Selected Letters of William Styron (98 page)

ttt
Willie Morris, “William Styron,”
Book-of-the-Month Club News
(Midsummer 1979).

uuu
Irving Paul “Swifty” Lazar (1907–93) was a talent agent who was given his nickname by his client Humphrey Bogart. Lazar represented many prominent actors and authors, including Lauren Bacall, Ernest Hemingway, Larry McMurtry, and many others.

vvv
The story was published in an edition of three hundred copies. William Styron,
Shadrach
(Los Angeles: Sylvester and Orphanos, 1979). The story also appeared as “Shadrach,”
Esquire Fortnightly
, November 21, 1978, and was collected in
A Tidewater Morning
.

www
The film of
Sophie’s Choice
, directed by Alan J. Pakula, opened on December 8, 1982. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, and Meryl Streep won Best Actress for her performance as Sophie.

xxx
Robert Towers found “it difficult to regard
Sophie’s Choice
as even a noble failure” in “Stingo’s Story,”
The New York Review of Books
, July 19, 1979. The
New Yorker
review of June 18, 1979, called the book “an elaborate showcase of every variety of racial prejudice and guilt” and “loaded with overwrought sentences.”

yyy
Ben Crovets, a Wantagh, New York, resident who wrote to Styron suggesting that he had known the original Sophie in Brooklyn in 1949.

zzz
Jim West offers a detailed account of the various women whom Styron put together to create Sophie. She was chiefly a combination of the physical attributes of an actual Polish Catholic Sophie whom Styron knew in Brooklyn in 1949 and the personality of a woman named Wanda Malinowska whom Styron dated in 1949. See West,
William Styron: A Life
.

AAA
George Target (1924–2005), British novelist and World War II veteran who spoke out vigorously against the failings of organized religion. He had sent Styron a lengthy fan letter praising
Sophie’s Choice
and comparing Styron to Thomas Wolfe and John Fowles.

BBB
Enclosed with this letter were inscribed copies of Styron’s books. In
Lie Down in Darkness
, Styron wrote: “To Charlie, the man who dragged me kicking and screaming through Officer Candidate School and made me the Marine I still am. Affectionate regards, Bill Vineyard Haven, Mass August 1979.” In
Sophie’s Choice
, Styron wrote: “To Charlie, Warmest best wishes from his old classmate. Semper Fidelis Bill—Martha’s Vineyard 1979.”

CCC
Burke Davis,
Marine! The Life of Chesty Puller
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1962).

DDD
Prassas wrote a letter to Lewis Lapham, editor of
Harper’s
, after John W. Aldridge’s “Styron’s Heavy Freight” appeared. Prassas included his letter to Lapham and Aldridge’s review in a letter to Styron on December 20, 1979, labeling Aldridge’s piece “a smug hatchet job,” which, like the
Turner
critiques of the late 1960s, “don’t even qualify as literary criticism.”

EEE
This letter consists of the short note and the long letter.

FFF
Styron is referring to his comment quoted in Michiko Kakutani, “Hellman-McCarthy Libel Suit Stirs Old Antagonisms,”
The New York Times
(March 19, 1980): “ ‘It’s unfortunate all around,’ was all William Styron had to say.” The lawsuit stemmed from Mary McCarthy’s comments on
The Dick Cavett Show
in January 1979. In the appearance, McCarthy said that Hellman was “overrated and dishonest” and that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” Hellman filed a defamation suit against McCarthy, Cavett, and the Educational Broadcasting Corporation (which aired Cavett’s show). Although sparked by McCarthy’s television remarks, Kakutani’s article delineates the feud’s roots in “hostile traditions within the intellectual Left.”

GGG
Styron refers to Elizabeth Hardwick, “The Little Foxes Revived,”
The New York Review of Books
(December 21, 1967).

HHH
A key character in Styron’s
Lie Down in Darkness
.

III
Solomon Lightfoot “Elder” Michaux (1885–1968) was a radio evangelist, entrepreneur, and founder of the Church of God Movement. Charles Manuel “Sweet Daddy” Grace (1881–1960) was the founder and first bishop of the predominantly African American United House of Prayer for All People.

JJJ
Postcard of Ronald Reagan bottle-feeding a chimpanzee.

