Selected Letters of William Styron (46 page)

Whatever I have done forgive me. But please don’t let too much time pass before clearing up the mystery. And do come see us when you land in New York. I am as ever your damned, derelict, but ever hopeful and devoted.

Bill

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

Fall, 1960 Roxbury, CT

Dear John:

Perhaps as my apologist you would like to do the same job on this fellow as you did on the
New Yorker
boy, though now, in spite of the N.Y.
Mirror
tone of this exposé, I am really beginning to acquire such honest self-doubts as to my place in the scheme of things that I wonder whether your protest to Ms. Malcolm was not sentimental & ill-advised. The enclosed is from a U. of Minn. Rag called “Critique,” containing 3 essays on me (all attacks) & 3 on Saul Bellow, all blowjobs.
^AA
I don’t know, thus was it always. So you will finish your book & this is what will happen to
you
. We had a lovely time up there. Enclosing check for phone calls. Love to Sue & Sarah & BB & even Ponto.

BS.

PS. Tugwell e morto.

Hope we see you for election eve.

T
O
L
OUIS
D. R
UBIN
, J
R
.

January 24, 1961 Roxbury, CT

Dear Louis:

I received the copy of the
Sewanee
, for which many thanks.
^BB
For so long a time I have been accustomed to hearing nothing but howls of execration about the book, that to read what you say comes as a most pleasant and bracing antidote, and naturally I think you are righter than the others. The last wholesale onslaught upon the book (which you may have seen) came not from the slick mags but from the very heart of the Academy itself, in a little quarterly called
Critique
, which contained three essays (all unfavorable) on the book, including one piece by someone named Foster which was so rabidly down on the book that the tone became almost psychotic—so furious, as a matter of fact, that I could not help but believe that the book held a perverse and lascivious sexual attraction for the man which in some way he was trying to exorcise. At any rate, the book has been catching hell from all sides. I really do feel initiated into the same purgatory which, I console myself, was endured by Melville, Faulkner, Fitzgerald & Co.; but one can put up with this sort of crap only so long, so it was with all the more satisfaction that I read your essay. Aside from its being a shrewd and honest appraisal, it will I suspect be read by a number of people who might quite justifiably have been put off the book by such rankly dishonest swine as Mizener & the jerk on
The New Yorker
, and these people will go ahead and read the book, and your purpose will be served. We do seem to live in an absolutely impossible time insofar as decent appraisal and literary integrity are concerned. I never wanted any sappy, slavish praise; I only wanted a few people to say that here was a book which—whatever its faults—had solid virtues and deserved to be read, but almost no one seemed to be willing to own up to that—why, I don’t really know, except that it seems that the literary cult and coterie are flourishing in and out of the Academy to a degree I had never imagined.

It is good to hear that your novel is on the brink of publication this year, and of course I will be eager to read it.
^CC
I will also be happy to offer
you my comments, for what they’re worth, if you would like. I know that Hiram thinks it’s wonderful, and that’s a great sign already. However, if it’s as good as I think it’s going to be, dear Louis, you will have to grow accustomed to a lot of abuse. That seems to be the way the cookie crumbles in the quality lit. biz.

As for my own recent work, I am at present worn out from having given a stern lecture at, of all places, the Yale Divinity School, and am now preparing to do a film script of
Set This House on Fire
, which a French movie company has optioned. I do not know whether this is going from the sublime to the ridiculous or vice versa, but in any case I hope soon to resume my misadventures in literature with an honest to God novella about which I’ve been thinking for a long time.

I’m still sorry that circumstances prevented my coming to your aid a few months ago—I certainly would have if I could have—but I hope it won’t be too long before we get together in one way or another. Best to you all from us, and let me know when and if you’re coming to the snowbound north.

