TO CARLOS FUENTES
January 28, 1967 Roxbury, CT
Dear Carlos:
Many thanks for your New Year’s greeting card which just arrived by slow boat. It came at a propitious moment, since I have just finished Nat Turner and am passionately ready for a vacation. I hope I’ll be able to see you when I make my European landfall; right now, I tentatively plan to arrive in Paris around March 1st. Will you be there? I noticed that your card was from Courmayeur,‡ss but I seem to have lost your Paris address. If by the time I send this I haven’t found it, it will go c/o Mexican Embassy in Rome, and I’ll hope it gets to you.
I expect that I’ll stay in Paris a week or ten days, then Rose will be coming over to join me, along with a couple of my multitudinous offspring, and we’ll go down to Rome for a while—though I prefer Paris at that time of the year. I don’t think I’ll try Moscow now, although Yevtushenko who was here a few weeks ago almost broke my arm trying to get me to go. Basically, I think it’s simply a matter of eating Russian pickles when I could be having coq au vin.…
I’m looking forward to the Richeburg. Please turn out the Viet Cong flags at Orly, and if you get this letter before I write the Joneses tell them that Beelly’s coming.
Abrazos,
Bill
PS. I didn’t see the Lukács article, but if you’ve got a copy of La Quinzaine littéraire please save it for me.‡tt
TO ROBERT PENN WARREN
February 21, 1967 Roxbury, CT
Dear Red:
After many bumblings about, much confusion and Angst attending upon the completion of Nat, I have finally crystallized my head into some semblance of sanity and have decided to accompany the Warrens to Cairo—instead of copping out, as Rose I think told you I was doing in her last letter to you. Those pharaohs and things really seem irresistible, especially in the company of you all, so I have among other things written to Mr. Rodenbeck at the Univ. of Cairo to put me down too as a cultural emissary. I hope you will pardon my shilly-shallying and procrastination, but believe me it was book-end madness.
We won’t be able to come to Magagnosc, I’m afraid, but if it’s all right we’ll be meeting you in Rome on March 22nd or anytime after. Rose tells me to tell you that our hangout there is to be the Hotel de la Ville (next to the Hassler, you’ll recall) and that is where you’ll be able to get in touch with us. Then we’ll all take off for Cairo and the old Nile. I’m leaving here for Paris next Wednesday, March 1, and my address there will be c/o James Jones, 10 Quai d’Orléans, 4e. The telephone no. there is DANton 18-50 and you should be able to call with ease if you want to get in touch about the trip. And maybe I’ll be able to come to Magagnosc after all, if I can take off from the nit-picking last work on the MS. Rose will be coming over 8 or 9 days after I do.
Your poems which I read in leisurely fashion on a gorgeous Bahamian beach are still continuing to be the best and most beautiful you have ever done. I was enormously moved by them and I hope you will allow me to talk with you at length about them when I see you. The Valery poem strikes me as especially great, but all are wonderful and I treasure them.‡uu More about them anon.
Thanks for mentioning Marc Ratner to me.‡vv He has already gotten in touch with me about the book he is doing on me, and I have written him back saying that Random House would send him galleys of Nat when available.
First reactions to Nat are fine, not the least financially—the Book-of-the-Month Club just paid $150,000 for the book and that is quite a hunk of cash to earn off a slave’s black back. I hear it’s the highest they have paid for a novel. Anyway the book no longer feels a part of me, and I’ll be glad when this last minute nit-picking is done.
Best love to all and will see you soon,
Bill
TO HOPE LERESCHE
February 21, 1967 Roxbury, CT
Dear Hope:
First news first. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which of course is our most prestigious book club, has just bought The Confessions of Nat Turner for $150,000! This according to my sources at Random House is the largest sum they have ever paid for a novel (as distinct from non-fiction). Interestingly enough too, in order to get the book they had to outbid the Literary Guild, whose offer of $100,000 was the highest they had ever made for a novel until then. Am I right in assuming this might be intriguing grist for Tom Maschler’s mill? Needless to say, I am both flabbergasted and delighted and I just wanted you to know.
