Reflecting on Joyce Carol Oates
Fellow alumna and friend
Joanne Creighton ’64 is in an ideal position to reflect on the work and life of writer Joyce Carol Oates MA’61.Creighton, who has been president of Mt. Holyoke College since 1996 and is a professor of English, has written two books and numerous articles and reviews about Oates. On Wisconsin asked Creighton to open a window on the prolific and stunning body of work that has made Oates one of the most critically acclaimed American authors of modern times.
By Joanne Vanish Creighton ’64
Sometimes, “an initial failure may release in us a new and appropriate channel of action; we have the power to redefine ourselves, to heal our wounds, to fight back.” So noted Joyce Carol Oates MA’61 — forty years later — about her memorable and pivotal year at the University of Wisconsin in a poignant autobiographical essay, “Nighthawk: Memoir of a Lost Time,” published in the Yale Review in 2001, and excerpted here on page 36.
She arrived in Madison as a graduate student in fall 1960, the same time I began as an undergraduate. While we did not meet there, we traversed the same terrain — she lived in Barnard Hall, where I was to live the next two years, and made her way up Bascom Hill to study English, as I did. We even had the same formative professor — her MA examiner, G. Thomas Tanselle, was to be my honors adviser. It wasn’t until the early seventies, though, when we both were in the Detroit area and I was writing a critical study of her work, that we met.
Part of my fascination with her work, I realize now, must have been rooted in the affinities between my background and experiences and hers — working class, Catholic, rural, backcountry. Her resonant fictional Eden County, drawn from her experience growing up in western New York State, strongly evoked my own northern Wisconsin origins.
Some of Joyce’s bright young women, like the author herself, escape their limiting childhood world through their awakening to the life of the mind in school and at the university. Such was Joyce’s experience in high school in Lockport, New York, where she was bused in from the countryside, and later as a scholarship student at Syracuse University. There, she blossomed, graduating as valedictorian of her class, even though she was the first in her family to complete high school, let alone college. During her college years she won the first of her many awards, first prize in Mademoiselle’s college fiction contest for her story “In the Old World.” In a 1972 Newsweek story, one of her professors, Donald A. Dike, commented that “about once a term she’d drop a 400-page novel on my desk,” adding unequivocally, “She was the most brilliant student we’ve ever had here.”
After such a dazzling undergraduate career, Joyce arrived in Madison eager to begin PhD studies in what she had been told was an outstanding English department, and expecting to continue to do her own writing as well. But quickly she found her imaginative life “smothered” in the service of academic study. She felt disillusioned and stultified by professors who discouraged the study of modern
literature or creative writing.
Furthermore, she complained to a friend, “There has never been anything so brutal as the method of getting MAs here at Wisconsin. You have three people on your examining board, who make or ruin your subsequent career. You may be dedicated to the teaching profession — want to teach in college above all — but if someone on the panel decides you aren’t quite good enough, down it goes on your record and you are about finished, save at some Mississippi girls’ school.”
She was right to be concerned. While she did very well in her classes, she was grilled in her MA oral exam, not about poetry, but instead about obscure dates and facts. In the end, although she passed, she was not admitted to the PhD program.
In “Nighthawk,” Joyce writes frankly and powerfully about the disjuncture she felt with the approach of many of her professors at Wisconsin and about their dismissive judgment of her. She reflects on “how many times as a naive first-term graduate student, trailing remnants of literary-mystical idealism, I was made to feel, in the entombed confines of venerable Bascomb [sic] Hall, like the humiliated boy-narrator at the conclusion of James Joyce’s ‘Araby’ — ‘a creature driven and derided by vanity.’ ”
If “revenge is living well, without you,” a line from one of her poems (in Love and its Derangements), then Joyce’s secure place in American letters is her revenge on those censorious examiners. While she never did get a PhD, she — the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University — has been at home in academia both literally and figuratively her entire adult life. Deeply erudite, her work is richly informed by literary and intellectual traditions. While Joyce is at times critical of the academy, its failed teachers, its fears and phobias and petty politics (The Hungry Ghosts is a good example of her academic satire), she is also aware of its value: its sanctification of the inner life, its rich heritage of ideas and art. She is a distinguished teacher, a learned critic, a provocative and insightful reviewer and commentator, and co-founder and co-editor with her late husband of The Ontario Review and the Ontario Review Press. Also a prolific writer of some fifty-four novels, thirty-one short story collections, eight collections of plays, twelve collections of essays and nonfiction, eight poetry collections, eight books for children or young adults, and hundreds of uncollected essays, reviews, poems, stories, and miscellany, Joyce has amassed a formidable record of achievement.
While her academic experience at Wisconsin was deeply unsettling, Joyce recalls, in a recent note to me, that other aspects of campus life were “just wonderful — the setting, the atmosphere, the other students, the library.” But even more to the point, it was a life-changing time for her, because at a social hour for graduate students she met Raymond Smith MA’58, PhD’61, a PhD candidate in English, about whom she wrote in her journal, “I anticipated from the first that we would be married.” And that didn’t take long. They met on October 23, 1960, got engaged on November 23, and got married on January 23, 1961. And so began a happy, exceedingly close marriage and partnership that lasted forty-seven years until Ray’s sudden death in February 2008, a “shattering” loss, which Joyce feels acutely. “Everything feels quite posthumous,” she said in an e-mail.
Joyce and Ray left Madison in the summer of 1961, she with an MA and he with a PhD, and after a year at Ray’s first job in Beaumont, Texas, they moved to teaching jobs in the Detroit area, where they were to live for sixteen years. Detroit, Joyce said in the book (Woman) Writer, is the place “which made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am — for better or worse.” She wrote that much of the writing of her early period, between 1963 and 1976, “has been emotionally inspired by Detroit and its suburbs … the quintessential American city with … a brooding presence, a force, larger and more significant than the sum of its parts.” Her Detroit novels encapsulate the migration of poor to the city, such as the Wendalls in them; the sterile world of the suburban rich in Expensive People; the malaise of the sixties, as in Wonderland. Often a male character attempts to free himself from intolerable constraints though violence — a mode of action particularly suited to Detroit, the reigning “murder capital.”
