Selected Letters of William Styron (34 page)

Well, I hope this has been of some help. Ravello is not the place to go, I think, if you’re in search of the same kind of constant diversion you find in seaside places. It has a tranquility, a kind of austerity with color and beauty, if that’s possible, which I found wonderfully healthful to the soul after a year or so of places like St. Tropez and Cannes and St. Jean-de-Luz and other Coney Islands. It is frankly a resort town, and makes its money that way, but it is not garish, it is not a clip-joint, and I like to think of it
as a place which still holds out against noise-makers, exhibitionists, press-agents, and other heathens. To my mind, the beauty of the place is incomparable, but the pace is gentle, the people are pleasant, and the tone civilized.

If there is anything else you’d like to know about Ravello, I’d be glad to let you know. I love to promote the town; I only hope it doesn’t finally get over-promoted and filled up, like any Elysium you can name, with lunatics.

Sincerely yours

William Styron

P.S
. No, I’m not Greek, though it has that sound. The name’s a corrupted form of the original English, which ended in “-ring.”

P.P.S
. “The Colossus of Maroussi” was a really superb book. Ravello is not far from Paestum, incidentally, where the glory of Greece is marvelously enshrined.

T
O
P
ETER
M
ATTHIESSEN

December 16, 1955 Baltimore, MD

Merry Xmas to Patsy and Peter and Lucas and Leary from Susanna Styron (age 9 Mos.)

Dear Peter:

Merry Xmas. Tragedy of tragedies. I just lost my cigarette Denicotea, which I bought in London and have had for nearly four years.
^§E
My nerves are all on edge. I write this from Baltimore, where we are convalescing from Rose’s appendix, extracted at Johns Hopkins by the world’s most famous surgeon (I had never heard of him) in 8½ minutes. She is doing fine now and we are heading to Roxbury day after tomorrow.

I recall drunkenly telling you that I would write you and tell you what
I thought of it, along with New Year’s plans.
^§F
Delighted. First, before I say the
con
things, I want to say how impressed I am by the fusion of your style and your narrative power. You’ve achieved an
ease
, in the last sense, which you didn’t have in
Race Rock
, and by that I think I mean simply that, artistically, you’ve become much more sure of yourself, and as a result the scenes flow naturally, one into the other without that kind of shaky lack of authority which in places marred
Race Rock
. Furthermore, I’m really tremendously impressed by what I think are really Dostoievski-like glimmerings of characterization-
cum
scene—like that of the appalling Marat conducting Sand, Virgil-like, through the lower depths of Paris, a trek in which the reader becomes
involved
, not only because you’ve so beautifully established Marat’s identity at the outset (again, the initial business with Marat in the bookstore is wonderful, Dostoievskish in its strangely rational, acceptable
grotesquerie
) but because you have at the same time such a fine sense of place—the hellish abbatoir, for instance, and the dismal potter’s field. Moreover, the ability you’ve developed to resurrect the nuances and overtones of a scene by one or two beautifully exact, extraneous observations (I’m thinking here, for instance, of the business with Sand in bed and Lise, half-sensual, half-repellant, gobbling
croissants
) is quite wonderful and something, so far as I can see, that is uniquely your own.

What do I see wrong with the book? I think my final disappointment lies not so much in any inherent, particular, and specific flaw as in the fact that you simply missed so many opportunities to flesh it out, give it substance, transform what was the marvelous suggestion of a scene into something which could be a dramatic powerhouse. I think or had the feeling that in every single scene a fine, pure imagination was at work but at the same time I felt terribly let down that this same imagination did not let itself go, prolong itself, take advantage of itself and fill out the crannies and corners. I’m thinking, for example, of the love-scene between Lise and Jacobi, which seemed an outline of a love-scene rather than the real stuff. And of course I’m not saying that you should have made it either sloppy or clinical. I think I simply mean (and I really say this with the profoundest respect for that real
great
talent glimmering throughout the book) that
there’s a hurried quality, as if it were written by a man who for some reason or another failed to realize the richness, the pregnancy, of his most promising and exciting scenes. Here endeth the lesson. I’d knock the piss out of anyone who said this to me (for my condescension by now must be sickening), but I think—such is my faith in your imagination, which you really
haven’t
let loose—that if you were to sit down and, say, over a period of two or three or even four years really suffer over a scene and let it loose, you could make us all look like Harold Bell Wright. Shit you not. I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel which, so skeletal as it seemed to me, impelled me to such famous conclusions.

