Selected Letters of William Styron (36 page)

Dear Mac—

Blackburn wrote that our misadventures on the Inland Waterway even got into the papers, why I don’t know, but with all the facts wrong. Anyway,
it was a fine day, except for the last business, and even that wasn’t too bad, I guess (from what I heard when I went back to the canal the next day), since there didn’t seem to be any big damage to the boat. Was this accurate information? One guy said that when you steamed away the next day, everything was shipshape. I hope so. The people from Rome were still there with your cleat stuck in their transom, but they didn’t seem to be all that disgruntled, so I suppose that the only real damage all the way around was the ignominy of running aground in the first place. In assigning the fault
there
, I see it purely and simply this way: it was clearly
your
fault. I, of course, was at the wheel (I do take it into account that it was graceful of you to say, as you did at the canal, that we were “changing over”), and I was, to be sure, somewhat drunk from the Jack Daniel’s I’d been swilling down ever since Mosquito Lagoon, and as a result I was at least 20° off course. As even the most uninformed person knows, however, it is the captain of any craft who is in the end responsible for the behavior of the people aboard, including drunkenness, and so I can hardly see how you can avoid the burden of blame. I should think that from now on you will be a lot more careful about who you let steer that tub of yours; after the next wreck you have you might not be so lucky, and the Coast Guard board of inquiry is not going to politely ask who was doing the steering, etc.: they’re simply going to get
you
.

Anyway, it was a fine trip, even with the disaster, which I hope you haven’t let overshadow all the rest. I would be glad to help reimburse you for that cleat, incidentally; actually, when I come to think of it, we’re damn lucky that one of us wasn’t buried with it rammed halfway down his throat.

I hope that the writing is coming along well, and that you’ll be able to take some time off before too long and come up this way. We’ve got a lot of room now that the other house is fixed up and if you feel the need for a change of scene or anything like that you’re welcome to stay here and work or relax or do anything you want.

I’m at page 590 of this great bloated overwritten monster I’m working on. I’m sick of it, and there’s no end in sight. If you ever begin to feel discouraged,
maybe you can at least take a small bit of comfort in the fact that there’s one other writer who’s just as sour about it all. Or more so.

Thanks for the warm Ga. Hospitality and the wonderful boat trip which will forever live in my memory, in spite of its demonstration of man’s inherent fallibility. By which I mean that I think that it’s damn close to criminal that the Army Engineers or whoever’s responsible is not made to dredge a wider channel out of Hanlover Canal, about 800 yds. at least, and that furthermore it seems to me utterly ridiculous that by now the Chris-Craft people haven’t developed a small, cheap, foolproof sounding device for the bottoms of their goddamn boats. It seems to me that when they expect you to stay sober and on top of that pay attention to the buoys + the rules of the road + all that sort of crap they’ve pretty nearly taken all the fun out of it. I hope you agree.

Bill

T
O
M
AXWELL
G
EISMAR

May 14, 1957 Roxbury, CT

Dear Max—

I’m glad you got an agent, and thanks for passing on the wise sentiments of Mr. Jack Jones. I’m not at all certain that Rose will receive his MS, but I’ve tipped her off about it and she will have an eye out when and if it comes, and so will I.