It was in Detroit that my husband, Tom, and I met Joyce and Ray socially, introduced by mutual friends. With them, we would occasionally go out to dinner or lunch. At that time, I was a young professor at Wayne State University writing about her work, while Joyce and Ray had moved across the river to teach at the University of Windsor in Ontario. Friendly, curious, wry, and witty, Joyce was a delightful person to be with, but she was habitually modest and evasive about her own work and about her private life and background. Of course, I was a bit intimidated by her; she, in turn, was probably a bit wary of me: such are the inevitable tensions in the complicated relationship of author and critic. Over the years, as we kept in touch intermittently, she became less self-protective, commenting generously on queries and drafts of texts, acknowledging the autobiographical underpinnings of her work.
She is now much more explicit about how much of her writing is an attempt, in part, “to memorialize my parents’ vanished world, my parents’ lives. Sometimes directly. Sometimes in metaphor,” as she admits in “My Father, My Fiction,” published in the New York Times Magazine in 1989. She is bemused by the “genteel” literary community that misunderstands and criticizes the harsh and violent world of much of her fiction. This world, Joyce insists, is part of her literal and psychic inheritance. There are violent events and family secrets only recently revealed: her maternal grandfather was murdered in a barroom brawl; her mother was “given away” to be reared by her aunt’s family, events fictionalized in Marya: A Life (1986), a novel which conflates her mother’s experiences and her own. When her father was fifteen, her great-grandfather tried unsuccessfully to kill his wife in a fit of rage and then killed himself — events which inspired The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007).
Joyce writes in “My Father” that she is in awe of her father and mother’s survival and “transcendence” of “a world so harsh and so repetitive in its harshness as to defy evocation, except perhaps in art.” She sees her parents’ lives, and her own, as emblematically American. Their survival and triumph over hardship — and similarly her own “transmogrification” of their vanished world into art — are examples of the aspiring and triumphant human spirit. While Joyce Carol Oates was early called the “Dark Lady of American Letters,” that label is not right. She has tremendous respect for the dark side of human experience, for the mysterious depths of the conscious, and for the primitive brutality at the core of physical existence. Yet Joyce’s vision is not dark. She is in fact optimistic about the possibilities of human resilience and transcendence of a distinctly American variety. Despite the violence and duress that her characters typically endure, Joyce respects their tenacious attempt to, as she wrote in the preface to Marya, “forge their own souls by way of the choices they make, large and small, conscious and half-conscious.”
Deeply absorbed not only by her family history but also by cultural currents and events, Joyce sometimes fictionally reimagines historic events and people, including infamous ones. Black Water (1992), for example, is told from the point of view of a young woman trapped in a submerged car waiting for The Senator who fails to come back to rescue her. Zombie (1995) is about a deranged, cannibalistic, serial murderer, like Jeffrey Dahmer. Blonde (2000) is a complex blend of fact and fiction drawn from the life of Marilyn Monroe.
Obsessed characters and fatal attractions dominate Joyce’s fictional world. My favorite novel, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990), depicts the bond that Iris, a white high school girl, feels with her black classmate, Jinx, a basketball star, after he defends her from an attacker whom he kills in self-defense. Iris’s obsession with her “blood bondage” to Jinx, the forbidden “other,” is emblematic of the electricity between the races simmering under the surface of America before the civil rights movement.
Another fascinating “other” for Joyce is the male sport of boxing, the subject of her aphoristic book On Boxing (1987) and several occasional essays. Joyce even experiments with “other” authorial selves, publishing seven novels under the pseudonym “Rosamond Smith” and, more recently, three under the name “Lauren Kelly.” Often slick psychological thrillers about twins, doubles, and doubling, these novels, she says, relieve her temporarily from the burden of being the famous “Joyce Carol Oates.”
Joyce does indeed write “all over the aesthetical map,” as John Barth admiringly noted in a January 1980 review in the Atlantic Monthly. “She certainly tried” is the epitaph she wryly suggests for her tombstone. With over forty-five years of sustained productivity, Joyce is still — at age seventy — vital, engaged, and extraordinarily productive. While she is thoroughly at home in academia, the academy hasn’t quite known what to make of her. Earlier in her career, she was categorized and dismissed as a “popular” writer of violence, but that is changing. Her work is finding its way into university courses and critical studies. A biography has been published. An invaluable Web site, Celestial Timepiece, http://jco.usfca.edu/, helps to keep track of her productivity. Syracuse University houses her voluminous archive. She is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards and has been short-listed for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
But she sprints far ahead of those who would attempt to assess her body of work. I agree with Anne Tyler, who was quoted in a Washington Post article (August 18, 1986) as saying: “A hundred years from now people will laugh at us for sort of taking her for granted.” This we know: she is one of the most accomplished and significant American writers of our time.
For me personally, pondering and writing about her work have been a great privilege and pleasure, as have been the rare occasions when we have had a chance to reconnect. She was kind to do a reading and give greetings at my presidential inauguration at Mt. Holyoke College in 1996.
Then again, it was a great pleasure for me to bestow upon her an honorary degree at our 2006 commencement. In her commencement address on that occasion, Joyce enumerated a litany of now-famous writers who did poorly in school or were rejected for publication: William Faulkner got a D in English; Cormac McCarthy had to leave the University of Tennessee because his grades were too low; Stephen King had sixty stories and four novels rejected before getting published. What seems like failure may positively strengthen and redirect your energies, she told the graduates. Surely she was thinking about her own transformation of “failure” at the University of Wisconsin into a luminous record of achievement.
By Joanne Vanish Creighton ’64
Sometimes, “an initial failure may release in us a new and appropriate channel of action; we have the power to redefine ourselves, to heal our wounds, to fight back.” So noted Joyce Carol Oates MA’61 — forty years later — about her memorable and pivotal year at the University of Wisconsin in a poignant autobiographical essay, “Nighthawk: Memoir of a Lost Time,” published in the Yale Review in 2001, and excerpted here on page 36.
She arrived in Madison as a graduate student in fall 1960, the same time I began as an undergraduate. While we did not meet there, we traversed the same terrain — she lived in Barnard Hall, where I was to live the next two years, and made her way up Bascom Hill to study English, as I did. We even had the same formative professor — her MA examiner, G. Thomas Tanselle, was to be my honors adviser. It wasn’t until the early seventies, though, when we both were in the Detroit area and I was writing a critical study of her work, that we met.
