Selected Letters of William Styron

by William Styron

  I grew up about 30 to 35 miles away, to the northeast, on the other side of the James River in an area almost exactly the same in its general topography. I lived near a city (Newport News) but as I pointed out in my last letter the little village where I grew up had a thoroughly rural tone. It has completely changed now, of course; World War II and the growth of industry saw to that. But I think it would be safe to say that whatever smell I have for Nat’s landscape derives from a familiarity with the same sort of landscape I grew up with as a boy: cornfields, swampy lowlands, pinewoods, etc. Curiously, all U.S. climatic and topographical maps—those which depict rainfall, average temperatures, length of growing season, etc.—include this little bulge in southeastern Va. in a general region which extends from east Texas through the deep South and up through the Carolina lowlands to its terminating point near Norfolk (cotton, for instance, won’t grow north of Norfolk). Thus I would say that with certain variations the Southampton region and my own along the James are not too different from the piney woods and flat lands you so perfectly described in the Louisiana of All the King’s Men. And you have a strangle-hold on that kind of country.

  I hope this is helpful. I’ve learned that Jimmy Baldwin is doing a long essay-review on Nat for The Atlantic Monthly.‡JJ Après moi, le déluge.

  À bientot,

  Bill

  TO DON CONGDON

  June 29, 1967 Vineyard Haven, MA

  Dear Don:

  I have sent both letters on to Tom Maschler with a stern note telling him to get Cape moving on the BOMC rights nuisance. They should know better, but I think this will get action.

  As for the movie offers on Nat Turner, I really do not care to start any negotiations until the book is published and even after that. As I think I told you before, I have had in the past so many annoying and ridiculous inquiries, half-assed options and mendacious propositions about my various books—none of which amounted to 10 cents—that this time I think I can remain completely aloof and call my own shots. As I also told you, truthfully, I have no urgent need for the money, and while I am not totally oblivious to the charms of cash, I simply do not care to bite on any offer that comes my way. In this case, especially, I do not want my book turned into some ghastly soap opera with Sidney Poitier and Lena Horne. If, on the other hand, there comes to your attention some proposition which seems to include the possibility of integrity and taste as part of the deal, I would certainly not be averse to at least talking things over with whomever makes the offer. I like films as a medium and while I know that it is extremely difficult for the writer of a book to have any say-so in its transformation to the screen, nonetheless I want to be able to go as far as possible in that direction, and am completely indifferent to any purely commercial proposition.

  Hope you will have a fine summer and that we can get together face to face for a chat before too long.

  Yours—

  Bill

  TO CLAIRE WHITE

  June 30, 1967 Vineyard Haven, MA

  Dear Claire:

  Cold and gloomy up here today, but I’m glad you liked the section of the book. The South was like that, I’m convinced beyond doubt, and even much worse down in places like Alabama. Compared to the Deep South, Virginia was paradise.

  I don’t understand how my treatment of religion in the part you read is “Freudian,” but I think when you read the other parts of the book (there are three main parts, and the one you read is the center one, #2) you will see that Nat is certainly religious, and that his religion is the guiding motif for all that he does, including killing 60 people. You must understand that, even at the age of 18, like so many Negroes who came after him, Nat’s religion was not your familiar religion of the Gospels but that of the cruel rhetoric of the Old Testament, and that the Bible was, indeed, often no more than a lofty grammar—as you succinctly put it—to such people. But Nat in his final days does find the Real Thing, as I think you will see when you read the entire book.

  Tell Bobby that I am looking forward eagerly to seeing his illustrations. Harper’s is going to promote this issue, according to Willie, as they have no other and it is sure to be read by lots of people. Bob Loomis tells me also that the bookstore orders are already 52,000 copies, which is some sort of record for Random House, and that one bookstore in Chicago, Brentano’s I believe, has alone ordered 3,500. So we’ll see …

  Come pay us a visit. It can’t stay gray forever. And thanks for what you said about the book.

