Writing as a Natural Reaction

JOYCE CAROL GATES can write eloquently from inside the heads of characters barely able to articulate. What she articulates through them occasionally may seem grotesque, overwhelming, overdrawn. But to anyone who finds it so, the author offers two creative precepts: "One has to be exhaustive and exhausting to really render the world in all its complexities and also in its dullness." And, "Gothicism, whatever it is, is not a literary tradition so much as a fairly realistic assessment of modern life." The assessment is based on six years of living and working in Detroit before she and her husband Raymond Smith moved across the river to Ontario, where they both teach literature at the University of Windsor. Detroit is Miss Gates' ideal American city of the '60s. It is, she says, a city so transparent "that one can see it ticking."

It is not an excessive remark, as any visitor may observe. At the city's airport, machine parts are displayed in glass cases as if they were gems. The highways glitter with the carapaces of new automobiles, while the finned monsters of the '50s have all crawled off to ghetto side streets to die. Even the city's showplaces are touched with the grotesque. Atop its status hotel--a clash of world's fair modern and imitation European traditional--a tired combo plays 1940s two-steps for well-oiled customers, who are served by aging waitresses in miniskirts.

Across the Detroit River in a small waterfront house in Windsor's quietly affluent Riverside section, Joyce Carol Gates and her husband are sheltered from the city's clang and danger. Living in Canada, the Smiths remain almost entirely American in their concerns. Joyce Carol--though she is against the Viet Nam war --has little sympathy with the kind of radical who, she feels, confuses personal frustrations with public problems. A minor character in her latest novel defines the type perfectly. She has small patience, too, with intellectuals who find her work too full of social and economic themes. "The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward," she says. "Intellectuals have forgotten, or else they never understood, how difficult it is to make one's way up from a low economic level, to assert one's will in a great crude way. It's so difficult. You have to go through it. You have to be poor."

Rejection Slip at 15. Daughter of a tool and die designer, she grew up outside of Lockport, a small city in western New York State. In a one-room schoolhouse, Joyce Carol's writer's reflex quickly asserted itself. She cannot recall a time when she was not setting down or thinking about a story. Her first submitted novel --250 pages devoted to a dope addict redeemed by getting a black stallion--was rejected by a New York publisher as too depressing for the 15-year-old market. Joyce Carol quietly accepted the verdict, though she was in a better position to judge. She was 15 years old.

In 1956, she earned a New York State Regents scholarship, allowing her to enter Syracuse University. She plunged into the study of literature, turned out a novel every semester. In 1959 she shared first prize in Mademoiselle magazine's national college fiction contest. Later, at the University of Wisconsin, she acquired a master's degree and met Raymond Smith, who was taking his Ph.D. She rarely rewrites. Today, novels, stories, essays, book reviews and poems jump from her electric typewriter with phenomenal speed: six books in six years, a play, numerous pieces of journalism, a collection of poems (Anonymous Sins) to be published this fall, a book of essays on tragedy scheduled for next spring, and a new novel already brewing. Yet, says Joyce Carol Gates, "I find it hard to accept the fact that I have been publishing for ten years. I think of myself as only beginning."

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