Selected Letters of William Styron (3 page)

Styron himself spoke to some of these difficulties even in the 1960s. Writing to Blackburn, who was editing the letters of Bill’s Duke classmate, the writer Mac Hyman, Bill mentioned his “surprise” at finding some of their letters in his papers. “During these last years we always spoke to each other by telephone,” Styron explained on March 30, 1965, “the invention which is in the process of killing off all literary correspondence.”

Fortunately, Styron did not cease writing letters altogether, even when the telephone took over more and more of his friendly and professional
communication. The hours he would spend on a given day (letters are often clustered in this manner) speak to the psychological space the activity helped create for him in the midst of struggling with a novel. Again and again in these pages, Styron expressed his belief that writing was “a tedious and agonizing process and I loathe [it] with almost a panic hatred.”

But in a letter to Hyman in May of 1953, Styron showed his typical ironic self-awareness as he revealed the importance of writing letters to help navigate that tedium and panic.

It was in his correspondence where Styron not only sounded out his frequent bouts with “melancholy” and “writer’s block” but helped ease himself out of both predicaments. Indeed, Bill’s self-awareness certainly extended to his letters; he wanted them to be more than scrawled grocery lists. He understood them as part of his oeuvre and expressed definite feelings about the publication of writers’ letters. When Blackburn proposed doing a collection of Styron’s letters in 1966, Bill wrote that “the publication
of personal letters … has somewhat the quality of gratuitous exposure.” Indeed, responding to a letter he had written to Mac in May of 1957, Styron told Blackburn, “when I read that letter of mine which you sent and thought of it appearing in print, I felt terribly
naked
all of a sudden.”

Fortunately for those reading this volume, Styron added that “when a writer is dead, certainly that becomes a different matter. Presumably then there evolves enough interest in the writer’s private self that the very publication of his correspondence wipes out the element of gratuitousness … when I myself am dead and someone wants to put my letters together, I couldn’t care less one way or another.”

Although we have taken Styron at his stated indifference, the hallmark of this volume reveals the very opposite guiding emotion. Styron’s care and concern pulse in each word collected here. My hope is that this invitation to see his “private self” will reveal his concern not just for showing love and friendship to those he corresponded with but for making lasting and worthy art for the readers he cared so much about.

R. B
LAKESLEE
G
ILPIN
February 2012

EDITORIAL NOTES
 

A
FTER TRANSCRIBING AND ANNOTATING
more than one thousand letters, it has been necessary to make certain cuts and edits. Ellipses mark infrequent deletions from the text. We have occasionally included incomplete letters, sometimes missing as much as a page, if the extant contents justified inclusion. Errors in punctuation and spelling have been silently corrected, with the exception of intentionally (often humorously) misspelled words. We have tried to keep explanatory notes to a minimum, identifying the people and books that we have deemed worthy of explanation.

A small number of these letters have appeared in print prior to being collected in this volume. Fourteen of Bill’s letters to the writer Donald Harington appeared in a special issue of
The Southern Quarterly
in 2002. We have also chosen to reprint several letters that first appeared in Styron’s
Letters to My Father
, ed. James L. W. West III (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009). West’s wonderful collection included all of Bill’s letters to William C. Styron, Sr., from January 1943 to October 1953.

All the letters follow a basic format:

Date Written from

R
ECIPIENT

William Styron dated virtually every letter he wrote during his long life. He also nearly always indicated where he was when he wrote a letter. In this way, readers can track his movements—often alternating seasonally between Roxbury, Connecticut, and Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts—but his extensive travel around the world is also catalogued in these letters. We have dispensed with elaborate abbreviations of archival locations, autograph versus typescript letters, and the like in order to include more of Styron’s actual correspondence. Unfortunately, there is no single location in which to view Styron’s letters. Our efforts to collect material from libraries
(The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and Yale University’s Beinecke Library and Manuscripts and Archives among them) represent a small fraction of the publicly and privately held letters that we solicited, copied, and received in order to represent Styron’s correspondence. In other words, you hold in your hands the closest approximation to an archive of this writer’s letters. Please enjoy them in the spirit in which they were written and received.

WILLIAM STYRON: A TIMELINE