Part of my fascination with her work, I realize now, must have been rooted in the affinities between my background and experiences and hers — working class, Catholic, rural, backcountry. Her resonant fictional Eden County, drawn from her experience growing up in western New York State, strongly evoked my own northern Wisconsin origins.
Some of Joyce’s bright young women, like the author herself, escape their limiting childhood world through their awakening to the life of the mind in school and at the university. Such was Joyce’s experience in high school in Lockport, New York, where she was bused in from the countryside, and later as a scholarship student at Syracuse University. There, she blossomed, graduating as valedictorian of her class, even though she was the first in her family to complete high school, let alone college. During her college years she won the first of her many awards, first prize in Mademoiselle’s college fiction contest for her story “In the Old World.” In a 1972 Newsweek story, one of her professors, Donald A. Dike, commented that “about once a term she’d drop a 400-page novel on my desk,” adding unequivocally, “She was the most brilliant student we’ve ever had here.”
After such a dazzling undergraduate career, Joyce arrived in Madison eager to begin PhD studies in what she had been told was an outstanding English department, and expecting to continue to do her own writing as well. But quickly she found her imaginative life “smothered” in the service of academic study. She felt disillusioned and stultified by professors who discouraged the study of modern
literature or creative writing.
Furthermore, she complained to a friend, “There has never been anything so brutal as the method of getting MAs here at Wisconsin. You have three people on your examining board, who make or ruin your subsequent career. You may be dedicated to the teaching profession — want to teach in college above all — but if someone on the panel decides you aren’t quite good enough, down it goes on your record and you are about finished, save at some Mississippi girls’ school.”
She was right to be concerned. While she did very well in her classes, she was grilled in her MA oral exam, not about poetry, but instead about obscure dates and facts. In the end, although she passed, she was not admitted to the PhD program.
In “Nighthawk,” Joyce writes frankly and powerfully about the disjuncture she felt with the approach of many of her professors at Wisconsin and about their dismissive judgment of her. She reflects on “how many times as a naive first-term graduate student, trailing remnants of literary-mystical idealism, I was made to feel, in the entombed confines of venerable Bascomb [sic] Hall, like the humiliated boy-narrator at the conclusion of James Joyce’s ‘Araby’ — ‘a creature driven and derided by vanity.’ ”
If “revenge is living well, without you,” a line from one of her poems (in Love and its Derangements), then Joyce’s secure place in American letters is her revenge on those censorious examiners. While she never did get a PhD, she — the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University — has been at home in academia both literally and figuratively her entire adult life. Deeply erudite, her work is richly informed by literary and intellectual traditions. While Joyce is at times critical of the academy, its failed teachers, its fears and phobias and petty politics (The Hungry Ghosts is a good example of her academic satire), she is also aware of its value: its sanctification of the inner life, its rich heritage of ideas and art. She is a distinguished teacher, a learned critic, a provocative and insightful reviewer and commentator, and co-founder and co-editor with her late husband of The Ontario Review and the Ontario Review Press. Also a prolific writer of some fifty-four novels, thirty-one short story collections, eight collections of plays, twelve collections of essays and nonfiction, eight poetry collections, eight books for children or young adults, and hundreds of uncollected essays, reviews, poems, stories, and miscellany, Joyce has amassed a formidable record of achievement.
While her academic experience at Wisconsin was deeply unsettling, Joyce recalls, in a recent note to me, that other aspects of campus life were “just wonderful — the setting, the atmosphere, the other students, the library.” But even more to the point, it was a life-changing time for her, because at a social hour for graduate students she met Raymond Smith MA’58, PhD’61, a PhD candidate in English, about whom she wrote in her journal, “I anticipated from the first that we would be married.” And that didn’t take long. They met on October 23, 1960, got engaged on November 23, and got married on January 23, 1961. And so began a happy, exceedingly close marriage and partnership that lasted forty-seven years until Ray’s sudden death in February 2008, a “shattering” loss, which Joyce feels acutely. “Everything feels quite posthumous,” she said in an e-mail.
Joyce and Ray left Madison in the summer of 1961, she with an MA and he with a PhD, and after a year at Ray’s first job in Beaumont, Texas, they moved to teaching jobs in the Detroit area, where they were to live for sixteen years. Detroit, Joyce said in the book (Woman) Writer, is the place “which made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am — for better or worse.” She wrote that much of the writing of her early period, between 1963 and 1976, “has been emotionally inspired by Detroit and its suburbs … the quintessential American city with … a brooding presence, a force, larger and more significant than the sum of its parts.” Her Detroit novels encapsulate the migration of poor to the city, such as the Wendalls in them; the sterile world of the suburban rich in Expensive People; the malaise of the sixties, as in Wonderland. Often a male character attempts to free himself from intolerable constraints though violence — a mode of action particularly suited to Detroit, the reigning “murder capital.”
It was in Detroit that my husband, Tom, and I met Joyce and Ray socially, introduced by mutual friends. With them, we would occasionally go out to dinner or lunch. At that time, I was a young professor at Wayne State University writing about her work, while Joyce and Ray had moved across the river to teach at the University of Windsor in Ontario. Friendly, curious, wry, and witty, Joyce was a delightful person to be with, but she was habitually modest and evasive about her own work and about her private life and background. Of course, I was a bit intimidated by her; she, in turn, was probably a bit wary of me: such are the inevitable tensions in the complicated relationship of author and critic. Over the years, as we kept in touch intermittently, she became less self-protective, commenting generously on queries and drafts of texts, acknowledging the autobiographical underpinnings of her work.
She is now much more explicit about how much of her writing is an attempt, in part, “to memorialize my parents’ vanished world, my parents’ lives. Sometimes directly. Sometimes in metaphor,” as she admits in “My Father, My Fiction,” published in the New York Times Magazine in 1989. She is bemused by the “genteel” literary community that misunderstands and criticizes the harsh and violent world of much of her fiction. This world, Joyce insists, is part of her literal and psychic inheritance. There are violent events and family secrets only recently revealed: her maternal grandfather was murdered in a barroom brawl; her mother was “given away” to be reared by her aunt’s family, events fictionalized in Marya: A Life (1986), a novel which conflates her mother’s experiences and her own. When her father was fifteen, her great-grandfather tried unsuccessfully to kill his wife in a fit of rage and then killed himself — events which inspired The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007).
