Selected Letters of William Styron

by William Styron

  February 22, 1971 Roxbury, CT

  Dear Vann:

  In regard to your reply to Mr. Stuckey’s attack on you, all I can say is that your patience, forbearance and good will are truly staggering if not monumental, and I don’t know how you do it.§PP

  In regard to Stuckey’s attack on the historians who have defended me, his statement that they implied everywhere “that Styron knows more than anyone else about how slaves perceived their experiences” is pretty pathetic since none of them—not Gene, not Duberman—would ever have been so foolish as to say any such thing. It is typical of the hyperbole and hysteria that every black intellectual has used when trying to lambaste me, and tends to undercut their already feeble position even more. Stuckey just doesn’t make the grade.

  A lovely time the other night. Hope for more soon.

  Right on!

  Bill

  TO PHILIP NOBILE§QQ

  June 9, 1971 Vineyard Haven, MA

  Dear Mr. Nobile:

  There were no hard feelings or differences of opinion involved in the fact that I have more or less stopped writing for The New York Review. It is simply because, although I am not averse to writing an occasional critical piece, criticism doesn’t really interest me too much and that is why my work has not recently appeared there. Although I find the Review often long-winded and boring, I think it is an invaluable publication and wouldn’t do without it.

  On purely personal grounds I am especially appreciative of the fact that the Review published the historian Eugene D. Genovese’s defense of The Confessions of Nat Turner against the black writers who attacked it, exposing their hysteric foolishness and paranoia for what it was. It was a bang-up job, and I don’t know of many other publications which would have given the piece so much space, or in whose pages the essay would have received such serious and valuable attention.

  Sincerely,

  William Styron

  TO DON CONGDON

  June 30, 1971 Vineyard Haven, MA

  Dear Don,

  There are a few things that I wanted to outline to you about the movie script which I didn’t go into over the telephone.

  In the first place, neither I nor my collaborator John Marquand feel as I do, say, about the script of Nat Turner. There I felt that the whole thing was so much under the domination of Wolper and his accomplices that I couldn’t really care less about how the movie turned out so long as I got that payment which you managed painfully to worm out of Wolper every January.§RR But with this new script we have a very proprietary feeling, a feeling based on the wish that this turn out to be as fine a movie as can be produced.§SS Had we not had this feeling, we would not have inaugurated the project. Nor would we have proceeded all on our own and upon complete speculation to finish it. Consequently we simply do not want to sell the script to the highest bidder and thereby lose control of the property. We want to participate in the production to the fullest extent possible in order that our vision of the story remain intact. This is what I do hope you keep in mind during negotiations for the property.

  While it is at this point, to say the least, premature to consider casting, you should know that concerning an actress to play the part of Ruth Snyder we have a very positive idea. We have written the part from start to finish around a particular actress, Dorothy Tristan, whom we both know well.§TT We hold her talents in high regard. We haven’t written a line for Ruth that we aren’t sure she can deliver splendidly. Indeed our identification of the actress with the part is so strong that it becomes difficult to imagine Ruth being played by anyone else. We mean to make the strongest possible pitch for Dorothy.

  Also I should tell you in greater detail the reasons for our very strong interest in Aram Avakian as producer. Avakian wants to buy an option on this screenplay. In order to insure our continued involvement in the project and our ability to influence the film to its final result, we believe we will not have a better opportunity than he has offered us. The most attractive aspect of Avakian’s proposal is that he, I and my collaborator will have in effect a tripartite control over the production. Our influence upon it is assured by the fact that decisions over content will be arrived at by majority vote between the three of us. And Avakian guarantees us against any “cut off” clause which could remove us from participation as screenwriters. I imagine we would be hard put to get such support from any other producer.

  Avakian does not consider that these assurances to me and John Marquand in any way deter his mounting of a production with the major film companies with which he has dealt and is currently dealing. Principal among these are Paramount and United Artists, and secondarily Warner’s and Universal. (None of us considers that the contact we have already established with Columbia Pictures mitigates the points I make above.) And Avakian accepts and welcomes these provisions, because he believes they will make his position stronger.

