The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page A

define them, they would not exist at all. The crucial fact of art.
     
    November 15, 1974. A Friday, a single class at eleven—fifty intense minutes circling about Kafka’s “The Hunter Gracchus” and our views generally of death—then lunch in Detroit, introduced to Elizabeth Janeway * by my friend Kay Smith. A dismally cold, wintry, windy day—Detroit at its worst—luncheon on the twenty-sixth floor of a downtown building—my astonishment as always upon meeting someone whose work I have read: we are all so different from our prose….
     
    Misrepresented? No. Not represented at all.
     
    Elizabeth Janeway warm, articulate, efficient; accustomed to travel, television shows, panels, public speaking. Promoting a recent book. A brief lunch, much to say, little time in which to say it—then Kay and Elizabeth left, Kay to drive her to the airport, I sitting on alone for ten minutes, drinking tea, staring at the snowstorm outside. Sense of envy, for lives or ways of life—living—inaccessible to me; but inaccessible, after all, because I have chosen my own life and of necessity cannot choose another.
     
    Balance between private, personal fulfillment (marriage, friendship, 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.
     
    Live like a bourgeois, according to Flaubert. Don’t we all? Most of us, at least? Survivors.
     
    Unwritten, untouched: the temptations of teaching, of giving oneself so completely to the vital immediacies of the classroom that nothing else remains. Commonplace but misleading, the skeptical attitude toward teaching. I can’t understand it. From the first, at the University of Detroit—eleven years ago!—the temptation was to lose myself in the teaching, in the fascinating complexities of the students, in the oddly jovial, frantic social context of the college. Very real temptations, these, because the rewards are so immediate—so emotional. After a long exhausting day—at the University from ten until after six—little spirit left for what is private (my own writing), yet much left for a continuation of the same bright rapid flow of consciousness. Euphoric, could teach hour after hour. And—?
     
    Goethe: “People go on shooting at me when I am already miles out of range.”
     
    Some of us are never in range: never totally represented by any work of art. By the time of publication, already detached—absorbed in something else—a “stranger”—vulnerable to personal hurt but not to artistic censure.
     
    Is this a strategy? No. One does not choose one’s nature, though perhaps the habits, the adaptations of one’s nature are freely chosen….
     
    Destiny casts a shadow backward, even upon our anatomy: upon the images we have developed of our own “anatomy.” The feminine as a habit, an illusion, a lazy means of adaptation…to protect one’s vitality, to withdraw from a tedious surface immediacy (departmental meetings) in order to meditate upon something permanent (the novel I am struggling with right now): how best to be protected from that surface immediacy? Withdrawingbehind the image, behind the mask of the feminine. Of course it helps to have those inclinations: to actually be fairly quiet, soft-spoken, unaggressive, unambitious, undominant….
     
    Lawrence says the artist is a liar. Very well. Perhaps. But if we lie, it is out of politeness—or unconsciousness. Who would lie when he could tell the truth? But the truth is so rarely accessible….
     
    November 17, 1974. Sunny, briskly mild, like a day in late March. Many birds, primarily juncos, feeding on our terrace. A rabbit appears—and then disappears. The river is placid and very blue.
     
    Unless one makes a conscious effort—almost, an effort of the muscles, the muscular cords that control the eyes—very little of the physical world is