Selected Letters of William Styron (52 page)

I’ve written you this, instead of someone else at
Esquire
, only because I feel that I know you well enough that I could lay these matters on the line. I think you will understand because I think, if you were in my position, you would do the same thing.

All the best to you and Penny,

Yours,

Bill

P.S. Just by way of respect to
Esquire
, perhaps you’d pass the following copy of the letter I got today to Arnold or other interested parties at the Magazine.—B

PPS: The “divided verdict” allows one jury to determine guilt; but another jury is allowed to examine the prisoner’s background, mentality, etc. in order to fix sentences. Much freer of prejudice.

T
O
R
OBERT
P
ENN
W
ARREN

July 19, 1963 Roxbury, CT

Dear Red: Just a line to let you know that I have made very good use of the Visit of Lafayette to the seminary material which you got them to send me from Lexington.
^*AA
It fits in superbly: I’ve used two entire poems, changing Lafayette to Governor Floyd of Va. visiting a similar seminary in Nat Turner country, and I’m indeed very happy that you sent it my way.

Have been thinking about
FLOOD
.
^*BB
It has a real resonance; the fact that it still lingers in my mind so powerfully convinces me how really splendidly effective the work is. I hope the final re-writing is coming along. We’re off to the Vineyard Aug. 1. Hope to see you before long. Love to Eleanor and the kids.—B

T
O
W
ILLIAM
B
LACKBURN

August 7, 1963 Box 948, Edgartown, MA

Dear Professor:

I have stopped smoking (well into my second week) and only now have attained enough self-command to be able to pick up a pen and write a letter.
^*CC
Actually, it is not as horrible as I thought it might be and don’t give it a second thought except once in a while trying to work and when socializing
at night. It surely is time: eating is once again a delight with the taste buds restored.

Shocking about Mac.
^*DD
I received your telegram and send belated thanks. For a while I thought I might try to make the funeral but was so near to completing a part of the new book that it seemed a prodigious wrench and I figured Mac would have understood. At any rate, I suppose like everyone I was stunned. It is just not the right age or time to go.

We are in Edgartown this year rather than Vineyard Haven, but with a similar house + view of the water. While in my non-smoking trauma I have taken a vacation from work but expect to get back to business soon. Two hundred pages done on Nat Turner, and I think they are good. We’ll be here until Sept 15
^th
. If you can see your way clear to spending some time with us we’d be delighted as always.

Ever yours,

B.S.      

T
O
J
AMES
J
ONES

August 22, 1963 Edgartown, MA

Dear James:

We’re up here again on the Vineyard, and will be here until September 15
^th
. I wish you and Moss could have seen it last year, as by American standards it is quite a wonderful place to spend a summer. Broad beaches, lousy food (at least dining out) but the best fishing on the East Coast—yesterday I caught 15 bluefish in less than three hours. There is a rather pleasant bunch up here, most of whom you know, I think: Lillian Hellman, the Marquands, Mike Nichols and his new wife, who is quite a dish.
^*EE
Well, maybe you’ll make it up here next summer. Not Dalmatia, but not half bad.

You may have seen the enclosed
Esquire
thing from the most recent issue but I’m sending it anyway. What I’m now really finally convinced about is that, aside from the faggot thing about you in terms of me that he has, he is quite simply obsessed about the fact that I made him a minor figure in
SET THIS HOUSE
, and a rather nasty figure at that.
^*FF
Otherwise I cannot figure his obsessive desire to run down the book as he does—in this desperate, clawing way which goes a lot further than simply aggressive criticism. I think if you read the enclosed closely you’ll see what I mean. Well anyway, as you say, he is a teapot tempest, and none of this really matters save for the irritation it causes one like an irrepressible flea. I’ll certainly be looking forward to your Comments from a Penitent Novelist, where I’m sure you have slapped the flea down.

