Uncensored

by Oates, Joyce Carol

• ISBN13: 9780060775575
• ISBN10: 0060775572
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Uncensored: Views & (Re)views is Joyce Carol Oates's most candid gathering of prose pieces since (Woman) Writer: Occasions & Opportunities . Her ninth book of nonfiction, it brings together thirty-eight diverse and provocative pieces from the New York Review of Books , the Times Literary Supplement , and the New York Times Book Review .Oates states in her preface, "In the essay or review, the dynamic of storytelling is hidden but not absent," and indeed, the voice of these "conversations" echoes the voice of her fiction in its dramatic directness, ethical perspective, and willingness to engage the reader in making critical judgments. Under the heading "Not a Nice Person," such controversial figures as Sylvia Plath, Patricia Highsmith, and Muriel Spark are considered without sentimentality or hyperbole; under "Our Contemporaries, Ourselves," such diversely talented figures as William Trevor, E. L. Doctorow, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Connelly, Alice Sebold, Mary Karr, Anne Tyler, and Ann Patchett are examined. In sections of "homages" and "revisits," Oates writes with enthusiasm and clarity of such cultural icons as Emily Brontë, Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Robert Lowell, Balthus, and Muhammad Ali ("The Greatest"); after a lapse of decades, she (re)considers the first film version of Bram Stoker's Dracula , and Americana , Don DeLillo's first novel, as well as the morality of selling private letters and the nostalgic significance of making a pilgrimage to Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond.Through these balanced and illuminating essays we see Oates at the top of her form, engaged with forebears and contemporaries, providing clues to her own creative process: "For prose is a kind of music: music creates 'mood.' What is argued on the surface may be but ripples rising from a deeper, subtextual urgency."

Author Biography

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
I. "Not a Nice Person"	1	(62)
Uncensored Sylvia Plath	3	(7)
"Restoring" Willie Stark	10	(18)
Catherizing Willa	28	(11)
Merciless Highsmith	39	(12)
"Glutton for Punishment": Richard Yates	51	(6)
"Not a Nice Person": Muriel Spark	57	(6)
II. Our Contemporaries, Ourselves	63	(172)
Irish Elegy: William Trevor	65	(8)
"Our Cheapened Dreams": E.L. Doctorow	73	(9)
"Despair of Living": Anita Brookner	82	(6)
An Artist of the Floating World: Kazuo Ishiguro	88	(6)
"City of Light": Robert Drewe's The Shark Net	94	(7)
L.A. Noir: Michael Connelly	101	(5)
Ringworm Belt: Memoirs by Mary Karr	106	(10)
Evolutionary Fever: Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map	116	(10)
"New Memoir": Alice Sebold's Lucky	126	(5)
Property Of: Valerie Martin's Property	131	(11)
Programmed by Art: David Lodge's Thinks...	142	(7)
Ghosts: Hilary Mantel	149	(12)
An Endangered Species: Short Stories	161	(23)
News from Everywhere: Short Stories	184	(20)
Mythmaking Realist: Pat Barker	204	(9)
Crazy for Love: Scott Spencer's A Ship Made of Paper	213	(6)
Amateurs: Anne Tyler's The Amateur Marriage	219	(10)
Memoirs of Crisis: Ann Patchett's Truth & Beauty	229	(6)
III. Homages	235	(90)
Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights	237	(11)
"Tragic Mulatta": Clotel; or, The President's Daughter	248	(11)
Ernest Hemingway	259	(13)
"You Are the We of Me": Carson McCullers	272	(9)
Remembering Robert Lowell	281	(2)
"About Whom Nothing Is Known": Balthus	283	(8)
In the Ring and Out: Jack Johnson	291	(19)
Muhammad Ali: "The Greatest"	310	(15)
IV. (Re)Visits	325	(43)
The Vampire's Secret: (Re)viewing Tod Browning's Dracula after Forty Years	327	(12)
Don DeLillo's Americana (1971) Revisited	339	(2)
Them Revisited	341	(7)
A Garden of Earthly Delights Revisited	348	(7)
On the Composition of I Lock My Door Upon Myself	355	(4)
Private Writings, Public Betrayals	359	(5)
Pilgrimage to Walden Pond: 1962, 2003	364	(4)
Acknowledgments	368

