Selected Letters of William Styron

by William Styron

  How is Norma? Hope all goes well with her physically-wise. Give her a hug and a kiss, and also tell Danny that Al is crocheting a jock strap for him to wear this summer on the fantail of the Diabolique. Incidentally, I’m enclosing two bills, one for storage and one for the installation of the hawse pipe, which is a dandy invention and will allow us to swing the anchor directly overside from the foredeck and to stow it permanently there. You can send me your check for ½ at your leisure.

  Everyone sends love and we are panting to know about Africa.

  Send us the gnus.

  Jambo,

  Pill

  Styron abandoned work on The Way of the Warrior and began a manuscript entitled Sophie’s Choice: A Memory.

  TO BOB BRUSTEIN

  January 22, 1973 Roxbury, CT

  Dear Bob, Happy to receive both of your communications. Your long letter cheered me up a great deal after the early and creepy reception from the distinguished members of the press. Jesus, what ignorant pricks! But things have improved immeasurably since then and I feel much better about the play on my own! For one thing, it actually got a couple of swell reviews—a rave in the Hartford Courant and a boff-o (or is it sock-o?) in, of all places, Variety. Then (from what I hear, since I haven’t been back since opening night) the performances have been knocking the audiences in the aisles. Our friend Phil Roth went a week or so ago with Howard and Alvin and all said that the effect was really tremendous. As you know, Philip is rather hard to please and he was wild about it, saying among other things that Schwartz was the best “stage Jew” he’d ever seen, but liking the whole thing enormously. And I know Philip well enough to feel that if he hadn’t liked it, his reticence would be vast. Howard and Alvin are both hugely delighted by the way things are going, so fuck Barnes and all the rest.

  Also thanks for your letter from Boyd. I spoke to Howard about it and he said he would send him a copy of the finished version of the script immediately. It could be great fun to see it done in London.… I haven’t seen hide nor hair of Phillip, whom I thought I was going to put together a tape for the sordid part of the production. I’ve also sent an order off through the mail for “There’s A Star-Spangled Bannner,” as sung by the original troubadour, Elton Britt, but haven’t received it, mail order places being notoriously slow. If you or Norma are in touch with P., please tell him to contact me as soon as possible because I would love to get that part of the production grooved in, so to speak.

  We saw the Miller play in a preview last night and it was, alas, all the frightful things that have been bruited about. There’s some really clever stage business here and there but that’s about all—mostly it’s a long Jewish joke about God. Jews as playwrights shouldn’t joke about the Creation. It all ends up sounding like cheap lower East Side vaudeville, and I’m afraid that’s about the level of Arthur’s play. Mainly, though, it just doesn’t hold together, doesn’t have any vision; also it’s badly marred by the Augustinian assumption that sex really is the evil behind human misery. This aspect is also done joking but it doesn’t work since it was never a good message and especially hard to take in the 1970s.

  Love and miss you all and are looking forward to your arrival in Dec, but tell Norma that our heart breaks at the thought that she can’t be here. Also Al is bereft at the thought of being deprived of those throbbing embraces of Danny’s, those wild nights of lust, that thrusting tool.

  Oh well, there is always next summer and the decks of the Diabolique.

  À bientôt,

  Bill

  TO PHILIP ROTH

  January 29, 1973 Roxbury, CT

  Dear Philip:

  I have not “committed the cruelty” of reading either Podhoretz or Howe more than once but I do have some lingering impressions.‖GG As one who is no stranger to such all-out attacks, I think I can both analyze and judge the nature of this kind of knee-in-the-groin criticism with, possibly, a little bit more astute familiarity than some writers.