I’ll also be looking forward to the childhood and youth pieces which you’re doing. I’ve thought of doing the same thing
^*GG
myself after I’m done with the present book. It makes a good change of pace, I think, and certainly a lot of the best writers have felt the same—Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Balzac, and God knows who else. As for me at the moment, I’ve finished a big hunk of the book—somewhere between a half and a third—and I’ve got that nice feeling one gets when a real hunk is finished. I’ve also stopped smoking, it’s been a month yesterday; it was getting at my goddam throat in the most horrible way—an inflammation which probably won’t be fully cleared up for several months, and the doctor told me to stop or ELSE. It seems that they’ve discovered conclusively that, among other horrors, smoking eventually destroys the cilia which are the little hairs in the nasopharyngal area that inhibit the entry of bacteria and microorganisms. When these cilia are gone your throat is simply a wreck—as mine is now—and almost everyone suffering from this condition runs a low-grade infection. Fortunately the cilia seem to regenerate themselves after a matter of months, and one gets back into shape but in the meantime: Défense
de Fumer … I might say, however, to my really astonishing surprise the cessation of smoking is far less an ordeal than I had thought. After a month (only the first couple of days are at all tough) one has only a vague desire for a butt after breakfast and a somewhat stronger desire late at night when everybody else is smoking. But I think it is far easier to stop than any addicted smoker really thinks it is—not completely easy, but easy nonetheless, and I’m just telling you this in case something might force you into stopping sometime.

There’s a fair-to-excellent chance that we might make the Paris scene late in the fall. I’m homesick in a sentimental way for the place, as I’ve always been. We’ll let you know when and if we come. Meanwhile, take care, and great love to all your gang from us.

B
.

T
O
B
ERTON
R
OUECHÉ
^*HH

August 30, 1963 Edgartown, MA

Dear Berton:

I very much enjoyed reading your article on
déjà vu
in
The New Yorker
. Just by coincidence and at about the same time I was reading C.G. Jung’s
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
which was published this year and which on p. 254 has a remarkable description of the phenomenon which Jung experienced traveling in Kenya in 1925. He sees a Negro on a cliff, with a spear, and this reminds him of some prior experience, etc. It all obviously ties in with Jung’s theories of “The Collective Unconscious” and I thought you might be interested in case you haven’t seen it already.

Saluti,

B.S.

T
O
W
ILLIAM
B
LACKBURN

December 18, 1963 Roxbury, CT

Dear Professore:

Just a Yuletide greeting. The season, however, is still somehow touched by melancholy, and one of the abiding wonders to me is the powerful hold Kennedy had on one’s imagination.

Here is an instructive anecdote. Exactly two weeks to the day before Kennedy was murdered, Rose and I were in New York and were invited to a party which the President was to attend.
^*II
Rose and I were late-comers, which is to say that we were invited in rather an impromptu fashion, at the last moment, and were not dressed in fancy evening clothes like the others, but had on our casual country duds. We arrived late, a little bit before midnight, and as we descended the stairs of this very elegant Fifth Avenue duplex, the first person I saw, out of the entire crowd of 75 or more, was the President, talking to some girl and laughing heartily at what I guess was a joke. Perhaps it was the informal way I was dressed, but anyway it was my intention at that moment to sidle past Kennedy and take up as inconspicuous a position as possible—after all, though I had met him a couple of times and though I had spent an afternoon with him and Jackie a long summer ago, I couldn’t claim even what might be called a casual acquaintance. But as I tried to maneuver myself and Rose out of the way, I caught his eye, or he caught my eye, or something; at any rate, he bore down upon us like long lost friends. “How did they get
you
here?” he said. (I’m quoting exactly.) “They had a hard enough time getting me here!” I didn’t know quite what he meant by this, until upon quick reflection I realized that the crowd assembled wasn’t quite his style—a mass of rather idiotic show people, not the amusing ones, but the boring ones, and in the distance I could see Porfirio Rubirosa, with whom Kennedy could have had nothing in common at all.

