My Generation: Collected Nonfiction

by William Styron

  Ever faithfully yours,

  BILL STYRON

  [Paris Review, inaugural issue, Spring 1953.]

  The Paris Review

  Memory is, of course, a traitor, and it is wise not to trust any memoir which lends the impression of total recall. The following account of the founding of The Paris Review comprises my own recollection of the event, highly colored by prejudice, and must not be considered any more the gospel than those frequent narratives of the twenties, which tell you the color of the shoes that Gertrude Stein wore at a certain hour on such and such a day….

  The Paris Review was born in Montparnasse in the spring of 1952. It was, as one looks back on it through nostalgia's deceptive haze, an especially warm and lovely and extravagant spring. Even in Paris, springs like that don't come too often. Everything seemed to be in premature leaf and bud, and by the middle of March there was a general great stirring. The pigeons were aloft, wheeling against a sky that stayed blue for days, tomcats prowled stealthily along rooftop balustrades, and by the first of April the girls already were sauntering on the boulevard in scanty cotton dresses, past the Dôme and the Rotonde and their vegetating loungers who, two weeks early that year, heliotrope faces turned skyward, were able to begin to shed winter's anemic cast. All sorts of things were afoot—parties, daytime excursions to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, picnics along the banks of the Marne, where, after a lunch of bread and saucissons and Brie and Evian water (the liver was a touch troubled, following a winter sourly closeted with too much wine), you could lie for hours in the grass by the quiet riverside and listen to the birds and the lazy stir and fidget of grasshoppers and understand, finally, that France could be pardoned her most snooty and magisterial pride, mistress as she was of such sweet distracting springs.

  At night there was a bar called Le Chaplain, on a little dogleg street not far from the Dôme, where a lot of people used to go; you could carve your name with an outstretched forefinger in the smoke of the place, but the refreshment was not too expensive, and in its ambience—quiet enough for conversation yet lively enough to forestall boredom, gloom, self-conscious lapses—it seemed to be a fine place to sit and work up a sweat about new magazines and other such far-fetched literary causes. Even though outside there was a kind of calm madness in the air—French boys, too, were being sent to that most futile and insane of wars, Korea—and in spite of the beatific spring, there was a subdued yet tense quality around, as of a people pushed very close to the breaking point, or as of one hysteric woman who, if you so much as dropped a pin behind her, would break out in screams. “U.S. Go Home.” The signs are gone now, for the moment. At that time, though, our national popularity had reached the nadir and in Paris there have been better times for literary ventures. But all of us had been in one war; besides, the young patron of Le Chaplain, named Paul, by his own proclamation loved America almost as much for “ses littérateurs” as for “ses dollars” (winks, knowing laughter, toasts in beer to two great nations), and if The Paris Review were to celebrate a patron saint, it would possibly have to be this wiry, tough, frenetic Algerian with the beneficent smile, who could vault over the bar and stiff-arm a drunk out into the night in less time than it takes to say Edgar Poe, and return, bland as butter, to take up where he left off about Symbolist imagery. Try starting a little magazine at Toots Shor's. Les américains en Amérique! indeed.

  Later that spring, as the idea of a new magazine grew less far-fetched (by this time someone mentioned that he actually knew where he could raise $500), we convened in an apartment on a hidden, sleepy street behind the Gare Montparnasse called the Rue Perceval. The apartment belonged to Peter Matthiessen, to whom credit is due for having originated the idea for the magazine. No one seemed to know the obscure street, not even the shrewdest of Left Bank cabdrivers, and in this seclusion three flights up, in a huge room with a sunny terrace overlooking all of Paris, the plans went forward in euphoria, in kennel snarls of bickering, in buoyant certitude, in schism and in total despair. Though it is no doubt less complicated to organize a little magazine than to start some sort of industrial combine, it is imponderably more difficult an enterprise, I will bet, than opening a delicatessen, and in France one must multiply one's problems—well, by France; to learn successfully how to browbeat a Parisian printer, for instance, is rough schooling for a Parisian, even more so for a recent graduate of Harvard or Yale, and the bureaucratic entanglements involved in setting up a corporation known as Société à Résponsibilité Limitée au capital de 500.000 frs. must be self-evident to anyone who has even so much as lost his passport. Yet somehow the thing was accomplished.

  To be young and in Paris is often a heady experience. In America a writer not only never knows who or where he is (“Well, what I mean is, was it a best seller?” “Is this novel of yours sort of historical, or maybe what they call psychological?” “Well, I really meant, what do you do for a living?”), he gets so he does not want to know. In Paris, on this level at least, it is different, as we all know, and like that hardship case of an American writer of authenticated record whose landlady, spying his translated poem in Les Nouvelles Littéraires and recognizing his name, offered him out of glowing pride a two percent reduction in his rent—like this young writer, touched by the sentiment even if not by sheer largesse, we feel peculiarly at ease for a change, we know where we are, and we wish to stick around. And so we persisted.

