Selected Letters of William Styron (95 page)

†jj
Postcard of a castle in Biarritz.

†kk
Bonnie Ethel Cone (1907–2003) was instrumental in transforming Charlotte College into the University of North Carolina–Charlotte.

†ll
Cone was featured in the July 16, 1965, issue of
Time
.

†mm
Mia Farrow, then nineteen, brought Susanna back to shore; this was the first time the Styrons met Farrow, who became a lifelong friend.

†nn
Styron refers to his practice of reading aloud to Bob Loomis from manuscripts in progress.

†oo
Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer best known for her 1962 novel
Ship of Fools
and her many short stories.

†pp
There was a widespread power outage on November 4, 1965.

†qq
Fuentes had sent Styron a copy when Farrar, Straus and Giroux published the novel in the United States in 1965. Styron wrote him, “Many thanks for the handsome book and also the nice inscription. It goes on a shelf next to another treasure—an inscribed copy of [Albert Camus’s]
La Peste
” (Styron to Fuentes, undated, 1965).

†rr
William Styron to Mac Hyman, April 29, 1957.

†ss
William Styron, “An Elegy for F. Scott Fitzgerald,”
The New York Review of Books
(November 28, 1963), collected in
This Quiet Dust
. Contrary to Styron’s characterization to Blackburn, the review essay calls Andrew Turnbull’s
The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963) “a fascinating” book.

†tt
Gollancz was a major British publisher throughout the twentieth century.

†uu
Harington and Styron’s agent, who quit without telling either of his clients.

†vv
Ivan von Auw, a prominent literary agent who worked for the Harold Ober agency from 1938 to 1973. He represented Pearl Buck, James M. Cain, Agatha Christie, Agnes de Mille, John Gunther, Langston Hughes, Oscar Lewis, Ross MacDonald, Muriel Spark, Dylan Thomas, and others.

†ww
Styron enclosed the announcement of his election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters on May 25, 1966.

†xx
Unknown attachment.

†yy
Norman Mailer.

†zz
Louis Malle (1932–95) was a French film director, screenwriter, and producer. He won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1956. Marlene Dietrich (1901–92) was one of the best-known actresses of her generation, renowned for her glamour and good looks.

†AA
Styron refers to Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
, published just a month earlier to great acclaim and commercial success.

†BB
Stephen E. Smith (1927–90) was the husband of Jean Kennedy Smith.

†CC
“Rose pregnant the fourth time the winters of Connecticut are terribly cold.”

†DD
Frederick Childe Hassam (1859–1935), American impressionist painter and a founding member of the influential artists’ group The Ten. Winslow Homer (1836–1910), the preeminent American landscape painter and printmaker in the nineteenth century.

†EE
Styron published the “Virginia: 1831” section of the novel in
The Paris Review
9 (Winter 1966): 13–45.

†FF
Styron refers to the Supreme Court decision of March 21, 1966,
Memoirs v. Massachusetts
, which tried to clarify the early obscenity decision of
Roth v. United States
(1957). The
Memoirs
case concerned John Cleland’s novel
Fanny Hill, or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
(1749) and failed to resolve what was or was not obscene.

†GG
John W. Aldridge’s
Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novel in Crisis
(New York: David McKay, 1966) contains the essay “William Styron and the Derivative Imagination.” Also see Aldridge, “Highbrow Authors and Middlebrow Books,”
Playboy
(April 1964).

†HH
Unknown.

†II
William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson,
Human Sexual Response
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1966).

†JJ
Alfred C. Kinsey et al.,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(Philadelphia, W. B. Saunders Co., 1948).

†KK
The Elizabeth Islands.

†LL
Maurice Girodias (1919–90) was the founder of the Olympia Press in Paris.

†MM
Michael Mewshaw (b. 1943) is the author of eleven novels and eight books of non-fiction, and best known for his novel
Year of the Gun
(1984). He wrote his master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation on William Styron.

†NN
Mewshaw published this letter (with lengthy commentary) in his memoir,
Do I Owe You Something? A Memoir of the Literary Life
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003).

†OO
Mewshaw’s wife, Linda.

†PP
Styron’s letter of March 24, 1966, explained that Harington might receive a Rockefeller grant.

†QQ
Stanley Kunitz (1905–2006) was a poet who won the National Book Award in 1995.

