Selected Letters of William Styron (92 page)
Read Selected Letters of William Styron Online
Authors: William Styron
‖g
Styron is paraphrasing a September 11, 1906, letter from the renowned psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) to the British writer H. G. Wells (1866–1946) in which James famously wrote, “the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease.”
‖h
“Ride Out” appeared in Foote’s 1954 collection
Jordan County: A Landscape in Narrative
(New York: Dial Press).
‖i
Rubin’s review of
Lie Down in Darkness
from
The Hopkins Review
, Fall 1951.
‖j
This letter was written in response to (and on top of) Mailer’s letter of March 12, 1958, where he quoted “a reliable source” that Styron had “been passing a few atrocious remarks” about Mailer’s wife Adele. Citing past instances of Styron besmirching other women, Mailer invites Styron “to a fight in which I expect to stomp out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit.”
‖k
At the urging of Rose (who had just given birth to Polly) and Jim and Gloria Jones, Styron decided not to send this annotated response.
1) I suggest that this “reliable source”—and I thought you above this type of shady allusion, Norman—is either a person with a warped and perverted imagination or simply an outrageous liar. I have no idea how close he or she is to me but, as a curator of paradoxes, you must be aware that closeness is no guarantee for the preservation of decency, and the fact that you have obviously not asked yourself whether this person simply does not hate and envy me, or you, or both of us—and above all himself—is one of the saddest parts of your letter.
2) “Atrocious remarks.” An unmitigated lie. Or, depending on your definition of atrocious, simply a lie. You force me to explain myself in some detail. I would be less than frank if I told you that Adele was my favorite person in the world. At the same time, I am honestly fond of her, and I do not defame the character of people I care for. The fact remains, though, that she does seem to be able to handle her liquor very well, and that at parties she becomes aggressive and [unknown] beyond the ordinary limits of what people call fun. If you think that this fact cheers me or gives me any malicious delight, rather than pain, you are dead wrong. And I have remarked about this, in company with more than a few others who have felt the same pain. I have however passed no “atrocious” remarks at any place or time, and if you wish to fight me on this point you will morally have to battle several dozen others who share my regret and my sentiments.
3) The venomous tone of your letter leads me to believe that, quite to the contrary, you wish to believe it more than anything in the world.
4) This is odd. The only woman I can remember slandering in your presence, the wife of a young critic, richly deserved the slander, and I remembered that you did not hesitate to join merrily in the slander, adding your own sage judgments.
5) Your delicate style, which would be degrading to you even if I were guilty of the monstrous things you allege against me, leaves me in little doubt that something is, and must have been,
eating
you that has nothing to do with the “viciousness” you so meanly and falsely saddle me with.
Mailer’s response on March 27 invited Styron to repeat his defense “face-to-face” or Mailer would know that Styron’s account was “a crock of shit.” This would be their last correspondence for more than twenty years. Styron admitted in a letter from April 2, 1980, that Mailer’s version of events was essentially correct.
‖l
Postcard of the
Mayflower II
, a full-scale replica of the original
Mayflower
.
‖m
Bill, Rose, and Susanna Styron visited Martha’s Vineyard for the first time that August, at the invitation of Hiram Haydn.
‖n
J. R. Salamanca,
The Lost Country
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958), was set in Virginia and adapted for the Elvis Presley vehicle
Wild in the Country
(1961).
‖o
The CBS adaptation of
The Long March
. Styron wrote a disparaging piece about the experience, “If You Write for Television …,”
New Republic
(April 6, 1959).
‖p
Thomas Wolfe,
The Web and the Rock
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939).
‖q
Styron pasted in several items and the header from the
National Enquirer: The World’s Liveliest Paper:
One paragraph about Russia’s deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan meeting escorts in New York City, another about Herbert Hoover and a “curvey cutie.” And: “James Jones, the ‘From Here to Eternity’ author, is holed up in an apartment at 17 Rue du Cirque, working diligently on a new tome. Mrs. Jones reports that her husband is ‘not very pleasant’ to live with while he’s embroiled in writing. ‘A lesser woman would have left him,’ she states bitterly.”
