Selected Letters of William Styron (54 page)

All best—

WS.

I have written to the fellow in Prague. Thanks.

T
O
R
OBERT
P
ENN
W
ARREN

February 19, 1965 Roxbury, CT

Dear Prof:

I spoke to Lillian today, and apparently I have been passed over by the Institute again, this time in favor of Messrs. Nemerov, Kazin, Lattimore among others.
^†dd
It is getting so that my desperation at being left out of the company of such literary titans as Glenway Wescott, William Maxwell and Kay Boyle is feeding so savagely at my liver that I don’t know how I’ll be able to stand it.
^†ee
At any rate, I wanted to tell you that, as honestly appreciative as I am for your nomination and support, I also feel that it must be getting as embarrassing for you as it is for me, and therefore I want to ask you please not to put my name up again. I am probably—as you once said—making it more important than it really is; nonetheless, I do find this rejection a little embarrassing, and I figure twice is quite enough. I do thank you, though, for your loyalty and your gesture.

Lillian said she suspected that the reason was that the voting musicians,
architects, etc., don’t know beans about “quality lit.” and therefore vote for the safe, the well-established, or the recent best-sellers. This may or may not be so, but if it is, then maybe that is all the more reason for thinking that it is not the club for me. At any rate, if nominatated or elected in the future—even unbeknownst to me—I shall, like Cal Coolidge, firmly decline the honor.

We are looking forward to another Vermont visit—with work, this time, also snow-shoeing—; Rose and Eleanor have already talked about it, but of course we’ll be seeing you before then.

Yrs. in Jesus,

—B.      

T
O
W
ILLIAM
B
LACKBURN

March 30, 1965 Roxbury, CT

Dear Professor:

About a week ago, Theodore Roethke’s widow wrote me, asking if I could locate a letter or two she knew Ted had written me from Seattle before he died. I found one of them, and while I was going through the great mass of correspondence I seem to have accumulated, I found to my great surprise these two letters from Mac, mainly because during these last years we always spoke to each other by telephone—the invention which is in the process of killing off all literary correspondence.
^†ff
At any rate, I was on the verge of sending them to you when I got your nice letter yesterday. These letters were written to me just after I got back from Italy in 1954, during the time I lived in New York before moving to Roxbury. The earlier one must have been written right after Random House had decided to publish
No Time for Sergeants
, while the later one—in July—was written after the Book of the Month Club had taken the book and it seemed headed for a great success. As I recollect, we saw quite a bit of Mac during that winter and spring. He was alone in New York, and would often come to the apartment for dinner, and later we would go out on the town, in the
Village or elsewhere. Anyway, here they are and feel free to make use of them as you wish.

I am still working away at Nat Turner, and the book doesn’t get any easier as I go along. I am rather ashamed to tell you that Random House has already sold the paperback rights to New American Library for $100,000, which will do one of two things to me: (a) totally corrupt me, or (b) cause me to finish it immediately out of shame and necessity. Anyway, I’ll keep you posted. Is there any chance of your getting up this way this spring or in June? We’ll be here for the next few months and it would be good to see you again.

Yrs as ever,

—B.      

T
O
D
ONALD
H
ARINGTON

April 8, 1965 Roxbury, CT

Dear Don:

Regrettably, Rose strained her back on the night before the morning we were due to go to Vermont—and I’m afraid that is the reason you didn’t hear from us. Perhaps another time we’ll be able to do it.

I’ve been leading what the French call the High Life (pronounced Heej Leef), going to New York more often than is good for me and ending up at 5:30 A.M. in dingy bars dancing with Jacqueline Kennedy. Honest Injun. I’m afraid that both I and the Widow Kennedy were quite stoned and when I asked her if she wished to dance the Fug she replied: “Oh no, I don’t like those dances which have no bodily contact.” So we ended up glued together, brow against sweaty brow. Alas, however, she was swept off into the morning in the embrace of a better, luckier man.