Anyway, I murmured something polite and appropriate, and he said: “Where did I see you quoted the other day? Was it the
Times
?” and I suppose again I said something harmless and appropriate, but almost immediately he was asking: “How is that book of yours coming along?” Now it
had been almost a year and a half since I had been on that boat ride with Jack and Jackie, and I had forgotten that I had even mentioned to him then Nat Turner, which I had not even started but just planned, but here he was all these many months later, asking me about the damned thing. And so we talked about it; he asked me something about historical sources, and what research I had used, and what approach I was going to use to tell the story, and of course that started me off, the flood-gates were opened, and we chattered happily about Negro slavery for a full ten minutes, the conversation finally getting around to the present revolt, just the three of us standing there amid a swirling mass of showgirls. It was all quite bizarre, but how much it tells about what kind of man Kennedy was! His eagerness, his honest curiosity, the real interest, the quality of caring! An hour or so later, just before he left the party, he passed me and shook hands and said good-night, casting a wry glance at Rubirosa or someone like him, and said to me: “If you can’t get a story out of this kind of party, you’re no writer.” And Rose said she could feel his hand warm on her shoulder, as he told her good-night and said, “Take care.” Famous last words.

Anyway, he is gone, and I suspect that in the great sweep of history he will be measured as somewhat less than the colossus he has seemed to be as the result of his martyrdom. But no matter. No one we have had since Jefferson, certainly, would have literally homed in on a writer as he did that night, and cared and asked questions, and made a writer feel that writing and the republic of letters was an important part of the other Republic, and figured large in the scheme of things. He was, as my father said on the day of his death, better than America ever deserved. I do sorely miss him.

Perhaps by now you have received
The N.Y. Review of Books
with my anti-smoking diatribe.
^*JJ
On the day of Kennedy’s death
Life
magazine asked me to compose an elegy of some sort, but I was so shattered that I couldn’t make it—and ended up writing about the sorrows of nicotine.

Merry Xmas to all in Durms,

W.S.                  

T
O
D
ONALD
H
ARINGTON

January 10, 1964 Roxbury, CT

Dear Don:

I was sorry that you were unable to make it down here, but I fully understand your baby-sitting difficulties, and hope you all will come instead sometime before too long. Almost anytime from now on will be fine with us, if you can give us a few days’ notice. Santa Claus brought me a marvelous gift in the form of a 16 mm sound movie projector so we are literally holed in for the winter, each week-end bringing us such delights as “The Informer,” “Diary of a Country Priest,” “Gold of Naples,” and others of the same class.
^*KK
I once thought that the
summum bonum
in life would be to have your own movies at home like a Hollywood Tycoon and now that that has arrived I will, in such beatitude, probably stop both reading and writing.

I will, however, save the time to read
The Cherry Pit
which I am most eager to see. I hope you will arrange to have a copy sent to me, of the MS or whatever, as soon as it is feasible. I have not talked directly to Loomis about it recently, but I have been led by grapevine comments to believe that you have written something very special—therefore my anticipation is running high. About writing “blocks”—I think you must learn to expect them every now and then.
^*LL
For instance, after a steady run on
Nat Turner
from the fall of 1962 until fall of this past year, I succumbed to an awful slump (not helped any by Kennedy’s death) and have literally only this week managed to start to extricate myself from the mire. I’ve had these empty periods all my life, and I don’t think I’ll ever get over them; I console myself with the notion that possibly, they serve as some sort of necessary psychic relief—a moment to restore the brain cells—but this may be a rationalization on my part. At any rate I wouldn’t suffer over
them too much but more or less roll with the punch—as you yourself can see, they always eventually go away.

Your observations on Mailer and his “novel” in
Esquire
amused me greatly.
^*MM
I was tempted myself to write them a letter, applauding their decision to invade the periodical field heretofore occupied by
True Confessions
and
Agony
, but decided not to. Really, the best comment was by someone who said that it all read like Noel Coward trying to write in the style of Mickey Spillane. Horribly enough, another person I know who has seen further installments at
Esquire
says that the “book” gets progressively worse—which is both easy and hard to believe. Anyway, it is a disturbing sight to see the way
Esquire
is exploiting his paranoiac misery.