Selected Letters of William Styron

INTRODUCTION
 

R
EADING
B
ILL
’
S LETTERS
has been a journey of surprise for me. As the originals and copies of the thousand-plus handwritten missives began to arrive from friends, colleagues, librarians, and others to whom I had sent hopeful queries about the letters’ existence, I opened them with excitement—but then, for a moment, might hesitate, feeling almost as if I were prying into a secret life, the life of a man I’d lived with and loved for fifty-four not uncomplicated years. The “secret life” wasn’t a different or parallel life—it was
our
life, one committed to paper, privately, enhanced for me now by a brilliant wordsmith with original thoughts and insights, with generous impulses and particular humor to particular persons he valued: family, close friends from childhood through middle age, writers contemporary and aspiring, mentors, Marine buddies, and neighbors and editors with whom he had deep connections over the years. What a gift! Suddenly, belatedly, I realized that half the endless hours I thought he was working on novels alone at one desk or another he was actually writing letters.

Bill wrote everywhere, it seems. When we met in Italy (a night in a bar with Truman Capote that burgeoned into a crazy romance), he was working in a small high room at the back of the palatial American Academy in Rome, the first fiction writer to be awarded its Prix de Rome. He was surrounded by painters, sculptors, architects, and musicians. Each morning, he said, he was roused by sounds from the Ping-Pong table on the terrace his window overlooked (Lukas and Cornelia Foss doing earliest battle). How different from the couple of years he struggled—even for food—in cheap, New York City rooms before
Lie Down in Darkness
became a bestseller.

Soon we moved in together: a dark basement flat next door to the Academy, where Giuseppe, its big uniformed doorman, would descend the steps to deliver Bill’s cherished mail. Bill piled books and yellow legal
pads on a creaky kitchenette table, spending sunny days down there as I explored the parks and museums and wrote poetry—outdoors. Usually we walked alone or with Academy fellows down to Trastevere for supper. Next, after a snowy, dramatic car trip to meet the
Paris Review
crowd he had been part of months before in France, and a three-month split (I’d moved to Florence), we married at the Campidoglio, driving in May to Ravello, where we lucked into our glorious honeymoon pad, a newly converted jail with turquoise tiled floors that I practiced rolling out and cutting my pasta on. Bill (daily for eight months) sat at a round marble table by new French doors that looked out on a lemon grove and beyond: a steep view of the Amalfi coast whose beaches we walked down to between work sessions and visitors. One day, when Bill found himself stuck on the second chapter of a new novel he titled
Blankenship
, he declared he had to abandon Italy’s beauty and go back to New York and face a blank wall. Since he had told me repeatedly how he hated New York, I protested. Only once.

Just before Christmas we sailed third class, me dreadfully seasick on rough waters, Bill in the upper bunk still writing. After a New York reunion with expat
Paris Review
founders (George Plimpton had opened a New York office in his apartment and everyone followed), we rented a small apartment on East Sixty-first Street. Bill sat faithfully therein at a corner table in the too-pink bedroom until noise from the building being torn down across the street became unbearable and we fled to the quiet Connecticut countryside.

In Roxbury, we arranged to buy the first house we looked at, falling in love with a farm property last occupied by prominent Russians escaping the revolution of 1917 (their stream of long-term guests included Alexander Kerensky, dancers, writers—reputedly even a Tolstoy). We settled in the barn they rebuilt as a guesthouse. It was still inhabited by a Russian relative, a bachelor, who, scantily clad, opened the top of its scarlet Dutch door to peer at us that first day. He left us everything from the furniture to nineteenth-century Russian encyclopedias and medical books, and an album, vintage 1920s, whose photographs detailed construction work, family tea on the terrace, and tennis players in long white skirts and trousers and straw hats. Also: a tangled array of his personal sex paraphernalia in the closet next to Bill’s new desk. This smooth six-foot chestnut slab on metal legs, set against a wall in our loft bedroom, served him well for
nearly forty years. All day I’d be with Susanna, our firstborn, adored by Bill, below in the living room or out on the lawn—my nursing efforts applauded by cows that would appear on schedule at the stone wall which bordered a dairy farm uphill. At dark, music would suddenly fill the house—symphonic Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms (or on light occasions, perhaps, folk songs, Southern ballads, lieder, or swing) and I knew our evenings together were about to begin.

A second child, Polly, and a huge Newfoundland, Tugwell, crowded us out three years later and we moved beyond the grape arbor to the big deserted farmhouse we had started to fix up. Opening old doors to small outbuildings—corncrib, toolshed, garage—I found remnants of a sort of Russian craft center with tapestries, jewelry, pottery, and rugs. The barn became Bill’s solitary studio (though summers it might be home to Philip Roth, or Donald Harington, and then, for thirty-eight years, long-term Virginia bon vivant Gray Beverly). The last dozen years or so of Bill’s life he transferred his workspace into the main house, taking over my large space, actually Polly’s old bedroom. He adopted my square white tilt-top desk and placed it near a window looking out on Alexandra’s backyard playhouse (the old corncrib she and her eight-year-old schoolmates once decided to paint, scared away when William Styron bellowed at them for spilling buckets of wild pink over its floors, steps, stone path, and lawn). It made a sweet quiet view, nestled in overgrown lilacs and untamed forsythia. Was Bill these days feeling lonely? Discouraged? Did he sense a worrisome decline?

Whatever, I was happy to have him close by. I still went off on certain missions for human rights and a birding trip or two, but much less often. I couldn’t forget that in 1985, when I was in Budapest planning to go with Timothy Garton Ash to Transylvania on a mission to meet with endangered dissidents, I called Bill to say good-bye, knowing I might have been incommunicado for a week or two. Bill’s voice shocked me. He said he was crashing, to PLEASE come home immediately. I did.

Sometimes in the years after this, on the meditative walks he took with his favorite dogs before each day’s work, I might be invited along to stride with him down to Judd’s Bridge by the river or across to Upper County Road between meadows and cornfields. Immediately on return, he would hasten to his study, to reappear only at dinnertime, about 9 p.m., or for a drink an hour earlier in the large, high-ceilinged back room we added, its
stretching bar the place where Bill would stand, most often alone, quiet, and spread out the day’s pages to contemplate. Rarely in later years did he read aloud the afternoon yellow-page compositions in his beautiful script as he had each evening of our first decades together, often by a fire he built. He’d stay up very late, revising. I would type (two fingers) the next morning as he slept. For years he’d want to discuss at least part of a chapter with me, and then with his treasured editor, Bob Loomis.

An inveterate note-taker but a poor correspondent myself, I was delighted to see Bill’s postcards and letters from 1967 to 2002 that detailed our leaving Connecticut quite regularly (
en famille
on school breaks), most often in winter, but often
à deux
. Bill hated cold weather. We might join the Robert Penn Warrens in Egypt, the James Joneses in France, the Sadri Khans in Kenya, the Carlos Fuenteses in Mexico, the John Marquands on Salt Cay, the Mike Nicholses or the Robert Brusteins sailing the Caribbean, or the Gabriel García Márquezes in Colombia, then Cuba. More serious missions—Poland with Kurt Vonnegut, Chile with Arthur Miller—were chronicled, too. Every summer we moved to Martha’s Vineyard, where Bill barricaded himself in a little prefab behind the house to write, posting an intimidating
VERBOTEN
sign on the door. Surely he was creating more than fiction.