I did not quote all this at such length in order to aggrandize myself, or out of insecurity. I have received since publication of Sophie literally hundreds of letters, in the same vein, from intelligent readers of roughly the same high literary standard of this woman. Aside from this, Sophie has received, generally speaking, the most favorable reviews (from critics I respect) of any of my novels. It has received (like all ambitious works) a certain amount of harsh criticism—but even most of this harsh criticism has been embedded in reviews which tend to regard the book as a good book with certain serious flaws. I take such reviews with good grace, since almost none of these reviewers approached the book with Aldridge’s built-in hatred and animosity; he is quite unique among his colleagues in regarding Sophie as a failure with no redeeming features. His crocodile tears shed for my hoped-for but unrealized success are laughable in their transparent dishonesty. He has been praying for my “failure” for years, and it must drive him half-wild to realize that he has been overwhelmingly outvoted.
But most of this is really beside the point, which is why I suggested that you are taking Aldridge much too seriously. The point itself is that Aldridge’s own credentials are by now seriously questionable and shaky. Writers have the right to scrutinize critics for their intrinsic quality, just as critics do writers, and by now Aldridge’s deficiencies as a literary arbiter are pathetically obvious. I hesitate to employ such an old cliché, but one really is tempted to ask: John W. Who? In even rather subtly savvy literary circles his name arouses no interest, rings no bell of recognition. It may be known that he is a sycophant of Norman Mailer, but that is about all. Well into his 50s he has not the shred of the reputation of his truly distinguished critical contemporaries: George Steiner, Hugh Kenner, Irving Howe—men who, unlike Aldridge, have illustrated the necessity of critics engaging our attention through a rich command of linguistics, history, philosophy, religion, sociology and other intellectual disciplines. There is no cerebral resonance in Aldridge, which is why he seems so provincial, so empty, so pompous, and why in the end he doesn’t matter.
But I do most heartily thank you again for your concern. Strangely enough, the once-great Harper’s has become the weird bellwether of philistinism (not, as its editor would like to think, the vanguard of intellectual inquiry), and Aldridge fits that philistinism like hand in glove. We need people like you to keep an eye on these dispiriting frauds, masquerading as the elite. For your thoughtfulness and effort, I am grateful.
Sincerely,
William Styron
TO LILLIAN HELLMAN
April 2, 1980 Roxbury, CT
Dear Lillian,
I returned from a week-long trip to Mississippi to find your letter. I am hastening to answer it, because I am afraid that the young Chink lady reporter with her single quote from me—“It’s unfortunate all around”—left you, and the general Times reader, with a sense of ambiguity which I certainly didn’t intend.FFF
Least of all did I intend my words in any way—in the slightest way—to be construed as an endorsement of Miss McCarthy’s sentiments. Surely you must know that. I found what she said about you to be as vicious, mendacious and appallingly tasteless as did most of the other people I’ve talked to about the matter. Certainly I have very little regard for Ms. M., personally or otherwise, in any case. I’ve only met her once or twice and was rather put off by her archness and smugness in each case. After Nat Turner appeared she made some very ugly remarks about my work which were quoted extensively in an Italian newspaper. So aside from being no fan of the lady, I was utterly repelled by the statement she made about you in public.
But, this said, I think it is “unfortunate” (and this is as strong a word as I would care to use) that you decided to sue this woman, as bitchy and outrageous as the statement was. The key complaint you have against me is embedded in your sentence: “I really don’t feel the anger I might have once felt about your lack of defense of me.” But the fact of the matter is this: you don’t need any defense. Let me tell you this: you are a fine and enduring writer whose work in several forms has touched millions of people, and whose life has stirred countless people, too. By contrast, La McCarthy is a literary careerist whose best creative work is distinctly second-rate or less, and whose critic work—always marred by cleverness, vindictiveness and an amazing amount of sheer bad writing—has already begun to look shopworn and dated. Against such an adversary you need no defense at all, save one: silence.
