A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates

On 18 February 2008, Joyce Carol Oates’s husband, Raymond J. Smith, died unexpectedly of cardiopulmonary arrest. Smith was eminent in his own field as editor of the Ontario Review, but quietly eminent. Now he has become famous, a household name in international literary circles – as his widow’s spouse. It is an odd state of being, or non-being. But this is an odd book, alternately brilliant and bizarre. The marriage was long and close – forty-seven years – and, by Oates’s account, it was a devoted and undeviating match. Husband and wife complemented one another. Their joint publishing ventures prospered and did no harm to Oates’s soaring career. Smith didn’t read his wife’s fiction, and Oates understands little of his guilt-plagued Catholic past or of his cadet experiments with a novel; but the union was evidently fond and fruitful in many ways (they had no children). This is how Oates characterises their division of labour: ‘Always Ray has been the repository of common sense in our household. The spouse who, with a gentle tug, holds in place the recklessly soaring kite, that would careen into the stratosphere and be lost, shattered to bits.’ And as it begins (that quote is from page thirteen), so the widow’s story goes on. After her husband’s sudden death, for which she blames herself (she should have kept him home, the medical care was inadequate, why didn’t she stay with him that night? how could she have missed the signs? … et cetera) Oates’s kite soars, crashes, flies again, becomes tangled, twists, droops, and finally comes to a fragile rest (equilibrium is too strong). The writing is always engaging – sharp, speculative, and intelligent – and so one goes on reading through the hectic anxieties of Oates’s plunge into widowhood: the depression, the skirting around oblivion, the pills, the socks in bed, the agoraphobia, and the hypersensitivity to tributes intended to soothe her grief. ‘Sympathy gift baskets’ provoke a rage that transmutes into lists of a waspish brio (pickled herring, ‘gourmet’ popcorn, ‘drunken’ goat cheese) that reminds one of Jessica Mitford. Not of Mitford’s bred-in-the-English-bone irony perhaps – Oates is a very different writer, a radically different personality, given to occasional primness (see her interviews) as well as distrait revelations, and possessed of a naïveté at which Mitford might marvel. The memoir is uneven, though always intriguing. It will drive some feminists to despair because this marriage of true minds, once ruptured by death, left the woman so disabled, not only by the trauma of loss but also by her inability to cope with the day-by-day practicalities, the bookkeeping of living. She nearly breaks down at the Motor Vehicle Department while attempting to acquire ‘title’ to the car she has been driving for years. Documents such as the ‘Executor Short Certificate’ loom like trolls. She recoils at her husband’s death certificate. The phone becomes a torment, shopping impossible. But there is an immediacy to the iteration of her misery, whatever offence it might give to staunch supporters of women’s independence. So what is one to do? Label the memoir ‘incorrect’? Or read it for what it is – a vivid, irritating, sometimes febrile, more often analytical and incisive account of what one highly cultivated, self-conscious woman experienced when she lost her lodestar. Joyce Carol Oates and Raymond J. Smith Those interested in the pathologies of grief and the (potential?) efficacy of writing it out will find much to ponder in A Widow’s Story. Oates conjures a squat figure – she calls it a basilisk – which crouches over her insomniac nights. She assumes a load of guilt that would disable most of us. She has bouts of assigning blame to her husband – how dare he leave her? He wouldn’t. He did. She can’t cope in public. She writes and receives a babel of emails, many of which she reproduces in the memoir. Some console her, briefly; some, from old friends, many of them literary luminaries (how I wish I didn’t know that) offer both wisdom and solace. Others disgust or perturb her. She does her multiple sympathisers no favour in reproducing many of their overwrought attempts at comfort. Too many of them slide inevitably into dramatising their own experience rather than understanding, with some tact, hers. The provenance of much of this long memoir is a study in itself, as is the timing. Oates says that the memoir was assembled from journal entries, most of which were driven by ‘the surprises’ of the day. So while the wife and widow-to-be was distraught, the writer kept noting things down. Hence the telling precision of observation. Other passages – the background of their life together in Detroit in the 1960s, for example – were written more conventionally. The journal was written in real time, as it were, the memoir begun in mid-summer of 2009, sixteen months after Raymond Smith had died, and during the year in which Oates married her second husband, Dr Charles Gross, a professor of neuroscience. Charles Gross appears, though not by name, on the very last page of the memoir, as a guest at a Princeton dinner party given at Oates’s house. One can understand her reticence about acknowledging his place in her life without applauding it. Writing the memoir was ‘a pilgrimage’ she says, and a way of memorialising Raymond Smith. That her pilgrimage has continued into another stage of wifehood does not vitiate her wish to do her husband honour. But it is an odd omission. And the disjunct between the journal’s anguish and the memoirist’s calculations is, at the very least, disconcerting. The length of the work is also disconcerting. I found myself returning to poetry for more succinct grief, for a reminder of the quiet that attends irreparable loss in poems such as Peter Porter’s ‘Non Piangere, Liù’: A card comes to tell you you should report to have your eyes tested.But your eyes melted in the fire and the only tears, which soon dried, fell in the chapel.Other things still come – invoices, subscription renewals, shiny plastic cards promising credit – not much for a life spent in the service of reality.You need answer none of them Nor my asking you for one drop of succour in my own hell … Porter’s poem comes out of a very different experience and sensibility. But its decorum is exemplary, and devastating. As Oates’s memoir wore on, it became harder and harder to focus on the object of her grief. Raymond Smith remains elusive. Even when the mystery Oates creates around Smith’s uncompleted novel and fraught, religion-ridden youth is rather limply explained (with an extraordinary ignorance about Catholicism pre- and post-1960), it does not etch any deeper in the reader’s mind the man she seeks to memorialise. To say this is not to question her love or her sincerity, or her quicksilver talent, but simply to say that there is a sketch where one expects a portrait. The writer is perhaps clearer, more evocative, when she dismisses (albeit a little ambiguously) theories about the primacy of the writer’s art – its privilege over all the bonds of intimacy and domestic imperatives. She quotes, and then disagrees with, her friend Philip Roth’s assertions (in Exit Ghost). ‘Brave defiant words’, she calls them, ‘that claim, for the writer, a privileged life of meaning, significance, and value beyond that of mere “life”.’ It is an interesting stand in the context of this work, in which mere ‘life’ seems so hard and long to learn, and art appears to be the default position, the constant, the refuge, the preoccupation. And yet, with all its digressions, evasions and obsessions, this remains a remarkable document by an extraordinary woman, one prepared to include – even welcome – into it the savage and utterly unsentimental advice of one good friend who told her to ‘Suffer, Joyce. Ray was worth it.’ He was, and she does.

Morag Fraser

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