Free The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates by Joyce Carol Oates

first-year class, and instead I am sitting at my desk—outside the window the berry bushes practically collapsed with snow—no birds in sight—the sky over Belle Isle glowing and glaring, but dark elsewhere. Last night, flashes of lightning from time to time—most unusual, for this time of year, for a snowstorm. Without a television set, without much interest in finding a helpful radio station, Ray and I are actually timeless today—this is the first snowfall, the first day of a purely white world, trackless, no wayof guessing where sidewalks or paths might be, and everything uncannily stilled, muffled. A few gulls above the broken ice at shore, the only living things in sight; must be fishing…? A solitary mallard paddling, bound for nowhere in particular. And I cannot even use the experience of this storm to write a story, because I did that very thing a year ago—probably a year ago, exactly—when we suffered an equivalent storm, but many of us were caught down at the University and found it difficult to get home. (“The Snowstorm,” which was published in Mademoiselle in July, of all months, when the eerie chaotic truths I tried to deal with could seem only metaphor, reduced to metaphor.)
     
    Reading the first Lady Chatterley * —which becomes far too didactic in the second half—a pity, since its momentum, its life, seems to me superior to the version Lawrence finally published. Pointless, to keep rewriting, revising, the life of a work would gradually be extinguished, as it is in James much of the time—whether he actually revised or not. James: dissatisfaction with the form of the short story. Now I understand him, now I am beginning to feel the same way, for if a few characters come to life and deserve their life and make claims upon my life, how can I erase them after a mere fifteen or twenty pages…? For they continue to live, many of them. It simply isn’t true that one creates, develops, and then extinguishes “fictional” characters. There are many, many who deserve more life…larger forms…the novella of which James spoke so warmly, the blessed nouvelle, which seeks its own organic shape. A disturbing truth, however: every short story, no matter how abbreviated, could really be a novel—an epic! But we don’t dare admit this. Life is simply too short. The difficulty in choosing, in selecting…more of a problem each year, far easier when I first began to write, because then it seemed I hadn’t so much latitude, didn’t know so much, hadn’t so much experience or awareness of others. The development of a kind of “anecdotal” short story, lighthearted surrealism of the kind Barthelme writes, made to fit the contours of magazines that publish little fiction and then only rather short fiction—when one has written a story like this, what satisfaction is there? It fades, evaporates, it is only a tissue of words, connected by the intensity,the feverish intensity, of the writer’s will (as opposed to his imagination), a tour de force of the will, no feeling to it. Short fiction moving toward poetry, toward the tissue-of-words of a certain kind of poetry…. The danger of cleverness rather than intellectual depth; bloodlessness, sterility, the idea of coolness rather than warmth, fear of being exposed at the basis of this literature—fear of being embarrassed, being made a fool of in public, etc. Very little risk to it, but little reward.
     
    …Writing of death, writing of the effect of a violent death upon others, survivors, upon the brothers and the widow of the “assassinated” one…an unnerving experience in ways I had not anticipated…sunk deep in sympathy for the brother who attempts suicide, the caricaturist whom I had wanted to caricature, gently, irreparably, still demanding his own half-life, his twisted aborted semi-living life…and now the wife, the widow, coming to consciousness…appearing in a dream of mine last night, which I can’t recall. For months now dreams have