Selected Letters of William Styron (41 page)

All the best + say hello to Bob

Bill            

T
O
J
OHN
P. M
ARQUAND
, J
R
.

June 10, 1959 Roxbury, CT

June 10, tomorrow I’ll be 34 sob!

Dear Marchand

Many thanks for your splendid vote of confidence in the
Esquire
piece; I’m deeply grateful since I respect your opinion as I do few others. I don’t know but whether you aren’t a bit premature, though, since the rest of the book upon recent re-reading seems solemn, pretentious and windy beyond all countenance. However, I am working hard to salvage something out of the wreckage before the Vineyard and Mrs. Tynan set in. I am very much looking forward to the beach. My esteem for John Welch has gone up 1005%. Love to Sue and the miraculously redeemed bush baby.

B.S.

I have a terrible feeling that Normie is going to show up on the Vineyard, along with several other hippy studs.

T
O
C
LAIRE
W
HITE

June 14, 1959 Roxbury, CT

Dear Claire,

Thanks so much for all the spooky, ritualistic, Catholic information, which I really do need to get on properly with this godforsaken novel I’m
writing now. It is already something that I’ve used to fine effect (how I could have thought that Ash Wednesday came in Holy Week I’ll never know) and if the book sells 100,000 copies, as I passionately am certain, it will all be due to you.

I think you know it, but let me repeat—we are expecting all of you for the Fourth of July. Rose says come any time after the First, and she adds that Stephanie can stay here in the “big house” (plantation talk), and if you want to you + Bobby can take your repose with the other two (excuse me, three) in what we are pompous enough to call the cottage. Anyway, we’re looking forward to seeing you all, and though it’s sad to me that due to your condition we probably won’t have much sexy nude swimming together I console myself with the notion that perhaps I can use you for a float.

Kiss Bobby for me + tell him we have his Lambretta picture hung up in the new living room, which he’ll see.

Love + XXX

Bill      

Thomas Styron was born August 4, 1959
.

T
O
J
AMES
J
ONES

September 15, 1959 Roxbury, CT

Dear James:

I just talked on the phone with Tom Guinzburg, who is at this moment unfortunately languishing in Harkness Pavilion with a thrombosis in his leg. It is something he has had for a long time, on and off, and I gather it isn’t gravely serious—there are drugs now to loosen the clot—but he said if I wrote you to say hello. So hello. He also said that he had seen you holding court in front of Doney’s with a bunch of your usual sycophants and worshippers and free-loaders, and that both you and Moss looked fine.
^‖G
Though I don’t particularly envy you an entourage made up in any part of Ed Trzcinski or however the hell you spell it, I do envy you in general—Rome, Portofino, etc.—and I’d give a gonad, both of them, to be over there right now.

I will not try to apologize for not writing in so long (I do still love you), except to say that in the interim since your last letter I have, consecutively, had a young son (Thomas, born August 4) and a novel (tentative title:
Veronica and Her Uncle Max
, brought to a close only a week ago). The former is now eight pounds, red, ugly, and has a huge cock; all I can say about the second is that it is 961 ms. pages long and, whatever its worth, it is my baby and I love it. It will be out in the spring. So before you curse me for my silence, please take all this into account and realize that I have really been
beset
, and that I haven’t been tooling around all over Europe ruining my liver and living like King Farouk.
^‖H
Though I have been, God knows, doing no good to my liver
here
; I thought I’d taper off bourbon now that the strain is mostly over, but no, I booze it up all that much more, part of some sort of semi-mystical act, I suppose, to convince myself that the book really is as good as Stendhal—which it isn’t—but at least as good, say, as Sloan Wilson and Herm Wouk.
^‖I
What a pile of crud, unmitigated crud, this writing dodge is. I thought I would get a big bang out of finishing this book, but all I have is a feeling of exhaustion, and a sense of extreme foreboding as I wait for the Prescotts to devour me and the highbrows to ignore me and the public, as usual, to not buy me (current total sale of Modern Library
Long March
: 4,523; that is not a misprint; I hear Leon Uris’ latest excresence has just topped a cool million copies).
^‖J

