Selected Letters of William Styron (93 page)

jj
Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr. (b. 1935), served as Paris editor of
The Paris Review
and edited the oral biography of George Plimpton,
George, Being George
(New York: Random House, 2008).

kk
The advertising firm Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO).

ll
Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov (1921–2004), beloved British character actor and prolific author.

mm
Highet’s review praised Styron’s “remarkable talents” even as he called attention to the novel’s “preternatural interest in sexual depravity.… It is a tribute to Mr. Styron’s skill with his language and his gift for manipulating people that he carries you on, over waves of nausea, to the last word of his long and complex novel.”

nn
The Chessman case was a landmark execution for the anti–death penalty movement, and the first such case in which Styron involved himself. Caryl Chessman was a career criminal convicted of several rapes in California. He was sentenced to death, many thought illegitimately, and executed on May 2, 1960. In addition to Styron, the statement was signed by Blair Fuller, Ben Johnson, Philip Roth, and Wallace Stegner.

oo
The British edition of
Set This House on Fire
(London: Hamish Hamilton, February 16, 1961). To comply with British obscenity statutes, the book was printed in the Netherlands.

pp
Gloria was pregnant with Kaylie.

qq
Granville Hicks,
Saturday Review
, June 4, 1960.

rr
Donald Malcolm’s long review of
Set This House on Fire
in the June 4, 1960,
New Yorker
was highly negative. Malcolm’s closing line was that “one begins intensely not to care” for either the plot or the characters in the novel. However, Malcolm’s review was not as severe as Arthur Mizener’s “Some People of Our Time” in the June 5, 1960,
New York Times Book Review
. After a sustained critique of the book’s “melodramatic” characters, method, and plot, Mizener maintained that
Set This House on Fire
proved the falsity of Styron’s “promise” as a writer. Styron never forgot Mizener’s review.

ss
Harington (1936–2009), novelist and nonfiction writer, was born and reared in Little Rock, Arkansas. Trained as an art historian at the University of Arkansas and Harvard University, Harington was an assistant professor at Bennett College in Millbrook, New York, when he first wrote to Styron. After reading
Set This House on Fire
, Harington wrote a detailed appreciation to Styron on June 4, 1960. This letter began a forty-year correspondence, which Harington collected and bound in 1986 for Styron’s archive at Duke University.

tt
Harington wrote: “I have read everything by Faulkner … everything by Fitzgerald, most everything by Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Wolfe, Farrell, and even Erskine Caldwell, everything by the young moderns: Agee, Salinger, Jones, Mailer, McCullers, Capote, et. al., and I have read your two earlier books; and among all the thick and thin, sick and well, glad and sad volumes in this mountain of American literature, I have never read a finer novel than STHOF. It is the
most
, to say the
least
.” Writing that it was sure to be deemed “controversial,” Harington echoed many of Styron’s own complaints: “I am beginning to grow tired of book reviewers who get a tight hard-on themselves from passages in a book and, feeling shamed afterwards, denounce the book.” “I want to write them and tell them off, but I remember what you said in your
Paris Review
interview about critics, and I remember your saying it’s the reader and not the critic who means something to you, and I decided to write to you instead of Prescott or Malcolm.”

uu
James Gould Cozzens’s immensely popular and critically well-received novel (1957).

vv
Wilcox (1850–1919) was an author and poet, most famous for her poem “Solitude,” and the line “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone.” Her work frequently appears in anthologies of bad poetry.

ww
John F. Kennedy.

xx
Frank Morrison Spillane (1918–2006) was an author of numerous bestselling crime novels, best known for his Mike Hammer series.

yy
Grace Metalious (1924–64) was an author best known for her controversial and bestselling novel
Peyton Place
(1956), which sold over 30 million copies.

zz
Charles A. Fenton (1919–60) was an author and a college professor best known for
The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway
(1954) and
Stephen Vincent Benét: The Life and Times of an American Man of Letters
(1958). His laudatory review “William Styron and the Age of the Slob” (The
South Atlantic Quarterly
, Autumn 1960), applauded Styron’s novel for capturing “the national mood.”