  … The first was from Stanley Kauffmann, who blasted Nat in the Hudson Review. It was not really a rancorous piece like Howe’s but it was nearly as negative, saying that as literature the book was kaput, valueless. Shortly after this Kauffmann wrote a revealing review of another novel in the Atlantic. I can’t at the moment recall what novel he was reviewing but it was someone you and I would consider a respectable writer and was receiving much acclaim in the press. Kauffmann put the book down from the first word, saying that it fell into a category of novels like Ship of Fools, In Cold Blood (though not strictly a novel), and Nat Turner—“big” books by decent writers which nonetheless had gained fame and favor not through any intrinsic worth but because their reception had been “rigged” by publishers and the media. I remember that as I read this review I suddenly became aware of the reason for Kauffmann’s hostility in the long Hudson Review piece. It was really because Nat Turner had been such a smashing success, not only in literary but commercial terms. I had noticed this tendency in Kauffmann in his New Republic film reviews, to blast what I thought were pretty good movies (Tom Jones was one) when they were both popular and critical successes, and he was using the same old bludgeon on me. For the truth of the matter is that to say as he did that the success of Nat Turner was “rigged” is tantamount to saying that the favorable criticism it had received—from people like Philip Rahv and Alfred Kazin and Vann Woodward among others—was duplicitous and hypocritical, by men who were lying through their teeth. And then when it became clear to me how large a component in Kauffmann’s critical lexicon was the idea of “success,” I began to realize the motivation for his negative appraisal of my work. It is of course too glib and easy to accuse all critics of being afflicted with the vice of envy—but I’m positive given the evidence, that this was Kauffmann’s trouble. My “success.”

  When criticism gives the impression of an inability to find virtually any value in work which many others (including those of high distinction) have regarded highly, you may be certain that the critic is deviously motivated. I know that there are all sorts of rebuttals to that proposition—the emperor’s clothes syndrome, for one—and of course there is the famous example of Dwight Macdonald’s demolition job on By Love Possessed.‖HH But everyone with any real literary sensibility (including me) knew that Cozzen’s book was bloated, badly written and incredibly overrated, and we were tickled to death by Macdonald’s attack. The point I’m trying to make is that, despite the inevitable shift in values over a long period of time, there is generally speaking, a sound instinct abroad in both the critical and public mind as to what constitutes a major writer or a major work. The consensus is usually pretty accurate, too—the consensus among those who count, that is. In the late thirties and early forties, when Clifton Fadiman was raking Faulkner over the coals in the New Yorker, I (who had just started to read books like The Sound and The Fury) knew in my 15-year-old head that Fadiman was a misguided imbecile.‖II

  I will come to Norman and Irving (don’t they run a delicatessen somewhere?) in a moment, after a last reference to the kind of criticism I’m talking about. The other major (non-black) attack on Nat Turner came from Richard Gilman in The New Republic. This long piece, like Howe’s, was aggressively rancorous, and it called Nat mediocre if not worthless. Much of Gilman’s motivation had to do with the poisonous thesis (that he was then dishing out) that whites could not understand or evaluate black life and letters, and the essay revealed to me also (rather startlingly, I must say) that Gilman could barely write grammatical English. But mainly Gilman, like Howe, undercut the thrust of his argument by his refusal to acknowledge any value in my work at all … But in his insistent and nattering negativism he resembled Howe, and therefore—after the initial smart had worn off (one has to admit it that it does hurt)—I realized how easily he could be dismissed. For no one can legitimately take unto himself the authority to deem as worthless work in which too many other people of taste and intelligence have discovered great value.

  Which brings me to Norman. His a
ttack on you is, quite simply, weird. What is “the New Class” anyway? Nowhere does he successfully or convincingly define it, this New Class. Whatever it is, you are its spokesman and he is greatly and clearly disturbed by your “success.” Of all people, Norman being troubled by success!! Of course, his concern with your success is somewhat different from the success-obsession of Kauffmann, who, I hate to say (because I used to know and rather like him), is a failed “creative” person for whom I honestly believe success in others acts like poison. Norman’s pain over your success derives, as far as I can tell, from ideological considerations, and they are pretty simple-minded. Simple-minded and, I might add, very close to Philistine. His statement that the purpose of your work has been largely to offer documentary evidence “for the complacent thesis that the country is inhabited exclusively by vulgarians, materialists, boobs and boors” reminds me of those scandalously reactionary pieces that used to appear in Time or Life back in the forties and fifties, putting down honest writers and praising Herman Wouk. Given Norman’s political and social reorientation I am not really surprised at this line, but I am amazed at how little subtlety he demonstrates. He sounds like Spiro Agnew. And indeed I think that’s the crux of the matter, and it’s such a tired situation that it borders on the absurd: an honest writer who has not shrunk from viewing life and society head-on once again being taken over the hurdles by someone who himself has abandoned literary standards even as he embraces Neanderthal social values and politics.

