Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
You have been constantly in my thoughts knowing as I do the devastation of raw grief over the loss of one’s nearest and dearest. What a privilege though in this life to have a marriage like yours combining in perfect harmony love and work. From the very first time I met you and Ray, I admired your rich collaboration and the loving way you treated each other . . . Though it may not help to assuage the sadness of your loss, I pass on to you something [my late husband] said to me in the days before his death: “You will be grief-stricken for the rest of your life, but don’t lose your vitality.”
***
There is no easy way to live through what you are experiencing. I know this so well. Nothing anyone says makes the pain go away. I forever and ever miss my life as it was with [my late husband] and to this day it is just as poignant and meaningful and monumental.
***
After nearly two years my wounds are less raw but I’m constantly reminded of [my late husband] and am beginning to find comfort in letting him live in my heart. I want his memory kept alive . . . I think I was in shock for a long time after he died—barely functional. It’s hard for me to imagine how you manage to continue teaching—being your public self . . . Please be kind with yourself. Healing will come in in its own good time. But you do need time for yourself. Oh how I wish we were closer. Please call me any time. I love you Joyce and embrace and kiss you through these miles.
***
. . . a note to say how often I have thought of you since Ray died—the absolute finality of death is both the most obvious thing about it & the most astonishing—it took me a long time to get beyond being stunned by [my husband’s] death, which was in fact quite predictable. (I see now.) I hope you are well & working—writing was at first just another hard part—there was no one to read it. But there is . . .
***
From the first e-mail you sent me that Monday morning with the shocking news, I noticed this: even though you were in a state of shock, at a time when living without Ray surely seemed unimaginable (as I would think it still does), when, if your experience was like mine, you may not have wanted to go on living—even then the words you chose showed a resilience and intention to live through it and recover your life. I noticed this, since not everyone has that—it’s quite involuntary, I think: but I felt that way too when widowed so suddenly. Then, when you were at Jeanne’s, I could see that in spite of the terrible grief you were going through, you were not depressed: you were alert, noticing, engaging the life around you. I was relieved and glad to see that. Not that one ever “gets over it.” Recently someone said she was glad I had “gotten over” the grief for my husband and I immediately asked her, “What makes you think I have gotten over it?” And [my husband died] twenty years ago.
Dear Joyce, you know that words break and slip at times like these . . .
Yes. Words may be “helpless”—yet words are all we have to shore against our ruin, as we have only one another.
An hour has passed. The sun has shifted. Both cats have left the courtyard and I am alone and the aloneness weighs upon me like something leaden. It’s a measure of my
disembodiment
that I have to think, to recall where I am; why I am here, outside in the courtyard.
So many letters and cards! So much sympathy, and kindness!
I meant to begin answering the letters. I’ve brought postcards outside with me, and Ray’s address book as well as my own; but now I am overcome with lethargy, a sick sinking sensation.
This is a mistake. I can’t do this. Not yet.
In all this time—an hour and a half—I have opened only a fraction of the letters in the bag. The bag is still heavy with letters and cards and I am so terribly sorry, I just can’t do it.
Please forgive me, if you are one who wrote to me. The person to whom you wrote isn’t here any longer, I am not sure who this is, in her place.
Chapter 69
“Happy, and Excited”
Impulsively—naively—we’d gone to live in Beaumont, Texas.
Of all unlikely places—this industrial coastal city in southeastern Texas near the Louisiana border, in the late summer of 1961.
Ray’s first teaching job was at Lamar College in Beaumont: an assistant professorship he’d too quickly accepted after we were married in January 1961. He’d thought that he had better have a job, and a reasonably secure job, to “support” a wife. With a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century English literature from the University of Wisconsin Ray had seemed attractive to the Lamar English department as he had to several other English departments that made him early offers of assistant professorships—one I recall was in northern Wisconsin, near the Canadian border.
Somehow, we’d imagined that Texas might be romantic. We did think that Texas would be remote. Insane as it seems in retrospect, we had both wanted to put distance between ourselves and our families. . . . We’d wanted to be “independent.”
In subsequent years I would become so very attached to my parents, it seems alien to me now that I ever thought this way. Ray, too, became more attached to his family in Milwaukee, after his father’s death.
In the early 1960s, it was expected that a man would “support” a wife. It was not altogether common that a woman, even with a master’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin, would want to work, or could find work; and when I applied to teach freshman English at Lamar College, or, later, with what naiveté I could not have begun to fathom, high schools in Beaumont and vicinity, my applications were turned down.
At Lamar, though he’d suggested to Ray at the time of their interview that, if I completed my master’s degree, he might be able to “use Joyce” as a freshman English teacher, the department chair declined to hire me after all—something of a shock, and a disappointment. In the Lamar public schools, only teachers with education degrees, preferably from Texas state colleges, were qualified to teach.
(The public school system was rigorously segregated, like the city of Beaumont. Not much of this was exactly known to Ray and me when we first moved there but we soon caught on that “Ne-gras” were very different from “whites”—so different that they seemed to speak a dialect so foreign as to be near-unintelligible to our northernly ears.)