This is all that I believe to be unfortunate about your part in the matter: that you rose to her bait and allowed yourself to be encouraged to enter into a probably long and costly lawsuit (with a questionable resolution) rather than to shrug it off and refuse to get down to Miss M’s level. What she said about you was loathsome and, of course, in itself a lie but so outlandishly hyperbolic as to be absurd. Had she said—just for example—that you were a card carrying Party member until the year 1960 (or that you were a lesbian, or that you had committed a fraud) you would probably have a sound case. But the very grossness of her statement—I was about to say, a kind of sublime silliness—paradoxically protects McCarthy, since it is so ludicrous that it plainly defies belief. The few people I know who saw the show all felt that the statement, and the patently vicious way she uttered it, reflected far more tellingly upon McCarthy than upon you. That is why I think the lawsuit is “unfortunate.” It has nothing to do with my undying regard and affection for you.
I am glad that you took up my defense in the face of an attack from some other writer, whomever he may be, and I appreciate it, but I fail to see what it has to do with the matter at hand. It is only what I would expect from a good friend, but in friendship there should be no quid pro quos.
If I had bothered to answer the attacks on me (remember Nat Turner, when I was, in print and in public called a “Fascist,” “morally senile,” “degenerate,” etc?) I would by now be prematurely withered and spent. The trouble with you, I fear, is that you cannot accept the fact that you are really a wonderfully powerful and enduring writer. When, a number of years ago, Elizabeth Hardwick attacked you in a disgustingly gratuitous and mean-spirited way, many people, including myself, were appalled.GGG But I was profoundly disturbed at the extent of your disappointment in me—or resentment, or whatever—when I refused to join those who sprang to your defense in print. It was, God knows, no lack of loyalty that prompted my refusal but only an abiding feeling, then as now, that such insults, no matter how insufferable, are best endured in silence, and that we somehow begin to weaken our hard-bought integrity by lowering ourselves to battle with those who are demonstrably vicious or second-rate.
Naturally, I don’t except you to agree with any or all of the above, but I do expect you to believe in my fondest love for you which, despite falterings and differences, has never failed.
Bill
TO DONALD HARINGTON
April 2, 1980 Roxbury, CT
Dear Don,
It was good indeed to hear from you again. Also very interesting to hear that you’re in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was the first “big” city that I ever saw, at about ten or so, when I would come up to Fayette Co., Pa., to see my Yankee (mother’s) relatives. I thought it was unbelievable to be able to eat lunch in a department store (Joseph Horne’s), and the Liberty Tube was the first tunnel I ever traveled through. Also, I saw my very first stiff when a rakish older lad (about 15) took me to the Allegheny County morgue. Finally, my mother was a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh—must have been in its very early days, before the grandiose Cathedral of Learning. You’re in good hands.
Now as to Mailer—I’m holding you to your word not to be libelous—it is a dull story. We had been for several years, back in the Fifties, what I thought were known as good pals. He lived not far from here, in an old farmhouse in Bridgewater, and he and his wife Adele and Rose and I saw a good deal of each other. I thought our relationship was going along swimmingly. I admired Mailer and his work, and I knew that he liked me and admired my
own writing. Then one day, out of the blue (I can remember the date perfectly, March 13, 1958, because it was the day my daughter Polly was born), I got a perfectly shocking letter from Norman. He accused me point-blank of having made “atrocious remarks” about Adele, and in so doing betraying forever our friendship. He also said that if he heard any more about my slanderous ways he would beat the shit out of me. I thought at the time that there was no foundation in his accusation, and was horrible hurt; I really suffered. In all honesty now, come to think of it, I really may have said some remarks about Adele. She was very aggressive.… I probably remarked on this to some tattletale, who promptly got back to Norman. Hence his rage. But in the end (after the initial shock) I didn’t care. A true friend would not have written such a vicious letter, would have wanted to talk it out instead. So I finally said, Fuck it, and that was the end of our relationship. I’ve never really regretted it.
I hope the preceding can be of some use to you, though you must vow to be discreet and, as you say, forbearing, forgiving, etc.
