Selected Letters of William Styron (32 page)

Irwin Shaw was over here from Switzerland just recently to collect $100,000 for the movie rights to “The Young Lions” and we gave a party for him in our apartment. The Matthiessens came, and all of Irwin’s pals—who are a shady bunch and more or less connected with the radio or TV or movies. There were a lot of freeloaders, too—we invited 20 and in came 55 and I bought 10 bottles of Scotch. Charles Addams came—the cartoon man in
The New Yorker
—and he poured salt in people’s drinks. Very funny. I think I’ll become a Trappist.

Peter and Patsy have a nice house in East Hampton, which we visited a weekend ago. Peter’s book is coming out in two weeks and he’s sort of disgruntled because
Harper’s
isn’t plugging the book, which is true. Marquand wanders fitfully about, searching for his daemon. Guinzburg is going with a beautiful girl named Francine du Plessy, whose father owns
Vogue
, but I don’t think he’s making out too well, since apparently she’s the girl who is destined to wed Blair Fuller when he comes back from Ubangi-land.
^§p
We saw Bernard Perlin the other night between the acts at
a play; he was with some curious-looking people, who appeared sexually unhinged, but he reports that all is well with him.

The next issue of
The Paris Review
is going to feature 30 pages of funny drawings, made in the guest books of Paris restaurants, by Picasso, Matisse, Dufy, Braque, Utrillo and practically anyone you can think of. There’s a very good chance that
Life
magaine will use part of the piece, which would be great for the
Review
. I hope you see it.

Rest content that you are where you are rather than in the land of Chlorophyll and Odo-ro-no. We miss you all very much and mourn each day that we are not all together drinking chianti again. But perhaps that time will come sooner than we think. Meanwhile keep us informed, give our love to Fran and Anne (tell them we’ll write), to Sebastiano, Steph and Christian, and be sure to brush your teeth with Gleem, contains GL-70, the antienzyme factor.

Love + XXXXXXXX Bill

T
O
W
ILLIAM
B
LACKBURN

June 17, 1954 231 East 76
^th
Street, New York, NY

Dear Doctor:

I seem to have a writer’s block to end all writer’s blocks and as a result I have found it nearly as difficult—if not more so—to write a letter as to write rich, beautiful fiction. Hence my long absence from the post.

I have wondered a number of times since I last saw you here in N.Y. just how Duke and Durms were treating you after the rich delights of Europe. Like me I suspect you have found much to be desired in the American landscape. Outside of good old Borden’s milk and a rapport with the language, I have rediscovered nothing in Amurka that would not send me back hopping straight to the bosom of the Amalfi coast.

Rose and I are ensconced in a dismally modern apartment opposite a noisy excavation project that looks like Warsaw in 1945. The sole advantage of the building is that in it, on a top floor, lives a friend whose apartment I use to work in during the day. It is quiet and cooler, but so far during this long, long season it has produced nothing in the way of prose that will be remembered in future centuries. I am fairly well along into a
new novel, but the thing is weak, halting, and insipid—a bit like the stuff Michael Arlen used to write. It has a sort of archness of tone and a perversity of emotion and a paucity of intellect that should make it sell well in places like Scarsdale and Webster Groves, Mo., among the Clay Felker set. Incidentally, had you heard that the ex–Mrs. Felker, nee Leslie Blatt, has set up housekeeping with the spokesman of the Lost Generation No. 2, Mr. John W. Aldridge, who left wife and four children in Vermont for her tarnished embraces? It shows you can’t keep a good girl down, from Duke.

I would try to keep you abreast of local happenings, but I suspect that you’ve gotten most of it from Alex, who Loomis told me has gone south for the summer, or part of it. Rose and I plan to stay in town through June and July—why I don’t know, except to allow me if possible to break the back of this new book, as the saying goes—and then I guess we’ll move for a month or so out to the end of Long Island, for the waters. I pine for Ravello each day but I suspect that it will be sometime before we become expatriate again.

Hope all goes well with you and that you’re bearing up under the Durham summer. Or are you at the beach now? Best to Brice and cheers from both of us.

As ever Bill

P.S. There’s a chance we might drive down to Florida in August or Sept., and if so will plan on a stop in Durham.

T
O
N
ORMAN
M
AILER

July 19, 1954 231 East 76
^th
Street, New York, NY

Dear Norman:

First, let me explain that the uncommon delay in my correspondence results not out of any reluctance to write you about “The Deer Park,” but simply from a neurotic procrastination coupled with an unwillingness to spend a scanty 15 minutes or so writing you a “Hiya, how’s everything in Mexico” note, when what I really want to do is send you something lengthy, thought-out and considered—like what I hope this will be.