Joyce writes in “My Father” that she is in awe of her father and mother’s survival and “transcendence” of “a world so harsh and so repetitive in its harshness as to defy evocation, except perhaps in art.” She sees her parents’ lives, and her own, as emblematically American. Their survival and triumph over hardship — and similarly her own “transmogrification” of their vanished world into art — are examples of the aspiring and triumphant human spirit. While Joyce Carol Oates was early called the “Dark Lady of American Letters,” that label is not right. She has tremendous respect for the dark side of human experience, for the mysterious depths of the conscious, and for the primitive brutality at the core of physical existence. Yet Joyce’s vision is not dark. She is in fact optimistic about the possibilities of human resilience and transcendence of a distinctly American variety. Despite the violence and duress that her characters typically endure, Joyce respects their tenacious attempt to, as she wrote in the preface to Marya, “forge their own souls by way of the choices they make, large and small, conscious and half-conscious.”
Deeply absorbed not only by her family history but also by cultural currents and events, Joyce sometimes fictionally reimagines historic events and people, including infamous ones. Black Water (1992), for example, is told from the point of view of a young woman trapped in a submerged car waiting for The Senator who fails to come back to rescue her. Zombie (1995) is about a deranged, cannibalistic, serial murderer, like Jeffrey Dahmer. Blonde (2000) is a complex blend of fact and fiction drawn from the life of Marilyn Monroe.
Obsessed characters and fatal attractions dominate Joyce’s fictional world. My favorite novel, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990), depicts the bond that Iris, a white high school girl, feels with her black classmate, Jinx, a basketball star, after he defends her from an attacker whom he kills in self-defense. Iris’s obsession with her “blood bondage” to Jinx, the forbidden “other,” is emblematic of the electricity between the races simmering under the surface of America before the civil rights movement.
Another fascinating “other” for Joyce is the male sport of boxing, the subject of her aphoristic book On Boxing (1987) and several occasional essays. Joyce even experiments with “other” authorial selves, publishing seven novels under the pseudonym “Rosamond Smith” and, more recently, three under the name “Lauren Kelly.” Often slick psychological thrillers about twins, doubles, and doubling, these novels, she says, relieve her temporarily from the burden of being the famous “Joyce Carol Oates.”
Joyce does indeed write “all over the aesthetical map,” as John Barth admiringly noted in a January 1980 review in the Atlantic Monthly. “She certainly tried” is the epitaph she wryly suggests for her tombstone. With over forty-five years of sustained productivity, Joyce is still — at age seventy — vital, engaged, and extraordinarily productive. While she is thoroughly at home in academia, the academy hasn’t quite known what to make of her. Earlier in her career, she was categorized and dismissed as a “popular” writer of violence, but that is changing. Her work is finding its way into university courses and critical studies. A biography has been published. An invaluable Web site, Celestial Timepiece, http://jco.usfca.edu/, helps to keep track of her productivity. Syracuse University houses her voluminous archive. She is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards and has been short-listed for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
But she sprints far ahead of those who would attempt to assess her body of work. I agree with Anne Tyler, who was quoted in a Washington Post article (August 18, 1986) as saying: “A hundred years from now people will laugh at us for sort of taking her for granted.” This we know: she is one of the most accomplished and significant American writers of our time.
For me personally, pondering and writing about her work have been a great privilege and pleasure, as have been the rare occasions when we have had a chance to reconnect. She was kind to do a reading and give greetings at my presidential inauguration at Mt. Holyoke College in 1996.
Then again, it was a great pleasure for me to bestow upon her an honorary degree at our 2006 commencement. In her commencement address on that occasion, Joyce enumerated a litany of now-famous writers who did poorly in school or were rejected for publication: William Faulkner got a D in English; Cormac McCarthy had to leave the University of Tennessee because his grades were too low; Stephen King had sixty stories and four novels rejected before getting published. What seems like failure may positively strengthen and redirect your energies, she told the graduates. Surely she was thinking about her own transformation of “failure” at the University of Wisconsin into a luminous record of achievement.
An excerpt from Joyce Carol Oates’s Nighthawk: A Memoir of Lost Time
I arrived by air, breathless with anticipation. I arrived alone. I see myself across an abyss now of four decades as a figure of uncertainty like a line drawing by Saul Steinberg. In years I was an adult of twenty-two, in experience I was still an adolescent. I was romantic-minded and vulnerable to hurt as if the outermost layer of my skin had been peeled away. I was the quintessential daughter-student in whose male elders’ eyes I was judged “bright” — “brilliant” — “an outstanding student”— a “promising writer.” … I’d been valedictorian of my graduating class at Syracuse University, and I’d been named a Knapp Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, where I intended to enroll as a PhD candidate in English. By romantic-minded I mean romantic in terms of books, literature, a practical career of university teaching. My vague, unexamined belief was that my “own” writing, fiction and poetry, would somehow fit into this scheme.
This great adventure! I’d fled the East because I had no wish to marry, and yet, within five swift months, in Madison I would fall in love, and marry; within ten months I would have become profoundly disillusioned with the PhD-scholarly-academic profession, even as I earned the master’s degree qualifying me to teach English as it happened I would do, in universities (currently Princeton) for more than four decades; I would, in Madison, cease writing anything except the most conventional or scholarly-critical papers, a development that would have seemed to me until this perilous time tantamount to ceasing to dream, or to breathe.
