Selected Letters of William Styron (77 page)

It would make a nice article and I hope you proceed with it. All goes well here, more or less, given our mortal condition on earth. Stay loose.

Yours,

B.S.   

T
O
P
HILIP
R
OTH

October 5, 1980
^JJJ
Roxbury, CT

Dear Philip: This is our next president feeding America.
^KKK
The Deeter attack on fags was fascinating and horrible. She may be our next Secretary of H.E.W., so watch your step. I’ve got to go to Dartmouth to be idiot-in-residence for the early part of this week but will get in touch for dinner soon.

—B.S.

T
O
W
ILLIE
M
ORRIS
^LLL

April 30, 1981 Roxbury, CT

Dear John: I doubt very much that I’ll be able to forge anything so elaborate as a complete inaugural address, but it may be that I can find the time for a few eloquent lines. If I can, I’ll do it, for it is plain that we cannot allow the mean opposition to even contemplate taking over a city which is a nice place to live largely because of your leadership. I find Fourex natural membranes, however, less abrasive than Trojans, and I hope I can expect a gross of such in recompense.
^MMM

Yrs ever,

Bill S.

T
O
W
ILLIE
M
ORRIS

May 28, 1981 Roxbury, CT

Dear Willie:

Your Mississippi piece is absolutely splendid—so tellingly right and beautiful.
^NNN
I’m proud of you for having written it for so many reasons. Not the least of these is the fact that once and for all it makes manifest the tremendous
humanity
of the state (and therefore, by indirection, the South in general), and wipes out forever any claim on the part of the North to moral superiority. But I also just loved the writing—the richness and the passion. It is a beautiful piece and will be read, I believe, for a long long time to come. (
Life
did a great job, too, in the presentation.)

The new president of France, Mitterrand, offered me and Arthur Miller round trip transportation by Concorde if we would come to his inaugural.
^OOO
So we went, paraded down the Champs-Élysées, went to the Arc de Triomphe, had a drunken 2-hour lunch at the palace, got drunk, got laid, and now I’m back. Such adventures do not come without their price, though. Since I’ve returned I’ve been suffering from (at the outset, at least) the worst attack of gastritis I’ve ever had (horrible nausea for 48 hours which made me contemplate suicide), followed by bronchitis which is still pestering me dreadfully. Can the clap be far behind? All this to help usher in the first left-wing administration in a quarter of a century.

IT IS TIME TO SETTLE DOWN AND STOP THIS TRAVELING ABOUT.

Willie, thanks for Miss. piece again, and give my love to Dean and Larry. And do stay in touch, as usual.

Always,

Bill

P.S. The check for my Ole Miss show arrived in good shape.

T
O
I
AN
H
AMILTON
^PPP

July 1, 1981 Vineyard Haven, MA

Dear Mr. Hamilton:

I saw Cal Lowell off and on during the years after I first met him—in Paris with Lizzie in the early 1950s—until the year of his death. I admired him enormously, always had great affection for him, and always wished I knew him better and saw more of him. He was enough my senior for me to be able to regard his response to my own work as big-brotherly, in the benign sense of the phrase, and I cherished the fact that he once told me that my
The Long March
was one of the finest short novels he had ever read. He could be painfully frank, though, telling me once that my novel
Set This House on Fire
had some very good things in it but was quite a bit too long (which it probably is).

One night back in the early 1960s—it was just before one of the episodes which led to his being put away in an institution—I recall listening to him rave in the most ferocious way about Stalin. I always believed Stalin was a monster myself and had no illusions, but Cal’s rage was obsessive and monumental; he said that by comparison Hitler was a saint, that no one in the history of the human race had committed such evil. I thought Cal was going to have apoplexy. I mention this only because his fury, in retrospect, seemed to be connected with the fact that only days later he was institutionalized. It was one of those strange, unsettling evenings that sticks in the mind.

