Selected Letters of William Styron (89 page)

*j
Styron’s father had offered to send him $100 a month.

*k
This was Styron’s imagined novella about his Hart’s Island experience.

*l
Anthony Trollope (1815–62) was one of the most successful and prolific authors of the Victorian era. He claimed to have written every morning with a watch open at his elbow. After exactly one hour, he would board the train to earn his living as a postal inspector. Although he was widely criticized for his mechanical approach, it turned out that Trollope only claimed to follow such a strictly regimented routine.

*m
This is Styron’s first mention of his distaste for critics, a major trope in his correspondence over the following fifty years.

*n
Blackburn had separated from his first wife.

*o
William Canine was a member of the “West Durham Literary Society,” an ironically named group Styron socialized with during his months in Durham while taking refuge from New York and getting started on
Lie Down in Darkness
.

*p
In the fall of 1949, Lord Talbot de Malahide discovered several thousand pages of unknown manuscripts by James Boswell (1740–95), the eighteenth-century biographer of Samuel Johnson. Yale University eventually purchased the papers for its renowned collection of Boswell materials.

*q
“The Enormous Window” was first published in Charles I. Glicksberg, ed.,
American Vanguard
(New York: Cambridge Publishing Co., 1950), and reprinted in
William Styron: Letters to My Father
.

*r
Eudora Welty (1909–2001) was an author best known for writing about the American South. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1972 novel
The Optimist’s Daughter
.

*s
Samuel Putnam, ed.,
Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote de la Mancha
(New York: Viking Press, 1949), and Justin O’Brien, ed.,
Journals of André Gide
(London: Secker and Warburg, 1948).

*t
Sinclair Lewis,
Babbitt
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922).

*u
This story does not survive.

*v
Carl Sandburg’s
Lincoln: The War Years
, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1939) won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1940.

*w
Styron begins to quote “Love conquers all,” immortalized by Caravaggio’s painting and Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
, among others.

*x
McIntosh, Robert Penn Warren’s agent, helped establish the literary agency McIntosh & Otis, which represented Hiram Haydn, John Steinbeck, John Irving, and many others.

*y
Agnes de Lima.

*z
Hill Massie and Dorothy Conway, friends from Durham.

*A
The de Limas’ home in Valley Cottage, New York.

*B
Styron’s abbreviation for “Sweet Baby.”

*C
Maloney was a fellow writer and student of Hiram Haydn at the New School. Haydn’s recollections of him appear in
Words and Faces
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).

*D
Leonard McCombe, “The Private Life of Gwyned-Filling,”
Life
(May 3, 1948).

*E
“Ars longa, vita brevis” are the first two lines of an aphorism by Hippocrates: “Art is long, life is short.”

*F
“Hiroshima, U.S.A.,”
Collier’s
(August 5, 1950).

*G
Styron claimed to have read Gide’s journals in a January 19, 1950, letter to Leon Edwards.

*H
Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), English author whose works include
Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk
—the source of the title
Lie Down in Darkness
. The relevant passage is quoted in Styron’s letter of April 17, 1951, to William Blackburn.

*I
Two trains collided on the Long Island Rail Road on November 22, 1950. Seventy-five people were killed and close to one hundred injured. See “Cars Telescoped: Hempstead Train Halts in the Path of One Going to Babylon,”
The New York Times
, November 23, 1950.

*J
A serious storm hit New York on November 25, 1950. See “Floods Rout Many,”
The New York Times
, November 26, 1950.

*K
Styron had remained in the Marine Corps Reserve and was eligible for recall in Korea.

*L
Montemora was one of the women Styron used to create Sophie Zawistowski. She was the daughter of the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski.

*M
Bobbs-Merrill made significant alterations to Peyton Loftis’s interior monologue, deleting words and substituting others. See Styron’s essay “ ‘I’ll Have to Ask Indianapolis—’ ” in his
Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays
(New York: Random House, 2008). Arthur D. Casciato examined these cuts in “His Editor’s Hand: Hiram Haydn’s Changes in
Lie Down in Darkness
,” in Arthur D. Casciato and James L. W. West III, eds.,
Critical Essays on William Styron
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982).

