Rose and I are anxiously awaiting your return to these shores with your blushing bride and have waiting here in Roxbury—besides Susanna, who has suddenly become appallingly talkative—all sorts of booze, Smithfield hams, good American milk and all sorts of other goodies which should make you regret that you ever sojourned so long among the wops and spicks and other types scarcely human. Set aside one of your earliest weekends and we’ll have a wonderful bleary time of it.
Give my love to Suay
All the best
Stybo
P.S. Very much enjoyed your article in Harper’s.§N It really gave me a new perspective on the situation, to quote Eric Sevareid.
TO HERBERT WEINSTOCK§O
July 26, 1956 Roxbury, CT
Dear Mr. Weinstock,
I must apologize for not having written you sooner about The Lost Steps.§P I asked Henry Carlisle to tell you what I thought about it, but he must have forgotten.
The fact is that I read with great interest, and that I liked it in a strange way but that I found it so overpoweringly exotic and curious that, in the end, I just don’t know what my opinion is. I read it much as if I were tasting some new tropical fruit whose flavor was quite unique and wonderful but which I had to turn down in the end for the good old stand-by orange. In other words, I liked it but it was too off-beat for my own particular taste in fiction, and as a result I don’t feel competent to give you a statement. I also found that my interest flagged about two-thirds of the way through, which is probably not so much the fault of the book as, again, my own particular taste.
Thanks for sending me the book—I am sorry about the delay—and I hope my feeling about it won’t deter you from sending my way anything else of special interest in the future.
Yours sincerely,
William Styron
TO LOUIS D. RUBIN, JR.
October 15, 1956 Roxbury, CT
Dear Louis,
I’m afraid I don’t have anything on hand right now for publication in The Provincial. I am up to my neck in this new novel I’m writing, a process which is as usual so painful & irksome to me that it leaves me soured on all writing in general. I very well might have something later on, however, and I’ll of course be proud to see it in The Provincial. I thought your first issue was most attractive; it seems literary yet refreshingly unpedantic, and I’m looking forward to seeing it expand in size. I liked the Lardner piece very much. I hope you won’t take it as a minor compliment, either, that the whole thing is handsomely printed and proof-read; after my experience with The Paris Review I know this is no mean accomplishment.
I shouldn’t worry too much about Aldridge if I were you. As grateful as I might be for the sweet things he’s said about me, I am also aware that about many things he is rather grotesquely opinionated and one-sided, and goes off half-cocked about 50% of the time. It’s too bad, since quite often his judgments are astute enough. To hell with all such critics anyway—a difficult thing to say for me, incidentally, since Aldridge (& wife), out of I suspect some bizarre desire to be near the only writer he loves, has bought a house 5 minutes away from us here in Roxbury—the same house which provided the nuptial surroundings for that strangely & frantically opportunistic dramatist, Mr. Arthur Miller, and that sexually endowed barrel of pineapple Jello, Miss Mmmmarilyn Monroe. Perhaps he’ll become a better critic with all those carnal ghosts lurking about the house.
Rose tells me to tell you that a friend of ours from Charleston, W.Va., a writer named Mary Lee Settle, is earnestly in need of a fellowship, and will probably be writing you for information about the Sewanee deal. Perhaps you would be kind enough to oblige her. She’s really quite talented, I think, greatly in need of support, and a bear for work. You may have seen or heard of her last novel, O Beulah Land, which got quite superior reviews everywhere.§Q
As I say, I hope I’ll be able to send you something later on. In the meantime, congratulations on what looks like a really auspicious start at something first-rate. Rose joins me in sending all the best to you & Eva.
As ever
Bill
The Random House edition of The Long March was published on October 29, 1956.
TO ELIZABETH MCKEE
December 4, 1956 2707 Lawina Road, Baltimore, MD
Dear Elizabeth
Here are some hollyhock seeds which Pop + Elizabeth Styron, who are visiting up here for a few days, asked me to deliver to you! Plant them in the spring, next to a wall.
I hope you received the letter from the Hollywood-type agent + are making profitable contact. Let me know if anything develops.
