Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Is this a coincidence? Only a coincidence—Ray and I met at a graduate student reception, not at Christmas but in October. And it can only be a coincidence, Paul is eight years older than Vanessa. As I read further it seems clear that Paul is Ray’s alter ego, the center of consciousness of the novel; the story is being related retrospectively, after Vanessa’s death/suicide, as Paul, at this time forty-one, a Jesuit, looks back upon their (not quite consummated?) love affair, which he’d broken off. Most of the notes focus on Paul:
He comes from a middle-class family in Milwaukee, Irish mother, father discontented with the “burden” of wife and children . . . Paul’s formal religious duties consist of saying mass every morning and saying his brievery [sic] . . . which have become mechanical to him . . . He feels that he functions “religiously” mainly when he helps other people . . . He is one of the “new” priests. Paul meets Vanessa in his fourth year when he is working on his dissertation . . . He thinks of her as superior to the other graduate students he knows and feels a certain protectiveness toward her. He is happy to read her poetry and offer criticism.
This, too, is coincidental—I think—for when Ray met me, he was in his fourth, final year as a graduate student, and he was writing his dissertation. Ray, too, volunteered to read some of my writing—not poetry, but fiction—including a story that had been published in
Mademoiselle
when I was nineteen. And I think that he felt “protective” toward me. . . .
What is fictitious about Paul is his career as a Jesuit academic: after leaving Madison, Wisconsin, he acquires a position at the University of Detroit (!) and later becomes chair of the English department at Fordham, a Jesuit-run university in New York. Vanessa, the troubled poet, drops out of graduate school after having failed her M.A. orals—she’s too brilliantly independent-minded to give her questioners the answers they expect . . . (Surely this is a coincidence, though I didn’t fail my M.A. orals in the spring of 1961 I was given a difficult time by my [male, smug] interrogators, and advised not to seek a Ph.D.; Ray was incensed on my behalf, more than I was, since I had not the slightest interest at the time in continuing the grim dull ordeal of graduate school.)
Reading Ray’s notes, hearing Ray’s voice—questing, questioning—the author addressing himself on the subject of his characters—(who are invariably as “real” as individuals in the “real” world, to the novelist)—leaves me terribly moved. It’s so clear that Paul
is
Ray—the Ray who’d lived out his father’s hope for him, and became that most elite of Catholic priests—a Jesuit. (Among the Catholic religious orders, the Society of Jesus is the Brahmin caste. Perversely, Jesuits take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—but Jesuits have traditionally/historically moved in the highest social classes in both Europe and the United States and have exerted political influence disproportionate to their numbers. Among Ray’s priest-friends were several Jesuits, my colleagues at the University of Detroit.)
It seems clear that Ray may have felt a strong attraction to the Church, despite his intellectual rejection of it; and that Ray identified with the “celibate” Paul, attracted to a young woman in defiance of his vows.
The crux of the novel is Paul’s rejection of Vanessa, and Vanessa’s subsequent suicide, not immediately but several years later. The present tense of the novel is the requiem mass Paul says for his former lover and his realization belatedly that he loved her—“If she could be brought back to life, would he leave the Church for her? Would he leave the priesthood to save her?” Amid much speculation is the blunt statement:
He has not left the priesthood for her. She is dead.
Paul and Vanessa are meant to suggest Abelard and Eloise, the fated lovers of medieval Catholic tradition, whose letters Ray had read and found deeply moving. Clearly there is a parallel also with the life and early death of Sylvia Plath, for Vanessa like Plath commits suicide by turning on a gas oven in a rented flat in London. (Recall that, when Ray was writing this novel in the late 1950s, the vogue for Sylvia Plath had only just begun and this material, far from being over-familiar as it would seem to us now, was quite daring for a novelist to explore.) Paul, however, is no Ted Hughes—his sexuality is self-conscious, thwarted. He’s a Catholic steeped in a sense of sin, as Ray was, by his own account, in adolescence; when he feels desire for Vanessa, and gives in to that desire, he is inadvertently condemning her to death—suicide: “To what extent is P. implicated in V.’s suicide? He has encouraged her in her poetry, which was life-giving to her . . . But when he realized he loved her, he decides not to see her again. . . .” And, the final note in the first section: “What about the Journal? How does P. get hold of it? V.’s point of view—helps fill in last days. No answers here, however.”
Following the typed notes are a dozen tablet-paper pages covered in Ray’s handwriting, twenty-three numbered paragraphs. I am not able to read more than a fraction of this handwriting—I am beginning to feel dazed, disoriented—how sad it seems to me, that Ray worked so hard on this novel, cared so much for his characters!—who must have dwelt deep within him, for years. Isolated queries—“Have V.’s voice recorded some way????”—“Would it be too idealistic for V. to give P. up?—remove herself from
his
life?”