I got your letter and noted the number of galleys that you wanted, and of course will have Random House send them to you as soon as they are ready; this should be in six weeks or so. Publication date is not definite, but it will probably be in late September or early October.
On March 1st (next Wednesday) I am flying to Paris and will be staying for a couple of weeks with Jim Jones; I can be reached there. I am taking with me a Xerox copy of the edited and corrected manuscript for Michel Mohrt to read at Gallimard.‡ww This is the only thing I’ve done in terms of foreign publication and I hope it meets with your approval. It is mainly for Gallimard’s general perusal; naturally I will want them to print from the corrected final galleys. They are eager to get it translated, however, and publish simultaneously with the American edition, and this is OK with me.
Perhaps I’ll be able to come to England for a brief visit while I’m staying with Jim; if not, is there a chance that you might be coming to Paris? In any case, let us stay in touch. I hope I don’t sound presumptuous when I say that everybody in whom I have any confidence here feels that the book is going to be very big indeed, and I mean everywhere.
All best wishes,
Bill S.
TO C. VANN WOODWARD
April, 1967 Egypt
Dear Vann:
Traveling up the Nile to Aswan with the Warrens on an old paddle-wheeler that looks like the Robert E. Lee.‡xx Scenery is magnificent, the ruins unbelievable, the food somewhat deficient in everything except flies. Rose and I will be staying in Italy until early May. Our address is Hotel de la Ville, Via Sistina, Rome. Hope you had a good trip to Grenada.
Love to Glenn,
All best. Bill S.
TO ROBERT PENN WARREN
May 24, 1967 Roxbury, CT
Dear Red:
Well, we had a fine trip back to the land of the big PX, I sitting next to the most suave and elegant Italian I have ever met, a gentleman who had been (I observed) reading William James and who fell into discourse with me about chamber music. When he got off the plane in Lisbon he handed me his card, which revealed him to be the Italian manager of the Coca-Cola Export Corporation. He sure was a thousand miles from Babbitt.
That was a lovely week-end in Magagnosc, all too brief however, and the kids still talk about it over the breakfast honey I bought for 9 francs in that wonderful citadel on the hilltop. They talk about other things too—the Nile and Esna and roguish camel drivers. Surely it all was the greatest trip that anyone ever took. Rose went down to the Yale hospital and they checked her over and found that her leg was doing fine.‡yy It developed however that the accident caused a minor dislocation of the jaw—nothing serious but one necessitating the use of a support at night while she sleeps for several weeks. One bright note: the lawyer in Rome writes that the motorscooter culprit does have money of sorts and will pay for most of Salvater Mundi, which wasn’t cheap. Which reminds me, how is Eleanor’s indisposition doing?
The galleys of Nat are out, and if you haven’t received your copy from Random by now you should get it imminently. I have no word about reviews except that Francis Brown of the Times liked the book very, very much (a good omen?) and that our friend Vann Woodward is going to do a piece on it for, of all places, The New Republic.‡zz I wish the damn thing were out and published and over with.
We are off to the Vineyard around June 23 and hope you all will join us for some Atlantic sun when you come back from Port-Cros. Keep in touch, and give a warm embrace to all the family, including Lilly.
As ever,
Bill
; TO JAMES AND GLORIA JONES
May 24, 1967 Roxbury, CT
Dear James and Moss: Well, me and Rose are finally back in Connecticut, after having flown from Nice to New York via Barcelona and Lisbon. My seat mate was Jim Clark, the racing driver, and I learned a lot of things about automobiles that I never knew before.‡AA Now back in Roxbury, me and Rose have been playing a lot of tennis on our fine new court. Rose is still limping a little from her accident so I manage to beat her quite handily; otherwise I’d be up shit creek. Actually, Rose had her leg checked out at Yale hospital, and while they said that it would have been far better if the Guinea doctors had left the bruise alone and not operated, she was making a perfect recovery and everything (aside from a tiny scar) will be well.
