Selected Letters of William Styron (29 page)

Best—

WCS
.

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

May 6, 1953 Rome, Italy

Dear Pop,

After incredibly complicated dealings with the Italian bureaucracy, Rose and I were married on Monday afternoon (the 4
^th
) in truly gala style, at the Campidoglio, which is Rome’s city hall. It was a very nice ceremony, unlike the equivalent in an American city, I’m sure, since the little room where it was performed was covered with wonderful crimson brocade and the officiating judge (in Rome the marrying judgeship is a high civic honor and our man, Signor Marconi, is Italy’s Samuel Goldwyn) was dressed in a beautiful green and red sash. On hand for the ceremony were a few Academy friends, Irwin Shaw and his wife, Jack Marquand, who came from Athens especially for the wedding, and Peter Matthiessen and Tom Guinzburg (my
Paris Review
friends), who flew down from Paris, also especially. Afterwards, the Shaws had a big reception for us in their apartment, with cake and champagne, and after
that
we had a big dinner in a restaurant, with
fettuccini
and chicken
alla
diavolo
. It was just fine. Best man was Bob White, whom I’ve mentioned; and his wife wrote a poem which she sang at the reception to a special tune written by Frank Wigglesworth, who accompanied her on a recorder. This sounds extremely corny, but I assure you it couldn’t have been more touching, to be surrounded by so many fine friends. No honeymoon, since it won’t be long before we decamp for Ravello.

Because of my matrimonial involvements (I’ve also bought
four
tailored suits) I haven’t had much time to write, but I did go to the American Express, as you requested, and was told very definitely that it would be far
better if you arranged the travel from Havre to Italy through their New York or Washington office, rather than go through the procedure of lots of complicated air mail letters to you from Rome or Paris. I really think this would be much better. As a matter of fact, Rose’s family, who do a lot of traveling, use a very good travel agent in Baltimore. The woman, whose name is Miss Ethel C. Einstein, runs the Metropolitan Tourist Agency (North Charles St.) and is a very influential person, apparently, in the travel field. She is also a personal friend of Mrs. Burgunder, Rose’s mother. I suggest that you write this lady, tell her who you are, and include information on where you want to go, how long you want to stay, how much you want to pay, etc. I have a feeling that she’ll fix you up much better than American Express.
^‡Y

That’s about all for now. Hope everything goes well, and I’m certainly looking forward to seeing you this summer.

Your son,

Bill …

T
O
R
OBERT
L
OOMIS

May 18, 1953 Rome, Italy

Dear Bob,

Thanks many times for your felicatory letter upon my nuptials. I suppose that by now John has received my letter describing the wedding day activities and has filled you in on the details. Both your and John’s letters have amused me greatly (John’s was really an encyclopedia of a letter) and it has only been the pre-wedding confusion, which involves, among other things, buying rings, flowers, new suits (4), struggling with the fantastic Italian bureaucracy, that has kept me from writing you all sooner. I can’t understand, though, why this event should top your list of unlikely happenings. I am now practically 28 years old, I have two faintly healthy gonads, and Rose, to me, is an enormously appealing girl. Practically everybody that both you and I know (and presumably including yourself)
is either (a) married, (b) has been married, or (
C
) going to get married. I don’t know what qualities of potential celibacy I’ve ever exhibited to make you believe I’d stay a bachelor all my life. As Jack Marquand wrote me, marriage is no doubt not particularly desirable but it is nonetheless inevitable; and the fact of the matter is that it seems to me far more desirable than I ever thought it would be, and I hope you will take it in a spirit of good old fraternal Phi Delt advice when I suggest that you certainly won’t go wrong in taking the plunge yourself, providing you have the right girl—and from what I’ve heard and seen you seem to have the right girl. This is not the talk of the man in the trap who wants to get all of his buddies trapped, too. Marriage must have its points, or else so many people wouldn’t get into it. I think people like you and I, being of the so-called artistic temperament, have felt perhaps too much that this matrimonial business encroaches on our personal freedom; this attitude is perfectly valid, of course, and only becomes selfish and, to my way of thinking, wrong, when one’s interest has been for so long, in simply fucking that they allow this interest to warp their outlook when the right girl comes along. I don’t mean to sound priggish or All-American, and I probably sound confused. What I’m trying to say is this, and I’ll shut up: that (a) fucking is wonderful and even marriage doesn’t put a halt, alas, to a desire to get into a million new women, but an endless round of fornications and “affairs” is, at our advanced age, both wearing on the mind and body, and infantile; (b) that if you’re lucky and I think I am, the girl you marry far from even trying to impinge upon your intellectual and artistic independence will indeed go so far out of her way to let you alone that it’s almost embarrassing, so that you have to whistle, from time to time, for her to come back. Besides, if you’re lucky, you simply
like
to be with her. End of lesson.

