Read Selected Letters of William Styron Online
Authors: William Styron
Selected Letters of William Styron (3 page)
Styron himself spoke to some of these difficulties even in the 1960s. Writing to Blackburn, who was editing the letters of Bill’s Duke classmate, the writer Mac Hyman, Bill mentioned his “surprise” at finding some of their letters in his papers. “During these last years we always spoke to each other by telephone,” Styron explained on March 30, 1965, “the invention which is in the process of killing off all literary correspondence.”
Fortunately, Styron did not cease writing letters altogether, even when the telephone took over more and more of his friendly and professional
communication. The hours he would spend on a given day (letters are often clustered in this manner) speak to the psychological space the activity helped create for him in the midst of struggling with a novel. Again and again in these pages, Styron expressed his belief that writing was “a tedious and agonizing process and I loathe [it] with almost a panic hatred.”
But in a letter to Hyman in May of 1953, Styron showed his typical ironic self-awareness as he revealed the importance of writing letters to help navigate that tedium and panic.
All this probably doesn’t interest you in the least, but what it narrows down to is this, if it’ll give you any comfort—that is, if you need any comfort. What I mean is that I think that any writer who ever lived, who was any good at all, has had long long periods of precisely the same sort of strain and struggle that both you and I are going through; I only comfort myself (and God knows it seems like forlorn comfort at times) that it seems to be true that often such periods of doubt and thrashing around eventually produce the best work. They often eventually produce the best work because it is during such periods of struggle (when one is long unpublished or goes through long periods of tortured sterility) that a writer really suffers. A lot of crap has been written about suffering, and the value of it, and in about two seconds I’ll shut up, but every now and then, even in the midst of my most dried-up, sterile depressions, I have a crazy confused moment of joy in the knowledge that anything good I ever did seemed at one time or another impossible of attaining, that it was a hard struggle in getting it out, that it seemed at times to be crushed under the weight of my doubts about it, but if it happened to be good at all it was because of the doubts, and perhaps a little suffering. End of quotation.
It was in his correspondence where Styron not only sounded out his frequent bouts with “melancholy” and “writer’s block” but helped ease himself out of both predicaments. Indeed, Bill’s self-awareness certainly extended to his letters; he wanted them to be more than scrawled grocery lists. He understood them as part of his oeuvre and expressed definite feelings about the publication of writers’ letters. When Blackburn proposed doing a collection of Styron’s letters in 1966, Bill wrote that “the publication
of personal letters … has somewhat the quality of gratuitous exposure.” Indeed, responding to a letter he had written to Mac in May of 1957, Styron told Blackburn, “when I read that letter of mine which you sent and thought of it appearing in print, I felt terribly
naked
all of a sudden.”
Fortunately for those reading this volume, Styron added that “when a writer is dead, certainly that becomes a different matter. Presumably then there evolves enough interest in the writer’s private self that the very publication of his correspondence wipes out the element of gratuitousness … when I myself am dead and someone wants to put my letters together, I couldn’t care less one way or another.”
Although we have taken Styron at his stated indifference, the hallmark of this volume reveals the very opposite guiding emotion. Styron’s care and concern pulse in each word collected here. My hope is that this invitation to see his “private self” will reveal his concern not just for showing love and friendship to those he corresponded with but for making lasting and worthy art for the readers he cared so much about.
R. B
LAKESLEE
G
ILPIN
February 2012
A
FTER TRANSCRIBING AND ANNOTATING
more than one thousand letters, it has been necessary to make certain cuts and edits. Ellipses mark infrequent deletions from the text. We have occasionally included incomplete letters, sometimes missing as much as a page, if the extant contents justified inclusion. Errors in punctuation and spelling have been silently corrected, with the exception of intentionally (often humorously) misspelled words. We have tried to keep explanatory notes to a minimum, identifying the people and books that we have deemed worthy of explanation.
A small number of these letters have appeared in print prior to being collected in this volume. Fourteen of Bill’s letters to the writer Donald Harington appeared in a special issue of
The Southern Quarterly
in 2002. We have also chosen to reprint several letters that first appeared in Styron’s
Letters to My Father
, ed. James L. W. West III (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009). West’s wonderful collection included all of Bill’s letters to William C. Styron, Sr., from January 1943 to October 1953.