Heartbreaking to see so detailed an outline for the novel—twenty-six chapters indicated by place names (London, Madison, Madison, London, Detroit, London, New York, London, etc.) with intercalations from the poet’s Journal (“poetry circuit in Midwest,” “midnight walk on George Washington Bridge,” “last days before suicide & poem ‘Black Mass’ ”)—chronologies of the lives of the characters—an obituary from the Sunday
Times
on the poet’s death, and much, much more . . . There is even an alternative ending, in which V. only just attempts suicide, and P. hurries to her, in London: “How can I show Paul making his choice—partially by the fact that he’s in London? Hopes she will recover, there won’t be brain damage, wonders whether she’ll be sorry she’s alive” (This breaks off without a punctuation mark.) The novel begins
in medias res
with a densely typed page of which most has been crossed out, though I can read what has been crossed out if I peer carefully at it. The prose is flat, blunt, affect-less and reportorial in the Hemingway mode, as a means of creating subtextual tension, but the author must have been dissatisfied with this beginning because in a few pages the scene evaporates and he begins again from another perspective.
Astonishing, I discover a dream-account Ray had written! Here is my young husband writing in a way he’d rarely spoken to me:
DREAM
In the dream I visited Marquette High school—where my classmates who’d become priests (about 1 dozen) were present . . . a sort of reunion?—dressed in “civilian” clothing—richly colored sport coats, suits and ties, each one different as if the colors matched personalities . . . Sitting on a sofa talking to my old friend upon whom Jerry in the novel is based. I looked at him with the idea of how to improve my description of Jerry’s features, feeling a little guilty about this. Later I was standing, talking to the Master of Discipline Father Boyle who seemed pleased to see me. I talked to him in the persona of the character Paul in my novel, telling him among other things that I had been ordained two years ago. In contrast to the others, I was not so richly dressed, but wore a sleeveless sweater instead of a coat—my position (duties?) were different. I was in an inferior position to them. How this is to be interpreted is puzzling. Fr. Boyle was wearing the usual cassock. Earlier I’d received a letter from the former principal with a handwritten note: “This Alumni Newsletter would like to hear about one Raymond Smith.” (The other Raymond Smith in my class is dead.)
There is no question but that the dream ties in with the novel! The novel may be seen as a belated attempt to enter upon a “higher” vocation, which would have pleased my father(s). It can be seen, too, as demonstrating what would have been wrong with that path. Paul is an alter ego—he is how I would have been had I entered the Jesuits at 19 instead of having a nervous breakdown.
This is stunning to me . . . “Nervous breakdown.”
In fact, Ray had told me when we’d first met—something about a “breakdown” about ten years before—in our early, intense conversations we spoke of things we would not speak of again. So in a sense I knew this, though I would have said that I’d forgotten it.
I had known, too, that there was another “Raymond Smith” in Ray’s high school class, who’d become a priest, and who had died. He’d died in some mysterious way, at a Jesuit residence in Ohio. Ray had said that the two “Ray Smiths” had been friendly in high school but hadn’t been close friends; yet when “Father Ray Smith” died, when Ray was studying in Madison, he’d been very upset.
Not since the early days of our courtship had Ray and I spoken of Ray’s alleged “breakdown”—he’d confessed to me, and I told him that it made absolutely no difference to me; I’d kissed him, and assured him—which was true, of course—that whatever had happened to him, ten years before, wasn’t important to me and would not alter my feelings for him in the slightest.
As I’d told Ray about my “heart murmur”—“tachycardia”—and he’d said it made no difference to him, either.
All these years, these intervening decades—neither the “breakdown” nor the “heart murmur” had consequences in our marriage. But these were gestures of openness, confiding, intimacy at the start of our love for each other, that make me cry now, recalling.
From Ray’s notes to himself, catechism-style, handwritten in fading blue ink:
“What function did the ‘nervous breakdown’ have?”
It lifted me right out of the situation I was in—the religious situation—the terrible guilt—kept me out of churches and away from anything religious—gave me a chance to see things more objectively . . .
“How did you contrive the ‘breakdown’?”
I allowed myself to get run-down—inadequate food and sleep. Didn’t keep up with my college subjects—unprepared for big chem. exam—didn’t go to school that morning—kept worrying myself with moral hairsplitting—like breaking fast, bad thoughts, etc.
“What brought you out of it?”
