Author Meets Southland Students : Joyce Carol Oates Lightens Up During Lecture Tour

She’s pale and painfully thin, with enormous dark eyes set in a serious face. Earlier in her career she was known to decline giving interviews and public talks, and even today writer Joyce Carol Oates looks like a woman who would rather go to the dentist than stand in front of a large audience.

Yet, during a recent visit to Chapman College in Orange, Oates met with 100 students in an informal question-and-answer session, held a press conference with three journalists, three photographers and a gallery of faculty onlookers and talked to almost 1,000 people who attended her reading and lecture. In each setting, the Princeton, N. J. novelist, essayist and poet turned out to be self-assured, relaxed and disarmingly witty.

Oates, 48, is one of the most prolific (38 books in 26 years of publishing) of contemporary American writers. She came to Southern California with Raymond Smith, her husband of 25 years, to spend three days college-hopping: first to UCLA, then to Chapman, then to Claremont McKenna College. Afterward she and Smith, a former English professor who now runs the Ontario Review Press, spent a few days in the desert before flying back to the East Coast.

“This is a sort of a holiday for me,” Oates explained at Chapman. Asked if she found it difficult to balance all her roles--writer, teacher (Oates is a lecturer in creative writing at Princeton University), co-editor (of the Ontario Review, a biannual literary magazine), public lecturer, wife, friend--she added that “I don’t think I do anything more extraordinary than most people I know.” Writing is “hard work for me, that makes me nervous, that makes me tense,” but “I like to work with young writers, I consider that enjoyment.”

Young writers had plenty of questions for Oates in the afternoon session, where the visitor confessed that she began concocting tales as a teen-ager, and “probably wrote a million pages before the first thing got published . . . I wrote novels just to practice, the way you practice the piano . . . One thing I tell my students is to find the subjects that are their own . . . I haven’t thought about writing a novel in 18 months, because the last one (“Marya: A Life”) was so difficult.”

“What is your purpose in writing?” asked an earnest young man. “Are you interested in conveying your feelings to the public, do you write for yourself . . . or is it just bread and butter now?”

Crusts of Bread

“Bread and butter,” Oates said immediately, dead-pan, startling her audience into laughter. “Crusts.” Turning more serious, she added, “I come from a family that’s not really artistic. My father plays the piano a little, but he’s not really an artist . . . my mother raises flowers . . . (things that) are not really artistic or exportable, but they’re creative. Everybody’s creative.” By channeling her own creativity into writing, Oates said, “I want to communicate with other people, and talk about the mystery of life, and the beauty and cruelty and complexity of life.”

Asked how one can write good dialogue, she advised the mostly undergraduate listeners to pay attention to what real people say. “People say funny things. You can tape-record people, and blackmail them later,” she joked. “Go around with your little surveillance kit.” In a good story, she added, “the dialogue rises from the characters. If you write it in an artificial way, it seems to come from nowhere.”

Her fiction mainly draws on what she imagines of other lives, Oates said, but “the poetry tends to be more personal . . . I use it for convalescent reasons. When I feel very (spiritually) weak, I read a lot of poetry. Music and poetry, they bring you back, they fill up the soul, like a well that has to be replenished.”

To be a good creative writer, Oates mused, it helps to be a little odd, to be an outsider. “If you’re completely normal and acculturated and integrated into society, there’s not much to write about. But if you’re excluded from things, you have the sharp eye and ear, the qualities you need . . . You can’t write stories that are sweet and kind” and still be interesting, she said; writers need “an edge to (their) vision.”

Oates grew up in Millersport, N.Y., a town too small to appear on maps. She won a scholarship to Syracuse University, earned an MA at the University of Wisconsin (where she met and married Smith), then taught at the University of Detroit and the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. Since 1978 she’s taught part time at Princeton, living in a house in the country outside town and spending her mornings writing.

