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The Madness of
Scholarship:
In the Joyce Carol Oates Archive
by Greg Johnson
One
day in February 1991, home from teaching my afternoon class in fiction
writing, I opened a thick manila envelope that had arrived in the mail.
Sent by the staff of the research library at Syracuse University, this packet
contained a detailed description of "The Joyce Carol Oates
Archive," which had been placed at Syracuse—Oates's undergraduate
institution—in 1990.
Although
I had already published a critical study of Oates's work, I was now
planning a new book that focused on her short fiction, and assumed that
the newly deposited archival materials would provide considerable insight
into her creative process. I had also contracted to write the authorized
biography of Oates, and the Archive naturally would become one of my
major sources for that project as well.
Oates's
productivity has long been legendary, and I knew, as a close follower of
her career, that she was actually far more productive than even her 60
published books would suggest—there are literally hundreds of short
stories, poems, essays and reviews that remain uncollected, published
through the years in a wide range of magazines. Still, I first read the
details of the Archive's holdings with an increasing sense of
astonishment, incredulity and what can only be described as awe.
This
accounting of the Archive's contents revealed that many of the accepted
notions about this author's work, and her work habits, were sheer
nonsense, fabrications by critics and so-called "literary
journalists" who had, for the past quarter-century, tirelessly
speculated, complained and just plain gossiped about the phenomenon of
"Oates."
My
absorption in Oates's work had begun almost two decades before, when I
was an undergraduate at Southern Methodist University. My first encounter
with one of her stories quickly led me to seek out her published
collections and novels; as an aspiring fiction writer myself, I read her
work with a sense of excitement and discovery, a new awareness of the
possibilities of fiction. At some point, I wrote to her, and first met
her in 1976, after one of her readings. Through the years, our ongoing
correspondence and occasional meetings had gradually led to my
professional involvement with her work.
During
my first plane ride to Syracuse, I reread the document I'd been mailed—a
single-spaced, 19-page narrative called "The Joyce Carol Oates
Archive: Introduction." On the first page was a capsule summary of
the library's holdings: "Ms. Oates's literary archive documents the
writing and production of over 50 books and hundreds of short stories,
essays, articles and poems. There are 4,000 pages of journal, 5,000
letters, 50,000 pages of manuscripts and typescripts, and 920 volumes of
published books and periodicals."
Even
more amazing was the information that these materials covered only the
period 1973-1990. Some time ago, Oates had written to me that before
1973, she had saved none of her letters or manuscripts, although she had
already published 18 books by that time (at the ripe old age of 35).
Letters, drafts, manuscripts, even a number of completed but unpublished
novels—everything, she said, had been "cheerfully thrown away."
When I
arrived in Syracuse, it didn't surprise me that the archivist in charge
of Oates's manuscripts, Kathleen Manwaring, is a tremendously energetic,
enthusiastic, knowledgeable young woman with prematurely gray hair. She
showed me to the large reading room where she had brought the first boxes
of Oates materials—drafts of her short story manuscripts—that I'd
indicated by mail I would want to examine. There were a dozen large
tables in the room, and at a couple of them, other scholars—both
historians, I would later learn—already sat at work.
Kathleen
showed me to "my" table, where she had placed perhaps 10
cardboard storage boxes; she was still in the process of bringing out the
materials I wanted, and she indicated another table where she would stack
the rest. "You'll need two tables," she said, smiling.
And
so, for several days, I studied the manuscripts. My critical analysis of
the short fiction would attempt to be comprehensive, so during that first
visit to the Archive I tried to assess all the holdings and decide which
materials I should ask the staff to photocopy, for more leisurely and
intensive study at home. My first, overwhelming impression was of the
sheer amount of labor represented by the manuscripts, for they betray the
stereotype of Oates as an author who writes rapidly or carelessly—or
easily.
