Selected Letters of William Styron (14 page)

In regard to the money you have been sending me, all I can say is that I would have been just about completely lost without it—and you must know yourself how much it has meant to me. But I don’t wish to keep taking it until my novel is written, or for any length of time, if it is more than you can spare. This is all by way of saying that I know the year is up, and more, that you offered to send me the checks, and I wouldn’t feel right in accepting still others, especially in the light of the shipbuilding slump and so forth.

You have had faith in me, and it has been a wonderful feeling to know that one is not alone. Even in this day when art is frowned upon still as a not quite healthy profession, a lot of artists are lucky and I’m glad to be one of them. In the long run, despite the sneers and indifference, the artist, the real one, has always been vindicated in the end, except that it takes a
long
time and some have a more
fortunate
time than others.
Amor Vincit
 …
^*w

No other news except that everything, again, goes well on the writing front and
that
, at the risk of sounding selfish, is gradually becoming to me the only thing that matters, although the lesson is fairly hard.

Your son,

Bill Jr.

T
O
S
IGRID DE
L
IMA

June 8, 1950 314 West 88
^th
Street, New York City

Dear Such a Sweet Sweet Baby:

Here it is a very hot (88°) June night and I am writing to my sweet baby because all this time I’ve been thinking about her and missing her very much. All week I have been writing on my book and today I reached an
impasse
, but I’m not too worried because I’ll conquer it tomorrow and, besides,
impasses
are to be expected. Loftis is getting ready to do the
Kreksing with Dolly, only he doesn’t want to really, because he has a thing against violating the sanctity of the house; anyway, he’s writing a real hot semi-love letter to Peyton, and I think that somehow he identifies Peyton with Dolly, or vice versa, or something. All I have to do is think of my sweet baby and I can write real good. Really.

Otherwise I haven’t been doing much of anything, Last night I went down to see Loomis and we sat around and played Beethoven. He seems much better now, because he has a girl that he’s interested in and who appears to be very nice. She’s rather unfortunately associated, though, with television, and last Sunday she took us behind the scenes at a television show—
The Aldrich Family
—and it was really something strange and wonderful. What phoniness and barrenness and toothpaste smiles and general squalor! It’s sponsored (
The Aldrich Family
) by
My-T-Fine
desserts.

Loomis and I think that poor Brice is going psychopathic or something. His letters get more and more irrational and “secretive” and odd. I think he realizes that all of his old friends are tiring of his eternal pettiness and are beginning to lose interest in him. Anyway, it’s very sad.

Your letter was so interesting—about going through the blizzard and everything, and the Frenchman (how old was he!) and the Utica meatpacking papa. Such a sweet baby, I sure do wish I had gone with you in the Vista-Dome and was with you right now in the Pacific place. We could go to the Top of the Mark and you could watch me as I drank Martinis and got ver-ti-gi-nous.

Biggest news is the fact that Haydn is going to become Editor at Bobbs-Merrill, and he had a talk with me about it the other day. It seems that he doesn’t want to abscond from Crown with all of his authors, since that is not quite cricket in publishing. So I seem to have two alternatives: stay with Crown, which is the most legal thing, but which I don’t want to do, because of the fact that I think they haven’t been too generous with me and that only Haydn is responsible for the $250 I have got; the other alternative, as Haydn told me, is to go see Mavis McIntosh, who is Eliz. McKee’s partner, and who also is his agent.
^*x
He doesn’t want to make any
motions himself, so through Mavis (I called her today) I’m going to try to work it so that when Haydn goes to Bobbs-Merrill, I’ll go too, and Bobbs-Merrill will reimburse Crown the $250 I’ve got so far. Also, this move, if it works out, might result in my getting another $250, although I’m not banking too strongly on that. But I surely hope it works out, as I have no love,
a priori
, for Crown. Incidentally, if you write Aggie
^*y
any time before the 21
^st
of June, don’t mention this thing about Haydn, because it’s supposed to be, for some weird reason, a “trade secret.”