What humiliating interviews! I recall an “assistant superintendent” of Beaumont public schools staring coldly at me as if, with my degrees from Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and one or another publication listed on my
vita
, I were some sort of subversive impostor. “Your undergraduate major was English,” she said, frowning at my résumé, “and your minor was ‘phil-o-soph-y.’ ” So carefully was
phil-o-soph-y
enunciated, it might have been a rare disease.
Yes, I said hesitantly. That was correct.
“Well!” the woman said, now smiling with a look of triumph, “Did
you
study ‘phil-o-soph-y’ in high school?”
No, I admitted.
“Then how can you expect to teach it in our high schools?”
There, she had me. My pretensions were utterly exposed.
“We don’t teach ‘phil-o-soph-y’ in our Beaumont public schools, Mrs. Smith.”
The woman’s triumph was complete. My application was denied.
In my chagrin I had no idea how to reply except to murmur thanks and quickly depart.
In the parking lot Ray was waiting in our black, secondhand Volkswagen. (Our first car!—we’d had to borrow $100 from Ray’s brother to help purchase it.) Seeing the stricken look on my face Ray squeezed my hand and said, “Never mind, honey. You can stay home and write.”
Meager consolation, I thought, for such jeering professional rejection.
Beaumont, Texas! Forever afterward—for nearly five decades—when Ray and I were faced, as frequently we were, with one or another serio-comic crisis, we would say
But we’re not in Beaumont!
Or,
At least we’re not in Beaumont.
My memory of this East Texas city near the Gulf of Mexico, one of the points of the “Golden Triangle” (Beaumont, Port Arthur, Orange), is vivid, visceral: the air was hazy, fuzzy; the air tasted of rotted oranges, with a harsh chemical taste beneath; at sunset the sky erupted in apocalyptic hues of crimson, flamey-orange, bruised-purple—“Isn’t the sky
gor-geous
!” residents would exclaim, as if such sunsets were a sign from God and not rather the consequence of airborne pollution from the then-booming oil refineries along the coast.
Our predominant Beaumont memory, apart from the perpetually hazy air, was of waiting—waiting, and waiting!—in long lines of traffic at train crossings, as freight trains rattled slowly—endlessly—past. Nearly every day there was rain, and sometimes very heavy rain; gale force winds rushing up from the Gulf, a threat of hurricanes; in the aftermath of torrential rain and flash floods the roads were frequently washed away in sections, or impassable; more than once, a line of cars had to maneuver around the bloated corpse of a steer in the road; everywhere were the bodies of snakes—some of them unnervingly long—broken and mashed on the pavement. Another ongoing joke in our marriage—if “joke” is the proper term to recall an incident fraught with alarm, disgust, near hysteria—had to do with the region’s “palmetto bugs”—enormous roaches with wings that seemed to be everywhere, and invincible. In the middle of our first night in a furnished rented duplex not far from the Lamar campus I prevailed upon Ray to investigate a sound of scurrying in our bedroom, and with a flashlight Ray discovered a swarm of roaches; by this time, I was standing on a chair, not very helpfully emitting cries of terror; Ray managed to banish the roaches with a broom, afterward claiming that the larger specimens actually “stood up to him” —“glared” at him.
Next morning we discovered to our horror that the duplex was infested—mattress, bedsprings, sofa, chairs—cupboards, closets—the interior of walls; in a panicked flurry we moved out, to an apartment in a more upscale section of Beaumont which, on Ray’s modest salary, we could barely afford.
Of such memories, the most intense intimacy is born.
When you’re young, your worst blunders can turn into blessings. It was a terrible blunder to have gone to live in Beaumont, Texas—a terrible blunder for my husband to have accepted a teaching position at Lamar College where, at the end of the first semester, Ray Smith caused something of a scandal when he graded his Lamar students as if they were Wisconsin undergraduates, though he’d been hired to “raise standards” at the college; it was a blunder, and would have been a severe strain upon many marriages, for a newly married couple to live in so remote a part of the country where they knew no one, hundreds of miles from their families.
Yet, somehow: our eight or nine months exiled in Beaumont were often idyllic, tenderly intimate, and certainly productive. In these months we became so extremely close, so utterly dependent upon each other, as we had not been while living in Madison, Wisconsin, and attending classes, that we were “wedded” in this way for life, as each other’s closest friend and companion.
We established at this time the routine of our domestic lives: work through the day, a late afternoon walk, dinner, reading/work in the evening until bedtime. While Ray taught courses at the college in a great squat cube of a concrete building without windows—so constructed to save on air-conditioning costs, in the pitiless Beaumont climate—I dealt with my newfound solitude by reworking a manuscript of short stories and beginning a new novel, inspired in part by the starkness of the Texas landscape and my sense of being
in extremis
so far from all that was familiar to me. Both the short stories and the novel dealt with “philosophical” subjects—the exploration, in fiction, of ideas of predestination and autonomy, that had so fascinated me as an undergraduate at Syracuse.
