Selected Letters of William Styron (25 page)

As for sending me the contract to sign, that brings me to the fact that sometime next week, probably Tuesday or Wednesday, I’m leaving for Rome. My address will be ACCADEMIA AMERICANA, PORTO SAN PANCRAZIO, Rome, but since I’m not absolutely sure whether this is the best address or not you can check by calling Miss May T. Williams at the American Academy in Rome office at 101 Park Avenue. The number is in the phone book. At any rate, if you have anything to send me before the middle of next week you might as well send it to the American Express here in Paris, with whom I will leave my Rome address and who are supposed to be very efficient about forwarding mail.

That’s about all. I’m about as devoid of news as you are, except to say that life is pleasant still here, but unexciting, and I’m looking forward to things picking up down in Italy. Best to all.

Love,

Bill

T
O
V
ANCE
B
OURJAILY

September 29, 1952 Paris, France

Dear Vance,

Thank you very much for your letter. I’m at present in a state of grim confusion about getting to Rome (I don’t know if I’m expected at the Academy, there’s a foul-up on train reservations, I’ve got to get money
changed, etc—you know how it is) so I think you’ll understand if this letter is brief and to the point.

First, I checked carefully over your list of emendations and corrections and agree with you on all of them, without exception. They all make perfect sense to me, and I’m glad you took
a priori
liberty in making the changes. Since you’re so strapped for time I won’t plead for copies of the galley proofs, but will trust you at your word about checking over it carefully yourself, which I know you will. The change in the first paragraph from “Flit-gun” to “hose” is Haydn’s correction, but he told me about it as a suggestion and it’s fine with me. I can’t think of anything else.

The magazine sounds like it’s shaping up fine, and I’m as proud to be in it as you say you are to have
The Long March
. Of course, I’ll be interested in all developments and I hope you’ll keep me posted from time to time. I’ll have a short list of addresses, later on, of people to whom I wish you’d have copies sent. My address, as of a few days from now, will be c/o Accademia Americana, Porta San Pancrazia, Rome. I’ve heard nothing of or from the people there, or their representatives in New York, since I first got word of winning the prize last March—and all this in spite of letters I’ve written—so I’m beginning to wonder if it’s all not a great big yuk on me. At any rate, I think the above address will do and I hope you keep in touch. Best to Tina, Aldridge and Company and all the characters you run into.

Best,

Bill

Styron arrived in Rome in October 1952 and began living at the American Academy
.

T
O
J
OHN
P. M
ARQUAND
, J
R
.

October 8, 1952 Rome, Italy

Dear Jack,

This will be I think a rather uninspired letter, in comparison to your very lively one, because the three days I’ve spent in Rome have resulted in nothing but a beautiful cold in chest and head—the second in six weeks. It must be psychosomatic or something, or perhaps because the only person I’ve seen to talk to has been Truman Capote, whom I ran into in the Excelsior Bar.

The Academy is really some joint, a beautiful place, totally inhabited by the queerest group of egg-heads you ever laid eyes on. I suspect that most of them will be very nice once I get to know them, but it’s a bit out of my frame of reference to be set down amidst a bunch of people which, to the myopic last one of them, almost, is made up of nothing but archaelogists. Your proposed trip with your uncle to Greece and points south already begins to appeal to me, anything that steers clear of archaeology, and although I can’t say yet for sure whether I’ll be able to go with you or not, I think I can safely say that the chances are that I can and will. I hope that this doesn’t sound too indefinite. I want to do another long story this month, aimed shamelessly at something like
Harper’s Bazaar
, or any chic place that will pay me a pot of dough, and if I get that done by the time you arrive—which I think I shall be able to—then it’s off we go to the flesh-pots of Smyrna. I wish I could be more conclusive, but I hope this will do for an answer.

It’s good to hear that you’re finally coming to Europe, even without Mrs. Bloomingdale, or whatever the hell she calls herself by now. I suppose it was a grim sort of summer for you, but I always am a sucker for platitudes and maintain that it’s all probably working out for the best. I trust that by the time you get this letter you will have shaken the burden of grief, or whatever shoddy emotion you’ve been feeling, from your shoulders and have begun to live high off Ben Hibbs’s $$$$.