“Love”—“affair” with young woman at the sanitarium—this gave me reason to live, gave me something to think of—a new obsession, as it were. Psychiatrist had referred to me as being “Love-starved.” (Would Paul be love-starved?)
These words, I read over—and over: “ ‘Love’—‘affair’ with a young woman at the sanitarium” . . . “Psychiatrist had referred to me as being ‘love-starved.’ ”
Ray had never told me this. In his account of his “breakdown” at nineteen he’d been brief, and vague; he’d seemed embarrassed, and ashamed; he’d appeared anxious, as if fearing that I might be repelled by what he was telling me. He’d told me virtually nothing about women with whom he’d gone out before meeting me; it was my impression that he’d never had an actual “love affair”—that I was the first woman/girl he’d loved. . . .
Of course, it should not surprise me: a young man of nineteen is certainly likely to fall in love, and to have a “love affair.” It should not fill me with unease to learn this, after Ray’s death; and so many years after it happened.
But he hadn’t told me! It was his secret. He’d been “love-starved”—someone else had provided that love.
I try to instruct myself: ten years later, when we met in Madison, Ray was a different person, and obviously he’d broken off with the young woman in the sanitarium, long before. It’s ridiculous for me to feel such belated jealousy—on a May morning in 2008, reading of a love affair that had occurred in 1949 . . .
But I am beginning to feel light-headed. I have been trying to ignore a sort of stinging electric-current pain between my shoulder blades, exacerbated by the way I am leaning over my desk, reading the dense-typed pages. And I have been trying to ignore the curious blots and blotches in my eyes, like slow-drifting gnats in the corner of my vision.
Love-starved.
How true this is. In May 2008 as in that long-ago season of breakdown 1949.
Why didn’t you finish your novel
,
Ray?
I set it aside and never went back. I became interested in other things.
So Ray told our friends, always with a smile. So Ray told anyone who knew he’d once been working on a novel.
Often adding
Bringing out a magazine is much more rewarding. You get to know new writers
,
each issue is new
,
each mail delivery . . . there are constant surprises.
This is the way Ray began to feel, in time. Where originally he’d wanted to be a writer, eventually in the 1970s he shifted his creative instincts to editing/publishing. As he was revealed to be a born gardener with a gardener’s zest for working in the soil with his hands, so he was revealed to be a born editor with a zest for working with writers, nurturing their work and publishing it. Many of his closest friendships were editor/writer relationships forged in the intimacy of letters, phone calls, faxes. With his Jesuit-trained scrupulosity for “perfection” Ray was an ideal line-editor and made it a principle to read, reread, and reread material—in manuscript, in galleys, and in page proofs.
Editors and gardeners are perennial optimists. No one steeped in a tragic sense of life can be either.
It was fortunate for Ray that he’d set his fiction writing aside. The Jesuit-trained scrupulosity that made him an excellent and enthusiastic editor was a handicap in the writing of fiction which can become obsessive for such personalities, exhausting and claustrophobic. Those of us who’ve been writers for most of our lives feel conflicted about urging others to write—and relief at hearing that someone has “set aside” a wish to write.
That Ray was working sporadically for years on a single novel without completing it suggests that, for all his impassioned identification with his central character, he hadn’t the artist’s necessary instinct for finishing a project and moving on. Essential as it is to be immersed in one’s work it is equally essential to move through it, and past it. It’s a terrible thing to be devoured by one’s work—you must learn to leap free of it as one might leap free of a raging fire.
Of course there are great writers who’ve been devoured by their work, but not happily so—James Joyce is the most extreme example, in his fanatic immersion in
Finnegans Wake
(his “monster” book) for more than a decade.
But overall, the writer must beware of becoming mesmerized by his material and lacking the perspective to organize it. It seems clear from the fragmentary pages of
Black Mass
that Ray left behind that he was utterly mesmerized by his material, that so paralleled his own life. Lengthy scenes of impassioned dialogue, densely packed passages of childhood memories, exposition, analysis—chapters that break off abruptly, alternative sub-plots that are taken up, then discarded—the novel fragment thrums with a vivid, felt life, an authentic
cri de coeur
of one wracked by guilt for having escaped with his own life—
Black Mass
is fascinating to me, to read yet would probably be impenetrable to someone else.
Initially, the (mad) thought had come to me—
Maybe I should finish
Black Mass.
If it’s near completion
,
I can complete it.
Except that it isn’t anywhere near completion. An entirely new work would have to be erected on this shaky foundation. And to what purpose?
There is no point in thinking
Ray would want this.
Surely,
Ray would not want this.