Excerpts

Uncensored: Views & (Re)views

Chapter One

Uncensored Sylvia Plath

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Edited by Karen V. Kukil

Who in February 1963 could have predicted, when a thirty-year-old American poet named Sylvia Plath committed suicide in London, distraught over the breakup of her marriage to the Yorkshire poet Ted Hughes, that Plath would quickly emerge as one of the most celebrated and controversial of postwar poets writing in English; and this in a golden era of poetry distinguished by such figures as Theodore Roethke, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, May Swenson, Adrienne Rich, as well as W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot? At the time of Plath's premature death she had published a single volume of poems that had received only moderate attention, The Colossus (1960), and a first novel, the Salingeresque The Bell Jar (which appeared a month before her death in England, under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas"), in addition to a number of strikingly bold poems in British and American magazines; her second, stronger volume of poems, Ariel, would not appear until 1965, by which time Plath's posthumous fame assured the book widespread attention, superlative reviews, and sales that would eventually make it one of the bestselling volumes of poetry to be published in England and America in the twentieth century. Plath's Collected Poems (1982), assembled and edited by Ted Hughes, would win a Pulitzer Prize.

"I am made, crudely, for success," Plath stated matter-of-factly in her journal in April 1958. Yet Plath could not have foreseen that her success would be almost entirely posthumous, and ironic: for, by killing herself impulsively and dying intestate, she delivered her precious fund of work, as well as her two young children Frieda and Nicholas, into the hands of her estranged husband, Hughes, and his proprietary sister Olywn, whom Plath had perceived as her enemies during the final, despairing weeks of her life. As her literary executor, Hughes had the power to publish what he wished of her work, or to publish it in radically "edited" (that is, expurgated) versions, like The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982); or, if he wished, he might "lose" or even destroy it, as Hughes bluntly acknowledged he had done with two of the journal notebooks written during the last three years of Plath's life. As the surviving, perennially estranged husband, Hughes excised from Plath's journals what he called "nasty bits" and "intimacies," as he had eliminated from Ariel "some of the more personally aggressive poems," with the excuse that he wanted to spare their children further distress. This new, unabridged and unexpurgated edition of the journals assembled by Karen V. Kukil, assistant curator of rare books at Smith College, is "an exact and complete transcript of the twenty-three original manuscripts in the Sylvia Plath Collection," that suggests that the person Ted Hughes most wanted to spare from distress and exposure was himself.

The Unabridged Journals document, in obsessive and exhausting detail Plath's undergraduate years at Smith College and her term as a Fulbright fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge; her marriage to Ted Hughes; and two years of teaching and writing in Northampton, Massachusetts, and in Boston. With the exception of appendices and fragments from 1960 to 1962, the most vivid of which describes the birth of Plath's second child, Nicholas, in January 1962, the Journals break off abruptly in November 1959 as Plath and Hughes, their marriage undercut by Plath's suspicions of Hughes's infidelity, prepare to return to England to live. The last entry of the 1959 journal is enigmatic as a typical Plath poem: "A bad day. A bad time. State of mind most important for work. A blithe, itchy eager state where the poem itself, the story itself is supreme."

The most memorable of Sylvia Plath's incantatory poems, many of them written during the final, turbulent weeks of her life, read as if they've been chiseled, with a fine surgical instrument, out of Arctic ice.

Her language is taut and original; her strategy elliptical; such poems as "Lesbos," "The Munich Mannequins," "Paralytic," "Daddy" (Plath's most notorious poem), and "Edge" (Plath's last poem, written in February 1963), and the prescient "Death & Co." linger long in the memory, with the power of malevolent nursery rhymes. For Plath, "The blood jet is poetry," and readers who might know little of the poet's private life can nonetheless feel the authenticity of Plath's recurring emotions: hurt, bewilderment, rage, stoic calm, bitter resignation. Like the greatest of her predecessors, Emily Dickinson, Plath understood that poetic truth is best told slantwise, in as few words as possible.

By contrast, the journals are a tumult of words, and present a very mixed aesthetic experience for even the sympathetic reader. As a corrective to Hughes's "editing," a wholly unedited version of Plath's material would seem justified, in theory at least. Uncritical admirers of Plath will find much here that is fascinating. Other readers may find much that is fascinating and repellent in equal measure. Nor is the book easy to read, for its organization is eccentric: following journal entries for 1959, for instance, we revert jarringly back to a fragment for 1951, listed by the editor as Appendix I. It would have been more practical for scattered fragments to have been integrated chronologically with the journals. The Unabridged Journals is impossible to read without a reliable biography in tandem, for it lacks a simple chronology of Plath's life and the editor's headnotes are scattered and minimal.

Uncensored: Views & (Re)views. Copyright © by Joyce Oates. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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