Because of Rose’s incision I doubt if we’ll be able to go further than to Sodom for New Year’s but as of this date Guinzburg informs me that interesting things are brewing in town that night. I guess we’ll be there for something or other, and Rose and I fondly and fully expect you to be there, too.

B.S.

T
O
H
IRAM
H
AYDN

April 20, 1956 Roxbury, CT

Dear Hiram:

I have thought it over and I think the best thing to put on the
cover
of the book is “The Long March,” a short novel by W.S. I think this because (a) in actuality, it is a short novel, and (b) to put simply
a story
by might discourage a potential buyer, besides making people wonder, perhaps, why on earth a “story” should be out between covers in a separate book. I don’t like “novella” because it sounds a bit too fancy to me; “novelette,” unfortunately, has gotten to mean the longer stuff you read in magazines like
The Ladies’ Home Journal
and
Redbook
. So, I think a short novel is both most honest and accurate.

As for the reviews, if I remember rightly the ones in both the
Times
+
Tribune
were written by queers and I got rather short shrift, or at least just a kind of ho-hum praise. Max Geismar reviewed it, I think, in
The Nation
and said some very nice things about it. But as for the exact quotes, I can’t give you them and so perhaps the best thing for you to do is to check with
Pocket Books, Inc. I think Robert Kotlowitz is the one to talk to, if he’s still working there. I also now remember that I got glowing mention in
The Commonweal
, if you want to use that.

As for the inside blurb copy, I just don’t know what to say, except that I would like it to be brief and have dignity. I remember that when the piece first appeared, N. Mailer wrote me that he thought it was probably the “best 100 or so pages written since the war,” and maybe you’d like to have him repeat it for a blurb, if he’s so inclined and still thinks so.
^§G

I’m sorry I can’t be of great help, but maybe these few notes will give you an idea or two. Hope to see you soon, when spring comes, if it ever does.

Benediction qui venit in nomine etc. etc.
^§H

Bill                 

T
O
P
ETER
M
ATTHIESSEN

May 15, 1956 Roxbury, CT

Dear Peter:

Here is a story which I like very, very much and which, in my august position of advisory editor, I am advising to be published in the
Review
.
^§I
It is a sort of Southern Engines of Hygeria, but has a great deal of humor, I think, besides being very warm and poignant. Let me know whether or not you agree. It may, however, be too long. The
Virginia Quarterly Review
, according to the author, would have taken it if he had reduced the length by 3 or 4,000 words, but this he didn’t want to do. What do you think?

The author is a North Carolinian, presently a Rhodes Scholar, and was
a student under Wm. Blackburn at Duke, which is how I came to know about him. If you don’t decide to take it, please send it back to Diarmuid Russell. Love to Patsy and all the young ones. I hope you’re having a better winter than we are in Conn. I’m planting lichen in the vegetable garden and have seeded the lawn with tundra.

