Selected Letters of William Styron (35 page)

Now as to the questions in your last letter:

Guinzburg and his now-recovered spouse are reported by Denton
Walker as making “goo-goo eyes” in the Hauvyn, a fashionable bistro. I see Guinzo every now and then. His clots are better but he is still surly.

Peter is still in Gansett, exposing his best friends to 6″ blowfish for $15 a head.

Appleton was up here for a recent week-end and was a wonderful guest until—I hate to say it—he came to a climax and left a ghastly mark like the track of a snail down the front of the dress of a woman named Mrs. Theodore Murkland.

The swimming pool is, to use Connecticut patois, as cold as a welldigger’s ass; the tomato crop withering.

John Aldridge’s fixation in the firmament is, if I may mix a metaphor, at a rather low ebb, his last book (in which I received nice praise) having been rent from limb to limb by all respectable critics, without exception, as the work of a maundering, confused, second-rate young man with delusions of glory. They wanted to buy a home up near here, but Rose + I conspired to chase them away.

Rose and I are anxiously awaiting your return to these shores with your blushing bride and have waiting here in Roxbury—besides Susanna, who has suddenly become appallingly talkative—all sorts of booze, Smithfield hams, good American milk and all sorts of other goodies which should make you regret that you ever sojourned so long among the wops and spicks and other types scarcely human. Set aside one of your earliest weekends and we’ll have a wonderful bleary time of it.

Give my love to Suay

All the best      

Stybo      

P.S. Very much enjoyed your article in
Harper’s
.
^§N
It really gave me a new perspective on the situation, to quote Eric Sevareid.

T
O
H
ERBERT
W
EINSTOCK
^§O

July 26, 1956 Roxbury, CT

Dear Mr. Weinstock,

I must apologize for not having written you sooner about
The Lost Steps
.
^§P
I asked Henry Carlisle to tell you what I thought about it, but he must have forgotten.

The fact is that I read with great interest, and that I liked it in a strange way but that I found it so overpoweringly exotic and curious that, in the end, I just don’t know what my opinion is. I read it much as if I were tasting some new tropical fruit whose flavor was quite unique and wonderful but which I had to turn down in the end for the good old stand-by orange. In other words, I liked it but it was too off-beat for my own particular taste in fiction, and as a result I don’t feel competent to give you a statement. I also found that my interest flagged about two-thirds of the way through, which is probably not so much the fault of the book as, again, my own particular taste.

Thanks for sending me the book—I am sorry about the delay—and I hope my feeling about it won’t deter you from sending my way anything else of special interest in the future.

Yours sincerely,

William Styron

T
O
L
OUIS
D. R
UBIN
, J
R
.

October 15, 1956 Roxbury, CT

Dear Louis,

I’m afraid I don’t have anything on hand right now for publication in
The Provincial
. I am up to my neck in this new novel I’m writing, a process which is as usual so painful & irksome to me that it leaves me soured on all writing in general. I very well might have something later on, however, and I’ll of course be proud to see it in
The Provincial
. I thought your first issue was most attractive; it seems literary yet refreshingly unpedantic, and I’m looking forward to seeing it expand in size. I liked the Lardner piece very much. I hope you won’t take it as a minor compliment, either, that the whole thing is handsomely printed and proof-read; after my experience with
The Paris Review
I know this is no mean accomplishment.

I shouldn’t worry too much about Aldridge if I were you. As grateful as I might be for the sweet things he’s said about me, I am also aware that about many things he is rather grotesquely opinionated and one-sided, and goes off half-cocked about 50% of the time. It’s too bad, since quite often his judgments are astute enough. To hell with all such critics anyway—a difficult thing to say for me, incidentally, since Aldridge (& wife), out of I suspect some bizarre desire to be near the only writer he loves, has bought a house 5 minutes away from us here in Roxbury—the same house which provided the nuptial surroundings for that strangely & frantically opportunistic dramatist, Mr. Arthur Miller, and that sexually endowed barrel of pineapple Jello, Miss Mmmmarilyn Monroe. Perhaps he’ll become a better critic with all those carnal ghosts lurking about the house.