  More important is that we have the utmost confidence in Avakian and respect him for his talents. Already he has been of considerable assistance to us in the research and development of the screenplay. In that process we learned, to our satisfaction, that he shares our vision of the film and that he is determined to protect its integrity.

  We are so seriously considering this arrangement with Avakian that I am anxious for your opinion. At your early convenience, I can arrange for Al Avakian to talk to you.

  Sincerely,

  Bill

  TO PHILIP ROTH

  July 27, 1971 Vineyard Haven, MA

  Dear Philip:

  I ever so much enjoyed seeing you up here, and I have a confession to make. I adore your mustache and have had a single incredible fantasy: suppose I was a girl and you were going down on me with that mustache. What would it be like? Please destroy this letter.

  The other purpose of this letter. Our friend Dean Brustein was passed over this past year at the august Academy or Institute or whatever it is we belong to. I was not surprised since it is a tough thing I gather to elect critics and such, as opposed to so-called creative artists. Someone told me that Marianne Moore proposed a critic named Morton Dauwen Zabel 14 times and he never got elected.§UU Maybe it was his name. Anyway, I think we should keep trying. As you may remember, at your suggestion I nominated Bob last year and you were the seconder. There seems to be no rule as such, but an informal practice seems to be that in succeeding years the roles are reversed and one of the seconders becomes the nominator. I suppose this is to avoid monotony or a smell of the obvious. Anyway, I wonder if you would care to nominate Bob this year and write a modest little blurb for him.* I think that eventually he will surely make it if we are persistent enough. I enclose the nomination form. Then next year we can start on other critics. What do you think of John Simon? Richard Gilman? Clay Felker?§VV

  I really love your mustache but must now go to bed. Please write soon.

  Your admirer,

  B.S.

  * I of course will second him. (It has to be in no later than October First.)

  TO PHILIP ROTH

  September 4, 1971 Vineyard Haven, MA

  Dear Philip:

  Your letter arrived in the same mail yesterday as your MS of the Nixon book§WW from Jason,§XX and I appreciate both. I’ve not yet started on the MS but intend to do so soon, and you will receive my reactions. As for the review, I have my doubts as to whether I will be able to do it, and this has nothing at all to do with whether I like it—which I expect I shall—or maybe not like it so much, as with the fact that I still feel so far behind on this Marine novel that I don’t know if I’ll be able to borrow the time to do it. God damned reviews and essays—as you yourself know, they take as much out of good writers as anything else they write. For example, I worked so hard on the Calley review (and did this only because I have been fathomlessly fascinated with Calley and the grotesque response he has evoked) that I began to get the illusion that it was taking me months.§YY (As a matter of fact, it did take me more than a week, plus four days reading.) So, it will have nothing to do wi
th my response to your book, one way or the other, if I don’t review it. On the other hand, I would very much like to review almost anything you wrote (About very few other writers can William Styron Make That Statement) and you may very well find me, enmeshed in the toils and agony of criticism, doing it. And I hope for the Times.

  Your letter on Marriott was just fine, proving to me once again that writers, real writers (and a few oddballs like Rahv) are the only respectably penetrating critics.§ZZ Just about everything you said was dead on target, and I am really grateful to you for the almost uncanny wisdom of a couple of your observations. For example, your bit about the narrator’s attitude toward sex, and to his girl Laurel. It is one of the real hazards of excerpting in a magazine that parts of a piece may look contiguous or connecting when they really aren’t. For reasons of space, and also to emphasize and play up the Colonel, Esquire left out quite a long episode, which comes before the Jeeter business, where the narrator (hereinafter known as “I”) literally courts suicide every weekend by driving at mad speed to N.Y. with his friend Lacy for the sole purpose of fucking Laurel for about 18 hours without stop.‖aa It not only contains the sex you find missing, it is—given the corollary theme of doom and the possibility of death—fairly sex-obsessed, and it is one of my favorite parts so far. It will probably be published separately somewhere else before long. But what so truly impresses me about you as writer-critic (I don’t think a Kazin would have caught it) is your ability to so unerringly sense an aesthetic gap, a subtle vacuum in the narrative—and even to point out just where it should be filled. Fortunately, in the actual book it is filled.

