Selected Letters of William Styron (47 page)

Thanks, incidentally, for your comments about
The Long March
. Philip Rahv is including it in an anthology called Great American Short Novels, which starts with Melville and ends with me, so I feel that in a sense it has “arrived.”
^HH
I agree with you about
Seize the Day
. I think it is Bellow’s best work, and truly superb.

Sincerely,

William Styron

T
O
L
EON
E
DWARDS

September 11, 1961 Box 1242, Vineyard Haven, MA

Dear Leon:

Since you and Marianne are immersed in the world of the “world’s most foremost ass-hound” I thought you’d like to see this review, by a friend of mine—Stanley Kauffmann
^II
—which I believe wraps up Miller
^JJ
once and for all—also wraps up Karl Shapiro,
^KK
for that matter.

We’ve been up here on Martha’s Vineyard since the first of August and plan to go back to Roxbury in a few days. I’ve been working mildly at a new novel, but have spent most of my time on several columns for
Esquire
.
Don’t fail to get the November issue, which has my thoughts on Beverly Aadland, Errol Flynn’s 15-year-old mistress.
^LL
I think it will be on the news stands in mid-October.

I’ll write at greater length soon. Meanwhile, fond wishes to all of you.

Bill

T
O
R
OBERT
L
OOMIS

November 9, 1961 Roxbury, CT

Dear Bob:

Not, I’ll swear, because of any premonition, but because the indomitable Mrs. Pilpel
^MM
(who really impresses me in many ways) tells me I’m an idiot not to (especially in the light of all my forthcoming movie loot), I’m at the moment on the verge of drawing up my last will and testament, in preparation for bliss eternal. This is a morbid subject but, as Harriet tells me, and I think quite rightly, it should not be; after all, Shirley Temple had her will drawn up at the age of four. And there is always the chance, in Roxbury, of being run down by a maddened cow.

At any rate, what this note is about is to ask you if you would be willing to become my literary executor, and to have that fact stated in the will. What this means is simply that, when I join the angelic host, you will be responsible for preventing all sorts of lunatics from turning “The Long March” into a musical with Chubby Checker playing Captain Mannix. I don’t know whether you wish to take on this awesome responsibility, and I think it is presumptuous of me even to ask, but I think you know my work better than anyone else, and this and other more personal, affectionate
considerations cause me to think of you very much first. I wish you would think it over, at any rate, for old time’s sake. According to Mrs P., the burden is not usually very heavy and your function is really extra-legal and advisory; and I think in the end you could derive great pleasure from telling Dore Schary
^NN
to go screw himself.

The enclosure is self-explanatory.
^OO
It is somehow so awful that the mind boggles.

—B.

T
O
J
AMES
J
ONES

January 22, 1962 Roxbury, CT

Jones:

Sources closer to you than you may realize have told me that you have been making atrocious remarks about my cat.
^PP
Ordinarily, I would not have believed these rumors, but recalling the way you have talked about cats in the past, I would not put it beneath you at all. Let me tell you something, Jimmy-boy. What you say has a way of getting back to me. If I hear that you have said one more thing about my cat, I am going to invite you to a fight in which I expect to beat out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit.

Bill

PS: Enclosed check is to pay for $10 each borrowed by me and Gerry. I’d forget otherwise. See you Thurs.

T
O
L
EON
E
DWARDS

February 5, 1962 Roxbury, CT

Dear Leon:

Next Thursday the 13
^th
, Rose and I are sailing on the maiden voyage of the jolly S.S.
France
for Le Havre, thence to Paris, where—with side trips—we plan to be for a month or so. The reasons for this trip are rather frivolous. My French publisher is bringing out
Set This House on Fire
and has invited me to be on hand. My German publisher (I’ve heard that I’m very BIG in the land of Auschwitz and Buchenwald) has also invited me for a visit, and I am supposed to give a lecture or two in Frankfurt or Berlin, and to appear on the Kraut television. My shame over this latter visitation would ordinarily be enough to drive me into the deepest anguish, save for the fact that I’ve already bought a Mercedes-Benz sportscar, thus being in the position of the famous murderer Judd Gray (he conspired with his paramour to kill her husband, ca. 1927), of whom it was said that once he had committed adultery (he was also a Presbyterian Sunday School teacher) his sense of sin was so great that the crime of murder seemed only a logical extension of his malfeasance. At any rate, it looks as if it might be a good trip. The
France
on its maiden voyage, so I’ve heard, promises to be a remarkably vulgar affair, with press agents, free booze, and international floozies (informally, I’m supposed to write it up for
Esquire
, so the passage is free)—but once we get off the boat I intend to hole up in the French alps, at the home of a couple Rose and I know, and there try to do some work on the Nat Turner novel which I’ve been sweating over for so long.

