Selected Letters of William Styron
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*Z Styron’s father wrote an eight-page biography of his son for the Duke alumni office. It is reprinted in Letters to My Father.
†a Dorothy “Didi” Parker was one of Styron’s colleagues at Whittlesey House. She should not be conufsed with the Algonquin Round Table founder of the same name.
†b “Shells Fall Short, Kill 8 Marines, Wound 23 at Camp Lejeune, N.C.,” The New York Times, June 21, 1951.
†c John Maloney, 117 West Thirteenth Street.
†d One of Styron’s affectionate spellings for Durham. He also used Durms, especially with Blackburn.
†e Maxwell Geismar (1909–79): American literary critic and biographer who taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College; author of a four-volume history of American novelists as well as two biographies, Henry James and the Jacobites (1963) and Mark Twain: An American Prophet (1970). He also edited literary collections by Ring Lardner, Thomas Wolfe, and Walt Whitman. He praised Lie Down in Darkness in print many times, most notably in American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity (New York: Hill and Wang, 1958).
†f Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) was a novelist and poet who became especially influential as an editor at Viking Press in the 1940s.
†g Aldridge reviewed Lie Down in Darkness in “In a Place Where Love Is a Stranger,” The New York Times Book Review, September 9, 1951.
†h Edith Abraham Crow was the only sister of Styron’s mother. She lived in Uniontown, Pennsylvania.
†i Southern literary critic, professor, and publisher (b. 1923). Rubin is a cofounder of Algonquin Books as well as the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He taught at Johns Hopkins University (1950–54), Hollins College (1957–67), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1967–89). A correspondence and friendship with Styron began when Rubin sent his review of Lie Down in Darkness, “What to Do About Chaos,” in The Hopkins Review (Fall 1951).
†j Styron first met Rose Burgunder, his future wife, at this meeting of Rubin’s graduate seminar at Johns Hopkins. Rose was working on a master’s degree in poetry and criticism. Styron was nervous about his appearance, writing in a letter to Rubin on December 18, 1951: “I’ll do my best at a talk to the students, though I’m inexperienced at that sort of thing. I expect I’ll make out all right, perhaps with a little prompting from you.” Rose recalled of the visit: “Bill was terrible, we all said to each other, nice guy, but not an intellectual.” Bill wrote to Rubin on March 26, 1968, declining an invitation to speak at UNC: “I guess I’d better decline. Who knows, though, I may change my mind. If I hadn’t done that before, you may remember, I would not have met Rose Burgunder.”
†k Arthur A. Ageton (1900–71), rear admiral in the U.S. Navy and later (1954–57) U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay. Louis Simpson (1923–2012), Jamaican-American poet who was an editor for Bobbs-Merrill in 1952.
†l Elliott Coleman (1906–80) was a poet who founded the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins in 1947. C. Vann Woodward (1908–99) was a renowned American historian who taught at Johns Hopkins (1946–61) and Yale University (1961–77). Woodward and Styron became close friends.
†m John Richard Hersey (1914–93), Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and journalist and resident of Martha’s Vineyard. Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–73) was a poet and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.
†n American singer, actress, and civil rights activist (1917–2011).
†o Loomis and Maloney were sharing the apartment at 117 West Thirteenth Street.
†p Gore Vidal (1925–2012) was the author of dozens of fiction and nonfiction works and screenplays. Styron refers to his 1952 novel, The Judgment of Paris.
†q Here Styron had rendered the UK cover of Lie Down in Darkness. He described the cover in a letter to Elizabeth McKee on March 13, 1952, as “full of drowning Peytons and prancing ostriches.”
†r George Rhoads (b. 1926), painter, sculptor, and one of the first American origami masters.
†s Postcard, “General View, Cadgwith, Helston.”
†t Styron refers to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).
†u Daphne du Maurier (1907–89) was a British author and playwright. She wrote the novels Rebecca and Jamaica Inn as well as the short stories “The Birds” and “Don’t Look Now.” Much of her work was adapted for films, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock.
†v Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) was a prolific British author best known for his novel Brideshead Revisited (1945).