Latest source of despondency is an essay in “Dissent” by some new critic named Richard Chase. It was actually a review of Aldridge’s “In Search of Heresy,” attacking him for a “middlebrow,” and saying that it was typical of J.W.A. that he should condemn such “
low
-middlebrow” books as “Marjorie Morningstar” while defending such books as “Lie Down in Darkness,” which he called a “middlebrow novel with highbrow flourishes of rhetoric.” It wasn’t so much the jab at me that was so depressing, since I’ve received worse, in such middlebrow journals as
Time
and
The New Yorker
, but the whole appalling, snobbish, mean-spirited, frightened-of-life tenor of the article. I’ve never read much “New” criticism, but if this guy is at all representative of the school—and I gather he is—then I can really see at long last that the situation is dangerous. Perhaps
it only takes a personal reference to bring it home; since the New critics have not paid any attention to me I suppose I can assume that this is the general feeling they have about my work. But as I say much more important than this was the whole small and petty, small-hearted, niggardly, undertaker atmosphere this guy’s writing generates. Who is this guy anyway, with his cheap mean little chatter about the “highbrow” (by which I suppose he means New criticism) being the only attitude in art that is worthwhile? Why doesn’t someone tip this dreary person off, along with all the rest of them, and point out that practically any fine novel ever written was middlebrow, written for the common middlebrow reader who had, presumably, warm blood in his veins and not, as in Chase’s case, embalming fluid. Does this guy consider Tolstoy “highbrow,” or Balzac, or for that matter Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald or Tom Wolfe? To hell with him anyway. It seems to me that the writer of heart, intelligence, good-will, and talent is in a terrible limbo at the moment—between the mass moron on one hand and on the other hand the frightened, grubby-souled little academic, like this Chase, who would turn literature into a kind of desolating calculus, or would level it horizontally to approximate the wasteland of his own spirit. At any rate, Max, outside of the good auspices of yourself and only one or two others, I think I can say that if I ever become famous and if
Lie Down
lasts for a while it won’t be because I got any boost from the so-called “pros” of literature, the New critics. I am looking forward to the day when my hair is crowned with laurel and a New critic starts jumping belatedly on the band-wagon and I am able to tromp on his fingers and say, “Get your dirty hands off.” I’ll do it, too.

Well, that’s that for today.

Biliously yours,      

B.                         

T
O
M
AXWELL
G
EISMAR

June 26, 1957 Roxbury, CT

Dear Max:

Congratulations! Or is it best wishes? I ask the last only because as I write this my Susanna is scrambling all over my shoulders and is saying
such a lot of precocious things that I am stricken chill with the notion that her day, too, is not far off. Rose and I would love to come to the
fiesta
, but unfortunately we have guests lined up for that week-end and won’t be able to make it. Please kiss the bride for us, though; we’ll be there in our hearts.

I am up to p. 703 (this is a quantitative age, which is why I’m so quick with figures). Your last letter bolstered my spirit some. There are bastards on the right and left of us—the mob and the university creeps—and sometimes I wonder which is worse. Have you looked at this new anthology “Mass Culture”?
^§U
It’s spotty but there are some really brilliant essays in it, especially one by someone named van den Haag whose view is so gloomy as to make one want to weep but whose analysis of mob culture is so brilliant as to be spellbinding and in an odd way strengthening.
^§V
One finally gets from this book such a grim + apocalyptic view of modern times that in a curious way it’s almost a cathartic and the duty of the writer—if there is any longer such a thing as duty—seems forlornly and rather splendidly noble. Read it.

I hope Rose and I will see you all before long. We are going to Nantucket for a while in August, but there’s plenty of free time before and after, and among other things I should like to engage Anne in a conversation regarding Eisenhower’s gonads and other pharmaceutical subjects.

Love and kisses to bride and all Geismars.

Bill

T
O
L
EON
E
DWARDS

August 29, 1957 Roxbury, CT

Dear Leon,

Your recent and much-enjoyed letter recalled to mind what a lousy correspondent I am. Forgive the lapse, if you can, and chalk it up not to indolence but to the fact that, as a writing man, so called, the day’s end leaves me fed up with words as they are writ—even such amiable, nonprofessional
ones as I might write you. I have just this month handed in 90,000—100,000 words of my next literary experiment to my publishers and, being still not much more than mid-way in the book, have for the past few weeks taken the sort of complete vacation that you seem deservedly to be taking down in San Antone. I’m all for it the easy life, that is; it clears the mind of too much seriousness and allows one to get a half-way decent perspective on life—not as she is lived by the bottled-up self but by other people, too. At the same time, the grass is always greener, etc., as the saying goes. I for one certainly curse myself for taking up the writer’s craft, or profession, or art, or whatever. It’s a miserable trade, cowardly and neurosis-producing. Some Protestant ethic in me keeps nagging at me that it’s not a fit job for a MAN and that I should be out healing the world’s wounds like you are doing, but it’s too late to go back, of course, and I can only keep grinding away. All this is merely in response to a statement in one of your last letters to the effect that you were still seized by the itch to write; my advice is to stay the hell away from it. It will do nothing but fill your life with nightmares.

