Ford and Showalter on JCO’s Marriage

Richard Ford and Elaine Showalter spoke at the recent celebration of Joyce Carol Oates and Charlie Gross’s wedding. Ford offered the new husband a humorous take on what to expect living with a particular novelist:

… everything Joyce undertakes — including … (yes, Charlie) … including marriage — becomes a literary concoction with a fictive dimension. And therefore the groom — perhaps a dead-beat, perhaps not (all this will be found out as the plot develops) — the groom is hereby put on notice that he can ignore this literary dimension only at his peril. Since everything he’s seeing today, he’ll pretty soon be seeing again, including himself and all his qualities — those good and less good — put on surgical display on some page somewhere. Perhaps even his name will be used, possibly with a different spelling, though possibly not even that). And because he and Joyce chose to elope as they did, and forsook the cautionary formalities of a long courtship, or an engagement, or dating, (or, some local skeptics would say, even forsook the formality of an actual acquaintanceship), the groom has therefore forsaken the chance to think long about his prospective act, as well as the chance to complain about anything, or to be granted a reprieve, or even a hearing. You, Charlie, must realize, now — a little late, you might believe — that he who marries a novelist must expect to see himself in print long before he sees himself in clover. The groom has been blessed with long life, it’s true. But art is much, much longer.

Showalter teasingly notes the differences in their early lives, but leaves unremarked how similarly driven both appeared to be:

He’s a red diaper baby, she’s a blue collar baby. Charlie’s an urban Brooklyn boy; Joyce is a girl from the North Country. While he was maniacally racking up his merit badges to become one of the youngest-ever Eagle Scouts, Joyce was memorizing three hundred Bible verses to win a week at a Methodist Bible Camp near Lake Ontario—one of those proverbial competitions in which 2nd prize must be two weeks at camp. While she was writing her first novels and getting her first story published in Seventeen magazine [sic], he was doing a research project on plant succession and dialectical materialism for the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. He was organizing a Pete Seeger concert at Harvard while Joyce was still trying to get out of her sorority at Syracuse.

Continue here for the complete, and completely amusing remarks by both Ford and Showalter. And as a bonus, JCO will dance for you.

Joyce Carol Oates on Shirley Jackson

Joyce Carol Oates reviews Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle for the New York Review of Books:

Of the precocious children and adolescents of mid-twentieth-century American fiction—a dazzling lot that includes the tomboys Frankie of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946) and Scout of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the murderous eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark of William March’s The Bad Seed (1954), and the slightly older, disaffected Holden Caulfield of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Esther Greenwood of Sylvia Plath’sThe Bell Jar (1963)—none is more memorable than eighteen-year-old “Merricat” of Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece of Gothic suspense We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). At once feral child, sulky adolescent, and Cassandra-like seer, Merricat addresses the reader as an intimate:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Con- stance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.Merricat speaks with a seductive and disturbing authority, never drawn to justifying her actions but only to recounting them. One might expect We Have Always Lived in the Castle to be a confession, of a kind—after all, one or another of the Blackwood sisters poisoned their entire family, six years before—but Merricat has nothing to confess, still less to regret. We Have Always Lived in the Castleis a romance with an improbable—magical—happy ending. As readers we are led to smile at Merricat’s childish self-definition, as one who dislikes “washing myself”; it will be many pages before we come to realize the significance of Amanita phalloides and the wish to have been born a werewolf.

In this deftly orchestrated opening, Merricat’s wholly sympathetic creator/ collaborator Shirley Jackson has struck every essential note of her Gothic tale of sexual repression and rhapsodic vengeance; as it unfolds in ways both inevitable and unexpected, We Have Always Lived in the Castle becomes a New England fairy tale of the more wicked variety, in which a “happy ending” is both ironic and literal, the consequence of unrepentant witchcraft and a terrible sacrifice—of others.

See also the NYRB’s podcast with JCO discussing Shirley Jackson. Joyce Carol Oates will edit the Library of America’s forthcoming volume on Shirley Jackson, due out in June, 2010.

Joyce Carol Oates on Ted Kennedy

As Edward Kennedy is lauded for his tremendous accomplishments as a Senator, Joyce Carol Oates remembers a voiceless victim from his past. From the Guardian:

‘There are no second acts in American lives’– this dour pronouncement of F Scott Fitzgerald has been many times refuted, and at no time more appropriately than in reference to the late Senator Ted Kennedy, whose death was announced yesterday. Indeed, it might be argued that Senator Kennedy’s career as one of the most influential of 20th-century Democratic politicians, an iconic figure as powerful, and as morally enigmatic, as President Bill Clinton, whom in many ways Kennedy resembled, was a consequence of his notorious behaviour at Chappaquiddick bridge in July 1969.

