d Published as “The Long Dark Road” in the March 1944 issue of The Archive and reprinted in One and Twenty: Duke Narrative and Verse, 1924–1945 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1945), which collected the writing of William Blackburn’s students. The story is reprinted in West, ed., William Styron: Letters to My Father.
e Leon Edwards, a childhood friend of Styron’s from Virginia. As Styron wrote to Mattie Russell on November 20, 1980: “Dr. Edwards was killed in a plane crash in 1979 and these letters were sent to me by his widow. I think that some of the letters might be of interest because they were written while I was writing Lie Down in Darkness and Set This House on Fire. Edwards was also trying to write fiction and some of the letters from me are in response to his requests for criticisms. Edwards was an almost exact contemporary of mine, we were in high school together in Virginia, and when he was going through Harvard Medical School I was in a position to lend him money enough to complete his education. Some of the correspondence deals with this matter but I think most of the interest has to do with my own reflections on writing my early work.”
f Claude Kirk, governor of Florida from 1967 to 1971, was eventually a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
g Schuman’s Prelude for Voices (1939). These are the opening lines of Thomas Wolfe’s 1929 novel.
h Styron’s “The Long Dark Road.”
i Urbanna, Virginia, was the biggest town anywhere near the Christchurch School.
j “Sun on the River,” appeared in the September 1944 Archive and is reprinted in William Styron: Letters to My Father.
k Styron was probably reading George McLean Harper’s William Wordsworth: His Life, Works, and Influence (London: John Murray, 1916). Wordsworth’s “The Two Thieves, or The Last Stage of Avarice” is based on this story.
l This novel does not survive. Christopher Morley’s Kitty Foyle, a 1939 bestseller, was narrated by a working-class woman from Philadelphia. James Hilton’s 1934 Goodbye, Mr. Chips was set at a British boarding school.
m Styron wrote about his hospital experience in the play In the Clap Shack (New York: Random House, 1973) and in the essay “A Case of the Great Pox,” The New Yorker, September 18, 1995, reprinted in Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays (New York: Random House, 2008).
n Styron misattributes to Santayana the statement of Karl Marx, “Religion is the opium of the people.”
o William Blackburn was a renowned literature professor at Duke University who helped create the school’s creative writing program. He mentored Styron as well as the writers Mac Hyman, Reynolds Price, Fred Chappell, and Anne Tyler. Styron said of him: “He possessed that subtle, magnetically appealing quality—a kind of invisible rapture—which caused students to respond with like rapture to the fresh and wondrous new world he was trying to reveal to them.… He was unquestionably a glorious teacher.”
p Styron’s stay in Parris Island V.D. Hospital.
q Barbara “Bobbie” Taeusch was a classmate of Styron’s at Duke, a student of William Blackburn, and one of Styron’s first serious girlfriends.
r Officer Candidate School.
s James V. Forrestal (1892–1949) was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Navy from 1944 to 1947.
t Blackburn replied to Styron, Sr., on January 19, 1945, “I know you are proud of William, especially since, as you say, he has chosen to be so tight-mouthed about his literary efforts. Having seen him come a long way in these efforts, I am proud of him too. He is one of the very few students I’ve had in the past fifteen years about whom I was pretty safe in saying, ‘You can become a writer if you want to be.’ ”
u “Composition” was a seminar in creative writing.
v Styron had hoped to finish his degree at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill but graduated from Duke.
w Blackburn sent copies of One and Twenty to several editors in New York, including Hiram Haydn, who had taught English at the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. Styron’s “Autumn” and “The Long Dark Road” appeared in One and Twenty. Styron received letters from John Selby, an editor at Rinehart, and Haydn, who was then an editor at Crown. Haydn became Styron’s first New York mentor and the editor of Lie Down in Darkness, which was published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1951.
x Styron’s mentor, William Blackburn, who had urged Styron to apply, was a Rhodes Scholar and a member of the North Carolina selection committee. See Styron, “Almost a Rhodes Scholar,” in the 1993 edition of This Quiet Dust.
y Styron finished his degree under the G.I. Bill (Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944), which paid college expenses and provided fifty dollars a month in pocket money for unmarried veterans of the war. Styron’s checks were issued by the Veterans’ Administration (“V.A.”).
z This letter was written to Warren when he was a member of the Department of English at the University of Minnesota.