Wide Range of Subjects

Her writing covers a wide spectrum of themes and genres. She won the National Book Award in 1970 for “them,” a novel set in violence-torn Detroit slums. She’s written books with political overtones (for instance, “The Assassins,” 1975) and books focusing on relationships (including “Solstice,” 1985, a rich characterization of passionate friendship between women). Oates’ many other books include a detective novel, a gothic, a romance, a family chronicle and several books of literary criticism, short stories and poetry.

Early this year “Marya: A Life” debuted, and last month saw the publication of a new collection of macabre short stories, “Raven’s Wing,” which The Times book reviewer Carolyn See called “perfect” depictions of “the marginal and the homeless, the spiritually bereft.”

An essay called “On Boxing,” which Oates said she researched and wrote because she’s fascinated by “this sort of tissue intelligence (of coordination and strength) that ordinary people don’t have or understand, and kind of disparage,” will be published as a small book by Doubleday & Co. next March. One Oates short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” was recently adapted by director Joyce Chopra into the critically acclaimed film, “Smooth Talk.”

Critics have marveled for years at Oates’ ability to be not-nice in her writing. Many of her fictional characters are emotionally twisted; some, like Bobbie Gotteson, the central figure in a 1976 book called “Triumph of the Spider Monkey,” are psychopaths. Frequently criticized in the 1970s for the violence in her stories, Oates wrote an essay in response called “Why Is Your Writing So Violent?” published in 1981 in the New York Times Book Review.

‘Sexist’ Question

The question was “always insulting . . . always ignorant . . . always sexist,” Oates wrote, and it was never asked of serious male writers because of a public perception that “war, rape, murder and the more colorful minor crimes evidently fall within the exclusive province of the male writer, just as, generally, they fall within the exclusive province of male action.”

“I am a feminist,” Oates said in her evening talk at Chapman, “as are most women who have any kind of interest in a professional career.” But, she added, she is not a feminist who feels hostile to men.

Mixing poems and short prose pieces with informal comments about her life and work, Oates came back again and again to the question of what it means to be both a writer and a woman today. Once, she said, she read some feminist poems at a writers conference and was approached afterward by a pugnacious man who said he found her ideas anti-male and personally insulting. Oates said she told the man that “ ‘Women are angry in a sort of generic sense, (from) being oppressed by men, now and then, a few times in the last 1,500 years . . . ‘ “

“ ‘Not by me,’ ” the man insisted.

“ ‘Maybe not by you personally,’ ” Oates said she told him, “ ‘but you’ve profited by it (the oppression).’ ”

In literature, Oates said, “I don’t think there’s a distinctly male or female voice. The writer is genderless.” Yet society has never accepted that concept, she added. “A woman who writes is a writer by her definition, but a woman writer by others’ definitions. The irony is that while there are women writers, there are no men writers, because the word writer implies a man.”

Literary Rules

The subjects acceptable in literature have always been “male,” Oates said. “If somebody wanted to write about domestic things, that was considered not literary, even though one could write about hunting and fishing and sword-fighting and bull-fighting.” Throughout history, it’s been commonly believed that “women can’t write, women can’t paint . . . even if (a woman writer) is Emily Dickinson, she can still be dismissed” by the critics, Oates said.

Once Oates appeared on the Dick Cavett Show and was told by Cavett that “ ‘you write like a man,’ and I said, ‘Which man?’ And he punched me in the nose,” she joked. “No, he was very nice about it,” but she was displeased with the intended compliment. Recently, she added, after part of her boxing essay was published in the New York Times Magazine, writer Norman Mailer told her, “ ‘That essay was so good, I almost thought I’d written it!’ He meant it as the highest compliment . . . that’s like God had written it,” Oates said.

Even today, she said, women are accused of lacking what writer William Gass has called “ ‘the blood-congested genital drive’ ” necessary for great writing. How can such an attitude be countered? Oates asked rhetorically, and answered herself: “With resilience, with a sense of humor, with stubbornness, with anger, with hope.”