Selected Letters of William Styron

by William Styron

  ‖r James Jones’s third novel, The Pistol (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959).

  ‖s Lapérouse is a venerable Parisian restaurant overlooking the Seine.

  ‖t Styron used this same descriptor, “abortion,” for Mason Flagg’s account of Alonzo’s movie in Set This House on Fire.

  ‖u Styron attached a note (and presumably a British review) dated February 9, 1959: “Dear Doctor—I suppose it’s only the direct insecurity that motivates my sending you these little plugs for myself, but I did want you to see that, possibly, I am finally being accepted in the Old Country. Would you return it, please, whenever you get a chance to write. Ever, Bill”

  ‖v Blackburn’s edited collection of Conrad’s letters.

  ‖w Lawrence Rust Hills (1924–2008), renowned fiction editor for Esquire magazine off and on from the 1950s through the 1990s. He was famed for being able to excerpt famous writers’ novels (such as Styron’s Sophie’s Choice) and make the pieces seem like standalone short stories.

  ‖x Theodore Philip Toynbee (1916–81), prolific British writer and critic.

  ‖y Leonard Lyons had a column in the New York Post entitled “The Lyons Den,” which covered entertainment gossip.

  ‖z Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), one of the most important essayists of the Renaissance period. Styron probably refers to Montaigne’s essay “Of Drunkenness,” in which he made many observations on wine, among them: “Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk till forty; but, after forty, gives them leave to please themselves.”

  ‖A Edwin Gilbert wrote many bestsellers, including Native Stone (New York: Doubleday, 1956) and Silver Spoon (New York: Lippincott, 1957).

  ‖B Esquire published the excerpts “Set This House on Fire” (June 1959) and “Home from St. Andrews” (May 1960).

  ‖C Haydn left Random House in March 1959 for a new venture, Atheneum Publishers, which he founded with Simon Bessie and Alfred A. Knopf, Jr. Hiram assumed that Bill would join him. Among other minor squabbles with Haydn was one over Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: Bill had brought it to Random House, and Haydn found the book offensive and humorless, while Bennett Cerf, the head of Random House, wanted to publish it. Styron wrote about the conflict over Lolita in “The Book on Lolita,” The New Yorker (September 4, 1995). Hiram and Rose had a huge dustup over it, but Random House didn’t take the novel. In Words and Faces, Haydn described the parting: “Styron made a decision that he must have found difficult. Moreover, there was never any question of his being ungrateful; there is strong evidence to prove the reverse. Part of his reasoning was that he had twice gone with me to a different publishing house; if he did this a third time, it would only confirm the opinion he had often been exposed to—that he couldn’t make his way without me. Add his liking for Cerf and Loomis, and the strength of Random House—and I think his decision was a sound, logical one. Today we get together over a rowdy game of croquet now and then, but it took quite a while for the hurt to heal.”

  ‖D Bennett Cerf admired Styron’s writing and liked him personally. Cerf wrote Styron on March 17, 1959, “We were proud to add you to the Random House list, and we will make every possible effort to keep you there. In a single sentence, I would like to be your publisher for the rest of my life.”

  ‖E The excerpt from Set This House on Fire, which ran in The Paris Review 22 (Autumn–Winter, 1959–60).

  ‖F John Train, editor at The Paris Review.

  ‖G Ristorante Doney is located on the Via Vittorio Veneto in Rome.

  ‖H King Farouk I (1920–65) of Egypt was notorious for his glamorous lifestyle on the Continent.

  ‖I Sloan Wilson (1920–2003), author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955), which was a bestseller. Herman Wouk (b. 1915) is perhaps best known for his novel The Caine Mutiny (New York: Doubleday, 1951), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1952.

  ‖J Orville Prescott (1907–96) was the main critic of fiction for The New York Times for nearly twenty-five years. Leon Uris, a frequent target of Styron’s envy and ire, had a number one bestseller in 1959 with Exodus.

  ‖K Elaine Dundy (1921–2008), actress and author of novels, biographies, and plays. She was married at the time to the actor and critic Kenneth Tynan; they divorced in 1964.

