Selected Letters of William Styron (37 page)

Someone gave me the galleys of Jones’ new book, and I’m sorry to say that I have to agree with you, and even more: I think it is very close to a catastrophe. In “Eternity” he was writing the real McCoy. Here most of the stuff sounds like the work of a not-too-bright literary 15-year-old, and it really grieves me, because it will simply be another turkey for the Du Boises to fall upon and say, “See about this generation? I told you so!” But maybe the experience (and I can’t possibly foresee anything but mayhem in the book pages) will sober Jonesey (he has been outrageously cocky) and he’ll go on to write a good #3.

I’ve turned in 650 pages of my next one to Hiram, with about 400 or so to go, which should occupy me for another year. Christ! it takes a long time to do a good job. I think Hiram is enthusiastic. Personally, I think
it’s better than
LDID
, but then I’m not a critic. Hope it won’t be too long before we get together.

Bill

P. S. In response to your wonderment about writing Jones, tell him frankly what you think of it. Flattery, as the saying goes, will get you nowhere. BS

T
O
W
ILLIAM
C. S
TYRON
, S
R
.

November 9, 1957 Roxbury, CT

Dear Pop—

I was indeed sorry to hear about your little set-to with the hospital, but was mighty happy to hear that you pulled through in good shape. With the feeling that some of your distress might have been occasioned by the criminal sort of bills that TV repairmen seem to be in the habit of sending these days—and that goes for auto mechanics, too—I am sending the enclosed check (written as you can see on my Nipps checkwriter, the use of which I am getting quite adept at) with the hopes that it will help ease some of the autumnal strain. American gadgetry has gotten into a preposterous mess. As I told you before, I think, our Bendix washer went into the sick decline to the tune of $115 for repairs, an amount which could have almost purchased a new washer. The man had the gall to send me another bill the other day for $15 more, at which I balked finally, writing him a letter to the effect that I felt under no obligation—morally, legally, or otherwise—to pay any more, that he could sue me if he wished, but that he would not get a penny more from me. After a point one can not be bled further. I have not heard from him, and don’t think I will.

Everybody is well up here, and we are crossing our fingers in regard to the flu. About a week ago Susanna had a fever of 104°, but to show you how sturdy the little scamp is the fever went down to almost normal the next day, and she had not a sniffle nor a complication, and within 48 hours was bedeviling the life out of us, as usual, with her chatter and her dollies and had spread several hundred poker chips the length and the breadth of the house. So I think we can be sure that if anyone suffers badly from this
Asian malady it will not be our darling daughter. Rose is well + thriving. She is going in Monday to see Alan Guttmacher about the new heir or heiress—a routine thing. We will of course be satisfied with whatever the Lord chooses to bless us with but we are both secretly hoping that it will not have quite the high-octane charge that was built into Susanna—though it probably will.

As I think I told you, the book is coming along quite well. I think I’m over the hump now; at least the end seems a possibility and not just a misty improbable vision. It is the most difficult thing I have ever had to do in my life and since I’m putting so much into it, and since deep down I feel that when it is done it will be one of the finest novels in a long time, I think it is only fitting to tell you that it will be dedicated jointly to Rose and to yourself, who are the two people who, as they say, are the most.

Rose sends her love to you + Elizabeth, as do I, and joins me in hoping that the autumn brings fair skies and sunny days.

Bill

T
O
M
AXWELL
G
EISMAR

November 23, 1957 Roxbury, CT

Dear Max:

I don’t know if you saw this, but it is something said by Albert Camus in a wonderful interview in the current
Reporter
: “Like so many men today, I am tired of criticism, denigration and meanness—in short, of nihilism. We must condemn what deserves condemnation; it should be done with vigor and then put aside. But what still deserves to be praised should be exalted at length. After all, it is for this that I am an artist, because even when what the artist creates is a denial, it still affirms something and pays homage to the miserable, magnificent life we live.”

