Selected Letters of William Styron

by William Styron

  ppp Bertha Krantz was the chief copy editor of Random House; she edited all of Styron’s books.

  qqq Styron forwarded this note to Bob Loomis in April of 1998.

  rrr The last line of Sophie’s Choice.

  sss The Orinoco River in Venezuela.

  ttt Willie Morris, “William Styron,” Book-of-the-Month Club News (Midsummer 1979).

  uuu Irving Paul “Swifty” Lazar (1907–93) was a talent agent who was given his nickname by his client Humphrey Bogart. Lazar represented many prominent actors and authors, including Lauren Bacall, Ernest Hemingway, Larry McMurtry, and many others.

  vvv The story was published in an edition of three hundred copies. William Styron, Shadrach (Los Angeles: Sylvester and Orphanos, 1979). The story also appeared as “Shadrach,” Esquire Fortnightly, November 21, 1978, and was collected in A Tidewater Morning.

  www The film of Sophie’s Choice, directed by Alan J. Pakula, opened on December 8, 1982. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, and Meryl Streep won Best Actress for her performance as Sophie.

  xxx Robert Towers found “it difficult to regard Sophie’s Choice as even a noble failure” in “Stingo’s Story,” The New York Review of Books, July 19, 1979. The New Yorker review of June 18, 1979, called the book “an elaborate showcase of every variety of racial prejudice and guilt” and “loaded with overwrought sentences.”

  yyy Ben Crovets, a Wantagh, New York, resident who wrote to Styron suggesting that he had known the original Sophie in Brooklyn in 1949.

  zzz Jim West offers a detailed account of the various women whom Styron put together to create Sophie. She was chiefly a combination of the physical attributes of an actual Polish Catholic Sophie whom Styron knew in Brooklyn in 1949 and the personality of a woman named Wanda Malinowska whom Styron dated in 1949. See West, William Styron: A Life.

  AAA George Target (1924–2005), British novelist and World War II veteran who spoke out vigorously against the failings of organized religion. He had sent Styron a lengthy fan letter praising Sophie’s Choice and comparing Styron to Thomas Wolfe and John Fowles.

  BBB Enclosed with this letter were inscribed copies of Styron’s books. In Lie Down in Darkness, Styron wrote: “To Charlie, the man who dragged me kicking and screaming through Officer Candidate School and made me the Marine I still am. Affectionate regards, Bill Vineyard Haven, Mass August 1979.” In Sophie’s Choice, Styron wrote: “To Charlie, Warmest best wishes from his old classmate. Semper Fidelis Bill—Martha’s Vineyard 1979.”

  CCC Burke Davis, Marine! The Life of Chesty Puller (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962).

  DDD Prassas wrote a letter to Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s, after John W. Aldridge’s “Styron’s Heavy Freight” appeared. Prassas included his letter to Lapham and Aldridge’s review in a letter to Styron on December 20, 1979, labeling Aldridge’s piece “a smug hatchet job,” which, like the Turner critiques of the late 1960s, “don’t even qualify as literary criticism.”

  EEE This letter consists of the short note and the long letter.

  FFF Styron is referring to his comment quoted in Michiko Kakutani, “Hellman-McCarthy Libel Suit Stirs Old Antagonisms,” The New York Times (March 19, 1980): “ ‘It’s unfortunate all around,’ was all William Styron had to say.” The lawsuit stemmed from Mary McCarthy’s comments on The Dick Cavett Show in January 1979. In the appearance, McCarthy said that Hellman was “overrated and dishonest” and that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” Hellman filed a defamation suit against McCarthy, Cavett, and the Educational Broadcasting Corporation (which aired Cavett’s show). Although sparked by McCarthy’s television remarks, Kakutani’s article delineates the feud’s roots in “hostile traditions within the intellectual Left.”

  GGG Styron refers to Elizabeth Hardwick, “The Little Foxes Revived,” The New York Review of Books (December 21, 1967).

  HHH A key character in Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness.

  III Solomon Lightfoot “Elder” Michaux (1885–1968) was a radio evangelist, entrepreneur, and founder of the Church of God Movement. Charles Manuel “Sweet Daddy” Grace (1881–1960) was the founder and first bishop of the predominantly African American United House of Prayer for All People.

  JJJ Postcard of Ronald Reagan bottle-feeding a chimpanzee.

  KKK Reagan was the subject of other notes between Styron and Roth. In an undated postcard from 1985 or 1986, Styron wrote that he was “saving a lovely true Reagan story until I see you next—soon, I hope.”