  Love and kisses,

  —B.

  * Tell Bobby I have a few camels up here for him to show.

  TO MIKE MEWSHAW

  July 22, 1967‡KK Vineyard Haven, MA

  Dear Mike:

  I have just gotten back your manuscript from my friend, whose opinion lit.-wise I respect, and indeed I am sorry to have taken so long—my reasons being that the ms. arrived while I was in Europe and languished there for a full month before I returned, the other—more important—being that I have until only the past few weeks been able to disentangle myself from the final details attendant upon the publication of Nat Turner; proof-reading, changes, additional proof-reading for the long section that is going to appear in the Sept. Harper’s, etc. So now, in the clear, I have finished the ms., and my friend too, and we seem to agree on all major points.

  The first and best point is that you are quite obviously a writer, that is, you know how to write, and for you words are not lumpish things to fling on the paper but units of the thought-process to be used meticulously, imaginatively, and with care. You are excellent at rendering mood, have a really fine eye and instinct for nature and the weather, and I was continually impressed, really impressed, by your uncanny gift for dialogue. Your ear here is really magnificent; all that tough idiomatic 20th century speech comes through perfectly, without a single hitch—not just the speech itself, either, but speech in connection with other speech, the dramatic inter-relationship of people talking—as on a stage. All that is truly first-rate.

  I wish I could say that with all my admiration for your quite obvious gift I felt that this novel succeeds as a book, but I have too many reservations about it to say that I think it does. For one thing, I think, there is something about the theme (in other words, what the writer is trying to say) that bugs me. Your story is about a young man named Chris, who, fleeing a rather unhappy relationship with a girl in the U.S., takes off and sets up housekeeping with four or five oddly-assorted fellow-Americans of both sexes on a West Indian island. The story alternates between flashbacks about his connection with the very pregnant girl, whom he loves, and his present situation with Ted and Gerald and Marty and Simone. What frankly troubles and perplexes me about your story, however, is that very little really happens; there is very little development either in terms of plot (I hate to use that old-fashioned word) or character. There is a lot of drinking, a lot of talk (quite good and accurate, as I’ve said) about screwing and booze, some action on the water, but I’m never really certain just where the story is leading us. To be quite blunt, I honestly don’t understand what the significance of all this is. None of the characters change, that is, nothing in the process of the story happens to change them or to allow the reader to perceive new insights as to what makes people tick. Ted is noisy and raucous in the beginning, loudly entangled in his complicated relationships with Marty and Simone, and he remains that to the very end. Chris himself undergoes no development either, so far as I can see; he rather listlessly observes the shenanigans of his fellow housemates, screws Marty, has a spell in jail, broods about his knocked-up girl, gets the mild hots for Karen, but nothing else really happens to him; neither he nor we—the readers—are in any way changed. There seems to be little dramatic tension in the story. Nothing really happens, as I say; I hate to be repetitious and abuse that word, but it is the only phrase I know how to use to describe my feeling that you have not so much constructed a novel with shifting moods, new insight into character, and a schema of dramatic tensions as a long and I’m
afraid too-often monotonous record of loud and drunken conversations between or among, rather, a group of not very interesting people. In short, I honestly can’t figure out what the novel is all about.

  It especially makes me unhappy to say all of this when, as I’ve already stated, you have so obviously a writer’s real gifts: keen ear for talk, skill at description, and a gutsy sense of the way people yammer at and exacerbate each other when they are confined together as these people are. But honestly, and to repeat, I just don’t think you have in this book discovered a theme: which is to say that possibly you have not thought out that striking and original thing in yourself that is absolutely imperative to have as a writer if you are to arrest the attention of 20th-century Americans already so distracted by The Vietnam War, television, pot, LSD, pornography and 10,000 other delights.