I think you mistook my last letter. No honest man wants the limelight; this is for movie actors, quizmasters, people of the caliber of Charles Van Doren, and other such pallid creeps.
^§Y
A writer who is worth anything
wants, however, like Dylan Thomas, to be
known
, and in order to be known look at Thomas—look at the excruciating posture he had to put himself in in order to get the recognition which should have been his due anyway: it killed him. This is an extreme case, of course, but the symptoms are the same. What I’m getting at is that a writer these days has to compete like he never did before. Was there ever a time when a serious artist had to contend with attention with the wretched likes of a Paddy Chayefsky? This sounds silly in a way, perhaps, and I have enough residual respect for the human race—though I sometimes wonder why—to realize that art eventually triumphs and all that crap; nevertheless, the feeling that one is writing in a vacuum sometimes gets overpowering. Look at your pal Griffin; I recently read
Devil
, and while I don’t perhaps share your complete enthusiasm for the book, it was a damn good job, but in spite of the NAL reprint and your critical support and so on did it get
1
⁄
10
^th
of the attention it deserved?
^§Z
No, the assholes were all reading
The Caine Mutiny
or some such tripe.

But I’m tired of complaining and I’m not going to do any more for a while. I can only reiterate, though, that like Camus I am tired of criticism, denigration and meanness. This book I’m writing—I have gotten to about p. 800 in the monster, and am at a point, over the hump, so to speak, where I can clearly see its virtues and defects. The defects, I think, are minor, or at least are outweighed by the virtues, which is as much as I can ask, I suppose. I have had the notion off and on that it might be too long, but I am now able to see that it encompasses its longness, and that makes it all right. What is most important, though, is that I think it’s going to be a better book than
Darkness
—it is less of a “novelistic” novel in that it is less confined, spreads out more, and I simply have more to say.

Trouble with
Darkness
, I think—in spite of the fact that it was a good book and all—was that it wasn’t intellectually attuned to that dreaded word Zeitgeist, that though it was a fine job for a novice it was still more arty than art; in short, it was a book which had almost everything except a really solid apprehension of the present in relation to the past. This book I think lacks some of the youthful zest and lyricism of
Darkness
and it has the grave and limiting but necessary defect of having the whole first half
told in the first person; but it is a bigger book in every other respect. The book is really the reason why I say I’m not going to do any more complaining for a while, since all the things I hate most are getting pretty well taken care of in the story. I don’t mean that it’s a polemical book or anything stupid like that. I think it will serve however as an antidote to a lot of smug shallow contemporary American thinking. As a matter of fact, the whole thing is fairly Anti- or un-American all the way around. Also anti-Catholic, anti-criticism, anti-denigration, anti-meanness, anti-nihilism.
Time
will hate it, the New Critics will ignore it, people instead of reading it will burn holes in their heads looking at
What’s My Line?
But it will be a good book. Rose will read it, you and Anne will read it, and it will be banned by the Archbishop of Detroit. What more could a writer ask? Want to know the title?
Set This House on Fire
. From a sermon by John Donne.

In this same essay Camus says: “I hate self-satisfied virtue. I hate the despicable morality of the world, and I hate it because, just like cynicism, it ends by depriving man of hope and preventing him from assuming responsibility for his own life with all its terrible burden of crimes and grandeur.” There could not be a more eloquent statement against the rotten hypocrisy which is the modern American way and therefore the way of the world. I just hope this book of mine is able to help reaffirm that statement. It is a tough road to go, but it has to be worth it or else we are all worth nothing at all. That is not ego speaking, it is faith.

I hope we can get together before too long. I realize as you say that you have more to complain about than I do, “being the obscurest critic in America,” which however is not true. If my feelings hold any water, though, let me say this: you will be un-obscure and you will endure simply because you are about the only critic I know who does not secretly loathe and despise the creative act. You have no envy. You are not an insane little prurient groper who hates both life and art. You will endure. It is embarrassing for a novelist to say this to a critic, I suppose, but it is true.

Love from all the Loftises,

Bill                        

Milton.                  

T
O
R
OBERT
C. S
NIDER
^‖a

January 29, 1958 Roxbury, CT

Dear Bob,

I have tried to write you several times since receiving your nice Christmas card, but for one reason or another always got hung up. Maybe if I try pen instead of Royal Portable I’ll have better success.