†RR
Izaak Walton (1593–1683), English writer and author of
The Compleat Angler
(1653).

†SS
Willie Morris (1934–99) was a writer, editor, and longtime friend to Styron. In 1967, Morris was made the youngest editor in chief ever at
Harper’s Magazine
. Styron attached Larry L. King, “The Ole Country Boys,”
Texas Observer
, June 24, 1966, a kind of glass-menagerie treatment of the Southern expatriates living in New York and Connecticut: Willie Morris, Styron, C. Vann Woodward, and Robert Penn Warren. “Red Warren was born in Kentucky,” King wrote. “Bill Styron grew up in the Tidewater Country of Virginia. Vann Woodward in Arkansas. Ole Country Boys. Take away their Pulitzers, Rolls-Royces, and legions of adoring fans, and they are just the same as you and me.” Lawrence Leo King (b. 1929), American novelist, journalist, playwright, and coauthor of the Broadway musical
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
, was a featured writer at
Harper’s
throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

†TT
Richard Goodwin, Lillian Hellman, Robert Brustein, Philip Roth, Jules Feiffer, and John Updike. Robert Sanford Brustein (b. 1927) has been a theater critic, producer, playwright, and educator. He founded the Yale Repertory Theatre and American Repertory Theater. He was dean of the Yale School of Drama from 1966 to 1979.

†UU
Bennett and Phyllis Cerf.

†VV
A mass market paperback published by Signet in 1966, edited by Albert H. Morehead, Harold J. Blum, and others.

†WW
In a letter of August 1966, Harington had recommended several books to Styron on the subject of Turner and “the Southampton incident”: G. P. R. James’s 1856 novel
The Old Dominion; or The Southampton Massacre: A Novel
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856), Arna Bontemps’s novel about Gabriel Prosser’s slave rebellion,
Black Thunder
(New York: Macmillan, 1936), and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp
(Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Co., 1856).

†XX
Donald Harington, “A Second Career,”
Esquire
(January 1967).

†YY
John Barth’s
Giles Goat-Boy; or The Revised New Syllabus
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966) was a satirical novel about American campus culture.

†ZZ
Pier Paolo Pasolini, dir.,
The Gospel According to St. Matthew
(1964).

‡aa
William Styron, “Runaway,”
Partisan Review
33 (Fall 1966).

‡bb
Styron referred to Woodward’s unpublished essay “Genovese, Aptheker, and Heresy.” Eugene Dominic Genovese (1930–2012) was an American historian known for his Marxist approach and his Bancroft Prize–winning work on slavery,
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
(1974).

‡cc
Robert Penn Warren,
Who Speaks for the Negro?
(New York: Random House, 1965).

‡dd
Several of Styron’s compliments are bracketed by publisher Donald I. Fine to use as pull quotes for Jones’s publicity.

‡ee
Joseph Conrad left Warsaw when he was four years old in 1861 and became a seaman at sixteen.

‡ff
Styron refers to Woodward’s unpublished essay, “The Second Reconstruction in Retrospect” (1966). Styron also refers to Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” originally published in the Summer 1957 issue of
Dissent
, and separately by City Lights Publishers, then collected in
Advertisements for Myself
(1959).

‡gg
Dwight Lowell Dumond (1895–1976) was a renowned American historian and pioneering scholar of abolitionism and slavery, best known for
Antislavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States
(1959).

‡hh
Styron refers to Woodward’s essay “The Antislavery Myth,”
American Scholar
(Spring 1962), collected in
The Future of the Past
(1989). In that essay, Woodward calls Dumond “a modern primitive, a Henri Rousseau of historiography.”

‡ii
James M. Dabbs, Jr. (1937–2004), was a professor of psychology at Georgia State University. Dabbs earned his Ph.D. from Yale University and is best known for his book
Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior
(2000).

‡jj
Alexandra Styron was born on October 28, 1966.

‡kk
As Styron later noted: “I was certain he was building a torture device for his new baby sister. But in fact, after a long and sinister silence, he emerged with a wondrous artifact: a wooden bird with metal wings, a gift for Alexandra, and tribute to the fact that even he, after all his isolated maleness, wished to celebrate the arrival of another sister, my new daughter.” See West,
William Styron: A Life
(New York: Random House, 1998), 370.

