Joyce Carol Oates: In the studio

IT'S A ROOM MUCH LONGER THAN IT IS WIDE, extending from the courtyard of our partly glass-walled house in suburban/rural Hopewell Township, New Jersey (approximately three miles from the high-decibel intensity of Princeton) into an area of pine trees, holly bushes and Korean dogwood through which deer, singly, or does-with-fawns, or small herds, are always drifting. Like the rest of the house my study has a good deal of glass: my immediate study area, where my desk is located, is brightly lighted during the day by seven windows and a skylight.

All the desks of my life have faced windows and except for an overwrought two-year period in the late 1980s when I worked on a word processor, I have always spent most of my time staring out the window, noting what is there, daydreaming or brooding. Most of the so-called imaginative life is encompassed by these three activities that blend so seamlessly together, not unlike reading the dictionary, as I often do as well, entire mornings can slip by, in a blissful daze of preoccupation. It's bizarre to me that people think that I am "prolific" and that I must use every spare minute of my time when in fact, as my intimates have always known, I spend most of my time looking out the window. (I recommend it.)

"It's just a turn-and freedom, Matty!"

A niece of Emily Dickinson would recount how the poet one day took her upstairs to her bedroom in the Dickinson house in Amherst, Massachusetts and made a gesture as if locking herself in with her thumb and forefinger closed upon an imaginary key. Just a turn. And freedom.

So with us all, I think. The precious room-of-one's-own. The private place, the sanctuary. To rephrase a famous remark of Robert Frost, our private places are those that, when we seek entry, we are never turned away.

Oscar Wilde noted that no man is a hero to his valet. We might say that no man/woman is heroic/oracular in private.

Thank God! Our natural instinct is to reject the Oracle, not to revere it. Above all, not to believe it.

The public oracular pronouncements of the literary icon are nearly always embarrassing, hollow and expedient. Such lofty phrases as the role of the poet-the voice of the poet-the conscience of the poet -ring especially unconvincing in the poet's own ear, in private. "Did I really say such things? Why? I must have been in public."

Speechifying is not poetry. Airing grandiose views is not literature. Theorizing is mostly self-aggrandizement. Advertising for the kind of thing that you, with your specific limitations, can do.

Still, we find ourselves making such pronouncements, sometimes. It seems to be a professional hazard to which the writer/poet becomes increasingly susceptible with age. In proportion to the elder's increasing deafness, he becomes more verbose, oracular.

In public, we become public figures. But in private, we "become" the individuals we are.

On my desk, where I can always see it, amid a flurry of other paper scraps bearing crucial bits of information and admonitions, is a handwritten reminder in fading red ink:

Anything that happens to me as a writer has been precipitated by an action of my own.

This is an irrefutable fact and it means that I have no one to blame except myself when things go badly for me. No hostile reviewers and critics. No one!

I would wish to think that serious art is transgressive, upsetting and not consoling, and that the serious artist can't really expect not to be attacked, ridiculed, dismissed; when it comes, the artist has brought his punishment upon himself. But maybe this is just wishful thinking, I'm hoping to exonerate myself.

In my study, as in any private place, I have to concede: the more we are hurt, the more we seek solace in the imagination. Ironically, conversely, the more imaginative work we create in this solitude, and publish, the more likely we are to be hurt by critical and public reaction to it; and so, again, we retreat into the imagination-assuring that more hurt will ensue. A bizarre cycle. Yet it makes a kind of sense. How do you write so much? is a question frequently asked of me. Less frequently asked is Why?

Writing, for me, is primarily remembering. Which means that "writing" isn't specifically verbal for me, as it must be for most poets: it's as likely to be cinematic, dramatic, emotional, auditory and shimmeringly unformed before it becomes actual language, transformed into words on a page. Editors are sometimes surprised that I entirely rewrite pieces that have been accepted for publication. Often I surprise myself, I exasperate and frustrate myself, by entirely rewriting chapters of novels that had seemed quite acceptable the previous day; and, on later occasions, rewriting these. For always I feel that I have new ideas, always there seem to me more felicitous ways of expressing what I want to say. So this study I have been speaking of with its windows, skylight, admonitory notes and works of art on window sills, walls, surfaces, is, in a way, incidental to the process of my writing.

Rarely do I invent at the typewriter (a Japanese-made Swintec 1000 with an approximate 10-page memory, printing capacity, storage for disks), and virtually never do I try to force anything into prose in this way. I need to imagine first, purely without language; and then remember. I spend much of my time away from the study, in fact. I spend much of my time in motion. Running (my favorite activity, in which my metabolism seems somehow "normal"), walking, bicycling. Driving a car (cruise control recommended) or being driven in one. In airports, on airplanes. So often, airports and airplanes! And in that twilight state between sleep and waking in the very early morning, before the rudely steep climb of the day's foothills and mountains. These are interludes when I try to think through what I am going to write at a later time; I try to envision scenes, to "hear" speech. At my desk I remember, though not merely. I am one of those writers who needs to know the ending of a work before she can begin with much confidence and energy. Of course the work will evolve, all imaginative work evolves in time, once its roots are established. But the ending must be there, in the unconscious at least, before there can be a strong beginning.

Still, I love my study. It's the place to which I return, with myriad daydreams, sketchy memories, scraps of paper. (Emily Dickinson, too, wrote on scraps of paper, folded and placed in the pockets of her apron. In the evening, in the freedom of her room, she took out these scraps to contemplate them.) At certain hours of the day the room is flooded with light and it is often warmer than other parts of the house, ideal for a rather icy-blooded individual. The other day a near-grown fawn approached a window to peer inside at me. I thought her expression was quizzical, bemused. What on earth is that human being doing? What can she be taking so seriously? Not herself, surely? But what?

JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author of numerous books including short story collections, poetry, plays, literary criticism, essays, and novels, the most recent of which is The Tattooed Girl (Ecco, 2003). She is also the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.

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