Selected Letters of William Styron (94 page)

*kk
William Styron, “As He Lay Dead, a Bitter Grief,”
Life
(July 20, 1962), collected in
This Quiet Dust
.

*ll
President and Mrs. Kennedy had invited the Styrons for a cruise in Edgartown harbor.

*mm
Styron’s essay “Havanas in Camelot” narrated this encounter and was the lead piece in the collection of the same name.

*nn
Styron attached his article “The Paris Review,” which appeared in
Harper’s Bazaar
(August 1953).

*oo
Geismar’s fondness for Styron extended to Jones; he was one of the few critics who applauded Jones’s novel.
The New York Times Book Review
(November 9, 1962).

*pp
P. J. Clarke’s, owned at the time by Daniel Lavezzo, Jr., provided the model for the setting of Billy Wilder’s
The Lost Weekend
(1945). Davis Grubb (1919–80) was a novelist and story writer. His first novel,
The Night of the Hunter
, was a best seller. Jones Harris was the son of Broadway producer Jed Harris and actress Ruth Gordon and was a networking socialite.

*qq
A reference to the race riots that followed James Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi on September 30, 1962.

*rr
Attached to this letter were four pages of photostats from a nineteenth-century Virginia history book.

*ss
Erik Erikson,
Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History
(New York: Norton, 1962): “I have so far mentioned two trends in the relationship between Hans and Martin: 1) the father’s driving economic ambition, which was threatened by something (maybe even murder) done in the past, and by a feeling close to murder which he always carried inside; and 2) the concentration of the father’s ambition on his oldest son, whom he treated with alternate periods of violent harshness and of habituating the son to himself in a manner which may well have been somewhat sentimental—a deadly combination.”

*tt
Warren was trying to get Styron admitted to the National Academy of Arts and Letters (formerly known as the American Institute of Arts and Letters).

*uu
Styron refers to a Calliope Records LP of him reading a section of
Lie Down in Darkness:
Calliope CAL 12 (1963).

*vv
Gay Talese (b. 1932) helped invent literary nonfiction and the New Journalism. His books include
The Bridge
(1964),
The Kingdom and the Power
(1969), and
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
(1981). He and his wife, Nan, rented an apartment to the Styrons very briefly in the 1960s.

*ww
Norman Mailer, “Some Children of the Goddess: Norman Mailer vs. Nine Writers,”
Esquire
(July 1963). Mailer’s piece appeared immediately before a conversation between Styron and James Jones, “Two Writers Talk It Over,” reprinted in James L. W. West III, ed.,
Conversations with William Styron
(Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1985).

*xx
Styron refers to the film of William Golding’s novel
Lord of the Flies
, produced by Allen, directed by Peter Brook, and released in 1963.

*yy
Dobell (b. 1927) was an influential editor at
Esquire, New York
, and
American Heritage
before devoting himself to painting.

*zz
Mailer’s column, “The Big Bite,” had begun appearing in
Esquire
in November 1962, and Styron refers to “Some Children of the Goddess.”

*AA
Styron had written Warren on April 17, 1963, considering it “a great favor if you could have these people send me the material on the young female seminarian of the 1820’s you were telling me about Sunday.”

*BB
Robert Penn Warren’s novel-in-progress,
Flood: A Romance of Our Time
, was published by Random House in 1964.

*CC
“He quit and took up candy,” Rose Styron recalls. Styron recalled this process while reviewing Ruth Brecher, Edward Brecher, et al.,
The Consumers Union Report on Smoking
and the Public Interest
, in “The Habit,”
The New York Review of Books
, December 26, 1963. The piece is collected in
This Quiet Dust
.

*DD
Mac Hyman died suddenly.

*EE
Mike Nichols (b. 1931) is a film, stage, and television director best known for directing
The Graduate
(1968), for which he won an Academy Award. Styron refers to Nichols’s second wife, Margo Callas.

*FF
There are elements of Mailer in the
Set This House on Fire
characters Mason Flagg and Harvey Glansner. The latter hews most closely to Styron’s oft-voiced critiques of Mailer.