Yet, the prospect of “completing” the novel hovers before me, tantalizingly. For my own writing moves with such excruciating slowness.
How much easier for me to be mesmerized by this material, and feel an intimacy with my lost husband of a kind I didn’t have while Ray was alive.
For all that I knew Ray so well, I didn’t know his
imagination.
I knew his daily, hourly self. I knew his sweet, kindly, ever-thoughtful domestic self. And I knew him as a presence among others—his “social” self. But it can’t be claimed that I knew anything of Ray’s
imagination
, as evidenced by this fragmentary novel.
That Ray would create a priest-protagonist, for instance. That the “religious situation”—the “terrible guilt”—was so predominant in his life several years after he had left the Jesuit seminary and broken with the Church. Paul, Vanessa . . . The celibate Jesuit, the “brilliantly talented, troubled” poet . . . They seem to me immensely attractive people, quite vivid and “real” on the page.
As I read through the fragmentary
Black Mass
—trying to establish a probable sequence of scenes, though many pages are not numbered and much has been crossed out—it’s as if I am inside Ray’s head, magically—as if he hasn’t died but is still young, and hopeful: typing these words rapidly on a manual typewriter in his quick-darting way—for he’d never taken time to learn to type, he’d used just one or two fingers of each hand.
On nearly every page I am likely to be startled by a nugget of memory, an incident about which Ray had told me years ago, long forgotten and now suddenly recalled:
One night Lucy [Paul’s sister] told me about her fiancée. We were sitting out at the kitchen table . . . I was drinking a bottle of my father’s beer. I had been in the seminary about four years and was home for a visit. “I gave in to him,” she said. “Last night—I let him touch me—the two of us—so close. It’s supposed to be a mortal sin. I don’t think it’s a sin when you love someone. I love him so.” She was looking across the table, waiting for my judgment. I couldn’t contradict her, give her a sense of guilt . . .
And, more jarring:
We sat across from each other at a table in the student cafeteria with its panoramic view of the frozen lake [Mendota] white and silent, the ice occasionally cracking like a rifle. Our coffee cups were empty. The little magazine V. had handed to me—
Pacific Review
—lay open on the table. I was reading the poem for the second time trying to concentrate . . . In signing the poem V. had used only her first two initials and surname. I thought this curious.
“Why the initials?” I asked.
“So the editor wouldn’t know it’s a woman,” she said.
I looked up to see that she was watching me, seriously. Her thick dark hair was brushed back from her shoulders.
“I don’t understand,” I said. . . .
“It’s easier for a man to be published than a woman,” she said matter-of-factly, lighting her cigarette.
I looked doubtful.
“It’s like that in every area of life,” she said, a little heatedly. “All else being equal, it’s easier for a man than a woman. More is expected of a woman—a superior performance.”
I saw that she lived in a world where women competed with men. I had never thought of it that way before—of the two sexes competing professionally. This kind of competition was absent from the Church. Nuns did not compete with priests. Women could approach the altar only as far as the communion railing.
This exchange, almost verbatim, was one Ray and I had had, in the Wisconsin student union. We, too, had a table overlooking frozen Lake Mendota. Ray, too, had expressed skepticism about my remarks—a sort of playful, flirtatious skepticism—though he’d seemed sympathetic, essentially. It’s jarring that Ray should so casually state “nuns did not compete with priests”—as if nuns were a sub-species, set beside their male counterparts—but for me, more jarring to realize that, except for the cigarette V. is smoking, the portrait of V. seems very familiar . . .
Is Ray writing about
me
?
Or maybe just partly—drawing upon Sylvia Plath, his young wife Joyce, and his own imagination . . .
Another jarring thing: I am beginning to realize that much of
Black Mass
must have been written after Ray had met me, and not before. Always he’d led me to believe that the bulk of the manuscript had been written before 1960 and so could have nothing to do with our relationship, or with me, but judging from the chronological outlines, which take the narrative into the 1970s, Ray was certainly working on the manuscript as late as 1972, 1973, 1974.
One of the chapters brings Paul to London, where Ray and I had lived in 1971–1972. The streets Ray describes are streets we’d walked on, often, in Mayfair, where we’d lived in a flat overlooking Hyde Park; frequently we passed the massive American Embassy with its security guards in perpetual readiness against anti-American picketers. I am fascinated to see how Ray used this material, as background to his Midwestern love story; it had never been possible for me to set a work of fiction in London, though I’d loved the city, as Ray had.
