Selected Letters of William Styron (16 page)

Outside of my own reactions, the book has really gone over with the rest of the people so far. The ones, that is, including Haydn, who’ve read the MS. Haydn really does think I’m the best writer living and it does me no harm to hear him say it, although I’m too much the natural pessimist
to let it turn my head. George Salter, the fellow who has done the jacket, has written a note to be sent out by Haydn to the booksellers. Salter is a very snooty guy, according to Haydn, and is not given to insincere tributes; Haydn will send you the note when it’s printed and I think you might be pleased by it. The book, incidentally, is finally scheduled to be published on August 20
^th
and you’ll get a galley copy long before that, probably sometime in May. So far three very big literary people have promised to read the book and to give a comment, if they like it, for the jacket. They are Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and Van Wyck Brooks.
^*N
Haydn also expects comments from the following: Edmund Wilson, Louis Kronenberger, Budd Schulberg, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Joseph Wood Krutch, Mark Van Doren, and John P. Marquand. Quite a list, no?
^*O
I might even get rich; if so, how about a new Pontiac for you?

I hope it won’t disturb you, as I heard that it did, to tell you that I’m marking time, resignedly, for my re-entrance into the Marine Corps.
^*P
Last time I didn’t mean to give an impression of abject anything—terror or despair. I just really felt then (heightened by the sudden shock), as I do now, a sort of disgust with the whole business. One can’t feel overjoyed at the prospect of being, in the prime of one’s life, militarized indefinitely. Communism and its threat (acknowledged), or the fact that I’ve already spent three years at it before, with or without combat—these have not so much to do with my disgust as that of being faced with a civilization apparently
going stark raving mad. I urge you to read a book called
1984
by George Orwell. It pictures beautifully the situation toward which we seem to be headed, and will reach unless people quit their mad lust for power. I despise Soviet Communism in any of its forms, but I equally believe that America is—at the moment, at least—far from guiltless and perhaps even a little criminal in its foreign policy. You understand I’m not speaking as a marine-to-be, but as a citizen. “My country right or wrong; but always my country”—these are fallacies that should have been shattered long ago, in a nation potentially as great in its democratic ideals as this one. I realize that we face a hideous threat, and it’s not the Marines or our foreign policy or possibility of combat which I protest so much as, again, being involved in a sort of zombie world where the only music is the sound of marching feet.
Please
don’t let this personal attitude affect you. As usual we aren’t taking it lying down; but the young people of today who do any sort of thinking do feel, I can assure you, somehow tricked and cheated. I feel lucky. I’ve written a book, my words are “graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock forever.”
^*Q
But what about the ones who want to write, and won’t have a chance?

You’ll get a copy of the jacket and the proofs sometime in May and I hope you enjoy it—especially since you’ll have the knowledge that you, mostly, made it possible. Because of more work I won’t be able to see you before I go to Lejeune, but I’m sure I’ll be able to see you on the weekends and furloughs thereafter.

Your son,

WCS jr

T
O
W
ILLIAM
B
LACKBURN

April 17, 1951 314 West 88
^th
Street, New York City

Dear Doctor,

I’m glad you like the title. It is, of course, from the old master himself—Chapter V of Urn-Burial: “since our longest sun set at right declensions … 
and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness and have our light in ashes.…” Since I have Peyton herself say part of the line, just before she jumps from the window, I’m not using it as a quote in the front of the book but merely appropriating it, a la Eliot. I hope Sir Thomas won’t turn over pompously in his grave. The quote I’m using as an epigraph is from
Finnegans Wake
: “Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair.”—the cry to Earwicker from his children, as he hears it in his sleep. I think it fits the book pretty well.

