Your son,
WCS jr
TO WILLIAM BLACKBURN
April 17, 1951 314 West 88th Street, New York City
Dear Doctor,
I’m glad you like the title. It is, of course, from the old master himself—Chapter V of Urn-Burial: “since our longest sun set at right declensions … and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness and have our light in ashes.…” Since I have Peyton herself say part of the line, just before she jumps from the window, I’m not using it as a quote in the front of the book but merely appropriating it, a la Eliot. I hope Sir Thomas won’t turn over pompously in his grave. The quote I’m using as an epigraph is from Finnegans Wake: “Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair.”—the cry to Earwicker from his children, as he hears it in his sleep. I think it fits the book pretty well.
I wrote the last 15,000 words in about two weeks. The most exhausting fortnight I’ve ever spent, or imagine I ever will spend. I lost fifteen pounds and I’m still in a state of semi-convalescence. I had to become Peyton and kill myself in the first person, and as it worked out I came pretty literally close to it. Luckily, I had Daddy Faith and his baptism to resuscitate me at the end. The book, as I told Brice, runs to over 600 typewritten pages. The last part is very frank and this will no doubt make me notorious and get me censored in Boston. If it turns out that way I will be able, no doubt, to buy you a new Cadillac, although I believe the part which may cause raised eyebrows was written honestly, and with no deliberate intention to shock. Harrison Smith*R and J. Donald Adams*S will gag over it, but other people will like it—and have liked it already. I only wish I didn’t have to go back into the loathed Marine Corps, but I’ve already resigned myself to the extent that it no longer gives me bad dreams. I’m indeed looking forward to seeing you on the weekends. As I recall from the last war, it’s not too long or rough a trip up from New River and no doubt I’ll soon meet someone with a convenient automobile to make the journey less a bore. I’ve stopped for a while my moaning and groaning about the state of the world. I’ll no doubt get angry again and soon, but at the moment I’m trying to practice a sort of Matthew Arnoldesque attitude of resignation, in the hope that though things might not measurably improve they may at least not get a hell of a lot worse.*T I hate in a way to leave New York but perhaps there are pleasanter spring fields in Carolina. I’ll be leaving on May 1st. If you write me after that, and before you get my Lejeune address, perhaps you’d better write in care of Bobbs-Merrill, 468 4th Avenue. But I hope to hear from you before that.
As ever,
Bill
Styron reported for duty at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in May 1951.
TO THOMAS PEYTON III
May 9, 1951 Camp Lejeune, NC
Dear Satan,*U
As you can see from the above address, while I don’t have it precisely made I have been at least temporarily saved from snoopin and poopin in the swamps. Right now I am assistant 5-3 of the 8th Marines, a job about which I know nothing and care less. They have so many 1st Lieuts. down here that they don’t know what to do with them, so they shoved me in here, hoping, I suspect, that I would at least keep out of the way. Mornings at 7:30 I go to Staff Command School, whatever that is, where a bunch of knucklehead Majors from TTU lecture on “high level” policy in Amphibious Tactics.*V When they have movies, just as in the old days, and the lights are out, I sleep. Afternoons I come back here and write letters and drink Coca-Colas. Evenings I sulk alone with a bourbon (already, after only a week, I think I’ve overrun my account) and correct the page-proofs on my book (they are coming in now, beautifully, permanently printed, and these provide my only consolation) and brood over the peculiar fate of our generation which has us tied helplessly to the brute wheel of evil and power.
Anyway, for a time, to more mundane things. How does this new reserve alarm affect your status. Down here it has caused mixed horror and joy. To people like myself who have just come in, the part about one year’s service has been very depressing, but of course the boys who came in in August are quite happy. The so-called proposed expansion of the Corps might blast everyone’s hopes, but even so the expansion seems to be a long-range proposition and, after all, might not get through Congress.