I rather regret that my best and most sustained recollection of Cal is connected with a trip that he and Lizzie and I, together with several other American writers, took to the Soviet Union during the late spring of the year of his death (1977). The regret has to do with the fact that it was the last I ever saw of him. The writers’ conference we attended in Moscow was the joint effort of the Soviet Writers Union and an American outfit called the Charles E. Kettering Foundation, dedicated to furthering Soviet-American relations. Cal (and I think Lizzie) seemed as skeptical as I about the potential fruitfulness of the trip but it could be regarded as a nice all-expenses-paid-for junket to a new and fascinating country, so we set off in
fairly good spirits. Before we got to Moscow I enjoyed seeing two examples of Cal’s disregard for convention—a nonconformity which I had seen him display before and which I really admired. Cal chain-smoked (I have little doubt that this contributed to his failing health) and on the Boeing 747 we were seated in the non-smoking section, although the smoking area had been requested. Cal smoked anyway, much to the annoyance and finally the fury of a non-smoker whose protests to the stewardesses were of no avail. Cal referred to this man contemptuously as an “environmentalist,” and kept smoking the entire way to Frankfurt, despite all efforts on the part of the staff to make him stop. I was rather tickled by his obstinacy; after all, it was Pan American which had made the mistake in seating, and he was standing by his rights.

Our group leader was a rather fussy bureaucrat from the Kettering Foundation who annoyed us all, but especially Cal, by his worry that the members of the group might exceed expense account limits in certain situations. We stopped over briefly in Frankfurt where we were housed at the very swank Frankfurterhof Hotel. There we were cautioned by the gentleman in question that, because of the expensiveness of the place, we should display caution and discretion in ordering, especially meals. This was offensive—after all we were grownups, even dignitaries of sorts, the Kettering Foundation was well-heeled—and no one was more insulted by the edict than Cal. To my great delight, Cal led a revolt in the restaurant and in clear sight of the man in charge ordered four of the most sumptuous and expensive bottles of white German wine that any of us had tasted. It was a clear victory of individual choice over bureaucracy.

But I began to detect a tired and melancholy strain in Cal. Before lunch in the bar of the hotel the next day we had Bloody Marys and I remember Cal speaking of Boris Pasternak, whose work he admired passionately; he said that he wanted to visit his grave, and spoke of death. “We all have one foot in the grave,” I distinctly remember him saying, though of course having no inkling then of what this might foreshadow.

I have always felt myself a little less sensitive than perhaps normal to the purely physical moods of others, but in Moscow even I could tell that Cal seemed extremely tired. Even so, he could be very funny as he so often was in that low-keyed but abrasive way. We were lodged in a hotel called the Sovietskaya, a one-time palace of the Czarist days now reserved for V.I.P. visitors. It is a high-ceilinged, dark, gloomy place which, despite its history,
has no charm whatever. When we entered the place one of our colleagues, a droll Russian-born scholar of Soviet literature named Vera Dunham, gestured despairingly and said: “This is the Russians’ Waldorf-Astoria.” To which I recall Cal replying: “My God, what is their Hilton like?”

Cal seemed to need a lot of sleep. Once in this dismal hotel when he and Lizzie and I were waiting, seemingly interminably, for food we had ordered at one of the “buffet” counters on an upper floor, Cal got restless and excused himself and disappeared. He was gone and for a long time, until Lizzie got a little nervous and I went up to his room to see what he might be doing. Opening the door, I found him on the bed, stripped to his underwear and sound asleep. It was as if he had become so exhausted that he had had to plunge into sleep without a word to anyone.

I’ll never forget how touched I was at the boring writers’ session when I would glance over and let my eyes rest on the brooding, sorrowing Beethovenesque head. I don’t know why that head and face so often touched me so through sheer presence—so much suffering contained there, I suppose. Hence the wicked and caustic wit which was so delicious (and sometimes cruel)—a way to turn one’s self away from suffering.

