Selected Letters of William Styron (60 page)

That was a lovely week-end in Magagnosc, all too brief however, and the kids still talk about it over the breakfast honey I bought for 9 francs in that wonderful citadel on the hilltop. They talk about other things too—the Nile and Esna and roguish camel drivers. Surely it all was the greatest trip that anyone ever took. Rose went down to the Yale hospital and they checked her over and found that her leg was doing fine.
^‡yy
It developed however that the accident caused a minor dislocation of the jaw—nothing serious but one necessitating the use of a support at night while she sleeps for several weeks. One bright note: the lawyer in Rome writes that the motorscooter
culprit
does
have money of sorts and
will
pay for most of Salvater Mundi, which wasn’t cheap. Which reminds me, how is Eleanor’s indisposition doing?

The galleys of
Nat
are out, and if you haven’t received your copy from Random by now you should get it imminently. I have no word about reviews except that Francis Brown of the
Times
liked the book very, very much (a good omen?) and that our friend Vann Woodward is going to do a piece on it for, of all places,
The New Republic
.
^‡zz
I wish the damn thing were out and published and over with.

We are off to the Vineyard around June 23 and hope you all will join us for some Atlantic sun when you come back from Port-Cros. Keep in touch, and give a warm embrace to all the family, including Lilly.

As ever,

Bill

T
O
J
AMES AND
G
LORIA
J
ONES

May 24, 1967 Roxbury, CT

Dear James and Moss: Well, me and Rose are finally back in Connecticut, after having flown from Nice to New York via Barcelona and Lisbon. My seat mate was Jim Clark, the racing driver, and I learned a lot of things about automobiles that I never knew before.
^‡AA
Now back in Roxbury, me and Rose have been playing a lot of tennis on our fine new court. Rose is still limping a little from her accident so I manage to beat her quite handily; otherwise I’d be up shit creek. Actually, Rose had her leg checked out at Yale hospital, and while they said that it would have been far better if the Guinea doctors had left the bruise alone and not operated, she was making a perfect recovery and everything (aside from a tiny scar) will be well.

I see by the paper that
GTTW-M
is on the best-seller list, which pleased us all.
^‡BB
Everybody I know was upset by the nasty treatment the book got and at the same time I’ve heard some wonderful remarks about the book which pretty much give the lie to the critic-pricks. For one thing, the guy that owns the bookstore nearby in Washington, Conn., told me that he felt it was easily one of your strongest works and likewise the best novel he had read this year by far. He’s something of a cynic about books, too, and coming from him the comment is high praise indeed. I also saw Gene Baro at a party up in the neighborhood and he corroborated my own observation that, critics be damned, the general reader was reading the book and very much digging it.

I’ve got no news on my own lit. scene except to say that the galleys have come in and the book
looks
good. Hope Leresche has managed to wangle a nice big fat advance out of the Gallimard kikes, so that’s a help, and there is going to be an advance piece on the book in
McCall’s
next August—a magazine that goes to suburban matrons but which apparently sells books.
^‡CC
Also Random House has projected a first printing of 75,000, which rather alarms me because I have a feeling that, despite all the good advance signs, the book may just fall flat on its face. But then that’s their tough luck, not mine.

We are staying here until around June 23
^rd
and then are going to the Vineyard. What are you all up to this summer, especially with the Greek mess?
^‡DD
We sure had a lovely time with you all doing Keblens, Basel, etc., and let’s do it again some time. I’ll probably be over in the fall, at which point I’ll get you to alert all the troops. Rose sends love to all as do I.

Bill

P.S. N. Mailer has a novel (on Lyndon Johnson) coming out the same week in OCT. as mine!!
^‡EE

T
O
R
OBERT
L
OOMIS

June 9, 1967 Roxbury, CT

Dear Bob:

I thought I would pass on to you what Bob Silvers
^‡FF
said about the book in a letter; it pleases me because it is almost the first expression of an understanding of what I myself thought I was trying to achieve.