The more I think of it, the more I don’t think I’ll be able to go to Hill and Dorothy’s wedding.
^*z
I don’t know how I’m going to tell them, and I’ll have to tell them soon, but I think they’ll understand that I just can’t afford another trip down there at this time. That last trip just about ruined me, and if I took this one, with the train fare and all both ways, plus “entertainment,” I’ll be flat busted. Or, as Peyton (Tom) puts it, I just “plain flat can’t afford it.” God. I hate to let them down, but as I look at it—along with the fact that it’ll interrupt my schedule, my “work cycle”—I think the whole thing would be ruinous and catastrophic.

It’s really not bad at all up here—although every time I think of V.C.
^*A
fair my poor heart collapses. This Howard is a very likeable guy, and considering that I came here sight unseen, we’re marvelously amiable. Speaking of V.C. fair, I called Aggie yesterday and she said that last week guess who helped her weed the corn—none other than our friend Niel, the Dutchman! Either this weekend or the next I’m going up there and hoe and weed and
sweat
and everything and think of my
sweat baby
. Joke!

Please write and tell me about that San Francisco place—everything, and all the places and things you’ve seen. Everything, because everywhere my sweet baby goes I want to know about it. Write!

Wind is blowing off the river, that flows by Nyack and all those pretty places, and I’m thinking of you.

Love, love, love.
    S.B.
^*B

T
O
S
IGRID DE
L
IMA

July 18, 1950 314 West 88
^th
Street, New York City

Dear Such a Sweet Baby:

Guess what! Bobbs-Merrill is going to give me $1000—count ’em—a thousand dollars for the famous novel
Death of Peyton Loftis
. Isn’t that a lot of dough? Actually, it’s not so immense as it sounds because I’m really going to get $500 now ($250 of which I have to pay back to Crown) and the other $500 is promised to me as soon as I deliver the completed MS. At any rate, it still is a very pleasant surprise, and I feel very wealthy and important although, being down to 13¢ and the check not in my hands yet, I’m really most broke.

The book itself is coming along—slow, as usual, but steadily. After considerable back-tracking, side digressions and such, I’m almost to the Charlottesville scene. After that, a switch to the funeral again, then the wedding, then Peyton’s day of judgment. Isn’t it going to be a long big book?

Howard and I went down to see John Maloney on Sunday night and had a very pleasant evening talking about life and art and the Korean situation.
^*C
Maloney still seems to be writing good reviews for the
Tribune
—his latest in last Sunday’s paper, were reviews of Shelby Foote’s novel (he’s a young Mississippian) and “The Dog-Star” by Donald Windham, from Georgia, I think.

Yesterday afternoon I went to a cocktail party at a friend of Haydn’s high in a building over First Avenue, where in the twilight you could see the UN building (a really startling structure: too bad it’ll be a 5 + 10¢ store in the next war, or a storehouse) and all of the other beautiful sunlit midtown buildings. It was like Hollywood’s idea of a New York cocktail party. Douglas Southall Freeman’s daughter was there (she’s married to Julius Ochs Adler, Jr., of the
Times)
and we talked about the old times in Richmond when we were both in prep-school and danced together. Also present was Grey Blake, who played the part of the young suitor in “The Cocktail Party.” He’s very British, as the phrase goes, but very nice and
personable and we had a long talk. At the Algonquin he had a room next to Tennessee Williams, who kept him awake all night with his typewriter, and when “Tenn” moved out, in moved Anton Karas (of “The Third Man”) with his zither. So Blake moved out. Also at the party was Gwyned, the “career girl” working in an ad-agency, whom
Life
wrote up a year ago, crying on her boy friend’s shoulder, etc.
^*D
She’s a very spoiled, lovely, silly-looking tomato.

Korea looks bad, but it doesn’t do to worry. If one worried one would go batty and get nothing accomplished.
Ars longa
 …
^*E

A Kiss for my S.B. (X). Two Kisses (XX) and much love from plain, hot little ol’ NYC.

