Selected Letters of William Styron (55 page)

Dick Goodwin is up here in a cottage and last week the President called him up and said he wanted him down in D.C. that same day to write the speech for the Voting Rights bill. Dick asked me along and they sent up the Vice-President’s Jet Star for the two of us and it took us back to Washington in 50 minutes … I rode in the Presidential motorcade from the White House to the Capitol (THIS IS NO SHIT, REPEAT, NO SHIT) in a limousine which was originally intended for Dick and myself but which, since the President at the last minute asked Dick to ride with him in his car, was occupied by me,
tout seul
. I am not being facetious when I say that eventually I became scared half out of my wits when I realized that without Dick to vouch for me I was the only person in that entire motorcade (which included Humphrey, the entire Cabinet and the Joint Chiefs of Staff) who was totally unknown to the Secret Service and indeed I really did almost get arrested at the Capitol when the motorcade stopped and I tried to worm my way into the procession to the Rotunda; the President’s bodyguard is a mean-looking killer from Georgia poetically named Rufus Youngblood and I’ll swear he was about to give me a Karate stroke to the neck when by the sheerest miracle, blurting out my name in a strangled gasp, I was saved by the new Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Mr. Gardner, to whom Dick had fortunately introduced me a half-hour before. Oh shit, what a scene. Anyway, the old Jet Star was waiting at Andrews A.F.B.—I still almost
come
when I am saluted by a Captain, which is the ritual on these planes—and we made it back the same day in time for croquet and beer.

Finally, as an anticlimax, Sinatra’s boat put into the harbor here (it is incidentally not true that the Widow K. boarded the yacht) and I thought that somehow we would be free of that particular business, except for the fact that my daughter Susanna, the half-Jewish idiot swimmer, lured by the misty scent of sex and glamour, took it into her head to swim the ½ mile through choppy seas out to the place in the harbor where the yacht was moored. Sinatra saved her, half-drowned, called her “sweetheart,” took her aboard and dried her off and sent her back to shore in a launch.
^†mm
This was bad enough in itself; however, it was also in the
N.Y. Herald
Tribune
along with a picture, the whole story scandalously implying that I was some sort of degenerate pimp for Susanna. I am going to put that child in an institution.…

I’ll probably be going to Russia for the State Department for a few weeks in December and will make it a stipulation that I stop to see you all in Paris. Much love to Kaylie + Jamie + Kate + all the girls. (Also my friend Mimi)

Love to you all,

Bill

T
O
R
OBERT
L
OOMIS

September 30, 1965 Roxbury, CT

Caro Roberto: The reading I gave at V.H. to you was a great help, because your advice was completely right about that part in which Nat overhears the conversation between his Massahs and the two ministers.
^†nn
I have drastically cut the section down so that it is less than ½ as long and much more pointed but with the same despair on Nat’s part at the end at knowing he is a slave. I really think it is very good now and that as you rightly pointed out it was all a matter of emphasis. Not that I have been tempted too much in such a direction, but I simply must at all costs (and have so far) avoid the pitfall of over-explaining certain technical and historical facts out of fear that the reader might not be properly oriented. All that business wherein Marse Samuel explains to the ministers the mystique of the plantation was precisely just such a trap, and I can’t tell you how delighted I was to read this bit to you and have you point out the exact weakness. Anyway, I’ve fixed that up real nice, as they say, and have forged ahead to what I think is other good stuff. The book is taking fine shape now.

Someone in Washington sent me
BOOK WEEK
which would have come out in N.Y. except for the strike. Apparently there was a nationwide poll among critics etc., on Great Writing of the last 20 years and
LDID
came in 12
^th
Greatest—not too bad out of the many thousands—and it
would really have pleased me save for the fact that the same list showed Saul Bellow as having written
four
out of the 20 most beautiful novels during the same period. What egregious shit.

There is a really fine new cigar at Dunhill’s named Belinda. Very rich & no more expensive than their other exorbitant smokes.

Maybe we’ll see you this week-end via the Carlisles. Give a call.

Yrs in Jesus

WS.      