I don’t know whether Cal got to visit Pasternak’s grave or not—Lizzie would remember, I’d imagine. Certainly not on the night before we all left Moscow—I to go back to New York, Cal and Lizzie, I believe, to Leningrad. We spent a fine drunken evening at Vosnesensky’s dacha Peredelkino—an event notable among other things for the presence of Yevtushenko, who was making friends again with Andrei after a long estrangement.
^QQQ
Perhaps because of Cal’s fatigue he and Lizzie went home early. Yevtushenko and I went to Pasternak’s grave and sat until dawn talking and drinking Bulgarian champagne. Yevtushenko toasted Cal as “your greatest poet.”

Sincerely

William Styron

T
O
W
ILLIE
M
ORRIS

August 16, 1981 Vineyard Haven, MA

Dear Willie: Your observations on John Gardner, received today, were right on target.
^RRR
Why the fuck couldn’t he have said all that originally, the fink?

Gloria was up here for a few days and we had a great time. She told me of the Doubleday contract and that’s great news for you.

I thought the enclosed from
The Village Voice
might interest you. Apparently the asshole Lewis Lapham has just resigned from
Harper’s
—that once-great magazine, thanks to you, which he has helped to kill.
^SSS
The sadness is unbearable.

See you soon.

Stingo

T
O
D
UKE
U
NIVERSITY
^TTT

August, 1981 Roxbury, CT

I think that it is necessary only to ask yourselves whether Harvard or Yale would consent to having a Nixon library associated with their names in order to realize why Duke must not permit the proposed library and archives. Duke has become a truly great university. To establish any connection, no matter how informal or tenuous, with the works of a man who brought such disgrace to his high office would be a smear on the image of the institution we all cherish and respect. There would seem to be no reason, other than that of misplaced vanity, for Duke to wish to be the location for these archives, which are doubtless of historical importance but
which could find suitable lodging elsewhere. In the 1950s my great teacher and mentor, William Blackburn, helped lead the successful fight to prevent Nixon from receiving an honorary degree from Duke. It must be remembered that this was even before Nixon became involved in the criminal activities of Watergate. It is with Professor Blackburn’s memory in mind, but also the self-esteem which I’m sure I share with thousands of loyal Duke alumni, that I vigorously protest this threat to our university’s fine reputation.

T
O
W
ILLIE
M
ORRIS

January 12, 1982 Roxbury, CT

Dear Willie:

I’m just back from Venezuela and the Brazilian jungles to face this incredible arctic weather. I was in an Indian village 300 miles up the Orinoco River and ran into “Knuckles” Kazin—he’s become a Baptist missionary.
^UUU

Seriously, Kazin has moved to Roxbury, and I’m mortified that I might have to have social intercourse.

Thought you’d like to see the enclosed—especially the part on RPW.

I learned just yesterday that
Sophie
was voted by the Paris book critics circle, or whatever, as the best novel published in France in 1980. There is some justice.

How goes the novel and your other work? Am looking forward.

Ever,

Bill

T
O
A
MELIE
B
URGUNDER
^VVV

May 15, 1982 Roxbury, CT

Dear Amelie,

I wish I could be encouraging about the special screening of
Sophie
, but I really have discovered that I have very little muscle where this movie is concerned. I was not really made to feel very welcome on the set (though I did go very briefly about three times) and so I don’t really feel I have much influence. I had rather hoped to have a screening benefit for my old prep school, Christchurch, but have been reluctant to approach Pakula or anyone about this. I don’t really mean to imply that Pakula, or anyone, has been unfriendly. Pakula has in fact been most solicitous about my reactions to the script, and I think (unlike some directors) he would be horrified if I were to express a negative reaction to his “translation.” But, as I say, I just don’t feel that I have any real influence on such matters as screenings. Pakula and the company are now in Yugoslavia doing the European part of the film, and will be there through the first week in June. I will try to bring up your screening when next I see him—but, if past experience means anything that may not be for a very long time. I wish I could be more positive but, as you can gather, I’m somewhat in the same boat.

Love, Bill

T
O
C. V
ANN
W
OODWARD