  ‖L George Axelrod (1922–2003), screenwriter, playwright, producer, and director, is best known for his play The Seven Year Itch and for his movie adaptations of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate.

  ‖M Old Forester bourbon.

  ‖N Hatcher supplied this letter to William Blackburn for Mac Hyman’s collected letters. As Hatcher explained on November 11, 1965, “Unhappily, Mac and I never wrote to each other … I do have one surviving note from Styron, a xerox of which I enclose.”

  ‖O Hatcher had attached a clipping from the Journal of the American Medical Association on the “Fat Content of Semen,” August 1, 1959.

  ‖P “I was, of course, tickled to have him use my name in his book,” Hatcher wrote Blackburn, “although I threatened to use his name as the hero of my (mythical) novel about a sodomite.”

  ‖Q William Rossa Cole (1919–2000) was best known as an editor and anthologist. He was an editor for Simon & Schuster and Viking and a columnist for the Saturday Review.

  ‖R Richard Avedon and Truman Capote, Observations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959), featured Avedon’s photographs of artists, writers, and celebrities, and Capote’s text.

  ‖S Walker Gibson’s poem “To the memory of the circus ship Euzkera, lost in the Caribbean Sea, 1 September 1948” (The New Yorker, November 6, 1948) was based on a true incident.

  ‖T Jean Ennis, director of publicity at Random House.

  ‖U Styron enclosed the same Moravian hymn he had sent William Blackburn in March 1956.

  ‖V Gloria Jones was pregnant with their daughter Kaylie Ann Jones, born August 5, 1960.

  ‖W Fine à l’eau: cognac and water.

  ‖X Brown was an editor at Esquire.

  ‖Y The key was evidently malfunctioning—the H/h is barely legible throughout the letter.

  ‖Z H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) was a journalist and critic of American life and culture. One of the most popular and widely syndicated American writers before World War II, Mencken became especially notorious for his coverage of the Scopes trial of 1925.

  aa Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) was a novelist best known for Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925). Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) was a novelist best known for his short story collection Winesburg, Ohio.

  bb Mary McCarthy (1912–89) was an author, critic, and political activist. Best known for her memoir Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) and novel The Group (1962), McCarthy also became somewhat infamous for her feud with Lillian Hellman.

  cc John Updike (1932–2009) was a novelist and critic best known for his Rabbit novels. Updike won the Pulitzer Prize twice, published twenty-three novels, and contributed regularly to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

  dd Wonderful to relate (from Virgil’s Aeneid).

  ee In addition to Orville Prescott of The New York Times, Styron refers to J. Donald Adams (1891–1968), a literary critic who wrote for The New Republic and The New York Times. Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930) is a neoconservative writer known for his work for Commentary magazine. Leslie Aaron Fiedler (1917–2003) was a literary critic best known for his book Love and Death in the American Novel (1960).

  ff Hughes Rudd.

  gg James Cross Giblin (b. 1933) worked on a stage adaptation of Lie Down in Darkness (for the Broadway producer Edward Pakula), which was never produced. Giblin was writing in the hopes of staging a free performance at “a loft workshop on West 17th Street.”

  hh Charles “Cy” Rembar (1915–2000), an intellectual property attorney who happened to be Norman Mailer’s cousin.

  ii Gregory Corso (1930–2001) was a poet and the youngest of the Beat
Generation inner circle. William S. Burroughs (1914–97) was a novelist, poet, and central figure of the Beat Generation, best known for his novel Naked Lunch (1959).

  jj Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr. (b. 1935), served as Paris editor of The Paris Review and edited the oral biography of George Plimpton, George, Being George (New York: Random House, 2008).

  kk The advertising firm Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO).

  ll Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov (1921–2004), beloved British character actor and prolific author.

  mm Highet’s review praised Styron’s “remarkable talents” even as he called attention to the novel’s “preternatural interest in sexual depravity.… It is a tribute to Mr. Styron’s skill with his language and his gift for manipulating people that he carries you on, over waves of nausea, to the last word of his long and complex novel.”

  nn The Chessman case was a landmark execution for the anti–death penalty movement, and the first such case in which Styron involved himself. Caryl Chessman was a career criminal convicted of several rapes in California. He was sentenced to death, many thought illegitimately, and executed on May 2, 1960. In addition to Styron, the statement was signed by Blair Fuller, Ben Johnson, Philip Roth, and Wallace Stegner.