I left everyone in Paris in good and characteristic shape—Cass high as a kite and the Matthiessens only a bit more sober, due to the fact that they’re expecting a bundle from heaven and don’t want it to arrive bleary-eyed and reeling. I caught this cold on the Rome Express and arrived in Rome in a feeble state and mumbling broken Italian. Since the Academy
is sort of in the suburbs of Rome I’ve spent more money in taxis than I did the whole time I was in Paris. I’ve really begun a dreary regime and have become a typical Amurrican, refusing to go to see the Colosseum or any of the celebrated wrecks around here, but staying safely within the confines of the Excelsior Bar where they speak English, have Truman Capote, and sell martinis at 60¢ apiece. Could anything be more shocking? I’m really not much of a traveler, my baggage being my own neuroses and a hacking cough, which weigh me down too heavily, even if I were in the Garden of Eden. However, by the time you heave on the scene I have no doubt that my perspective will have altered and I’ll be a hardy voyageur, ready for hashish in Haifa and belly-dancers in Baghdad. Let me know how things progress with you and in the meantime I’ll try to clear my conscience with Art.

Best,

Bill

T
O
W
ILLIAM
C. S
TYRON
, S
R
.

October 27, 1952 Rome, Italy

Dear Pop,

Thanks for the piece by Mr. Jebb, which I liked, and for your earlier letter. The reason I haven’t written more promptly is because I’ve just recently finished a week’s trip by car—along with some other members of the Academy—to Florence, Siena, Ravenna, Urbino and Assisi. It was an excellent trip, lasting about a week, and thoroughly illuminating because my companions were all either painters or, better yet, art historians who gave me first-hand scholarship and information about the Art (with a capital A) we were seeing. I think, Art-wise, I was most impressed by the Medici tombs in Florence and by the Ravenna mosaics, which date from the middle of the Dark Ages and shine today in all their glory. As far as towns go I think I was particularly struck by Urbino, which is pitched on the top of a mountain and is filled with winding, steep streets and the nicest people in all of Italy. Assisi, on the other hand, is a tourist trap, filled with knick-knacks and holy pilgrims from places like Munich and Brussels.

Back at the Academy now, I’ve somewhat settled down. I wish I had a photograph of the place, but I’ll try and get one for you soon. It’s really a lovely place, a real palace, and big enough so that no one gets in anyone else’s way. The painters, sculptors, and architects all get enormous studios which would cost a four-figure sum in New York, and each of which commands a marvelous view of Rome down below. I myself, not needing so much space, have to be content with two huge connecting rooms, excellently furnished, with large ceiling-high windows and a view of the Academy courtyard below, where there is a fountain surrounded by four beautiful cedar trees. We eat in a sort of community dining hall. The food is good Italo-American style, but as in Paris I generally, except for lunch, prefer to eat down in Rome where there are of course excellent restaurants. The keynote here, somewhat like Rabelais’ Abbey of Thélème, is “Do What You Will” and there is no more routine here, or regulations, than in a hotel. That suits me fine. Of course I’ve already met some very amiable and interesting people, yet in spite of the slightly community aspects of the place, it doesn’t look to me as if there will be any trouble in keeping out of each other’s way, nor, on the other hand, as if there will be any lack of parties and
bon camaraderie
when the occasion demands. I have also met an absolutely beautiful girl, American, named Rose, with whom I get along right well, and who has an apartment on the other side of Rome, which will obviously necessitate my buying a car
pronto
.
^‡x
It won’t be a Fiat, but either a German Volkswagen (an excellent car) or an English Austin, either of which will cost around $1300 but which cost I can get back substantially in re-sale before I come back to the U.S.A. One thing just leads to another. A young man just must have a girl, and that always—even, or I should say
especially
in Europe—brings up the question of wheels.

