Selected Letters of William Styron (91 page)

‡U
The first issue of
The Paris Review
had just been published. Styron enclosed a clipping from
Newsweek
mentioning Styron’s “Letter to the Editor.” See “Advance-Guard Advance,”
Newsweek
(March 30, 1953).

‡V
Samuel Barber (1910–81) was already well known in the 1950s for his
Adagio for Strings
. Originally written as the second movement of String Quartet Op. 11 (1936), his orchestral adaptation was first performed in 1938. Elliott Braxton was a native of Newport News. Alexei Haieff (1914–94) was a pianist and composer who created the music for George Balanchine’s
Divertimento
(1944).

‡W
This was the ring that Styron’s father gave to his mother when they became engaged in 1919.

‡X
“The Prevalence of Wonders,”
The Nation
, 176 (May 1953).

‡Y
The Styrons decided instead to travel to South America.

‡Z
The novella Styron refers to is his story about the Hart’s Island prison. The piece was eventually published as “Blankenship” in a special Styron issue of
Papers on Language and Literature
23 (Fall 1987). It also appears in William Styron,
The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps
, ed. James L. W. West III (New York: Random House, 2009).

§a
This incident inspired the collision between Peter Leverett and Luciano di Lieto in
Set This House on Fire
.

§b
Leon Uris,
Battle Cry
(New York: Putnam, 1953).

§c
The review of the French edition of
Lie Down in Darkness—Un lit de ténèbres
(Éditions Mondiales, 1953): “For he shows us above all an American evil: that of ‘frustration’: a word which recurs as often in Styron as in Norman Mailer, Paul Bowles and many others.”

§d
Styron met James Jones and the actor Montgomery Clift at a party in New York given by Vance Bourjaily. Clift’s encounter with Jim Jones at that party led to one of the actor’s signature roles, as Prewitt in the film of Jones’s
From Here to Eternity
.

§e
Gustave Flaubert (1821–80): “Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.”

§f
Adele Morales was Norman Mailer’s second wife. Their relationship ended after Mailer stabbed her with a penknife at a party. She wrote a memoir about the relationship,
The Last Party: Scenes from My Life with Norman Mailer
(New York: Barricade, 1997).

§g
Styron refers to “daemon” in the Aristotelian sense (from the
Eudemian Ethics
): a spiritual guide or muse.

§h
Styron is loosely paraphrasing Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: “a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.”

§i
Lewis M. Allen (1922–2003), a playwright and producer who produced
Annie
on Broadway with Mike Nichols. Styron and Allen met as two Virginians in New York and became very close friends. Allen married Jay Presson, a very successful screenwriter, who happened to be the first person to hold Styron’s first daughter, Susanna.

§j
Bernard Baruch (1870–1965), enormously successful financier who advised Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

§k
Lillian Hellman (1905–84) was an author of numerous plays and screenplays, and was nominated for an Academy Award for
The Little Foxes
(1941).

§l
Rose Styron on January 31, 2011: “It’s interesting that he said this, because he hated the theater.”

§m
This is the interview of Styron by Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton that would appear in
The Paris Review
5 (Spring 1954), later republished in Malcolm Cowley, ed.,
Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews
(New York: Viking, 1958).

§n
Truman Capote and Anthony West. West (1914–87) was a British author best known for the biography of his father,
H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life
(New York: Random House, 1984).

§o
Set This House on Fire
, which Styron would complete in 1959.

§p
Francine du Plessix (b. 1930) is a Pulitzer Prize–nominated writer and literary critic best known for her essays in
The New Yorker
. She married the painter Cleve Gray (1918–2004) in 1957.

§q
These lines, appearing on page 277 of the Rinehart proofs sent to Styron, are reproduced at the end of “Fourth Advertisement for Myself: The Last Draft of The Deer Park,” in Norman Mailer,
Advertisements for Myself
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959).

§r
Bellevue was at the time a psychiatric hospital.

§s
Styron wrote his New York address, 231 East 76
^th
Street, New York, NY, because they had not yet moved in to Rucum Road.

