Give my best to old man Tom Peyton, and tell him I am surviving, God knows how, in Yankeeland. I must be charmed.
Love to everyone,
Sty.
TO ELIZABETH MCKEE
August 8, 1958‖l 75 Main Street, Nantucket, MA
Dear Elizabeth:
Everything up here is dandy, except for occasional fog and airplane crackups that disturb the even tenor of our days. Rose + Susanna are sundrenched and flourishing and they send their love to you all.
While on the Vineyard I saw a lot of Lillian Hellman and she wants me to write a play for her production company, Devon Productions.‖m She is ready to give me an advance + contract. I told her I’d be delighted to give it a try, but of course I had to finish the novel first. She understood that, of course, and asked me to ask you to get in touch with her partner so that you could talk over terms and so forth. Will you do this? I think he is expecting your call. His name is Lester Ostermen, Devon Prod., 55 W. 54th St., Judson 6-5570.
Will be back around Labor Day, sound and brown, I hope. Take care of Roxbury.
XXX Bill
TO LOUIS D. RUBIN, JR.
October 24, 1958 Roxbury, CT
Dear Louis:
It seems to me that not too long ago I wrote you an extremely ill-tempered letter telling you why I despised all the critic swine and so forth and that you wrote me a much more well-tempered letter back, pointing out how my spleen was misdirected and it all made pretty good sense to me—so much so that only a sense of embarrassment at having gone off half-cocked must have prevented me from writing back right away. I still hate the critic swine—and you know the type I mean—but maybe now with a little more sympathy, at least understanding; that was a fine letter, and I’m glad you pointed out a few things to me about which I was rather pig-headed and blind. Anyway, we got your letter and are both very happy that your Robert is flourishing and has a big mouth. As an old hand at this racket, bub, let me tell you that the first 3 months are the EASIEST, then it gets worse—everything gets worse before it gets better—and that there are moments in the mid-watches of the night when a razor or the oven look mighty enticing, I’ll tell you; then all of a sudden, around the time that they are almost grown-up, they start to behave and act human, then you can knock the shit out of them. Tell Eva she’s got a lot to look forward to.
The other thing I was interested to hear was about the Hispano-Virginia don, Señor Salamanca, who has apparently done the commonwealth up brown.‖n Since my own new book will probably exceed even his in length, or grossness, I can only applaud his good American stick-to-itiveness, I think it’s called. But, man, that dialogue. I’ll lay you even money right now that MGM has bought it for a juicy sum. People like Salamanca always have it made.… Speaking of which, I don’t know whether you saw it or even heard about it, but “The Long March” was on TV recently—a total disaster from beginning to end, with my tragic little tale being turned into a paean to the Marine Corps, the lead actor dead drunk, gumming his lines, everything appallingly grim and tasteless for 1-½ hours.‖o Well, I more than expected this even before it happened, happily collected my CBS loot, and really couldn’t have cared less how it turned out. But let me tell you a small but sad sequel to the whole thing. Just yesterday comes this letter from the headmaster of Christchurch School, my old alma mater, telling me that it was so fine and dramatic, that program, and how he sat breathless watching it, and all the boys thought it was just the greatest thing ever, and finally how happy he was that I’d really made the big time and from now on out Christchurch had its EYES ON ME. Well, I could have almost wept, thinking of this Bright Young Educator down there on the Rappahannock—entrusted with the guidance of 125 nubile young boys—who, if I wrote twelve masterpieces to equal Tolstoy wouldn’t bat an eye or give me the time of day but who, having seen a cheap piece of quackery on TV which is a travesty of the original, comes all over himself telling me how great I am. Do you want to know what I did? I sent him a large check (CBS money) and a pompous letter telling him to buy some books for the library, if they still had one, and letting him know that I had no fear for American education as long as the likes of him were in the saddle.
Well, maybe the written word is dying, I don’t know. Anyway, remembering my mean letter to you about the critics, I reflected that the critics were still probably not the writer’s friend, but that here was the REAL enemy—young headmasters, young so-called educated people, teachers, frauds and cretins everywhere who are supposed to know, supposed to be educators, leaders, but who really have no more concept of culture or history or of the humanities than some country sheriff’s poor harelip daughter. You don’t expect the clods or illiterates to dig you or even care; it’s when people like my headmaster buddy cheer you for the wrong thing that you begin to think that you’re living in a vacuum, or a madhouse.