  One sunny afternoon toward the end of that spring George Plimpton, another of the founders (the others were Thomas Guinzburg, Harold Humes, William Pène du Bois, and John Train), arrived at Matthiessen's apartment bearing two sinister-looking green bottles of absinthe. He burst in upon a glum gathering desultorily testing names. Promises. Ascent. Villanelle. Tides. Weather-cock. Spume. Humes. (I think it was Matthiessen who later hit upon the perfectly exact and simple title that the magazine bears.) Everyone was at low ebb, and it is quite probable that once again the group would have broken up had it not been for Plimpton's absinthe. Here I do not wish to suggest that there was something so fortuitously creative about that afternoon as to lead us to discover right then, once and for all, what we wished the magazine to “be”; by the same token, absinthe, according to the Britannica, “acts powerfully upon the nerve centers, and causes delirium and hallucinations, followed in some cases by idiocy.” One can make what one will out of that; for myself, I simply believe that that afternoon was the one upon which we were destined to make a breakthrough, and that Plimpton's absinthe, while it might not have aided us in our efforts to define our policy, did nothing to hinder us, either. At any rate, toward the end of that day we had discovered roughly what we wished to make of the magazine, and we were in surprising accord.

  [From Styron's introduction to Best Short Stories from The Paris Review. Dutton, 1959.]

  The Long March

  Although not nearly so long nor so ambitious as my other works, The Long March achieved within its own scope, I think, a unity and a sense of artistic inevitability which still, ten years after the writing, I rather wistfully admire. Lest I appear immodest, I would hasten to add that I do not consider the book even remotely perfect, yet certainly every novelist must have within the body of his writing a work of which he recalls everything having gone just right during the composition: through some stroke of luck, form and substance fuse into a single harmonious whole and it all goes down on paper with miraculous ease. For me this was true of The Long March, and since otherwise the process of writing has remained exceedingly painful, I cherish the memory of this brief work, often wondering why for a large part of the time I cannot recapture the sense of compulsion and necessity that dominated its creation.

  Possibly much of the urgency of the book is due to factors that are extremely personal. As the reader may eventually begin to suspect, the story is autobiographical. To be sure, all writing is to some degree autobiographical, but The Long March is intensely and specifically so. I do not mean that the central figures are not more or less imaginary—they are; but the morta
r explosion and the forced march, which are central to the entire narrative, were actual incidents in which I was involved, just as I was bound up, for a time, in the same desolating atmosphere of a military base in the midst of a fiercely hot American summer. If the story has a sense of truth and verisimilitude, it is because at the time of the writing all of these things—the terrible explosion, the heat of summer, and the anguish of the march itself—still persisted in my mind with the reality of some unshakable nightmare.

  Perhaps it was an even larger nightmare which I was trying to create in this book, and which lends to the work whatever symbolic power it has the fortune to possess. Because for myself (as I do believe for most thoughtful people, not only Americans but the community of peaceable men everywhere) the very idea of another war—this one in remote and strange Korea, and only five years after the most cataclysmic conflict ever to engulf mankind—possessed a kind of murky, surrealistic, half-lunatic unreality that we are mercifully spared while awake, but which we do occasionally confront in a horrible dream. Especially for those like myself who had shed their uniforms only five years before—in the blissful notion that the unspeakable orgy of war was now only a memory and safely behind—the experience of putting on that uniform again and facing anew the ritualistic death dance had an effect that can only be described as traumatic. World War II was dreadful enough, but at least the issues involved were amenable to reasonable definition. To be suddenly plunged again into war, into a war, furthermore, where the issues were fuzzy and ambiguous, if not fraudulent, a war that could not possibly be “won,” a senseless conflict so unpopular that even the most sanguinary politician or war lover shrank from inciting people to a patriotic zeal, a war without slogans or ballads or heroes—to have to endure this kind of war seemed, to most of us involved in it at the time, more than we could bear. War was no longer simply a temporary madness into which human beings happily lapsed from time to time. War had at last become the human condition.

  It was this feeling I believe I was trying to recapture when sometime later, in the summer of 1952, I found myself in Paris still unable to shake off the sense of having just recently awakened from a nightmare. My own ordeal and the ordeal of most of my Marine Corps friends (including one or two who died in Korea) was over—yet the persistent image of eight boys killed by a random mortar shell and of a long and brutal march lingered in my mind. Senseless mass slaughter and a seemingly endless march, the participants of which were faceless zeroes, were all that in retrospect appeared to me significant about this war without heroes, this war which lacked so utterly a sense of human identity, and which in so sinister a fashion presaged the faceless, soulless, pushbutton wars of the future. All right, I would write about this faceless, soulless march. Yet, all my intentions to the contrary, I began to understand, as I wrote, that even in the midst of an ultimate process of dehumanization the human spirit cannot be utterly denied or downed: against all odds, faces emerge from the faceless aggregate of ciphers, and in the middle of the march I was creating I found Captain Mannix slogging and sweating away, tortured, beaten but indomitable. A hero in spite of himself or me, he endures, and in the midst of inhumanity retains all that which makes it worthwhile to be human. I myself cannot be sure, but possibly it is the hopeful implications derived from this mystery—this kind of indefatigable man—which are all an artist can pretend to suggest, however imperfectly, in his struggle to comprehend the agony of our violent, suicidal century.