. . .

Kennedy chose to flee the scene , leaving the young woman to die an agonising death not of drowning but of suffocation over a period of hours. Incredibly, it was 10 hours before Kennedy reported the accident, by which time he’d consulted a family lawyer. The senator’s explanation for this unconscionable, despicable, unmanly and inexplicable behaviour was never convincing: he claimed that he’d struck his head and was “confused” and “exhausted” from diving and trying to rescue the young woman and had gone home to bed.

. . .

Yet if one weighs the life of a single young woman against the accomplishments of the man President Obama has called the greatest Democratic senator in history, what is one to think?

In 1992, JCO published Black Water, a Pulitzer-finalist that reimagined the Chappaquiddick tragedy in the present time, and from the point-of-view of the drowned victim.

American Fantastic Tales

Joyce Carol Oates makes her first appearance (I believe!) in the monumental Library of America this Fall when the two-volume American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny, edited by Peter Straub, is published. Volume one, “from Poe to the Pulps” covers Charles Brockden Brown to Charles Bloch; and volume two, “from the 1940s to now” includes the JCO story “Family,” first published in the December 1989 issue of Omni magazine, and reprinted in JCO’s own collection Heat and Other Stories. as well as the 3rd annual Years’s Best Fantasy & Horror where Ellen Datlow introduced the story this way:

Joyce Carol Oates, when inspired, is immediate in her response to requests for stories. I commissioned a short-short from her for Omni and a couple of weeks later I received it, as well as “Family,” which is certainly science fiction, definitely horrific, and has all the earmarks of an Oates gem. The basic plot is simple: An isolated family adapts to changing times. It’s only when one considers the nature of the changing outside world, and the bizarre nature of the family’s adaptations, that “Family” achieves its full effect.

JCO’s second contribution to the Library of America will be a volume on Shirley Jackson that she is editing.

Full contents:

VOLUME TWO: 1940-2008   744 PAGES.

INTRODUCTION BY PETER STRAUB.

JOHN COLLIER. EVENING PRIMROSE (1940).

FRITZ LEIBER. SMOKE GHOST (1941).

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS. MYSTERIES OF THE JOY RIO (1941).

JANE RICE. THE REFUGEE (1943).

ANTHONY BOUCHER. MR. LUPESCU (1945).

TRUMAN CAPOTE. MIRIAM (1945).

JOHN CHEEVER. TORCH SONG (1947).

JACK SNOW. MIDNIGHT (1947).

JACK FINNEY. I’M SCARED (1948).

SHIRLEY JACKSON. THE DAEMON LOVER (1949).

PAUL BOWLES. THE CIRCULAR VALLEY (1950).

RAY BRADBURY. THE APRIL WITCH (1952).

JEROME BIXBY. IT’S A GOOD LIFE (1953).

TRACE (1964). SPACE BY THE TAIL (1964).

CHARLES BEAUMONT. BLACK COUNTRY (1954).

VLADIMIR NABOKOV. THE VANE SISTERS (1959).

DAVIS GRUBB. WHERE THE WOODBINE TWINETH (1964).

DONALD WANDREI. NIGHTMARE (1965).

HARLAN ELLISON. I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM (1967).

RICHARD MATHESON. PREY (1969).

T.E.D. KLEIN. EVENTS AT POROTH FARM (1972).

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER. HANKA (1974).

FRED CHAPPELL. LINNEAUS FORGETS (1977).

JOHN CROWLEY. NOVELTY (1983).

JONATHAN CARROLL. MR. FIDDLEHEAD (1989).

JOYCE CAROL OATES. FAMILY (1989).

THOMAS LIGOTTI. THE LAST FEAST OF HARLEQUIN (1990).

PETER STRAUB. A SHORT GUIDE TO THE CITY (1990).

KARL EDWARD WAGNER. CEDAR LANE (1990).

JEFF VANDERMEER. THE GENERAL WHO IS DEAD (1996).

STEPHEN KING. THAT FEELING, YOU CAN ONLY SAY WHAT IT IS IN FRENCH (1998).