Don’t fret over your book. It’s a fine one—although I do know how you may be suffering from pre-publication jitters …

T
O
W
ILLIAM
B
LACKBURN

June 2, 1965 Roxbury, CT

Dear Professor:

I greatly enjoyed seeing you duly credited by the
Times Lit Sup
, and sent the editorial along to my father who was also delighted. I was rather surprised, however, to see my name linked with yours for in England, at least, as I think I have told you, I have always had a rather mediocre reputation, with both sales and critical esteem next to zero. At any rate, it was good to see you mentioned in such a flattering way and it probably created a lot of much-deserved envy around Dooks.

In a little over a week I will attain the venerable age of 40, a troubling anniversary which I approach with mixed feelings. Actually one shouldn’t worry too much about age, I suppose—as you once remarked, it is Time which is the mystery—and the fact that the novel I am working on seems to be going well does a lot to allay my trepidation. I think it was Lillian Hellman’s great friend and mentor, the psychiatrist Gregory Zilboorg,
^†gg
who had made a study of the matter and pointed out that the decade between 40 and 50 and even the decade after should be the most productive in a man’s life. It is a nice thought anyway. I have the highest hopes for old Nat Turner. I think I am in almost perfect control of a subject which demands and is getting whatever good balance of intellect and emotion I possess, and if I don’t blow it up in the last part of the book I think it will really be something for the world to see. I regret that the pace is so slow and laborious but that is something I cannot help.

As is not the case in Albion, in France (I say this with complete immodesty) I am along with Salinger the best-known living American writer, a fact which tickles me deeply, and already it has been announced in the French press that I am arriving in Paris on June 23d. I hope this doesn’t offend you. At any rate, I am taking a little time off from the book and am going to stay with Jim Jones in Paris, with a side trip down the Loire and to Pamplona, and will be back on Martha’s Vineyard around the middle
of July. If there is any way you can pay a summer visit to the Island, you are as usual quadruply welcome.

As ever,

Bill

T
O
M
ANAGER
OF
WTOP
^†hh

June 9, 1965 Roxbury, CT

Dear Sir:

Thank you for sending me a copy of your editorial on Robert Lowell’s protest.
^†ii

What you do not seem to realize is that, in an age of publicity, Mr. Lowell’s boycott of culture was the only public protest he could make. Suppose he had made his protest “poetically,” as you put it. Would that have made the front page of
The New York Times
, and the newspapers of England and France?

Sincerely,

W Styron

T
O
J
AMES AND
G
LORIA
J
ONES

June 14, 1965 Roxbury, CT

Dear Moss; and dear James & Kaylie & Jamie:

The flight is Pan American #118 which arrives at Orly at 9:40 in the evening on Wednesday, June 23d.

Gerry Murphy won’t be flying with us. The sad news about Gerry is
that her fiancé, who for so many long years it took to get him hooked, was killed last Monday in a Marine training accident in California. Apparently they were coming down a mountain and a guy slipped and fell into a swift-running river and Gerry’s boy jumped in to save him, but both of them were washed out of sight. Isn’t that the
damndest
thing to happen to poor Gerry after all these spinster years?

But the good news is that we are
coming
with joy at the prospect of Paris and doing the trip with all of you & can barely wait for Biarritz and Pamplona and all the rest.

Oh, I forgot to tell you—Virginia and Ed Gilbert are coming back too; meeting us toward the end of the month in the Loire country and going down to Biarritz in a car they’ve rented. They have a house there too, also tickets to the Feria in Pamplona. They said they were sure you wouldn’t mind if they horned in just a bit. Gil sold his last book
AMERICAN CHROME
to Paramount for a mint, which is the reason they can swing it. Gil wants to do research for a bullfighting novel to be called
SPANISH GNOME
. It’s all about a very tiny short matador but very brave, etc. They’ll also be driving back to Paris with us.

The above is a nightmare I had last night. Please forget it.

