The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates Read Online Free PDF Page B

Kazin (1915–98) published Bright Book of Life , a survey of American writers, in 1973; he had depicted Oates as a “Cassandra” who was absorbed in her own visions. Oates also had not cared for his interview/essay on her, “Oates,” which had appeared in the August 1971 Harper’s .
    † Donald Barthelme (1931–89), William Gass (b. 1924), and William S. Burroughs (1914–97) were experimental American fiction writers whom Oates admired, with some reservations.
    ‡ Her problems with a person here called “A.K.” were particularly acute during this year, as this and subsequent journal entries show.
    * Evelyn Shrifte, Oates’s editor at Vanguard Press.
    * Jack Morrissey and Elena Howe were major characters in Oates’s novel Do With Me What You Will , published in the fall of 1973 by Vanguard.
    * Oates’s essay “Is This the Promised End?: The Tragedy of King Lear ,” appeared in the fall 1974 issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and was collected in her volume Contraries: Essays , published in 1981 by Oxford University Press.
    † John Berryman (1914–72), American poet (and suicide) in the “confessional” mode.
    * Mircea Eliade (1907–86), Rumanian philosopher and novelist.
    * The Esalen Institute, founded in 1962 and located in Big Sur, California, promulgated a blend of East/West philosophies, held “experiential workshops,” and served as a meeting place for philosophers, psychologists, artists, and religious thinkers. Tassajara was a Zen Center located in rural California.
    * Oates had been extremely close to her paternal grandmother, Blanche Morgenstern Woodside, who died in the summer of 1970.
    * Oates had attended Syracuse University as an undergraduate, 1956 to 1960, and maintained friendly relations with some of her former professors.
    * Oates and Smith began publishing a biannual literary magazine, Ontario Review , in 1974.
    † Oates’s study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry, The Hostile Sun , was published in 1973 by Black Sparrow Press.
    ‡ During the 1970s, Oates occasionally spoke, or was the subject of panel discussions, at the annual conventions of the Modern Language Association.
    * “A.K.” had continued to shadow Oates’s life. According to him, the “package” had been a packet of condoms.
    † Leslie Fiedler (1917–2003), American critic and novelist, and a professional acquaintance of Oates’s.

two : 1974
    Balance between private, personal fulfillment (marriage, 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.
    T his year finds Joyce Carol Oates characteristically engaged in an ambitious project: the planning and writing of her longest novel to date, The Assassins, which would be published in 1975. Her journal records her daily struggle to find the right balance between “private, personal fulfillment” and the demands of her art.
    Though often focused on her writing life, Oates also describes lively social gatherings with her Detroit-area friends and with her University of Windsor colleagues; her travels to the Humanities Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where she read from her work, and to Yale University for a two-day stint as a “Visiting Writer”; her interactions with other well-known writers such as Philip Roth, Anne Sexton, and Stanley Elkin; and her teaching, which gave vent to the gregarious, sociable side of her personality and which served as an important counterweight to the necessary isolation of her life as a writer.
    Though she continued to brood upon her problems with “A.K.” and about the philosophical issues that haunted her daily life, this year’s entries suggest a relatively fulfilled and well-balanced artist whose essential seriousness was leavened by her gift for irony and humor. As she noted onNovember 23, she made “a point of telling my students regularly: