Sidetracked again, or one thing leads to another

I'm seriously wondering whether to re-name this blog The Accidental Reader.  After reporting on my reading in progress and plans for the rest of the month, in which I mentioned Joyce Carol Oates, I started hankering after reading another of her novels.  This led to my pondering the question of her amazing productivity, which in turn led me to take Greg Johnson's biography Invisible Writer down from the shelf and before I knew it I was on page 303 having read nothing else all weekend.

Some passages which struck me:

"None of her classmates or teachers knew that she had written a novel while still in junior high, or could have guessed that she had now begun a deliberate apprenticeship, "consciously training myself by writing novel after novel." For the time being, the fifteen-year-old Joyce put aside any notion of publication, throwing away her apprentice novels as soon as she completed them: "I seem to have written them as a pianist practises scales and exercises."  Some of the novels - she wrote roughly a dozen of them - were deliberate imitations of the masters she read in her classes." (p.52)

"Reading was "the greatest pleasure of civilization," she remarked to one interviewer, and in a later essay titled "Literature as Pleasure, Pleasure as Literature," she argued that "reading constitutes the keenest, because most secret, sort of pleasure."  Since her teenage years Joyce had turned her chronic insomnia into the opportunity to perform what had become, for her, a "sacramental" act, one that represented an intimate and profound communion with another consciousness.  "It is the sole means," she wrote, "by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin; another's voice; another's soul." (p.140-1)

Her devotion to Flaubert's dictum: "Live like the bourgeoisie so you can be wild in your imagination."

The critic Alfred Kazin remarked of her "her mind is unbelievably crowded with psychic existences, with such a mass of stories that she lives by being wholly submissive to them."

Discussing the almost separate life and personality that she perceives the writer 'Joyce Carol Oates' to have in comparison to the inner person who writes:

"The famous writer who consented to these public appearances, however, was "Joyce Carol Oates," a person still quite distinct in Joyce's mind from the private, invisible writer who conducted, again like Emily Dickinson, a richly rewarding interior life at home.  Joyce's only apprehension about the move to Princeton, in fact, was feeling "doomed to perform in the role of 'Joyce Carol Oates,' " whereas in Windsor she had felt comfortably anonymous as "Joyce Smith."  Two years earlier, she had chafed at the occasional "restriction to a few cubic feet of consciousness: Joyce Carol Oates,"  feeling herself "fated to spend hours as a kind of secretary to that person, answering her mail, turning down requests politely ... As Oates' public fortunes rise, mine must necessarily fall; as hers level off or decline, I gain." "

And this poignant comment on her marriage:

" "my marriage has made my life stable.  Ray is a center; perhaps the center without which .... But it's useless to speculate."  She described him as "kindly, loving, sweet, at times critically intelligent, sensitive, funny, unambitious ... Ray is an extraordinary person whose depths are not immediately obvious."  The idea of living without him would be "like the end of the universe, the obliteration of time.  Unthinkable.  If I survived his loss it wouldn't be Joyce who survived but another lesser, broken person." "

How very sad then to read of his death in February this year here and here.

After the death of a close friend Joyce in 1980, Greg Johnson's biography notes

"Joyce turned to her work for solace.... She reflected on the degree to which her own writing represented "an idyll, a true 'romance' " to which she could always turn in times of pain and confusion, For Joyce, art was always the supreme consolation: "A vision on the page; the works' integrity; allowing me constantly to change form - and to slip free.  My salvation." "