KIT REED. THE MOTHERS OF SHARK ISLAND (1998).

CAITLIN R. KIERNAN. THE LONG HALL ON THE TOP FLOOR (1999).

GEORGE SAUNDERS. SEA OAK (2000).

THOMAS TESSIER. NOCTURNE (2000).

MICHAEL CHABON. THE GOD OF DARK LAUGHTER (2001).

JOE HILL. POP ART (2001).

POPPY Z. BRITE. PANSU (2003).

STEVEN MILLHAUSER. DANGEROUS LAUGHTER (2003).

M. RICKERT. THE CHAMBERED FRUIT (2003).

BRIAN EVENSON. THE WAVERING KNIFE (2004).

KELLY LINK. STONE ANIMALS (2004).

TIM POWERS. PAT MOORE (2004).

GENE WOLFE. THE LITTLE STRANGER (2004).

BENJAMIN PERCY. DIAL TONE (2007).

Volume 1

INTRODUCTION BY PETER STRAUB.

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN.  SOMNAMBULISM: A FRAGMENT (1805).

WASHINGTON IRVING.   ADVENTURE OF THE GERMAN STUDENT IRVING (1824).

EDGAR ALLAN POE.  BERENICE (1835).

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN (1835).

HERMAN MELVILLE.  THE TARTARUS OF MAIDS (1855).

FITZ-JAMES O’BRIEN.    WHAT WAS IT? (1859).

BRET HARTE.   THE LEGEND OF MONTE DEL DIABLO (1863).

HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD.    THE MOONSTONE MASS (1868).

W. C. MORROW.    HIS UNCONQUERABLE ENEMY (1889).

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN. THE YELLOW WALLPAPER (1892).

KATE CHOPIN. MA’AME PÉLAGIE (1893).

JOHN KENDRICK BANGS. THURLOW’S CHRISTMAS STORY (1894).

ROBERT W. CHAMBERS. THE REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS (1895).

RALPH ADAMS CRAM. THE DEAD VALLEY (1895).

MADELEINE YALE WYNNE. THE LITTLE ROOM (1895).

GERTRUDE ATHERTON. THE STRIDING PLACE (1896).

SARAH ORNE JEWETT. IN DARK NEW ENGLAND DAYS (1896).

EMMA FRANCIS DAWSON. AN ITINERANT HOUSE (1897).

STEPHEN CRANE. THE BLACK DOG (1898).

MARY WILKINS FREEMAN. LUELLA MILLER (1902).

FRANK NORRIS. GRETTIR AT THORNHALL-STEAD (1903).

LAFCADIO HEARN. YUKI-ONNA (1904).

F. MARION CRAWFORD. FOR THE BLOOD IS THE LIFE (1905).

AMBROSE BIERCE. THE MOONLIT ROAD (1907).

EDWARD LUCAS WHITE. LUKUNDOO (1907).

OLIVIA HOWARD DUNBAR. THE SHELL OF SENSE (1908).

HENRY JAMES. THE JOLLY CORNER (1908).

ALICE BROWN. GOLDEN BABY (1910).

EDITH WHARTON. AFTERWARD (1910).

JILLA CATHER. CONSEQUENCES (1915).

ELLEN GLASGOW. THE SHADOWY THIRD (1916).

JULIAN HAWTHORNE. THE ISLAND OF GHOSTS (1919).

FRANCIS STEVENS [GERTRUDE BARROWS BENNETT]. UNSEEN, UNFEARED (1919).

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD. THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (1922).

SEABURY QUINN. THE CURSE OF EVERARD MAUNDY (1927).

STEPHEN VINCENT BENET. THE KING OF THE CATS (1929).

DAVID H. KELLER. THE JELLY-FISH (1929).

CONRAD AIKEN. MR. ARCULARIS (1931).

ROBERT E. HOWARD. THE BLACK STONE (1931).

HENRY S. WHITEHEAD. PASSING OF A GOD (1931).

AUGUST DERLETH. THE PANELLED ROOM (1933).

H.P. LOVECRAFT. THE THING ON THE DOORSTEP (1933).

CLARK ASHTON SMITH. GENIUS LOCI (1933).

ROBERT BLOCH. THE CLOAK (1939).

Volume 2

INTRODUCTION BY PETER STRAUB.

JOHN COLLIER. EVENING PRIMROSE (1940).

FRITZ LEIBER. SMOKE GHOST (1941).

