Selected Letters of William Styron (2 page)

Post office visits remained a fact of daily life. Walks to the main post office in Vineyard Haven before lunch and to the little auxiliary one in West Chop with a series of dogs in the afternoons supplanted his Connecticut drives to the small clapboard structure in the center of Roxbury.

Reading these letters, I was moved again and again by the love he expressed for me, for his children, for his friends. He was a kind, physically gentle man who flew into legendary short-lived rages at all of us; hung up the phone on his family’s callers, old and young, if they didn’t dare to schmooze with him first; invented mesmerizing horror stories to terrify and amuse his children at bedtime; got jealous of the considerable attention I paid to each child—especially, I guess, son Tommy—and would shout unpleasantries from his workrooms at their high-spirited noisiness or perceived misbehavior. By the time Alexandra, much younger, was growing up, his outbursts were becoming more intense. I did not see the handwriting on the wall: incipient depression. Only after he gave up alcohol at fifty-eight—a decision he stuck to as firmly as he had cigarettes at thirty-eight—did I realize disaster lurked.

An extraordinary thinker and artist, Bill put much on paper that he would never say aloud. Though immersing myself in his letters made me miss him more, respect and admire him more, as might be anticipated, it also sparked old doubts, and certain resentments, and regrets about my own responses in later years. Much of his youthful correspondence—which we had to eliminate because of space—made me wish I had known him as a boy—his language crafted so often with funny details of “fooling around.” A fourteen-year-old’s diary entry: “After supper wrote letters. Went to bed.” Discursive teenage missives sent from home and prep school implored recipients for a reply. One quoted an Eaton stationery ad: “To get a letter, send a letter.” Often he’d ask a relative to send him special stamps, and he wrote away for rare and exotic stamps himself.

Y
OU WILL SEE
as you read these letters that his chief correspondents, those to whom he opened his mind and heart, were, first, his father, William Styron, Sr., then his Duke mentor, Professor William Blackburn, and his novelist friends such as James Jones, Norman Mailer, and Willie Morris. Others he was very close to, like Peter Matthiessen and Carlos Fuentes, rated only a few because he saw them or phoned them so frequently. Neighbors like Mia Farrow and Philip Roth, with whom we shared so many evenings, did find several: witty litanies about home life, or reassurances about books and performances. His thoughts on his own creative process and those of his fellow writers are profound, discursive, rich. Our eldest daughter unearthed one of the best batches. From age sixteen she frequently lived abroad. To Susanna the letters are humorous and compassionate, full of advice and comments, on family life at home, on news, world politics, and literature, and endless warnings to drive carefully. He shared much of his deeper self with her, as he did with his great friends whom he encouraged with fair and insightful criticism of their works-in-progress, or with readers requesting advice on mental health issues (many wrote back that his personal replies had helped save their sanity). Indeed, it’s stunning how often he wrote back to fans—how he loved his fans! It has been difficult to select. Thank heavens for Bob Loomis and Blake Gilpin and their judicious cutting.

So we begin with a series of letters to Pop, who supported him in every way after the death of his mother, from his early teen years through the
advent of marriage. Unfortunately, we could not locate letters to James Baldwin, Bill’s close friend, who spent most of a year at our home in Connecticut in the sixties. Racial violence and the civil rights movement dominated the news. Bill and Jimmy would sit in the back room each evening discussing the books they were working on that year. Jimmy encouraged Bill to write
Nat Turner
in the first person. A number of black writers published objections to Bill’s inhabiting their hero. Though he won a Pulitzer and was supported by Jimmy and John Hope Franklin, Bill, a man who championed civil and human rights as well as fictional license, was hurt. And sad that the film, already in process and starring James Earl Jones, was canceled. It took more than a dozen years before the success of
Sophie’s Choice
, novel and film and opera, restored his sense of public appreciation.

Many stories are told in these pages, but inevitably some of the pieces are missing. As this goes to print, I suspect postcards and letters may still be on their way. In an electronic age of immediate communication, does anyone still correspond at such length? Alas.

R
OSE
S
TYRON

February 2012

POSTMARK
 

M
Y PERSONAL INTERACTIONS WITH
William Styron were glancing, but they revolved entirely around his correspondence. For two summers, between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one, I served as the postmaster of a seasonal post office on Martha’s Vineyard. My one-room shop intersected one of Bill’s walking routes and throughout those summers, I could count on the occasional and nearly wordless encounter as he bought stamps for a postcard to Philip Roth or a package to Carlos Fuentes.

I imagined myself a budding writer and I anticipated our postal exchanges with great interest. I secretly hoped Bill would recognize me as a kindred spirit, but alas, we never muttered more than a few words to each other. I was left to thumb the addresses of his outgoing mail, daydreaming about the exciting literary world he inhabited.

Midway through my doctorate, I discovered Styron’s letters to one of my dissertation subjects, Robert Penn Warren. Styron wrote Warren in December of 1946, hoping to study “writing under [him].” This was the beginning of a long friendship, which grew especially close when the two became neighbors in the Connecticut countryside. After stumbling upon Bill’s letters to Warren, I began to investigate Styron’s friendships with Southern expatriates like C. Vann Woodward and Willie Morris. Chance had met opportunity and I was soon off to Durham, North Carolina, to explore Bill’s papers.