*GG
Styron would not turn to this project until the next decade, in
A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth
(New York: Random House, 1993).

*HH
Berton Roueché (1910–94) was the medical writer for
The New Yorker
for nearly fifty years. He was also the author of twenty books.

*II
President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963.

*JJ
Styron had given Blackburn a subscription to
The New York Review of Books
, which he called “an improvement over the
N.Y. Times Book Review
.”

*KK
The films: John Ford’s
The Informer
(1935), Robert Bresson’s
Diary of a Country Priest
(1951), and Vittorio De Sica’s
Gold of Naples
(1954).

*LL
Harington’s planned visit in December 1963 was postponed. In his letter to Styron on January 6, 1964, Harington wrote: “One of the prime motives behind my wish for the visit was, frankly, that I might get some advice from you on the various personal means for licking that hideous thing called Writer’s Block, but my current bout with this incapacitating and insidious disease seems to have cured itself.”

*MM
Harington’s letter included a long critique of Norman Mailer’s
The American Dream
, a novel published in serial form in
Esquire
throughout 1964, before being issued by Dial Press in 1965. Mailer’s attempt to write under the same monthly deadlines as Dickens for serialization prompted Harington to say, “obviously a clinical example of free association writing by some poor Bellevue patient trapped in the advanced throes of chronic pathological delusional paranoia.”

*NN
Styron enclosed a copy of Stanley Elkins’s
Slavery
. Elkins argued that “the typical plantation slave [was] docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing.” Elkins made American slavery a system of such intense domination that blacks could only respond with shameful personal habits and petty resistance, where the slave’s “relationship with his master was one of utter dependence and childlike attachment.” The book remains very controversial among American historians; it was harshly criticized in the 1950s and 1960s for its almost complete lack of research or evidence. See David Donald, “Stanley Elkins,
Slavery
,”
The American Historical Review
65, no. 4 (July 1960): 921–22, and Oscar Handlin, “Stanley Elkins,
Slavery
,”
The New England Quarterly
34, no. 2 (June 1961): 253–55.

*OO
Postcard of Midway Point, 17-Mile Drive, Monterey Peninsula, California.

*PP
Terry Southern (1924–95) was an author and screenwriter best known for his satirical writing and the memorable dialogue in films such as
Dr. Strangelove
and
Easy Rider
. Styron remembered Southern in his essay “Transcontinental with Tex,”
The Paris Review
(Spring 1996), also collected in
Havanas in Camelot
.

*QQ
Shirley Jane Temple (b. 1928) was one of American cinema’s first child superstars, starring in films like
Bright Eyes, Curly Top
, and
Heidi
.

*RR
Herbert Caen (1916–97) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist for the
San Francisco Chronicle
. William Saroyan (1908–81) was a dramatist and author who won a Pulitzer Prize as well as an Academy Award.

*SS
The purchase of the Styrons’ home in Vineyard Haven was a terrible ordeal involving a rival buyer who pursued the house through successive lawsuits and appeals (all the way to the Supreme Court of Massachusetts); the legal complications were resolved only in 1966.

*TT
Richard Goodwin (b. 1931), adviser to President Kennedy and special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson. He was a summer neighbor on Martha’s Vineyard.

*UU
Harry Hopkins (1890–1946) Secretary of Commerce under FDR.

*VV
Norman Mailer,
An American Dream
(New York: Dial, 1965).

*WW
Unknown.

*XX
Enclosure, David Halberstam, “Rights Workers Embitter Delta,”
New York Times
(July 19, 1964). The article describes the civil rights turmoil in Cleveland, Mississippi. Sheriff Capps asked Halberstam, “What would happen if 200 of us went up to Harlem to tell the Southern side of the story? Why there wouldn’t be enough police up there in the city to protect us. Yet these people come down here.”