  LLL The letter was addressed to John O. Leslie and was a response to another of Morris’s prank letters. Leslie was the mayor of Oxford, Mississippi, and a friend of both Morris and Styron. Morris wrote Styron on April 27, 1981, on Leslie’s stationery asking him to replace Morris as Leslie’s speechwriter.

  MMM This payment in prophylactics was in reference to Leslie’s/Morris’s offer to have “anything in my drugstore” in payment.

  NNN Willie Morris, “Coming on Back,” Life (May 1981), reprinted in Shifting Interludes: Selected Essays (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2002).

  OOO Styron wrote about the event in “A Leader Who Prefers Writers to Politicians,” The Boston Globe (July 26, 1981), collected in Havanas in Camelot as “Les Amis du Président.”

  PPP Author of Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1983).

  QQQ Andrei Andreyevich Voznesensky (1933–2010), Russian poet and writer whom Lowell called “one of the greatest living poets in any language.”

  RRR Styron refers to Gardner’s freshly written headnote to his critical review of Sophie’s Choice, which was reprinted in Arthur D. Casciato and James L. W. West III, eds., Critical Essays on William Styron (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982). Gardner qualified much of his original criticism of the novel in this headnote.

  SSS Styron wrote later in August to Morris, “Incidentally, it turns out that Lewis Lapham was not just ‘resigned,’ as reported, but fired, which is all the more justice.”

  TTT Styron wrote this when Duke was considering whether to allow its most famous graduate, President Richard Nixon, to house his presidential library at the university.

  UUU Alfred Kazin.

  VVV Amelie Burgunder was married to Rose’s brother Bernei.

  WWW Woodward’s wife, Glenn Boyd McLeod, who had passed away.

  XXX Bunker (1933–2005) was an ex-convict who taught himself to write in prison and went on to a successful career as a writer, actor, and screenwriter. As his widow, Jennifer, wrote, “There was no greater friend to Eddie than Bill. He was generous beyond measure to his friends and to other writers. He once called me with a question when he was filling out an application for a Guggenheim Fellowship for Eddie. He was in a deep depression but somehow managed to complete the application because he knew how much Eddie needed it.”

  YYY George Pratt Shultz (b. 1920), American economist and statesman; Secretary of the Treasury (1972–74) and Secretary of State (1982–89).

  ZZZ William Henry Luers (b. 1929), diplomat and former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela and Czechoslovakia. He served as president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for thirteen years. Bill and his wife, Wendy, became very close friends of the Styrons.

  *aaa Carlos Fuentes and his wife, Sylvia.

  *bbb Thomas Edwards, professor at Rutgers and editor of the literary quarterly Raritan, wrote “Rhetoric Doing the Work of Thought,” The New York Times Book Review (November 21, 1982).

  *ccc William Forrest Winter (b. 1923) served as the fifty-eighth governor of Mississippi from 1980 to 1984 as a Democrat.

  *ddd Mary Wakefield Buxton was related by marriage to Elizabeth Buxton, Styron’s first stepmother. Buxton wrote a piece, “Journeys,” for The Southside Sentinel (serving Virginia south of the Rappahannock River), which celebrated Elizabeth. “One of the crosses Aunt Elizabeth had to bear in life was being the stepmother of William Styron … [she] dedicated a portion of her time to keeping young Bill in line and he later sought his rev
enge by writing Lie Down in Darkness in which Aunt Elizabeth was portrayed as one of the most dreadful women ever depicted in American literature. I thought he exaggerated.” More recently, Mary published a similar account as “The ‘Evil’ Step-Muse,” Virginia Living 5, no. 3 (April 5, 2007).

  *eee Postcard, “La Piscine de l’Hôtel Majestic et les jardins du Casino.”

  *fff Fuentes was Harvard’s commencement speaker in 1983 and aroused controversy because of his outspoken criticism of American foreign policy and President Ronald Reagan.

  *ggg Exley received a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1984.

  *hhh On the back of the postcard is a note from Marcus: “Bill, What I have dreaded has happened.… I met Gabina the Russian lesbian Jewish émigré while shopping with my wife …” etc.

  *iii E. L. Doctorow, Lives of the Poets: Six Stories and a Novella (New York: Random House, 1984).

  *jjj Louis Rubin, ed., An Apple for My Teacher (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1987), collects a dozen writers’ essays on influential teachers.

  *kkk Kings Row is a 1942 film starring Ronald Reagan, based on Henry Ballamann’s controversial 1940 novel about the duality of small-town life. By “mentality,” Styron may be referring to a scene in the film in which Reagan’s character, after having his legs amputated by a sadistic surgeon, asks, “Where’s the rest of me?”