(Was there was no hope of adroitly mixing the academic and the “imaginative” at Madison, as I’d done at Syracuse? There was none. My graduate-level professors, most of them Harvard educated, were a generation older — or more — than my Syracuse professors and resisted even the analytical New Critical approach to literature; to these conservative elders, with the notable exception of the medievalist Helen C. White, canonical texts were to be approached as sacred-historical documents primarily, to be laden with footnotes as a centipede is fitted out with legs. When, in my initial idealism, I wrote a seminar paper on Edmund Spenser and Franz Kafka, on the ways in which the allegorical and the surreal are akin, my professor, the eminent Merritt Hughes, who knew nothing of Kafka and had no interest in correcting his ignorance, returned the paper to me with an expression of gentlemanly repugnance and suggested that I attempt the Spenser assignment again, from a more “traditional” perspective. My face burned with shame: I was made to feel, in the eyes of the other graduate students as in Professor Hughes’s disdainful vision, a barbarian who stood before them naked, utterly exposed.) …
A disquieting odor as of disinfectant, bandages, and cafeteria food pervades my memory of Barnard Hall, the graduate women’s residence in which I lived for a brief yet exhausting semester, though of course this is absurd and unfair; Barnard Hall wasn’t a hospital, and its occupants, graduate women, so very different in the aggregate from the undergraduate women with whom I’d lived for four years at Syracuse, weren’t patients or convalescents; on the contrary, these women, some young and others less so, exuded an air of determined bustle, grim-cheery energy, like novice nuns in a convent who must brave the world outside the convent, run by men, the other. (In fact, there were two nuns on my floor, from different orders, living in separate rooms.) My convent-room with its single window looking out onto University Avenue was on the third floor of the residence, and in that room in the first week I was stricken by insomnia as if by a swarm of invisible mosquitoes lying in wait in that space. No matter how exhausted I was from hours of reading, writing, library research, the restless walking-running that has long characterized my life, no matter how I tried to calm my rampaging thoughts. Insomnia! …
Madison, Wisconsin, was in those days an idyllic college town built upon the southern bank of Lake Mendota. The enormous campus inhabited woodland near the lake; the terrain was nearly as hilly as Syracuse, a landscape long ago convulsed by glaciers and retaining still, even on sunny autumn days, a wintry-windy flavor to the air. In Madison as in all new places before habitude dulls, or masks, strangeness, I realized how
precarious our hold upon what we call sanity is. …
In Madison, during these months of intense academic study, when my head was filled with Old English, medieval and Renaissance and eighteenth-century English literature, of course I wrote no fiction or poetry, nothing of my “own” (as
I thought it) except desperate fragments in a journal like feeble cries for help. As my imaginative life was smothered in the service of academic study, my intellectual life was heightened, revered, run to exhaustion like a hunting dog whose only food will be the terrified prey he flushes out for his master. (Hunting dog, prey, what’s the distinction?) I admonished myself, What did you expect, this is graduate school. You’re training to be a scholar. To be a serious adult. This isn’t dreamland. To write about my “lost time” in Madison is very difficult even decades later. To violate the taboo of exposing the self, and those innocent individuals intimate with the self, is simply not possible. But mostly I’ve never written about my Madison sojourn because I have never known how. Emotions are the element in which we live, or fail to live; “events seem to us comparatively detached; yet, in speaking of oneself, emotions are of no more interest than dreams; it’s historic event that seems to matter, and one is baffled at how to match event with emotion, emotion with event. Our most profound experiences elude all speech, even spoken speech. What vocabulary to choose to attempt to evoke a flood of sheer, untrammeled emotion? — the common experiences of grief, terror, panic, falling-in-love, desperation-at-losing-love. For me, the vocabulary of loss, despair, frustration, defeat is inappropriate, or inadequate, in writing of my months in Madison, since in fact, much of the time, and nearly always publicly, I was very happy; after I met the man I would marry, I would have defined myself, and would certainly be defined by others, as very happy. For one can embody without at all understanding the paradox that one can be both happy and desperately unhappy at the same time; contrary to Aristotle’s logic, one can be X and non-X simultaneously. …
Yet my happiest, my most romantic morning-insomniac adventures were out-of-doors. If it wasn’t bitter cold, or raining, or snowing, or oppressively windy, I gave up on Barnard Hall, dressed, and began the day early, in darkness. I’d grown up on a small farm in western New York, and rising early in the dark, in terrible weather, had been routine. Through the winter, the school bus swung by our road at about 7:30 a.m., in darkness. By my logic, to begin a day before 4:30 a.m. was eccentric; after that hour, when the clock’s hands were moving toward 5:00 a.m., beginning a day was normal, a sign of optimism. Who knew what adventures the new day might bring? Outside the claustral residence hall I felt a surge of energy, for energy is hope, and hope is energy, and I would break into a run, as if I had an immediate destination; I ran on University Avenue and on Park Street to the foot of Bascomb [sic] Hill, and up the steep, windy hill itself until I could run no longer. (Hours later, midmorning, I would be among forty or so graduate students seated in a classroom in Bascomb Hall, in a hallucinatory drowse trying to take notes as the eminent Renaissance scholar Mark Eccles lectured on the Elizabethan-Jacobean drama, reading from copious notes in a quiet, uninflected voice like a hypnotist’s.) In the gradually lightening dark I would continue past Bascomb Hill, in the direction of the observatory; my ultimate destination was a State Street diner that opened early, but I forestalled going there too soon; in these long-ago years a dense stand of trees, deciduous and evergreen, bordered the hill; beyond was Lake Mendota; I would return, down the long hill, passing by the State Historical Library and the mammoth Memorial Union, not open at this hour; if it wasn’t too cold or windy, I’d walk along the lakefront; I’d pause on the terrace, to stare at the lake; here, I was nearly always happy; freed from the confines of my room and from the rampage of my thoughts; I was exhilarated and yet comforted by the lapping waves, and Lake Mendota was often a rough, churning lake; in the twilit early morning it appeared vast as an inland sea, its farther shore too distant to be seen. On misty or foggy mornings, which were common in Madison, the lake’s waves emerged out of an opacity of gunmetal gray like a scrim; there was no horizon, and there was no sky, and it would not have surprised me if when I glanced down at my feet I saw that there was no ground. …
Often in my circuitous route to the State Street diner, I would pass the still-darkened university library, which was one of my places of refuge during the day; swiftly I’d walk along Langdon Street, past fraternity houses, impressive façades bearing cryptic Greek symbols emerging out of the gloom, and invariably there were lights burning in these massive houses, who knew why? I was quick to note isolated lights in the windows of apartment buildings and wood-frame rental houses on Langdon, Gorham, Henry, as the early morning shifted toward 6:00 a.m.; still darkness, for this was autumn in a northerly climate, but with a promise of dawn in the eastern sky. The nighthawk takes comfort in noting others, kindred souls, but at a distance: warmly lit city buses on Gorham and University bearing a few passengers; headlights of vehicles; occasional pedestrians; a few among these might have been morning-insomniacs like me, relieved and grateful for the new day, the new chance, but most of them were workers, custodians, cafeteria staff, attendants at the university hospital; for them there was no special romance to the hour, nor probably any malaise; beneath their coats they wore uniforms. …
In January 1961 I was married, and moved from Barnard Hall to live with my husband in a surprisingly spacious, airy five-room apartment on the second floor of a wood-frame house on University Avenue, a mile away from the university residence in which I’d spent so many insomniac hours. In May, one sunny morning, I was examined for my master’s degree, in venerable Bascomb Hall for what would be the final time. My examiners were all men; two were older professors with whom I’d studied and who had seemed to approve of my work; the third was a younger professor of American literature, very likely an assistant professor, who stared at me, now “Joyce Carol Smith,” doubtfully. A married woman? A serious scholar? It did seem suspicious. In this man’s unsmiling eyes,
I saw my fate.