§t
Elizabeth McKee had a house in Litchfield County.

§u
Friends eventually dubbed the house Styron’s Acres, and Styron lived there until his death, in 2006. Rose Styron sold the property in 2011.

§v
Vance Bourjaily,
The Violated
(New York: Dial, 1958).

§w
“Gregory Acquires ‘Naked and Dead,’ ”
The New York Times
, August 20, 1954.

§x
Robert Lindner,
Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath
(New York: Grune and Stratton, 1944) was the source of the film’s title but none of its content. Peconic is a town on the North Shore of Long Island.

§y
Chandler Brossard (1922–93), prolific journalist and writer whose first novel,
Who Walk in Darkness
(New York: James Laughlin, 1952), documented life in 1940s Greenwich Village.

§z
James A. Michener’s first blockbuster,
Tales of the South Pacific
(New York: Macmillan, 1947), won a Pulitzer and was turned into the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical
South Pacific
, which won ten Tony awards and a Pulitzer.
Mr. Roberts
was a comic production starring Henry Fonda, who appeared in the Broadway role and the film.
The Teahouse of the August Moon
was another comedy, appearing on Broadway in 1952 and as a film in 1956 starring Marlon Brando. Leon Uris’s
Battle Cry
was made into a film in 1955 starring Van Heflin and Raymond Massey. Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) was a Protestant minister and radio personality. He is best known for his book
The Power of Positive Thinking
(New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952), which spent 186 weeks on the
New York Times
best seller list.

§A
Louis Kronenberger (1904–80), author of
Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954).

§B
Edmund Trzcinski (1921–96), playwright best known for his drama
Stalag 17
, written with Donald Bevan, and made into the Billy Wilder film of the same name in 1953.

§C
Bennett Cerf (1898–1971) was a publisher and cofounder of Random House.

§D
Henry Miller (1891–1980), novelist, travel writer, and painter, best known for his controversial novel
Tropic of Cancer
(Paris: Obelisk Press, 1934). At the end of the letter, Styron compliments Miller for
The Colossus of Maroussi
(San Francisco: Colt Press, 1941), a reflection on a year Miller spent in Greece with the writer Lawrence Durrell.

§E
A Denicotea is a German-made cigarette holder with disposable filters.

§F
Matthiessen’s new novel,
Partisans
(New York: Viking, 1955).
Race Rock
(1954) was his first novel.

§G
Styron is quoting Mailer’s first letter to him, February 26, 1953. Mailer actually wrote: “I think it’s just terrific, how good I’m almost embarrassed to say, but as a modest estimate it’s certainly as good an eighty pages as any American has written since the war, and really I think it’s much more than that.”

§H
A pun on a line from the Christian prayer known as the Sanctus. The actual line is
Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini
(Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord).

§I
An unknown story by Reynolds Price. Price (1933–2011) was a novelist, poet, dramatist, essayist, and professor at Duke University.

§J
The playwright and essayist Arthur Miller (1915–2005) was a neighbor of the Styrons in Connecticut, and they later became close friends. Miller married Marilyn Monroe on June 29, 1956, and they divorced in 1961.

§K
Michael Temple Canfield and Lee Radziwill (née Caroline Lee Bouvier).

§L
Arlene Francis (1907–2001) was an American actress, radio talk show host, and game show panelist. Moss Hart (1904–61) was a playwright and theater director. Cole Porter (1891–1964) was a composer and the writer of many memorable Broadway musical scores and popular songs. Richard Charles Rodgers (1902–79) was a composer of more than nine hundred songs and forty-three Broadway musicals, best known for his song-writing partnerships with Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein. Steve Allen (1921–2000) was a television personality and the first host of
The Tonight Show
.

§M
Peter Viertel (1920–2007) was an author and screenwriter whose work included such notable films as
The African Queen
(1951). Niven Busch (1903–91) was an author and screenwriter best known as the co-writer of the screenplay for
The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1946). Elia “Gadge” Kazan (1909–2003) was one of the most important directors in the history of Broadway and Hollywood, and was infamous for his testimony as a friendly witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Kazan earned his nickname in college—“Gadge” or “Gadg,” short for “gadget”—because he was compact and useful. Edmund Purdom (1926–2009) was a British actor.