  *lll “Love Day,” an excerpt from The Way of the Warrior, was later included in A Tidewater Morning (1993).

  *mmm Philip Caputo (b. 1941) is an American author and journalist. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1973, Caputo is best known for his Vietnam memoir A Rumor of War, which Styron reviewed: “A Farewell to Arms,” The New York Review of Books (June 23, 1977). Styron praised the book, calling it a “remarkable personal account of the war in Vietnam.” This review was also collected in This Quiet Dust.

  *nnn Rose recalls that Bill began “going down the tubes” over Thanksgiving 1985 on Martha’s Vineyard—the last Thanksgiving the family would celebrate there for nearly a decade. The week following Thanksgiving, Bill gave a speech in Virginia and it was a disaster. Soon after, Bill and Rose went to a literary fund-raiser at the circus. Norman Mailer was dressed as a strongman, Erica Jong was dressed as a fairy, and Bill, not in costume, was “a portrait of horror.” The next day, Rose checked him into Yale–New Haven Hospital.

  *ooo “Love Day,” Esquire (August 1985).

  *ppp Donald Harington, Let Us Build Us a City: Eleven Lost Towns (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1986).

  *qqq Virginia Foster Durr (1903–99) was a civil rights activist and the mother of close Styron friend and Vineyard neighbor Lucy Hackney.

  *rrr Philip Caputo, “Styron’s Choices,” Esquire (December 1986).

  *sss William H. Gass (b. 1924), American novelist, essayist, and philosopher. His novel The Tunnel won the National Book Award in 1995.

  *ttt Bill Broyles, Brothers in Arms: A Journey from War to Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).

  *uuu Herbert Hendin and Ann Pollinger Hass, Wounds of War: The Psychological Aftermath of Combat in Vietnam (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

  *vvv William Styron, “Death Row,” The New York Times (May 10, 1987).

  *www Styron appeared on the August 1987 cover of Esquire with John Updike; the issue contains Styron’s novella A Tidewater Morning.

  *xxx Willie Morris, “Faulkner’s Mississippi,” National Geographic 175 (March 1989).

  *yyy Richard Ford (b. 1944) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer. Styron refers to Ford’s 1987 short-story collection, Rock Springs (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987).

  *zzz Author of The Novels of William Styron: From Harmony to History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995) and Rereading William Styron (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013).

  *AAA The Fellowship of Southern Writers was founded in 1987 by a group of authors to encourage the literature of the South. Charter members included Styron, Rubin, Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward, Cleanth Brooks, Shelby Foote, and several others.

  *BBB Southern literary critics Walter Sullivan (1924–2006) and Lewis P. Simpson (1916–2005).

  *CCC Morris was never elected to the fellowship.

  *DDD William B. Hopkins, One Bugle No Drums: The Marines at Chosin Reservoir (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1986).

  *EEE In an article in The Oxford Eagle (November 12, 1987), Morris playfully slipped Kissinger’s name into a list of notables present at the dinner where Styron was awarded the Legion of Honor.

  *FFF Unknown speech about James Dickey (1923–97), the poet and novelist best known for Deliverance (1970).

  *GGG William L. Tazewell, Down to the Sea with Jack Woodson: The Artistry of a Distinguished American Illustrator (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1987).

  *HHH Stephen B. Oates, William Faulkner: The Man and the Artist, a Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1987).

  *III Stephen B. Oates, Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).

  *JJJ In November 1991, Oates and Styron exchanged letters about the alleged plagiarism. Oates was faulted by the American Historical Association for “misuse” (a category of misconduct that the association’s professional division created for Oates’s work) rather than plagiarism. The debate over his alleged offenses was still raging a decade after the initial accusations.

  *KKK Steel was the attorney who represented Tony Maynard, on whose behalf Styron testified in 1974. Maynard’s manslaughter conviction was thrown out, but he had spent seven years in prison and was wounded during the Attica rebellion. Steel wrote in 2008, “After the trial we developed a friendship which unfortunately floundered on the shoals of Nat Turner.”

  *LLL George Garrett, “Young Fenians in Love and History,” The New York Times (January 3, 1988), was a review of Thomas Flanagan’s 824-page The Tenants of Time (New York: Dutton, 1988). In the review, Garrett cited Shelby Foote’s “displeasure with Mr. Styron’s liberties with and distortions of the character and story of Nat Turner—‘If I write a story about a very tough little western badman, that is very different from pretending to write a story that I made up out of my head and call him Billy the Kid. I have no right to do that to Billy. No one has.’ ”

  *MMM Fuentes was awarded Spain’s $87,000 Cervantes Prize, often considered the top honor for Spanish-language writing.