As ever,

Bill

T
O
W
ILLIAM
B
LACKBURN

January 24, 1961 Roxbury, CT

Dear Doctor:

I received your delightful telegram last night about the
Sewanee
review, and I do appreciate it, and I wish you would tell the other two signatories (who have been most faithful to me) how pleased I was.
^DD
It
was
a good and honest appraisal, I thought (I received a copy just yesterday), and though I’ve by now become completely inured to every type of hostility and meanness (so much so that in a sluggish, masochistic way I’ve come to actually
suspect
any good word that is said about the book), it really is refreshing to read the words of someone who feels that the book might have some worth, after all. And, as I say, it was good to get your concurring telegram.
After all these months, though, the bitterness has pretty much worn off. I know what the book is. It is a good book, and it will be read for a long time to come, after the barriers so meticulously set up by the small, the blind and the envious have been broken down. I have come to understand recently that the book really did crucify a lot of people; that it wasn’t any inherent structural fault, or aesthetic fault of any kind, that got people so angry and stirred up; it was, rather, that something in the book itself (its “message,” for want of a better word) was too strong a mouthful for them to get down, much less digest. Book reviewers, after all, are a soggy lot, and have a weak stomach for evil, and now that I look back on it I can see that I should have expected nothing better than I got. Incidentally, I don’t know whether I told you or not, but the reaction abroad has been somewhat different, and perhaps indicates the validity of the “message”: the book has been contracted for publication in every western European language (with the single exception of Dutch, where everyone reads English, but including such odd ones as Portuguese and
Finnish)
and my agent tells me that the advances paid in France and Germany are the highest ever for a “serious” novel. This might strike a rather commercial note, but at this point I don’t give a good God damn.

I am sorry to have missed you as you came back to these shores, but I hope it won’t be too long before we can get together. You may find it difficult to believe but just the other day I gave a lecture on certain aspects of Good and Evil to a class in Philosophical Theology at the Yale Divinity School. It was wildly received by the milling throng present, especially inasmuch as I told them a little less Christian forbearance and love and a lot more sex and disorganized, negative, hateful thinking would create a truly productive society. So far as I know, it will be published in a forthcoming issue of the
Yale Review
, and I think it settles the problem of Good, Evil, and Manicheanism once and for all.

Incidentally, I read Reynolds Price’s stories,
^EE
and I think they really achieve something unique and fine; I told the Guggenheim people so, but what they do about it is Fate. As a poet friend of mine, Louis Simpson, wrote in a letter: “One must respect one’s self and accrue virtue. Everything else is in the lap of the gods.”

Many thanks again for the telegram, and I hope all goes well with you until we meet again.

Ever yours,
    
Bill

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

February 24, 1961 Roxbury, CT

Dear Pop,

Well, the snow has begun to melt, and it looks as if the worst of the horrible winter is over, although I am knocking on wood. After all, we have had blizzards up here as late as the beginning of April. Nonetheless, I am hoping for the best. At least our various minor and major catastrophes attendant upon the weather seem to have slackened off, and I have only one more to look forward to—Susanna’s birthday party, tomorrow, with 18 squalling children, horns, melted ice cream, and total bedlam.

Perhaps you remember my interest in old Nat Turner’s rebellion some years ago, when you sent me various photostated items which I carefully put away and kept. Well now the interest has returned, I have re-read all the literature (including the books which were sent me long ago from Hampton Institute); only now the whole project seems to shape up much more as a movie than as a book. By movie I mean a good movie, not one of these Hollywood flashy colored numbers; and now that a few Americans, at least, are attempting to make serious, good films, it seems the subject is pertinent now as it never was—the black man raging against the white—and if done properly (meaning done as I see it in my mind’s eye) it would make a violent, moving film. Very few “historical” movies made in the U.S. have ever been good, because they tend to be cheap and romantic; the story of Nat, however, could be full of raw truth very meaningful to our time.… I have elicited a lot of real interest in this movie from several people whom I know and trust who are closely connected with the industry but are not “Hollywood” types, and it is a matter now of getting the story down on paper in outline form before doing the script. I by no means intend to abandon my other writing, but I have great feelings for the movies (at their best) as an art form, and I think something
really fine can be done with this story of Nat and his rampage. All you have to do is read about Lumumba and what’s happening in the Congo to see how significant Nat’s story is, how contemporaneous and universal.
^FF

