Your mention of Death of a Salesman prompts me to reflect on the fact that just last night in New York, I saw Arthur’s new play Broken Glass.†ppp As usual, it got savaged by the critics here but will probably be a big hit in London. Arthur is quite amusing about all this. I think he no longer expects the U.S. critics to give him so much as the time of day but of course he feels that so long as the Brits love him in the passionate way they do, he’s home free. It’s good to be loved somewhere.
A Tidewater Morning came out here last fall and did quite well for a slim book of stories but set no record on the best-seller lists—something I hadn’t expected anyway. The reviews were in general quite good and the book has been contracted for in all European countries except Germany, for some odd reason, where I really could care less about publication. Jim West remarked that the one review from England he saw—from, I think, the Sunday Times—may have been the single nastiest review he’s ever read about any of my work, including the Nat Turner garbage. Basically, though, reviews don’t seem to touch me in the way they used to; good, bad, or indifferently stupid, they just roll off my thickened hide. One piece of recent news is the fact that this year Random House will be bringing out Nat Turner in their beautiful new resurrected Modern Library. It’s a superb edition of selected books, all “classics,” and I’m happy to be a member of the club.
I’m also pleased to hear about your book, both mine and yours. The U.S. odyssey sounds like it could be enormously entertaining. As for the one on yrs. truly, I hope the tone is properly obsequious and you will treat me with the fawning deference I deserve. Incidentally, are you dealing with Darkness Visible? It’s astounding, the ripples that little book continues to create. Enclosed is a recent spin-off. I’ll be here in Rox. until June 1, then the Vineyard. Let me hear from you sometime.
As ever,
Bill
P.S. How is your offspring faring? Robust, I hope.
TO EDWARD BUNKER
August 18, 1994 Vineyard Haven, MA
Dear Eddie,
I called you the other day to tell you that (among other things) I looked at Reservoir Dogs and I thank you for digging it up for me.†qqq The summer has been so filled with weird social events that I wasn’t able to get to it until now, but I do appreciate you sending it. I agree with you that it isn’t terribly good but it has some remarkable stuff in it and represents, I guess, a mode of filmmaking in which violence is pretty much taken to the limit. Rose got up and left at the point where the cop was about to be burned up and didn’t come back even when I told her he was saved. I found the whole thing pretty gut-turning, too, but it was worth seeing and I thought you turned in a delightfully Bunkeresque (whatever that means) performance.
It looks as if the Clintons are on their way, which will make the social whirl even more horrendous. Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez are going to be here and a dinner is planned wherein, I suspect, García Márquez will be pushing Clinton for making peace with Castro. At least, that seems to be the idea at the moment. I look forward to the Clintons’ arrival with mixed fascination and dread. But I will probably take Hillary for a walk on the beach again—she is a good ole woman, as they say down South, and deserves compassion for having taken so much ill-deserved abuse.
The enclosed Modern Library edition of Nat Turner proves that I’m some sort of classic. I think it’s a beautiful edition. I can’t remember whether you may have read the introduction or not. Anyway, stay in touch.
Ever,
Bill
TO GEORGE D’ALMEIDA†rrr
November 2, 1994 Roxbury, CT
Dear George,
I am deep into your beautiful epic verse and enjoying it immensely. I have to take it in slow draughts—it is so rich—but the total effect is so far greatly moving, like certain music. It will sustain me through this chill November, and I thank you.
Many years ago—27, to be exact—I remember sitting in my Vineyard living room, with you present while I went over the jacket copy (finding mistakes) of Nat Turner. After all of the misery it went through, Nat is now reincarnated in The Modern Library, which I reckon establishes it as at least a minor classic (in the catalog it roosts between Laurence Sterne and Thoreau) and at any rate makes me feel that the book—if I may use the unpolitically correct allusion—has triumphed over darkness.
That was a lovely time seeing you guys on the Island—much better, I might add, than when the Clintons arrived, which had its nice moments but was also noisy and chaotic.
Love to all & stay in touch.
Bill
P.S. I hope you read the new introduction.