  *NNN Kidder (b. 1948) is an actress best known for playing the role of Lois Lane opposite Christopher Reeve in four Superman movies.

  *OOO Styron sent Louis Rubin a copy of this letter with a cover note reading: “Dear Louis, You may want to circulate this letter to certain concerned parties. —Bill.” Styron also provided the letter to Jim West and others.

  *PPP Morris’s Good Old Boy was made into a TV movie titled The River Pirates, which premiered in 1988.

  *QQQ Director of Gift Planning (1987–93) at North Carolina State University, where a memorial fund in Styron’s father’s name was established in 1989. Horne suggested to Styron that he collect and publish in book form the three stories in A Tidewater Morning.

  *RRR Postcard of Edward Degas’ A Cotton Office in New Orleans (1873).

  *SSS Willie Morris, “Faulkner’s Mississippi,” National Geographic, vol. 175 (March 1989).

  *TTT William Styron, “Darkness Visible,” Vanity Fair (December 1989). This 15,000-word piece was expanded into book form in 1990.

  *UUU Thomas Grey Wicker (1926–2011) was a journalist and columnist for The New York Times.

  *VVV Arthur D. Casciato, “His Editor’s Hand: Hiram Haydn’s Changes in Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness,” Studies in Bibliography 33 (1980).

  *WWW Styron refers to the revolutions of 1989 and the fall of communism, events that began in Poland and quickly spread to Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania.

  *XXX In a letter from April 14, 1990, Styron added that “our residences will overlap for a couple of weeks but that’s perfectly all right with me since I trust th
at we will be independent of each other as much as either of us would wish. Jimmy Baldwin, for instance, had the same arrangement over a much longer period of time and there was no sweat. I trust you will have some sort of vehicle because this place as you know is a long way from nowhere.”

  *YYY JoAnne Prichard Morris was Willie Morris’s second wife. She was the executive editor at the University Press of Mississippi from 1982 to 1997 and is currently an editor at the Jackson Free Press.

  *ZZZ William Morris, “The Blood Blister,” Esquire (October 2, 1990).

  †aaa The film Frankenheimer made of Mewshaw’s novel.

  †bbb This letter also appears in the Matthiessen Papers with a handwritten yellow Post-it note stamped with Styron’s address in Roxbury: “Pete man, Here is the letter with your good points incorporated. See you soon Porter.”

  †ccc Styron explains the Turner award fiasco in “We Weren’t in It for the Money,” The Washington Post (July 16, 1991). This was Styron’s answer to Jonathan Yardley’s attack on the judges in The Washington Post.

  †ddd The Styron name is fairly common in eastern North Carolina, particularly in Carteret County and along the Outer Banks. The Mailboat, edited by Karen Willis Amspacher on Harkers Island, was a periodical devoted to coastal North Carolina history and folklore.

  †eee Rubin had just retired from Algonquin Books, turning over control of the company to his son Robert and cofounder Shannon Ravenel.

  †fff The Fellowship of Southern Writers met biennially in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

  †ggg Roth fictionalized his own encounter with Halcion in his novel Operation Shylock (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).

  †hhh William Styron, “Prozac Days, Halcion Nights,” The Nation (January 4/11, 1993), and William Styron, “The Enduring Metaphors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” Newsweek (January 11, 1993).

  †iii Albert E. Stone, The Return of Nat Turner: History, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Sixties America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992).

  †jjj Schlesinger replied that he didn’t “blame” Styron “for a certain irritation” over the Stone book. “It seems really idiotic—or malicious—to stir up twenty-five years later a controversy that was both mischievous and meaningless at the time.” “I have mentioned the Stone book to a number of historians,” Schlesinger went on, “none of them has ever heard of Stone. The feeling is that the book will probably be stillborn and that attacks will only [give] it undeserved publicity.… This, I think, is Vann Woodward’s feeling, for example. Probably stoic indifference is the best policy. This too will pass—and ole Nat will remain.” Schlesinger then commented on his participation in a conference in Seville for the Columbus quincentennial. “Poor Chris—another casualty of political correctness. If he had known all the things he would be held accountable for five hundred years after, I doubt that he would have bothered to discover America.” Styron wrote Schlesinger on July 1, 1992: “Dear Arthur, Thanks for sending me the TLS review of the book on Nat Turner. On balance, not too bad, though I think Norman (as well as I) would be amazed by: ‘Mailer-ish on the belief that exposition is the great clue to character.’ That’s a brand new wrinkle in Nat Turner criticism.” See Michael O’Brien, “Elegy for Virginia,” The Times Literary Supplement (June 5, 1992).