AA
The three pieces were by Robert Gorham Davis, “Styron and the Students,” David L. Stevenson, “Styron and the Fiction of the Fifties,” and Richard Foster, “An Orgy of Commerce: William Styron’s
Set This House on Fire
,”
Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 3
(Summer 1960). Foster’s piece concluded that “we must be willing to throw a writer like Mr. Styron back into the hopper of anonymity and make him at last prove his claim to the amount of attention he has had from us undeserved. And we must do this not only in the interest of the writer’s soul, but in the interest of our own as well.” Styron wrote beneath the comment: “The little prick who edits this mag sent me 5 copies, and had the gall to write: ‘A liberal supply of this issue is available to send to your friends.’ BS.”

BB
Louis Rubin, “An Artist in Bonds,”
The Sewanee Review
, Winter 1961. The piece was an assessment of Styron’s work, focusing mainly on
Set This House on Fire
.

CC
Louis Rubin,
The Golden Weather
(New York: Atheneum, 1961).

DD
Rubin’s piece on
Set This House on Fire
.

EE
The Names and Faces of Heroes
(New York: Atheneum, 1963).

FF
Patrice Émery Lumumba (1925–61) was the first legally elected prime minister of the Republic of the Congo, after helping his country win independence from Belgium in June 1960. Twelve weeks later, he would be deposed, arrested, imprisoned, and finally executed by a Belgian firing squad.

GG
Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) was a poet and Librarian of Congress who received three Pulitzer Prizes. James Thurber (1894–1961) was an author and cartoonist best known for his contributions to
The New Yorker
.

HH
Philip Rahv, ed.,
Eight Great American Short Novels
(New York: Berkley Books, 1963).

II
Stanley Kauffmann, “Across the Great Divide,”
The New Republic
(February 20, 1961).

JJ
Kauffmann’s review is highly critical of Arthur Miller.

KK
Karl Jay Shapiro (1913–2000) was a poet and essayist, winner of the Pulitzer Prize (1945) and the Bollingen Prize (1969).

LL
Styron reviewed Florence Aadland’s
The Big Love
(New York: Lancer, 1961), an account of her daughter Beverly’s affair with Errol Flynn, in “Mrs. Aadland’s Little Girl, Beverly,”
Esquire
, November 1961. Some credit Styron with helping turn the book into a cult classic. Aadland addressed Styron in a letter she sent to the editors of
Esquire
on October 24, 1961, after seeing the review, to say that she did not “know how to begin to thank you. I am on cloud nine after reading your article in
Esquire
.… For you to find in our book the things that were truly in my heart … words fail me, I can only say thank you again.”

MM
Harriet Pilpel (1913–81), a literary lawyer.

NN
Isador Schary (1905–80), screenwriter (of
Boys Town
among other films) and movie producer, who became head of MGM Pictures after ousting founder Louis B. Mayer.

OO
The clipping concerned Styron and Loomis’s friend John Maloney, who was “accused of stabbing a woman writer during a quarrel” and charged with felonious assault.

PP
Styron was parodying Norman Mailer’s threatening note of March 12, 1958. Not surprisingly, Styron used that episode in
Set This House on Fire
for Mason Flagg’s threats to the narrator Peter Leverett: “You wait here, Petesy boy, because when I come back I expect to stomp out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit.” Alexandra Styron refers to Flagg as “the avatar of Daddy’s revenge” following Mailer’s
Advertisements for Myself
, in Alexandra Styron,
Reading My Father: A Memoir
(New York: Scribner, 2011).

QQ
Edwards had asked Styron for a loan to help him pay for medical school, and Styron agreed to lend Edwards money. As he wrote on August 31, 1955, “Your promissory note(s) seem fine to me, and I feel a great smug sense of power in having you so firmly clenched by your financial balls. You’d better watch your step, buddy. To be honest, I couldn’t be more satisfied with the arrangement, not more pleased that I have been able to help out. One thing I want to tell you, though, in all candor. When I told you over the telephone that I thought I’d be able to swing the whole $16 G, or whatever it is thereabouts, it was with more sanguinity than realism. Actually, I still hope to be able to lend you the annual installment each year as you have outlined it. As far as I can see, I’m well-enough fixed to do it. What I hope you will realize, though, is simply that although I’m filthy rich I have very little Rockefeller blood in my veins, and only one or two piddling little oil-wells, and there is always the chance that next year or the year after will not find me so well-heeled. This is the result of being a writer.”