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS. MYSTERIES OF THE JOY RIO (1941).

JANE RICE. THE REFUGEE (1943).

ANTHONY BOUCHER. MR. LUPESCU (1945).

TRUMAN CAPOTE. MIRIAM (1945).

JOHN CHEEVER. TORCH SONG (1947).

JACK SNOW. MIDNIGHT (1947).

JACK FINNEY. I’M SCARED (1948).

SHIRLEY JACKSON. THE DAEMON LOVER (1949).

PAUL BOWLES. THE CIRCULAR VALLEY (1950).

RAY BRADBURY. THE APRIL WITCH (1952).

JEROME BIXBY. IT’S A GOOD LIFE (1953).

TRACE (1964). SPACE BY THE TAIL (1964).

CHARLES BEAUMONT. BLACK COUNTRY (1954).

VLADIMIR NABOKOV. THE VANE SISTERS (1959).

DAVIS GRUBB. WHERE THE WOODBINE TWINETH (1964).

DONALD WANDREI. NIGHTMARE (1965).

HARLAN ELLISON. I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM (1967).

RICHARD MATHESON. PREY (1969).

T.E.D. KLEIN. EVENTS AT POROTH FARM (1972).

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER. HANKA (1974).

FRED CHAPPELL. LINNEAUS FORGETS (1977).

JOHN CROWLEY. NOVELTY (1983).

JONATHAN CARROLL. MR. FIDDLEHEAD (1989).

JOYCE CAROL OATES. FAMILY (1989).

THOMAS LIGOTTI. THE LAST FEAST OF HARLEQUIN (1990).

PETER STRAUB. A SHORT GUIDE TO THE CITY (1990).

KARL EDWARD WAGNER. CEDAR LANE (1990).

JEFF VANDERMEER. THE GENERAL WHO IS DEAD (1996).

STEPHEN KING. THAT FEELING, YOU CAN ONLY SAY WHAT IT IS IN FRENCH (1998).

KIT REED. THE MOTHERS OF SHARK ISLAND (1998).

CAITLIN R. KIERNAN. THE LONG HALL ON THE TOP FLOOR (1999).

GEORGE SAUNDERS. SEA OAK (2000).

THOMAS TESSIER. NOCTURNE (2000).

MICHAEL CHABON. THE GOD OF DARK LAUGHTER (2001).

JOE HILL. POP ART (2001).

POPPY Z. BRITE. PANSU (2003).

STEVEN MILLHAUSER. DANGEROUS LAUGHTER (2003).

M. RICKERT. THE CHAMBERED FRUIT (2003).

BRIAN EVENSON. THE WAVERING KNIFE (2004).

KELLY LINK. STONE ANIMALS (2004).

TIM POWERS. PAT MOORE (2004).

GENE WOLFE. THE LITTLE STRANGER (2004).

BENJAMIN PERCY. DIAL TONE (2007).

Joyce Carol Oates in Paris

Guest post by Tanya Tromble

Joyce Carol Oates made an appearance in Paris on Saturday, July 4, for an interview and book signing session at the Virgin Megastore on the Champs Elysées.  The appearance was to promote the release of the French translation of her Journal.  She responded to questions from an interviewer and then from the audience for about an hour and then signed books.  This is the first time I had met her in person, and she was just as gracious and natural as I had imagined her.

She spoke about the difference between fiction writing and journal writing and encouraged everyone in the audience to begin keeping a journal if they were not already doing so.  She said that though there are a few things in the journal she wishes she hadn’t written, overall she feels that looking back at it allowed her to realize the past difficulties she had confronted and gotten through.  Responding to the seemingly mandatory question about violence in her work, she pointed out that an artist is not his/her subject matter, rather the subject is just the material used by the artist.  She thinks that criticism of violence in her work stems from a miscomprehension of what an artist is and stressed that an artist lives in his/her imagination, whereas her own life is a peaceful one.  She quoted Flaubert who said “live like the bourgeoisie so you can be violent in your writing.”