TO WILLIE MORRIS
November 29, 1994 Roxbury, CT
To: Willie
From: Stingo
Willie, you are about to enter into an amazing new phase in your life, take it from me, who has been in that phase longer than I would like to admit. It has been told that the distinguished Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, then in his late sixties, sent a telegram to a colleague on his sixtieth birthday which read: “Welcome to the great decade!”
Willie, Felix Frankfurter was off his rocker. Let me tell you, the sixties really suck. Your wiring and your plumbing begin to go haywire, things start to crack and leak—the name of the game is dysfunction. You will find that this is the decade of eroding religious faith, and you will lose the radiant belief that so sustained you as a Baptist from Yazoo City. No man, you will discover, can continue to profess devotion to a Deity who thought up anything so ludicrous as the prostate gland.
But there are wondrous compensations. You will discover that, with the waning of the old ardor, you will be overtaken by an even more intense love of dogs and children. You will continue to appreciate the joys of gastronomy, though there are only limited ways to give flavor to soft food. You will learn the pleasures of slow motion, like the three or four minutes to get out of the front seat of a car. And Willie, when you sense a deliriously lovely young girl eyeing you on the sidewalk, and you think of the old days when they used to fawn over you and ask you up for coffee, and then she asks you if she can help you across the street—then you know that age itself is a glorious compensation, and that respect is a more beautiful attribute than anything so tawdry as lust.
But mainly, Willie, as you enter Felix Frankfurter’s grisly decade, take comfort from the supreme knowledge that you have the abiding love of your friends, not only here in Connecticut, where Rose and I and Dinah and Tashmoo are thinking of you, but throughout the world—literary and otherwise—where your name is honored as an imperishably lovely writer and one of the indisputable life-enhancers of our time. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
TO PETER MATTHIESSEN
February 7, 1995 Roxbury, CT
Dear Peter,
You were incredibly brilliant the other night, what with your orotund and enormously effective declamation of my rich beautiful prose, not to speak of your oleaginous and, I might add, entirely justified praise of my work—I just wanted to say how grateful I am for laying it on with the moving thickness I deserve.
Also I’m greatly pleased that Mr. Watson proceeds at such a happy pace—keep me informed of progress.
And let us reunite in some fine sociable way very soon.
As ever,
Porter
TO PETER MATTHIESSEN
March 17, 1995 Roxbury, CT
Dear Peter,
I know there are no words to help assuage the bottomless pain that you and Luke and family are feeling, but I did want to say that I’ve been thinking of you constantly.†sss There’s very little I can do, I know, but you helped me through my darkest times, and if there’s any way I can help you at this moment I am here.
We send love to all of you
Porter
TO ROBERT L. BYRD†ttt
April 10, 1995 Roxbury, CT
Dear Bob,
I thought that the enclosed book should be put among my papers, since it is an important work relevant to The Confessions of Nat Turner.†u
uu The attached letter from Magda Moyano will partially explain it.†vvv
Until she sent me this thesis on John Hartwell Cocke, I had reached an impasse in the writing of Nat Turner. After I read the work, the outline of the rest of the book became clear: I would use John Hartwell Cocke as a model for Nat’s master, Samuel Turner, and also use Bremo Plantation as a prototype for the kind of environment Nat would be reared in. The book proceeded well and smoothly after I made that decision, but it really did require the serendipitous acquisition of this work by Coyner to make the breakthrough.
I thought it would be a good addition to my collection.
Best regards,
W.S.
TO PHILIP NOBILE†www
April 10, 1995†xxx Roxbury, CT
Dear Mr. Nobile:
Your lengthy letter deserves a lengthy reply.
I think I have tried to face up to the sins of our culture, to use Garry Wills’s term, as well as any American writer.
But there are so many pious and hypocritical points of view suggested in your letter—from those of the Pope and the Church to that of the ignorant and misinformed Eisenhower to that of the admirable Garry Wills—that I find it hard to adequately express my contempt for the idea of apologizing to Japan, much less explaining the many reasons why such an apology would be outrageous—the most important being that the lives of thousands of potential invading troops on the mainland of Japan (myself included) were almost certainly saved by the dropping of the atomic bomb.