A Ecclesiastes 12:12.
B Ashbel Brice was an instructor in the English Department when Styron was at Duke. He served as director of Duke University Press from 1951 to 1981.
C Styron was working as an editor at Whittlesey House, an imprint of McGraw-Hill.
D One of the manuscripts Styron tossed aside was the international bestseller by Thor Heyerdahl, Kon-Tiki (New York: Rand McNally, 1950). Styron recalled that neither he nor his colleagues thought anyone would read the book.
E Pitkin’s Life Begins at Forty was published by Whittlesey House in 1932.
F Metropolitan Life Insurance Company built this enormous complex of low- and middle-income housing in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Styron never lived there.
G Carter Glass (1858–1946), a native of Lynchburg, Virginia, and Secretary of the Treasury under Woodrow Wilson.
H Greet was another writing pupil of William Blackburn at Duke.
I Styron refers to Blackburn’s students and aspiring writers Mac Hyman and Guy Davenport. Mac Hyman (1923–63) was born in Cordele, Georgia, and was a fellow pupil of Blackburn at Duke. His novel No Time for Sergeants was published by Random House in 1954. Another novel, Take Now Thy Son, was published in 1965. After his untimely death, Professor Blackburn put together a collection of his letters, Love, Boy: The Letters of Mac Hyman (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969). Guy Davenport (1927–2005) was a prolific poet, writer, and translator, a Rhodes Scholar and MacArthur Fellow. He eventually published twenty-two original works of fiction and poetry along with a dozen major translations.
J Edward C. Aswell became editor in chief at Whittlesey House in September 1947. He was Thomas Wolfe’s editor at Harper and Brothers in the late 1930s and assembled three posthumous volumes of Wolfe’s writing: The Web and the Rock (1939), You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), and The Hills Beyond (1941). Aswell was fictionalized as “The Weasel” in Sophie’s Choice (New York: Random House, 1979).
K Edgar Hatcher ended up working in advertising. He was Styron’s roommate in 1947. Bobbie Taeusch worked at Union Carbide during this period.
L Robert Loomis (b. 1926), a classmate at Duke who was Styron’s editor at Random House for nearly fifty years.
M Davenport’s first novel, Effie Garner, never appeared in print.
N Dorothy “Didi” Parker, later Dorothy Parker Maloff, one of Styron’s colleagues at Whittlesey House. Parker (not to be confused with the Algonquin Round Table founder of the same name) was married with a son when she and Styron began a relationship. Styron nearly married her in the spring of 1951, but his travels in Europe seem to have short-circuited that plan.
O Styron refers to his story “A Moment in Trieste,” which was eventually published in the anthology of New School writers, Don M. Wolfe, ed., American Vanguard (New York: Cambridge Publishing Co., 1948), and reprinted in William Styron: Letters to My Father, 205–10.
P Styron’s maternal grandmother, Belle Abraham, left money in her will to Styron and his father. Styron used this experience for the story of the slave Artiste in Sophie’s Choice.
R “A Moment in Trieste.”
S John W. Aldridge, “The New Generation of Writers: With Some Reflections on the Older Ones,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1947. Aldridge (1924–2007), writer and literary critic, best known as author of After the Lost Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951). Along with Vance Bourjaily, Aldridge edited Discovery No. 1, which published Styron’s novella The Long March in February 1953.
T Styron’s father sent him Ellery Sedgwick, ed., Atlantic Harvest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1947), which included writing by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, Alfred North Whitehead, Ernest Hemingway, and D. H. Lawrence among others.