  I hate to be in the magisterial position of telling a young writer what I think is wrong with his work; after all, it is all too clear that I may be wrong too. But you asked for my opinion and I gave it, and I hope it won’t create too wrong an effect. The important thing to me is that you are a writer, with all the fine potential that that single word implies. Just as important is the fact that you are still very young, and have so much opportunity to do the big thing in the fullness of time. I frankly don’t think that you have found yourself—your true voice—in this book, but I have no doubt that you will before very long. I would not have gone on at such length about your work if I did not have faith in what will come from you in the future.

  In case that it is any comfort to you, I might report that (although at your age I had not produced a novel) I had an equivalent amount of pages of short stories that now I am glad I put away upon the shelf.

  Best of luck always. I have no doubt that you will overcome.

  Yours ever,

  Bill Styron

  PS: I’m sending the copy of the ms. back under separate cover.

  and best to Slim

  TO ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.

  July 29, 1967 Vineyard Haven, MA

  Dear Arthur:

  I feel flattered all out of shape by your fine review, and I do appreciate your sending it to me.‡LL Aside from the praise—which is always nice—what I think I liked most about the review was the way you connected Nat with Frantz Fanon, who of course is a 20th-century Nat Turner.‡MM I will be lucky to get any reviews with half the perception you compressed into that brief space.

  As to why I did not include the incident about Nat running away, I indeed thought about it but found that it would not fit into the narrative.‡NN So instead I put in the part about Hark running away, which seemed to say the same thing. I have the feeling that a lot of M.A. candidates will be kept busy figuring out just where and when I stuck to or departed from the original “Confessions.”

  Again, many thanks for the fine and understanding review. Both Rose and I will be looking forward to seeing you up here sometime this summer.

  As ever,

  Bill

  P.S. I have just been reading Fanon and find him very scary.‡OO

  TO ROBERT LOOMIS

  September 4, 1967 Vineyard Haven, MA

  Dear Bob:

  Philip Rahv showed me the first line of his review in The N.Y. Review of Books which reads, verbatim, as follows:

  “This is a first-rate novel, the best that William Styron has written and the best by an American writer that has appeared in some years.”‡PP

  If you want to use this in that jumbo Times daily ad, however, you should make sure to check dates inasmuch as Philip’s review might come after the book has been published. But since it is assured, perhaps you could use some sort of line like “from a forthcoming review in The New York Review of Books.” I leave it up to you.

  B

  The Confessions of Nat Turner was published by Random House on October 9, 1967.

  TO PAMELA MARKE‡QQ

  November 6, 1967‡RR Paris, France

  Dear Miss Marke:

  The books I would give Susanna for the Utopian Society on that distant planet might be:

  1st—A one-volume edition of the complete Greek drama, for its tragedy and laughter;

  2nd—A revised edition of HOYLE’S GAMES, for the necessary bulwark against ennui;

  3rd—(and I’m at a loss here) Either the U.S. ARMY SURVIVAL MANUAL or Rombauer & Becker’s NEW JOY OF COOKING, each of which explains with precision certain techniques fundamental to existence, if not to the elegant life.

  Sincerely,

  William Styron

  TO WILLIAM BLACKBURN

  November 29, 1967 Roxbury, CT

  Dear Professor:

  Unfortunately, it looks as if I will be unable to get down to the affair in Greensboro, and hence that means that I also would be unable to participate in anything at Duke on the 12th of February (although your surmise is accurate: I’ve heard nothing from the Duke people either, so I don’t suppose I would have been invited anyway). I do hope to get down to Durham before too long on a private visit, though. I have tentative plans to go to Cuba early in January on some sort of writers’ junket sponsored by a thawing-out Castro and I’m hoping that maybe on the way back I could stop both in Durham and in Va. But all this is pretty tentative.