I am in a terrible funk, having contracted an almost terminal bronchitis while sleeping for two nights in the Bilbo Suite (named after the late senator and demagogue) in the Governor’s Mansion in Jackson, Mississippi. Anyway my near terminal bronchitis is the result of having commenced smoking innocently at the age of 14 (all this data confirmed by the new Smoking Report of Surgeon General of the U.S.). I’m shooting to make 60, which is due to come along in a shockingly short time (I’m one year younger than Jimmy Carter who, according to The Washington Post, is spending his evenings reading Sophie’s Choice)—but if these fucking attacks continue to lay me under like they are now doing, I’ll be sleeping in HIS Bosom any time now.
I relished your reminiscence about John Irving. I’m sending you a copy of Sophie, autographed, by return mail. Stay in touch and Believe in Him.
Bill
Styron delivered the commencement address at Duke University in May 1980.
TO JAMES L. W. WEST III
August 18, 1980 Vineyard Haven, MA
Dear Jim:
You’re absolutely right about Daddy Grace, except that the interesting thing is that there were two prophets, and both were the inspiration for Daddy Faith.HHH The other Newport News impresario was the Elder Solomon Lightfoot Michaux and he had a rival temple in the Negro section of N.N. (generally known as Jefferson Avenue).III I never could get them straight except that they had a large influence in the town in those days—among the Negroes, that is. The city in the Thirties was close to 50% and Niggertown was sheer hell, with more knifings, cuttings and murders per capita than any city in the U.S. outside of (for some unknown reason) Chattanooga, Tenn. The district where most of the mayhem went on, incidentally, was called Blood Fields (not Bloody). Dr. Joseph Buxton, the surgeon who delivered me (and the father of my father’s second wife) had to go in there every Saturday night and sew up the victims. I saw the mass baptisms of both Daddy Grace and the Elder Michaux many times. They were held in the shallow water near the Little Boat Harbor, where the ferry to Norfolk docked (supplanted in the Fifties by a tunnel). Thousands of Negroes showed up from all over Va. & N.C. Tidewaters and I remember the Fox Movietone newsreel people also covered it. Quite a sight, all those black people (mostly women) in their white turbans and robes, hollering Hallelujah.
It would make a nice article and I hope you proceed with it. All goes well here, more or less, given our mortal condition on earth. Stay loose.
Yours,
B.S.
TO PHILIP ROTH
October 5, 1980JJJ Roxbury, CT
Dear Philip: This is our next president feeding America.KKK The Deeter attack on fags was fascinating and horrible. She may be our next Secretary of H.E.W., so watch your step. I’ve got to go to Dartmouth to be idiot-in-residence for the early part of this week but will get in touch for dinner soon.
—B.S.
TO WILLIE MORRISLLL
April 30, 1981 Roxbury, CT
Dear John: I doubt very much that I’ll be able to forge anything so elaborate as a complete inaugural address, but it may be that I can find the time for a few eloquent lines. If I can, I’ll do it, for it is plain that we cannot allow the mean opposition to even contemplate taking over a city which is a nice place to live largely because of your leadership. I find Fourex natural membranes, however, less abrasive than Trojans, and I hope I can expect a gross of such in recompense.MMM
Yrs ever,
Bill S.
TO WILLIE MORRIS
May 28, 1981 Roxbury, CT
Dear Willie:
Your Mississippi piece is absolutely splendid—so tellingly right and beautiful.NNN I’m proud of you for having written it for so many reasons. Not the least of these is the fact that once and for all it makes manifest the tremendous humanity of the state (and therefore, by indirection, the South in general), and wipes out forever any claim on the part of the North to moral superiority. But I also just loved the writing—the richness and the passion. It is a beautiful piece and will be read, I believe, for a long long time to come. (Life did a great job, too, in the presentation.)
The new president of France, Mitterrand, offered me and Arthur Miller round trip transportation by Concorde if we would come to his inaugural.OOO So we went, paraded down the Champs-Élysées, went to the Arc de Triomphe, had a drunken 2-hour lunch at the palace, got drunk, got laid, and now I’m back. Such adventures do not come without their price, though. Since I’ve returned I’ve been suffering from (at the outset, at least) the worst attack of gastritis I’ve ever had (horrible nausea for 48 hours which made me contemplate suicide), followed by bronchitis which is still pestering me dreadfully. Can the clap be far behind? All this to help usher in the first left-wing administration in a quarter of a century.