§N
John Phillips, “What Is the Matter with Mary Jane? The Tragicomedy of Cyprus,”
Harper’s Magazine
, June 1956.

§O
Herbert Weinstock, executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf in the 1950s.

§P
The Lost Steps
(
Los pasos perdidos
) (New York: Knopf, 1956) was a novel by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban writer and supporter of Castro’s revolution. Weinstock initially thought Carpentier’s novel was “unreadable,” but did not want to lose the author to another publisher. He solicited blurbs from Styron, Ralph Ellison, Lionel Trilling, and Robert Penn Warren, among others. Only Ellison, Trilling, and Styron responded.

§Q
Mary Lee Settle (1918–2005) was best known for her historical novels about West Virginia.
O Beulah Land
(1956) began the series.

§R
Robert Francis Goheen (1919–2008), classics scholar, president of Princeton University (1957–72), and U.S. Ambassador to India (1977–80).

§S
Robert Arthur (1909–86), screenwriter and producer.

§T
Styron discovered the original of this letter, which had been returned to him after Hyman’s death, when William Blackburn collected Hyman’s correspondence. He wrote to Blackburn on June 8, 1964, in frustration: “I looked in vain through my letters for communications from Mac. Not a solitary one showed up, though I’ll look again. I think the simple fact of the matter is that whenever Mac and I got in touch it was almost invariably by telephone. This of course is the curse of our age, and I suspect a lot of interesting chatty stuff has been lost to posterity because it was uttered over the phone rather than written down more or less imperishably. I have another batch of letters stored away elsewhere, and when I can get my hands on them I’ll look to see if any of them are Mac’s and let you know—though I rather doubt that any will show up.”

§U
Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds.,
Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America
(1957).

§V
Ernest van den Haag, “Of Happiness and of Despair We Have No Measure.”

§W
Styron refers to Harry F. Byrd, Sr. (1887–1966), a governor of and senator from Virginia, whose political machine dominated state politics for most of the twentieth century. Styron and his father both abhorred Byrd’s politics.

§X
William Du Bois, “Books of the Times,”
The New York Times
, September 14, 1957.

§Y
Charles Van Doren (b. 1926) is a writer and editor who was involved in the 1950s scandal surrounding the television quiz show
Twenty-One
.

§Z
John Howard Griffin,
The Devil Rides Outside
(Fort Worth, Tex.: Smiths, Inc., 1952).

‖a
A friend from the Marine Corps.

‖b
The clipping reads: “A total of 150 days in jail was assessed against Milton Adams, whose address was given as 5971 Jefferson Ave. He had appealed from a conviction in Warwick Municipal Court of assaulting Mrs. Virginia Toler, 217 Court A, Ferguson Park, Dec. 28. He was found guilty on the assault charge and was fined $50 and given 90 days in jail. He had been convicted in Municipal Court on two charges, one an ABC violation and another on a charge of creating a nuisance. He received 30 days on each charge, the jail terms being suspended. When he appeared in Municipal Court on the assault charge the suspension of the two previous sentences was revoked. Judge Armistead ruled yesterday his terms would run consecutively. Adams was not in court at the time of trial yesterday. He was not represented by counsel. Judge Armistead directed that a capias be issued for him and he was arrested in the afternoon and taken to Denbigh jail.”

‖c
Milton Adams lived in Hilton Village, Virginia, and was a bit older than Styron. His father ran the dive bar that is fictionalized in Styron’s story “A Tidewater Morning.”

‖d
Eva Rubin’s due date.

‖e
American writer and literary critic (1915–98).

‖f
Robie Macauley (1919–95) was a senior editor at
Playboy
and Houghton Mifflin, as well as the author of two novels and a volume of short stories. James Gould Cozzens’s
By Love Possessed
(New York: Harcourt, 1957) was a bestseller. Styron used the term
unowho
(or
unuhoo
, in later years), to refer to God.