What I am leading up to is this. I think Rose talked to you about bringing Susanna and Polly down to Newport News sometime this spring and all of us paying you a visit. This sounds fine to me anyway, because we’d love to see you, besides getting south for a change. Meanwhile, I have looked at various maps, and it occurs to me that Southampton County and Courtland and Drewryville—where Nat’s rebellion took place—couldn’t be more than about an hour and a half from Newport News. I have always wanted to trace the route of Nat’s warpath—at least that part of it that can be traced—and, moreover, see whatever original houses and buildings are left standing, and in general get a “feel” of the exact landscape. Naturally I have a superficial sense of what it’s like, having been through country like it many times when on our way to Washington, N.C., years ago; but the feeling tends to fade after some years, and I would like to re-experience the countryside, if only for a day. If you are game for this, what I’d like to do is make a trip with you down there one day, starting early in the morning, and just snoop around for four or five hours. One or two of the houses he raided may still be there; certainly the sites are marked. The revolt was in August, and our visit would be in the spring, but this wouldn’t matter. Another thing, just a shot in the dark: perhaps you know someone from Courtland or Drewryville (or know someone who knows someone) or that general Southampton area who, let us say, still lives down there, and who might have some Turner lore, and whom we might look up. But this is just an eventuality, and since the sense of history is all but dead in our country, I doubt if such a person exists; they are probably all listening to Lawrence Welk.

In any case, I thought it would be interesting to mention the possibility of this excursion to you. I think it would be a lot of fun, and very enlightening, too, provided we knew what to look for first. We’ll be letting you know soon just when we plan to come down with the kids. In the meanwhile
I am writing to the state library in Richmond and various other sources in regard to the manner in which to go about what would be called, in the de luxe magazines, a Tour of the Turner Country, and will keep you informed of the results. Love to you both.

Bill jr

PS The bulky letter you forwarded to me from the University of Virginia was an invitation to give the annual Peter Rushton Lecture in Contemporary Literature at the Alderman Library, next year. It sounded very distinguished, since some of the past lecturers have been Robert Penn Warren, Archibald MacLeish, W.H. Auden, Malcolm Cowley, Stephen Spender, and James Thurber, but I turned it down in the honest belief that I need no such fancy feather in my bedraggled cap.
^GG
I thanked them kindly, but told them I had more important rows to hoe. I was not in the least arrogant, and it occurred to me as I wrote them that for a man whose career (if the reviews were any touchstone) had ended with his last book I still hadn’t done too badly in the eyes of my fellow Virginians, and I thanked them for thinking of me.

T
O
R
UST
H
ILLS

May 1, 1961 Roxbury, CT

Dear Mr. Hills,

Thank you for your letter about my various projects. Elizabeth McKee is quite accurate if she told you that I am doing the Nat Turner thing instead of the novellas, which I have temporarily put aside. However, it looks as if the Turner work will develop into a shortish (possibly 60,000 words) but still full-scale novel instead of a novella-length story. So I think that
Esquire
’s interest would be in excerpting a piece or two from the work, as you did from my last novel. I will certainly keep you posted, for as you know I have a high regard for
Esquire
(you have courage, which is more
than can be said for, let us say,
The New Yorker
). As for it being historical, I hope you will not think me presumptuous if I say that I do not think this work will be any more “historical,” in the pejorative sense, than the plays of Shakespeare or
War and Peace
. “Historical fiction” has received a bad name, and for good reason, most of it having been costume melodrama to titillate the ladies. But it seems to me that if a serious writer can bring his imagination to play upon a historical event, and does it well, the resulting insight and illumination are just as valid as if he had been dealing with contemporary themes. Anyway, in this case we shall see …