Selected Letters of William Styron (13 page)

Answer: I guess it is. I seem to be dealing in stock attitudes tonight, but that does seem to be the answer. It’s worth it if it’s inconceivable to you that you could live out the rest of your years without doing it; so, merely because of that, you do it. Actually, I’m quite happy, really very happy, and all these things are merely a very facile way of getting things off my chest.

The approach of maturity has been for me long-coming. Only recently do I think I’ve seen the first glimmering signs on the horizon. It’s a very pleasant thing, in a way, to know that gradually you can really begin to take stock of your possessions, examine yourself. Because I believe that before maturity itself comes, there is this wayside station—when you begin to question your own motives, when you wonder what ends your coming maturity will be directed toward. It’s an almost palpable state for me, and hard to describe! You don’t quite possess level judgment, wisdom, and sympathy, yet you know they’re at hand, and in my case it’s merely wondering what’s to be done with them when I’ve got them. Incidentally, I should like to discriminate between “maturity” and “experience” as related to art. I’m aware that there is such a thing as an ivory-tower, but I believe, too, that the better parts of maturity are merely imagination and
contemplation, and that you can subsist forever, artistically, upon the accretions of experience gained during the first twenty-one years of your life. That time limit admittedly is arbitrary, but I do believe, despite edicts to the contrary, that one can settle down to creating at a fairly early age and the earlier the better.

I think the foundations of artistic achievement rest perhaps on your legs, the legs themselves being the real touchstones: despair and joy, talent and hard work. Despair and joy coexist and seem to me to be almost the same. I think perhaps you have to be able to live, in the same minute, the wildest despondency and the giddiest joy, to be able to really create. A sort of synthesis of egotism and humility. Talent itself is obvious; you’ve got it or you don’t, and I think that, given the breaks, hard work can make that talent genius. I don’t value genius for itself; I do value what it implies, and in many cases, it seems to me, that genius is merely talent transcended, a sort of self-imposed slavery whereby, through toil and discipline—
discipline
mainly, so hard for Virginians—and through undeviating effort toward a single goal, you expose yourself for what you are—a man who has grown, a man who has become a man. I happen to think that in this age of tiny, tiny things there are more ignoble objectives than to try to
grow
through art, no matter what pain it causes one.

Now I’ve said enough about credos. Every time I write you I seem to want to state a credo. Anyway, I hope you have been an indulgent listener. Despite my probably obsessive worry with what I’m writing, life is fine down here. I haven’t been reading as much as I should, but I’ve managed to get started on the new Putnam translation of
Don Quixote
, and have read at random a considerable amount of Gide’s
Journals
.
^*s
I think Gide is highly overrated as a creative artist, but as a journal-ist he’s absolutely first-rate. There seems to be a lot of deadwood in the
Journals
, but there’s much that is stimulating, and I think you’d find them interesting to read, if you haven’t already. I just recently re-read
Babbitt
and thought it was great stuff.
^*t
The sophisticates are currently sniffing at Lewis, but of all the writers
of the twenties, including Hemingway, I think he’s most likely to survive.

I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to come to Boston anytime soon, but I’d love to. Incidentally, if you come through New York by any chance, the telephone is NYack 7–1806-W. I dearly look forward to seeing you all before long. In the meantime, don’t be overwhelmingly shy that you wait
eight
months to write me. That’s
shameful
, you’ll have to admit. Send me a picture of Geoffrey, if you have one; I hope to God that he looks like Marianne, to whom I send love and greetings.

