First, it rains. Then the rain stops and the world looks fresh and wet and vulnerable, as if a thin protective layer has been rinsed away and what’s left is too tender, too raw, too frank, to be glimpsed without a filter. Greens are greener, blacks and browns, starker.
It almost hurts to look. But you do, because a shy, subterranean glow is visible in each leaf and branch and patch of damp grass in Joyce Carol Oates’ back yard in Princeton, N.J., and you don’t want to miss a thing.
You know it’s only a trick of the sunlight. Inspired by Oates’ work, though, a part of you wonders if the illumination is coming as much from within as without, if secret truths live in the landscape.
Not easy truths. Not pretty truths. But truths nonetheless.
If Oates’ novels and short stories sometimes seem too abrupt and unsettling to think about for too long–there are, throughout dozens and dozens of publications, the cut-up families; the cocky, heartless bullies; the smart, lonely adolescent girls who yearn and burn; the rapacious sons and malevolent mothers–they also force a kind of furious reckoning with things as they are. Hard things. “He wanted to see, yet he did not want to see,” Oates writes of haunted young Jesse Vogel in the novel “Wonderland” (1971).
That is how it is: We want to see. We don’t want to see.
Oates’ world is a place scrubbed clean of consoling lies and habitual hypocrisies, stripped of alibis, of simple answers, of coy cleverness, so that all that remains is what James Agee once called “the cruel radiance of what is.”
Like a back yard in the wake of the rain, these truths make everything look peeled and new. Shimmering with possibility. Like, maybe, a blank page.
Like, in effect, another Eden.
And you know what happened there.
First: the land. Before plot, dialogue, before theme, before mood, before climax and resolution, there is, in a Joyce Carol Oates story, the land. The implacable place. The stubborn, unmistakable geographical context. The ground underfoot.
“The landscape itself is a character,” Oates says. “So I never write without a sense of where it is. And I wouldn’t want to. It wouldn’t be much fun for me. Really, I think the people are expressions of the landscape. Of the atmosphere of a special place.”
She is sitting in a wide, window-lined room that looks out across that rain-dazed back yard, a couple of acres complicated by trees and rambling hedges and an impression of endless, aimless green. It’s late afternoon, a day after the beginning of fall term at Princeton University, where she has taught creative writing for almost three decades.
Oates, 68, is every bit as lithe and pale as you’ve been led to expect from the photos on the backs of book jackets. What doesn’t come across in the photos, though, is the sturdy calm she radiates. It’s the opposite of fragility. It’s an ineffable sense of peace and self-sufficiency that arises, you must assume, from knowing in your bones that you’re doing the work you were born to do, using your gifts the way they were meant to be used, and that the world, usually fatally distracted and perilously preoccupied, has taken note of it.
Next Sunday, she will receive the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Oates has published more than 100 works, from novels and short stories to plays to books for children and young adults to essays and to poetry, (a handful of her novels were under pseudonyms). She chronicles the breadth of the American experience as no other author ever has, striking every important national touchstone–social justice; sports; race; gender; terrorism–but not as broad categories, not as labels, but through stories about people–people and the places in which they thrive or falter, dream or don’t dream, live and die.
“Her work could be an encyclopedia of our times,” says Pinckney Benedict, an author and former Oates student who teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University. “She’s a warrior for the truth.”
Yet to be in Oates’ presence is to sense not the brutal industry, the fierce efficiency that must support that astonishing output, but rather poise, contentment, a certain golden stillness. She puts one in mind of Virginia Woolf’s description of her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, as a bowl that brims but never overflows.
Consciously or not, Oates offers a clue to her own appearance when she describes a character in “The Falls” (2004) as possessing “an antique sort of beauty. Her face seemed both ethereal and resolute … “
Resolute: That’s the word. Because Oates writes relentlessly, wherever she is, amid whatever else is going on in her life. It doesn’t matter if she’s here in Princeton, where she lives with her husband, editor and publisher Raymond Smith, in the comfortable ranch home at wood’s edge. Doesn’t matter if she’s waiting in an airport or in line at the dry cleaners. Doesn’t matter if she’s tired or sick.
“I can write anywhere,” she says.
Daniel Halpern, president and publisher of Ecco Press and editor of Oates’ books, explains it this way: “It’s her particular wiring. If she’s in a limo, she’s writing. If she’s early to a party, she’s writing. She’s 19th Century in that way. She writes like a Charles Dickens–so much, at such a high quality.”