Despite the Emperor’s sanctimonious “deep sadness,” the Japanese have never officially apologized for their appalling atrocities against civilians in Asia and against Allied prisoners of war, scores of thousands of whom died in conditions approaching those of the Nazi concentration camps, and whose ordeal has recently been definitively chronicled in Prisoners of the Japanese by Gavan Daws.†yyy By contrast, the Germans have admirably confronted their Nazi past, and Americans have dealt soul-searchingly not only with slavery and our sins against Native Americans but also with our criminal war in Vietnam, culminating at this very moment with the remarkable confessions of Robert McNamara.
The Japanese have steadfastly refused, as a nation, to accept guilt for their recent history (this has been scathingly documented by Ian Buruma in The New York Review of Books), but until they do, our future, and theirs, will be in danger.†zzz I am convinced from the evidence that the Japanese were not ready to surrender, and that, tragic as it was, the dropping of the atomic bomb was a historical necessity. But even if this were not so, there would be a need for Japan to accept blame for its atrocious past (of which Pearl Harbor was only a small component), and that they have not done so remains a moral outrage and an offense to humanity.
Sincerely,
William Styron
TO EDITOR, The New York Times
April 23, 1995†AAA Roxbury, CT
To The Editor:
In “Mr. McNamara’s War” (editorial, April 12) you savagely attack Robert S. McNamara’s acknowledgment of error in Vietnam as “prime-time apology and stale tears,” declaring that he “must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen.”
No mea culpa deserves such contempt. It is true that his comes late—very late—but it should be saluted, not scorned. This country can never be truly reunited until the Vietnam wound is closed. Mr. McNamara, by his admission, has taken a long step toward the healing. What he needs now is company. The presidents of those years are dead, but most of the other warlords are still among us. Let’s hear from them.
You state: “Fifty-eight thousand Americans got to come home in body bags. Mr. McNamara, while tormented by his role in the war, got a sinecure at the World Bank and summers at the Vineyard.”
These are the facts. Robert S. McNamara became Secretary of Defense on Jan. 21, 1961, and resigned on Nov. 29, 1967. On Jan. 19, 1968—nearly two months later—the United States high command reported the total number of Americans killed in Vietnam as 16,459.
Our bloodiest years in Vietnam lay ahead. By the end of 1969 there would be 39,893 dead. Your final figure is correct: 58,135. But that was more than six years after Mr. McNamara left the Pentagon. So if it was Mr. McNamara’s war, was it not also Mr. Rusk’s? Mr. Bundy’s? Mr. Clifford’s? Mr. Rostow’s? Mr. Laird’s? And—last, but certainly not least—Mr. Kissinger’s?
As writers we have always taken a solemn view of our responsibilities as Americans. Fifty years ago we served in the United States Marine Corps. We vigorously denounced the war in Vietnam—though never the brave men who fought there—and we openly, often bitterly, disagreed with all who were prosecuting it, including Mr. McNamara.
We welcome his acknowledgment that the United States was wrong then, believing that America can never be damaged by an act of contrition, and we invite all those who stood with him to join him now on his knees.
William Styron
William Manchester
TO PHILIP ROTH
June 21, 1995 Vineyard Haven, MA
Dear Philip,
I’ll certainly refrain from any contact with the press in regard to your book, as per your request. After reading the New Yorker excerpt, which was splendid, I’m looking forward to the whole thing—I’ve got the bound galleys here and I’m sure the rest of the text will live up to the terrific New Yorker sample.†BBB
I appreciate your birthday note. Oh God, it’s hard, hard—I mean, it’s not really hard, or as hard as it used to be, and that’s the trouble although to be quite honest I’m rather pleasantly surprised that I’m not yet ready to be fitted for an implant. Maybe just some kind of brace.
Stay in touch.
Your buddy,
Bill
P.S. While cooking fried chicken the other night Daphne mused wistfully about you. I think she wants some dick, like the old days.