Rose tells me to tell you that a friend of ours from Charleston, W.Va., a writer named Mary Lee Settle, is earnestly in need of a fellowship, and will probably be writing you for information about the Sewanee deal. Perhaps you would be kind enough to oblige her. She’s really quite talented, I think, greatly in need of support, and a bear for work. You may have seen
or heard of her last novel,
O Beulah Land
, which got quite superior reviews everywhere.
^§Q

As I say, I hope I’ll be able to send you something later on. In the meantime, congratulations on what looks like a really auspicious start at something first-rate. Rose joins me in sending all the best to you & Eva.

As ever

Bill

The Random House edition of
The Long March
was published on October 29, 1956
.

T
O
E
LIZABETH
M
C
K
EE

December 4, 1956 2707 Lawina Road, Baltimore, MD

Dear Elizabeth

Here are some hollyhock seeds which Pop + Elizabeth Styron, who are visiting up here for a few days, asked me to deliver to you! Plant them in the spring, next to a wall.

I hope you received the letter from the Hollywood-type agent + are making profitable contact. Let me know if anything develops.

Susanna is wonderful, brilliant, articulate (I’ll swear she can write every word perfectly of “Mary had a little lamb”) but she breaks my heart because she won’t say a word to me at all + turns up her nose at all paternal advances.

Love + XXX Bill

T
O
W
ILLIAM
B
LACKBURN

December 8, 1956 2707 Lawina Road, Baltimore, MD

Dear Doctor:

Just a note from the in-law bailiwick in Baltimore to let you know that I got your note and I’m glad that all goes well. Rose and Susanna and I have been here for a week and expect to spend a week more, before going back to the Connecticut glades for Xmas. I don’t expect that we can make it down to Durum this season, but I hope we can perhaps visit you sometime in the spring. Reason: we have been invited to spend two weeks or more next March or April in a friend’s house at Cocoa Beach, Fla. Also, from what I can make out, “The Long March” will be filmed in the swamps of that part of Florida at around the same time. The producer is an amiable gent who evinces a remarkable respect for the opus per se, and has said that he would like me to be on hand for the production. I have no great illusions that the movie is going to be any work of art, but I have been told that this fellow’s attitude is unheard of, miraculous, and incomparable, so the chances are that I might take advantage of it and go down and lend my pennyworth of inspiration to the venture. One way or another, I hope we’ll be able to stop off and see you. Last Saturday (Dec. 1) Jim Brown, the agent, gave a party for Mac Hyman in N.Y., which we went to, and we rode as far as Baltimore on the train next day with Mac + Gwen. Mac seems to be in great shape and I’m hoping to drop in on Cordele, too, if this trip really materializes, which it ought to.

The new novel is proceeding apace, despite shoals and snags and misadventures of one sort or another. One thing that it is impossible to do is accuse Styron of excessive speed. But I have 550-600 yellow sheets done, all fairly clean and with little rewriting to be done, and I pray that next year this time will find me close to the end of the accursed thing. I find the whole business abominably, sweatily tiresome. I loathe writing with what amounts to a kind of phobia, and I suppose that it’s only a sort of perverse masochism that keeps me at it. I have developed, in my old age, an exhausting pessimism about all things literary; this is not a pose, Doctor, because I have examined it from all angles and only come up with a perpetual wonder over the fact that I have chosen to engage my mind and spirit in an activity which gives me so little satisfaction. The extraordinary thing, however, is how with this attitude I can go on writing things which
seem to me quite good. It might seem strange, but it is as if in my hatred of the act of writing I had to prove myself supremely superior to it by turning out stuff that is, at least by my own standards, always of a high order. And I suppose that’s why I write so slowly, approaching the wretched work each day as maybe a sculptor does when confronted with a 20-ton block of granite to give meaning to, with a paring knife for a weapon. Right now I don’t know how this book is going to end up. It couldn’t be more totally different from
LDID
. It is told in the first person. The narrator is a glib wisecracker. The book abruptly breaks off mid-way and is told by an entirely different character, third-person. How out of this mess I am to fashion the noble tragedy which glimmers ever and anon before my eye, I still do not know. And maybe it will all be a terrific botch. But I do know that at least it will have a few fine things in it—these I have written already—so it simply
cannot
be a real disaster. Furthermore, I have a secret, tiny feeling that in spite of all my fears it will be the best thing I have written, which is a strange thing to say, if not idiotic, by one who has just stated his (excuse me while I find the phrase) “exhausting pessimism about all things literary.” Finally, I am simply exasperated by all of this stale, left-over adulation of people like Hemingway. If literature is to be viable and worth a damn it’s got to be perpetually renewed, and I’m determined that this book will be an important factor in the renewing process, or else I’ll pull a severe Sherwood Anderson and go into the paint business.

