We find them, one balmy summer evening, in a car moving too fast over an old, unlit, unmarked road. The Senator steers with one hand; the other grips a paper cup of vodka and tonic. His companion is a young woman whose Liberty Print summer purse is prudently equipped with a condom. Having abandoned a house party on the island, they are racing to the ferry, to his motel room on the mainland, to a night of bedded pleasure.
But the trip ends abruptly in a skid and a plunge into deep marsh water. He swims to safety; she is trapped in the submerged wreckage. We read on for 150 more pages as the life of a girl called Kelly drains away in little bursts of memories and in desperate fantasies of rescue. With painful frequency, until the very last page, the story keeps reminding us ” . . . and she died.”
Sounds vaguely familiar, does it? The details are close enough for discomfort if the sign on the door reads ”Edward Kennedy.” Nearly 23 years after Chappaquidick, where the senator`s car flew off a wooden bridge and a 19-year-old campaign worker named Mary Jo Kopechne died in Poucha Pond, Joyce Carol Oates has applied a novelist`s eye and imagination to a roughly similar event.
The book is ”Black Water,” to be issued in May by Dutton in a confident 50,000 first printing already chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. The title, Oates explained one day recently, is a reminder that at night, at the bottom of a deep pond, water loses its transparency, water becomes a dark, claustrophobic surround.
It should be noted at once that Oates says she intended no malice toward the man who survived Chappaquidick and who, after a long period of divorced bachelorhood, has lately pledged his troth to a Washington lawyer. In fact, Oates volunteered, she has always admired Kennedy`s liberal Democratic positions.
But she is a writer whose social and moral concerns are central to her work and whose subjects find her as often as she finds them. At the very least, she appears to approach her themes with the dedication of a woman possessed, to spin out stories, as her friend, novelist Gail Godwin once put it, in a state of ”trancelike intensity.”
”Black Water” radiates obsession, and small wonder. ”I have been haunted by the image of a woman in this situation for years and I wanted to write about it in a kind of prose poem way,” Oates says. ”I think many women, including myself, identified with her.”
In the headlined weeks after the night of July 18, 1969, Oates`
imagination was seized by the events of Chappaquidick. Among other things, she was struck by how little attention was paid to the dead woman. Inevitably, it is the more-famous survivor on whom interest settles and around whom questions swirl. Why did Ted Kennedy wait 10 hours to report the accident? (He said it was shock.) How would the law deal with him? (Leniently.) Would the scandal hurt his chances to run for president some day? (Probably.)
(Kennedy`s office declined to comment on the book.)
Oates has files of folders crammed with drafts of abandoned projects, and one of them holds sheets scrawled at the time of Chappaquidick. ”Some little passages, some notes-I began something,” she says. ”As I said, I was haunted by this image. But I couldn`t ever find a structure for a story. I didn`t have a structure for it until last summer.”
Serious and reserved
Oates is sitting in an impeccably neat library-cum-workroom in the home she shares with her husband, Raymond J. Smith, who edits the quarterly The Ontario Review and runs a small publishing house. The walls hold yards of books and some striking contemporary art.
The Oates-Smith ranch house is on a woodland fringe of Princeton, a few miles down the road from the university where, as a tenured professor, she teaches creative writing.
Until she relaxes a trifle, Oates` arms remain rigidly folded about her middle. She is a serious person of monumental reserve, with a small, barely inflected voice that does not seem equipped to rise in enthusiasm or anger. As ever, enormous glasses overwhelm the small, schoolgirl face; at 53, she looks, as she always has, as if she survives happily on a daily diet of three lettuce leaves and a soda cracker.
In 1969, the year of Chappaquidick, she had published ”them,” which, the next year, would win the National Book Award, and she was at work on her next novel, ”Wonderland.” In all, since 1963, there have been more than 20 novels, including several pseudonymous mysteries, and an even larger number of volumes of short stories, poetry, plays and essays. She has also written several screenplays that have not been filmed.
For years, her prodigious output has excited criticism, some of it venomous, as if a life poised perennially and purposefully over notepad and typewriter was unfashionable, possibly sinful.
Since the ”real” world, in all its chaos and cruelties, and ”real”
people, in all their follies, have often provided rich fodder for Oates`
fiction, it is hardly surprising that last summer she suddenly felt driven to craft a narrative out of an incident more than two decades old. As Oates remembers it, she was galvanized by several contemporary events.