  [Introduction to the Norwegian edition of The Long March; Cappelens, 1963.]

  We Weren’t in It for the Money

  Most of us writers who were involved as judges at the birth of an unfortunate literary enterprise called the Turner Tomorrow Award wish we had never heard of it, for the thing was misshapen, ill-conceived in its Atlanta womb, and caused us who presided at its parturition to be cast as the venal midwives. Sponsored by the Turner Publishing Co., offshoot of Ted Turner's communications empire, the award of $500,000 (reputedly the largest of its kind ever given) was to go to a single work of fiction that would produce “creative and positive solutions to global problems.” Four awards of $50,000 each would go to the runners-up.

  In a diatribe written by Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post’s in-house Torquemada, the judges—who included Carlos Fuentes, Peter Matthiessen, Wallace Stegner, Nadine Gordimer, and myself—were accused of being whorish sellouts who not only would comprise our literary standards, if we had any, by getting connected with such a venture but “would do just about anything” to obtain the $10,000 fee we were each given for our labors.1 Yardley's piece is filled with silly judgmental bluster, but if, as a responsible journalist, he had bothered to discover some of the facts about our involvement in this venture he could have easily done so.

  Most of us had some misgivings when the Turner organization enlisted us through Thomas Guinzburg—a respected New York literary figure who was a friend of all of us—but I think that we each felt it was possible that our participation might at least cause some of this huge amount of money to be distributed to a few writers of promise. But this was before the outlines of the woeful project became clear. Some months later, early this year, when we learned of the extraordinary dreck the first readers were encountering in the winnowing-out process (one manuscript among the 2,500 submitted worldwide contained the word “pray” repeated an estimated 150,000 times) our earlier doubts crystallized into dismay. We sent a letter to Guinzburg stating our misgivings and making it clear that we wished to resign, categorically, so that other judges might be substituted. Interestingly, the letter contains virtually the same indictment of the award that Yardley made (including the impossibility of good fiction being served up on demand) and that he implied we would never dare to express, being “blinded by the bucks.”

  If we had insisted on resigning, as we should have, each of us would have had to forfeit the $10,000 fee, a reward which Yardley really believes had held us in greedy expectation for nearly a year. One hates to paw over this matter in public, but it's hard to avoid Yardley's vulgar fixation on money. He is at his most sanctimonious in his insistence that the prospect of this “fortune,” as he puts it, unhinged us with avarice. Few American writers make as much as a second-rate TV anchorperson or a second-rate second baseman, but some of us do quite well. Carlos Fuentes, who lectures widely, receives a minimum of $15,000 an appearance. There is scarcely one of the judges who could not with ease get $10,000 for a lecture or an appearance and spare him or herself the miseries of the Turner Tomorrow Award, which required—in my case—setting aside numerous afternoons better devoted to my work, plowing through twelve hulking manuscripts, taking three thousand words of notes, conferring with fellow judges, and traveling to the final judges’ meeting with its poisonous unpleasantness. (Nadine Gordimer, a woman of stony integrity, told me in distress that she actually lost income during the grind, which included a fourteen-thousand-mile round-trip from South Africa.) On emotional grounds alone, I would not repeat the experience for twice the fee.

  But we were persuaded to stay by Guinzburg and in the process were blandly deceived by the Turner organization. One of our inducements was the claim that there were many promising entries from the Third World and Eastern Europe, where money, publication, and media attention would be a significant boon to writers who had worked long in obscurity. (These never materialized.) We were also told that if we stayed we would be free to make any prize-winning decisions we chose to, even if our judgments were negative. Indeed, we could make no awards at all. Given this autonomy, we stayed. Our reading did turn up, surprisingly enough, four novels by writers we felt were deserving of encouragement, though no single one of the books, in the opinion of the majority of the judges, was exciting enough to make us want to anoint it with $500,000—a sum we thought from the beginning (and said in our letter) was cosmically inflated. We therefore decided on the more modest course of awarding each of the four winners the runner-up prize of $50,000, with Ishmael—an intelligent and provoca
tive work by Daniel Quinn—being singled out for special attention.2 This seemed a way of bringing sensible scale, at least, to a project badly afflicted by grandiosity.

  At a fairly rancorous judges’ meeting in New York City early in May—also attended by one Michael Reagan, a self-styled “media” person representing the Turner management—our majority decision was accepted as binding. Of the final panel of nine judges only three, including the science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury, favored the bloated half-million-dollar award and took the side of Reagan, who, though a nonvoting onlooker, was plainly seething over our refusal to give the seal of approval to Ted Turner's megalomaniacal shower of gold. (Reagan would later make whiny remarks about the dissenting judges’ failure to hand our fees back, his apparent logic being that only judges favorable to the Cause deserved recompense; he also was plainly determined to overlook our authority to make any decision we pleased.) When we left the meeting it was with the understanding that our decision would be honored.