As ever,

Bill

T
O
W
ILLIAM
B
LACKBURN

February 23, 1950 Valley Cottage, NY

Dear Professor Blackburn,

I seem to have mailed my last letter to you just before I received yours, but anyway I want to thank you for your nice words of praise and the criticism, too, which was accurate and to-the-point and appreciated. I’m very glad that generally speaking you looked upon the book and found it good, for although I like to feel myself Olympian and aloof from either criticism or praise—in the manner of the grand artiste—I know that I’m really not that at all, but actually just dying to hear a good word spoken, especially from you, whose words are always so just and right. In general I think that so far I’ve accomplished what I set out to do at the cost of a lot of effort, but worthwhile effort. I think that my next work will be a little easier to write on account of all this present strain and toil. The rhetorical passage about Peyton’s beauty, which you mentioned, was already noted by Haydn and by others, including myself, and consequently I plan to change it in the final version. Outside of the choruses, which are grandiose and which I really plan to dispense with eventually, this passage is the only one I’m not satisfied with. Of course, when I read the MS over myself I’m often not satisfied with anything, but that comes only in moments of overcritical and over-reproachful despair; actually, I just don’t think I can
change very much at all, except for a few minor phrases and the passage I mentioned. My natural bent seems to be rhetorical and in this book I have to fight against the inclination all the time, realizing, as I finally do, that the scope of this particular novel, despite my visions of grandeur, is too limited to allow many “purple patches.” However, I’m not a devotee of the Hemingway tight-lipped mumble school, as you know, and eventually when I mature and broaden I expect to use the language on as exalted and elevated a level as I can sustain. I believe that a writer should accommodate language to his own peculiar personality, and mine wants to use great words, evocative words, when the situation demands them. I believe in infinite artistic restraint, but I also believe that the “lean, spare style” of our time can be, and is, just as artificial as the more orotund and high-flown passages in Tom Wolfe. Somewhere there’s an in-between and I aim to find it. As for this novel again, my only over-all worry is that Peyton won’t emerge, treating her as I do so objectively. But maybe that’s what I’m really trying to do: leaving her out, except as a background figure, so that finally in the doomsday monologue (which I plan for the end of the book) she becomes a symbol of suffering and lost youth and all eternal tragic misunderstanding.

Thanks again for the guitar-book. I’ll do my best so that next time we meet we can make the music of the spheres. And thanks again for your letter: it means a great deal to me.

As ever,

Bill S.

T
O
W
ILLIAM
C. S
TYRON
, S
R
.

April 13, 1950 Valley Cottage, NY

Dear Pop,

Whenever I look at the calendar it always seems that it’s this part of the month that I write you, and that I’ve been most dilatory in writing you anyway. I hope I can beg your indulgence for my neglect, this month at least, for actually what with one thing and another—forging ahead, as the phrase goes, on my novel, and finishing a short story—I look back and
find that in weeks I haven’t written to anyone at all. Not that that’s much of an explanation.

Your advice as to my getting exercise was well taken, and the exercise itself will go into effect as soon as the weather clears. Right now, here at this late date, it’s snowing in small flurries outside, though I don’t think it’ll stick. At any rate, I hope you weren’t really concerned over the stomach upset I had, for it cleared itself up in no time at all and I feel fine once more.

The story I mentioned above I just finished a week or so ago, taking time off for a few days from my book, and I do believe it’s the best short story I’ve done to date.
^*u
It concerns an “ex-” Southerner’s visit to a ramshackle farm in Virginia, where he meets his old uncle, only to be driven off the place with derision and imprecations. It’s not a pretentious story: by that I mean that I think I’ve balanced the
intention
of the story with the substance of the narrative, and all in all I believe I’ve managed to carry the thing off with a peculiarly, and successfully, haunting effect. The “haunting” part, I think, derives from the fact that it’s based almost fully on a dreamy half-nightmare I had one night, which was so impressive that I didn’t go to sleep at all but wrote the outline for the story in the hours before dawn. I’ve sent it off to my agent, Elizabeth McKee, who is irritatingly slow always in answering my letters to her, so I don’t know whether she thinks she can sell it or not. If she can’t sell this one then I doubt if she’ll be able to sell any of my stories. By this time, though, I’ve become, if not resigned, then at least accustomed to remaining in literary oblivion. I’ve lost most of the old frantic desire to get printed. I realize now that most of my stories of the past few years really weren’t worth being printed, and it makes me happy, if not especially wild-eyed and desperate for recognition, to see how well I’ve progressed—as with this latest story. So I just bide my time and keep on writing with the same slow, identical painstakingness that I imagine I’ll be employing forty years from now, and am more comfortable in the realization that eventually these things will not only suffer the painful
accouchement
but will get the smiles, maybe, and the approval that all good fathers’ sons should receive.