However, all these disclaimers aside, I think I’m writing a good book. It’s absolutely totally different from
LDID
in theme and subject matter so that I will either be praised for “versatility” or condemned for getting out of my depth—probably the latter, but either way it doesn’t matter. You end up writing what you have to the most. At the same time writing a long novel, as I am doing, has an overpowering effect on the psyche. There’s so much of it, there are so many things to keep straight, so much that you want to put into but for artistic considerations can’t, so much that’s almost bound to fall short of your lofty aims that, if you’re at all serious, you end up existing in a perpetual state of sweat and melancholy and quasi-alcoholism. In effect, it’s a perfect symbol of one’s own strengths and weaknesses as a human, and I can only console myself with the rather feeble notion that perhaps, after all, that is all a novel is supposed to be.

We are now living like the Massah himself in the “big” house, which we have fixed up to resemble something that falls between
House + Garden
and
The Saturday Evening Post
. We have also acquired a huge Newfoundland dog weighing 150 lbs. who for some reason is named Tugwell. You mentioned in your letter that you were reporting back to Boston next January so you must right now make plans to stop by on your way and pay us a visit. One thing we have is a surfeit of rooms, so do try to come. I have
no intention whatever of approaching your disturbing fecundity, but just to show that I’m keeping my hand, or something, in I want you to know that Rose is expecting another in March. We have already nearly given Pop apoplexy by promising to name it, if a boy, Harry Flood Byrd Styron.
^§W

Tomorrow we’re heading toward your country for Labor Day—to Newburyport, for several sessions on the beach with the Marquands. I’ll give a Hail Mary as we pass Newton Centre. It is sad to see summer draw to a close, and we often could wish that Roxbury were more in the general latitude of San Antonio. At the same time I’m usually pretty happy to be up here in this frosty climate—too much sun breeds a soft mind and softer books, I always say. Don’t forget about us on your way back. Rose joins me in all sorts of love to Marianne and the Kids.

As ever

Bill

T
O
M
AXWELL
G
EISMAR

October 2, 1957 Roxbury, CT

Dear Max—

Thanks for your letter, which was fine, although I don’t really know what the postmistress will say about the “Artist Extraordinary” cachet on the envelope. It’s tough enough being an artist in this country, anyway, without advertising the un-American fact. But thank you for the compliment.

The essay sounds nice—or more than that—and I’m grateful for it, and I hope you’ll send me a copy of the book when it comes out. I think I’ve told you before that I’m not so removed in interest from the critical scene not to be touched and flattered by your espousal of my cause—whatever that might be. Outside of Aldridge, you’re the only critic (I’m not talking about the newspaper boys) who has ever paid the slightest bit of attention to me, or anyone of my colleagues, for that matter. What the
hell did Hemingway, Fitzgerald + Co. have to scream about and call themselves the Lost Generation? In terms of any literary recognition or acceptance this (our) generation is about as lost as you can get. As an attitude generally prevailing, I call your attention to the review several weeks ago in
The N.Y. Times
by one Du Bois, of a book called “Best Short Stories of World War II,” in which
The Long March
is included.
^§X
He roundly damned all 20 stories—Mailer, Burns, Shaw, Jones, et al.—and finished up by calling
The Long March
“this slightly hysterical piece.” In other words, the general tone—outside of the review’s essential ignorance—was that the generation
post
World War II was simply not worth a damn. Du Bois, of course, is simply and patently a stupid person, but what is so depressing is how representative such a review seems to be of the thinking of those who would judge the literary group which has emerged since the war. Hemingway and Fitzgerald and that gang, it seems to me, had the least claim to being lost of any people I know. They were read, they were celebrated, they were appreciated. And we are roundly damned at every turn. I hope the tincture of self-pity here is not too strong. I don’t mean it to be. I simply think that all this is true, and that is why people like yourself are rare and valuable. Perhaps around 1980, with your help, people will wake up to the fact that we were writing our literature after all.