Susanna is wonderful, brilliant, articulate (I’ll swear she can write every word perfectly of “Mary had a little lamb”) but she breaks my heart because she won’t say a word to me at all + turns up her nose at all paternal advances.
Love + XXX Bill
TO WILLIAM BLACKBURN
December 8, 1956 2707 Lawina Road, Baltimore, MD
Dear Doctor:
Just a note from the in-law bailiwick in Baltimore to let you know that I got your note and I’m glad that all goes well. Rose and Susanna and I have been here for a week and expect to spend a week more, before going back to the Connecticut glades for Xmas. I don’t expect that we can make it down to Durum this season, but I hope we can perhaps visit you sometime in the spring. Reason: we have been invited to spend two weeks or more next March or April in a friend’s house at Cocoa Beach, Fla. Also, from what I can make out, “The Long March” will be filmed in the swamps of that part of Florida at around the same time. The producer is an amiable gent who evinces a remarkable respect for the opus per se, and has said that he would like me to be on hand for the production. I have no great illusions that the movie is going to be any work of art, but I have been told that this fellow’s attitude is unheard of, miraculous, and incomparable, so the chances are that I might take advantage of it and go down and lend my pennyworth of inspiration to the venture. One way or another, I hope we’ll be able to stop off and see you. Last Saturday (Dec. 1) Jim Brown, the agent, gave a party for Mac Hyman in N.Y., which we went to, and we rode as far as Baltimore on the train next day with Mac + Gwen. Mac seems to be in great shape and I’m hoping to drop in on Cordele, too, if this trip really materializes, which it ought to.
The new novel is proceeding apace, despite shoals and snags and misadventures of one sort or another. One thing that it is impossible to do is accuse Styron of excessive speed. But I have 550-600 yellow sheets done, all fairly clean and with little rewriting to be done, and I pray that next year this time will find me close to the end of the accursed thing. I find the whole business abominably, sweatily tiresome. I loathe writing with what amounts to a kind of phobia, and I suppose that it’s only a sort of perverse masochism that keeps me at it. I have developed, in my old age, an exhausting pessimism about all things literary; this is not a pose, Doctor, because I have examined it from all angles and only come up with a perpetual wonder over the fact that I have chosen to engage my mind and spirit in an activity which gives me so little satisfaction. The extraordinary thing, however, is how with this attitude I can go on writing things which seem to me quite good. It might seem strange, but it is as if in my hatred of the act of writing I had to prove myself supremely superior to it by turning out stuff that is, at least by my own standards, always of a high order. And I suppose that’s why I write so slowly, approaching the wretched work each day as maybe a sculptor does when confronted with a 20-ton block of granite to give meaning to, with a paring knife for a weapon. Right now I don’t know how this book is going to end up. It couldn’t be more totally different from LDID. It is told in the first person. The narrator is a glib wisecracker. The book abruptly breaks off mid-way and is told by an entirely different character, third-person. How out of this mess I am to fashion the noble tragedy which glimmers ever and anon before my eye, I still do not know. And maybe it will all be a terrific botch. But I do know that at least it will have a few fine things in it—these I ha
ve written already—so it simply cannot be a real disaster. Furthermore, I have a secret, tiny feeling that in spite of all my fears it will be the best thing I have written, which is a strange thing to say, if not idiotic, by one who has just stated his (excuse me while I find the phrase) “exhausting pessimism about all things literary.” Finally, I am simply exasperated by all of this stale, left-over adulation of people like Hemingway. If literature is to be viable and worth a damn it’s got to be perpetually renewed, and I’m determined that this book will be an important factor in the renewing process, or else I’ll pull a severe Sherwood Anderson and go into the paint business.
LDID, incidentally, is coming out next month in the Compass paperback editions, published by Viking at $1.25. Maybe at that price you can drum up some trade at the Duke bookstore.
Rose sends her fond regards and joins me in saying that she looks forward to seeing you before long. If you should come to N.Y. before then, don’t forget to call us. Meanwhile I hope you have a gorgeous Yuletide.