I wrote the last 15,000 words in about two weeks. The most exhausting fortnight I’ve ever spent, or imagine I ever will spend. I lost fifteen pounds and I’m still in a state of semi-convalescence. I had to
become
Peyton and kill myself in the first person, and as it worked out I came pretty literally close to it. Luckily, I had Daddy Faith and his baptism to resuscitate me at the end. The book, as I told Brice, runs to over 600 typewritten pages. The last part is very frank and this will no doubt make me notorious and get me censored in Boston. If it turns out that way I will be able, no doubt, to buy you a new Cadillac, although I believe the part which may cause raised eyebrows was written honestly, and with no deliberate intention to shock. Harrison Smith
^*R
and J. Donald Adams
^*S
will gag over it, but other people will like it—and have liked it already. I only wish I didn’t have to go back into the loathed Marine Corps, but I’ve already resigned myself to the extent that it no longer gives me bad dreams. I’m indeed looking forward to seeing you on the weekends. As I recall from the last war, it’s not too long or rough a trip up from New River and no doubt I’ll soon meet someone with a convenient automobile to make the journey less a bore. I’ve stopped for a while my moaning and groaning about the state of the world. I’ll no doubt get angry again and soon, but at the moment I’m trying to practice a sort of Matthew Arnoldesque attitude of resignation, in the hope that though things might not measurably improve they may at least not get a hell of a lot worse.
^*T
I hate in a way to leave New York but
perhaps there are pleasanter spring fields in Carolina. I’ll be leaving on May 1
^st
. If you write me after that, and before you get my Lejeune address, perhaps you’d better write in care of Bobbs-Merrill, 468 4
^th
Avenue. But I hope to hear from you before that.

As ever,

Bill

Styron reported for duty at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in May 1951
.

T
O
T
HOMAS
P
EYTON
III

May 9, 1951 Camp Lejeune, NC

Dear Satan,
^*U

As you can see from the above address, while I don’t have it precisely made I have been at least temporarily saved from snoopin and poopin in the swamps. Right now I am assistant 5-3 of the 8
^th
Marines, a job about which I know nothing and care less. They have so many 1
^st
Lieuts. down here that they don’t know what to do with them, so they shoved me in here, hoping, I suspect, that I would at least keep out of the way. Mornings at 7:30 I go to Staff Command School, whatever that is, where a bunch of knucklehead Majors from TTU lecture on “high level” policy in Amphibious Tactics.
^*V
When they have movies, just as in the old days, and the lights are out, I sleep. Afternoons I come back here and write letters and drink Coca-Colas. Evenings I sulk alone with a bourbon (already, after only a week, I think I’ve overrun my account) and correct the page-proofs on my book (they are coming in now, beautifully, permanently printed, and these provide my only consolation) and brood over the peculiar fate of our generation which has us tied helplessly to the brute wheel of evil and power.

Anyway, for a time, to more mundane things. How does this new reserve
alarm affect your status. Down here it has caused mixed horror and joy. To people like myself who have just come in, the part about one year’s service has been very depressing, but of course the boys who came in in August are quite happy. The so-called proposed expansion of the Corps might blast everyone’s hopes, but even so the expansion seems to be a long-range proposition and, after all, might not get through Congress.

God, ain’t it horrible? You should know even more than I, old buddy, being in your position. I sure hope something good happens to you before you go west, like losing a finger or a toe. It’d be worth it. There ain’t no justice, to think that only four months separated your PCS class from mine, and yet by some purely chronological quirk you boys got crapped on this time. At least (so far) most of us have gotten easy jobs. Let me know how you think this new order will affect you. I sho hope something will keep you East and that this whole bloody mess will clear up miraculously and that you and your spouse and me and mine (I’d be half-way married myself this month) could get together on the river somewhere and drink beer by the soul-cleansing gallon. It is possible though I can hardly see how it’s probable. If the lunatic fringe of both the Republican and Democratic parties would for Christ’s sake just get
killed
and the sane members get
together
, and quick, there might be a way to finish off Korea and work for a lasting, final peace. But I doubt it. If we are destroyed, remember that we are destroyed by evil, ignorant, criminal men, not only in Russia but in D.C. A man would be justified using a BAR on about half of Congress.
^*W

I’m tired of thinking about the situation, and I’m more tired of being held captive by the enemy. Maybe I’ll rebel, go over the hill, I don’t know. At least I know that no men of good will would point a finger at me and cry “shame.” My dreams are haunted by visions of a time when you and I were younger and more innocent, a time long before the time when, as the Bible says, violent men raised spears against us.
^*X
Let us pray.

