Joyce Carol Oates: Letters to a Biographer

Edited by Greg Johnson

Brooklyn, NY: Akashic Books, 2024
333 pages

In this generous selection of Joyce Carol Oates’s letters to her biographer and friend Greg Johnson, readers will discover a never-before-seen dimension of her phenomenal talent.

In 1975, when Johnson was a graduate student, he first wrote to Oates, already a world-famous author, and drew an appreciative, empathetic response. Soon the two began a fairly intense, largely epistolary friendship that would last until the present day. As time passed, letters became faxes, and faxes became emails, but the energy and vividness of Oates’s writing never abated. Her letters are often sprinkled with the names of famous people, from John Updike and Toni Morrison to Steve Martin and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. There are also descriptions of far-flung travels she undertook with her first husband, the scholar and editor Raymond Smith, and with her second, the distinguished Princeton neuroscientist Charlie Gross. But much of Oates’s prose centered on the pleasures of her home life, including her pet cats and the wildlife outside her study window.

Whereas her academic essays and book reviews are eloquent in a formal way, in these letters she is wholly relaxed, even when she is serious in her concerns. Like Johnson, she was always engaged in work, whether a long novel or a brief essay, and the letters give a fascinating glimpse into Oates’s writing practice.

Contents

Preface by Greg Johnson
Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates

Part One: 1975–1990
Part Two: 1991–1992
Part Three: 1993–1995
Part Four: 1996–1998
Part Five: 1999–2004
Part Six: 2005–2006

Preface by Greg Johnson

My correspondence with Joyce Carol Oates began in 1975 and has continued for almost half a century. When it began, Oates was already one of the most famous writers in America—winner of the National Book Award in 1970 (for them) and several O. Henry awards, and her stories were also included in multiple Best American Short Stories volumes. She was also a prolific literary and cultural critic, her essays often serving as a reflection, or a kind of gloss, on her plentiful and powerful fictions. Taken together, all her novels, stories, and essays revealed a dynamic mind at work, and a vision of America—for that matter, of human existence—that presumably comported with those of her many readers.

An undergraduate at the time I first read her, I found her work enthralling, especially in depicting the effects of a chaotic modern world upon the solitary, often flailing psyches of her characters. She wrote superbly well about girls and women—her tale of a young girl in peril, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, is one of the most celebrated short stories of the twentieth century—but equally well about men, as in her sprawling and masterly 1971 novel Wonderland. Her forceful prose style—driving, daring, relentless—was as distinctive as her individual works were aesthetically unique as works of art. Each was different, and yet unmistakably her own.

My first letter to Oates in 1975 concerned a professor of mine who had committed suicide, and the letter inspired a prompt, empathetic response. Over the next few years, I wrote to her occasionally, usually about a new book she had written, and was always gratified that she responded so swiftly. She was then teaching at the University of Windsor in Ontario, while I was graduate student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. By virtue of gender, upbringing, location, and station in life, we could not have been more different, yet we saw much in both art and life the same way, and as the years passed our letters increased in their length and frequency. We corresponded not only about her books, but as I began to write and publish, about my own; more broadly, we wrote about other authors and about literature in general.

As we came to be friends, occasionally meeting in Atlanta, Princeton, and New York, our frame of reference grew. Because of her success, she had come to know many famous people, and these letters contain vignettes about such diverse luminaries as John Updike, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Steve Martin. There are, further, brief cameos by Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Cynthia Ozick, Stephen King, and many others of note. After deciding to research and write Oates’s authorized biography, which was published in 1998, I also came in contact with many of her friends in Princeton and elsewhere.

As the letters proceed through the late 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, and beyond, they also encompass personal matters, not least among them our relationships with our beloved animals—her cats, my dachshunds. When she traveled around the world giving talks, lectures, and readings, I often received postcards from exotic locations in Europe and elsewhere. With her second husband, the renowned and peripatetic Princeton neuroscientist Charlie Gross, she visited South America as well. In recent years, Oates began sending me new works of hers before they were published, and I would comment on these to the best of my ability. We often exchanged cards and gifts for birthdays and at Christmas. In all, through occasional visits but especially through our thousands of letters, faxes, emails, and cards, a friendship evolved that was close and meaningful to us both.

The following selection of letters shows Oates at her most relaxed; she is often serious in her concerns, but at other times wickedly funny. (Her sense of humor has been somewhat undervalued by literary critics over the years.) The letters form a kind of narrative, especially of the books we wrote but also of the people most important to us. Oates’s parents, Frederic and Carolina Oates, are major characters in this narrative, and I am deeply grateful that I was able to know and revere them during the last years of their lives.

Unfortunately, many letters have been excluded or shortened; a full collection would run to more than a thousand pages. In this edited sampling, however, I have tried to show the essential Oates: witty, humane, and splendidly articulate. One of her friends (and critics), John Updike, once called her America’s “foremost” woman of letters, and the following collection should only confirm that assessment.

Greg Johnson
January 2024

Excerpt

April 24, 1995

Dear Greg,

. . . We’ll see you on Friday (for dinner first? then the play?). I haven’t heard anything from August Staube for a while, and have no idea how rehearsals are progressing. In Bad Girls, casting is essential . . . I’ll know within minutes if it’s going to be a disaster, as soon as I see the actresses. (In theater, casting is 90 percent of the effort. If you make a mistake at casting, there’s virtually nothing you can do to rectify it, no matter how brilliantly people might work.)

. . . Yes, my father is just delighted with the books. Simply to be remembered is very nice for him. He’s making an effort to keep involved at U Buffalo though he doesn’t take courses; he’s going to a literary festival this weekend that includes, along with Allen Ginsberg, your friend Camille Paglia. (I hope she won’t “go crazy” and denounce me on my home turf . . .)

. . . So sad: not only did the PEN/Faulkner go to another novelist (a “first novelist”), but the Pulitzer, another time. (Did I mention I’d been nominated, with four other titles, for the PEN/Faulkner? Maybe if my novel had another author’s name on it, it might have fared better.) I’m looking forward to next week, though with some trepidation. (I do want to see your house, certainly—and Lucy [Lucy was my pet dachshund.  —GJ].)

Much affection,

Joyce

See further excerpts in The Paris Review.

Reviews

Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2023

Throughout, Oates displays her witty, humorous, and sly style. . . . An interesting barometer of Oates’ development as a writer over 30 years.

Publishers Weekly, January 29, 2024, page 54

… an inviting compendium of his correspondence with the National Book Award winner from 1975 to 2006.

Image: “All those letters…” by Jan Jaromír Horák