Well, I’m going to stop whining for a minute, and tell you that otherwise everything has been pretty good. We spent part of the summer on
Martha’s Vineyard, where we were neighbors of Lillian Hellman’s; I don’t know if you know her or not, but she is a fine lady, and a great friend to the younger literary generation. She’s a staunch admirer of your work, incidentally. We were also neighbors of Elaine Tynan,
^‖K
who is indeed a somewhat different story than Lillian. I gather you two were living it up in Germany with Kenneth while we two had the decided burden of the distaff half; she is straight out of Scott Fitzgerald, though without some of the dew and freshness, and is possessed of what I can only describe as a kind of morbid carnality. She drops names like pennies, and perhaps it sums her up to say that she is the only person I have ever seen drop with an immense glow of self-satisfaction the name of George Axelrod.
^‖L
We had a very full summer.

Rose and I
definitely
plan to come to Europe next year—probably in the spring, if we can swing it to leave one or two of the kids with Gran’ma—and hope to make it to Paris first. As an old Paris hand I do not feel like a visiting fireman, and I trust you will treat us with the proper respect. Are you still going to be there then? I do hope so, as both Rose and I have missed seeing you all. We’ll tell you when to lay in a supply of Old Forestry.
^‖M

I have not seen hide nor hair of Norman, except to hear that he has coming out soon an anthology of his work called
Advertisements for Myself
, a characteristically self-effacing title, which includes a 75,000 word essay, heretofore unpublished, about the problems facing a man who wishes to become a “major” writer in our time. The sad, sad thing is that Norman
could
be a major writer, but I don’t see how he can be one if all his energy is thrown into crap like this. Who gives a damn about the problems of becoming a major writer? Nobody. Except maybe a few other writers. The only way to become a major writer is to write books.

Incidentally, God knows why, but I have become literary adviser to
Harper & Brothers. I realize that this is in the best tradition—Eliot, Graham Greene, Moravia, etc.—but I can’t help but feel slightly creepy about it all. Like I should start wearing a bowler hat and umbrella. Anyway, if you have any loose manuscripts hanging around …

Look, James, tell Moss that I think of her with hard despondent lust at all hours. I really miss that girl. I miss you too, and I hope that this one time you will forgive me for my lapse in correspondence. I will certainly do better, much better, from now on out. Swallow your pride, you bastard, and send me a letter.

Love,

B.S.

I hope this gets to the address Guinzburg gave me.

T
O
E
DGAR
H
ATCHER

September 23, 1959
^‖N
Roxbury, CT

Dear Hatcher:

I appreciate and was greatly tickled by the seminal intelligence you sent me, which puts my mind at ease about a great many nagging worries I have had about certain obese women in my past.
^‖O
I have sent the piece on to Tom Guinzburg, who needs it, since he is at present recuperating from phlebitis at Harkness Pavilion.

If I can stay sober long enough, my book will be totally complete within a week or ten days. There is a very minor character in the book whom I have taken the liberty of naming after you.
^‖P
He is quite an old man and
his name is Vice-Admiral Sir Edgar A. Hatcher. He is retired and, though vacationing in Italy, his permanent address is Southsea, Hampshire—which is something of the equivalent of La Jolla, where our decrepit seadogs go to die. I was casting about for the perfect name for a British Admiral, and yours simply struck me as being without parallel. If you are offended, or feel that in the future you will wish to sue for invasion etc., let me know so that I can strike it out of the galleys. This Hatcher was once third sea lord of the Royal Navy, in charge of submarines.

When are you all coming up here? The weather is good.

B.S.

T
O
W
ILLIAM
C
OLE
^‖Q

December 1, 1959 Roxbury, CT

Dear Bill:

Now that I have perused Capote’s and Avedon’s
OBSERVATIONS
which you so kindly sent me I am somewhat inclined to agree with your own acerb observations when I saw you last.
^‖R
Some of the pictures are really quite striking, and every now and then Truman has a sharp thing to say, but there is such a desperate air of vogue and chichi over the whole venture that it all tends to try one’s patience before long. But thank you for sending it; it will adorn my coffee table, and give to our Connecticut homestead a proper air of swank. Incidentally, you might let your copyediting department know, if they care, that in Truman’s prose I found at least five typos and misspellings (especially mistakes in the Italian) after only ten minutes quick skimming.