P.P.S. You might want to look for a long memoir of mine in The New Yorker sometime before long. It’s a non-fiction version of the ordeal I memorialized in that play “In the Clap Shack.”†CCC
TO PETER AND MARIA MATTHIESSEN
July 7, 1995 Roxbury, CT
Dear Peter and Maria,
Thanks from my heart’s bottom for the splendid pen recorder which Al delivered to me safely. Now on my walks with my beloved poochies I’ll be able to record some of the aphorisms for which I’m famous (“Cogito, ergo sum”; “virtue is its own reward”; “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” etc.), and have them at hand hot for the typewriter and posterity.†DDD It is my finest birthday present—even surpassing an inscribed copy of Newt Gingrich’s 1945 (which he was honest enough to call a “potboiler).”
Love and stay in touch
Porter
TO C. VANN WOODWARD
January 1, 1996 Roxbury, CT
Dear Vann,
Charles Joyner asked me to be present at Coastal Carolina Univ. later this month to be on stage with you for a conversation about Southern matters.†EEE I told him that I’d be glad to do it if I can work out the right dates. Since I’ve got to give a talk in Orlando, Fla., on January 24th, the best date for me would be Jan 25th-26th. Would this be convenient for you? Please let me know.
In that fine essay of Joyner’s on Nat Turner, which you gave me, he made the point that David Walker’s famous Appeal expressed rage and hatred at black people not because they were black but because slavery had so profoundly degraded them. This love-hatred motif was something I tried to express in Nat Turner but apparently our Nobel laureate, Ms. Morrison, has not been able to perceive that. Enclosed is some more of Ms. Morrison’s wisdom.
Happy New Year,
Bill
TO MIA FARROW
January 16, 1996 Roxbury, CT
Dear Mia, When you get this I will be, God willing, asprawl on the sands of Anguilla (thinking of you in a snowdrift. Ho! Ho! Ho!).
I’m enclosing Toni Morrison’s statement about my Nat Turner, along with a page from a very long essay on my book that will soon be published b
y Charles Joyner, a distinguished historian of slavery.†FFF You will see that he quotes Eugene Genovese about the matter that Toni Morrison chokes on. I think it explains the whole thing very well.
I’ll be back in 10 days or so and will call you for another walk, dinner, whatever. Stay warm.
Love,
Bill
TO MIKE HILL†GGG
August 6, 1996 Vineyard Haven, MA
Dear Mr. Hill,
I’d be glad to participate in your film on Apollo 8, which sounds exciting indeed, and I thank you for the invitation.
The essay in question was the introduction to a book of photographs taken by various astronauts on several flights.†HHH This book was published at least 10 years ago by, I believe, the firm of Clarkson N. Potter and was edited by my friend Carol Southern, who now has her own imprint under her name at Random House. Oddly enough, I’ve forgotten the name of the book (the copy I have is in my house in Connecticut) and I’d also forgotten that the essay had been reprinted in Final Frontier. If you have a copy of the full essay, that’s fine. I mention the publishing history of the piece only to point out that the original could be found in that book and, I’m sure, located by contacting Carol Southern at Random House.
In any case, as I say, I’d be quite willing to read the essay for you. I’ll have considerable free time here on the Vineyard this summer, and will probably be back in Connecticut by mid-September and will have time there, too. What I guess I’m saying is that I’m flexible and can, within reason, tailor my time to suit your schedule. I think the best thing might be for you to telephone me here on the Vineyard so that we can set up a time.
As you can tell, I was incredibly moved by that mission and so I’m very happy to be able to help you out.
Sincerely,
William Styron
TO GAVIN COLOGNE-BROOKES
August 29, 1997 Vineyard Haven, MA
Dear Gavin,
I’m sorry to have been out of touch for so long but your kind letter gave me an opportunity to re-establish lines of communication. I hate to say it, but I’ve gotten so accustomed to telephones and faxes that letters are becoming a bit strange to me; I gather that’s a fairly common symptom nowadays.
Selected Letters of William Styron Page 63