Selected Letters of William Styron (42 page)

Norman’s book got very good coverage and mixed reviews, some saying it was all crap, others saying just what Norman says: that he is the most powerful and amazing writer of the generation. Maybe you will have read it by now. It doesn’t make a bit of difference one way or the other, but I think we come off rather well among his contemporaries (“competitors”), in spite of the fact that you’ve “sold out badly” and that I have “oiled every literary lever and power” to advance myself. There is a terrible air of paranoia and self-destruction all through the book, and the most intelligent thing that was said about it was in some review which pointed out the tragedy of a man with such genuine talent ranting and raving so wildly instead of employing that energy in the construction of a work of art.

I’ll try to keep in touch and let you know when we’ll be turning up there. Drop me a line if you find the time. You sound as if you feel you’ve found something good and strong in this new work of yours and I’d love to look at it, if you’ll let me, when it’s done. These are singularly crappy times for writing, but you’ve got it, I know, and I’ve got some of it, I’m pretty sure (Mailer’s got it, too, if he’d quit writhing in agony over recognition), and maybe someday in the 22d century they’ll put our pictures on a set of postage stamps. Wouldn’t that be something to strive for?

Rose sends her love to you and Moss and the conceptus (a horrible word, but I can think of nothing more beautiful) and I hope it won’t be too long before we’ll have a
fine à l’eau
.
^‖W

As ever,

B.S
.

T
O
R
OBERT
B
ROWN
^‖X

January 8, 1960 Roxbury, CT

Dear Bob:

I have no quarrel with most of your premises about my premises; indeed, I thought (I’m having trouble with my h’s
^‖Y
) your letter was an excellent one, and I’m at least glad that my introduction—with all your disagreements—provoked you into writing me. Actually, I think writers of fiction like myself shouldn’t write discursive essays at all; their brains don’t operate right, and their prejudices and peeves tend to get out of hand.

Basically, I think I’m a lot more sympathetic to critics and criticism than most writers I know. I have read an amount of criticism, in college and out, and have profited by it. Good criticism is a creative act; some criticism is infinitely better than nine-tenths of the so-called “creative writing” that is being produced nowadays. I don’t think that even the best criticism will be as good or as valuable as say,
MOBY-DICK
or
HUCKLEBERRY FINN
but that’s begging the question; the point is not only as I said in the introduction that “it is not necessarily a shameful act for a writer of fiction to read criticism” but that a writer will be denying himself something very good and illuminating if he does not at one time or another avail himself of the
best
that criticism has to offer.

This said, I would like to uncloak myself, and in a somewhat autobiographical way tell you why I still feel that criticism has a long way to go in this country before it becomes half-way responsible. I will have to talk about myself, and I hope it will not embarrass either of us too much.

One of the functions of criticism, I think you will agree, the function that sets it apart from the Prescotts and that sort of trash, lies in its requisite that it separate the real cream from the crud, that it informs the small body of honest, serious, seeking readers that such and such a work or writer is
really
good, as distinct from the rest of second- and third-raters who are daily touted as geniuses in the press. This is what Edmund Wilson
did for Hemingway and Fitzgerald, what Mencken
^‖Z
did for Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, and there are countless other examples in France and England; this was the time when in your phrase, quite rightly, the critic was the writer’s “best and only ally and friend.”
^aa
You go on: “he pays serious attention to what the writer writes holding that it is rich, unique, valuable, interesting, important, complex, difficult,” etc., and all that is very good. Now I don’t know what you personally think of
LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS
. I assume that you may have some regard for my work to write me such a complex and interesting letter. But now I will tell you about the career of
LDID
, letting the self-pity fall where it may.