  Despite the disclaimer to the contrary, Podhoretz really resents your treatment of the Jews and I would say that this resentment is at the heart of both his and Howe’s assaults on your work. Had you not written Letting Go and When She Was Good it would have been difficult for both of them, but it immeasurably helps their strategy (part of which, or I should say a major part of which is to damn you for bearing false witness against Jewish life) to be able to say in effect, “Look, we are not after Roth for his nasty portrayal of Jews, because see how ugly he paints WASP life too.” At least that’s my reading of the matter. Howe’s mind is vastly more penetrating and complex than Podhoretz’s and of course he possesses, basically, a finer literary sensibility. But I can’t get over the feeling that the rather well-hidden but overriding animus in Howe’s piece has to do with your treatment of Jews. I don’t mean to say that Howe is so unsophisticated as to think that Jewish life, any more than that of any other minority, should be exempted from the writer’s right to portray it with as much severity as is compatible with his vision of the truth. I do think, however (and I’ve seen it in the pages of Dissent) that Howe is, quite unbeknownst to himself, possessed of an old-fashioned Jewish defensiveness which caused your work (despite his early praise of it) to stick in his craw as painfully as it did in the throats of those rabbis. Literarily speaking, the intensity of his attack on you rarely makes much sense and he often seems to lapse into arcane double-talk when he runs out of logic in trying to make a point. His entire attack on Portnoy, for instance, is to me nearly incomprehensible since it fails to acknowledge the fact that whatever its defects the book works; the animating spirit behind the novel is of such vigor as to make it quite academic whether the book is a group of skits, or has imperfect “development,” or whatever. This is why earlier on, rather self-indulgently, I made the comparison with the Gilman treatment of Nat. The point is that, whatever its flaws, Nat Turner worked in a very special way for people, and it totally begs the question whether, as Gilman insisted, I had found the “wrong voice” for Nat, just as it begs the question that Howe is offended that Portnoy “never shuts up.” For most people the book worked beautifully—whatever the mystery behind it—and throughout his piece Howe gives himself away by protesting too much. Also I think his taste has become degraded. I thought Last Exit to Brooklyn, with which he compares you unfavorably, was one of the most shrill, turgidly overwritten books I’d ever read.

  At any rate, at too great length, these are my reflections, for what they’re worth. In regard to Howe’s piece, and on the purely mundane level, it is still curious to me that I’ve not heard a single person—in the great literary jungle we all sometimes venture into—mention a word about it, nor indeed about Commentary, where, if memory serves me right, that Macdonald attack on Cozzens was published. And I recall with what noisy glee that piece was received everywhere! I would only suggest that the crashing silence surrounding Howe’s “reconsideration” of you means that, if many people read it at all, which I doubt, the unfair and hectoring tone which Howe adopted so bored people—as it did me—or turned them off, that they simply lost interest.

  Well, you’re forty now and old enough to know you’ve just got to take such shit. Wait till you’re forty-seven‖JJ (I can barely write it), boy, then you’ll know what the wintry touch of mortality really feels like. However, we can get our walking sticks out when you come back in the spring and hobble through the Connecticut woods, in the late summer of life for you, I in the early autumn.

  Yours in the slime we sometimes find

  ourselves up to our asses in—Bill

  TO MIA FARROW

  February 7, 1973 Roxbury, CT

  Dear Mia: I received your nice cards warning me about calls from your agent, but Mr. McIlwane (is that the way you spell it?) was most pleasant on the telephone, and I now have recently had the opportunity of getting together with David Brown, who also has struck me as a capital fellow, really. Seems that he and Mr. Zanuck have a movie company or something and they would very much love to do a movie with you starring and me writing the script. The idea sounds good to me.

