Review: I Lock My Door Upon Myself (Joyce Carol Oates)

I have rarely read such a ‘big’ short novel as this novel by Joyce Carol Oates. Under 100 pages in length yet it addresses the complex inner life of a woman, the issues of race and the varieties of love.

I want to read this novel again before posting a full review, but I found it a very powerful and potent read.

The added, unexpected, delight for me was that the secondhand copy I had bought was once upon a time owned by one favourite writer (A S Byatt) and signed and dedicated to her by another favourite writer (Joyce Carol Oates). I’m afraid Antonia, if you were wondering where it was and wanting it back – no way! As I read it I imagined ASB reading it on the flight home from Princeton, she turned 3 page corners down, and probably read the whole on the flight! Well, that’s what my imagination creates. Perhaps her companion on the journey read it!

Foibles 1

I am sure if I think about it I have many reading foibles (not to mention other foibles) – actually, I just love the word FOIBLE.

So what foible is this? I always like to keep some work of a dead writer unread, to know I have something fresh ahead. Only last year I finally read F Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Beautiful and the Damned’ – it was the novel I was holding back on. Don’t panic (well I won’t) – I still have a number of his short stories that I haven’t read.

I have some essays, poetry and letters still of Oscar Wilde’s and loads and loads of Dickens, a little of George Eliot, 2 Virginia Woolf novels, and thankfully many of her essays and letters. That is just a small example from the dead writers I admire, I don’t want this to become a list!

Owning a Personal Library (1)

I’ve never thought of owning a personal library as a particularly original thing. I have a number of friends who also have a lot of books, but for the most part, when I mention my book collection, people look at me somewhat aghast. One or two people think that their collection of 50 or so books is quite a lot. When they hear of my over 4,300 they seem amazed. I am only amazed that I can get that many books into a one bedroom flat – so is my friend in the flat below, who expects to come home and find one day that she now lives in the sub-basement!

Having the opportunity to own a personal library is a great gift, and a privilege. I know that when I am gone it will all be dispersed, my siblings have libraries of varying degrees of their own. I don’t have any children. But knowing that I have books at my beck and call, whenever I want to reach for them is a joy. Knowing that half-way through one book – finding a reference to another – very often I can lift my hand and find that book and read the relevant passage in full, is a wonderful thing.

I often buy books when I know it will be years before I will read them. I’ve worked out that on average, a book not read in the first year of purchase is likely to sit winking at me for 12 years. I will buy anything that looks good relating to particular topics, and I continue to buy books by favourite authors and often stop reading them for long periods. Then start again with the latest volume, leaving half a dozen between the first I read and those I read now. A little glut of possibilities I can return to when I can’t wait for the next new offering.

Some evenings I wander round the room taking up books from this pile or off of that shelf (yes, there are piles, or teetering towers I have to own!). Sometimes they get moved to other piles. Or I make connections, or start pulling collections of related books together – is that a look of horror that they aren’t already in some kind of order? 

When I moved into my current flat 17 years ago, A-H fiction went on one particular set of shelves, but after that it became a bit of a free-for all, and since, I have added and added. Related books do tend to find themselves roughly in the same place. Every now and then when I think I want to read a particular topic or writer I shift one lot of books and re-locate them, and create what Anne Fadiman in her delightful collection of essays ‘Ex Libris’ calls an “odd shelf”. Shelves with books that tend towards a particular passion or obsession.

I generally know where almost all my books are, unless I’ve had a sort-out! So far I only have 2 missing volumes – ie books I have suddenly thought I wanted to put my hand on and .. er.. can’t!

I fantasise about my perfect library. The house that will hold my treasured collection in perfect style. I watch property-porn on the tv. Top of my criteria, were I to go house hunting with ‘Escape to the Country’ would be a fitting space for my books. I’ve seen one or two homes that would fit the bill. What is the perfect space? Well it wouldn’t necessarily be only one room. I would like much of the collection in one room, with a few nooks and crannies for various parts of the collection elsewhere. Poetry would always be housed in the bedroom. Why? Well I tend to think of poetry as being bound to the spirit and inner being, and I link that most with the experience of sleep and dreams, the unconscious and imagination.