When asked about the relationship between her work and detective fiction, she responded “I don’t write thrillers, exactly” and went on to list many different genres and subgenres of detective fiction.  “I’ve never written a thriller and I’m not drawn to the genre,” she said before going on to explain what she views as the action structure of the thriller.  “The genre I like is psychological mystery/suspense which I think is very true to life.”  For her, this genre is written from the point of view of one person, sometimes a detective, and represents the position we are often in when confronted with something mysterious.  She spoke about family secrets at the periphery of her experience when growing up and expressed the idea that a writer is always pursuing mysterious threads toward illumination and knowledge.  She distinguished between genre fiction and literary fiction saying that in genre fiction the mystery is always explained because of the contract between reader and writer, whereas literary fiction operates in a different dimension where each literary work is supposed to be unique, so things don’t need to necessarily be explained/resolved.  Oates offered Black Girl, White Girl as an example of one of her works with the form of a mystery/suspense novel. Told from the perspective of the white girl, you know immediately that the black girl is dead. The novel looks back over fifteen years, dealing with white guilt, class-generated guilt, and the (sometimes wrongly) perceived cliché qualities in the Other.

Before concluding, she went on to answer questions about The Gravedigger’s Daughter, her play I Stand Before You Naked, her writing process and her favorite French authors including Flaubert (especially Madame Bovary), Camus, Sartre, Duras and Colette.  She apologized for not being familiar with the work of contemporary French authors, explaining that as far as she knew, there were few, if any, English translations available, publishers being wary of venturing into this domain.

It was a surprise and a joy to have Oates finally visit France!

Reflecting on Joyce Carol Oates

Joanne Creighton, President of Mt. Holyoke College, and Joyce Carol Oates scholar, offers her thoughts on JCO’s life and career in the Summer 2009 issue of On Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin, Madison alumni magazine.

“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.’”

. . .

“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.”

Married!

Joyce Carol Oates confirms her Gothic sensibilities by secretly marrying fiance Charlie Gross on Friday the 13th (March 2009) in a private, civil ceremony. Not wishing to “rouse much of a fuss,” friends and relatives were not invited.

Congratulations Joyce & Charlie!

Mike Tyson

Oates and Tyson in 1986

Joyce Carol Oates attended a screening of James Toback’s documentary Tyson with the director and Iron Mike himself, and participated in a Q & A session, as reported in New York Magazine:

“What’s the experience of watching yourself in this movie?” [Oates] asked. “Do you feel like you yourself are an abstract piece of art?”

“I just look at it like Jim asked me questions and I answered the questions,” Tyson explained. “It looked very simplistic to me at first, but watching it with a conglomerate of people here, I feel very vulnerable. I don’t like watching it.”

JCO of course has written extensively on boxing from her book on the subject, to many articles on Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali, and others. Of the young Tyson, JCO wrote in 1986:

Mike Tyson, a boy warrior, has become legendary, in a sense, before there is a legend to define him. And never has the collective will of a crowd—the very nearly palpable wish of a crowd—been more powerfully expressed than it is tonight in Las Vegas. With his much-publicized 27-0 record as a professional boxer, of which twenty-five victories are knockouts (fifteen in the first round, several within sixty seconds), with so much expectation centered upon him as the “new hope” of heavyweight boxing, Tyson recalls the young Jack Dempsey, who fought his most spectacular fights before winning the heavyweight title. Like Dempsey in the upward trajectory of his career, Tyson suggests a savagery only symbolically contained within the brightly illuminated elevated ring, with its referee, its resident physician, its scrupulously observed rules, regulations, customs, and rituals. Like Dempsey he has the power to galvanize crowds as if awakening in them the instinct not merely for raw aggression and the mysterious will to do hurt that resides, for better or worse, in the human soul, but for suggesting incontestable justice of such an instinct . . .

Shirley Jackson Award Finalist

Joyce Carol Oates’s story collection Wild Nights! is among the finalists for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award. Other finalists in the “collection” category include A Better Angel, Chris Adrian; Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser; The Diving Pool, Yoko Ogawa; The Girl on the Fridge, Etgar Keret; and Just After Sunset, Stephen King.

The Shirley Jackson Awards ”have been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.” Winners will be announced on July 12, 2009.

Coincidentally, as reported by Elaine Showalter in an Economist interview, JCO will be editing Shirley Jackson’s work for the Library of America.

A Woman’s Work

Deborah Solomon interviews Joyce Carol Oates for the New York Times Magazine:

Why do you find violence so alluring as a literary subject?

If you’re going to spend the next year of your life writing, you would probably rather write “Moby Dick” than a little household mystery with cat detectives. I consider tragedy the highest form of art.

Topics briefly touched on include widowhood and memoirs, JCO autistic sister, housework, religion, and JCO’s fiance (first mentioned in this blog back in January).