And if, for some bizarre reason, she were not able to write?
Without hesitation, Halpern declares, “Unimaginable.”
Greg Johnson, who wrote a biography of Oates called “Invisible Writer” (1998), says: “She writes because that’s what writers do, and she is hardly unique–think of Balzac, Trollope, Dickens. She is in their tradition, not in that of the fragile modernist novelist working years and years to produce a single slim book.”
With Oates, there is no hint of the sighing, fainting, finicky creator waiting for the iffy descent of a fickle muse. She simply writes–a fact that can occasionally make people puzzled and suspicious, so accustomed are we to assigning worth on the basis of scarcity.
“She works like mad,” says Benedict. “She works harder than anybody I know–and I grew up on a dairy farm, with a father and brother who got up every day at 4 a.m. We’re not accustomed to it. And we’re certainly not accustomed to it from our artists.”
If Oates does have a muse, then, it’s a decidedly blue-collar one, a muse that doesn’t mess around with gossamer wings and delicate flutterings, doesn’t hover and tease but gets right down to business.
Business such as “We Were the Mulvaneys,” the lovely, harrowing 1996 novel about the fault lines in an American family that Oprah Winfrey was wise enough to select for her book club. Business such as “Black Water” (1992), deceptively short, a mere slip of a book, but watch out–it won’t leave you alone, this completely convincing and psychologically acute retelling of the Chappaquiddick tragedy.
Business such as “On Boxing” (1987), a collection of savvy, lyrical essays on the sport that perversely enthralls her. Business such as the nervous-making short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1970), so well known and widely anthologized that it’s part of our literary Mt. Rushmore, its faint profile perfectly familiar even at a distance.
Business such as “The Gravedigger’s Daughter,” a novel based on her grandmother’s life that will be published next spring.
It is, Halpern says flatly, “the best book she’s ever written,” adding: “And it could only have been written by someone who has written 100 books.”
“Nobody wanted me to know. But I wanted to know.”
–“After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, And Flew Away” (2006)
ART IS MYSTERIOUS, a thing of dreams and magic, but it’s also coldly practical. A thing of toil and skill and repetition.
Reminded that many people, in awe of her productivity, seem to think it comes easy for her–that she sits down, fetches a pen and out flow those beautiful sentences–Oates shakes her head.
“I know, I know. And it’s just not like that at all,” she says emphatically. “I wish it did come like that.” She pauses. “In a way, though, it might not be as much fun.”
Her work has the edgy, raggedy, finger-snapping feel of a sudden jazz solo. It can read like a transcript of a hurried conversation eavesdropped on the “L.” And yet, from Oates’ account of her methods, that sort of easy, swinging rhythm to her work–that offhand, unfussed, oh-look-what-just-fell-in-my-lap cool–comes only at the end of an arduous and lengthy period of composition and revision.
It’s similar to actor Helen Mirren’s description of a Wassily Kandinsky painting, quoted in a recent New Yorker profile: “The appearance of improvisation: in fact, it’s intensity, beautifully worked out.”
Emphasis “work.”
Each morning Oates rises, drinks a cup of herbal tea, feeds her two cats, chats briefly with her husband, skims The New York Times, then begins to write. In longhand.
Once a manuscript is finished, she puts it away, often for a year or more. “Then I sit down and read it,” she says. “It’s like reading someone else’s novel. I read it fast but I wrote it slow. And I think, ‘I can do better than this. It’s not what I really want.’ So by the time I finish a novel, I’ve rewritten the first chapter countless times. So many times. And each time I think, ‘This is the last time.’ And then I go back and do it again.
“When I finished ‘Blonde,’ I said to myself, ‘I’m never, ever, ever going to be unhappy about anything, ever again, because I can wake up every morning and think, ‘I’m done. I’m finished with “Blonde.” ‘ And that actually lasted for months– I didn’t complain about anything, I was so happy! And then gradually, life came back in.”
Yet if her stringent, persevering workdays sound like drudgery, forget it. As Oates quickly adds, “It’s very exciting. Very pleasurable.
“Most artists who have a long career are obsessive artists, like Picasso or Faulkner. Picasso once said, ‘Nothing interests me as much as the movements of my own mind.’ If you’re a writer and you’re working on a novel, you don’t really know how the sentences will come. Or what the characters will say to one another. That air of being surprised–and sometimes being anxious about it–makes you very keenly aware of the life within.”