  oo The British edition of Set This House on Fire (London: Hamish Hamilton, February 16, 1961). To comply with British obscenity statutes, the book was printed in the Netherlands.

  pp Gloria was pregnant with Kaylie.

  qq Granville Hicks, Saturday Review, June 4, 1960.

  rr Donald Malcolm’s long review of Set This House on Fire in the June 4, 1960, New Yorker was highly negative. Malcolm’s closing line was that “one begins intensely not to care” for either the plot or the characters in the novel. However, Malcolm’s review was not as severe as Arthur Mizener’s “Some People of Our Time” in the June 5, 1960, New York Times Book Review. After a sustained critique of the book’s “melodramatic” characters, method, and plot, Mizener maintained that Set This House on Fire proved the falsity of Styron’s “promise” as a writer. Styron never forgot Mizener’s review.

  ss Harington (1936–2009), novelist and nonfiction writer, was born and reared in Little Rock, Arkansas. Trained as an art historian at the University of Arkansas and Harvard University, Harington was an assistant professor at Bennett College in Millbrook, New York, when he first wrote to Styron. After reading Set This House on Fire, Harington wrote a detailed appreciation to Styron on June 4, 1960. This letter began a forty-year correspondence, which Harington collected and bound in 1986 for Styron’s archive at Duke University.

  tt Harington wrote: “I have read everything by Faulkner … everything by Fitzgerald, most everything by Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Wolfe, Farrell, and even Erskine Caldwell, everything by the young moderns: Agee, Salinger, Jones, Mailer, McCullers, Capote, et. al., and I have read your two earlier books; and among all the thick and thin, sick and well, glad and sad volumes in this mountain of American literature, I have never read a finer novel than STHOF. It is the most, to say the least.” Writing that it was sure to be deemed “controversial,” Harington echoed many of Styron’s own complaints: “I am beginning to grow tired of book reviewers who get a tight hard-on themselves from passages in a book and, feeling shamed afterwards, denounce the book.” “I want to write them and tell them off, but I remember what you said in your Paris Review interview about critics, and I remember your saying it’s the reader and not the critic who means something to you, and I decided to write to you instead of Prescott or Malcolm.”

  uu James Gould Cozzens’s immensely popular and critically well-received novel (1957).

  vv Wilcox (1850–1919) was an author and poet, most famous for her poem “Solitude,” and the line “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone.” Her work frequently appears in anthologies of bad poetry.

  ww John F. Kennedy.

  xx Frank Morrison Spillane (1918–2006) was an author of numerous bestselling crime novels, best known for his Mike Hammer series.

  yy Grace Metalious (1924–64) was an author best known for her controversial and bestselling novel Peyton Place (1956), which sold over 30 million copies.

  zz Charles A. Fenton (1919–60) was an author and a college professor best known for The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway (1954) and Stephen Vincent Benét: The Life and Times of an American Man of Letters (1958). His laudatory review “William Styron and the Age of the Slob” (The South Atlantic Quarterly, Autumn 1960), applauded Styron’s novel for capturing “the national mood.”

  AA The three pieces were by Robert Gorham Davis, “Styron and the Students,” David L. Stevenson, “Styron and the Fiction of the Fifties,” and Richard Foster, “An Orgy of Commerce: William Styron’s Set This House on Fire,” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 3 (Summer 1960). Foster’s piece concluded that “we must be willing to throw a writer like Mr. Styron back into the hopper of anonymity and make him at last prove his claim to the amount of attention he has had from us undeserved. And we must do this not only in the interest of the writer’s soul, but in the interest of our own as well.” Styron wrote beneath the comment: “The little prick who edits this mag sent me 5 copies, and had the gall to write: ‘A liberal supply of this issue is available to send to your friends.’ BS.”

  BB Louis Rubin, “An Artist in Bonds,” The Sewanee Review, Winter 1961. The piece was an assessment of Styron’s work, focusing mainly on Set This House on Fire.

  CC Louis Rubin, The Golden Weather (New York: Atheneum, 1961).