Let me know your progress, old boy; keep me well informed, and
don’t
let the bastards get you down. In all the despair I still somehow have a secret place in my heart that says that we will prevail.

Your buddy,

Sty       

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

June 1, 1951 Camp Lejeune, NC

Dear Pop,

I heard from Eliza that you are a little under the weather now. I’m terribly sorry and know how you must feel, lying so quiescent on your back; but also knowing the old spirit, I have no doubt that you will snap back and be in good shape again soon.

If any kind of doubts or wonderings are troubling your ability to get back into shape, please don’t worry about me, or let a worry about me hinder your recuperation. I am in the finest of spirits, both mentally and physically, and am making the best of my lot down here in the swamps. I would rather, of course, be elsewhere, but I have found to my absolute surprise—after all these years of living my own life—that the new discipline agrees with me very well. I rise at 7:00, eat three big square meals a day and have a sunburn that even Johnny Weissmuller would envy.
^*Y
We go out into the field once every two weeks for about two days and although lying on the swampy turf amid all the ticks and chiggers is not exactly my idea of the Waldorf, it nonetheless and undoubtedly gives a certain sense of physical well-being.

I’m getting the last of my proofs now, and they should be in bound pages very soon. Hiram will send you a copy as soon as they come through, which should be within the next three or four weeks. About the book, of course, now that it’s over, I am wildly happy. People all over—I understand from my New York Intelligence—are already talking about it, and there’s no doubt about it—and modesty has nothing to do with it—that your boy is about to become the sensation, at
least
of 1951. God knows, I’m not getting swell-headed over the thing—being essentially too aware of the transitoriness of fame—but I don’t mind getting all this additional reward, especially after knowing that first and foremost I was honest, that the book represents hours of real sweat and pain, and that I did my level best, in every word of it.

Of course you must know what you’ve done for me. If it hadn’t been for your faith in me, and your gentle and constant encouragement, it would
never have been written. There are few enough artists who have gotten encouragement from people at large, much less their parents—toward whom the very fact that they create usually represents a tacit antipathy. But you have been faithful to the very end of my first endeavor, and I appreciate it to the bottom of my heart. We live in a troubled era, there is no doubt of that, and sometimes I wonder if we will all endure. Yet with all my complaint, often, at the times, and at life in general, I somehow know we shall endure and that all this striving is not at all in vain. The very fact that you and I have worked together, no matter with what unspoken understanding, represents a partnership of the spirit, and if that is love, it will prevail—forever and ever. I will write until my knuckles are worn and my brain bewildered, but I will write on and on, and if it can be done by a feckless soul like myself it can be done by the human race: this eternal creation and recreation, even in the face of the bleakest future. You have given me the chance and I’ll not let you down. When you read my
second
book, or play, or whatever it is, it might not be very good, but no matter. Remember that your faith in me has given me the watchword, or something: you have believed in me, so because of that I have believed in myself, and so, having strived, I believe, ceaselessly upward (in the words of Goethe), I can be saved. And so can we all be saved.

My God, it’s been a long pull, but, as I say, I’m as happy as it is possible to be. Don’t mind the reviews when they come in August—they’re going to raise hell with me. But I
know
that I’ve written a fine, true book and that it will live for a long time. And I thank you for everything you’ve done to make it possible.

Soon we come to Little Creek in Norfolk for amphibious training—sometime within the next month—so then I’ll be able to see you. I’ll give you the exact details very soon. Keep the doormat out and we’ll have a fine talk together.