*YY
Tom Maschler, British publisher and writer, was the head of Jonathan Cape Publishers. In addition to discovering many notable writers and authoring a memoir,
Publisher
(2007), Maschler is most notable for playing a central role in creating Britain’s Booker Prize for Fiction in 1968.

*ZZ
Styron forwarded this letter to Hope Leresche with a note: “This is a copy of the letter I have just sent to H.H., with your changes, which seemed to me to be perfect. Many thanks! B.S.” Those changes—noted in a letter from Leresche on October 7, 1964, began with giving the publisher “too many loopholes through which they can wriggle.” Leresche also suggested an entire paragraph of the letter which might “awake in their minds … a new and ardent desire to keep you on their list because they begin to perceive where they have gone wrong and what indeed is your true value.” The paragraph she suggested omitting followed “… spasmodic interest in me.” Styron wrote: “Such matters would be less than trivial for me if I didn’t quite honestly feel that there was something basically wrong and awry in my connection with the firm. Permit me for a second to blow my own horn a little; it is only necessary to something I am leading up to. I don’t suppose I have to tell you what my reputation is here in America; like all writers I have had my slumps and have been bitterly attacked, but I honestly believe that any census taking into account the leading five writers in America would include me. In France, I don’t think that anyone but Salinger is better known than myself, and from reports that come back from Paris I’m even getting the edge on Salinger (see Yves Berger’s article in
The New York Times Book Review
last June). I have a similar reputation in Germany, and it is growing.
SET THIS HOUSE ON FIRE
is going to be published soon in Italy by Einaudi to what I gather will be great fanfare (they have taken exquisite pains in getting an excellent translation). But enough of this—which embarrasses me. The point is that in England, of all places—the country which by tradition and culture and language I should hope to find the most receptive audience outside my own—I am virtually a non-entity. I know this to be true simply because there are too many sympathetic witnesses to the fact: Englishmen whom I have spoken to, who care very much for my work, who are dismayed by the fact that I am so little appreciated or known in Britain. Whole long essays and articles on modern American writing (such as one not too long ago in the
Times Lit Sup)
which mentions all sorts of writers, including a lot of egregious hacks, but never once utter my name. What’s the reason for this? Certainly I am aware that it partially must be due to factors beyond anyone’s control: the bad reviews that
SET THIS HOUSE ON FIRE
got in England, for instance, were merely echoes of the irrationally bad reviews the book got here. The book has already begun to be re-assessed here, and to be found a good one; it was good from the beginning in France. No one can be held responsible for this kind of hostility.”

†aa
Leresche wrote Styron on December 3, 1964, “I was delighted to receive from you the note from Hamish Hamilton releasing you from your contract with them.”

†bb
Ambrose was the Joneses’ adopted son; he later changed his name to Jamie. The Joneses met him in Jamaica in 1962 and, after many delays from the French government, finally completed the adoption.

†cc
Styron refers to his meditation on contemporary race relations and the Nat Turner rebellion, “This Quiet Dust,”
Harper’s Magazine
230 (April 1965). Collected in
This Quiet Dust
.

†dd
Howard Nemerov (1920–91) was a poet who won the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, and Bollingen Prize. Richmond Lattimore (1906–84) was a poet and translator best known for his translations of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
.

†ee
Kay Boyle (1902–92) was a prolific author best known for
Being Geniuses Together
(1968), an important memoir of Paris in the 1920s. William Maxwell (1908–2000) was a novelist and longtime editor at
The New Yorker
.

†ff
Theodore Roethke (1908–63), American poet. He and his wife, Beatrice, took over the Styrons’ lease in Rome.

†gg
Gregory Zilboorg (1890–1959), psychoanalyst and historian of psychiatry who helped popularize psychiatry, partly through his writing and partly through his eminent clientele.

†hh
Frank Wilson was the manager of WTOP, a radio station owned by
The Washington Post
.

†ii
American poet Robert Lowell (1917–77) boycotted the White House Festival of the American Arts because he objected to President Johnson’s foreign policy decisions. Wilson criticized Lowell for his “monolithic view of human activity.”