LDID
, incidentally, is coming out next month in the Compass paperback editions, published by Viking at $1.25. Maybe at that price you can drum up some trade at the Duke bookstore.

Rose sends her fond regards and joins me in saying that she looks forward to seeing you before long. If you should come to N.Y. before then, don’t forget to call us. Meanwhile I hope you have a gorgeous Yuletide.

As ever,

Bill

P.S. The paper today brought me one bright item of hope—about Bob Goheen, the new president of Princeton.
^§R
He was at the Academy in Rome when I was there and a more elegant nice gentleman you could not hope
to know. I would say he bears the same relation to Edens or Manchester as St. John does to Norman Vincent Peale.

T
O
E
LIZABETH
M
C
K
EE

March 7, 1957 Cocoa Beach, FL

Dear Elizabeth:

I got your communication with the various attached letters. I’m not very optimistic either about Bob Arthur
^§S
doing anything inspired, but I don’t see much else to do except to string along with whatever Coe has up his sleeve. I wrote him just now and told him essentially that: that I was sorry, too, but that I was interested in seeing how the next version turned out, etc., and my prayers went with the project and so on. Just a nice letter. There’s not much else to do as far as I see but to wait and hope.

I wrote to De Liso and told him that I was interested—which I am—but that it would be at least a month before I would be able to do anything about it. If he really does corral Bellow, Jones, Mailer, etc., it might be an interesting book.

It went down to 45° here today, but we’ve had some lovely hot days and the prediction is for more. We’re leaving here around the 14
^th
and, with a stopover in Virginia, we should arrive in Roxbury around the 21
^st
or so. I rode down the Inland Waterway with Mac Hyman on his Chris-Craft: 160 miles of clear cruising until, 10 miles from here, we ran aground on a mudbank and had to have the Coast Guard pull us off. No damage; Susanna + Rose are fine. Susanna is a regular duck in the surf, but can’t decide really whether she loves it or loathes it. The work is coming along well. Any news from Padula? Best to all.

Love + XXX

Bill      

T
O
M
AXWELL
G
EISMAR

April 29, 1957 Roxbury, CT

Dear Max,

Was going to tell Ann—during the phallic interlude of the other night—why I thought you were my most perceptive critic (which, of course, means the most perceptive critic around), but somehow I forgot what I was going to say. Anyway, it’s this: you were the only person who wrote anything about “LDID” who found any
humor
in the book. There is humor in it, by God, and I think you’ll find humor in the one I’m writing now. Most critics are such solemn jackasses, really. Jonesy, incidentally, thought both you and Anne were the
most
, to use his own picturesque
mot
.

Hope you have (or have had already) great success at Brandeis.

Ever yours,

Bill      

P.S. Ask Ann what she thinks of International Cellulose Products, Inc., mfrs. of “Tampax,” “Midol” & other aids to ladies. I suspect that this would be akin to Exposition, Horizon, & other vanity houses, though I really don’t know.

T
O
M
AC
H
YMAN

April 29, 1957
^§T
Roxbury, CT