‘Letters to a Biographer’
By Joyce Carol Oates
Edited by Greg Johnson
Akashic Books, 336 pages

In 1975, graduate student Greg Johnson wrote to Joyce Carol Oates, beginning a correspondence that would lead to friendship and to his writing of her biography. Her letters explain why she has been so productive, with such catholicity and lack of egoism.

Is there any subject Ms. Oates has not handled in fiction, poetry, plays, and literary criticism? Murder, crime of all sorts, boxing, the lives of writers from Emily Dickinson to Mark Twain to Ernest Hemingway, Hollywood stars (Marilyn Monroe and her cohort), and Washington politicians (Senator Kennedy and his ilk), urban life, country life — you name it, all have become vessels of what she sometimes refers to as JCO, as if that is the acronym for an industrial concern.

In these letters, JCO is always on the job of writing — at home between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m; when she is traveling; and anywhere she happens to be. The late George Garrett once described to me sitting next to her in the back seat of a car as she calmly pulled out pen and notebook and got to work.

Apparently, Ms. Oates did not vote for President George W. Bush in 2004, and when he won re-election, she was downcast. Yet that’s about it:  Whatever she thinks about politics goes into her fiction; too much political talk at parties annoys her.

Ms. Oates has a wide range of friends, and they all seem supportive, as do her editors. She is remarkably open to criticism, and seems not all troubled by Mr. Johnson’s biography of her, even when he goes about interviewing family members, old classmates, and others she has lost contact with decades ago. In effect, she incorporates the biographer into her own life.

Ms. Oates does express considerable irritation with critics who harp on what they consider her outlandish output, and she seems rather stressed when another round of Nobel Prizes are about to be announced and she is in the running once again. If a Nobel prize really means anything to her, it is hard to say. What matters most is writing, her close relationship with her parents, and marriage to Raymond Smith, who edited the Ontario Review, which published Mr. Johnson’s fiction.

Ms. Oates travels a lot, attending conferences and giving talks, which always seem well received. She enjoys teaching at Princeton, and the company over the years of fellow writers Edmund White, Richard Ford, and sometimes John Updike, though she finds the latter less copacetic as he ages. Susan Sontag wanted a closer friendship with JCO, but JCO is not one who is built to share intimacies.

You won’t learn all that much about how JCO’s writing has been put together. But you will discover that it was a traumatic as well as exciting experience to write “Blonde,” her novel about Marilyn Monroe. At one time it was more than 1,400 pages, and she worked hard to reduce its size.

Length, in fact, is often a problem for JCO — at least she thinks so. She starts out thinking she is going to write a short novel and it just keeps expanding. Afterward, though, she returns to what seems to be her first love: the short story.

Where is Greg Johnson in all this correspondence? He hides out in brief, italicized passages summarizing the content of his letters so as to provide a context for his subject’s replies. It is understandable that he does not include his own letters, as Ms. Oates is the main event, and what he has to say gets her going, so to speak. 

Exactly why Mr. Johnson appeals to JCO is never clear. He evidently writes a good letter. Of course, he is attentive and seems to review every one of her books. In the main, though, the bond between biographer and subject has to be taken on faith.

Ellipses are a troubling aspect of this collection. Perhaps what is left out is just ho hum and would detract from presenting a corking good read; even so, the biographer in me wants to turn over every page, every sentence, of the joint correspondence. Meeting JCO, on the evidence of these elliptical letters, seems almost invariably to be a pleasure. She is likely to treat you as a person of interest.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”