“It seemed to me magnificent and marvelous, the best novel by an American in a great many years and one that will be read always. It is the kind of book that one cannot bear to break off reading and that leaves you sad because you will never have the chance to read it that way again. What it does is make one great part of the country’s history horribly and beautifully real in a way that had never seemed possible; and after one reads it one feels that one possesses and is possessed by a consciousness that has been lying in wait and now has come terrifyingly into the open, never to leave. So it seems to me we are all lucky that you wrote this book.”

B.S.

P.S. The jacket for
Nat
is
perfect
in my recollection. Don’t change a jot or a tittle!

T
O
R
OBERT
P
ENN
W
ARREN

June 20, 1967 Roxbury, CT

Dear Red:

I’m delighted that you liked
Nat
and needless to say I will treasure your letter, which is as fine an appreciation of the work as I might ask. I do profoundly appreciate all you said, and I mean that.

The turn-down by
Life
does probably mean that they are going to run a piece of the book—at least that’s what my agent seems to believe. There
is also the chance that they got someone else before you put in your bid, but this seems a little less likely.

I thought I had pretty much exhausted my biography in that letter but with fainting heart will try again.
^‡GG
As for the Okinawa bit, I was not actually in combat there but was on my way there as a newly-commissioned Lieutenant in the Marines when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima; as a result, I am not quite as guilt-obsessed about Hiroshima as some people I know. As for writers that I re-read, I have (among the novelists) re-read Dostoievski and Conrad considerably, Faulkner to a lesser extent, and periodically re-read
Huckleberry Finn
and
Moby-Dick
. I’m a great fan of Orwell. Most re-reading I do, however, is probably in poetry—the Elizabethans, John Donne, and among the more modern poets Emily Dickinson, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, R.P. Warren—whose newest poems, especially ones like “Île de Port Cros: What Happened,” are among the finest done by a modern poet. Also I have read much of the Bible as literature, which I was saturated in as a youth in Virginia, also later on in college (fundamentalist Presbyterian). It must have been at the New School (which you queried me about, and which I attended in the late 40’s) that the Bible merged with a vague social consciousness, producing a cat like
Nat Turner
. Also music has been an integral part of my work. Without the rhythms and architecture and spirit of Bach, Telemann, Mozart, Handel, Beethoven I doubt that I should ever have gotten a line written. I live a fairly uncomplicated life. Did I quote you the motto from Flaubert I have had tacked for years near my desk? “Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your works.” Suits me to a tee.

Two days from now we are going to the Island so my address until mid-Sept. will be Vineyard Haven, Mass. We hope you will all pay a jolly visit as soon as you return from where the slow fig’s purple sloth swells.
^‡HH
All love to all

Yrs ever,

Bill

T
O
R
OBERT
P
ENN
W
ARREN

June 20, 1967 Roxbury, CT

Dear Red:

In re your questions from Munich:

1. My blood is Scotch-Irish and Welsh on my mother’s side, Yorkshire English on my father’s side by way of the Danish conquest. The name was originally Danish—Styring. My mother was from western Pennsylvania, my father from Tidewater Va. and N.C. region. I had grandfathers and uncles on both the Union and Confederate sides of the War between the States.

2. In regard to my connections with the Southern past, I got a big dose of it as a boy. My paternal grandmother was an old lady in her upper eighties in the late Thirties, but she had been born in the ante-bellum South, was born and raised in Beaufort County, N.C., a tobacco and cotton area on the Pamlico River. I never knew my grandfather (father’s father) but he had served as a courier during the War in one of the N.C. regiments. Was at Chancellorsville. My grandmother used to tell me about the two little slave girls which she herself had owned as a little girl just before the War. She told me how much she loved them and how well she treated them. One of the slave girls was named, so help me, Drusilla. As a boy I spent much time with this old grandmother of mine. Mainly during the summers I spent much time amid the small-town life of the Tidewater Va. and N.C. region, having all sorts of cousins spread about there. I went to a rural high school about ten miles up the James River from Newport News at a time when there was still a rural atmosphere in the area. I never actually lived on a farm or anything like that (I was raised in a village) but there was still enough real country around for me to get a lot of it in my bones.