First, let me congratulate you upon your fine looking wife and boy. Second, let me felicitate you upon your appearance; the passing years have done little to efface what I remember as always being a slightly jaded optimism—good combination—and unlike myself and most of my contemporaries you seem to have taken on only a few ounces of avoirdupois around the jowls. Third, may I express my happiness at your professorship, especially at a place like Chicago; I always felt that, in spite of all the odds, there was one person in the F.M.F. who was destined to become something other than a plumber or a golf pro or a used-car salesman—and that man, of course, was you. What are you teaching, by the way? Chaucer? Socio-dynamics? Sanitary engineering? I’m in the dark.

The U.S.M.C., of course, laid a trauma upon my soul from which I am only gradually emerging to this day. To be sure, I had them—or they had me—
twice
, since I was called back in 1951, spending the whole time (10 months) at Camp Lejeune, where with that wonderful irony that happens only in life and not in books I was assigned to an outfit which made its headquarters in the identical building we both suffered in during the regime of Lt. Perry. Did you ever put a tracer on that bastard? He could not possibly survive in civilized society, except behind bars, and I’ve often yearned to know what institution he was eventually committed to. Anyway, pleading blindness and psychosis both, I got out, quickly got myself a discharge, and in this age of miracles finally consider myself safe and invulnerable. But it took a lot of sweat along the way.

We have a nice old 18
^th
century farmhouse here in the Berkshire foothills and a swimming pool (Connecticut-type, which means that it gets fouled up with algae and salamanders, and is box-, rather than kidney-shaped) and a place to play croquet and a lot of mice in the attic. For the
East Coast, we are in the middle of nowhere, which suits me just fine. The we is my wife, Rose from Baltimore, and daughter Susanna, age 3, though we, I guess, are what you might call a quasi-four, since another is on the way and is due early in March. There are just enough people around within spitting distance—mainly literary queers—to keep the solitude from being oppressive, and we manage to get to N.Y. (85 min) often enough to retain the tremendous veneer of culture and sophistication we are so celebrated for here on the Atlantic Seaboard. So it is not too bad; it seems to snow a lot, and often seems as cold as it must get in Jamestown, N.D., but you’ve got to live somewhere.

To fill you in on my whereabouts since the Marine bondage, as briefly as I can: I got out of Duke in ’47 and went to N.Y. and became the most unsuccessful editor that McGraw-Hill ever had. After this debacle I decided that there was only one thing left to do and that was to redeem myself by writing a book that would expose McGraw-Hill. Well, this didn’t turn out very well as a leitmotif, but I did hole up in Nyack, N.Y., and wrote a spook-ridden, guilt-laden, desperate novel about Virginia which, as you probably know, came out in 1951. After that I bummed around in Paris for a year or so, and got a fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, where I went for a most unprofitable year—except for the exposure to Italy and for meeting Rose there. We were married, amid much panoply, at Michelangelo’s Campidoglio. When we came back we spent a year in New York—a total waste of time—and since early 1955 we’ve been holed up here in Roxbury. Probably the most unexciting career a youngish writer has had since the days of Walter Pater.

At present I am under contract to Random House for a novel, and am 800+ monstrous pages along toward the end. I don’t think it will ever end, although now I am so far up to my ears in it that I don’t really care. What with sputniks, Lawrence Welk, critics and God knows what else, the novel seems to me a fairly useless form of expression, as is “art” increasingly in general, but I have made my bed and will try to fit into it somehow. I can always console myself with the fact that there are worse things to be doing—and there really are: working for B.B.D. & O., for instance, or working one’s self up the ladder in the United States Marine Corps. Or writing for television. In the meantime, parts of this novel really aren’t half bad. It’s laid in Italy and is full of murder and rape and all sorts of romantic trash, and will appeal mainly to the discontented middle-class
matrons who make up the bulk of our reading population anyway, but parts of it are really O.K. and the hero—a true
enfant du siècle
, full of all sorts of morbid longings—is, I think, a very successful creation.