‖r
James Jones’s third novel,
The Pistol
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959).
‖s
Lapérouse is a venerable Parisian restaurant overlooking the Seine.
‖t
Styron used this same descriptor, “abortion,” for Mason Flagg’s account of Alonzo’s movie in
Set This House on Fire
.
‖u
Styron attached a note (and presumably a British review) dated February 9, 1959: “Dear Doctor—I suppose it’s only the direct insecurity that motivates my sending you these little plugs for myself, but I did want you to see that, possibly, I am finally being accepted in the Old Country. Would you return it, please, whenever you get a chance to write. Ever, Bill”
‖v
Blackburn’s edited collection of Conrad’s letters.
‖w
Lawrence Rust Hills (1924–2008), renowned fiction editor for
Esquire
magazine off and on from the 1950s through the 1990s. He was famed for being able to excerpt famous writers’ novels (such as Styron’s
Sophie’s Choice
) and make the pieces seem like standalone short stories.
‖x
Theodore Philip Toynbee (1916–81), prolific British writer and critic.
‖y
Leonard Lyons had a column in the
New York Post
entitled “The Lyons Den,” which covered entertainment gossip.
‖z
Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), one of the most important essayists of the Renaissance period. Styron probably refers to Montaigne’s essay “Of Drunkenness,” in which he made many observations on wine, among them: “Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk till forty; but, after forty, gives them leave to please themselves.”
‖A
Edwin Gilbert wrote many bestsellers, including
Native Stone
(New York: Doubleday, 1956) and
Silver Spoon
(New York: Lippincott, 1957).
‖B
Esquire
published the excerpts “Set This House on Fire” (June 1959) and “Home from St. Andrews” (May 1960).
‖C
Haydn left Random House in March 1959 for a new venture, Atheneum Publishers, which he founded with Simon Bessie and Alfred A. Knopf, Jr. Hiram assumed that Bill would join him. Among other minor squabbles with Haydn was one over Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita:
Bill had brought it to Random House, and Haydn found the book offensive and humorless, while Bennett Cerf, the head of Random House, wanted to publish it. Styron wrote about the conflict over
Lolita
in “The Book on Lolita,”
The New Yorker
(September 4, 1995). Hiram and Rose had a huge dustup over it, but Random House didn’t take the novel. In
Words and Faces
, Haydn described the parting: “Styron made a decision that he must have found difficult. Moreover, there was never any question of his being ungrateful; there is strong evidence to prove the reverse. Part of his reasoning was that he had twice gone with me to a different publishing house; if he did this a third time, it would only confirm the opinion he had often been exposed to—that he couldn’t make his way without me. Add his liking for Cerf and Loomis, and the strength of Random House—and I think his decision was a sound, logical one. Today we get together over a rowdy game of croquet now and then, but it took quite a while for the hurt to heal.”
‖D
Bennett Cerf admired Styron’s writing and liked him personally. Cerf wrote Styron on March 17, 1959, “We were proud to add you to the Random House list, and we will make every possible effort to keep you there. In a single sentence, I would like to be your publisher for the rest of my life.”
‖E
The excerpt from
Set This House on Fire
, which ran in
The Paris Review
22 (Autumn–Winter, 1959–60).
‖F
John Train, editor at
The Paris Review
.
‖G
Ristorante Doney is located on the Via Vittorio Veneto in Rome.
‖H
King Farouk I (1920–65) of Egypt was notorious for his glamorous lifestyle on the Continent.
‖I
Sloan Wilson (1920–2003), author of
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955), which was a bestseller. Herman Wouk (b. 1915) is perhaps best known for his novel
The Caine Mutiny
(New York: Doubleday, 1951), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1952.
‖J
Orville Prescott (1907–96) was the main critic of fiction for
The New York Times
for nearly twenty-five years. Leon Uris, a frequent target of Styron’s envy and ire, had a number one bestseller in 1959 with
Exodus
.