In case one of the planes I will be flying on later should go down over Silesia, and I should join bliss eternal, I want to inform you that I have made you the recipient, in my recently drawn-up will, of the note sum of $10,750.
^QQ
Already I find this subject both grisly and rather embarrassing,
but my lawyer told me that I should tell you this—for the record, so to speak. My motives are both more generous than they might appear, and I shall try to explain. In the first place, disabuse yourself of the notion that I am well off enough—or that my estate, morbid word, would be large enough—to leave you this REAL sum, much as I would like to leave it—and to about only two other people who deserve it, besides yourself. To put it simply, in my mortal state I hope that you will be in a position someday to pay the note back. Dead as a smelt, however, as I surely will be if that kraut pilot makes a misstep coming into the Tempelhof airport, I will
not
need $10,750; and since Rose, who is well provided for, will not need it either, I and my lawyer figured that this would be the best way, under such circumstances, for you to be disencumbered of any posthumous debt to me. Furthermore, as it stands, you see, this loan is in the legal sense a sort of a gift: that is, it is money upon which I have already paid taxes and which, if paid back while I am
alive
, is tax-free. Under law, however (at least in N.Y. & Conn. which have the worst estate taxes in the union) a note is like a liquid asset: if my estate collects from you when the note comes due (which, as I have explained, I do not want them to do, nor does Rose), the estate will have to pay taxes on it—something like a horrifying 50%, too. I think you will agree that we don’t want all of that money to go to the govmint, the motherfuckers. When, then, Jesus forbid soon, I have become but clay, my estate will bring you the glad tidings that in my generosity I have left you $10,750. Choking back a sob, you will present your copy of your note to me in the same amount (my lawyer will also have a copy of the note in his safe), and it will be thereupon agreed that nobody owes nobody nothing. The government doesn’t get a nickel, you owe nothing, and they will sing an extra psalm for me in the hereafter. I hope all this is clear. My lawyer, incidentally, tells me that this sort
of thing goes on all the time. As for myself, the very subject depresses me hopelessly, and I don’t want to say anything more about it.
^*

I hope we shall be able to get together again soon, when (and if) I get back from Europe—did I gather from your Xmas card that you are going back to Walter Reed? If possible, I am never again going to spend a winter in Connecticut. Post-nasal drip, chronic bronchitis, and general sullenness have been my lot for two months. The children are all fine, though I think Susanna is coming down with measles.
Small World Dep’t
: it turns out that your first cousin, Betty Lou Holland, in whose father’s N.Y. apartment you and I slept our first night ever in New York, has gotten herself married to a friend of mine named Cordier, a Frenchman who has taken on an option on
Set This House on Fire
for the movies. I saw them the other night. They look the picture of wedded bliss, and though Betty Lou is a curious amalgam of both you and Bozo, I find her hauntingly sexy.

Love to Marianne and the kids.

Bill

^*
My lawyer pointed out that the foregoing knowledge could be an incentive to murder, but I told him that you were a decent chap.

T
O
M
YRICK
L
AND
^RR

February 8, 1962 Roxbury, CT

Dear Mr Land:

Your book sounds interesting and I wish you success with it, but I really don’t want to go into anything about Mailer and me, save perhaps to reflect on the fact that both Mailer’s honesty and his gift for prophecy are contained in his statement which you quote in paragraph 4: “For Styron has spent years oiling every literary lever … and there are medals waiting for him in the mass-media.” As anyone who read the reviews of
Set This House on Fire
can recall, the medals were made of solid lead. As for the
rest, any “feud” which exists has always, for some queer reason, seemed far more important to Mailer than it has to me.