  But before I met Mr. Brown (David, that is) I came up with another notion. I know that when you and I talked last you spoke of your disaffection with some of the kooky roles you had played in the fairly recent past, and I could understand your feeling. However, I also wondered if this weren’t the perfect moment to cast you in Lie Down in Darkness, of course as Peyton, who was a little kooky, but, more importantly, tragic and potentially a splendid role for an actress of your caliber. Over the years LDID has been optioned more times than I can count, and there have been many treatments and several scripts, but for various reasons (usually cowardice and inertia on the part of the producers) nothing ever panned out.

  In 1962, John Frankenheimer took an option on the book, and lined up Natalie Wood to play Peyton and Hank Fonda to play the father. A friend of mine, Richard Yates (author of a fine first novel, Revolutionary Road), wrote the screenplay.‖KK Then something happened; the story goes that Natalie’s agent persuaded her that the role of Peyton would destroy her virginal, all-American image, and when Natalie backed out so did Fonda and eventually Frankenheimer. All that was left was Yates’s script—a good one, I think.

  I recited the foregoing history to David, and it interested him enormously. He has of course asked to see the script, and I am in the process of getting it into his hands. I have not re-read the script in the intervening ten years, but I do remember it being strong and faithful to the book, and especially sensitive to the nuances of Peyton’s rather complex character. I spoke to Yates over the phone (he now teaches in the Midwest) and he still expresses his faith in the script, with the reservation that it was, after all, written ten years ago and would doubtless need some revision, if only to take advantage of the more liberated situation movies find themselves in in A.D. 1973. I would doubtless collaborate in whatever rewriting and revisions are necessary.

  At any rate this is a tentative feeler, pardon the expression, to ask you if this interests you and maybe excites you as much as it does me and, apparently, David Brown. I have a feeling that Dick Zanuck will be taken by the idea too. You are one of the very few actresses who has the range and subtlety to grasp a sad and complicated girl like Peyton Loftis, and I believe the time is ripe for the film …‖LL

  TO BOB BRUSTEIN

  April 23, 1973 Roxbury, CT

  Dear Bob:

  Enjoyed your last letter and, needless to say, your visit to New Haven—all
too brief as it was. Now the play is, as they say, history but I hope it won’t be embalmed in history, since I’m looking forward to a few more productions here and there from time to time. The Random House edition, incidentally, will be appearing imminently, complete with photographs, and I’ll airmail you a copy as soon as I get one.

  Good to hear about your Vineyard arrival although you seem to be having such a fine time that only a pleasant retreat like our island could ease the re-entry shock into the Citadel of Democracy. A weird atmosphere prevails here now—a kind of obverse side of the radical violence scene, with apathy on the campuses, political and otherwise, nostalgia for the 50’s, etc. Indeed, I think in certain respects the 70’s might resemble the Eisenhower years.

  My novel about the Marine freak hero is coming along well, though at a time when Poirier proclaims Mailer the equal of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and potentially as great as Faulkner I feel very weak and humble as a writer.‖MM I’m possibly taking a week off early in June to tour Holland with Rose and Bobby and Claire White (she’s Dutch-born). Plans are skimpy so far, and iffy, but iffy I do come I might stop by in London for a fort with you chaps. I’ll let you know well in advance.

  You should enjoy writing your Times pieces since they are very elegant jobs indeed. We all enjoyed the piece on English actors enormously. Right on. I’ve done a long piece for The Book Review on Malcolm Cowley’s farewell look at the Lost Generation, and have been told it will be on page 1. I’ll send it to you in May, if you don’t get it anyway.

  A stupid boat bill is enclosed, but necessary, I think, in order to preserve the metal on the darling Diabolique. Just send a check at your leisure, anticipating, however, at the painful moment of check writing some lovely hours to come at Tashmoo, etc. Love to all from all of us.