KKK
Reagan was the subject of other notes between Styron and Roth. In an undated postcard from 1985 or 1986, Styron wrote that he was “saving a lovely true Reagan story until I see you next—soon, I hope.”

LLL
The letter was addressed to John O. Leslie and was a response to another of Morris’s prank letters. Leslie was the mayor of Oxford, Mississippi, and a friend of both Morris and Styron. Morris wrote Styron on April 27, 1981, on Leslie’s stationery asking him to replace Morris as Leslie’s speechwriter.

MMM
This payment in prophylactics was in reference to Leslie’s/Morris’s offer to have “anything in my drugstore” in payment.

NNN
Willie Morris, “Coming on Back,”
Life
(May 1981), reprinted in
Shifting Interludes: Selected Essays
(Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2002).

OOO
Styron wrote about the event in “A Leader Who Prefers Writers to Politicians,”
The Boston Globe
(July 26, 1981), collected in
Havanas in Camelot
as “Les Amis du Président.”

PPP
Author of
Robert Lowell: A Biography
(New York: Vintage, 1983).

QQQ
Andrei Andreyevich Voznesensky (1933–2010), Russian poet and writer whom Lowell called “one of the greatest living poets in any language.”

RRR
Styron refers to Gardner’s freshly written headnote to his critical review of
Sophie’s Choice
, which was reprinted in Arthur D. Casciato and James L. W. West III, eds.,
Critical Essays on William Styron
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982). Gardner qualified much of his original criticism of the novel in this headnote.

SSS
Styron wrote later in August to Morris, “Incidentally, it turns out that Lewis Lapham was not just ‘resigned,’ as reported, but fired, which is all the more justice.”

TTT
Styron wrote this when Duke was considering whether to allow its most famous graduate, President Richard Nixon, to house his presidential library at the university.

UUU
Alfred Kazin.

VVV
Amelie Burgunder was married to Rose’s brother Bernei.

WWW
Woodward’s wife, Glenn Boyd McLeod, who had passed away.

XXX
Bunker (1933–2005) was an ex-convict who taught himself to write in prison and went on to a successful career as a writer, actor, and screenwriter. As his widow, Jennifer, wrote, “There was no greater friend to Eddie than Bill. He was generous beyond measure to his friends and to other writers. He once called me with a question when he was filling out an application for a Guggenheim Fellowship for Eddie. He was in a deep depression but somehow managed to complete the application because he knew how much Eddie needed it.”

YYY
George Pratt Shultz (b. 1920), American economist and statesman; Secretary of the Treasury (1972–74) and Secretary of State (1982–89).

ZZZ
William Henry Luers (b. 1929), diplomat and former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela and Czechoslovakia. He served as president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for thirteen years. Bill and his wife, Wendy, became very close friends of the Styrons.

*aaa
Carlos Fuentes and his wife, Sylvia.

*bbb
Thomas Edwards, professor at Rutgers and editor of the literary quarterly
Raritan
, wrote “Rhetoric Doing the Work of Thought,”
The New York Times Book Review
(November 21, 1982).

*ccc
William Forrest Winter (b. 1923) served as the fifty-eighth governor of Mississippi from 1980 to 1984 as a Democrat.

*ddd
Mary Wakefield Buxton was related by marriage to Elizabeth Buxton, Styron’s first stepmother. Buxton wrote a piece, “Journeys,” for
The Southside Sentinel
(serving Virginia south of the Rappahannock River), which celebrated Elizabeth. “One of the crosses Aunt Elizabeth had to bear in life was being the stepmother of William Styron … [she] dedicated a portion of her time to keeping young Bill in line and he later sought his revenge by writing
Lie Down in Darkness
in which Aunt Elizabeth was portrayed as one of the most dreadful women ever depicted in American literature. I thought he exaggerated.” More recently, Mary published a similar account as “The ‘Evil’ Step-Muse,”
Virginia Living
5, no. 3 (April 5, 2007).

*eee
Postcard, “La Piscine de l’Hôtel Majestic et les jardins du Casino.”

*fff
Fuentes was Harvard’s commencement speaker in 1983 and aroused controversy because of his outspoken criticism of American foreign policy and President Ronald Reagan.

*ggg
Exley received a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1984.