Well, to hell with it. I’m very glad to hear that your novel is coming along. Curious, although practically all of my book is set in Italy, the framework which supplies the story and the flashbacks is all laid in Charleston, S.C. Which makes it difficult, since my knowledge of Charleston is limited to about three visits of 24 hours each. However, I have solved the problem by having the two major characters—who are trying mutually to recollect what went on in Italy—sit fishing in a skiff in the Ashley river, from which they never move. Describing rivers is easy. However, I know nothing about Charleston fish so I wrote to the Chamber of Commerce and they sent me a flashy pamphlet which set me straight—spot, croakers, and channel bass.
Rose and I don’t know yet where we’re going to be between Christmas and New Year’s—it will be either here or Baltimore—but I hope we can get together during that time. If it’s Balto. maybe you can stop by on your way up to or down from N.Y.; if here, I should think surely we could get together somehow, either in N.Y., or perhaps we could entice you up to the country. Our vines have tender grapes, the children raise hell, but we call it home. We would like to see you.
Give Eva our best. As Kerouac says: “Like I mean, you gotta swing with it.”
Yours,
Bill
PS I was re-reading The Web and the Rock the other day (part of it) and it becomes more and more apparent that this was the most tragic writer as Writer who ever lived.‖p Such power and majesty he has still, for me, such a torrent of pure grandeur, and, in the end, such godawful CRAP.
TO JAMES AND GLORIA JONES
January 20, 1959 Roxbury, CT
(You must understand I have not placed these items in any particular order. Actually I would put you above Mikoyan, though several cuts above Herbert Hoover.)‖q
Dear Jim and Gloria:
Rose + I figured that, though you must undoubtedly subscribe to the Enquirer, you probably don’t get the Air Mail edition, so I am rushing these clips off to you tout de suite, so that you may know that you are still keeping the best of company. I have written to J.J. Miller, who of course runs the whole show, telling him your correct address (if it isn’t, you won’t get this), and I hope you will appreciate that fact. Incidentally, Gloria, when you really get pissed-off with Jim you can come live with Rose + me.
We’ve read a lot of the reviews of The Pistol, and are very pleased that it seems to be getting more judicious treatment than Running.‖r Most of the ones I’ve seen have treated it with the greatest respect, which it very much deserves. It is, as I think I told you several thousand years ago (when was it, last March?), quite a wonderful job, and I’m glad that the critics are at least basically acknowledging that fact. Why we give a God damn what the reviewers think is something which, in the long run, escapes me, but we do, even though they’re all practically scoundrels and nitwits. Anyway, to repeat, I’m happy that The Pistol is receiving (at least partially) its just measure.
We enjoyed your various postcards from exotic shores and envied you both until we were each the color of pea soup. Cannes! The Italian Riviera! Paris! To hell with both of you. As I write the temperature outside is 18° and o
ur monstrous dog, Tugwell, has just vomited all over the living-room rug. Do you call this living? We wish we could join you at the Lapérouse, but unfortunately we can’t, until I finish this novel, which I’m still writing on, as I was last March, and which I expect to be doing until I’m a dreary old man, scrofulous, incontinent, and a ward of the State.‖s Actually, I hoped and prayed that I’d have it all done by now, but the deeper I get into it the more horribly complex and endless it seems to get. Though I’m being somewhat melodramatic, really. If I keep a steady hand I should have it all done in a matter of a few months. The trouble is keeping that steady hand. Though sometimes I tell myself that I know it’s a fine book, most of the time it seems a big gross idiotic pain in the ass. In the meantime, time skips by and I develop a big fat gut and everybody seems to be looking at television.
Speaking of which, The Long March was on television last fall (Playhouse 90) and it was turned into an absolutely incredibly delicate abortion‖t: Jack (“Mannie”) Carson drunk, blowing his lines, Sterling Hayden as the Colonel striving valiantly with lines no one, least of all me, could conceive of, a chorus line of cuties, Inez and Pearl and Roberta, a lot of dames I never heard of, a triumphant mountain climb at the end, the Marine Corps supreme, beautiful, inviolate, etc. Thank God you’re in France.