God, ain’t it horrible? You should know even more than I, old buddy, being in your position. I sure hope something good happens to you before you go west, like losing a finger or a toe. It’d be worth it. There ain’t no justice, to think that only four months separated your PCS class from mine, and yet by some purely chronological quirk you boys got crapped on this time. At least (so far) most of us have gotten easy jobs. Let me know how you think this new order will affect you. I sho hope something will keep you East and that this whole bloody mess will clear up miraculously and that you and your spouse and me and mine (I’d be half-way married myself this month) could get together on the river somewhere and drink beer by the soul-cleansing gallon. It is possible though I can hardly see how it’s probable. If the lunatic fringe of both the Republican and Democratic parties would for Christ’s sake just get killed and the sane members get together, and quick, there might be a way to finish off Korea and work for a lasting, final peace. But I doubt it. If we are destroyed, remember that we are destroyed by evil, ignorant, criminal men, not only in Russia but in D.C. A man would be justified using a BAR on about half of Congress.*W
I’m tired of thinking about the situation, and I’m more tired of being held captive by the enemy. Maybe I’ll rebel, go over the hill, I don’t know. At least I know that no men of good will would point a finger at me and cry “shame.” My dreams are haunted by visions of a time when you and I were younger and more innocent, a time long before the time when, as the Bible says, violent men raised spears against us.*X Let us pray.
Let me know your progress, old boy; keep me well informed, and don’t let the bastards get you down. In all the despair I still somehow have a secret place in my heart that says that we will prevail.
Your buddy,
Sty
TO WILLIAM C. STYRON, SR.
June 1, 1951 Camp Lejeune, NC
Dear Pop,
I heard from Eliza that you are a little under the weather now. I’m terribly sorry and know how you must feel, lying so quiescent on your back; but also knowing the old spirit, I have no doubt that you will snap back and be in good shape again soon.
If any kind of doubts or wonderings are troubling your ability to get back into shape, please don’t worry about me, or let a worry about me hinder your recuperation. I am in the finest of spirits, both mentally and physically, and am making the best of my lot down here in the swamps. I would rather, of course, be elsewhere, but I have found to my absolute surprise—after all these years of living my own life—that the new discipline agrees with me very well. I rise at 7:00, eat three big square meals a day and have a sunburn that even Johnny Weissmuller would envy.*Y We go out into the field once every two weeks for about two days and although lying on the swampy turf amid all the ticks and chiggers is not exactly my idea of the Waldorf, it nonetheless and undoubtedly gives a certain sense of physical well-being.
I’m getting the last of my proofs now, and they should be in bound pages very soon. Hiram will send you a copy as soon as they come through, which should be within the next three or four weeks. About the book, of course, now that it’s over, I am wildly happy. People all over—I understand from my New York Intelligence—are already talking about it, and there’s no doubt about it—and modesty has nothing to do with it—that your boy is about to become the sensation, at least of 1951. God knows, I’m not getting swell-headed over the thing—being essentially too aware of the transitoriness of fame—but I don’t mind getting all this additional reward, especially after knowing that first and foremost I was honest, that the book represents hours of real sweat and pain, and that I did my level best, in every word of it.
Of course you must know what you’ve done for me. If it hadn’t been for your fa
ith in me, and your gentle and constant encouragement, it would never have been written. There are few enough artists who have gotten encouragement from people at large, much less their parents—toward whom the very fact that they create usually represents a tacit antipathy. But you have been faithful to the very end of my first endeavor, and I appreciate it to the bottom of my heart. We live in a troubled era, there is no doubt of that, and sometimes I wonder if we will all endure. Yet with all my complaint, often, at the times, and at life in general, I somehow know we shall endure and that all this striving is not at all in vain. The very fact that you and I have worked together, no matter with what unspoken understanding, represents a partnership of the spirit, and if that is love, it will prevail—forever and ever. I will write until my knuckles are worn and my brain bewildered, but I will write on and on, and if it can be done by a feckless soul like myself it can be done by the human race: this eternal creation and recreation, even in the face of the bleakest future. You have given me the chance and I’ll not let you down. When you read my second book, or play, or whatever it is, it might not be very good, but no matter. Remember that your faith in me has given me the watchword, or something: you have believed in me, so because of that I have believed in myself, and so, having strived, I believe, ceaselessly upward (in the words of Goethe), I can be saved. And so can we all be saved.
My God, it’s been a long pull, but, as I say, I’m as happy as it is possible to be. Don’t mind the reviews when they come in August—they’re going to raise hell with me. But I know that I’ve written a fine, true book and that it will live for a long time. And I thank you for everything you’ve done to make it possible.
Soon we come to Little Creek in Norfolk for amphibious training—sometime within the next month—so then I’ll be able to see you. I’ll give you the exact details very soon. Keep the doormat out and we’ll have a fine talk together.