Sincerely,

William Styron

P.S. Feel free to quote the above in part or in
toto
.

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

March 10, 1962 Grand Hôtel de la Ville, Rome, Italy

After this date: Hotel Lotti, rue Castiglione, Paris

Dear Louis—

Many thanks for your letter. Yes, I will certainly agree to come to Hollins, provided I don’t have to make a formal speech but can either (a) read from my work and/or (b) engage in a kind of colloquy with you, as I did that time at Hopkins. Speeches scare me and I’m no good at them. If this is O.K., let me know.

It might provide an interesting footnote to your piece on me to mark the fact that
Set This House on Fire
has, in French translation, achieved the biggest success (both critical and popular) of any American novel in France since the war. It even astonishes me. It is selling by the thousands, there have been new printings every week, and overnight I have become literally the best-known American writer in France since Faulkner. What the secret of all this is, is mystifying, except I imagine that the book contains just enough nasty but honest knocks at the U.S. to satisfy the fainting French spirit. But you have never heard such praise.
L’Express
, front page (equivalent to the
Times Book Review
): “the most intelligent and optimistic of the great American tragedies.”
^SS
Robert Kanters (the Edmund Wilson of France) in
Figaro
: “a great book which may not be a work of
genius but is certainly the product of the highest talent” etc. I am really left quite numb and had to flee Paris for fear of being
plastiqué
like Sartre and Malraux. At any rate, vengeance is truly sweet and I shall be overjoyed when the news seeps back to the American super-literati and super-patriots, as it most certainly will.

I’ll be looking forward to seeing you in Hollins next year, if not before. Hope the book goes well. Naturally, I’ll be interested in seeing it, even if I don’t agree. But I expect I will.

Best to you and Eva,

Bill      

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

March 24, 1962 Hotel Lotti, Paris, France

Dear Pop:

I have been traveling at such a great pace these past weeks that I’ve hardly had time to sit down, much less write. The Book, in France, is now a matter of history. It received the greatest reception of any American novel since the war. “A masterpiece,” “one of the great American tragedies,” “written with an almost supernatural power to impart life, like God the father,” “a miraculous achievement.” Those were some of the quotes. The most severe criticism I received was in one of the journals, which said that it wasn’t quite a masterpiece, but still a literary work of the highest order. So at last I feel pretty much vindicated after the mauling I took from the American critics. The book is selling
very
well indeed. I allowed myself to go on a television program (something I’d never do in the U.S.) and since there is only one channel in France (state-owned) I was seen by every Frenchman with a TV set. As a result of all this, Gallimard the publisher is planning to reissue the translation of
Lie Down in Darkness
. It is quite astounding the seriousness with which the French take a novelist, who in the U.S. ranks somewhere below a local politician, and certainly below a preacher or a doctor. Here he is without doubt Numero #1, as with the Chinese.

Rose and I are both getting dizzied with travel. The trip to Rome by jet
Caravella (1 hr 40 min) was spectacular but not nearly so spectacular as the Rome–Geneva flight, with the light sparking on Mt. Blanc at 15,000 ft. Tomorrow we go to Frankfurt, and all next week I will be giving readings to the Krauts, in Frankfurt, Berlin and Munich. I will tell you about Dachau, which I intend to see. My publishers, the Fischers, were Thomas Mann’s publishers, and are extraordinarily kind, gentle, and intelligent people. They are Jewish and were evicted by Hitler at around the book-burning era of 1937–38. They went to Vienna, and were forced to flee during the Anschluss. They then came to the U.S. via Sweden and Russia under the aegis of Thomas Mann, who was then living in California. They became American citizens, have a house in Greenwich, Conn. and now run the biggest and best publishing house in Germany. Really extremely civilized people (they make no bones about deploring their fellow countrymen) and Rose and I will be glad to see them. Rose is flying back to N.Y. on March 31
^st
from Frankfurt, and I’m coming back to Paris for two or three weeks to work on my book about Nat Turner. Then I shall return to Roxbury spring and the kiddies. I expect to stay here at the Lotti during that time, though a French friend offered me the use of an elegant 12-room apartment which I found hard to resist, save for the fact that it is simply too huge for one all alone.