One was the appointment of Clarence Thomas to fill the Supreme Court seat long held by Thurgood Marshall. Another was the rape case against William Kennedy Smith.
”It was the whole atmosphere of the last year,” she went on. ”It was the post-Reagan, post-Thurgood Marshall period, the feeling that the Supreme Court is increasingly inhospitable to women`s rights. I felt a lot of pressure and a lot of anxiety in the air.”
Unable to let go
For the book, Oates changed the time to 1991, moved the locale from Massachusetts to a fictitious Grayling Island off the coast of Maine (a favorite summer refuge of hers), and wrote a 7,500-word short story. By the time it appeared, somewhat shortened, in the September issue of Lear`s Magazine, she had gone on to develop her characters further and to expand the narrative.
”I couldn`t let it go,” she says. ”I was very much immersed in the subject. I was dreaming about it at night and I had weeks of anxiety about it because it was so tense.”
She repeatedly discard material she had briefly persuaded herself was needed. ”You spend a whole day on writing that`s not critical. Then you go to bed and wake up the next morning and look at it. And you say, `No, you tried hard and your heart was in the right place. But this will not do.` ”
The male figure in the novel is referred to only as The Senator, a title intended to stress the aura and allure of a handsome, high office-holder to the worshipful young woman who is thrilled to meet him at a weekend party. The Senator`s family and political background are not carbon copies of Ted Kennedy`s, and he comes from a state that Oates thinks is probably
Connecticut.
Above all, she wants it understood, he is not intended to represent a villain, or a demagogue. Rather, he wears the kind of idealism and good intentions that many young people find attractive.
As a professor, Oates encounters any number of bright, ambitious, politically aware women on their way to the sort of serious writing career that her Kelly Kellaher character has found.
”It`s kind of a composite,” she says. ”I was thinking of someone in Washington, a young woman in her 20s, very idealistic, working for very little money. You wonder: How long can she keep doing that? What will happen to her?”
The novel`s dedication reads, ”For the Kellys,” who, Oates explains, are the eager, striving, political recent graduates much like her doomed heroine. She worries that they tend to be ”too trusting.” Her concerns are personal. By the time the novel was finished, Oates had identified completely with her heroine. ”I felt I could be that girl.”
One circumstance pointedly remained unchanged from the actual event. The autopsy report on the death of Mary Jo Kopechne suggested she may have lived for some time after the car was submerged, probably surviving on a narrow pocket of air that eventually was used up or filled with water.
So, too, Kelly lives on, using up available oxygen, boosting her spirit by telling herself that rescue is on the way and finally hallucinating that it is at hand. It is nearly unendurable, and it was meant to be.
”I wanted to be faithful to the experience. I wanted to write something that would be difficult to bear. It certainly was for me.”
Not until she had a finished manuscript did Oates, more out of curiosity than necessity, drive to the Princeton public library to examine one of the innumerable books offering theories on Chappaquidick. What she read stirred great indignation at the law`s handling of the case, but it did not dictate any serious alterations in her work.
Still recovering
When she was ready to relinquish ”Black Water,” Oates sent it off to her editor, William Abrahams, who works out of San Francisco. To her mind, it was less an offering to her publisher than a courtesy. In recent years, she had turned out a couple of short works that, for complicated reasons, were placed with small literary houses.
Instead, Abrahams, who never knows what she has been working on until a fat envelope is delivered from New Jersey, sat down with her newest offering soon after it arrived and didn`t leave his chair for two hours. Minutes after he had read the last page, he dialed her number, bursting with appreciation.
”It just tore me apart,” he said recently. ”To me it was an amazing work of art, a masterwork.”
The book seems to have temporarily depleted her. More than a half-year after polishing the final version of ”Black Water,” she still talks of exhaustion. She has taken a semester`s leave from Princeton to turn to theater; working entirely in dialogue is a relief after months immersed in a draining narrative. Some modest productions of Oates plays have been produced in the past.
The new piece, ”Gulf War,” was given a reading in Manhattan not long ago, and will be fully staged by an off-Broadway group in May, around the time the novel appears.
And then there is always the critical and public response to the book to wonder about. Oates acknowledges that some readers may deplore her raking up an old scandal just when Kennedy appears to be settling down to new domesticity.
”The novel is controversial in a small way,” she says serenely. ”But I`m willing to anticipate that. I don`t expect smooth sailing.”