Never in my life had I been so isolated, in my attachment to the world by way of a single individual, my husband. Never had I had such uninterrupted time in which to work, for previously I’d been a student, and a student’s life is fragmented and driven by schedules; now, alone for hours, I could immerse myself in my writing, like one sinking beneath the surface of the sea. In such isolation I might have drowned—there were mornings, entire days, when I felt a touch of panic, that maybe I was making a mistake, another mistake, in so plunging into what had seemed to me previously far too risky to have considered—
a writer’s life.
Always it had seemed to me, and seems to me still, a kind of boastfulness, or hubris—claiming that one is a
writer
, an
artist.
In the sub-literary working-class world of my parents and grandparents, such a claim would have been greeted with disbelief, if not derision. The drollery of the Lamar public schools administrator is exactly the sort of reaction one might have expected in upstate rural New York in those years: “ ‘Phil-o-soph-y’?”
In our (mostly) roach-free apartment in an outlying Beaumont neighborhood—Sweet Gum Lane was the luridly lyric street name!—I had time to read at length those writers who, in my undergraduate courses, had seemed to me so compelling, beguiling, haunting—Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Pascal, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Mann, Sartre, Camus. As it happened, one of my professors, Donald Dike, had taught the prose works of a writer of whom no one had heard— Samuel Beckett:
Molloy
,
Malone Dies
and
The Unnameable
. When shortly after we met, Ray learned that I’d been reading Beckett as an undergraduate, and that I’d written an essay on Beckett’s prose trilogy which had been published in an academic critical journal, he’d looked at me with some surprise but smiled saying, “Well! You must be serious.”
It might be, that I was
serious.
But my
seriousness
was never an impediment in my marriage.
At Madison, and when he’d lived in Milwaukee, before starting graduate school, Ray had wanted to be a “writer,” too—it was then he’d begun the manuscript he would title
Black Mass
, upon which he worked intermittently for years. When he gave this novel manuscript to me to read it was piecemeal—some chapters he considered “less incoherent” than others—and some passages he thought might be “fairly good”—but overall, he was doubtful, and did not wish to seek encouragement from me, as his young adoring wife. “Whatever you tell me, it can’t be objective. You would want to shield me from criticism.”
No, I said. Oh no!
Yet, this was probably true. It is probably always true when we read something written by an individual whom we love, and do not want to hurt. Our wish is for these individuals to be
made happy
—our wish is that we are the means by which they are
made happy
—objective criticism does not flourish in such soil.
For these reasons, and for other more personal reasons, I did not wish to give Ray my fiction. Ray’s response to my work was likely to be identical to his response to my cooking:
Honey this is really good!
Or,
Honey this is excellent.
Though Ray Smith was highly critical elsewhere, a controversial figure in the Lamar English department where in his first semester of teaching he’d failed more students than the rest of his colleagues combined, and gave many more Ds and C minuses, yet Ray was rarely critical of my writing; perhaps in fact he was never critical of the writing I gave him to read, but only just encouraging, enthusiastic. For more than four decades Ray read my nonfiction essays and reviews with the sharp remorseless eye of one trained by the Jesuits to detect grammatical inaccuracies and errors of logic—he was an ideal editor, one whose editorial comments are lightly marked in pencil.
I am thinking now, in writing this—Ray will never see it. . . .
Never again will I see his penciled
unclear
—the subtlety of
?.
The ideal marriage is of a writer and her/his editor—if the editor is your closest friend and companion.
In the interstices of my long writing days at a card table in our bedroom on Sweet Gum Lane, I decided to begin graduate studies at Rice University—at the time, Rice Institute of Technology—in Houston, some ninety miles away; it must have seemed, to one with a hope of teaching college, a necessary next step. I had no great love of scholarship or the kind of immersion in historical documents that is, or was, the essence of advanced graduate work in English literature, but I was eager to be self-sufficient; I did not want to be s
upported by
my husband indefinitely; I thought it unfair, that Ray must work, in such unpleasant circumstances, while I had time to write. Each midweek I would take a bus to Houston, attend two graduate seminars, both with an emphasis upon historical documents—Shakespeare, The Eighteenth Century; Ray would drive in the Volkswagen to meet me, we would have dinner and stay overnight at a hotel, and drive back to Beaumont in the morning. How romantic this was! Simply to escape from Beaumont was a great relief—by contrast Houston was a
city
, and Rice was a beautiful oasis of a campus, a place of such prestige that, when I happened to mention to a faculty wife in Beaumont that I was taking graduate courses at Rice, the woman blinked at me in amazement: “Why, it’s real hard to get into Rice—you must be
smart.
”
Abruptly I quit the Rice Ph.D. program when I discovered, on the bus trip to Houston one day, that a short story of mine that had been published in a literary magazine was listed in the “honor roll” of
The Best American Short Stories
1962
edited by the renowned Martha Foley.
It is likely that Ray read some, if not all, of the stories collected in my first book
By the North Gate
, since this book was dedicated
to Raymond Smith.
I don’t believe that Ray read my first novel
With Shuddering
Fall
, most of which was written during our Beaumont exile.