As ever,
Bill
P.S. The paper today brought me one bright item of hope—about Bob Goheen, the new president of Princeton.§R He was at the Academy in Rome when I was there and a more elegant nice gentleman you could not hope to know. I would say he bears the same relation to Edens or Manchester as St. John does to Norman Vincent Peale.
TO ELIZABETH MCKEE
March 7, 1957 Cocoa Beach, FL
Dear Elizabeth:
I got your communication with the various attached letters. I’m not very optimistic either about Bob Arthur§S doing anything inspired, but I don’t see much else to do except to string along with whatever Coe has up his sleeve. I wrote him just now and told him essentially that: that I was sorry, too, but that I was interested in seeing how the next version turned out, etc., and my prayers went with the project and so on. Just a nice letter. There’s not much else to do as far as I see but to wait and hope.
I wrote to De Liso and told him that I was interested—which I am—but that it would be at least a month before I would be able to do anything about it. If he really does corral Bellow, Jones, Mailer, etc., it might be an interesting book.
It went down to 45° here today, but we’ve had some lovely hot days and the prediction is for more. We’re leaving here around the 14th and, with a stopover in Virginia, we should arrive in Roxbury around the 21st or so. I rode down the Inland Waterway with Mac Hyman on his Chris-Craft: 160 miles of clear cruising until, 10 miles from here, we ran aground on a mudbank and had to have the Coast Guard pull us off. No damage; Susanna + Rose are fine. Susanna is a regular duck in the surf, but can’t decide really whether she loves it or loathes it. The work is coming along well. Any news from Padula? Best to all.
Love + XXX
Bill
TO MAXWELL GEISMAR
April 29, 1957 Roxbury, CT
Dear Max,
Was going to tell Ann—during the phallic interlude of the other night—why I thought you were my most perceptive critic (which, of course, means the most perceptive critic around), but somehow I forgot what I was going to say. Anyway, it’s this: you were the only person who wrote anything about “LDID” who found any humor in the book. There is humor in it, by God, and I think you’ll find humor in the one I’m writing now. Most critics are such solemn jackasses, really. Jonesy, incidentally, thought both you and Anne were the most, to use his own picturesque mot.
Hope you have (or have had already) great success at Brandeis.
Ever yours,
Bill
P.S. Ask Ann what she thinks of International Cellulose Products, Inc., mfrs. of “Tampax,” “Midol” & other aids to ladies. I suspect that this would be akin to Exposition, Horizon, & other vanity houses, though I really don’t know.
TO MAC HYMAN
April 29, 1957§T Roxbury, CT
Dear Mac—
Blackburn wrote that our misadventures on the Inland Waterway even got into the papers, why I don’t know, but with all the facts wrong. Anyway, it was a fine day, except for the last business, and even that wasn’t too bad, I guess (from what I heard when I went back to the canal the next day), since there didn’t seem to be any big damage to the boat. Was this accurate information? One guy said that when you steamed away the next day, everything was shipshape. I hope so. The people from Rome were still there with your cleat stuck in their transom, but they didn’t seem to be all that disgruntled, so I suppose that the only real damage all the way around was the ignominy of running aground in the first place. In assigning the fault there, I see it purely and simply this way: it was clearly your fault. I, of course, was at the wheel (I do take it into account that it was graceful of you to say, as you did at the canal, that we were “changing over”), and I was, to be sure, somewhat drunk from the Jack Daniel’s I’d been swilling down ever since Mosquito Lagoon, and as a result I was at least 20° off course. As even the most uninformed person knows, however, it is the captain of any craft who is in the end responsible for the behavior of the people aboard, including drunkenness, and so I can hardly see how you can avoid the burden of blame. I should think that from now on you will be a lot more careful about who you let steer that tub of yours; after the next wreck you have you might not be so lucky, and the Coast Guard board of inquiry is not going to politely ask who was doing the steering, etc.: they’re simply going to get you.
