Selected Letters of William Styron (99 page)

*III
Stephen B. Oates,
Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion
(New York: Harper and Row, 1975).

*JJJ
In November 1991, Oates and Styron exchanged letters about the alleged plagiarism. Oates was faulted by the American Historical Association for “misuse” (a category of misconduct that the association’s professional division created for Oates’s work) rather than plagiarism. The debate over his alleged offenses was still raging a decade after the initial accusations.

*KKK
Steel was the attorney who represented Tony Maynard, on whose behalf Styron testified in 1974. Maynard’s manslaughter conviction was thrown out, but he had spent seven years in prison and was wounded during the Attica rebellion. Steel wrote in 2008, “After the trial we developed a friendship which unfortunately floundered on the shoals of Nat Turner.”

*LLL
George Garrett, “Young Fenians in Love and History,”
The New York Times
(January 3, 1988), was a review of Thomas Flanagan’s 824-page
The Tenants of Time
(New York: Dutton, 1988). In the review, Garrett cited Shelby Foote’s “displeasure with Mr. Styron’s liberties with and distortions of the character and story of Nat Turner—‘If I write a story about a very tough little western badman, that is very different from pretending to write a story that I made up out of my head and call him Billy the Kid. I have no right to do that to Billy. No one has.’ ”

*MMM
Fuentes was awarded Spain’s $87,000 Cervantes Prize, often considered the top honor for Spanish-language writing.

*NNN
Kidder (b. 1948) is an actress best known for playing the role of Lois Lane opposite Christopher Reeve in four Superman movies.

*OOO
Styron sent Louis Rubin a copy of this letter with a cover note reading: “Dear Louis, You may want to circulate this letter to certain concerned parties. —Bill.” Styron also provided the letter to Jim West and others.

*PPP
Morris’s
Good Old Boy
was made into a TV movie titled
The River Pirates
, which premiered in 1988.

*QQQ
Director of Gift Planning (1987–93) at North Carolina State University, where a memorial fund in Styron’s father’s name was established in 1989. Horne suggested to Styron that he collect and publish in book form the three stories in
A Tidewater Morning
.

*RRR
Postcard of Edward Degas’
A Cotton Office in New Orleans
(1873).

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

*TTT
William Styron, “Darkness Visible,”
Vanity Fair
(December 1989). This 15,000-word piece was expanded into book form in 1990.

*UUU
Thomas Grey Wicker (1926–2011) was a journalist and columnist for
The New York Times
.

*VVV
Arthur D. Casciato, “His Editor’s Hand: Hiram Haydn’s Changes in Styron’s
Lie Down in Darkness
,”
Studies in Bibliography
33 (1980).

*WWW
Styron refers to the revolutions of 1989 and the fall of communism, events that began in Poland and quickly spread to Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania.

*XXX
In a letter from April 14, 1990, Styron added that “our residences will overlap for a couple of weeks but that’s perfectly all right with me since I trust that we will be independent of each other as much as either of us would wish. Jimmy Baldwin, for instance, had the same arrangement over a much longer period of time and there was no sweat. I trust you will have some sort of vehicle because this place as you know is a long way from nowhere.”

*YYY
JoAnne Prichard Morris was Willie Morris’s second wife. She was the executive editor at the University Press of Mississippi from 1982 to 1997 and is currently an editor at the
Jackson Free Press
.

*ZZZ
William Morris, “The Blood Blister,”
Esquire
(October 2, 1990).

†aaa
The film Frankenheimer made of Mewshaw’s novel.

†bbb
This letter also appears in the Matthiessen Papers with a handwritten yellow Post-it note stamped with Styron’s address in Roxbury: “Pete man, Here is the letter with your good points incorporated. See you soon Porter.”

†ccc
Styron explains the Turner award fiasco in “We Weren’t in It for the Money,”
The Washington Post
(July 16, 1991). This was Styron’s answer to Jonathan Yardley’s attack on the judges in
The Washington Post
.

†ddd
The Styron name is fairly common in eastern North Carolina, particularly in Carteret County and along the Outer Banks.
The Mailboat
, edited by Karen Willis Amspacher on Harkers Island, was a periodical devoted to coastal North Carolina history and folklore.