Review: Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston) [Re-read]

I first came to African American writing when I was fourteen years of age in 1974. I had a mixed race English teacher who allowed us to read books not on the curriculum if we knuckled down to the work on the timetable.

She introduced us to the work of James Baldwin and I fell in love. I fell in love with the wonderful language, and the complex lives that were so far from my own life. I also fell in love with the gappy toothed smile of the little man Baldwin turned out to be. Reading Baldwin led to the works of other African American writers as they became available to us, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, John Wiseman and others.

The lives of African Americans in the 1970s wasn’t so much better than in the 1960s and before, and segregation issues were still alive and prospering, after all, Martin Luther King’s dream had not that long been let off like a balloon into the ether. In my 20s I had an African American friend, only a few years older than myself, who told of how she had been chased out of school by her white friends fathers wielding baseball bats and violent dogs on chains. However, this isn’t the world of Hurston’s characters.

‘Their Eyes were Watching God’ is probably the most famous novel written by Zora Neale Hurston. I came to her work via an essay in Alice Walker’s ‘In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens’, in the 1980s. Walker was partially responsible for the resurgence of Hurston’s career, although by then Hurston had been long dead.


Written in 1937, the novel is split (unequally) into three parts, the three marriages of Janie, the main character, who is a mullatto (mixed race person), whose mother may well have been raped by the son of her white ‘employer’.

The story is told retrospectively, with Janie sitting on the porch stairs telling her best friend Pheoby what has happened to her and why she has returned. The chattering town’s folk will learn about Janie’s story by word of mouth via her friend. The writing is rich in patois which resonates in your ear, and you float along as if on a wave of melted caramel.

Janie was raised by her grandmother who enforces a marriage to a much older black man of station when Janie reaches 17, just before her own death. She wants to know that Janie is safe before she dies. After a number of unsatisfactory years with Mr Killicks, Janie leaves town with Joe, who has his eye on being a man of power in the first black town that is beginning to form itself. He marries Janie and takes her with him, however his own enthusiasm for position does not lead Janie to the kind of life she expects.

It separates her from the people of the town because Joe demands that she stand outside of the lives of the ordinary town’s people as she is the Mayor’s wife. Joe transforms the village, but his efforts are as likely to get him resented as thanked, and Janie is seen as standoffish and high and mighty.

After Joe’s early death, Janie, now in her forties, is wooed by a man who comes to the town called ‘Tea Cake’ and she goes with him to find work in ‘the muck’ in the Everglades or Glades. A hard working, hard life kind of place where people flock during certain seasons to harvest beans. Their world is harsh but satisfying, full of community and warmth, where Janie and Tea Cake’s home is the centre of entertainments, dancing, music and dice. However the workers do not heed the signs when the Native American Indian’s start to leave the area warning of a hurricane, and they leave it too late to leave the area and many die in the floods that follow. Janie and Tea Cake survive, but Tea Cake is bitten by a mad dog and a month after his return he suffers wild rages and jealousies, and madness that lead to his death.

The novel title is taken from a line during the hurricane, when they are watching what nature is about to do next, 'their eyes were watching God'.

Janie returns to the town in which she was the Mayor’s wife to reclaim her home there and settle down and tell her story.

Hurston’s writing is deeply entrenched in the oral tradition, and much of her work is anthropological, ethnological and steeped in the folk tradition. She collected folktales and songs and studied old religions including voodoo.

There is a very fine biography of Hurston by Valerie Boyd called ‘Wrapped in Rainbows’, and Hurston wrote an autobiography ‘Dust Tracks’. As well as novels and anthropology she also wrote plays and short stories. Her voice can be heard on the disk which accompanies a delightful volume of facsimile documents about her life ‘Speak, so you can speak again’, published by Doubleday, 2004.