All the letters follow a basic format:
Date Written from
R
ECIPIENT
William Styron dated virtually every letter he wrote during his long life. He also nearly always indicated where he was when he wrote a letter. In this way, readers can track his movements—often alternating seasonally between Roxbury, Connecticut, and Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts—but his extensive travel around the world is also catalogued in these letters. We have dispensed with elaborate abbreviations of archival locations, autograph versus typescript letters, and the like in order to include more of Styron’s actual correspondence. Unfortunately, there is no single location in which to view Styron’s letters. Our efforts to collect material from libraries
(The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and Yale University’s Beinecke Library and Manuscripts and Archives among them) represent a small fraction of the publicly and privately held letters that we solicited, copied, and received in order to represent Styron’s correspondence. In other words, you hold in your hands the closest approximation to an archive of this writer’s letters. Please enjoy them in the spirit in which they were written and received.
| 1925 | Born William Clark Styron, Jr., on June 11 in Newport News, in the Tidewater region of Virginia. |
| 1932–37 | The Styrons move to Hilton Village, a small community just outside Newport News, in 1932. |
| 1939 | Pauline dies on July 20, after years of intense pain. |
| 1940 | Starts his first year at Christchurch, a small Episcopal boys’ prep school near West Point, Virginia, in September. |
| 1941 | Father and Elizabeth Buxton marry and move to Hampton Roads. |
| 1942 | Completes year at Davidson College in North Carolina. Transfers to Duke University to join the Marines’ V-12 program and enrolls in Professor William Blackburn’s creative writing course. |
| 1944–45 | Ordered to boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina (sent to the VD ward with a mistaken diagnosis of syphilis). Transferred to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, for officer training, then sent to Platoon Commander School at Quantico, Virginia, where he is commissioned a second lieutenant. |
| 1946 | After the war ends, Styron returns to Duke University. In summer, signs up as a deckhand on the Cedar Rapids Victory , a merchant cattle ship bound for Trieste. |
| 1947 | Graduates from Duke and reenlists in the Marine Corps Reserve. Moves to New York City and becomes an assistant editor at Whittlesey House, but is soon fired. Inherits $1000 from his maternal grandmother’s estate, which, combined with his GI benefits, allows him to survive without taking another job. Enrolls in a fiction-writing seminar at the New School for Social Research at the invitation of its instructor, Hiram Haydn. Haydn arranges a $250 advance from Crown for Styron’s first novel. |
| 1948–49 | Briefly returns to Durham before moving back to New York City. Stays rent-free with Sigrid de Lima, a friend from the New School, and her mother, Agnes (Aggie) de Lima, then finds a room in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where he meets an Auschwitz survivor named Sophie. Faces money problems as GI benefits run out and accepts an offer to live rent-free with Aggie and Sigrid de Lima at their country residence in Valley Cottage, a village near Nyack, New York, north of the city. Father urges Styron to continue working on his first novel and pledges to send $100 a month until its completion. |
| 1950 | Hiram Haydn leaves Crown for Bobbs-Merrill in Indianapolis. Styron negotiates a release from his contract with Crown and follows Haydn. |
| 1951 | Recalled by the Marine Corps, but Haydn secures him a deferment. Pushes himself physically and emotionally to write the final one hundred pages of Lie Down in Darkness before returning to the service. |
| | Completes an all-night, thirty-three-mile march, and soon afterward is discharged because of a cataract in his right eye. |
| | Lie Down in Darkness published September 10. Invited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., to meet with graduate students at Johns Hopkins that spring, where he is introduced to Rose Burgunder. |
| 1952 | In February, Lie Down in Darkness wins the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. |
| | Sails to England on the Île de France for the British publication of Lie Down in Darkness , then on to Paris. Becomes friendly with the American writer Peter Matthiessen, who introduces Styron to his circle of literary expatriates, who will soon found The Paris Review . |
| | In Rome, begins to date Rose Burgunder, writes the manifesto for the first issue of The Paris Review , and proposes marriage to Rose. |
| 1953 | Marries Rose Burgunder and honeymoons in Ravello, Italy. |