†eee
Rubin had just retired from Algonquin Books, turning over control of the company to his son Robert and cofounder Shannon Ravenel.

†fff
The Fellowship of Southern Writers met biennially in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

†ggg
Roth fictionalized his own encounter with Halcion in his novel
Operation Shylock
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).

†hhh
William Styron, “Prozac Days, Halcion Nights,”
The Nation
(January 4/11, 1993), and William Styron, “The Enduring Metaphors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima,”
Newsweek
(January 11, 1993).

†iii
Albert E. Stone,
The Return of Nat Turner: History, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Sixties America
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992).

†jjj
Schlesinger replied that he didn’t “blame” Styron “for a certain irritation” over the Stone book. “It seems really idiotic—or malicious—to stir up twenty-five years later a controversy that was both mischievous and meaningless at the time.” “I have mentioned the Stone book to a number of historians,” Schlesinger went on, “none of them has ever heard of Stone. The feeling is that the book will probably be stillborn and that attacks will only [give] it undeserved publicity.… This, I think, is Vann Woodward’s feeling, for example. Probably stoic indifference is the best policy. This too will pass—and ole
Nat
will remain.” Schlesinger then commented on his participation in a conference in Seville for the Columbus quincentennial. “Poor Chris—another casualty of political correctness. If he had known all the things he would be held accountable for five hundred years after, I doubt that he would have bothered to discover America.” Styron wrote Schlesinger on July 1, 1992: “Dear Arthur, Thanks for sending me the
TLS
review of the book on Nat Turner. On balance, not too bad, though I think Norman (as well as I) would be amazed by: ‘Mailer-ish on the belief that exposition is the great clue to character.’ That’s a brand new wrinkle in Nat Turner criticism.” See Michael O’Brien, “Elegy for Virginia,”
The Times Literary Supplement
(June 5, 1992).

†kkk
Carlos Fuentes,
The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).

†lll
See William Styron, “Too Late for Conversion or Prayer,” first published (in English) in
Havanas in Camelot
.

†mmm
A sign of superannuation and the mortician’s knock—old guys talking about their prostates!

†nnn
Morris’s 1993 memoir about his days as the editor of
Harper’s
.

†ooo
Styron attached a clipping from
Random House Magazine
with a photo of President and Mrs. Clinton presenting him the National Medal of Arts. Styron circled and identified “movie director Billy Wilder” looking on.

†ppp
Arthur Miller’s
Broken Glass
ran at Manhattan’s Booth Theatre from April 24 to June 26, 1994.

†qqq
Bunker appeared in Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 film in the role of Mr. Blue.

†rrr
D’Almeida, a painter and poet, was a friend from Rome in 1959. George’s mother married Paul Warburg, who owned a large estate on Martha’s Vineyard, so they became friends on the Vineyard as well.

†sss
Matthiessen’s grandson was killed by a hit-and-run driver.

†ttt
Then director of the Special Collections Library at Duke University.

†uuu
Boyd Boyner, “General Hartwell Cocke of Bremo,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia.

†vvv
Styron met Magda Moyano, a young translator, on a trip to Mexico for the Inter-American Foundation in 1963. Although her father was Argentinian, Moyano’s mother was from Fulvana County, Virginia. Moyano was a descendant of John Hartwell Cocke, master of Bremo Plantation in Virginia. It was Moyano who led Styron to Boyner’s study of this progressive slave owner.

†www
Nobile authored
Judgment at the Smithsonian: The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
(New York: Marlowe and Co., 1995).

†xxx
This letter was written in response to Nobile’s letter to Styron on April 7, 1995, requesting Styron’s opinion of the United States’ apologizing to Japan on the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bomb.

†yyy
Gavan Daws,
Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific
(New York: William Morrow, 1994).

†zzz
Styron is referring to Buruma’s many articles in
The New York Review of Books
in the early 1990s, among them “The Devils of Hiroshima” (October 25, 1990) and “Ghosts of Pearl Harbor” (December 19, 1991).

†AAA
The writer William Manchester also signed this letter.