Love to all, see you bientôt,

Bill

T
O
R
OBERT
AND
C
LAIRE
W
HITE

July 3, 1965
^†jj
Biarritz, France

We have et our way through France with the Joneses by way of the Chateux country + Périgueux (Truffleville) and are now ensconced in this pleasure-dome where all is modified bliss. Ran into—guess-who—Duncan Longcope, living in a ratty hotel where we stayed. He sends regards. We are going out tonight with Frank Sinatra. I am the 12
^th
most famous American in France. Love to all—Billie S.

T
O
B
ONNIE
C
ONE
^†kk

August 9, 1965 Vineyard Haven, MA

Dear Miss Cone:

In 1943, when I was a student in the Marine V-12 program at Duke, you taught me mathematics—a subject at which I am no more adept now than I was then. I was a terrible student and I recall that I spent most of my time in your class reading Dos Passos and Thomas Wolfe. At eighteen I was a passionate reader and determined to become a writer someday. On one occasion I recall that my non-interest in math was so intense and my concentration upon some novel or other so deep that you called me down in class and, quite rightly, put me on report. I was quite angry at this totally justified punishment, but I remember that there was something about you that commanded the greatest respect, and I also recall that we had a lively and friendly argument. I said that I was going to be a writer come hell or high water and I remember you said with great good humor that you hoped I would succeed in my ambition, adding that when my first novel came out you hoped I would send a copy to your home in (I’ll never forget the name) Lodge, South Carolina. Well, it has been more than a few years since that book came out, and I always intended to send you a copy but for all sorts of procrastinating reasons I never got around to it.

As I told Mrs. Whisenant over the telephone not too long ago, I read all about your great achievement in Charlotte in
Time
magazine—a kind of miracle, really, since it is a magazine I try to avoid (even though they had the good sense to recognize you) but couldn’t avoid in this instance since it was my only reading material during a July plane flight from Madrid to New York.
^†ll
All the memories of you and our brief and curious and (for me, at least) unforgettable association at Duke came rushing back, and I decided at last that I would make sure that you got a copy of
Lie Down in Darkness
. Ordinarily it might seem too late to send you a book published 14 years ago, but I take a little pride in the fact that in a small way the book has become some sort of classic, and I hope you will receive it in
good spirit from a non-mathematician who, however, has never forgotten you and who holds you and your achievement in Charlotte in the greatest admiration.

Ever sincerely yours,      

William Styron

T
O
J
AMES AND
G
LORIA
J
ONES

August 12, 1965 Vineyard Haven, MA

Having just re-read this letter on the morning after, I hesitate to send it but find it in all major respects absolutely true, and I feel that if it had a title it should perhaps be called: NOTES OF A WAIF ASTRAY IN THE 20
^th
CENTURY.

Dear James + Moss:

Well, there has been a good deal of high excitement around old Vineyard Haven since last we met, so much of a constant buzz in fact that it is a wonder how anyone gets any work done.

First, the widow Kennedy came over for the weekend all sleek and tan in a Bikini, with Caroline and John, Jr., and eight—count ’em—eight Secret Service men in tow, all of them very polite but bulging with .45s, plus two Coast Guardsmen in a turbo-jet 45 mph speedboat for Jackie’s water-skiing. Well, we water skied a bit and told dirty jokes (I have the honor of telling the widow K. what a dildo is; she was thereupon horrified to learn that you had one secreted away in Paris; if
you
had just shown me the dildo like I asked I wouldn’t have told her) and we swam around quite a bit on the ocean beach and I rubbed a good deal of Sea n’ Ski foam on the widow’s thighs. Rose had to undress John, Jr., at one point and she reports that he has an enormous schlong, twice as big as Tommy’s. I hate to make it sound like such a sexy weekend, it really wasn’t, but anyway we had a very good time and our baby sitter got laid by one of the Secret Service. We are going over to the widow’s at Newport later in the month, that’s the way we swing, very much like Biarritz, and as I say I really don’t know how I get any work done.