And the life without, because the world is always present in an Oates story; the world is close and busy, the world is the stone against which characters sharpen themselves or by which they are crushed, broken, haunted. “The landscapes,” Oates says, “are real. These are places I’ve been.”
Indeed, some of those landscapes can sound a lot like the western half of upstate New York, near Niagara Falls, where Oates was born on June 16, 1938, to a working-class family forced to fret between paychecks. It’s a region of hard Februarys and long Julys, of winter-stiffened ground and icy spring rains. It’s a region, Oates believes, that is much closer to the Midwest in terms of its sensibility, its internal and external weather, than to the East Coast.
Those early days, Johnson believes, are crucial to an understanding of the author, of both her subject matter and of her piston-like productivity.
“Her background is one of a strong work ethic,” he says. “Her parents left school early because they had to work, and their lifelong industry is surely reflected in Oates’ own.”
As Oates ruminates in an essay collection published by Ontario Press, the small publishing company she and her husband run: “I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes … and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.”
“Is there any mystery like who you finally turn out to be … “
–“You Must Remember This” (1987)
THERE IS NO “OATES STYLE.” There are, rather, styles: a constant search for the perfect way to put across a certain theme, to deliver characters exactly where they need to be.
“I think there’s an ideal form to express a particular story,” Oates says. “So I have to find the structure.” Hence she reconfigures her storytelling method over and over again, from the earnest social realism of “them” (1970) to the Gothic filigree of “Bellefleur” (1980) to the muscular, straight-ahead narrative style in rich family sagas such as “We Were the Mulvaneys” and “The Falls.”
It’s what Oates has done ever since childhood, Johnson records in his biography: She figures out a way to go from here to there, to get where she needs to be. Adjusting. Adapting.
Oates attended a one-room schoolhouse that lacked indoor plumbing, and then won a scholarship to Syracuse University. After graduation she headed to the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a master’s degree in English. She and fellow graduate student Smith–a quiet, handsome Milwaukee native with the thoughtful air of the literary scholar he is–met there and were married. After a brief stint in Texas, where Smith taught while Oates worked on her writing, both took teaching posts at the University of Detroit. Then it was on to the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, and in 1978, Princeton.
Along the way, she wrote the books that made her famous and revered.
The past, though, is always with her, embedded as deeply in her work as “an eye in a socket,” as Oates writes about another kind of truth in “You Must Remember This”. She returns to that past repeatedly in her fiction, to the complex and difficult lives of her beloved parents and grandparents.
The journey is not without cost.
Of writing “The Gravedigger’s Daughter,” Oates says, “I was so emotionally engaged with that novel that when I put it away for a year and then brought it out, I had a real sense of anxiety about reading it. So many emotions. And so–this isn’t like me at all–I would get tears in my eyes. I’d start to cry. It’s because of the emotions the novel stirred–remembering my grandmother’s life.
“And then when I finally let go of that novel, I really felt quite melancholy and quite exhausted. I was saying goodbye to that part of my life.” For now.
“You learn not to look back, anything you’re walking away from. You don’t cry. If you do, it isn’t you.”
–“The Rise of Life on Earth” (1991)
EVERYBODY WANTS TO know The Secret.
Everybody wants to know how it’s done. How this reserved, demure, unassuming, polite woman with the pale oval face and the long, thin fingers and the slender body regularly creates a literature that seems so unlike herself.
Because the stories are huge and tough. They’re overwhelming. They contain multitudes. They have barbed edges and flammable cores. They’re hot to the touch. They can burn you if you’re not careful.
“Observing Oates’ career from a distance,” Johnson admits, “I had long viewed her life as bearing a paradoxical relationship to her writing. She pursued a quiet, disciplined daily routine, yet wrote about people floundering in personal chaos and social disorder.”
We may wish, perversely, that there were stories about a loutish Oates, an angry and demanding Oates, an Oates who hurls telephones at hotel desk clerks, because then we could understand. Then we’d get it.
We’re used to that–to artists as accomplished and significant as Oates behaving badly because, we tell ourselves, look at all the dark truths they’re forced to contemplate about humanity. Just imagine the bleak and bitter insights they must entertain about our benighted species in order to give it all back to us in a steady march of gorgeous paragraphs.