Your son,
Bill, Jr.
P.S. I thought the biography you sent to Duke was fine stuff, if a little embarrassing to read first-hand by the biographee.*Z
TO DOROTHY PARKER†a
June 19, 1951 Camp Lejeune, NC
TOP SECRET 8th Marines (Reinf.)
IN THE FIELD
WES/wb-1
Dlt-14
AUTHENTICATED
TIME:191950Q
[Begun Tuesday P.M
for civilians]
REGIMENTAL OPERATION}
ORDER 16-51} JOCKSTRAP
TASK ORGANIZATION: ME AND YOU
Dearest: I am at present sitting in a tick-ridden bed of pine needles amidst a group of oddly-camouflaged tents surrounded, in the twilight, by a grotesque confusion of bushes and trees. Although I am not suffering hideously and although I have just gorged myself on a huge meal (in the field we eat twice a day, squatting or kneeling, at 6:00 A.M. and 5:30 P.M., so the interim hunger is great) I am definitely not enjoying myself, and the associate boredom and waiting, the total idiocy of the thing, the getting rained on when it rains, the mosquitoes and ticks, the sleeping on the good earth when and if you get a chance to sleep, the not taking of baths—all of these tend to put one in a state of mind which, mildly stated, might be called cranky. There will be tonight and tomorrow and tomorrow night and half of the next day; then all will be over for quite a while, but already I feel like I’ve been out here for a year.
Then yesterday I got your letter telling me that the weasel of Whittlesey House has pulled another of his fanciful coups and fired you—which made me feel ugly and distressed and more morbid than just the lack of sleep could ever make me—not so much because of his act in itself, because you’d be quitting anyway, but because again we have the tiny little man up to his abysmal, petty tricks. And I feel dreadful about the whole business. Why did he do it? And what weak-minded, mealy-mouthed excuses did he offer? And where do you think you will land another place, and when?
Of course—or perhaps not of course—but anyway a tiny bit of the sad feeling I have is simply the fact of your leaving that monstrous green building; perhaps no building on earth should be less capable of evoking nostalgia, but topographically I have thought of you always enthroned in one of those fake mahogany offices, and now I shall have to rearrange all my tender visions.
But, as you say and seem to think, it’s all most very likely the best thing (I’ve always thought Aswell wanted to take you into his scented boudoir), and that pile of money due you certainly sounds worthwhile, God Knows. So I don’t know whether to really mourn or what; I think it’s just Aswell—who bears a remarkable resemblance, physically and morally, to some of the dangerous little colonels around here—that has sickened me, and the knowledge that somehow, no matter in what slight way, he has managed to hurt you.
Incidentally, and seriously—and I mean it—don’t you think it would be a good thing if I wrote to Hiram about you? I don’t know what he could do right off, but he knows well of you through me and he would be powerfully interested in you if I wrote, and I would write him a powerful letter. I’m dead serious about this, and Hiram is a man of influence and the fact of the matter is that he would do anything in the world for me that he could—so please think it over and let me know as soon as you can.
God, life is a bloody trial sometimes, isn’t it? Right now it’s almost ten in the evening and, having risen at 4:30 this morning, I feel that this day never really began, but just existed always. I am sitting in a blackout tent with my two sergeants (they are really fine fellows; the tragic part about war + the military is not—as the so-called sensitive person who has never seen it might think—the fact that one is thrown in among disagreeable people; for most all of the people are pretty decent and good, and grow affectionately together in their common misery) and the tent, being shut up, is stifling and smells of DDT. At midnight I will get off my stool and climb down on the ground in the fashion of some other animal than a human—a dog, perhaps—and sleep the four hours allotted me until H-hour at 4:00 A.M. and then arise, exhausted and scratching. Well actually, I suppose, it could be a lot worse and I’ve had it worse myself, but because it’s happening to me now I feel it with a moderate pang of hurt and degradation and futility, so please excuse a moment’s bitching. I’ve gotten it off my chest.
