Oates In Exile

Contents

Introduction
One Flesh
Poor Lizzie
Two Doors
The Lover
Desire
The Call
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars . . .
My Madman
Immortal Longings
Anecdote
An Old-Fashioned Love Story
The Insomniac
The Quarrel
Birds of Night
The Ebony Casket
Train

Reviews

• The Globe and Mail (Canada), February 2, 1991

Introduction

My Life in Exile

And here you are, Barry Callaghan: this is your doing.

A mosaic-assembling of short fiction, some classically-shaped short stories, others what I've come to call miniature narratives, taken from approximately fifteen years in EXILE. What I loved about piecing this book together was my discovery, which somehow I hadn't anticipated, that the prose I'd written so long ago is both different from, and clearly akin to, the prose of recent years; that, particularly in aria-like moments, near the end of such stories as "The Lover," `Immortal Longings," and "The Insomniac," which belong to the mid-1970's, the lyric voice, struggling to express itself in the aftermath of emotion, is of the same substance as the bodiless yet body-haunted voice of the most recent story, which is also the final story in the collection, "Train." I discovered, too, though this should hardly have surprised me, that a number of the stories resolve themselves, or expose themselves as irresoluble, in twilit or insomniac states. How sharp our vision, at night!—we see as vividly, and as unsparingly, inward as outward, at such times.

My life in EXILE cannot, and should not, be imagined as a life apart from the specific phenomenon of EXILE-as-edited-by-Barry-Callaghan. There are, of course, magazines and journals edited by seemingly anonymous souls, or by a succession of such, leaving no imprint upon their handiwork, and deserving none; but the great magazines and journals can only be edited by one person, or, perhaps, persons in intense and intimate collaboration, and the handiwork is the editor's soul—or a public portion thereof.

EXILE is Barry Callaghan's astonishing creature, as all of literary Canada knows, though Barry Callaghan is not EXILE's creature. (That's to say, as if it required saying, that Callaghan has another and entire soul, writerly, complex, and certainly public, apart from EXILE.) Writers are instinctively drawn to the very best editors they can find, who will have them; probably in the way, and with the same motives, that Felis silvestris (the wildcat) attached itself to mankind, and evolved into Felis Catus(the domestic cat). So this gathering of Oates-in-Exile is a consequence purely of EXILE-as-edited-by-Barry-Callaghan. It helps to define an era, for me; though not to write an epitaph to it.

Another discovery I made in this re-reading and assembling is the apparent fascination I have always had with the phenomenon of the fugitive life, the life lived (or merely suggested?) by the Doppelganger; that self-as-glimpsed-from-beneath/beside/above/below; the self flung at us unexpectedly out of reflecting surfaces we'd trusted to b opaque. (Or, as at the conclusion of "Birds of Night," when Constantine glimpses his uncanny-"self" in a window, transparent.) One of the strangest stories I've written is "Desire"—in which a man belatedly discovers a long-lost twin brother; another, in my own terms at least, is "An Old-Fashioned Love Story," in which Doppelganger/incest makes a kind of musical sense, in the rhythm and beat of that particular language (which I'd never used before, nor since). All writers are involved in dialogues with fictive/"buried" selves, each of which may demand, at different periods in the writer's life, a voice, and a verbal tapestry to contain it; so the fictions are artful ways of presenting voices and of structuring forms to suggest, as through a prismatic lens, visions from uncharted sources. (In this gathering, the most capacious vision—ultimately—is that of the narrator of "The Ebony Casket," who will become the narrator of the labyrinthine novel BELLEFLEUR, written intermittently for years in the 1970's and published at last in 1980.)

EXILE is the first place of refuge for the writer who experiments—with ideas, technique, language; even, at times, with the way the prose looks. Its very existence encourages such experimentation at a time when, yet more notoriously in the United States, publishers have become increasingly conservative. ("Conservative" is code for worrying that something, however good, might not sell.) EXILE looks—what? Strange, exotic, a bit threatening . . . ? The cover is likely to be something you hadn't expected to see, which makes you pause. In the hand, even, EXILE seems oddly to weigh, not simply to be there, like most other journals. For the writer there's a powerful sense that, being in exile as most of us are, here's home.

This volume is a testament to Barry Callaghan's fine craftsmanship, encouragement, and friendship, over the years. I thank him for making a place for these fictions to live, not once, but twice. As editor and reader he would seem to embody the counsel of Anselm, to which the bodiless narrator of "Immortal Longings" alludes at the end of that story: Credo ut intelligam.

Believe in order to understand. How otherwise?