It came out in 1951, and due to the good offices of an editor and publisher who had faith in the book it received considerable journalistic attention. It got fine reviews in the Sunday book pages; embarrassingly enough, even Prescott half-liked it, and though
Time
Magazine and
The New Yorker
shrugged it off as another magnolia-and-moonlight potboiler, there were a lot of very fine and intelligent reviews from the provinces. It was even a moderate best-seller for a while, and then it dropped out of sight. Well, I thought all this was swell enough, but being university-bred myself and not ashamed of it, I began to wonder when I would get really
serious
attention. I mean I began to say to myself that all this middlebrow attention was very good, but now—how about the
serious
audience? How about the old
Kenyon
and old
Partisan
and the old
Hudson
and all the rest? Who was going to tout this book onto the college readers—the serious young people in college or just out who after all make up one of the major parts of a serious writer’s audience? When were the people I had been taught to respect—the
critics
, the Edmund Wilsons of the era—when were these boys going to loosen up and put a laurel or two on my fevered brow? I should not have bothered to fret so. Because with one single exception—the short-lived
Hopkins Review
—I got not a solitary notice anywhere … nor to my knowledge have I gotten a solitary notice
to this day. I used to read them avidly, these literary journals: there was a lot of stuff about the wry, sly talent of Miss Mary McCarthy,
^bb
or Truman Capote, or such giants as Peter Taylor and the artful Robie Macauley, but not a breath about me. Yes, there was indeed one mention: this was from the illustrious Richard Chase, who in a single line damned my work as “a middlebrow novel with highbrow flourishes of rhetoric.” So be it, I thought; maybe it
was
just that, after all the Critic knows best. So just kept on writing.

Well, for several years after publication the fortunes of
LDID
declined. To be sure, every now and then I would get a breathless note from a club matron in Palmyra, Ohio, telling me how fine she thought my work was, but this would only give me a feeling of Weltschmerz and fatigue; and though I knew I had a small group of fans—cultists, you might say—most people who might have heard of
LDID
had, in fact, not heard of it (or
The Long March
either) and I saw the zooming ascent of the talents of James Jones and Salinger and John Updike, but looked upon these ascents with some equanimity, knowing that I was simply not in their league (had not Chase, that “best ally and friend,” told me so?).
^cc
Anyway, I still kept on writing, and then about two or three years ago I noticed a really singular and astonishing change. I found that despite the total indifference of the learned critics, despite the fact that I did not have a Wilson or a Mencken, my book was actually being
read
—that people were somehow stumbling upon it (and
The Long March
, too) and reading it and passing the word on, and reading it in considerable numbers. I found that at a party, instead of shyly standing in a corner and being introduced to someone who then would ask me what my “line” was, I would actually be known
before
I even got to the goddam party; that someone would actually come up to me and say they had read my work and tell me how much they liked it. Naturally, all this strange new interest necessitated a revival of the printed page itself, and your friend and mine, Thomas Guinzburg,
reprinted it at Viking. This edition has now undergone the astonishing phenomenon (for fiction in “quality” paperback) of a second printing, and now,
mirabile dictu
,
^dd
I find that
LDID
is on the required reading lists at close to ninety colleges and universities throughout the length and breadth of this great land. With no more attention from those best and only allies and friends of the writer than you could stick up the ass of a flea, I find that my book has become some sort of modern classic; I find that in England Philip Toynbee, who until a year ago had never heard of the book (how could he? surely his American critical cousins would never have sicked him onto such a middlebrow book), reads
LDID
and writes of it in the
Observer
that it is the only book since Faulkner’s early work that is on a comparable level of achievement. I find, in short, that after a long period of utterly needless neglect and indifference on the part of those whose duty it was presumably to pay attention to important writing (at last belatedly I
know
I’m better than the fustian creeps and homunculi they were writing about all those years) my work has simply vindicated itself. Which of course is as it should be.