| 1954 | The Styrons move back to New York; Styron spends ten days in bed with heart palpitations. The Styrons purchase a large, two-story nineteenth-century frame house in Roxbury, Connecticut. |
| 1955 | Hiram Haydn moves to Random House in January and Styron signs a two-book contract with Random House. Daughter Susanna Margaret born February 25. |
| 1956–58 | Norman Mailer and his wife move to nearby Bridgewater, Connecticut. |
| | Daughter Paola (Polly) Clark Styron born March 13, 1958. Mailer accuses Styron of spreading slander about Mailer’s wife, Adele, ending their friendship for twenty-five years. |
| 1959 | Hiram Haydn resigns from Random House to start a new firm (Atheneum). Styron decides to work with Bob Loomis at Random House. |
| | Son Thomas Haydn Styron born August 4. |
| 1960 | Set This House on Fire published May 5, 1960. The Styrons spend February and March with James and Gloria Jones in Paris, then travel through Geneva, Milan, and Florence, and arrive to settle in Rome in early May. |
| | James Baldwin moves into the Styrons’ guesthouse to work on a novel. |
| 1961 | Travels in May to Southampton County, Virginia, with Rose, his father, and a local relative as guide in an attempt to trace the path of slave rebel Nat Turner’s revolt. |
| 1962 | Travels to Paris for the publication of Coindreau’s translation of Set This House on Fire . |
| | The Styrons attend a dinner at the White House. Styron transfers the handling of foreign publishing rights, in May, to the London-based Hope Leresche and Steele agency. |
| | Attends William Faulkner’s funeral service in Oxford, Mississippi. |
| 1964 | The Styrons decide to purchase a harbor-front house on Martha’s Vineyard. |
| 1965 | Viking Press publishes Rose’s first collection of poetry, From Summer to Summer . |
| 1966 | Daughter Claire Alexandra (Al) Styron born October 28. |
| 1967 | There are prepublication orders of 125,000 copies when The Confessions of Nat Turner is published on October 9. |
| 1968 | The Confessions of Nat Turner wins the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. |
| | Flies to Seattle with Arthur Miller and Jules Feiffer to campaign for Eugene McCarthy in the Washington and Oregon Democratic presidential primaries. |
| | Serves as an honorary pallbearer at the funeral of Robert Kennedy. |
| | Beacon Press in Boston issues William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond , a collection of essays attacking the novel. |
| | Attends Democratic National Convention in Chicago. |
| | Travels with Rose to the Soviet Union to attend an Afro-Asian authors’ conference. |
| 1970 | Awarded the Howells Medal. |
| 1971 | Father, aged eighty-one, marries Eunice Edmundson, aged seventy-six. |
| 1972 | In the Clap Shack produced by the Yale Repertory Theatre. |
| 1973 | Decides to stop work on Marine novel The Way of the Warrior and begin writing Sophie’s Choice: A Memory after a vivid dream involving Sophie, a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz. |
| | Viking Press publishes Thieves’ Afternoon , a collection of Rose’s poetry. |
| 1974 | Styron travels to Europe to visit the death camp at Auschwitz. |
| 1977 | James Jones dies of congestive heart failure on May 8, 1977, at age fifty-five. |
| 1978 | Stepmother Eunice dies and Styron moves his father to a nursing home near Roxbury where he dies on August 10, 1978. |
| 1979 | Sophie’s Choice is published on June 11, Styron’s fifty-fourth birthday, reaching number one on the New York Times bestseller list. |
| 1980 | Sophie’s Choice wins the first American Book Award in February 1980. |
| | Styron attends presidential inauguration ceremonies for François Mitterrand in Paris. |
| 1982 | Publishes a collection of nonfiction prose entitled This Quiet Dust and Other Writings . |
| | Alan Pakula’s movie of Sophie’s Choice is released. |
| 1985 | Begins to suffer from clinical depression and considers plans for suicide. Admitted to Yale–New Haven Hospital on December 14. Receives treatment and medication and makes a steady improvement. |
| 1986–90 | Speaks about depression at two events in 1989. Meets Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown who offers to publish his account. |
| 1990 | Publishes Darkness Visible . |
| 1990–2000 | Speaks frequently on depression to groups of physicians and therapists. |
| 1993 | Publishes A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth . |
| 2000–2005 | Styron’s final years are unproductive, as the results of depression affect his narrative ability. Cancer is discovered. |
| 2006–07 | Hospitalized for much of the last year and a half of his life, Styron dies in Martha’s Vineyard Hospital on November 1, 2006, and his ashes are buried on the Vineyard. |
| | A memorial service in his honor is held on February 2, 2007, at St. Bartholomew’s Church, New York City. |