T
O
S
IGRID DE
L
IMA

July 23, 1950 314 West 88
^th
Street, New York City

Dear Such a Sweet Baby:

It is toward the end of a hot and humid Saturday afternoon, and I have been working—ineffectually enough, on account of the heat, or just maybe a lack of inspiration—and so thought it would be a good enough time to apprise you of what I have been doing recently. Aggie called me up a couple of hours ago and asked me to go to V.C. fair with her and the Maxwells, and it was a considerable temptation, but at the time I thought (mistakenly) that my thoughts were flowing well toward the book. I should have gone, but I hope to go tomorrow, to write a little and look at the corn which Aggie says is now higher than my head. Isn’t that miraculous? I had lunch with Aggie on Thursday at the Captain’s Table and had a nice talk, and then I went over to the School and saw the beginnings of her fine new, pale blue office on the sixth floor.

Last Thursday, too, I guess it was, I finished the scene between Dolly and Loftis and am now ready to go on to the Charlottesville episode. It’s about time, and I would be there quicker, had it not been for the fact that
in the Loftis-Dolly sex scene I had to go back, through some compulsion, and describe a Christmas dinner of the year before. The scene is pretty long (the Xmas episode) and it won’t surprise you that it bears quite a resemblance to the first-hand Christmas dinner experience which I once told you about. I’m terribly put off about this Charlottesville scene, because I want it to be one of the best ones in the book. It seems to be obstinate in starting, but a couple more days of concentration should put it on the road. I’ll feel that when that scene is done, the end, for the first time, will really be in sight.

My check for $500 is due sometime this next week and I’ll welcome it with relief. I’ve been living off nothing at all during the past week or so and I’m tired of poverty and of borrowing. After I sign the contract on Monday, Haydn is going to take it to Indianapolis with him (he’s flying to B-M’s head office) and I’ll get the money by air mail as soon as he can arrange it out there. I haven’t seen the contract, but Haydn says that Mavis McIntosh arranged a fine one, so I’m happy. Actually, though, it looks as if the book won’t get published until fall of ’51, because I really don’t think I’ll get it finished until Christmas, possibly, even February, and it takes six or seven months to get a book published. Haydn is rather put out by the fact that I won’t get it done by this November, because the spring season, for some reason, is a better season to promote a first novel, but I think he also realizes that not only am I a slow worker, but that I won’t be satisfied if I rush the job, get sloppy or hasty. My vanity has desired that I get the book published before my 26
^th
birthday, but that’s a rather stupid conceit anyway, so what the hell. It’s going to be such a good book, I think, really a fine book—with all of its multitude of faults—and it’s progressing better and better each day—each day, that is, in which I force myself, with pain and groans, to write. I just hope that this last part won’t be so much better than the first that it becomes evident that I was just groping around in the first chapters. However, I’m going to do a little tightening and rewriting in the first chapters anyway. What a long road it is! Nothing in my life has ever seemed so incapable of completion—not that I don’t want to complete it (it’s exactly the opposite of that), but it’s still like carrying knapsacks of unbearable sand through endless woods to a sunlit meadow, the lovely contours of which I can only vaguely imagine.

New York is hot and sluggish, and there is incessant chatter of war. God, what a time we live in! Who cares really for art or beauty or anything
like that when one is so inundated by perpetual mementoes of distraction, ugliness, television faces. At a party at Loomis’s last night I was surrounded by a real herd of television and radio creatures. It was a veritable shame to hear them talk, and so I got abruptly and impolitely drunk. Surely this Peter Viereck is correct in writing that the real Babbitts of our time are not the hollow-headed businessmen but the intellectual
chic
: the ones who read
Flair
, and go to
avant-garde
movies and think Charlie Chaplin is the new messiah, and believe that the music of Kurt Weill and Burl Ives and
South Pacific
reach dizzy summits of emotion. Maybe the outfit is headed for extinction, and we do need the Atom bomb.
Collier’s
, incidentally, has a really horrifying article portraying the destruction of N.Y.C. by the Bomb, with a capital B.
^*F

The corn will be ripe when you return, so come back and you and I will eat some, also
our
tomatoes. We’ll also avoid Anna O’Higgins like a plague and if I take my MS up I’ll wrap it in windproof cellophane.