  You even sensed the bit about the reference to the “obscene bulletin” from Laurel. Because Laurel is eliminated from the Esquire excerpt, the editors thought—wisely in this case, I thought—that the obscene letter from her would be obtrusive, and so it is the only passage (as distinct from a separate episode) that has been removed from the excerpt. But it is broadly sexual, a long fantasy of how she dreams of sucking his (excuse me, “my”) prick, and I think helps satisfy that missing element you so sensitively detect. As a matter of fact, there are several more of these letters—a kind of motif—all lewd, and I had as much fun writing them as you must have had with parts of Portnoy.

  There are a couple of places, though, where I did not anticipate you, and for which I find your remarks especially valuable. The vision of myself in bed fantasizing a sodomistic relationship and incest between the two Jeeters is a brilliant idea, and I’m certainly going to go back in the final draft and play with it, to strain a metaphor. The other place where I think you may have accurately divined a weakness is in the playing down of the truly idealistic side of my writer-self, with the consequent overemphasis on the theme of success. I’m not sure whether in the course of the remaining narrative I hadn’t been planning to do what you suggest anyway; but in any case your feeling about this lack, at this point in the story, is I feel absolutely right, and I’m grateful to you for expressing it, because I think it will spur me to subtly alter that part of the portrait.

  So, fine. It was truly good stuff you wrote, encouraging me for the really remarkable reasons you mentioned, and which I think only two writers, interchanging intuitions, could absorb or appreciate.

  Now to finish the motherfucker. Meanwhile, I will be addressing myself to OUR GANG, and with anticipation. And we must do New York together more than once this fall and winter, although the city has begun to sadden me beyond measure. After the funeral mass with you the other day, Loomis and I went to a porno film on 6th Ave.—the first hard-core flick, in living color, I’ve seen. I maintained about a ⅝ths erection throughout but two hours of all those throbbing cocks and slippery pink vaginas made me feel like Cato must have felt in the Roman mire, and I came out blinking into the bright light of 6th Ave. feeling very downcast about the future of Fun City or any of us.

  Keep the faith

  Bill

  TO JACK ZAJAC‖bb

  September 25, 1971 Vineyard Haven, MA

  Dear Jack:

  I held off writing you because I was awaiting final word on the African thing. Alas, it has had to be postponed, mainly due to the fact that our leader, Myles Turner, who would be essential to the trip, recently had a kidney operation in Arusha, Tanzania, and would be in no shape to go now.‖cc This doesn’t mean, however, that the trip is forever off; as a matter of fact, we’re already re-cranking up new plans for a safari in the same place as early as next February, when the weather should even be better than October. So do not lose hope altogether by any means, and I can assure you that if there is any possibility of getting you onto the trip I will do my damndest to help do it.

  Received your libidinous letter from Greece, which I shared with Rose and others, and also the flies which Tom is using joyously on our little stream down in Connecticut. Finally, I want to say how much I appreciate the dashing bush jacket, which is truly a groovy thing and in this slightly chilly autumn weather has caused me to set something of a fashion here on Martha’s Vineyard. Needless to say, it will accompany me to Nairobi.

  Little else to report at the moment except to say that to my utter amazement I find myself in the midst of writing a play, my first. I don’t know if it’s going to work, but I love doing it, since it is about my experiences on the V.D. ward of a Naval Hospital during WW II, and concerns such characters as an evil, moralistic urologist named Dr. Glanz and will have lots of dripping tools and the first full-scale short-arm inspection ever seen on the American stage. I hope you will come to the opening if, God willing, there is an opening—no pun intended.

  Rose is in Rox., while I labor here on the island. She tells me that your sculpture looks marvelous in the new big living room, and I’m anxious to see it. Susanna is in school in Lugano, incidentally, and I hope she’ll look you all up when she comes to Rome sometime later. Meanwhile, I’ll keep you informed as to my own trek to Europe, which I hope will take place soon, after I finish my dramatic sojourn in the clap shack.‖dd On this note, I send fond greetings to you all.