  Thanks for the kind words about Nat. It seems to be doing extremely well; Mr. Cerf told me the other day that sales are approaching 100,000 which is, as they say, real fine for a book only published six weeks. I don’t know if I told you that the book was sold to the movies for a record amount, $600,000, most of which goes to pursue the war in Vietnam but still enough to keep me in sour mash for the next couple of years. These are commercial items of news, but I cannot help but find them fascinating nonetheless. I don’t know if you saw the recent review by George Steiner or the one in the Nov. Commentary by John Thompson; along with Rahv’s piece in the NY Review they comprise the most intelligent appraisals of the book so far.‡SS Many of the others have been favorable enough though rather stupid.

  I hope you will tell Bill Hamilton that, grateful as I am for the gesture, I would really not want an honorary degree from Duke. I was about to say any institution, but this would not be quite truthful for in fact I was just awarded something called the Doctor of Humanities degree by Wilberforce University in Ohio.‡TT Lest I sound inconsistent, I must add that Wilberforce (unless you didn’t know, which I didn’t) is the oldest Negro college in the USA; the president of the school had read Nat and had been impressed, and to have turned down the degree (plus an invitation to deliver the Fall Convocation address) would have seemed a studied slight on my part. Besides, I was very touched by this particular honor, its context, etc. But otherwise I simply do not believe in honorary degrees—from Duke or Yale or Princeton or wherever, at least for a writer. There is a formal, burlesque quality about such degrees that Mencken used to poke such fun at, and I’m rather in agreement with him. It has, you understand, nothing at all in particular to do with my feelings about Duke; it is rather a matter of general principle, and I hope you can get the word slyly to Bill Hamilton and that he will understand.

  I hope all goes well with you and that you are relaxed and happy with the lighter schedule. I’ll be calling or writing you in the near future about (in fond hope) a flying visit to Durms.

  All best to you.

  Yrs ever

  —B.S.

  TO LEW ALLEN

  December 27, 1967 Roxbury, CT

  Dear Lewie + Jay:

  The Bodyscope and the Love plaque were the only lovely gifts I received out of all the tons of execrable junk that descended on me this Yuletide. They are both truly an inspiration and are hanging now, of course in my downstairs narcissistic bathroom.‡UU I will ever be grateful for this remembrance, especially the Bodyscope which, whenever I enter the sanctuary, is always mysteriously turned to either “male” or “female genitalia.”

  Love + happy New Year.

  —B

  “Nat” has just hit 115,000—all white customers.

&nbs
p; TO ROBERT PENN WARREN

  January 13, 1968 Roxbury, CT

  Dear Red:

  I have nothing but the highest regard for the way you have touted my daughter and your god-daughter on to Milton Academy and I only hope she doesn’t end up caught with pot or LSD or something that might besmirch your reputation.

  The poem on Audubon is truly fine, one of your loveliest. I’d love to see the others on him. We must get together soon since it has been all too long.

  Your Russian translator’s name is Victor Golishev, Tishinskaia Sq. 6, Apt. 11, Moscow D-56, U.S.S.R. I’m sure he would be tickled pink, as they say, if you dropped him a note.

  À bientôt,

  Bill

  TO JAMES JONES

  January 17, 1968 Roxbury, CT

  Dear Jim:

  This is what may happen to you, too, if you incur Max Geismar’s displeasure.‡VV He wrote this in a shabby little Stalinist organ called Minority of One. Watch out, you may be next! Love to all—B.

  TO JAMES AND GLORIA JONES

  [Unknown] 1968‡WW English Harbour, Antigua, West Indies

  Dear James and Moss:

  Me and Rose are cruising with Mike Nichols on Joe Levine’s 95-foot Jewish cocktail yacht complete with wall-to-wall carpeting in the bathrooms, shocking pink toilet seats, tape recorders in every room and a free blowjob every day before breakfast (you have to pay 25¢ for that, though). Down to Guadeloupe tomorrow where we hope to pick up a few French groceries. Get this: I have an acting part in Mike’s movie version of “Catch-22.”‡XX If you want a part too, let me know; I think you might be a sadistic officer like me. Moss could be either a nurse or a whore.