If you have time to send a letter, do so; otherwise, don’t send these terrible, glittering, sexy, seductive, abominable postcards with angle shots of sun and sea and European poontang which makes me wish you’d drop dead. But in spite of all my gloom, there’s a fairly good chance that we’ll make it to Europe by summer. We want to go back to Ravello and if we go we plan to ease through Paris and give you a hard time as a couple of visiting firemen.
The children are fine. Polly is an incredible production, fat as a pig and with an ingratiating moronic grin; Susanna stuck a safety pin (closed, thank God) up her vagina, but we got it out O.K., and where she goes from here is anybody’s guess. They send their love, as does Rose, and I too—
Truly yours always
Billy
TO MAC HYMAN
February 4, 1959 Roxbury, CT
Dear Mac:
This is just a short note to tell you that though I was extremely tempted by your invitation to go to Castro-land, I have had recently a lot of second thoughts. Man, they shoot you down there! Anyway, as soon as I finish up this economy-sized novel of mine, maybe we can join forces, you and I, and go to some nice civilized place like the Belgian Congo (they’re having just a small revolution there) and shoot crocodiles and sip up a few rum Collinses.
I thoroughly enjoyed your boat piece in Esquire. It was really funny all the way through and, having had one nautical experience with you anyway, that only made it that much better. Speaking of Esquire, they are running a longish hunk of my novel next June, so you might take a look at it, though I have more than a few qualms about pre-publication of parts of novels: I mean, taken out of context, the stuff often just doesn’t make too much sense. Anyway, they don’t pay too badly (though not too good, either) so what the hell: I figure you can’t really lose.
Are you going to make the New York run anytime soon? If so, let me know, so that we can get the great room squared away and lay in a few cases of Rheingold. I’ll tell you one thing: by now I am so sick and tired of writing that I get spots before my eyes everytime I sit down at a desk. Wouldn’t it have been great to have lived in those days when everyone sat around and talked about how exquisitely wonderful it was? So come on up and we’ll sit around and talk about—boats, maybe, and sex, and writing.
Best to Gwen + your family
Bill
TO WILLIAM BLACKBURN
February 4, 1959‖u Roxbury, CT
Dear Doctor
So belatedly that I fear I am past hope, I want to thank you for your fine Conrad book, which I read with enormous interest, and also to tell you that, despite my silence, I am still alive and kicking.‖v I was sorry to learn from your last note that you had suffered an indisposition. I hope everything goes well now. But mainly I wanted to congratulate you on the Conrad; the letters are really worth having (he was one of the last who knew how to write them). Perhaps it is only because they are so good that kept me from writing you for so long! Even when he was talking about money (and money did seem to be on his brain) his letters are alive. I love that line: “Perhaps true literature is something like a disease which one feels in one’s bones, sinews, and joints.” And I love the letter to Blackwood about “Thackeray’s penny worth of mediocre fact,” followed by his creed—character living through action. It is a really valuable book, and I was delighted, incidentally, to see that it was accorded proper treatment in the Times Book Review.
I am staggering numbly and blindly through the last pages of my own mammoth economy-size novel. It will be the most blissful day of my life when it is finished. Then I will write nothing but short pieces—none of them any larger than a postage stamp. The newly-vamped Esquire, by the way, which has pretensions to something called quality, is going to run a longish excerpt from the first part of the book this coming June. The piece will, I fear, do very little to communicate the real quality of the book, but the reaction in itself is not too bad and I got $1,000 for it (I sound like Conrad), and perhaps there is an outside chance that it will whet one or two readers’ appetites for the book itself. We shall see.
I trust you are still planning on the big Duke jubilee in April, as I have it on my calendar. Will I have to make any formal speech? I sincerely hope not, although I won’t balk at making a few introductory comments. I have for some reason never gotten over a kind of childish stage-fright. Perhaps a year or two of honest teaching would have cured that. At any rate, I am looking forward to Carolina in the spring. The climate up here is fit for muskrats and the birds.
