The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates [Greg Johnson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061745959
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

May 10, 1978.…Have condensed all of the Preludes, that hopelessly ambitious project, into one single poem. One single poem, after all the planning!*

Still, it’s a solid poem, I like it well enough, I can’t make it any better. I have such a headache from this poem, and from the past two hours at the piano, going through again and again the E-minor Nocturne, hearing it as it should be played and as I am forced to play it….

[…]

“Prelude.” Tall coffin. Chopin. Valdemosta. His relationship w/George Sand interests me not at all: garish and improbable and mad. But not really interesting. Not as art. His art is the only reality. Hers was craftsmanship of a sort (so I gather, I haven’t read her novels), directed toward a definite end, that of making money; his was art, and therefore impersonal. How the Preludes were composed is fascinating, of course—the bizarre circumstances, Chopin’s ill health, etc.—but ultimately irrelevant. If they had been composed in a comfortable drawing-room by a man in excellent health they would be no less prodigious.

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