‖K
Elaine Dundy (1921–2008), actress and author of novels, biographies, and plays. She was married at the time to the actor and critic Kenneth Tynan; they divorced in 1964.
‖L
George Axelrod (1922–2003), screenwriter, playwright, producer, and director, is best known for his play
The Seven Year Itch
and for his movie adaptations of Truman Capote’s
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
and Richard Condon’s
The Manchurian Candidate
.
‖M
Old Forester bourbon.
‖N
Hatcher supplied this letter to William Blackburn for Mac Hyman’s collected letters. As Hatcher explained on November 11, 1965, “Unhappily, Mac and I never wrote to each other … I do have one surviving note from Styron, a xerox of which I enclose.”
‖O
Hatcher had attached a clipping from the
Journal of the American Medical Association
on the “Fat Content of Semen,” August 1, 1959.
‖P
“I was, of course, tickled to have him use my name in his book,” Hatcher wrote Blackburn, “although I threatened to use his name as the hero of my (mythical) novel about a sodomite.”
‖Q
William Rossa Cole (1919–2000) was best known as an editor and anthologist. He was an editor for Simon & Schuster and Viking and a columnist for the
Saturday Review
.
‖R
Richard Avedon and Truman Capote,
Observations
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959), featured Avedon’s photographs of artists, writers, and celebrities, and Capote’s text.
‖S
Walker Gibson’s poem “To the memory of the circus ship Euzkera, lost in the Caribbean Sea, 1 September 1948” (The
New Yorker
, November 6, 1948) was based on a true incident.
‖T
Jean Ennis, director of publicity at Random House.
‖U
Styron enclosed the same Moravian hymn he had sent William Blackburn in March 1956.
‖V
Gloria Jones was pregnant with their daughter Kaylie Ann Jones, born August 5, 1960.
‖W
Fine à l’eau:
cognac and water.
‖X
Brown was an editor at
Esquire
.
‖Y
The key was evidently malfunctioning—the
H/h
is barely legible throughout the letter.
‖Z
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) was a journalist and critic of American life and culture. One of the most popular and widely syndicated American writers before World War II, Mencken became especially notorious for his coverage of the Scopes trial of 1925.
aa
Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) was a novelist best known for
Sister Carrie
(1900) and
An American Tragedy
(1925). Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) was a novelist best known for his short story collection
Winesburg, Ohio
.
bb
Mary McCarthy (1912–89) was an author, critic, and political activist. Best known for her memoir
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
(1957) and novel
The Group
(1962), McCarthy also became somewhat infamous for her feud with Lillian Hellman.
cc
John Updike (1932–2009) was a novelist and critic best known for his Rabbit novels. Updike won the Pulitzer Prize twice, published twenty-three novels, and contributed regularly to
The New Yorker
and
The New York Review of Books
.
dd
Wonderful to relate (from Virgil’s
Aeneid
).
ee
In addition to Orville Prescott of
The New York Times
, Styron refers to J. Donald Adams (1891–1968), a literary critic who wrote for
The New Republic
and
The New York Times
. Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930) is a neoconservative writer known for his work for
Commentary
magazine. Leslie Aaron Fiedler (1917–2003) was a literary critic best known for his book
Love and Death in the American Novel
(1960).
ff
Hughes Rudd.
gg
James Cross Giblin (b. 1933) worked on a stage adaptation of
Lie Down in Darkness
(for the Broadway producer Edward Pakula), which was never produced. Giblin was writing in the hopes of staging a free performance at “a loft workshop on West 17
th
Street.”
hh
Charles “Cy” Rembar (1915–2000), an intellectual property attorney who happened to be Norman Mailer’s cousin.
ii
Gregory Corso (1930–2001) was a poet and the youngest of the Beat Generation inner circle. William S. Burroughs (1914–97) was a novelist, poet, and central figure of the Beat Generation, best known for his novel
Naked Lunch
(1959).