But here is Oates, author of works as large and tumultuous as any in our literature, and she’s not loud, not boastful, not rude, not ragged. Her life is not a mess. The only thing ferocious about her are her work habits–not only in her writing, but in her teaching.
“For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?”
–“Ugly” (2001)
AT PRINCETON, OATES’ classes are legendary. Not easy, but memorable.
“There are many writers who would say that she was the most important teacher they ever had,” says Jonathan Safran Foer, who completed two of Oates’ classes. “There are a fair number of writers who say they wouldn’t be writers if they hadn’t met her.”
Foer, author of the critically praised and best-selling novels “Everything Is Illuminated” (2002) and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” (2005), says Oates “took me under her wing.” He’d never contemplated a writing career, Foer says, but with Oates in his corner, why not?
“When she likes something, it feels different than your little brother liking something. Or your high school English teacher liking something.”
Class, though, was no picnic, Foer recalls. “Joyce is very forthright. I think one kid cried in the course of the semester–an inevitability in a creative writing class, because you’re putting yourself out there. But kids also got very excited about their writing.
“She has,” Foer continues, “a unique kind of honesty. She’s not like anybody else.”
“God’s blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.”
–“Bellefleur” (1980)
WHAT TROUBLES SOME readers, what they can’t get past, is the violence in Oates’ work. The murders and the rapes. The smashed skulls. The bruised flesh. The senseless, casual nature of the most violent acts, the fact that the bloodiest and beastliest and most shocking of atrocities often aren’t meticulously planned but just … sort of … happen.
And yet in an Oates story, the violence is there for a reason, and the reason is never to shock. The events, no matter how horrific, never swell into melodrama, never seem forced or gratuitous. In her introduction to “The Best American Mystery Stories 2005,” for which she served as guest editor, she provides a succinct yet powerful justification for her habit of pointing out, again and again, the absolute worst that people can do to one another:
“There can be no art in violence, only crude, cruel, raw, and irremediable harm, but there can be art in the strategies by which violence is endured, transcended, and transformed by its survivors. Where there is no meaning, both death and life can seem pointless, but where meaning can be discovered, perhaps even violence can be redeemed, to a degree.”
“… the sport wasn’t a sport at all. It was just life speeded up.”
–“You Must Remember This”
SHE HAS WRITTEN lovingly and eloquently about boxing, the sport her father introduced her to, and when people try to describe the quality and breadth of her achievement, they often settle on sports imagery. It’s true that Oates enjoys running and biking, but that’s not what her admirers mean.
“She’s the greatest athlete of literature we have,” declares Benedict. “Her energy is focused. She doesn’t lose any of that energy outward. There’s no wasted motion.”
Darin Strauss (the name as published has been corrected in this text), author of the acclaimed novel “Chang and Eng” (2000), adds, “To call her a prolific writer doesn’t get at the heroic measure of her inventiveness. She’s the tireless marathoner of the solitary life.”
She gets it all in there, every weird, wild contradiction about America, its brutality and beauty, all the messy and hectic and unbelievable and terrifying and wonderful carnival of it.
Her passion to know the world and to get that knowledge down on the page is her trademark, her life’s work, the reason she pushes, pushes, pushes.
“The thing I’ve always felt about Joyce,” says Benedict, “is that generations are going to look back and say, ‘You people had no idea who you had available to you.’ Her work is so massive, so astonishing, people get fooled into complacency.
“Everything that is in the world–that’s her work.”
Yet the mystery remains, the mystery of how this tiny, taciturn woman pulls it off, time after time, with so little fuss and self-righteousness. So little whining. Just work.
In a literary world split between “serious” authors over whom critics purr and regular Joes whose books are relished by actual readers, Oates occupies a special place: She’s respected as a literary master by those in the know–and beloved by those who just know what they like. She’s had several best sellers. “She’s a great storyteller, and not all ‘literary’ writers are,” says Randy Souther, a librarian at the University of San Francisco who founded a website on Oates’ work in 1995.
“Some writers,” he adds, “are studied more than they’re read, and some read more than they’re studied. The great ones are both studied and read: Dickens, Dostoevsky–and one day, Oates.”
A recent day for her began in Wilmington, Ohio. She read from her latest book, “Black Girl, White Girl,” then flew back to Princeton, taught her creative writing class and, that evening, met friends for dinner. It’s the sort of schedule a senatorial candidate might keep if she were 10 points behind in the polls.