Beginnings
of stories, in particular, are rewritten again and again. Fairly early in
her career, she developed a habit that remained consistent: she begins by
folding a piece of ordinary typing paper in half, and then making stray
handwritten notes along the narrow "columns" thus created. She
uses both sides of most sheets, so there are four columns of these notes
per page, most of them very rough, discontinuous; at this point, she is
feeling her way into the story. Some pages suggest that she has
temporarily lost direction and so she sits daydreaming, writing stray
words, phrases, names of other writers and many versions of her own
name—"J.C.Oates," "Joyce Carol Smith," etc. There are
also numerous drawings: especially women's faces, almost always in
profile, special attention given to the eyes. Then she returns to the
story in progress, trying out a sentence or two in her unhurried, elegant
handwriting. Some of these worksheets break off abruptly, making the
scholar wonder if perhaps the story had suddenly "come
together" in Oates's mind, sending her to the typewriter.
But
the typewritten drafts, too, show evidence of tentativeness, false starts
and ceaseless revision. On many pages, she types a sentence or two, then
turns the page upside down and starts again; she gets a bit further on
this second attempt, but again stalls, takes the sheet out of the
typewriter, turns it over, and tries it once more. Countless stories have
five, eight, even a dozen such hesitant beginnings, suggesting—to this
writer, at least—an almost superhuman doggedness and patience, an
absolute refusal to give up. Equally amazing is that there are entire
drafts of stories whose title and characters are instantly recognizable,
but which are substantially different from the work that finally appeared
in print. Clearly, a first draft is only that; days later, or even years
later, a story might be subjected to a full-scale reimagining, a process
to which the word "revision" scarcely does justice.
Occasionally,
as Kathleen had warned me, the manuscripts are confusing because they are
not dated, and because Oates—evidently an environmentalist long before it
was fashionable—is frugal with paper, often writing drafts of new stories
on the reverse side of discarded drafts of other stories, of abandoned
novels, of letters and journal entries. There are notes on University of
Windsor stationery, on Princeton University memo pads, on the backs of
classroom hand-outs, on the backs of "fan" letters.
Oates's
tendency to use every available space on a sheet of paper, combined with
her habit of doodling and sketching in the margins, conveyed to me the
same impression that Joe David Bellamy had mentioned in his 1972
interview-by-mail: Oates's responses were "crowded onto the page,
typewritten single-spaced in shotgun style with `X'ed-out corrections,
almost without margins, as if the pages themselves had seemed scarcely
large enough to the writer to contain the potential deluge of
language."
Since
that first experience in the Oates Archive, I've gone once more, this
time to read that 4,000-page journal. When I began researching the
biography, Oates had asked if I would be interested in editing her
journal for publication one day, and in eventually serving as her
literary executor. I agreed, and although I also agreed to discuss the
journal only in the pages of the biography itself, I can say
generally—and very confidently—that this two-million-word document, which
so amply records the daily ebb-and-flow of her personal, artistic and
intellectual life over the past two decades, will one day be regarded as
one of the world's great diaries.
Now
that my book on Oates's short fiction is complete, I've also taken the
opportunity to study the manuscripts of her novels, plays, criticism and
poetry. Although some time ago I gave up being surprised at the extent of
Oates's engagement with her work, the novel manuscripts in particular are
astonishing in their complexity, their evidence of ceaseless revision
and, of course, their sheer volume.
A few
examples should suffice. For her 1989 novel American
Appetites, there are 3,000 pages of worksheets and early drafts;
even the 500-page "final" manuscript has extensive revisions.
Worksheets and manuscripts for her 1987 novel, You Must
Remember This, total 3,500 pages; for one of her
still-forthcoming books, with its working title My Heart Laid Bare,
there are 5,000 pages. Even a relatively minor novel, Nemesis,
published under a pseudonym ("Rosamond Smith") in
1990, took 3,000 pages of drafts to reach its final form. (And these
drafts are manuscripts, not "printouts." Oates does not use a
word processor.)
Of
course, Oates is still in mid-career, but even if she stopped writing
tomorrow, her Archive would remain as ample proof that her work
represents one of the richest legacies in American fiction. "If I
had to do it all over again, I'm not sure that I could," she told a
recent interviewer. She said wryly to another that her epitaph might
read: "She certainly tried."
Just
as she inspires younger writers, she continues to derive sustenance from
previous masters of the art of fiction. A quotation from that other prolific
American novelist, Henry James, is affixed to the bulletin board over her
desk, and perhaps best expresses her own ultimate view of her life and
writing: "We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we
have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is
the madness of art."
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