3. I wish I could be more informative about the germ of the style and method I used in
NAT
, but I’m a bit vague. The “Confessions” might have had something to do with it, but it seems that I recall one day thinking (with the vision of Nat in the jail cell in my mind) that the only possible way to tell the story was from Nat’s viewpoint. I also noticed that few if
any books by white men had ever been written from this black viewpoint, and—come to think of it—maybe this very fact caused me to try it, caused me to risk it.

4. “Fact-novel.” I would hazard the guess that for some unknown reason there is a spirit in the literary air which is tending toward an interest in what actually happened vs. purely imagined experience, and somehow
NAT
falls into this category. It is an actual happening about actual people to which, however, I have had to bring considerable imagination to bear. The subject of Nat Turner is furthermore a lucky one in that so very little is known about Nat outside of the details of the revolt. Conversely, as I think I’ve said in talking to you, I doubt that anyone could write a very interesting novel (as distinct from biography) about John Brown, simply because of the plethora of known facts about the man. Nat Turner is just dim and unknown enough in history to make him fascinating as a subject for fiction.

5. & 6. As I may have told you, you can learn all there is to know about Nat Turner during a day’s leisurely reading. There is only the “Confessions” and Drewry’s book of 1900—
The Southampton Insurrection
. I have, however, read a great amount about the period, and I doubt if there is an important book on the ante-bellum South, especially connected with slavery, that I have missed. I’ve also read many plantation records; and the unpublished U. Va. Ph.D. thesis (which I showed you) on Gen. John Hartwell Cocke, upon whom I modeled Nat’s Marse Samuel, was especially valuable.
^‡II

The weather here on the Vineyard is sparkling. And we miss you all. Love to all and come home soon.

Bill

T
O
R
OBERT
P
ENN
W
ARREN

June 26, 1967 Vineyard Haven, MA

Here is more info, as requested:

Nat Turner, according to his own “Confessions,” was born October 1, 1800 (same year and month, if I’m not mistaken, as John Brown). No one knows exactly where he was born, but it was somewhere in Southampton County, Va.

It is flat, typical Tidewater country with pinewoods and fields interrupted here and there by swampy lowlands with stands of cypress and gum and juniper. In Nat’s time, tobacco had all but vanished due to over-cultivation, and the farmers turned to cotton, which grows well there but not in the vast Mississippi-Delta-like quantities to make it a valuable money crop. In a kind of desperation they also turned to the cultivation of apples, and found a reasonably good market for cider and brandy in places like Richmond and Norfolk. Then too, of course, there were many pigs (Southampton hams were famous) which flourished off the abundant acorns of the region.

I grew up about 30 to 35 miles away, to the northeast, on the other side of the James River in an area almost exactly the same in its general topography. I lived near a city (Newport News) but as I pointed out in my last letter the little village where I grew up had a thoroughly rural tone. It has completely changed now, of course; World War II and the growth of industry saw to that. But I think it would be safe to say that whatever smell I have for Nat’s landscape derives from a familiarity with the same sort of landscape I grew up with as a boy: cornfields, swampy lowlands, pinewoods, etc. Curiously, all U.S. climatic and topographical maps—those which depict rainfall, average temperatures, length of growing season, etc.—include this little bulge in southeastern Va. in a general region which extends from east Texas through the deep South and up through the Carolina lowlands to its terminating point near Norfolk (cotton, for instance, won’t grow north of Norfolk). Thus I would say that with certain variations the Southampton region and my own along the James are not too different from the piney woods and flat lands you so perfectly described in the Louisiana of
All the King’s Men
. And you have a strangle-hold on
that
kind of country.