U Thomas Peyton III was Styron’s best friend from the Christchurch School. The two were friends for their entire lives. Styron’s only son, Thomas, was named after Peyton (as was the protagonist of Lie Down in Darkness, Peyton Loftis). Styron wrote to him on November 24, 1959, about Tommy: “Like his namesake, he is mean as the devil and ugly and very loud.”
V During the storm, Styron first read Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946). He recalled the experience, and the influence of Warren’s novel on Lie Down in Darkness, in “Robert Penn Warren,” in This Quiet Dust and Other Writings.
W Barbara was the daughter of Commander and Mrs. Raymond B. Bottom of Newport News. Her father was the owner of the Newport News Daily Press. Styron based the character of Peyton Loftis in Lie Down in Darkness in part on Barbara.
X Styron was working on Inheritance of Night, the early version of Lie Down in Darkness.
Y Styron attached a mixed review from the March 28, 1948, The New York Times Book Review as well as more positive ones from the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, The New York Times, and the Herald Tribune.
Z Latin for “a healthy mind in a healthy body.”
*a An expression meaning to cause a stir in a quiet setting. A dovecote is a small compartment for domesticated pigeons.
*b Ashbel Brice’s apartment near Duke’s East Campus.
*c Suzie was one of Styron’s girlfriends in New York. Switzer was a friend from Duke, but Styron shared the apartment with Bill Snitger, who worked at a radio station in Durham.
*d Patton (1906–2000) was one of the first professional writers whom Styron knew socially. Her stories appeared in various magazines, including The New Yorker, McCall’s, and Ladies’ Home Journal; her novel Good Morning, Miss Dove was published in 1976. Her best short fiction is collected in Twenty-Eight Stories (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1969).
*e Styron refers to Bliss Perry, A Study of Prose Fiction (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902).
*f This story does not survive.
*g This letter was written from the family home of the de Limas. Agnes (“Aggie”) was a progressive journalist, editor, and educator. Agnes and her daughter, Sigrid, befriended Styron at the New School. Sigrid was a girlfriend of Styron’s and became a novelist in her own right. Bill dedicated Lie Down in Darkness to her.
*h The guitarist and ex-convict Huddie William Ledbetter (1888–1949) did not die until the end of the year. The records Styron described were some of Lead Belly’s first recordings for Columbia Records in the 1930s.
*i Styron refers to Sigrid de Lima’s first novel, Captain’s Beach (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950).
*j Styron’s father had offered to send him $100 a month.
*k This was Styron’s imagined novella about his Hart’s Island experience.
*l Anthony Trollope (1815–62) was one of the most successful and prolific authors of the Victorian era. He claimed to have written every morning with a watch open at his elbow. After exactly one hour, he would board the train to earn his living as a postal inspector. Although he was widely criticized for his mechanical approach, it turned out that Trollope only claimed to follow such a strictly regimented routine.
*m This is Styron’s first mention of his distaste for critics, a major trope in his correspondence over the following fifty years.
*n Blackburn had separated from his first wife.
*o William Canine was a member of the “West Durham Literary Society,” an ironically named group Styron socialized with during his months in Durham while taking refuge from New York and getting started on Lie Down in Darkness.
*p In the fall of 1949, Lord Talbot de Malahide discovered several thousand pages of unknown manuscripts by James Boswell (1740–95), the eighteenth-century biographer of Samuel Johnson. Yale University eventually purchased the papers for its renowned collection of Boswell materials.
*q “The Enormous Window” was first published in Charles I. Glicksberg, ed., American Vanguard (New York: Cambridge Publishing Co., 1950), and reprinted in William Styron: Letters to My Father.
*r Eudora Welty (1909–2001) was an author best known for writing about the American South. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1972 novel The Optimist’s Daughter.
*s Samuel Putnam, ed., Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote de la Mancha (New York: Viking Press, 1949), and Justin O’Brien, ed., Journals of André Gide (London: Secker and Warburg, 1948).
*t Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922).
*u This story does not survive.
*v Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln: The War Years, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1939) won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1940.
*w Styron begins to quote “Love conquers all,” immortalized by Caravaggio’s painting and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, among others.
