annoyed at a
stranger making them: who cares about normality,
about things going right or well, about “Joyce Carol Oates”
enjoying her writing? I should say that I find it torture
and don’t know why I do it.
Ontologies of identity lie under these surfaces like shredding shark’s teeth---
her novellas aren’t by accident called things like I Am No One You Know and
Where Is Here? (“Who Am ‘I’” or “Who Is The ‘I’” is the irradiating subtext of
these ‘day books.’)
Ultimately and not surprisingly, it is biography and friendships that furnish
her most vivid and dangerous material. Many major writers spot character
sources in their fellow craftsmen, but nobody vivisects them like the Jeffrey
Dahmer-obsessed Oates. There are Alfred Kazin’s facial tics bubbling up like tar
out of the “deepest loneliness,” and “probable resentment of those who are not
as unhappy as he.” (Beautiful.) There is John Updike’s “gentle, sly, immensely
attractive modesty,” his disbelief of and “slight guilt over his early and easy
success.” Anne Sexton amazes the diarist with her “final, feverish, death-
directed work,” compendious and ferocious, but “self-pitying, self-
contemptuous, self-despising.” Ditto John Berryman: “His alchoholism and
general misery were, he said, ‘the price you pay for an overdeveloped sensibility,’
but I always believed him to be underdeveloped, with a very weak sense of
others’ existences . . . he seemed already dead----an inert, clayey substance,
so chilling . . . .”
So while souls prove frivolous, deceptive, rotten or dauntingly saintly, Oates’
s respite becomes the natural world. It remains a vast, impersonal, spark-lit
galaxy kaleidescopically settling and resettling itself: “Sleet storm, blizzard, bits
of ice thrown against the windows, crackling tinkling noises, small explosions,”
and a Jersey countryside filled with “Blue juncots, cardinals and sparrows in the
berry bushes . . . vast Siberian lakes, snow so thick the river invisible.” For
Oates, like for her beloved Lawrence, the “wilde wood” pours out its mystical
rhythms to leapers and lepers alike, freeing the author from the world of people
and from the institution’s mandarin confines. One forgets, before going back
through these pages, that for all the vermin in Oates’s festering logs there is a
surface of sweet bark, sweet leaves---the world becoming its own bright book of
life.
subjective ‘reality’ . . . he must guard against the demonic idea of imagining
that he possesses or even can possess ultimate truth. In this way he is like a
scientist, an ideal scientist. Humble, striving for what he does not yet know,
wanting to discover it, not to impose a pre-imagined dogma on reality. The novel
as discovery. Fiction as constant discovery, revelation. The person who
completes a novel is not the person who began it. . . . When one believes he
has the truth, he is no longer an artist. When we finish a great work we should
realize that we know less than we did before we began, in a sense; we are
bewildered, confused, disturbed, filled with questions . . . unsettled by mystery.”
So reads J.C. Oates’s journal entry of March 1975, after she had sent off
the Byronic, devil-drenched manuscript of Son of the Morning. The personality
lying behind her prodigious creations---logorrhea, some have called it---is on
amazing display in the first volume of her journals, running from dismal mid-
decade to mid-decade as she wove together her Bellefleur romances. And if that
personality is nothing more than the roving Monad-eye she flashed at me once
from under her synaptic, squiggly perm---describing how a poem should “never,
ever be larger than a postage stamp,” though a rectangular one, stood on its
end---then it is more accessible than most, more robustly and fearlessly
displayed here than in any contemporary writer’s diary since John Cheever’s.
From someone who attacked probing biographers’ “pathographies” and who
said she “could not create an admirable character” (at a reading for Broke Down
Heart), Oates’s journals reveal surprisingly normal and disciplined work habits:
placid mornings at the Selectric and name-dropper, dream dinner parties at her
Princeton and Ontario homes. [The black and white snapshots of these are alone
worth the price of the book.] So how did the vapors get into the McKeesport
“burb girl” and Berlind Distinguished Professor? How did she get so good at
knowing how maniacs “think”, how it felt to stand with her high school girlfriends
on boulders in the Detroit River while boys they wanted to date shot cans off
their heads with 22s?