The election of course is a big topic over here, too, although perhaps not so intensely emotional as in the U.S. Everyone seems to be rooting for Stevenson and I hope he gets elected, too. The only reading matter available
is
Time
and the
Herald-Tribune
and it seems to me that even in those arch-Republican journals it cannot be disguised just what a prime jackass Eisenhower has made of himself. If he had come out just once and roundly condemned McCarthy he might have had a chance with the not-after-all-so-dumb voter. But by the time you get this letter I suppose all the issues will be coming to a head.

As soon as I get this car situation straightened out, I’m going to settle down for a spell of work. I have ideas for three or four more long stories, which will help me financially, and in the meantime I suppose I will have thought up something for a new novel. I suspect that my long story “Long March” will be the strongest piece in the forthcoming issue of
Discovery
, which I’ll have sent to you in December or January. Meanwhile, I’ve gotten a proof of the jacket of the jumbo, economy-sized 50¢ Signet Double Volume, which will appear in every Walgreen drugstore in November, in which a wan, sad, half-clad Peyton is seen on the verge of climbing into bed with one of the most unsavory-looking Italians you ever saw.
Sic
Transit
Gloria
Literati
, but it will sell 250,000 copies and my stock will soar in Peoria. Best to all.
In
Italia
Ego
. Yet, American to the bone, I think often of home.

Your son,

Bill

T
O
J
OHN
P. C. T
RAIN
^‡y

November 6, 1952 Rome, Italy

Dear John:

I think that I was probably a very poor person to write a preface; judging from the edited copy which I got back, there were about three and a half lines of copy which seemed acceptable.
^‡z
Being new at the preface-writing
game, I am completely amenable to suggestions, and thank you for your comments, which in most cases seem to me to be reasonable enough; however, I would really quite frankly like to know where the line is which separates the rather dogmatic approach to the preface and the more informal approach of that “letter” which you suggest. In other words: I wrote a rather formal preface, a good part of which has been so completely altered or grammatically changed as to make it not “my” preface any longer, but someone else’s. This seems perfectly logical to me because, since all the editors have slightly varying points of view, and I used throughout the word “editors,” meaning “all of us,” some drastic tailoring has to be done in order to have my original beautiful prose conformed to a sort of median opinion of all the editors. However, in this case, what is finally left will apparently still appear above my name, and I don’t think I would want that too much, simply because the end result is not what I wrote.

As an alternative, then, you seem to suggest a letter to the reader. Before writing that I would like to ask you what you think should be in the letter. Again, I would like to avoid having you suggest what I should say. I think the letter idea is a good one, and one which finally solves the pompous manifesto, however I think you would agree with me that such a letter—if it is at all to possess the informality of tone implicit in a letter—has to be left intact pretty much completely, excluding, of course, two or three proofreaders’ marks. When I ask you, then, what you think should be in the letter, I am really asking: don’t you think it should be no more and no less than any friendly piece of correspondence from one so-called thinking person to another, or group of others? I have written one on the following pages which incorporates some of your counter suggestions. I do hope that it won’t be altered, since if it is it will lose its point.

As for your comments on my original preface, I do not agree with all of them, but since both my ideas and your comments upon them end up pretty much being matters of opinion, I can’t readily say that I shared them (and I’m not being harsh) “very interesting.” I did not, however, mean to imply that decadence, defeat, and decay in our literature is merely a fancy of the critics. I myself, like you, do think the times are serious, and I think that our literature is full of a concomitant despair; I only meant to say (and I no doubt simply didn’t say it clearly enough) that the shallow critics (call them “book reviewers”) assail modern writing, poetry for its
“decadence,” “defeat,” “decay,” without honestly juxtaposing the despair of the literature against the despair of the times.

At any rate, the letter follows on the next pages, and I hope you and PM and GP and the others will find it suitable. As for your commentary, I found it an excellent + perceptive piece and liked it very much, perhaps one reason being that your moderate attitude toward the expatriate literary life thoroughly concurs with mine.