‡ll
The postcard image was of a woman’s knees, and Styron had drawn train tracks leading in between them.

‡mm
Truman Capote held a masquerade ball, the Black and White Ball, on November 28, 1966. The party was the most desirable social event of the year and only five hundred people were invited.

‡nn
Henry Ford II (1917–87), grandson of the founder of Ford Motor Company.

‡oo
Styron refers to the old Random House building.

‡pp
A male schoolteacher in Maine, dying of cancer, who wrote to Styron to ask for some words of faith.

‡qq
Don Congdon (1918–2009), literary agent best known for representing Ray Bradbury, William Shirer, and David Sedaris. Bradbury dedicated
Fahrenheit 451
to Congdon.

‡rr
Styron is likely referring to William Manchester (1922–2004), the author and biographer, best known for
Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War
(1980), which partly chronicles his serious wounds during the campaign on Okinawa.

‡ss
A town in northern Italy at the foot of Mont Blanc.

‡tt
Styron refers to György Lukács (1885–1971), Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Styron also refers to an interview that Naim Kattan conducted with Lukács that appeared in
La Quinzaine littéraire
in December 1966.

‡uu
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry (1871–1945) was a French poet and philosopher.

‡vv
Marc L. Ratner’s
William Styron
(New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972) was the first study of Styron to be published.

‡ww
Michel Mohrt (1914–2011), editor, writer, historian of French literature, and longtime editor at Éditions Gallimard.

‡xx
Styron wrote about this trip in “William Styron’s Nile Diary,”
Geo
3 (September 1981). Collected in
This Quiet Dust
.

‡yy
Rose had hurt her leg.

‡zz
C. Vann Woodward, “Confessions of a Rebel: 1831,”
The New Republic
, October 7, 1967.

‡AA
James Clark (1936–68), British Formula One racing driver from Scotland. He won two World Championships in 1963 and 1965. He was killed in a Formula Two race in Hockenheim, Germany, on April 7, 1968.

‡BB
James Jones,
Go to the Widow-Maker
(New York: Delacorte, 1967).

‡CC
William Styron, “The Oldest America,”
McCall’s
95 (July 1968). Collected in
This Quiet Dust
.

‡DD
Styron refers to the Greek military coup that began on April 21, 1967. Four colonels in the Greek army took control of the country, beginning a seven-year period of military rule.

‡EE
Styron is likely referring to Norman Mailer’s
The Armies of the Night
, which was not published until 1968. This nonfiction novel went on to win the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Mailer’s novel
Why Are We in Vietnam?
was published in 1967, but is not about Lyndon Johnson.

‡FF
Robert Silvers (b. 1929), editor of
The New York Review of Books
since 1963.

‡GG
Robert Penn Warren used this information for “William Styron,”
Book-of-the-Month Club News
(October 1967).

‡HH
Styron refers to Warren’s poem “Where the Slow Figs Purple Sloth,” which appears in John Burt, ed.,
Selected Poems of Robert Penn Warren
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001).

‡II
Boyd Martin Coyner, “General John Hartwell Cocke of Bremo: Agriculture and Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 1961.

‡JJ
This piece never materialized.

‡KK
Mewshaw reprinted this letter in his memoir and reflected on its influence on his career: “Disappointed as I was that he didn’t like the novel, and although I questioned how much encouragement to draw from his comments, I realized something remarkable had occurred. It wasn’t just that Styron believed I was ‘quite obviously a writer’ and would ‘do the big thing in the fullness of time.’ It was that he had done more than skim the manuscript and respond with polite evasions and tepid good wishes. He identified its flaws as well as its few strengths, and took the time to discuss what I could do to grow as a writer. What moved me most—and does so every time I reread the letter—was Styron’s generosity of spirit, his collegiality and readiness to assume an obligation to a neophyte for no better reason than that we both, though vastly different in talent and temperament and age, were committed to writing.
“The letter reveals volumes about William Styron—the seriousness and integrity he has always brought to his fiction, the kindness and concern he has shown lost souls, no matter whether they languished in jail, on death row, or in the Laocoon coils of their own unrealized ambitions. It also proves, if such proof is required, that he wasn’t the spoiled rich boy and literary networker his critics accused him of being.”