Reading, for one. She breakfasts on obsessive Russians (“tragic, or just a
realistic, view of life?”); opium-addled French Symbolists; Romanian murderers
who strangle their landladies like Roskonokov and then really do hide the money
under a flat rock. Secondly, it sounds like she made the pycholanalysis rounds in
those days, though I may be pathographizing:
As in [my] Wonderland Jesse’s earlier
memories are closer to him, more definitely
imbedded (sic) than anything experienced as
an adult . . . so this must be true of all of us . . .
The earliest sights . . . . rooms, playgrounds
and backyards and the houses of relatives . . .
fix themselves in the brain far more powerfully
than anything afterward . . . [and] . . . we deceive
ourselves if we believe otherwise . . .
Or these indecisive, shape-shifting double visions of herself, questioning even
the writer’s authenticity and sincerity:
“Happiness” and its variants---contentment,
well-being, optimism---are exasperating when
they are pushed down our throats. When I read
an interview with myself---which, I confess---
I find hard to do---for good reason---I’m annoyed
at the statements I make as I’d be annoyed at a
stranger making them: who cares about normality,
about things going right or well, about “Joyce Carol Oates”
enjoying her writing? I should say that I find it torture
and don’t know why I do it.
Ontologies of identity lie under these surfaces like shredding shark’s teeth---
her novellas aren’t by accident called things like I Am No One You Know and
Where Is Here? (“Who Am ‘I’” or “Who Is The ‘I’” is the irradiating subtext of
these ‘day books.’)
Ultimately and not surprisingly, it is biography and friendships that furnish
her most vivid and dangerous material. Many major writers spot character
sources in their fellow craftsmen, but nobody vivisects them like the Jeffrey
Dahmer-obsessed Oates. There are Alfred Kazin’s facial tics bubbling up like tar
out of the “deepest loneliness,” and “probable resentment of those who are not
as unhappy as he.” (Beautiful.) There is John Updike’s “gentle, sly, immensely
attractive modesty,” his disbelief of and “slight guilt over his early and easy
success.” Anne Sexton amazes the diarist with her “final, feverish, death-
directed work,” compendious and ferocious, but “self-pitying, self-
contemptuous, self-despising.” Ditto John Berryman: “His alchoholism and
general misery were, he said, ‘the price you pay for an overdeveloped sensibility,’
but I always believed him to be underdeveloped, with a very weak sense of
others’ existences . . . he seemed already dead----an inert, clayey substance,
so chilling . . . .”
So while souls prove frivolous, deceptive, rotten or dauntingly saintly, Oates’
s respite becomes the natural world. It remains a vast, impersonal, spark-lit
galaxy kaleidescopically settling and resettling itself: “Sleet storm, blizzard, bits
of ice thrown against the windows, crackling tinkling noises, small explosions,”
and a Jersey countryside filled with “Blue juncots, cardinals and sparrows in the
berry bushes . . . vast Siberian lakes, snow so thick the river invisible.” For
Oates, like for her beloved Lawrence, the “wilde wood” pours out its mystical
rhythms to leapers and lepers alike, freeing the author from the world of people
and from the institution’s mandarin confines. One forgets, before going back
through these pages, that for all the vermin in Oates’s festering logs there is a
surface of sweet bark, sweet leaves---the world becoming its own bright book of
life.
r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal
winter 2008
book review by richard wirick
DEVIL IN MY BEEHIVE: The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973—82
New York: Ecco/HarperCollins (509 pages)
winter 2008
book review by richard wirick
DEVIL IN MY BEEHIVE: The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973—82
New York: Ecco/HarperCollins (509 pages)
reading a book by tamar factor