And there Oates was, at evening’s end, pausing at the door of the restaurant to say goodnight to a Princeton colleague and his wife. Oates turned. She was tucking her dark hair beneath a fetching maroon hat that capped her small delicate face and dipped just slightly over the narrow white forehead.
For a fleeting second, she looked not 68, but 16.
She looked like Enid Maria Stevick in “You Must Remember This” or Marya in “Marya: A Life” or Norma Jeane in “Blonde” or Kelly Kelleher in “Black Water.”
She was all of them. She was none of them.
And she was on her way home to work.
“For memory is a moral action, a choice.
You can choose to remember. You can choose not.”
-Joyce Carol Oates: “The Deaths: An Elegy” (2004)
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Oates 101
With more than 100 published works, Joyce Carol Oates can seem like an intimidating literary figure. But she’s really not. In fact, her productivity and accomplishment in so many different genres make her an author for all seasons and many tastes. Here are some suggested starting places:
“You Must Remember This” (1987)
My all-time favorite Oates novel. Set in the 1950s, it’s a tale of forbidden passion and of the paranoid, closed-in feel of that strange gray decade. And the boxing scenes rock.
“Blonde” (2000) The price of American celebrity has never been so intricately, liltingly explored as in this tale of Marilyn Monroe’s life and disintegration.
“I Am No One You Know” (2004)
More short stories in a spectacular collection, including “Curly Red,” which sprinkles more wisdom about families into its 17 pages than other authors can cram into fat trilogies with a crowbar. The final story, “The Mutants,” takes on 9/11.
“High Lonesome: Stories 1966-2006” (2006)
Oates is the absolute master of the short story, able to create intense emotional effects and unforgettable characters in just a few pages. Her best-known stories are here, along with superb newer ones.
“After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away” (2006)
A 15-year-old girl survives a dreadful accident, and Oates’ story for young adults is utterly respectful of an adolescent’s fierce emotions and fledgling insights.
— JK
AN OATES SAMPLER
But Jo-Jo answered the bell for the fifth, Jo-Jo was to answer the bell for the sixth, he was young, he was strong, he could recover with amazing swiftness and his corner had worked a miracle on his chopped-up face getting the blood to coagulate into Vaseline-smeared crusts. The problem was his left eye, swelling to the size of a peach or an apple or maybe a small melon … But Jo-Jo came out for the fifth and landed some telling punches, Jo-Jo made his opponent stagger; he came out for the sixth groggy, blinking, very likely not knowing which round it was precisely or what he was obliged to do, but his legs were holding up beautifully: after all he was twenty-one years old. His opponent was perhaps fifteen years older and his legs were gone so there Byron McCord stood in the center of the ring, flat-footed, taunting in his Dempsey’s killer crouch waiting for Jo-Jo to try a lead. Jo-Jo circled him cautious, staring … At last something gave way — McCord connected with a wild left hook, striking Jo-Jo’s face high on the swollen cheekbone and Jo-Jo staged backward astonished as if he’d been hit for the first time in his life … Jo-Jo lay unable to move but McCord crawled to the ring apron to hoist himself up on the ropes, his head tilted sharply backward so he could breathe. He looked savage in victory — one of his eyes puffed closed and his swollen lips drawn back from his mouthpiece caked with blood …”
From “You Must Remember This” (1987)
From Joyce Carol Oates’ remarks in accepting the 1970 National Book Award.
“Writers of prose are all historians, dealing with the past. It is the legendary quality of the past we are most interested in, the immediate past, mysterious and profound, that feeds into the future. It is writers who create history … The writer of prose is committed to recreating the world through language, and he should not be distracted from this task by even the most attractive of temptations. The opposite of language is silence; silence for human beings is death. . . In novels I have written, I have tried to give a shape to certain obsessions of mid-century Americans: a confusion of love and money, of the categories of public and private experience, of a demonic urge I sense all around me, an urge to violence as the answer to all problems, an urge to self-annihilation, suicide, the ultimate experience, and the ultimate surrender. The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.”
Excerpted from Celestial Timepiece, a web site (http://jco.usfca.edu — the Web site address as published has been corrected in this text) dedicated to Oates’ work, maintained by Randy Souther
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jikeller@tribune.com