Two-thirds of the exam went well: I’d followed my husband’s advice and memorized sonnets by Shakespeare and Donne that I could analyze and discuss; I could recite the opening of Paradise Lost, and key passages of “Lycidas” and “The Rape of the Lock”; but the youngish professor of American literature was unimpressed, biding his time. He didn’t question me about primary works at all. I might have spoken knowledgeably about the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, but I wasn’t given the opportunity; as in a courtroom nightmare, I was asked only questions I couldn’t answer with any confidence about dates of poems, publications, editions; for instance, how did the 1867 Leaves of Grass differ from the 1855 edition, and what were the circumstances of the 1871 edition? Through a haze of shame I heard myself murmur repeatedly, “I don’t know,” and, “I’m afraid I don’t know.” ...
How vulnerable I’d been, that May morning in 1961! How negligible in his eyes, how expendable, a young woman, and married; not a likely candidate for the holy orders of the PhD. And it was so: though my love for literature was undiminished, I’d become profoundly disillusioned with graduate study and couldn’t have imagined continuing in Madison for another year, let alone two or three; my subterranean despair would have choked me, and destroyed the happiness of my marriage; it would have destroyed my marriage. The drudgery of scholarly research and the mind-numbing routines of academic English study, above all the anxious need to please, never to displease, one’s sensitive elders, weren’t for me. My major writing effort of the year was a one-hundred-page seminar paper on Herman Melville tailored to the expectations of a quirky, very senior professor named Harry Hayden Clark, who had a penchant for massive footnotes and “sources”; this document was well received by Professor Clark but so depressed me that I threw away my only copy soon afterward.
The verdict of the examining committee was that “Joyce Carol Smith” be granted a master’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin; but she was not recommended to continue PhD studies there. The verdict was You are not one of us, and how could I reasonably disagree?
When, a quarter-century later, in what might be called the second act of a fairy tale of wavering intentions, I returned to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to be given an “honorary doctorate of humane letters” in an elaborate commencement ceremony, the occasion would seem surreal to me; I couldn’t help brooding on the irony of the situation, and perhaps the perversity, hearing my name amid those of other “distinguished alumni”; not that I was an impostor exactly, but if I hadn’t been rejected as a PhD candidate in 1961, if, instead, my examiners had urged me to continue with graduate work, I might have succumbed to the temptation; if I’d been a young man, for instance, of equal talent, I might have made myself into another person, and I certainly wouldn’t have been invited back to Wisconsin to be graciously honored. The paradox was not one that might be elevated to a principle for others: to be accepted by my elders in one decade, I’d been required to be repudiated by my elders in an earlier decade.
And now, at an even later date, 27 September 1999, as I compose this memoir in a room at the Edgewater Inn in Madison, Wisconsin, overlooking a rain-lashed Lake Mendota, I’m forced to recall the bittersweet irony of my situation; another time I’ve been invited back to Madison, to give a public reading in a beautiful art museum built long after my departure, and to be honored at an elaborate dinner with the chancellor, his wife, and a gathering of the university community. Honored at the age of sixty-one as an indirect (and yet irrefutable) consequence of having failed at the age of twenty-two! …
In Madison, I’ve been made to feel at last that I do belong. I’ve arrived at an age when, if someone welcomes you, you don’t question the motives. You don’t question your own motives. Rejoice, and give thanks!
Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.
This has been a fragmentary memoir of a lost time; a time for which there was no adequate language; and so the effort turns upon itself like a Mobius strip, shrinking from its primary subject. I am paralyzed by the taboo of violating the privacy of individuals close to me, and by the taboo, which seems a lesser one, of violating the privacy of one’s own heart; exposing the very heart, vulnerable and pulsing with life. There are intimacies, secrets, epiphanies and revelations and matters of simple historic fact of which I will never speak, still less write. Yet I’m thinking, in Madison, Wisconsin, in the early morning hours of 28 September 1999, of that Sunday afternoon, 23 October 1960. I’d come to the reception in the Memorial Union overlooking this same lake, these waves, about a mile from where I’m sitting now, composing these words. I’d come to the reception by myself. I knew no one. I was one of three thousand graduate students at the university, and perhaps fifty or sixty had come to this lounge in the student union; I was sitting at a table with some others, their faces now long forgotten, and in the corner of my eye I saw a figure approaching. I have no memory of myself except that I was dreamy-eyed, listening to the conversation at the table without joining in; I wouldn’t glance around with a bright, hopeful, welcoming American-girl smile at whoever was coming near. In one of my own works of fiction such a figure, undefined and mysterious, might turn out to be Death — but this wasn’t fiction, this was my life.
Still, I didn’t glance around. Until, when a man asked if he might join us, and pulled out a chair to sit beside me, I did.
This great adventure! I’d fled the East because I had no wish to marry, and yet, within five swift months, in Madison I would fall in love, and marry; within ten months I would have become profoundly disillusioned with the PhD-scholarly-academic profession, even as I earned the master’s degree qualifying me to teach English as it happened I would do, in universities (currently Princeton) for more than four decades; I would, in Madison, cease writing anything except the most conventional or scholarly-critical papers, a development that would have seemed to me until this perilous time tantamount to ceasing to dream, or to breathe.