I didn’t mean to go on at such length; I just wanted to unload upon you some first impressions, I guess. Meanwhile, in a couple weeks we’re going down to Ravello for the summer and I trust that by September I’ll have written solidly and true, as Papa would say, and that when I get back to New York I’ll have both a MS to show off in the way of a “novella”
^‡Z
and the beginnings of a novel, besides a pretty wife. Let me hear how your
Gloria business is developing. I got a long, wistful letter from Suzie the other day; for God’s sake see if you can’t fix her up with a nice big man!

Yrs in the bond,

Bill

T
O
N
ORMAN
M
AILER

June 1, 1953 Rome, Italy

Dear Norman:

I note that you began your last letter: “I’ve been kind of depressed lately,” and by way of preface to this letter I should say that I’ve been both depressed and elated since you last heard from me—elated at having just married a most admirable girl (perhaps you’ve gotten an announcement) and depressed because for roughly your own sort of reasons—an inability to get going again at this writing game. To complicate the situation, a few days ago, barreling down the Autostrada in an effort to catch up with Irwin Shaw’s Ford convertible (we had been on a two-car picnic at Angio) I smacked into a motorscooter going full tilt and glued an Italian all over the front end of my car.
^§a
The guy was made of brick and will survive with nothing more than lacerations, and fortunately for the legal end of the thing it was his own fault (he was a moron, for one thing, and for another had been driving with a glass eye) but such incidents always leave me spookily aware of just how vulnerable we all are. Perhaps they’re valuable as such from an ah-tistic point of view, but I doubt it.

At any rate, having descended from my earlier manic phase, I can easily appreciate your present difficulties. In waiting for my car to recover from its wounds (which were much more grievous than the Italian’s) so that we can go to Ravello, I’ve been futilely trying to get started on something—another novelette, I think—and the complications arising from the thing certainly support that old saw about the more you go along in writing the
more difficult it gets. I admire your tenacity; at least in this book you’re doing you seem to be plunging ahead. As for me, if I don’t feel that my very first page is a real sockeroo then I tend to give up in anguish—which is an attitude that is fatal and will, if anything, if I don’t snap out of it, be my downfall. It certainly justifies your earlier comment about a peculiar tendency I have to invent and manner the style; indeed, I’m beginning to see that everything I write and my whole timorous approach to writing is of the same rough pattern of my day-to-day life—that being one of caution, trepidation and cowardly fears. No self-confidence. How do you beat it? Perhaps I’ll change some as I get older but it seems to me that life (and I wonder how closely it parallels the experience of other men) is a long gray depression interrupted by moments of high hilarity. No wonder
Time
magazine is forever complaining about young writers re-writing their own tangled neuroses. However, I should add (in a brief flicker of exaltation, and bugger
Time
) that any writer worth 10¢ has written out of nothing much more than his own neuroses; and I have no doubt that this summer—prompted by the absence of whiskey (most of us drink too much), a set of tennis each day, and wife who will rout me out of my slothful, womb-like sleeping habits sometime before noon—I’ll do that novelette
somehow
, cautious and fearful as it may turn out to be when it’s finished. Incidentally, while I think of it, I’m flattered about your supposition about reading my book; I reread part of it for the first time again not long ago, and while I’m certainly not ashamed of lots of it, I can realize why quite a few of the critics took it to task, for much of it is dreadfully self-indulgent, and cluttered up with all these fears and cautions I have. Not that I’m going to start writing big, hopeful books for Harrison Smith, but there seems to me now to be far too much agonizing in it: Anyway, I shouldn’t feel timid about reading it if I were you, who, as I said before, are one of the tiny number of contemporary writers who have a solid, unshakable, recognizable style. By the way, these lousy war novels still seem to be coming out, don’t they? “Battle Cry.” “By a man who loves the Marines.” Jesus!
^§b