All the best,
Bill
TO RUST HILLS ‖w
February 9, 1959 Roxbury, CT
P.P.S. One typo I’ve noticed (my fault): on page 38, line 18, please change the word “But” to “Bent.”
Dear Mr. Hills,
Naturally one never gets everything worked out right in a telephone conversation. Since talking to you today I have had these minor afterthoughts about MS. On page 106–107, regarding your query about the construction of Line 8, I have consulted Fowler and find that he views this sort of thing as one of those cases where you just have to throw up your hands and say O.K., technically it is not right but let it stand.* So maybe we’d better let it stand. Another thing—pp. 114, 115—it is of course a good thing to throw out the references to the Kinsolvings, which you had marked. Please cut. Finally—p. 105—(and this is also something I wish to delete in the book MS) please change the name S.J. Perelman [note in margin: “P.S. besides, Gibbs is dead, so no problem for Esquire about invasion of privacy. Mainly, they’re sweet as she is, I have conceived of Rosemarie as one of those people who think of the New Yorker as a sophisticated Holy Bible, sweet as ‘it’ is.”] to Wolcott Gibbs. This is exceedingly minor, meant only as a small swipe at New Yorker–worshippers, but I don’t in any way wish to malign Perelman, whom I admire, while I couldn’t care less about Gibbs.
Only one other thing, I gather from the fact that you’re going to run my photograph and so forth you will have at least some kind of explanatory text to run along with it. I don’t know whether you have any intention at all of using any kind of critical reference, but in case you do, I have one for you which I received the other day which pleased me immensely. (This is the author blowing his own horn.) It was from the London Observer of Feb. 1, and the critic was Philip Toynbee, who I gather is one of the best in the Old Country.‖x At any rate, the quote was embedded in a review of Faulkner’s collected stories, in which he was discussing the fact that Faulkner was not only the first but “by far the best” of the “Southern school” of American writing. The quote is this: “William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness is the only other novel of this school which seems to me to be on a comparable level of achi
evement.” Actually, I really don’t consider myself of the Southern school, whatever that is, but I think the comment was a handsome one, and I rather immodestly hand it on to you, and won’t feel in the slightest miffed if you don’t use it.
Many thanks for your excellent help and comment, and I hope we will all be mutually pleased by the June issue of Esquire.
Sincerely,
William Styron.
* Fowler’s pitch seems to be that in a case like this the phrase “or merely the struggles of the day” has sufficient “rhythmical weight” to override the more grammatical “he.” (If I flop as a writer, I can always get a job as a grammarian.)
TO JAMES AND GLORIA JONES
March 24, 1959 Roxbury, CT
Dear James and Moss:
In the past six weeks I have been scouring the N.Y. Enquirer and all the other gossip sheets, including Leonard Lyons,‖y for news of you but found nothing, so I’ve decided to venture a communication in order that I may, perhaps, find out how you are first-hand. Your last letter was greatly enjoyed. The apartment sounds fabulous and you cannot know how much we envy you. Especially since we are at present concerned with such problems as: the spring running dry (this can cause a big stink in the house, but we finally got it fixed); Susanna filling up all the milk bottles, put out for collection, with jellybeans; the Plymouth V-8 station wagon catching a case of the clap, or whatever the hell else it is that causes it to use a quart of oil every 100 miles; the washing machine getting clogged with grease and running all over the kitchen floor; the maid sulky because we don’t call her “ma’am.” You people don’t really know how lucky you are. Also, you may be interested to know that the both of us, caught up in the grip of overpowering lust one winter night, got exceedingly careless, and we are going to have Scion #3 next August. I don’t know what possesses me to do such a thing; I am not a Catholic and it is certainly not (since I am secure in my virility) ego-gratification: it must be madness. Any way, I hope the two of you will for Christ sake get started along the same lines so I won’t feel like a complete fool about this thing. The worst thing, of course, is that it cuts out any hope of a trip to Europe this summer, you will just have to do the Portofino bit by your own selves, and we will curse you every minute. We are going to Martha’s Vineyard. Shit, do you really think He does care for us at all?
Selected Letters of William Styron Page 29