IT IS TIME TO SETTLE DOWN AND STOP THIS TRAVELING ABOUT.
Willie, thanks for Miss. piece again, and give my love to Dean and Larry. And do stay in touch, as usual.
Always,
Bill
P.S. The check for my Ole Miss show arrived in good shape.
TO IAN HAMILTONPPP
July 1, 1981 Vineyard Haven, MA
Dear Mr. Hamilton:
I saw Cal Lowell off and on during the years after I first met him—in Paris with Lizzie in the early 1950s—until the year of his death. I admired him enormously, always had great affection for him, and always wished I knew him better and saw more of him. He was enough my senior for me to be able to regard his response to my own work as big-brotherly, in the benign sense of the phrase, and I cherished the fact that he once told me that my The Long March was one of the finest short novels he had ever read. He could be painfully frank, though, telling me once that my novel Set This House on Fire had some very good things in it but was quite a bit too long (which it probably is).
One night back in the early 1960s—it was just before one of the episodes which led to his being put away in an institution—I recall listening to him rave in the most ferocious way about Stalin. I always believed Stalin was a monster myself and had no illusions, but Cal’s rage was obsessive and monumental; he said that by comparison Hitler was a saint, that no one in the history of the human race had committed such evil. I thought Cal was going to have apoplexy. I mention this only because his fury, in retrospect, seemed to be connected with the fact that only days later he was institutionalized. It was one of those strange, unsettling evenings that sticks in the mind.
I rather regret that my best and most sustained recollection of Cal is connected with a trip that he and Lizzie and I, together with several other American writers, took to the Soviet Union during the late spring of the year of his death (1977). The regret has to do with the fact that it was the last I ever saw of him. The writers’ conference we attended in Moscow was the joint effort of the Soviet Writers Union and an American outfit called the Charles E. Kettering Foundation, dedicated to furthering Soviet-American relations. Cal (and I think Lizzie) seemed as skeptical as I about the potential f
ruitfulness of the trip but it could be regarded as a nice all-expenses-paid-for junket to a new and fascinating country, so we set off in fairly good spirits. Before we got to Moscow I enjoyed seeing two examples of Cal’s disregard for convention—a nonconformity which I had seen him display before and which I really admired. Cal chain-smoked (I have little doubt that this contributed to his failing health) and on the Boeing 747 we were seated in the non-smoking section, although the smoking area had been requested. Cal smoked anyway, much to the annoyance and finally the fury of a non-smoker whose protests to the stewardesses were of no avail. Cal referred to this man contemptuously as an “environmentalist,” and kept smoking the entire way to Frankfurt, despite all efforts on the part of the staff to make him stop. I was rather tickled by his obstinacy; after all, it was Pan American which had made the mistake in seating, and he was standing by his rights.
Our group leader was a rather fussy bureaucrat from the Kettering Foundation who annoyed us all, but especially Cal, by his worry that the members of the group might exceed expense account limits in certain situations. We stopped over briefly in Frankfurt where we were housed at the very swank Frankfurterhof Hotel. There we were cautioned by the gentleman in question that, because of the expensiveness of the place, we should display caution and discretion in ordering, especially meals. This was offensive—after all we were grownups, even dignitaries of sorts, the Kettering Foundation was well-heeled—and no one was more insulted by the edict than Cal. To my great delight, Cal led a revolt in the restaurant and in clear sight of the man in charge ordered four of the most sumptuous and expensive bottles of white German wine that any of us had tasted. It was a clear victory of individual choice over bureaucracy.
But I began to detect a tired and melancholy strain in Cal. Before lunch in the bar of the hotel the next day we had Bloody Marys and I remember Cal speaking of Boris Pasternak, whose work he admired passionately; he said that he wanted to visit his grave, and spoke of death. “We all have one foot in the grave,” I distinctly remember him saying, though of course having no inkling then of what this might foreshadow.
Selected Letters of William Styron Page 56