T
O
W
ILLIAM
B
LACKBURN

November 12, 1965 Roxbury, CT

Dear Professor:

The enclosed clipping from the front page of
The N.Y. Times
will explain why my trip to Moscow was cancelled—or at least postponed. It was a rather bad disappointment—I had expected to spend a week or so in Paris on the way and a similar period in Rome on returning—but it does have its bright side in the fact that it will allow me to progress in the current book without interruption. And I’ve been told that I will be first on the list when and if the exchange program begins again. And so it goes …

I’ve been invited to spend some time next spring as a visiting scribbler to the University of Virginia and also to take the post of writer-in-residence—a six month thing—held by Mr. William Faulkner first, then Katherine Anne Porter, Dos Passos, + Stephen Spender.
^†oo
So I may be closer to Durham in the near future. However, I have not made up my mind—anything which tends to greatly interrupt my work I try to avoid—and may possibly put the whole thing off until another year like ’67 or ’68 when, God be praised and God willing, the endless (not in length but in time) Nat Turner will be finished and done with. But I will let you know.

Your Prof. Warddropper sounds remarkably like his name. Do give him a good boot in the tail for me.

Have you read the new second volume of Camus’
Notebooks
? If you
get a copy, do look up the wonderful quotation on the last page beginning “If I were to die unknown to the world …” which I am using as an epigraph to Nat Turner. But mainly look up the book because the whole thing is so good—a lovely man. How he would have laughed at Norman Mailer.

Hope all goes well with you. Give my best to my friends at Dook.

As ever in Jesus’ name,

W.S.      

T
O
J
AMES
J
ONES

November 23, 1965 Roxbury, CT

 … Dear James:

I hope you will be thoughtful enough to bring me back from Paris a box of H. Upmann Petit Coronas. I know that there is an inordinate risk involved and that you may get a 2-year stretch at Leavenworth but it
will
be a test of your friendship. Right now I’m down to the last three short and frazzled Montecristos I bought in Biarritz.

Anyway, Rose and I will be absolutely delighted for you all to stay with us on the Vineyard. We have, as you may know, a guest house up there and there are all sorts of living combinations we can work out—me and Kaylie in one house, along with Moss; you and my man Terry in the other, etc. At any rate, we are tickled to pieces that you all are coming. There’s plenty of room, really, and we can discuss the details when you arrive. I imagine that we will be going up there for the summer around the middle of June and will stay until mid-September. So anytime between those dates is fine with us and stay as long as you like. I think it’ll be great fun. We can take a lot of trips to the deserted Elizabeth Islands and lay around in the sun and drink and smoke cigars and look at the adorable teen-age girls at the yacht club. It will be a ball, as they say …

The blackout didn’t affect me.
^†pp
We were “out” for only 15 minutes before
they got the local waterfall going—we were the luckiest area in 5 states.

Prof. Rubin is coming over fairly soon to talk about you and vice versa. An odd chap. He wants to “play tennis” with Rose, but I told him that Rose will be in Boston and I’d give him 5 hours to talk about you—take it or leave it. Since I’ve gotten published in Romania I figure my time is worth about $50 an hour, so with this kind of debt over your head maybe you’ll bring me
two
boxes of cigars.

Keep in touch about your arrival. A big smooch to Moss + Kaylie + a firm handshake to Jamie.

Love to all,

Bill      

T
O
C
ARLOS
F
UENTES

December 6, 1965 Roxbury, CT

Alas, Carlos, sad news! The Russians evidently decided that we American writers were peddling dangerous bourgeois ideas, for only a week or so ago they cancelled my invitation—just after Rose had bought a sable coat for the Moscow winter! I should sue! Anyway, we’re not coming, at least this year, and will miss you. Please convey my respects to Betty di Robilant and give me a call if you come back through N.Y. I loved
Aura
—deft + beautiful.
^†qq
Saluti! B.S.