I see by the paper that GTTW-M is on the best-seller list, which pleased us all.‡BB Everybody I know was upset by the nasty treatment the book got and at the same time I’ve heard some wonderful remarks about the book which pretty much give the lie to the critic-pricks. For one thing, the guy that owns the bookstore nearby in Washington, Conn., told me that he felt it was easily one of your strongest works and likewise the best novel he had read this year by far. He’s something of a cynic about books, too, and coming from him the comment is high praise indeed. I also saw Gene Baro at a party up in the neighborhood and he corroborated my own observation that, critics be damned, the general reader was reading the book and very much digging it.
I’ve got no news on my own lit. scene except to say that the galleys have come in and the book looks good. Hope Leresche has managed to wangle a nice big fat advance out of the Gallimard kikes, so that’s a help, and there is going to be an advance piece on the book in McCall’s next August—a magazine that goes to suburban matrons but which apparently sells books.‡CC Also Random House has projected a first printing of 75,000, which rather alarms me because I have a feeling that, despite all the good advance signs, the book may just fall flat on its face. But then that’s their tough luck, not mine.
We are staying here until around June 23rd and then are going to the Vineyard. What are you all up to this summer, especially with the Greek mess?‡DD We sure had a lovely time with you all doing Keblens, Basel, etc., and let’s do it again some time. I’ll probably be over in the fall, at which point I’ll get you to alert all the troops. Rose sends love to all as do I.
Bill
P.S. N. Mailer has a novel (on Lyndon Johnson) coming out the same week in OCT. as mine!!‡EE
TO ROBERT LOOMIS
June 9, 1967 Roxbury, CT
Dear Bob:
I thought I would pass on to you what Bob Silvers‡FF said about the book in a letter; it pleases me because it is almost the first expression of an understanding of what I myself thought I was trying to achieve.
“It seemed to me magnificent and marvelous, the best novel by an American in a great many years and one that will be read always. It is the kind of book that one cannot bear to break off reading and that leaves you sad because you will never have the chance to read it that way again. What it does is make one great part of the country’s history horribly and beautifully real in a way that had never seemed possible; and after one reads it one feels that one possesses and is possessed by a consciousness that has been lying in wait and now has come terrifyingly into the open, never to leave. So it seems to me we are all lucky that you wrote this book.”
B.S.
P.S. The jacket for Nat is perfect in my recollection. Don’t change a jot or a tittle!
TO ROBERT PENN WARREN
June 20, 1967 Roxbury, CT
Dear Red:
I’m delighted that you liked Nat and needless to say I will treasure your letter, which is as fine an appreciation of the work as I might ask. I do profoundly appreciate all you said, and I mean that.
The turn-down by Life does probably mean that they are going to run a piece of the book—at least that’s what my agent seems to believe. There is also the chance that they got someone else before you put in your bid, but this seems a little less likely.
I thought I had pretty much exhausted my biography in that letter but with fainting heart will try again.‡GG As for the Okinawa bit, I was not actually in combat there but was on my way there as a newly-commissioned Lieutenant in the Marines when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima; as a result, I am not quite as guilt-obsessed about Hiroshima as some people I know. As for writers that I re-read, I have (among the novelists) re-read Dostoievski and Conrad considerably, Faulkner to a lesser extent, and periodically re-read Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick. I’m a great fan of Orwell. Most re-reading I do, however, is probably in poetry—the Elizabethans, John Donne, and among the more modern poets Emily Dickinson, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, R.P. Warren—whose newest poems, especially ones like “Île de Port Cros: What Happened,” are among the finest done by a modern poet. Also I have read much of the Bible as literature, which I was saturated in as a youth in Virginia, also later on in college (fundamentalist Presbyterian). It must have been at the New School (which you queried me about, and which I attended in the late 40’s) that the Bible merged with a vague social consciousness, producing a cat like Nat Turner. Also music has been an integral part of my work. Without the rhythms and architecture and spirit of Bach, Telemann, Mozart, Handel, Beethoven I doubt that I should ever have gotten a line written. I live a fairly uncomplicated life. Did I quote you the motto from Flaubert I have had tacked for years near my desk? “Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your works.” Suits me to a tee.