*N
Allen Tate (1899–1979) was a poet and essayist who helped form the Fugitive literary group as well as the Southern Agrarians. Van Wyck Brooks (1886–1963) was a literary critic and biographer best known for
The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865
, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

*O
Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) was a writer and literary critic who authored many books, including
Patriotic Gore
(1962). Louis Kronenberger (1904–80) was a writer and critic who wrote and edited dozens of books over his long career. Budd Schulberg (1914–2009) was a screenwriter, television producer, and novelist, best known for his Academy Award–winning screenplay for
On the Waterfront
. Lionel Trilling (1905–75) was a prominent literary critic and major contributor to the
Partisan Review
. Alfred Kazin (1915–98) was a writer and literary critic. Joseph Wood Krutch (1893–1970) was a writer and critic who wrote several important biographies and works of criticism. Mark Van Doren (1894–1972) was a poet, writer, and critic who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1940. John Phillips Marquand (1893–1960) was a writer best known for his Mr. Moto spy novels who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1938. There were no quotations from any of these on the cover of the first edition of
Lie Down in Darkness
.

*P
Styron used the delay Hiram Haydn arranged to finish
Lie Down in Darkness
.

*Q
Job 19:23–24. “Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever!”

*R
Along with Jonathan Cape (and later Robert Haas), Harrison Smith was William Faulkner’s publisher beginning with
The Sound and the Fury
(1929).

*S
J. Donald Adams (1891–1968) was a book critic and editor, best known for his edited collections of poetry and prose.

*T
Styron refers to the British poet and literary critic Matthew Arnold (1822–88) and his poem “Resignation.”

*U
Styron’s nickname for Peyton.

*V
Texas Tech University.

*W
Browning automatic rifle.

*X
2 Samuel 23:20.

*Y
Johnny Weissmuller (1904–1984) was an Olympic swimmer and the most famous portrayer of Tarzan in films.

*Z
Styron’s father wrote an eight-page biography of his son for the Duke alumni office. It is reprinted in
Letters to My Father
.

†a
Dorothy “Didi” Parker was one of Styron’s colleagues at Whittlesey House. She should not be conufsed with the Algonquin Round Table founder of the same name.

†b
“Shells Fall Short, Kill 8 Marines, Wound 23 at Camp Lejeune, N.C.,”
The New York Times
, June 21, 1951.

†c
John Maloney, 117 West Thirteenth Street.

†d
One of Styron’s affectionate spellings for Durham. He also used Durms, especially with Blackburn.

†e
Maxwell Geismar (1909–79): American literary critic and biographer who taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College; author of a four-volume history of American novelists as well as two biographies,
Henry James and the Jacobites
(1963) and
Mark Twain: An American Prophet
(1970). He also edited literary collections by Ring Lardner, Thomas Wolfe, and Walt Whitman. He praised
Lie Down in Darkness
in print many times, most notably in
American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1958).

†f
Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) was a novelist and poet who became especially influential as an editor at Viking Press in the 1940s.

†g
Aldridge reviewed
Lie Down in Darkness
in “In a Place Where Love Is a Stranger,”
The New York Times Book Review
, September 9, 1951.

†h
Edith Abraham Crow was the only sister of Styron’s mother. She lived in Uniontown, Pennsylvania.

†i
Southern literary critic, professor, and publisher (b. 1923). Rubin is a cofounder of Algonquin Books as well as the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He taught at Johns Hopkins University (1950–54), Hollins College (1957–67), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1967–89). A correspondence and friendship with Styron began when Rubin sent his review of
Lie Down in Darkness
, “What to Do About Chaos,” in
The Hopkins Review
(Fall 1951).

