The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates Read Online Free PDF

her letter came the next day.
     
    Well….
     
    What is one to conclude? Sheer coincidence; or, one can somehow “see” into the future; or, time is already complete and we merely remember; or, telepathy. (?) (She had so disturbing a psychic experience that I somehow registered it. But how likely is this “explanation”…or any explanation?)
     
    December 18, 1973. …Planning Ontario Review . *
     
    Someone asked me re. Publications & I’m astonished at the number, all in a brief period of time. Do With Me What You Will; The Hostile Sun † ; “Miracle Play” at the Phoenix off-Broadway; stories, poems, etc. in Sparrow, Partisan, Hudson, The Critic, NYTimes Book Rev., Remington Review, Southern Review, Journal of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, Literary Review , and even Viva …. (This is really too much. When did I write all these things…?)
     
    December 29, 1973. …MLA convention at Chicago; ‡ busy, enjoyable. I was “used” by a Feminist group without knowing it until it was too late—but don’t much mind. (Scheduled to be the second of fourspeakers, I was moved to the fourth slot. Nearly two hours passed before I was allowed to give my talk; and of course everyone was bored and restless by then. Still, I think I was effective—I gave up on the idea of an academic talk and simply conversed.)
     
    A.K. showed up & thrust something at me, a tiny package. A razor blade in it, I’m led to believe. * But I shrank away, surprised, and dropped it, and never did retrieve it.
     
    He looked pale, haggard, bitter. Murderous. (Five minutes afterward Leslie Fiedler † showed up to warn me about A.K. He should be considered “dangerous,” evidently.)
     
    I can’t believe, though, that he would really try to hurt me…in a physical way….
     
    Would he?
     
    A waste of his energy, hatred for me. It disturbs me to learn he wishes my death but it really doesn’t interest other people, nor does it help A.K. much with his life.
     
    Embarrassing, to be the object of someone’s obsessional hatred. As much a nuisance of being over-loved.
     
    Love/hate. But I don’t think the man ever loved me. That’s unlikely.
    * Black Sparrow Press published several of Oates’s more experimental, less commercial books in the 1970s. As it happened, however, The Poisoned Kiss would be published by Vanguard in 1975.
    † Jules Wendall was a major character in Oates’s novel them (1969), which had won the National Book Award in 1970.
    * The story “Honeybit,” inspired by Oates’s dream, appeared in Confrontation in fall 1974 and was collected in The Goddess and Other Women (Vanguard, 1974).
    † “The Golden Madonna” would appear, in fact, in Playboy , in the March 1974 issue. Oates collected the story in Crossing the Border (Vanguard, 1976).
    ‡ Stephen Dedalus is the hero of James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
    * Walter Pater (1839–94), an essayist and philosopher who helped promulgate the idea of art and aesthetics—“art for art’s sake”—as a primary goal in human life.
    † When Oates had her “peculiar” mystical experience in December of 1970, she and Smith had been on sabbatical from the University of Windsor and had spent the year in London.
    ‡ Oates had recently been working on a novel entitled How Lucien Florey Died, and Was Born. Though she did complete the novel, it was never published except for an excerpt, entitled “Corinne,” in the fall 1975 issue of North American Review. The only extant manuscript of this novel is now in the Joyce Carol Oates Archive at Syracuse University.
    * Charles Ives (1874–1954) and John Cage (1912–92) were both experimental composers Oates admired.
    † Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was strongly influenced by German Romanticism; in general Oates had limited admiration for Romantic poets because of their intense absorption with the self.
    ‡ Oates and Smith had been married on January 23, 1961.
    * The critic Alfred