  DD Rubin’s piece on Set This House on Fire.

  EE The Names and Faces of Heroes (New York: Atheneum, 1963).

  FF Patrice Émery Lumumba (1925–61) was the first legally elected prime minister of the Republic of the Congo, after helping his country win independence from Belgium in June 1960. Twelve weeks later, he would be deposed, arrested, imprisoned, and finally executed by a Belgian firing squad.

  GG Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) was a poet and Librarian of Congress who received three Pulitzer Prizes. James Thurber (1894–1961) was an author and cartoonist best known for his contributions to The New Yorker.

  HH Philip Rahv, ed., Eight Great American Short Novels (New York: Berkley Books, 1963).

  II Stanley Kauffmann, “Across the Great Divide,” The New Republic (February 20, 1961).

  JJ Kauffmann’s review is highly critical of Arthur Miller.

  KK Karl Jay Shapiro (1913–2000) was a poet and essayist, winner of the Pulitzer Prize (1945) and the Bollingen Prize (1969).

  LL Styron reviewed Florence Aadland’s The Big Love (New York: Lancer, 1961), an account of her daughter Beverly’s affair with Errol Flynn, in “Mrs. Aadland’s Little Girl, Beverly,” Esquire, November 1961. Some credit Styron with helping turn the book into a cult classic. Aadland addressed Styron in a letter she sent to the editors of Esquire on October 24, 1961, after seeing the review, to say that she did not “know how to begin to thank you. I am on cloud nine after reading your article in Esquire.… For you to find in our book the things that were truly in my heart … words fail me, I can only say thank you again.”

  MM Harriet Pilpel (1913–81), a literary lawyer.

  NN Isador Schary (1905–80), screenwriter (of Boys Town among other films) and movie producer, who became head of MGM Pictures after ousting founder Louis B. Mayer.

  OO The clipping concerned Styron and Loomis’s friend John Maloney, who was “accused of stabbing a woman writer during a quarrel” and charged with felonious assault.

  PP Styron was parodying Norman Mailer’s threatening note of March 12, 1958. Not surprisingly, Styron used that episode in Set This House on Fire for Mason Flagg’s threats to the narrator Peter Leverett: “You wait here, Petesy boy, because when I come back I expect to stomp out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit.” Alexandra Styron refers to Flagg as “the avatar of Daddy’s revenge” following Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, in Alexandra Styron, Reading My Father: A Memoir (New York: Scribn
er, 2011).

  QQ Edwards had asked Styron for a loan to help him pay for medical school, and Styron agreed to lend Edwards money. As he wrote on August 31, 1955, “Your promissory note(s) seem fine to me, and I feel a great smug sense of power in having you so firmly clenched by your financial balls. You’d better watch your step, buddy. To be honest, I couldn’t be more satisfied with the arrangement, not more pleased that I have been able to help out. One thing I want to tell you, though, in all candor. When I told you over the telephone that I thought I’d be able to swing the whole $16 G, or whatever it is thereabouts, it was with more sanguinity than realism. Actually, I still hope to be able to lend you the annual installment each year as you have outlined it. As far as I can see, I’m well-enough fixed to do it. What I hope you will realize, though, is simply that although I’m filthy rich I have very little Rockefeller blood in my veins, and only one or two piddling little oil-wells, and there is always the chance that next year or the year after will not find me so well-heeled. This is the result of being a writer.”

  RR Land (1922–88) wrote a book on literary feuds, The Fine Art of Literary Mayhem (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), which included a section on Mailer and Styron with quotations from this letter.

  SS L’Express, March 8, 1962. An interiew with Madeleine Chapsal also appeared in the same issue, reprinted in Quinze Écrivains: Entretiens (Paris: René Julliard, 1963) and in James L. W. West III, ed., Conversations with William Styron (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985).

  TT Romain Gary, “L’ONU n’existe pas,” Le Nouveau Candide (December 21–27, 1960).

  UU “Red” was Robert Penn Warren’s nickname.

  VV Paul G. Sanderson, Jr., ran a literary event called the Suffield Writer’s Conference. He asked Styron to participate nearly every year for a decade.