All yours,

BS

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

July 4, 1956 Roxbury, CT

Dear Marq,

Since this is the night of Independence Day, I thought it not remiss to let you know—you who seems to be callously lacking in any proper respect for the country which nurtured you—that all is well with the Republic. Are you in Spain? I don’t know what kind of news you’ve been getting. Eisenhower has been force-fed through the asshole for lo these many weeks, and the
Trib
reported with some joy today that he got his first hopefully albeit feebly licks in with his mashie at Gettysburg. An acquaintance of mine in advertising, who has a pipeline to BBD+O, swears that they are going to run the poor bastard even if they have to call in a taxidermist. Two airplanes crashed in a kind of Huxleyesque rapture of horror over the Grand Canyon, claiming 128 lives (come back by boat). A middle-aged man in Miami Beach had a stroke while sunbathing and lay paralyzed beneath the blazing sun for 2½ days until someone on a church picnic discovered his mute and helpless condition. He died of second-degree burns. Nixon is in the Philippines, spreading sunshine to the gooks. Foster has been out in the corn country, Iowa or someplace like that, receiving Le D’s and sowing seeds of disaster. The country is in the hands of morons, juvenile rapists, water skiers, and a pimply crooner whom thank God you’ve been spared the ordeal of seeing named Elvis Presley. In our pathetic and lovely little hometown of Roxbury this past week there was consummated the wretched alliance of Marilyn Monroe and an ex-playwright named Arthur Miller, bringing to these tranquil glens and glades a gawking procession of shortshirted, Pontiac-ensconced,
growling cretins such as you would never have imagined, and leaving dead around an oak tree not ½ mile from this house the lady correspondent from
Paris-Match
, who cracked up chasing the couple.
^§J
Malcolm Bray, the rat-faced real estate agent who sold us our place and who also doubles as town constable, told us with Rotarian pride that land values hereabouts have skyrocketed since the event. I wouldn’t be surprised. At any rate, I am too sad about everything to go on any more about what’s new with the U.S.A.

Rose and I were both vastly entertained by your letter, especially by the account of Mr. Aldrich’s goodwill ambassador who put the whammy on Steve Spender. However, you must have been mistaken, in that such a palpable arse could
not
have come from Virginia.

You chose the wrong time, of course, to dissociate yourself from
The Paris Review
. It has been quoted at length in all the journals throughout the land, Luce papers included, and to belong on its masthead is definitely a cachet of honor second only to being on that old ladies’ magazine,
The New Yorker
. I think you’ll eventually regret the move when the literary history of our time is written and the name Phillips is not connected with the gallant little organ. Plimpton, whom I saw recently at a gala fete given at the St. Regis for our millionaire friend, Irwin Shaw, told me that he was very upset by your move and suspects that the only reason you left us is because you are on the verge of doing a literary hatchet job on your erstwhile Paris pals. Is there a patina of truth to this observation?

Here at random are some more items which may be of interest to one who has chosen in the most démodé fashion possible to expatriate himself from the finest and most progressive nation on earth (speaking of things démodé, I hope you have let Michael and Lee
^§K
know that what they’re up to is not only terribly non-U, in spite of the obvious paradox, but dangerous as well, and that I should not like to be on hand to see them in some Socialist turnbail some years hence, being hauled to the gibbet at the Marble Arch): being now in the Random House fold I am great pals with not
only old Ben Cerf but his pals, too: old Arlene Francis and old Buddy Schulberg and old Mossy Hart and swell old Colesy Porter and Dickie Rodgers and sweet, wry-witted Stevie Allen.
^§L
We all get together at Ben’s place in Mt. Kisco and go swimming and play charades and that sort of thing and then I get on the phone and call up old Joe Fox in Crowfields and taunt him about the fun I’m having with all my swell celebrity friends. I’m a pretty good man with a tongue in the right place: as a result of my efforts,
The Long March
is coming out in the Modern Library this Sept. You are wrong, however, about
LM
being acted by Brando + Lancaster. I wouldn’t have them. It is to be filmed next spring in Florida by a guy named Coe that Joe works for and Fox is to be the grand panjandrum and unit manager. I thought if you + Suay got back in time, we could all go down there and suck on tangerines and watch the cameras spin. Or dolly in, as we say in the business. I have written 400 rather faltering pages on my newest effort, and the end is still not in sight. With all my cinema commitments my literary emotions have of course suffered a kind of anemia. Who wants a Nobel prize when you can pal around with people like Gore Vidal and Peter Viertel and Niven Busch and “Gadge” Kazan and Edmund Purdom?
^§M
I have taken to smoking black Brazilian cigars, so that my lips have become wet and lubricious.