The main thing, of course, is that I love you and that grows and grows until sometimes I feel I won’t be quite able to stand it—if that doesn’t sound too silly. Out here in the swamps, separated further from you by this week’s chancy business of mail, I feel that an ocean of silence keeps us apart—and the ocean is green—not “our” ocean—with the unhealthy, persistent green of a military forest. They even shame nature in war, soiling what should be grand and exciting by their very presence, their very touch. Anyway, I love you more and more each moment, because each moment allows me to think more about your loveliness and all the things I love about you; and you touched me when you said that when we meet it’ll probably be like two strangers who have only heard a lot of each other, because that’s no doubt true and we’ll likely be absurd for a while—but not for too long. So last night gave me quite an opportunity to think about you, for the first night in the woods is generally a sleepless one for me, and, supine in the weeds, with this damn gasoline lamp roaring in the tent about me, I went through the most fetching fantasies—trying, I suspect, to summon you to accompany me to sleep and dreams: first I thought of you and I walking through Central Park and then of you and I in the Green or perhaps White Mountains, then of you and I slumbering together in a garden full of flowers.
A few days later: well, I was mistaken: we all suffered pretty hideously. Immediately after the above trifle was written, the Colonel came in the tent with plans for a hike. I went to bed at four, woke at six and spent all morning on the radio. Then at noon all hell broke loose; two mortar shells burst into the Sixth Marines lines adjacent to us—strictly an accident (did you read about it in the papers?) but eleven men were killed and twenty-some wounded and I had to guide our own regimental surgeon to the a
rea to give aid. It was terrible. I stood by down there for three or four hours while the wounded were evacuated, and then at eight o’clock in the evening we began a 30-mile forced march back to the base. It went all night, with a ten minute break each hour, and it was sheer hell. A hike doesn’t sound like much, probably, but 30 miles is a long way, even for the Marines and I don’t believe any of us thought we’d make it, considering the fact that none of us had more than four hours’ sleep during the two preceding nights. I have blisters the size of eggs on both feet and I all but collapsed at the finish line and—oh well, I’m frankly just too goddamn tired to bore you about it any longer, though I’ll probably regale you over martinis with a complete account of the whole ghastly day.
I had intended to write you much more but I just haven’t had enough time, and now I must pack up (it’s Friday noon now) and go out to the rifle range for a week. Write me at the same address you have. I want this to get to N.Y. in time for you to read it when you get back on Monday. It ain’t much of a letter and I wanted to tell you many more times that I love you. And I do love you, my darling, and for 30 miles the thought of you kept my feet moving ahead, and the thought of you will forever sustain me through worse trials than that.
—Bill
TO SIGRID DE LIMA
June 30, 1951 Camp Lejeune, NC
My dearest Such a Sweet Baby,
I’m sorry for taking such a long time to write you this time, but I’ve never had two weeks in which time was at such a premium and when so many things seemed to be happening. First we went out to the woods and I will tell you about it. We established a bivouac for the regiment (this was Monday before last) in the most trackless wilderness of sand and pines and thorns I’ve ever seen. It rained constantly and though every now and then I had a tent to shelter me, I still stayed soaked for hours. The first night I got two hours’ sleep, in the wet grass, the second night I got 3½ hours sleep, this time a little dryer, though—wrapped up in a poncho. On the third day all hell broke loose. The regiment adjacent to us and working with us on the problem had two mortar shells go off in its line, killing nine men (did you read about it in the papers?) and wounding twenty-odd.†b Although it was not our outfit, we of course sent doctors and ambulances and it was my duty to take the regimental surgeon down to the area in a jeep. It was ghastly, and it was just like war, and that’s about all there is to say. Then that night the colonel ordered the entire regiment to march the entire 33 miles back to the main base. We marched and marched and marched from 8:30 P.M until 7:00 the following morning, and it was sheer hell. I don’t believe anyone has the slightest idea of how far 33 miles are, until one has hiked them, at a set pace (2½ miles per hour) and in 85° heat and with a ten-minute break every hour. Even for the marines this hike was something of a record and only 65% of the regiment made it and I made it all the way in, with blisters on both feet the size of pingpong balls—though why I stuck it out I don’t know. I—who have not walked 200 consecutive yards in the last five years. Now if you will add, to the simple fact of the hike, the blisters, the drugged, dead, plodding exhaustion after the no-sleep for the two preceding nights, the memory of the slain marines I’d just seen, the heat and, above all, the futility of it all—you can imagine what a state I, and all the others, was in at the end of the trail. I fell into bed and slept until 5:00 in the afternoon and only now have my feet begun to cease limping.
Selected Letters of William Styron Page 12