(Was there was no hope of adroitly mixing the academic and the “imaginative” at Madison, as I’d done at Syracuse? There was none. My graduate-level professors, most of them Harvard educated, were a generation older — or more — than my Syracuse professors and resisted even the analytical New Critical approach to literature; to these conservative elders, with the notable exception of the medievalist Helen C. White, canonical texts were to be approached as sacred-historical documents primarily, to be laden with footnotes as a centipede is fitted out with legs. When, in my initial idealism, I wrote a seminar paper on Edmund Spenser and Franz Kafka, on the ways in which the allegorical and the surreal are akin, my professor, the eminent Merritt Hughes, who knew nothing of Kafka and had no interest in correcting his ignorance, returned the paper to me with an expression of gentlemanly repugnance and suggested that I attempt the Spenser assignment again, from a more “traditional” perspective. My face burned with shame: I was made to feel, in the eyes of the other graduate students as in Professor Hughes’s disdainful vision, a barbarian who stood before them naked, utterly exposed.) …
A disquieting odor as of disinfectant, bandages, and cafeteria food pervades my memory of Barnard Hall, the graduate women’s residence in which I lived for a brief yet exhausting semester, though of course this is absurd and unfair; Barnard Hall wasn’t a hospital, and its occupants, graduate women, so very different in the aggregate from the undergraduate women with whom I’d lived for four years at Syracuse, weren’t patients or convalescents; on the contrary, these women, some young and others less so, exuded an air of determined bustle, grim-cheery energy, like novice nuns in a convent who must brave the world outside the convent, run by men, the other. (In fact, there were two nuns on my floor, from different orders, living in separate rooms.) My convent-room with its single window looking out onto University Avenue was on the third floor of the residence, and in that room in the first week I was stricken by insomnia as if by a swarm of invisible mosquitoes lying in wait in that space. No matter how exhausted I was from hours of reading, writing, library research, the restless walking-running that has long characterized my life, no matter how I tried to calm my rampaging thoughts. Insomnia! …
Madison, Wisconsin, was in those days an idyllic college town built upon the southern bank of Lake Mendota. The enormous campus inhabited woodland near the lake; the terrain was nearly as hilly as Syracuse, a landscape long ago convulsed by glaciers and retaining still, even on sunny autumn days, a wintry-windy flavor to the air. In Madison as in all new places before habitude dulls, or masks, strangeness, I realized how
precarious our hold upon what we call sanity is. …
In Madison, during these months of intense academic study, when my head was filled with Old English, medieval and Renaissance and eighteenth-century English literature, of course I wrote no fiction or poetry, nothing of my “own” (as
I thought it) except desperate fragments in a journal like feeble cries for help. As my imaginative life was smothered in the service of academic study, my intellectual life was heightened, revered, run to exhaustion like a hunting dog whose only food will be the terrified prey he flushes out for his master. (Hunting dog, prey, what’s the distinction?) I admonished myself, What did you expect, this is graduate school. You’re training to be a scholar. To be a serious adult. This isn’t dreamland. To write about my “lost time” in Madison is very difficult even decades later. To violate the taboo of exposing the self, and those innocent individuals intimate with the self, is simply not possible. But mostly I’ve never written about my Madison sojourn because I have never known how. Emotions are the element in which we live, or fail to live; “events seem to us comparatively detached; yet, in speaking of oneself, emotions are of no more interest than dreams; it’s historic event that seems to matter, and one is baffled at how to match event with emotion, emotion with event. Our most profound experiences elude all speech, even spoken speech. What vocabulary to choose to attempt to evoke a flood of sheer, untrammeled emotion? — the common experiences of grief, terror, panic, falling-in-love, desperation-at-losing-love. For me, the vocabulary of loss, despair, frustration, defeat is inappropriate, or inadequate, in writing of my months in Madison, since in fact, much of the time, and nearly always publicly, I was very happy; after I met the man I would marry, I would have defined myself, and would certainly be defined by others, as very happy. For one can embody without at all understanding the paradox that one can be both happy and desperately unhappy at the same time; contrary to Aristotle’s logic, one can be X and non-X simultaneously. …
Yet my happiest, my most romantic morning-insomniac adventures were out-of-doors. If it wasn’t bitter cold, or raining, or snowing, or oppressively windy, I gave up on Barnard Hall, dressed, and began the day early, in darkness. I’d grown up on a small farm in western New York, and rising early in the dark, in terrible weather, had been routine. Through the winter, the school bus swung by our road at about 7:30 a.m., in darkness. By my logic, to begin a day before 4:30 a.m. was eccentric; after that hour, when the clock’s hands were moving toward 5:00 a.m., beginning a day was normal, a sign of optimism. Who knew what adventures the new day might bring? Outside the claustral residence hall I felt a surge of energy, for energy is hope, and hope is energy, and I would break into a run, as if I had an immediate destination; I ran on University Avenue and on Park Street to the foot of Bascomb [sic] Hill, and up the steep, windy hill itself until I could run no longer. (Hours later, midmorning, I would be among forty or so graduate students seated in a classroom in Bascomb Hall, in a hallucinatory drowse trying to take notes as the eminent Renaissance scholar Mark Eccles lectured on the Elizabethan-Jacobean drama, reading from copious notes in a quiet, uninflected voice like a hypnotist’s.) In the gradually lightening dark I would continue past Bascomb Hill, in the direction of the observatory; my ultimate destination was a State Street diner that opened early, but I forestalled going there too soon; in these long-ago years a dense stand of trees, deciduous and evergreen, bordered the hill; beyond was Lake Mendota; I would return, down the long hill, passing by the State Historical Library and the mammoth Memorial Union, not open at this hour; if it wasn’t too cold or windy, I’d walk along the lakefront; I’d pause on the terrace, to stare at the lake; here, I was nearly always happy; freed from the confines of my room and from the rampage of my thoughts; I was exhilarated and yet comforted by the lapping waves, and Lake Mendota was often a rough, churning lake; in the twilit early morning it appeared vast as an inland sea, its farther shore too distant to be seen. On misty or foggy mornings, which were common in Madison, the lake’s waves emerged out of an opacity of gunmetal gray like a scrim; there was no horizon, and there was no sky, and it would not have surprised me if when I glanced down at my feet I saw that there was no ground. …
Often in my circuitous route to the State Street diner, I would pass the still-darkened university library, which was one of my places of refuge during the day; swiftly I’d walk along Langdon Street, past fraternity houses, impressive façades bearing cryptic Greek symbols emerging out of the gloom, and invariably there were lights burning in these massive houses, who knew why? I was quick to note isolated lights in the windows of apartment buildings and wood-frame rental houses on Langdon, Gorham, Henry, as the early morning shifted toward 6:00 a.m.; still darkness, for this was autumn in a northerly climate, but with a promise of dawn in the eastern sky. The nighthawk takes comfort in noting others, kindred souls, but at a distance: warmly lit city buses on Gorham and University bearing a few passengers; headlights of vehicles; occasional pedestrians; a few among these might have been morning-insomniacs like me, relieved and grateful for the new day, the new chance, but most of them were workers, custodians, cafeteria staff, attendants at the university hospital; for them there was no special romance to the hour, nor probably any malaise; beneath their coats they wore uniforms. …
In January 1961 I was married, and moved from Barnard Hall to live with my husband in a surprisingly spacious, airy five-room apartment on the second floor of a wood-frame house on University Avenue, a mile away from the university residence in which I’d spent so many insomniac hours. In May, one sunny morning, I was examined for my master’s degree, in venerable Bascomb Hall for what would be the final time. My examiners were all men; two were older professors with whom I’d studied and who had seemed to approve of my work; the third was a younger professor of American literature, very likely an assistant professor, who stared at me, now “Joyce Carol Smith,” doubtfully. A married woman? A serious scholar? It did seem suspicious. In this man’s unsmiling eyes,
I saw my fate.