RR
Land (1922–88) wrote a book on literary feuds,
The Fine Art of Literary Mayhem
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), which included a section on Mailer and Styron with quotations from this letter.

SS
L’Express
, March 8, 1962. An interiew with Madeleine Chapsal also appeared in the same issue, reprinted in
Quinze Écrivains: Entretiens
(Paris: René Julliard, 1963) and in James L. W. West III, ed.,
Conversations with William Styron
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985).

TT
Romain Gary, “L’ONU n’existe pas,”
Le Nouveau Candide
(December 21–27, 1960).

UU
“Red” was Robert Penn Warren’s nickname.

VV
Paul G. Sanderson, Jr., ran a literary event called the Suffield Writer’s Conference. He asked Styron to participate nearly every year for a decade.

WW
John Ashbery (b. 1927) is a poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
(1975).

XX
This was Styron’s first mention of James Baldwin (1924–87), the author, notably, of
Go Tell It on the Mountain
(1953),
Notes of a Native Son
(1955), and
The Fire Next Time
(1963), who lived in the Styrons’ guesthouse during the winter of 1961. Styron recalled the experience in “James Baldwin: His Voice Remembered,”
The New York Times
, December 20, 1987, reprinted in
Havanas in Camelot
.

YY
Linus Pauling (1901–94) was a chemist and peace activist and the only person besides Marie Curie to win Nobel Prizes in two different fields. Julius Stratton (1901–94) was an electrical engineer who was president of MIT between 1959 and 1966.

ZZ
Nathan Pusey (1907–2001) was president of Harvard University from 1953 to 1971. Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67) was a theoretical physicist often called the father of the atomic bomb. Ralph Bunche (1903–71) was a political scientist and diplomat who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950.

*aa
Along with her husband, Diana Trilling (1905–96) was a prominent literary critic and contributor to the
Partisan Review
. Robert Frost (1874–1963), American poet. Fredric March (1897–1975), stage and film actor who won two Best Actor Academy Awards for
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1932) and
The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946).

*bb
Pierre Salinger (1925–2004) served as White House press secretary under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and was later a prominent ABC news correspondent. Robert F. Kennedy (1925–68) was a Democratic senator from New York and U.S. Attorney General (1961–64). Robert was assassinated during the 1968 presidential campaign. He was survived by his wife, Ethel (b. 1928). The “simple-minded brother-in-law” was Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr. (1915–2011), who helped found the Peace Corps. He was married to John F. Kennedy’s sister Eunice.

*cc
This was Styron’s first encounter with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1917–2007), an American historian who served as the unofficial chronicler of John F. Kennedy’s administration and taught at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (1966–94). Schlesinger and Styron became great friends in the ensuing years.

*dd
Styron refers to his first piece on the death row inmate he helped to save from execution, “The Death-in-Life of Benjamin Reid,”
Esquire
(February 1962).

*ee
John Dodds was Styron’s lawyer.

*ff
In a telephone conversation between McKee and Harriet Pilpel on June 25, 1962, McKee reported that she “was so hurt—so personally hurt” by Styron’s letter.

*gg
Hope Leresche ran her own literary agency in London, Hope Leresche and Steele. Leresche handled Styron’s foreign rights after his split with Elizabeth McKee. Leresche played a significant role in his becoming a writer of international reputation.

*hh
“I think it is crazy,” Leresche wrote Styron, “that this has not at least been offered in England and elsewhere.”

*ii
Leresche assured Styron, “I shall make every personal effort to further the interest of your work.”

*jj
Plimpton had nominated Styron for membership in the Century Association, an exclusive club in New York City founded in 1829 by editor and poet William Cullen Bryant.