The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

lives, other lives. Personalities that are compatible but not predictable. Ongoing drama. Growing older, one marvels at the sheer diversity of us! We must make a spectacle, indeed. Colin and Jo told us an extraordinary tall tale about me…lifted and embroidered from them , evidently, Nadine’s assault upon Jules † attributed to me (that is, a threatened assault). Unfortunately my life can’t hope to compete with my fiction.
     
    Party at the McNamaras’, quite large. Enjoyable, though tiring. One’s spirit is diminished and must be then built up again. The art of self-effacement. Listening, observing, studying. Implicit understandings between some of us, now “old” friends, unspoken exchanges, glances, etc. The miracle of relationships. Why are some of us intimate friends and others merely friends and still others acquaintances…? Why do some people respond to one another, so spontaneously, warmly?…and to others not at all? “Social life” a mysterious thing. One has an instinctive yearning for it, yet most of the time it is unsatisfying. Only friendship, only relationships over an extended period of time, have meaning. Even then, so much of our lives are eclipsed, secret, how can we know each other easily…? Perhaps the dream-selves somehow keep pace. I dodream about friends, and perhaps they are the people themselves and not symbols or imaged emotions…. In any case it is out of our control. We grow into friendships like plants, our roots mingle, a slower and less dramatic form of love. The growth is something that happens and can’t be forced, but it can be encouraged. Then again, sometimes it can’t.
     
    One more party in 1974, New Year’s. The year 1975 seems unreal, still. Am planning ahead into 1976 already. What an infinity of time! The Assassins giving me technical difficulty; fitting pieces of a puzzle together without using force. A novel that won’t be published for a long time, if ever…yet far more crucial to me, at the moment, than anything that will appear in the near future.
     
    No interest in stories, still. Is the story form too brief, too thin, for what I feel compelled to do? No poetry either…. The spirit moves where it will.
    * Oates’s story “Black Eucharist,” which she never collected, was published in the fall 1977 issue of a short-lived literary magazine called Canto.
    * “The Spectre” appeared in the summer 1974 issue of New Letters magazine and was collected in Oates’s 1978 volume Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money (Louisiana State University Press).
    † Oates’s poem “Seizure” had appeared in the fall 1973 issue of Ohio Review and would be included in her 1975 volume The Fabulous Beasts (Louisiana State University Press).
    ‡ Roth’s novel My Life As a Man appeared in 1974.
    * Gene McNamara, Alistair MacLeod, and Colin Atkinson were all English department colleagues of Oates’s at the University of Windsor.
    † Elizabeth Graham and Kay Smith were close Detroit-area friends during Oates’s years teaching at the University of Detroit and the University of Windsor.
    ‡ Oates’s story “Paradise: A Post-Love Story,” loosely based on her relationship with A.K., was published in the summer 1976 issue of Shenandoah . Death-Festival is the journal’s first mention of the novel that would later be retitled The Assassins and published in 1975 by Vanguard.
    § The Petrie family—Andrew, Yvonne, Hugh, and Stephen—were the focus of Oates’s new novel in progress.
    ¶ Quentin Bell’s biography of his aunt, British novelist Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), had recently appeared.
    * A prolific author, Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist and Harvard professor.
    * Elizabeth Janeway (1913–2005) was a feminist social critic and novelist.
    * Jules Wendall in Oates’s novel them (1969) becomes involved in the Detroit riots of 1967 and shoots a policeman.
    * Oates’s novel Wonderland (1971) is replete with imagery of food and eating. In one