*hhh
On the back of the postcard is a note from Marcus: “Bill, What I have dreaded has happened.… I met Gabina the Russian lesbian Jewish émigré while shopping with my wife …” etc.

*iii
E. L. Doctorow,
Lives of the Poets: Six Stories and a Novella
(New York: Random House, 1984).

*jjj
Louis Rubin, ed.,
An Apple for My Teacher
(Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1987), collects a dozen writers’ essays on influential teachers.

*kkk
Kings Row
is a 1942 film starring Ronald Reagan, based on Henry Ballamann’s controversial 1940 novel about the duality of small-town life. By “mentality,” Styron may be referring to a scene in the film in which Reagan’s character, after having his legs amputated by a sadistic surgeon, asks, “Where’s the rest of me?”

*lll
“Love Day,” an excerpt from
The Way of the Warrior
, was later included in
A Tidewater Morning
(1993).

*mmm
Philip Caputo (b. 1941) is an American author and journalist. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1973, Caputo is best known for his Vietnam memoir
A Rumor of War
, which Styron reviewed: “A Farewell to Arms,”
The New York Review of Books
(June 23, 1977). Styron praised the book, calling it a “remarkable personal account of the war in Vietnam.” This review was also collected in
This Quiet Dust
.

*nnn
Rose recalls that Bill began “going down the tubes” over Thanksgiving 1985 on Martha’s Vineyard—the last Thanksgiving the family would celebrate there for nearly a decade. The week following Thanksgiving, Bill gave a speech in Virginia and it was a disaster. Soon after, Bill and Rose went to a literary fund-raiser at the circus. Norman Mailer was dressed as a strongman, Erica Jong was dressed as a fairy, and Bill, not in costume, was “a portrait of horror.” The next day, Rose checked him into Yale–New Haven Hospital.

*ooo
“Love Day,”
Esquire
(August 1985).

*ppp
Donald Harington,
Let Us Build Us a City: Eleven Lost Towns
(San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1986).

*qqq
Virginia Foster Durr (1903–99) was a civil rights activist and the mother of close Styron friend and Vineyard neighbor Lucy Hackney.

*rrr
Philip Caputo, “Styron’s Choices,”
Esquire
(December 1986).

*sss
William H. Gass (b. 1924), American novelist, essayist, and philosopher. His novel
The Tunnel
won the National Book Award in 1995.

*ttt
Bill Broyles,
Brothers in Arms: A Journey from War to Peace
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).

*uuu
Herbert Hendin and Ann Pollinger Hass,
Wounds of War: The Psychological Aftermath of Combat in Vietnam
(New York: Basic Books, 1984).

*vvv
William Styron, “Death Row,”
The New York Times
(May 10, 1987).

*www
Styron appeared on the August 1987 cover of
Esquire
with John Updike; the issue contains Styron’s novella
A Tidewater Morning
.

*xxx
Willie Morris, “Faulkner’s Mississippi,”
National Geographic
175 (March 1989).

*yyy
Richard Ford (b. 1944) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer. Styron refers to Ford’s 1987 short-story collection,
Rock Springs
(New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987).

*zzz
Author of
The Novels of William Styron: From Harmony to History
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995) and
Rereading William Styron
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013).

*AAA
The Fellowship of Southern Writers was founded in 1987 by a group of authors to encourage the literature of the South. Charter members included Styron, Rubin, Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward, Cleanth Brooks, Shelby Foote, and several others.

*BBB
Southern literary critics Walter Sullivan (1924–2006) and Lewis P. Simpson (1916–2005).

*CCC
Morris was never elected to the fellowship.

*DDD
William B. Hopkins,
One Bugle No Drums: The Marines at Chosin Reservoir
(Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1986).

*EEE
In an article in
The Oxford Eagle
(November 12, 1987), Morris playfully slipped Kissinger’s name into a list of notables present at the dinner where Styron was awarded the Legion of Honor.

*FFF
Unknown speech about James Dickey (1923–97), the poet and novelist best known for
Deliverance
(1970).

*GGG
William L. Tazewell,
Down to the Sea with Jack Woodson: The Artistry of a Distinguished American Illustrator
(Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1987).

*HHH
Stephen B. Oates,
William Faulkner: The Man and the Artist, a Biography
(New York: Harper and Row, 1987).