Anyway, it was a fine trip, even with the disaster, which I hope you haven’t let overshadow all the rest. I would be glad to help reimburse you for that cleat, incidentally; actually, when I come to think of it, we’re damn lucky that one of us wasn’t buried with it rammed halfway down his throat.
I hope that the writing is coming along well, and that you’ll be able to take some time off before too long and come up this way. We’ve got a lot of room now that the other house is fixed up and if you feel the need for a change of scene or anything like that you’re welcome to stay here and work or relax or do anything you want.
I’m at page 590 of this great bloated overwritten monster I’m working on. I’m sick of it, and there’s no end in sight. If you ever begin to feel discouraged, maybe you can at least take a small bit of comfort in the fact that there’s one other writer who’s just as sour about it all. Or more so.
Thanks for the warm Ga. Hospitality and the wonderful boat trip which will forever live in my memory, in spite of its demonstration of man’s inherent fallibility. By which I mean that I think that it’s damn close to criminal that the Army Engineers or whoever’s responsible is not made to dredge a wider channel out of Hanlover Canal, about 800 yds. at least, and that furthermore it seems to me utterly ridiculous that by now the Chris-Craft people haven’t developed a small, cheap, foolproof sounding device for the bottoms of their goddamn boats. It seems to me that when they expect you to stay sober and on top of that pay attention to the buoys + the rules of the road + all that sort of crap they’ve pretty nearly taken all the fun out of it. I hope you agree.
Bill
TO MAXWELL GEISMAR
May 14, 1957 Roxbury, CT
Dear Max—
I’m glad you got an agent, and thanks for passing on the wise sentiments of Mr. Jack Jones. I’m not at all certain that Rose will receive his MS, but I’ve tipped her off about it and she will have an eye out when and if it comes, and so will I.
Latest source of despondency is an essay in “Dissent” by some new critic named Richard Chase. It was actually a review of Aldridge’s “In Search of Heresy,” attacking him for a “middlebrow,” and saying that it was typical of J.W.A. that he should condemn such “low-middlebrow” books as “Marjorie Morningstar” while defending such books as “Lie Down in Darkness,” which he called a “middlebrow novel with highbrow flourishes of rhetoric.” It wasn’t so much the jab at me that was so depressing, since I’ve received worse, in such middlebrow journals as Time and The New Yorker, but the whole appalling, snobbish, mean-spirited, frightened-of-life tenor of the article. I’ve never re
ad much “New” criticism, but if this guy is at all representative of the school—and I gather he is—then I can really see at long last that the situation is dangerous. Perhaps it only takes a personal reference to bring it home; since the New critics have not paid any attention to me I suppose I can assume that this is the general feeling they have about my work. But as I say much more important than this was the whole small and petty, small-hearted, niggardly, undertaker atmosphere this guy’s writing generates. Who is this guy anyway, with his cheap mean little chatter about the “highbrow” (by which I suppose he means New criticism) being the only attitude in art that is worthwhile? Why doesn’t someone tip this dreary person off, along with all the rest of them, and point out that practically any fine novel ever written was middlebrow, written for the common middlebrow reader who had, presumably, warm blood in his veins and not, as in Chase’s case, embalming fluid. Does this guy consider Tolstoy “highbrow,” or Balzac, or for that matter Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald or Tom Wolfe? To hell with him anyway. It seems to me that the writer of heart, intelligence, good-will, and talent is in a terrible limbo at the moment—between the mass moron on one hand and on the other hand the frightened, grubby-souled little academic, like this Chase, who would turn literature into a kind of desolating calculus, or would level it horizontally to approximate the wasteland of his own spirit. At any rate, Max, outside of the good auspices of yourself and only one or two others, I think I can say that if I ever become famous and if Lie Down lasts for a while it won’t be because I got any boost from the so-called “pros” of literature, the New critics. I am looking forward to the day when my hair is crowned with laurel and a New critic starts jumping belatedly on the band-wagon and I am able to tromp on his fingers and say, “Get your dirty hands off.” I’ll do it, too.
Selected Letters of William Styron Page 26