Two-thirds of the exam went well: I’d followed my husband’s advice and memorized sonnets by Shakespeare and Donne that I could analyze and discuss; I could recite the opening of Paradise Lost, and key passages of “Lycidas” and “The Rape of the Lock”; but the youngish professor of American literature was unimpressed, biding his time. He didn’t question me about primary works at all. I might have spoken knowledgeably about the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, but I wasn’t given the opportunity; as in a courtroom nightmare, I was asked only questions I couldn’t answer with any confidence about dates of poems, publications, editions; for instance, how did the 1867 Leaves of Grass differ from the 1855 edition, and what were the circumstances of the 1871 edition? Through a haze of shame I heard myself murmur repeatedly, “I don’t know,” and, “I’m afraid I don’t know.” ...
How vulnerable I’d been, that May morning in 1961! How negligible in his eyes, how expendable, a young woman, and married; not a likely candidate for the holy orders of the PhD. And it was so: though my love for literature was undiminished, I’d become profoundly disillusioned with graduate study and couldn’t have imagined continuing in Madison for another year, let alone two or three; my subterranean despair would have choked me, and destroyed the happiness of my marriage; it would have destroyed my marriage. The drudgery of scholarly research and the mind-numbing routines of academic English study, above all the anxious need to please, never to displease, one’s sensitive elders, weren’t for me. My major writing effort of the year was a one-hundred-page seminar paper on Herman Melville tailored to the expectations of a quirky, very senior professor named Harry Hayden Clark, who had a penchant for massive footnotes and “sources”; this document was well received by Professor Clark but so depressed me that I threw away my only copy soon afterward.
The verdict of the examining committee was that “Joyce Carol Smith” be granted a master’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin; but she was not recommended to continue PhD studies there. The verdict was You are not one of us, and how could I reasonably disagree?
When, a quarter-century later, in what might be called the second act of a fairy tale of wavering intentions, I returned to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to be given an “honorary doctorate of humane letters” in an elaborate commencement ceremony, the occasion would seem surreal to me; I couldn’t help brooding on the irony of the situation, and perhaps the perversity, hearing my name amid those of other “distinguished alumni”; not that I was an impostor exactly, but if I hadn’t been rejected as a PhD candidate in 1961, if, instead, my examiners had urged me to continue with graduate work, I might have succumbed to the temptation; if I’d been a young man, for instance, of equal talent, I might have made myself into another person, and I certainly wouldn’t have been invited back to Wisconsin to be graciously honored. The paradox was not one that might be elevated to a principle for others: to be accepted by my elders in one decade, I’d been required to be repudiated by my elders in an earlier decade.
And now, at an even later date, 27 September 1999, as I compose this memoir in a room at the Edgewater Inn in Madison, Wisconsin, overlooking a rain-lashed Lake Mendota, I’m forced to recall the bittersweet irony of my situation; another time I’ve been invited back to Madison, to give a public reading in a beautiful art museum built long after my departure, and to be honored at an elaborate dinner with the chancellor, his wife, and a gathering of the university community. Honored at the age of sixty-one as an indirect (and yet irrefutable) consequence of having failed at the age of twenty-two! …
In Madison, I’ve been made to feel at last that I do belong. I’ve arrived at an age when, if someone welcomes you, you don’t question the motives. You don’t question your own motives. Rejoice, and give thanks!
Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.
This has been a fragmentary memoir of a lost time; a time for which there was no adequate language; and so the effort turns upon itself like a Mobius strip, shrinking from its primary subject. I am paralyzed by the taboo of violating the privacy of individuals close to me, and by the taboo, which seems a lesser one, of violating the privacy of one’s own heart; exposing the very heart, vulnerable and pulsing with life. There are intimacies, secrets, epiphanies and revelations and matters of simple historic fact of which I will never speak, still less write. Yet I’m thinking, in Madison, Wisconsin, in the early morning hours of 28 September 1999, of that Sunday afternoon, 23 October 1960. I’d come to the reception in the Memorial Union overlooking this same lake, these waves, about a mile from where I’m sitting now, composing these words. I’d come to the reception by myself. I knew no one. I was one of three thousand graduate students at the university, and perhaps fifty or sixty had come to this lounge in the student union; I was sitting at a table with some others, their faces now long forgotten, and in the corner of my eye I saw a figure approaching. I have no memory of myself except that I was dreamy-eyed, listening to the conversation at the table without joining in; I wouldn’t glance around with a bright, hopeful, welcoming American-girl smile at whoever was coming near. In one of my own works of fiction such a figure, undefined and mysterious, might turn out to be Death — but this wasn’t fiction, this was my life.
Still, I didn’t glance around. Until, when a man asked if he might join us, and pulled out a chair to sit beside me, I did.