I know that this letter sounds terribly self-centered, and I also know that it doesn’t come to grips with some of the more specialized and cogent observations you made about criticism in your letter. To practically all of them I say amen, and I hope you will believe me when I say I have no war with criticism per se. But if, as I believe to be true,
one
of the important functions of criticism is not only to explicate the whiteness of Melville’s whale but also to apprehend and pay serious attention to the literature of one’s own time, then I personally feel that I do not owe to contemporary criticism a plug farthing. I think that contemporary literature is blighted not so much by the Prescotts and J. Donald Assholes (though they are bad enough) but by the cliquishness and myopia of the Trillings and the Chases and the deadly young squirts like Podhoretz and such actual haters of books as Leslie Fiedler, who
wish
the novel to be dead.
^ee
That is why such introductions to anthologies as I write are apt to be cranky, and I
hope you understand. I hope I have not been too immodest. I am all too well aware of the limitations and faults in my own work, and in retrospect I cannot claim for that first book of mine anything that isn’t there. But I do think that it has proved on its own hook its own value, which seems to be a fairly lasting value; unlike most books published since the war, mine still
lives
, but if it had been up to any imprimatur from modern criticism to keep it alive, rather than the slow accumulating enthusiasm of readers, it would now be as dead as the dodo. Incidentally, I am all for symbols.

Yours,

Bill

PS Rose and I are giving a party at Cass and Sidney’s on Jan. 29
^th
, a Friday, from 9:30 PM on. Why don’t you come? I think Rudd,
^ff
of “THE FISHERS,” will be there.

PPS. I’m having Random House send you a copy of “Set This House on Fire” in March. It is not an obscure work, but it cannot be made explicit to an idiot, thank God, and I think you might like it.—B.S.

T
O
E
LIZABETH
M
C
K
EE

February 22, 1960 Hotel Lotti, Paris, France

Dear Elizabeth:

I received this letter today from our friend Giblin and am sending it on to you so that you may communicate with him.
^gg
I am writing him to tell him that it is all right with me if he and his group want to put on the play
but that the final word would have to be with you and Cy because of the possible legal complications, etc.
^hh
But do get in touch with him and let him know one way or the other.

Paris is a ball and the kids are eating it up. It is, God Knows, so expensive as to stagger the mind but I am trusting that between you and me and
STHOF
we shall be able to remove some of the ominous pall from this problem. We’ve seen a lot of Jim + Gloria Jones, also the Gilberts—the latter about as wildly chic and parisien and expatriate as you could manage to get. I don’t know just how long we are going to stay. There’s a far-out chance we may get an apartment and stay here until summer, but more probably we will be going to Italy in a week or so.

The Kids and Rose all send their love to you and Ted, as do I, and please keep in touch with your benighted client.

Love,

Bill

P.S. Let us know your plans for Europe as they develop.

T
O
L
EW
A
LLEN

March 6, 1960 Hotel Principe e Savoia, Milan, Italy

Dear Lewie:

This will be a somewhat shortish note, as we just got off the train from Geneva and are kind of worn out after a long albeit spectacular trip through the Alps. However, the Hotel Principe e Savoia is not too unlike the Sheraton-Hilton in Cincinnati and I have beside me a double Scotch so at least I should make sense.

Mainly I wanted to tell you that I am pleased about the news concerning the movie and Radwitz (is my spelling right?). I got your letter in Paris and it all seemed to me very optimistic this time. Youngstein I know has
for a long time been a hot personal admirer of
LDID
and I think that it is a good sign that he is for the picture, since I have little doubt that he will wish to make a
good
picture rather than a film a la Jerry Wald. So all I can say now is that I hope things continue to progress in the near future in the way we want them to.

I suspect that you may wish to keep me informed, so maybe I should tell you that after the 11
^th
of March we will be staying in Rome at the Hotel Majestic, Via Veneto. We’ll be there a week or so, I imagine, in the meantime trying to find an apartment for our terrifying and proliferant brood. This trip has been so shockingly expensive that I am reduced nightly to warm, bitter tears, but in spite of all it has been tremendous and sometimes hair-raising fun. We have come close to losing both Polly and Susanna in at least three train stations, and in Geneva, Polly very nearly fell off the fifth floor terrace of the Hotel de la Paix. We have 18 pieces of baggage which considerably cramps a train compartment, especially when, as between Paris and Geneva, we got our reservations mangled and had to share the compartment—spilled milk, shitty diapers and all—with two exceedingly unfriendly Swiss businessmen.