  B—

  TO PHILIP ROTH

  September 25, 1971 Vineyard Haven, MA

  Dear Philip:

  I have read OUR GANG and I think it is not only mostly hilarious but also a very important satirical document about a man who desperately needs this kind of treatment. It’s uncanny, I think, how well you’ve caught the tone of those droning evasions and fatuous half-truths put forth as “explanations.” Also your little extravaganzas are dead on target: the football skull session with the “spiritual coach,” etc., is worth the price of admission in itself. Indeed, each piece is, separately, so funny that I think you’re going to come in for a kind of criticism that you haven’t received before; namely, that this is the kind of book which really should not be read at one sitting, continuously, but should be savored at random and perhaps even haphazardly. That is the only criticism that I have, as a matter of fact: laughter is a difficult thing to sustain in one’s self for any great length of time, and this is a book which demands to be sampled. My friend Art Buchwald gave me a collection of his columns this summer. Most of the time, Art is an extremely funny man, but I noticed that in re-reading the columns in book form I was unable to go straight through. I think your book might have the same problem, which has to do with format rather than substance; but after all this comes down to being a voluntary matter on the part of the reader, and perhaps not ultimately important. What I really want to say is that it is a marvelously droll and trenchant book—an important exercise in political satire—and I trust it’s a winner in every respect.

  My own feelings about reviewing the book are rimmed round by the fact that I’ve just embarked, to my utter astonishment, on a play—doing something that I’ve never done before, not only the play itself but interrupting my Marriott novel to get it done. This play is about my infamous adventures in the clap shack during WWII, and it took off with such surprising speed and feeling of assurance (perhaps unwarranted but a
ssurance nonetheless) that it has preoccupied me entirely for the last ten days. Rather than interrupt the thought processes, I’d better stick with it, and that is the real reason why I would be reluctant to do the review. It might not be much compensation, but I’d be delighted to contribute a quote or anything of that nature—perhaps Jason would get in touch with me about it.

  Anyway, it’s a hell of a good book. You’ve removed Tricky’s clothes to let us see, in a kind of reverse-Emperor’s parable, what we’ve suspected all along: there’s Nothing underneath. So, many congratulations.

  Bill

  TO SUSANNA STYRON‖ee

  September 26, 1971 Vineyard Haven, MA

  Dear Sue:

  We certainly did enjoy your wonderful letter, written under a Lugano fig tree. I had great fun reading of your trials and adventures and am very, very happy that you are so happy. Pasta, as you well know, is a great temptation, and in that Italian-speaking part of the country a plate of fettucine must be truly superb (the Acapulco Gold of pasta); so I am especially glad and proud that you are resisting the temptation to go hog wild and turn yourself into a continental version of Rebecca Stuart.

  Since the school recommends a car, I see no reason why you shouldn’t get one right away. I do think, however, you should confine your driving to Lugano and immediate environs, at least for the next few months. As you know, I owe you an automobile, so it is entirely up to you what kind to get. A Rolls-Royce would be pretentious, an Alfa-Romeo is too fast. Any of those smaller cars you mentioned would be fine, but please try to keep the price down to a reasonable level by getting the straight, unadorned model which is not cluttered up with a lot of extras. Let me know what you decide and I will have the funds transferred to your bank there.

  We certainly miss you, and speaking for myself, I just ache every time I walk by the little house on my way into town and realize that you aren’t there but are 10 light-years away. But we’ll see each other before too long, even though the African trip was postponed—really mean postponed, too, rather than cancelled, because we still have definite plans to do the trip next year, perhaps as early as February. Guess what? I’m writing a play—a morbid, sad play about a military hospital during World War II. Anyway, it’s going very well and quite fast and if I’m lucky I’ll have it done by the end of October—at which point I expect to take a vacation and come to Europe. Naturally, I’ll come to Lugano and pay you a visit, and you can drive me around the country in that car I will have bought you. Parenthesis: Please always drive carefully; from past knowledge I know that the Italians, even if they be Italian-Swiss, are like Teddy Kennedy after a long night’s party, so you must constantly keep an eye not only on the road but on the other maniac. Do be careful.