Two days from now we are going to the Island so my address until mid-Sept. will be Vineyard Haven, Mass. We hope you will all pay a jolly visit as soon as you return from where the slow fig’s purple sloth swells.‡HH All love to all
Yrs ever,
Bill
TO ROBERT PENN WARREN
June 20, 1967 Roxbury, CT
Dear Red:
In re your questions from Munich:
1. My blood is Scotch-Irish and Welsh on my mother’s side, Yorkshire English on my father’s side by way of the Danish conquest. The name was originally Danish—Styring. My mother was from western Pennsylvania, my father from Tidewater Va. and N.C. region. I had grandfathers and uncles on both the Union and Confederate sides of the War between the States.
2. In regard to my connections with the Southern past, I got a big dose of it as a boy. My paternal grandmother was an old lady in her upper eighties in the late Thirties, but she had been born in the ante-bellum South, was born and raised in Beaufort County, N.C., a tobacco and cotton area on the Pamlico River. I never knew my grandfather (father’s father) but he had served as a courier during the War in one of the N.C. regiments. Was at Chancellorsville. My grandmother used to tell me about the two little slave girls which she herself had owned as a little girl just before the War. She told me how much she loved them and how well she treated them. One of the slave girls was named, so help me, Drusilla. As a boy I spent much time with this old grandmother of mine. Mainly during the summers I spent much time amid the small-town life of the Tidewater Va. and N.C. region, having all sorts of cousins spread about there. I went to a rural high school about ten miles up the James River from Newport News at a time when there was still a rural atmosphere in the area. I never actually lived on a farm or anything like that (I was raised in a village) but there was still enough real country around for me to get a lot of it in my bones.
3. I wish I could be more informative about the germ of the style and method I used in NAT, but I’m a bit vague. The “Confessions” might have had something to do with it, but it seems that I recall one day thinking (with the vision of Nat in the jail cell in my mind) that the only possible way to tell the story was from Nat’s viewpoint. I also noticed that few if any books by white men had ever been written from this black viewpoint, and—come to think of it—maybe this very fact caused me to try it, caused me to risk it.
4. “Fact-novel.” I would hazard the guess that
for some unknown reason there is a spirit in the literary air which is tending toward an interest in what actually happened vs. purely imagined experience, and somehow NAT falls into this category. It is an actual happening about actual people to which, however, I have had to bring considerable imagination to bear. The subject of Nat Turner is furthermore a lucky one in that so very little is known about Nat outside of the details of the revolt. Conversely, as I think I’ve said in talking to you, I doubt that anyone could write a very interesting novel (as distinct from biography) about John Brown, simply because of the plethora of known facts about the man. Nat Turner is just dim and unknown enough in history to make him fascinating as a subject for fiction.
5. & 6. As I may have told you, you can learn all there is to know about Nat Turner during a day’s leisurely reading. There is only the “Confessions” and Drewry’s book of 1900—The Southampton Insurrection. I have, however, read a great amount about the period, and I doubt if there is an important book on the ante-bellum South, especially connected with slavery, that I have missed. I’ve also read many plantation records; and the unpublished U. Va. Ph.D. thesis (which I showed you) on Gen. John Hartwell Cocke, upon whom I modeled Nat’s Marse Samuel, was especially valuable.‡II
The weather here on the Vineyard is sparkling. And we miss you all. Love to all and come home soon.
Bill
TO ROBERT PENN WARREN
June 26, 1967 Vineyard Haven, MA
Here is more info, as requested:
Nat Turner, according to his own “Confessions,” was born October 1, 1800 (same year and month, if I’m not mistaken, as John Brown). No one knows exactly where he was born, but it was somewhere in Southampton County, Va.
It is flat, typical Tidewater country with pinewoods and fields interrupted here and there by swampy lowlands with stands of cypress and gum and juniper. In Nat’s time, tobacco had all but vanished due to over-cultivation, and the farmers turned to cotton, which grows well there but not in the vast Mississippi-Delta-like quantities to make it a valuable money crop. In a kind of desperation they also turned to the cultivation of apples, and found a reasonably good market for cider and brandy in places like Richmond and Norfolk. Then too, of course, there were many pigs (Southampton hams were famous) which flourished off the abundant acorns of the region.
Selected Letters of William Styron Page 44