Fascinating, too, to see what use Ray has made of the Modern Language Association meeting in Chicago, to which we’d gone from Beaumont, Texas; and what use he has made of Detroit; and of his own brief tenure as chair of the English department at Windsor. Whenever Vanessa enters the narrative, the tone shifts—Vanessa is the mysterious other, like Christabel in Coleridge’s gothic poem: the (male) protagonist is drawn to her as if against his will, as she is drawn to him: the (forbidden) celibate priest.
Did Ray think of himself as a (forbidden) celibate priest, in his marriage?
Did Ray think of me, his wife, as a “mysterious other”?
Truly, I don’t think so. I can’t think so. There was much laughter in our marriage.
Black Mass
is a myth, not a literal replica of life.
I must keep that in mind. I must not upset myself, reading meanings into this material that might not be there.
Maybe the girl with whom he fell in love in the sanitarium. Maybe this is the “mysterious other”—who had saved him from despair
,
and whom he’d lost.
But Vanessa is a poet, allegedly a very good poet. And Vanessa kills herself, when Paul rejects her.
Paul rejects her because he has taken vows of celibacy, as a Jesuit priest. Paul does not reject her because he doesn’t love her. Devoted as Vanessa was to her poetry, as Paul says: “Her poetry wasn’t enough.”
Lost love, a death sentence. It is said to Paul, by an angry friend of Vanessa: “You celibate. You bloody celibate. And now you want to write a book about her.”
Now, I am writing a book about Ray.
I am writing a book about the (lost) Ray.
Black Mass
isn’t complete but there is an ending of a sort, a poem by Vanessa which Paul discovers after her death. The last words are
Rest in peace
,
rest in peace.
What I wish: that Ray had shown me the manuscript of
Black Mass
after he’d worked on it further. That we’d spoken more openly about it. That I might have helped him. (I might have encouraged him.) Maybe, when he’d first shown me the manuscript, when we were first married, I hadn’t known what to say, and had not said the right things. As a young wife married to an “older” man—a man with an air of authority, in matters in which I was naively inexperienced—I had so rarely expressed any opinion that was not intended to placate him, or to entertain or impress him; it was years before I summoned the courage to suggest to Ray that I did not really like some of the music he frequently played on our stereo—such macho-hectic compositions as Prokofiev’s
Alexander Nevsky
, the chorale ending of Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony
with its relentless
joy joy joy
like spikes hammered into the skull, much of Mahler . . .
Now, I would be so happy to hear this music booming out of the stereo.
Mostly the house is silent, since Ray died. I have not played a single CD. Rarely do I turn on the radio in the kitchen, to which Ray listened when he prepared his breakfast or made coffee.
Ray’s coffee: the package is still in the refrigerator. Since I don’t drink coffee, it will never be touched again. Yet I can’t bring myself to throw it away, as I can’t bring myself to remove Ray’s books from the coffee table . . . I am afraid that, when friends come to visit, over a period of months—years?—they will see these books in exactly the same place and feel pity for me . . .
But I can’t. I can’t move Ray’s books. If I take them away there will be emptiness there. I can’t.
As dusk comes on, the pain between my shoulder blades is gradually worsening. And there seem to be related pains, short vertical pains, around my rib cage. But I can’t stop reading
Black Mass
, I am drawn into the melancholy tale of P. and V.—the celibate priest, the “brilliantly talented troubled poet” . . . Almost, I can forget that this is fiction; it has the tone of memoir, to which fictitious elements have been added, like the light strokes of a watercolor brush.
Amid a section of unnumbered red-ink pages near the end of the novel there are several paragraphs crossed out, which I can decipher, barely. This seems to be a memory sequence—Paul recalling his sister’s “rebellious behavior”—not the “good” sister Lucy but a “bad” sister Caroline—younger than Lucy—a girl of twelve who flares up in anger against the righteous father—refuses to say the rosary with the family—is obstreperous at mass—becomes personally messy, “smelly”—laughs “inappropriately.”
“Caroline” is clearly Carol. Ray is writing about his institutionalized sister Carol. But the typed scene breaks off in the middle of a page.
Then, a few pages later, in scrawled handwriting there’s a new memory sequence involving Caroline in which Paul’s father summons their parish priest—the priest “prays over” Caroline who is believed to be “demon-possessed”—there is an “exorcism” conducted in the parents’ bedroom—Paul (who is nine at the time) and Lucy are terrified and kept from seeing what is done to their sister; at a later time, Caroline is taken forcibly to a doctor/clinic—a “lobotomy” is performed on her brain, to “calm” her—when Paul sees his sister again, he doesn’t recognize her at first. She will be committed to “St. Francis of Assisi”—a hospital, or a residence . . .