Your problem of point-of-view confronts me, too. You’re right about the 3d person and the world-view, yet I should think that after so effectively
achieving a welding of the two in
Naked
that it shouldn’t be too rough on you now. I know too, though, how one’s attitudes change. Me, I’ve never been successful with 1
^st
person, mostly for the reasons you describe. One gets to love-scenes, for instance, and if the “I” happens to be the hero-narrator, as is often the case, the result is: “I took her in my arms and felt her responsive belly scalding mine; she looked at me with adoration and desire and with a tremendous whimper of love said ‘Darling Bill,’ and slid onto my pulsating pecker.” Which seems self-centered. Anyway, Norm, I shouldn’t worry about the “fundamental poverty of imagination” you assign to yourself; that’s the kind of talk I indulge in. Keep at it, and let me hear how things are going. My address after the 10
^th
will be c/o Hotel Palumbo, Ravello (Salerno) Italy. Best to you, and to all.

Bill

T
O
M
AC
H
YMAN

August 15, 1953 Ravello, Italy

Dear Mac:

It certainly was good to hear from you again. Every now and then I’d get a word or two from Sigrid or Bob Loomis or someone about you, but the information was rather sketchy and so I’m mighty glad to hear from you first hand. Glad you got out of the USAF. For me, anything military is only about two yards removed from hell, and since, as you probably know, I was back in the Marines in ’51, I can feel the relief you must have felt on getting out.

Externally, I am living the rich, full life, something like J.B. Duke in his later years. Rose and I have an 11
^th
century palace which has been completely modernized, with tiled floors, chromium plated john, garden, private grove of lemon trees, and an incredible sort of panorama overlooking the area. It costs $100 a month and we have a full-time maid who slaves like a Cordele nigra and costs us about $25 a month. I have a car, a new English Austin heavily carapaced with birdshit, so we can drive down to the beach at Amalfi almost anytime we want. Internally, however, I am living a very different kind of life—often I think sort of like St. Sebastian when that 35
^th
arrow was shot into him. The reason behind this is the
same reason I can so easily sympathize with what you said in your letter—“not being able to break out of this goddamned whirlpool of living.” The fact is—and I really mean it—that I often wonder whether it would not have been better to go unpublished than to be in the state I am now, which is a state of feeling that I’ve written all I can and that anything else I write will be the sheerest sort of manufactured crap, without meaning or conviction. Of course, I’m not recommending you to stay unpublished—and I know you won’t—and I’m not trying to say that I wasn’t crazy to be published when I wasn’t published. I’m merely saying that I used to think (before I was published) that it was a pose, all that business about the tortures a person goes through trying to get something written after having had a successful first novel. As it stands, here I am: living the short happy life of Alfred Gwyne Vanderbilt,
2½ years
since the last word of “Lie Down in Darkness” was written and with only one piece (the story in
Discovery
) written since then. Of course, I can rationalize by saying that of that time 7 months were spent in the Marines, when perhaps I could hardly be expected to write, and that, after all, a person’s time in Europe should be spent in “education” and “discovery,” but that’s so much hooey. The fact of the matter is that I’ve doped off to a monumental degree and every day that goes by I’m getting older and older and with nothing done to show for it. My main flaw (and it seems to me to be a goddam big one) is a sort of total paralysis of will, and I envy those who can write and write and write, and I shudder when I think that time will no doubt find me an old, old man with one novel and a novelette to my credit.