†w Walter Baxter was a British army commander in Burma and the author of the novel The Image and the Search (1953), which was prosecuted in Britain for obscenity.
†x This was Styron’s first mention of the slave rebel Nat Turner, the subject of his third and most controversial novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Turner (1800–31) was the leader of the most fully realized slave rebellion in American history, a revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, that led to the murder of fifty-six whites, and probably a hundred blacks killed in reprisal.
†y David Laurance Chambers was an editor, editor in chief, and eventual president of the Bobbs-Merrill Company.
†z See Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: “He was a verray, parfit, gentil knyght …”
†A Calder Willingham (1922–95) was a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter best known for his novels Eternal Fire and Rambling Rose.
†B George Mandel (b. 1920), novelist whose debut, Flee the Angry Strangers (New York: Dial, 1952), is considered the first Beat novel.
†C Ernest Lehman (1915–2005), American screenwriter, who was nominated for six Academy Awards and won an honorary one. In the early 1950s he was working as a freelance writer.
†D Attached to the letter was Styron’s completed questionnaire.
†E The French give sprigs of lily of the valley (muguet) to their friends on May Day as a symbol of springtime. Flower vendors and workers’ organizations are allowed to sell the flowers on May Day without charging tax.
†F American novelist, nonfiction writer, a founder of The Paris Review, and environmental activist (b. 1927). Matthiessen’s first novel, Race Rock, was published by Harper & Brothers in 1954. He was one of Styron’s closest friends. sources, see Arthur D. Casciato and James L. W. West III, “William Styron and The Southampton Insurrection,” American Literature 52 (1981).
†G Haydn edited Redding’s book On Being Negro in America (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950) and introduced the Hampton Institute professor to Styron. Redding sent Styron a packet of materials, including William Sidney Drewry’s The Southampton Insurrection (Washington, D.C.: Neal Co., 1900) and Frederick Law Olmsted’s A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856). For a careful discussion of Styron’s use of these two
†H John Knox (1514–72) was a Scottish clergyman and leader of the Protestant Reformation.
†I The Little Acorn was a restaurant in Durham’s warehouse district, started in 1940 by Robert Roycroft. In the words of a 1951 write-up, the Little Acorn was “one of the most modernly equipped establishments of its kind in Durham.… Private dining rooms [were] maintained for parties and banquets. They specialize[d] in pit-cooked barbecue, brunswick stew, Southern-style fried chicken, and sea foods.” See http://endangereddurham.blogspot.com/2008/07/little-acorn-restaurant.html.
†J Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. (b. 1926), is the son of the pioneering film mogul Samuel Goldwyn and the producer of Mystic Pizza, Master and Commander, and other films.
†K Irwin Shaw (1913–84), playwright, screenwriter, and novelist best known for his novel The Young Lions (1948). He and Styron became close friends.
†L Along with Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas (1877–1967) hosted a salon in Paris which included some of the most important American writers and French painters.
†M Truman Capote (1924–84) was a writer best known for his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood (1965). Capote was already an established writer for periodicals and the screen when
Styron met him.
†N Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia, 1942). Aptheker (1915–2003) was a Marxist historian who pioneered the study of slave revolts and was one of the first professional historians to pay careful attention to Nat Turner. His outspoken communism led to many struggles in the academy. Styron later critiqued the Aptheker volume as a white man’s “fantasy” in “Overcome,” The New York Review of Books (September 26, 1963). Styron’s review focused instead on Stanley M. Elkins’s Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). Styron also refers to Ulrich Bonnell Phillips and his seminal work, American Negro Slavery (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1918). Phillips was a historian at Columbia University who professionalized the study of the South in the 1920s by defending slavery, calling it a system of “gentleness, kind-hearted friendship and mutual loyalty,” concepts that guided several generations of historians.
†O Haydn wrote Styron on May 15, 1952, warning the author off Turner: “I would hate to see you get involved in subject matter as purple as your own imagination is.”
†P John Phillip Marquand (1893–1980) was a novelist initially famous for his Mr. Moto spy stories, but Styron cites him here for his nostalgic treatment of the crumbling New England aristocracy. He was also the father of one of Styron’s friends, John P. Marquand, Jr.