T
O
W
ILLIAM
B
LACKBURN

January 12, 1966 Roxbury, CT

Dear Professor:

I hope you will not consider me churlish or ungenerous when I balk at your publishing that letter of mine.
^†rr
I’ve read it over carefully, and while it seems from this vantage point to be honest enough and well-intentioned, I just don’t see what purpose is really served by publishing it. In the first place, your book is to be a book of Mac’s letters, not mine. Second and more importantly, I have very definite feelings about publishing letters in general (you may recall the long review I did of Fitzgerald’s letters in
The N.Y. Review of Books
; at any rate, I have given the matter some professional thought).
^†ss
Quite frankly, I feel that the publication of personal letters—as distinct from “public” letters, correspondence to newspapers, etc.—while the writer is still alive has somewhat the quality of gratuitous exposure; to be honest, when I read that letter of mine which you sent and thought of it appearing in print, I felt terribly
naked
all of a sudden. Certainly as I say the letter has nothing in its content to be really embarrassed about—an earnest youth worrying about his future, etc. Nonetheless, it was not written for public display and since I’m still quite alive (or feel myself to be so from time to time) I would quite simply not want to see these very private meanderings in print.

When a writer is dead, certainly that becomes a different matter. Presumably then there evolves enough interest in the writer’s private self that the very publication of his correspondence wipes out the element of gratuitousness. Fitzgerald is an example; the mythology surrounding his name generates enough excitement to make valid the publication of his most casual squiggle. Besides, being quite dead, he can hardly feel the sensation of nakedness. And when I myself am dead and someone wants to put my letters together, I couldn’t care less one way or another. But being alive, I have quite strong feelings about this—the only word is again, I’m afraid,
exposure—and so I really would not want you to include the letter in the book.

The footnote you asked me to comment on sounds perfectly fine to me, though I wish I could cast more light on just what J.P. Marquand said to the BOMC board. If I’m not mistaken I got the news from John Marquand, Jr. I am going to be seeing him soon and I’ll ask him if he can recollect any of the details; if he can, I’ll certainly send them on to you as soon as I can. We think our powers of recollection are fabulous, but faced with such matters it is amazing how little our memories really stand up.

Yours ever,

Bill      

T
O
D
ONALD
H
ARINGTON

January 17, 1966 Roxbury, CT

Dear Don:

Having come back from Jamaica, where I enjoyed and sunned myself in the company of the damndest, fruitiest, emptiest group of English lords and ladies I’ve ever seen (the English are really the
bottom
of the heap), I returned to find that the house (the big house) has been invaded by the damndest and fruitiest plague of rats you can imagine. It took me some time to divine the reason, but it’s basically simple. The Seltzer farm atop the hill, it may interest you to learn, has gone out of business—at least for the moment—and all the cattle and equipment sold. So all those barn rats up there, suddenly abandoned, homed in on the Styron spread like a bunch of Bowery bums heading for the Salvation Army. Fortunately there is something called “d-Con,” a lethal poison, which has been able to cope with the problem, and they are being diminished, but until you’ve had a real invasion like this you don’t know what it must be like to live in the slums of Calcutta.

This is my main problem for the moment. Otherwise all in Roxbury is fairly serene. I’ve re-read your letter of November and I’m able to sympathize with your plaint as I was back then. Surely the only thing more unsettling and traumatic than to be reviewed hatefully and unfairly and maliciously is to be reviewed either sparsely, as you have, or not at all. I
really think Random House is at fault in this; they sit on the book—but that does happen from time to time, and the only thing you can do now is to lament the fact. In consolation I can only say that your experience is really not unique in the history of first novels by writers of great gifts; I am thinking now of a whole horde of writers and their first books (just Americans), ranging from Hawthorne and
Fanshawe
down through Anderson and
Windy MacPherson’s Son
to Daddy-O himself—I mean Faulkner and his earliest works,
Soldier’s Pay
and
Mosquitoes
. Unless I am terribly mistaken—and I don’t think I am—all these writers and those works were almost totally ignored, and quite as crushingly as
The Cherry Pit
. The incidence of writers who have scored smashingly with their first work must at the very least be no larger than the other way around, and I suspect you are in very good company, melancholy as that company is. Even as I say all this, I am aware of course that it is in the nature of a consolation; but I have given it thought and I do mean it, and I hope you won’t let the experience even partially diminish the determination to keep on writing. Gollancz’s faith is bracing, I think—he’s no fool—and most of the rest of us are folks who thought and still think you have great talent.
^†tt