*x McIntosh, Robert Penn Warren’s agent, helped establish the literary agency McIntosh & Otis, which represented Hiram Haydn, John Steinbeck, John Irving, and many others.
*y Agnes de Lima.
*z Hill Massie and Dorothy Conway, friends from Durham.
*A The de Limas’ home in Valley Cottage, New York.
*B Styron’s abbreviation for “Sweet Baby.”
*C Maloney was a fellow writer and student of Hiram Haydn at the New School. Haydn’s recollections of him appear in Words and Faces (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).
*D Leonard McCombe, “The Private Life of Gwyned-Filling,” Life (May 3, 1948).
*E “Ars longa, vita brevis” are the first two lines of an aphorism by Hippocrates: “Art is long, life is short.”
*F “Hiroshima, U.S.A.,” Collier’s (August 5, 1950).
*G Styron claimed to have read Gide’s journals in a January 19, 1950, letter to Leon Edwards.
*H Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82), English author whose works include Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk—the source of the title Lie Down in Darkness. The relevant passage is quoted in Styron’s letter of April 17, 1951, to William Blackburn.
*I Two trains collided on the Long Island Rail Road on November 22, 1950. Seventy-five people were killed and close to one hundred injured. See “Cars Telescoped: Hempstead Train Halts in the Path of One Going to Babylon,” The New York Times, November 23, 1950.
*J A serious storm hit New York on November 25, 1950. See “Floods Rout Many,” The New York Times, November 26, 1950.
*K Styron had remained in the Marine Corps Reserve and was eligible for recall in Korea.
*L Montemora was one of the women Styron used to create Sophie Zawistowski. She was the daughter of the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski.
*M Bobbs-Merrill made significant alterations to Peyton Loftis’s interior monologue, deleting words and substituting others. See Styron’s essay “ ‘I’ll Have to Ask Indianapolis—’ ” in his Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays (New York: Random House, 2008). Arthur D. Casciato examined these cuts in “His Editor’s Hand: Hiram Haydn’s Changes in Lie Down in Darkness,” in Arthur D. Casciato and
James L. W. West III, eds., Critical Essays on William Styron (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982).
*N Allen Tate (1899–1979) was a poet and essayist who helped form the Fugitive literary group as well as the Southern Agrarians. Van Wyck Brooks (1886–1963) was a literary critic and biographer best known for The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
*O Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) was a writer and literary critic who authored many books, including Patriotic Gore (1962). Louis Kronenberger (1904–80) was a writer and critic who wrote and edited dozens of books over his long career. Budd Schulberg (1914–2009) was a screenwriter, television producer, and novelist, best known for his Academy Award–winning screenplay for On the Waterfront. Lionel Trilling (1905–75) was a prominent literary critic and major contributor to the Partisan Review. Alfred Kazin (1915–98) was a writer and literary critic. Joseph Wood Krutch (1893–1970) was a writer and critic who wrote several important biographies and works of criticism. Mark Van Doren (1894–1972) was a poet, writer, and critic who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1940. John Phillips Marquand (1893–1960) was a writer best known for his Mr. Moto spy novels who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1938. There were no quotations from any of these on the cover of the first edition of Lie Down in Darkness.
*P Styron used the delay Hiram Haydn arranged to finish Lie Down in Darkness.
*Q Job 19:23–24. “Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever!”
*R Along with Jonathan Cape (and later Robert Haas), Harrison Smith was William Faulkner’s publisher beginning with The Sound and the Fury (1929).
*S J. Donald Adams (1891–1968) was a book critic and editor, best known for his edited collections of poetry and prose.
*T Styron refers to the British poet and literary critic Matthew Arnold (1822–88) and his poem “Resignation.”
*U Styron’s nickname for Peyton.
*V Texas Tech University.
*W Browning automatic rifle.
*X 2 Samuel 23:20.
*Y Johnny Weissmuller (1904–1984) was an Olympic swimmer and the most famous portrayer of Tarzan in films.
Selected Letters of William Styron Page 65