†Q The review appeared in the April 30, 1952, edition of Punch and was a rare positive response from the British critics. “The writing,” the review noted, “a rare and satisfying mixture of graphic realism and subtle impressionism, reaches a very high standard, and the story loses none of its effectiveness by starting with the dénouement and backpedalling through numerous day-dreams and recollections. Warmly recommended.”
†R The list does not survive.
†S Styron’s father had sent him a copy of a talk by Norman Cousins, “In Defense of a Writing Career,” Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review (Autumn 1950).
†T James T. Farrell (1904–79) was a novelist best known for his Studs Lonigan trilogy.
†U Stephen Spender (1909–95) was an English poet and novelist.
†V With John Aldridge, Vance Bourjaily (whom Styron called Raoul Beaujolais, following the example of John Appleton) was an editor of Discovery. Bourjaily was also a novelist whose first novel, The End of My Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), was critically acclaimed. According to Esquire magazine, “Everyone came to Bourjaily’s parties in the early 1950s,” and Styron attended enthusiastically alongside Mailer, Jones, actors, literary personalities, and many others. See Bruce Weber, “Vance Bourjaily, Novelist Exploring Postwar America, Dies at 87,” The New York Times, September 3, 2010.
†W Leslie Blatt Felker was a Duke classmate, but she did not earn her degree because of her marriage to Clay Felker (1925–2008), a Duke classmate and later founder of New York magazine. After their divorce, she married literary critic and Styron admirer John W. Aldridge, and her third husband was Princeton University population researcher Charles F. Westoff, whom she also divorced. She recalled an unsatisfying sexual encounter with William Faulkner in Leslie Aldridge Westoff’s “A Faulkner Flirtation,” The New York Times Magazine, May 10, 1987.
†X George Mandel and Mickey Knox. Knox (b. 1922) was at the time a blacklisted actor living in Rome, and a close friend of (and fervent correspondent with) Norman Mailer and James Jones. See Mickey Knox, The Good, the Bad, and the Dolce Vita: The Adventures of an Actor in Hollywood, Paris, and Rome (New York: Nation Books, 2004).
†Y Glenway Wescott (1901–87) was a major novelist in the expatriate community in Paris in the 1920s.
†Z Prétexte was a perfume, now discontinued, by the French house Lanvin.
‡a James Ramon Jones (1921–77), a novelist best known for his novel From Here to Eternity (1951), which established him as a major voice in postwar American literature. He and his wife, Gloria, became very close friends of the Styrons. This is the first correspondence between Styron and Jones; the two met through John P. Marquand, Jr., at a party in Manhattan in the fall of 1951. For more see Willie Morris, James Jones: A Friendship (New York: Doubleday, 1978).
‡b Postcard, “Van Gogh’s bedroom in Arles.” Styron addressed the postcard to “James Jones ‘Author of Catcher in the Rye.’ ”
‡c Ormonde de Kay (1924–98), writer and editor, who wrote the 1949 film Lost Boundaries, as well as several children’s books.
‡d A pun on Hippocrates’ aphorism “Art is long, life is short.”
‡e Styron refers to his draft of The Long March.
‡f Hortense Calisher (1911–2009) was a prolific author nominated for the National Book Award three times. “Little Truman” refers to Truman Capote.
‡g The Franz J. Horch literary firm was a major manager of foreign rights at the time. The firm became known as the Roslyn Targ Literary Agency in the 1970s.
‡h Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan (1933–2003) had been a classmate of George Plimpton at Harvard and socialized with the Paris Review crowd in the 1950s, becoming a close friend of the Styron family. He served as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees between 1966 and 1978.
‡i Letter from Geneva Marsh of Ventura, California, who called Lie Down in Darkness “the biggest hunk of nothing I’ve ever had the displeasure to stumble through … the most unsatisfactory waste of time I’ve ever spent.”
‡j Postcard of la Côte d’Azur.
‡k George Plimpton (1927–2003): journalist, writer, and longtime editor in chief of The Paris Review, which he helped found.