†j
Styron first met Rose Burgunder, his future wife, at this meeting of Rubin’s graduate seminar at Johns Hopkins. Rose was working on a master’s degree in poetry and criticism. Styron was nervous about his appearance, writing in a letter to Rubin on December 18, 1951: “I’ll do my best at a talk to the students, though I’m inexperienced at that sort of thing. I expect I’ll make out all right, perhaps with a little prompting from you.” Rose recalled of the visit: “Bill was terrible, we all said to each other, nice guy, but not an intellectual.” Bill wrote to Rubin on March 26, 1968, declining an invitation to speak at UNC: “I guess I’d better decline. Who knows, though, I may change my mind. If I hadn’t done that before, you may remember, I would not have met Rose Burgunder.”

†k
Arthur A. Ageton (1900–71), rear admiral in the U.S. Navy and later (1954–57) U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay. Louis Simpson (1923–2012), Jamaican-American poet who was an editor for Bobbs-Merrill in 1952.

†l
Elliott Coleman (1906–80) was a poet who founded the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins in 1947. C. Vann Woodward (1908–99) was a renowned American historian who taught at Johns Hopkins (1946–61) and Yale University (1961–77). Woodward and Styron became close friends.

†m
John Richard Hersey (1914–93), Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and journalist and resident of Martha’s Vineyard. Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–73) was a poet and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

†n
American singer, actress, and civil rights activist (1917–2011).

†o
Loomis and Maloney were sharing the apartment at 117 West Thirteenth Street.

†p
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) was the author of dozens of fiction and nonfiction works and screenplays. Styron refers to his 1952 novel,
The Judgment of Paris
.

†q
Here Styron had rendered the UK cover of
Lie Down in Darkness
. He described the cover in a letter to Elizabeth McKee on March 13, 1952, as “full of drowning Peytons and prancing ostriches.”

†r
George Rhoads (b. 1926), painter, sculptor, and one of the first American origami masters.

†s
Postcard, “General View, Cadgwith, Helston.”

†t
Styron refers to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s
The Hound of the Baskervilles
(1902).

†u
Daphne du Maurier (1907–89) was a British author and playwright. She wrote the novels
Rebecca
and
Jamaica Inn
as well as the short stories “The Birds” and “Don’t Look Now.” Much of her work was adapted for films, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock.

†v
Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) was a prolific British author best known for his novel
Brideshead Revisited
(1945).

†w
Walter Baxter was a British army commander in Burma and the author of the novel
The Image and the Search
(1953), which was prosecuted in Britain for obscenity.

†x
This was Styron’s first mention of the slave rebel Nat Turner, the subject of his third and most controversial novel,
The Confessions of Nat Turner
(1967). Turner (1800–31) was the leader of the most fully realized slave rebellion in American history, a revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, that led to the murder of fifty-six whites, and probably a hundred blacks killed in reprisal.

†y
David Laurance Chambers was an editor, editor in chief, and eventual president of the Bobbs-Merrill Company.

†z
See Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
: “He was a verray, parfit,
gentil
knyght …”

†A
Calder Willingham (1922–95) was a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter best known for his novels
Eternal Fire
and
Rambling Rose
.

†B
George Mandel (b. 1920), novelist whose debut,
Flee the Angry Strangers
(New York: Dial, 1952), is considered the first Beat novel.

†C
Ernest Lehman (1915–2005), American screenwriter, who was nominated for six Academy Awards and won an honorary one. In the early 1950s he was working as a freelance writer.

†D
Attached to the letter was Styron’s completed questionnaire.

†E
The French give sprigs of lily of the valley (
muguet
) to their friends on May Day as a symbol of springtime. Flower vendors and workers’ organizations are allowed to sell the flowers on May Day without charging tax.

†F
American novelist, nonfiction writer, a founder of
The Paris Review
, and environmental activist (b. 1927). Matthiessen’s first novel,
Race Rock
, was published by Harper & Brothers in 1954. He was one of Styron’s closest friends. sources, see Arthur D. Casciato and James L. W. West III, “William Styron and The Southampton Insurrection,”
American Literature
52 (1981).