At Duke, in a beautifully organized archive, I found the story of a man, a writer, and an American century. Styron’s letters intimately document sixty years of his hopes and fears, narrating history that he not only witnessed but touched and changed. Like most writers, Styron explored the challenges of the act of creation in his letters. However, very few writers so powerfully probe the meaning of writing, the constant tug-of-war between a writer and the critical establishment, and the pains and joys of life itself. In other words, in these pages, you will find so much more than
reportage about the events of daily life; these letters show the same attention to the human condition that allowed Styron’s writing to touch so many lives.

On the individual level, Bill repeatedly reached out to help aspiring writers, took the time to respond to fans who had been touched by his work, and wrote to nearly everyone in the same spirit as his epistles to close friends like James Jones and John Marquand. Particularly noteworthy in this regard are Bill’s letters to his eldest child, Susanna. One letter of note, from May 15, 1972, shows the affectionate thoughtfulness that characterizes his correspondence.

I am not aware of many parents who would take the time to write to their children with such care and profundity, much less treat the subject and the child with such humor, compassion, and respect. The historian in me revels in other examples. Writing to James Jones on August 12, 1965, Bill recalled writing Lyndon Johnson’s Voting Rights Act speech with Vineyard neighbor Richard Goodwin. That letter screams its importance, with juxtapositions of Jackie Onassis water-skiing, Frank Sinatra as a lifeguard, and Bill self-consciously announcing the letter as “Notes of a Waif Astray in the 20th Century.”

There is rollicking humor and deep sadness in these letters; signs of
towering ego and profound insecurity; sweet affection and stinging bitterness. You will find elements of all in Bill’s letter to Philip Roth on January 29, 1973. Ostensibly, Bill wrote to comfort Roth after Norman Podhoretz and Irving Howe viciously attacked Roth’s character in an article in
Commentary
. But before Styron addressed the
Commentary
piece, he offered a lengthy excursus about his experiences during the
Nat Turner
controversy and the sheer absurdity of the critical establishment. The nearly 2,000-word letter is a testament to both the isolation and the camaraderie of the modern American novelist. Expressed in classic Styronese, Bill signed off with “Yours in the slime we sometimes find ourselves up to our asses in.”

As one follows the vicissitudes of the writerly existence in these pages, it is hard not to develop a deep attraction to Styron’s mind and pen. My own passion for this correspondence led to a meeting with Bill’s widow, Rose, in the fall of 2007. When Rose asked if I would like to edit Bill’s letters, I naively leapt at the chance. Little did I know that the process of gathering, transcribing, and notating those letters would take the better part of five years, but what an incredible journey it has been. Benefiting from serendipitous circumstances and generous support from various institutions, I was able to meet with Rose daily for almost an entire year. Each morning, we would sit together in the Styron home in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, and work through my previous day’s transcriptions and notations. Rose would retrieve names, books, and obscure events at a constant clip. Working intimately with this sparkling soul, the matriarch who knew about or experienced most of what transpires in these pages, has been a distinct privilege.

As this collection grew in size, scope, and quality, Rose and I shared the joy of uncovering a new narrative about William Styron. Quite distinct from a biography or a memoir, these selected letters narrate one writer’s lifelong struggles and joys—captured in private dispatches about professional life, friendship, and family. Indeed, in many ways, the stories in these pages were known only in part to Bill’s individual correspondents, and the extent of this writing has surprised even his closest friends.

Of course, across these pages, certain themes emerge. All the ambitious young littérateurs will be touched by Bill’s self-conscious journey from the Duke classroom to the
New York Times
bestseller list. Styron’s ambitions are captured in a letter to his mentor William Blackburn in February 1950 as he was finishing his first novel,
Lie Down in Darkness
. Acknowledging
his conscious restraint in the book, Styron expressed his lifelong distaste for “the Hemingway tight-lipped mumble school.” “I believe that a writer should accommodate language to his own peculiar personality,” he continued, “and mine wants to use great words, evocative words, when the situation demands them.”

Styron would spend the next six decades negotiating the tension between the “orotund” and the “spare.” In these intimate snapshots of his interior life, readers will follow the unique circumstances that helped Styron establish himself at the forefront of American letters. These letters are intimate, funny, and profound all at once. One sees his foibles laid bare, his friendships given color and life, and his accomplishments put into sharpest relief. Tracing the deep cultural impact of
The Confessions of Nat Turner
to the harrowingly personal
Darkness Visible
, Styron’s letters help us appreciate the swirl of events that contributed to his creative work, and the struggle that took each project from the germ of an idea to a finished product.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Styron approached letter writing rather haphazardly; he seemed to write only when the epistolary muse struck him. A grudging typist, Styron’s handwritten letters are all unique—that is to say, without carbons. With no eye toward posterity, Styron’s extensive archive at Duke consists almost entirely of letters written
to
, not
by
him. As such, the process of assembling this collection has been an ongoing and worldwide search for the scattered but precious words he sent to friends and fans alike. We have been unable, despite Herculean efforts, to track down letters Bill wrote to James Baldwin, for instance, though we know such letters exist. There are surely other gaps and omissions, and so these are William Styron’s
Selected Letters
, for we fear they could never be made truly complete.