I also this month completed a chapter of the novel, which leaves me, if my present plan is followed, only two more to go out of a total of six. These last chapters, however, will be somewhat longer than the first. What a baffling, splendid job writing a novel is! With all of the heartaches involved, it’s the most rewarding task, in a way, that a person can set himself to. Each paragraph, each page becomes better and better—at least in my case—and it’s a wonderful revelation to see how strikingly one’s power of expression becomes more forceful and strengthened after the exercise of two hundred pages or so. This novel will be shot through with faults, but when it is finished I will know my own style, I will know how to write.

I have been reading Sandburg’s “Lincoln: The War Years,” and it’s really an astonishing book.
^*v
It’s heightened my interest in the War Between the States, which I’ve always had to some extent, and I think that sometime not too long from now, after reading a lot more, I’ll walk over the Virginia battlefields: the road to Richmond is full of them: Seven Pines, Gaines’ Mill, Malvern Hills, Chickahominy. What a splendid thing it would be to write a vast book about that war, I mean a really great book. Some say (the “intellectuals”) that America has never had glory or tragedy, but, with all its stupid confusions of motive, that war was both glorious and tragic, and I daresay that it was the last war in which the Lord God of Hosts hovered over the battlefields.

The papers are still coming and I enjoy them and tell Eliza I appreciate, too, the various and interesting clippings.

Best to all.

Your son

Wm. C. Styron, Jr.

Styron moved back to New York City in June 1950, sharing an apartment with Howard Hoffman, a painter and sculptor
.

T
O
W
ILLIAM
C. S
TYRON
, S
R
.

June 5, 1950 314 West 88
^th
Street, New York City

Dear Pop,

I suppose you might be surprised to see the change of address above, but I moved down here a few days ago and I expect to be here all summer—a temporary stay, I hope. I think my wonderful stay at the de Limas was destined to come to an end about this time, and although the move was not effected without a certain amount of regret on all sides, it came about with as little pain as possible, and I think it was the only thing to do. I don’t know whether I’ll go back to Valley Cottage or not—permanently, that is—but even if I don’t I’ll remember my stay there as about the most pleasant, mutually rewarding of my life. At any rate, before I left I planted corn and tomatoes in the garden up there, and so Sigrid and Mrs. de Lima and I have planned to go back most every weekend to weed and cultivate and pick the crop.

The novel still goes very well, and I have picked out a nice place, I think, to write. It’s located between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue, 1½ rooms, which I share with a fellow named Howard Hoffman, kitchen, bath—$8.25 a week, which is very reasonable. The guy I share the place with is a New School student—had an advertisement up on the bulletin board down there. He is a teacher and a sculptor, and seems to be both very intelligent and very nice. So I think I’m all set up until I finish the novel—at which time I intend to move to Sussex County, Va., and raise peanuts, with writing as an avocation.

It has been a long hard road for me—not from a material point of view (there I’ve been much better set up than most, I know), but in the inner struggle and the
quest
. I’m still far from my goal, but gradually I’m beginning to see things clearer, and to learn how to relate my art to my life. I’m sure I’m writing better all the time, and that my writing is becoming stronger and more mature. I think that I am becoming more mature, too. It is certainly a manifest truth in this day that what, above all, our people need to have is maturity and strength and an illumination of that spirit which has never died, or never will die—even if it means that in order to write with truth one has to batter his head bloody against a mass of materialism, and hypocrisy, and runaway “progress.” Even if it means being “reactionary” to write in the name of Christian charity and the worn-out
virtues, I will show them, as powerfully as I can, if I can beat the race with time.