‡l H. L. “Doc” Humes (1926–92): a founder of The Paris Review and the author of two novels. His girlfriend at the time was nicknamed “Moose.”
‡m Robert Hazel (1921–93), poet and novelist, author of The Lost Year (1953) and A Field Full of People (1954).
‡n Shelby Foote (1916–2005), historian and novelist, authored the multivolume The Civil War: A Narrative. He became especially well known for his starring role in Ken Burns’s 1990 PBS documentary The Civil War.
‡o J. Donald Adams, literary critic and editor of The New York Times Book Review.
‡p Art Buchwald (1925–2007), American humorist and longtime summer resident of Martha’s Vineyard, where he was a close friend of the Styrons.
‡q Elsa Maxwell (1893–1963) was a gossip columnist and author best known for hosting high society parties.
‡r Mrs. William Paley (1915–78) was born Barbara Cushing. She was the CBS television founder’s second wife.
‡s Darryl F. Zanuck (1902–79) was a producer, writer, and studio executive and winner of three Academy Awards. Styron refers to Whittaker Chambers (1901–61), the Communist turncoat, Soviet spy, and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Chambers testified against Alger Hiss and wrote a scathing anti-Communist account of the trial and his life in the bestselling and influential 1952 autobiography Witness.
‡t Fulton John Sheen (1895–1979) was a conservative archbishop in the American Catholic Church known for his radio program The Catholic Hour.
‡u As noted earlier, John’s father was the novelist John P. Marquand. When John, Jr., wrote The Second Happiest Day (1953), he published under the nom de plume John Philips. He was part of the Paris Review circle, serving as an advisory editor and contributor.
‡v Marquand Jr. won the New York Post’s emerging writer prize, worth $25,000. Cass Canfield (1897–1986) was a publishing executive, and the longtime president of Harper & Brothers.
‡w Pidey Bailey married Peter Gimbel (1927–87), heir to the Gimbels department store chain, before marrying Sidney Lumet (1924–2011), the director of such films as 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network, and also a producer and screenwriter.
‡x After finishing her master’s degree, Rose took a year off to travel and study in Europe. Louis Rubin wrote to tell her that Styron had won the Prix de Rome and was at the American Academy. Rose left a note in Styron’s mailbox there and t
hey made a date to meet in the bar of the Hotel Excelsior.
‡y John P. C. Train (b. 1928) is an investment adviser and author. A college friend of George Plimpton, Train was the first managing editor of The Paris Review.
‡z Styron’s first attempt at an introduction for The Paris Review’s debut issue was harshly criticized by Marquand, Plimpton, and Matthiessen.
‡A Bassett House was one of the women’s dormitories at Duke.
‡B Rose Burgunder.
‡C The Second Happiest Day.
‡D Truman Capote.
‡E Styron refers to humorous rumors that he and Truman Capote were romantically involved.
‡F Thomas Henry Guinzburg (1926–2010), editor and publisher as well as cofounder of The Paris Review. He succeeded his father as president of Viking Press.
‡G Robert and Claire White were two of Styron’s closest friends in Italy. The couple partly inspired Cass and Poppy Kinsolving in Set This House on Fire.
‡H Styron refers to Don M. Wolfe, editor of Discovery.
‡I The first correspondence exchanged between Mailer and Styron was Mailer’s very generous and engaged letter of February 26, 1953, reprinted in The New York Review of Books (February 26, 2009). Mailer called Styron’s Long March “just terrific, how good I’m almost embarrassed to say, but as a modest estimate it’s certainly as good an eighty pages as any American has written since the war.” Mailer continued with “one humble criticism”: “I wonder if you realize how good you are.” Mailer identified a “manner” in Styron’s prose which reveals “a certain covert doubt of your strengths as a writer … which I suppose is like saying, ‘You, neurotic—stop being neurotic!’ ”
‡J Hamlet, 1.2.133: “How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!”
‡K Beat the Devil (1953) starred Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, and Peter Lorre. John Huston directed Truman Capote’s script.
‡L Cicero’s oration against Verres: “Oh the times! Oh the customs!”