Thank you mainly for your own book. Just from the little bit of dipping into it I have done already I can tell that it is a lovely anthology, and I plan to take it with me when I go to Europe this winter. I am glad you
put in Hoffenstein and especially Walker Gibson’s circus ship poem which I read when it first appeared and have looked for vainly since.
^‖S

My novel,
SET THIS HOUSE ON FIRE
, will be in bound books—so I am told—by the latter part of March. I’m sure Jean Ennis will send you a copy and I hope you like it.
^‖T

All the best,

Bill Styron

PS. It has now occurred to me, after reading the fine section in your book titled “Primitive,” that someday you might want to do an anthology of gruesome verse. Accordingly, I am enclosing the words to an old hymn which was included in an anthology done by an English friend of mine. I think it has real style, and I have copied out a few stanzas for you.
^‖U
The entire poem may be found in
Hymns as Poetry
, compiled by Tom Ingram and Douglas Newton (London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1956).

T
O
J
AMES
J
ONES

December 7, 1959 Roxbury, CT

Dear Jim:

You’re no doubt as surprised to be getting a reply so soon to your letter as I am to write it. I might as well tell you that what it’s prompted by mainly is the fact that Rose and I have begun to definitely make plans to come over your way, and no doubt you will see us, grinning from ear to ear and dressed like visiting firemen, as we stand on your doorstep sometime early in February. My book is completely finished (I’m going over the galleys at the moment) and it is mainly the fact that I’ve been up here in Roxbury for the four-plus years that it has taken me to write the thing that
makes me now want to take off from here and get away from the American scene for a good long while. It must be a fairly natural reaction; anyway, though this doesn’t mean a permanent move, it does mean that I am wanting to spend six or seven months in Europe, so as I say Rose and I will come over and scout around for a place toward the end of Jan., or early Feb. We may stay in Paris, we may not—I’ve got my eye on something around Lake Como or the Ticino part of southern Switzerland—but anyway this will be a scouting trip, then I expect I will stay over while Rose goes back to Baltimore and collects our proliferant brood of offspring and comes back and settles down with me wherever it is we plan to stay. However, we definitely expect to use Paris as a command-post, as Hemingway would put it, so I imagine you will be seeing us more often than is decent or healthy for a while.

Rose and I are both delighted about Moss’ condition, which is another reason for this letter, and we want to tell you that we too have our fingers crossed and hope that everything goes well this time.
^‖V
As a father of three I can now attest to the fact that though the traffic-pattern around the house often gets a little congested, and it is sometimes hard on the nerve-ends, there is nothing like one or two of the little monsters to give a kind of roundness to one’s life. If this sounds a little fatuous it is only because most basic truths are fatuous, and difficult to express freshly. Anyhow, I think you will discover this for yourself, and we wish you all the best.

As I say, the book is all done. It should run to about 500 printed pages, and everybody at Random seems to like it very much; they are showing their faith in it by a first printing of 30,000 copies, which naturally pleases me: I only hope they aren’t going to get stung. At any rate, now that I can see it in galleys some of my confidence in it comes back after weeks of rather grim depression. There is an authority in the fact of print which tends to make one feel that it was somehow all preordained, and perhaps pretty good after all. I’ve even gotten to the point where I am no longer so foolishly worried about the treatment the book is going to endure at the hands of the critics. What the hell I say, I’ve done my best. If it’s really a good book then all the little maggots can’t harm it in terms of its ultimate value; if it deserves their attacks then it deserves it. The book is not going
to be published until June, when I’ll be in Europe somewhere, and perhaps I’ll have the distant and frosty objectivity, this time, not even to read what they say about it … perhaps, I doubt it.