†BBB
Philip Roth, “The Ultimatum,”
The New Yorker
(June 26, 1995).

†CCC
William Styron, “A Case of the Great Pox,”
The New Yorker
(September 18, 1995), collected in
Havanas in Camelot
.

†DDD
Styron mentions Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” Cicero’s “Virtue is its own reward,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

†EEE
Charles Joyner is Burroughs Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture at Coastal Carolina University and author of several books on American slavery.

†FFF
Charles Joyner, “Styron’s Choice: A Meditation on History, Literature, and Moral Imperatives,” in Christopher Morris and Susan A. Eacker,
Southern Writers and Their Worlds
(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996). See Toni Morrison, “The Art of Fiction No. 134,”
The Paris Review
(Fall 1993). Morrison responded to questions about Styron’s novel: “Well, here we have a very self-conscious character who says things like, I looked at my black hand. Or, I woke up and I felt black. It is very much on Bill Styron’s mind. He feels charged in Nat Turner’s skin … in this place that feels exotic to him. So it reads exotically to us, that’s all.… He has a right to write about whatever he wants. To suggest otherwise is outrageous. What they should have criticized, and some of them did, was Styron’s suggestion that Nat Turner hated black people. In the book Turner expresses his revulsion over and over again … he’s so distant from blacks, so superior. So the fundamental question is why would anybody follow him? What kind of leader is this who has a fundamentally racist contempt that seems unreal to any black person reading it? Any white leader would have some interest and identification with the people he was asking to die. That was what these critics meant when they said Nat Turner speaks like a white man. That racial distance is strong and clear in that book.”

†GGG
Mike Hill, filmmaker who made an audio recording of Styron in the fall of 1996 for a documentary about Apollo 8, the first space mission to circle the moon in December 1968. Hill served as a consultant on the PBS documentary
Race to the Moon
(2005).

†HHH
In his foreword to Ron Schick and Julia Van Haaften,
The View from Space: American Astronaut Photography 1962–1972
(New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1988), Styron recalls the hush that fell over a small group of friends watching the televised Apollo 8 mission during a party. He later identified the host as Leonard Bernstein.

†III
Richard Widmark (1915–2008), actor and neighbor of Styron’s in Roxbury, Connecticut.

†JJJ
Francine du Plessix Gray, “Department of Second Thoughts,”
The New Yorker
(September 15, 1997).

†KKK
The letter thanks Styron for the “book that was every bit as responsible for saving my life as the surgeon and internist who put my body back together after my suicide attempt.”

†LLL
Claire Nicholas White,
Stanford White: Letters to His Family
(New York: Rizzoli, 1997).

†MMM
Styron refers to a 1998 calendar entitled “A Literary Companion,” issued by the Library of Congress. The writers whose pictures appear therein include Poe, Eliot, Rebecca West, Pasternak, Capote, Hughes, and Gertrude Stein.

†NNN
Uri Geller had sent Bill a crystal after the two met at a birthday party, and Styron forwarded Geller’s note to Roth.

†OOO
Edgar L. Nettles was a coworker of Bill, Sr., at the Newport News shipyard. His wife, Frances C. Cosby, was Styron’s sixth-grade teacher. Reading “A Tidewater Morning” prompted Nettles to write Styron.

†PPP
This postcard is from the “Writers and Their Familiars” series (photographs by Jill Krementz). The photograph is of Styron walking with his dog Aquinnah in Roxbury. As the caption reads: “William Styron with Aquinnah, Roxbury, Conn., April 29, 1979. William Styron (b. 1925) has written some of the most important novels of our time, including
Lie Down in Darkness
(1951),
The Confessions of Nat Turner
(1967), and
Sophie’s Choice
(1979).” Aquinnah, a golden retriever, “had attributes that were nearly human, but she also possessed all-too-human failings,” Styron recalls. “For instance, when I taught her how to drive, she insisted on staying on the left-hand side of the road. So that ended her driving career, which made it all the better for our wonderful daily walks together.” The co-editor of this volume, R. Blakeslee Gilpin, sold Styron the stamp for this postcard and canceled it at the West Chop, Massachusetts, post office.