I’ll try, then, to dig in on the book without further ado. I read it a
couple of days after you left and although it’s of course not quite so fresh in my mind as it was then, I took quite a few notes on it and have done considerable pondering in the meanwhile. First of all, I think it’s a fine, big book in the sense that it’s a major attempt to re-create a distinct
milieu
—an important one and one deeply representative of all the shabby materialism and corruption which are, after all, the real roots of our national existence. As a picture of this
milieu
, the book seems to me to be both honest and brilliant. It is also a depressing book, really depressing, in its manifest candor, and I’m afraid there aren’t going to be many people who will like it. The chapter toward the end, for instance, which reveals Teppis in all his gruesome horror is, I’m convinced, the most brilliantly scathing assault on a Hollywood demi-God that has yet been written; the blow-job is just right, the perfect symbolic admixture of impotence and cruelty.
^§q
But it is just this sort of unrelenting honesty, as you must know, that is going to make the critics howl. The sex throughout the book is painful—painful as sex can only be when it has become a meaningless sensation. It is that way I know that you meant it, and it gives a tone to the book of unalleviated and leaden anxiety. Anxiety runs through the book like a dark river—the true torturous anxiety—and gives to the book this deep sense of depression, which is totally divorced from purely literary concerns. This I think the critics are going to miss—they’re going to flay you alive for indulging yourself in sensations when in fact it is the piling up of sensation after meaningless sensation, of lovelessness and debauchery, which gives such a meaning to the novel as a whole. Truly, modern life is golden-filled with golden girls like Lulu Meyers in resplendent Jaguars—but set in a wasteland of endless corruption and despair. A real Desert d’Or. But you’re going to be criticized for not being “gayer,” lighter about it.

Outside of Teppis (who really, I suppose, figures in a relatively minor role) your best character is Eitel. His final corruption is complete, and you portray his finish with power and a great deal of sympathy. Even he is depressing though, for since he is the only really “nice” character in the book one hopes desperately for his triumph and is deeply depressed by his
finale. It really is an appalling picture you paint, appalling and truthful, and the book, I suppose, is so unpleasant—and so fascinating—to read, because the truth is so appalling. It is the apotheosis of total vacuum. Yet out of that vacuum I wouldn’t doubt but that you’ve created the most piercing study of Hollywood that’s been written. I only personally wish I “
liked
” the book more, that for all of these glittering creatures which you’ve skewered with such real art and insight I felt more heartbreak.

Some minor things: The party at the beginning is wonderful—the dialogue there is as good as any I know. Sergius doesn’t quite come off as a character (as someone else—I think Loomis—pointed out) and I wonder whether really that’s at all important, and whether that should worry you, if it does at all. It seems to me that first person narrators rarely if ever come off, and perhaps it’s better that they don’t but remain (like Nick Carraway in
The Great Gatsby
) shadowy and unobtrusively in the background, even though they participate in some of the action. At any rate although Sergius did seem elusive to me, I reflected while reading that it didn’t seem to bother me much—perhaps because I came to accept him pretty much merely as a window through which to observe Eitel and Lulu and the rest. You worked some sort of magic, too, in the transitions, so that I found that I accepted motivations and actions even when Sergius wasn’t on hand to observe them. The curious thing about first-rate writers is that they can ignore the iron-clad conventions and rules and get by with it.

Here, then, is my final pompous verdict: you’ve written a book like sour wine, a lethal draught bitter and unlikable, but one which was written with a fine and growing art, and about which I think you can feel proud. It doesn’t have the fire of “Naked” but I think has primer and maturer insights. It is not an appealing book, but neither does it compromise, and for that alone you should be awarded a medal. If lacking the large universe of “Naked,” it doesn’t have “Naked” ’s impact, it is also a book which burns with a different, somehow keener light. I don’t like the book, but I admire the hell out of it, and I suppose that’s all I have to say for the moment—or until I can talk to you face to face. What is really important is that the book is a solid one, with a deep sense of morality.

So I haven’t written you all this before because I seem to finally have become gripped by the creeping paralysis which has taken hold of me within the past year or so, and which has extended even to letter-writing. My mornings (12 noon +) are agony, and the daily
Angst
is hell. I look
forward each day with the same hopeless ardor that a monk must envision paradise to the time when I’m free of this thing that constricts me, to the time when I’m “liberated” enough to be able to sit down and write 25 consecutive words without fear and trembling. It must be my liver, though it might be the heat—which has been terrible—and withal, no doubt, booze is heavily to blame. Anyway, it can’t last too much longer, for I’ll simply have to throw it all up and become a druggist or something. One thing, Rose is going to have a baby (I hope it’s a baby) next March and that might have the quality of snapping me out of my neurotic antics. It is strange, too, how on the weekends, when we go to see people in L.I. or in Conn., a sheer euphoria takes hold of me. I’m self-analytical enough to realize that my murderous anxiety mornings here in the city is because I’m faced with the ridiculous responsibility of creating a masterpiece, whereas the weekends have me gaily unburdened.

After you left, Maloney went temporarily off his rocker, drunkenly attempted suicide with his seconal, and ended up for a week in Bellevue.
^§r
He’s all right now, but is going to lose his job, and God knows where he’ll eventually end up—the Bowery, probably. We are all by now sorely tempted to go on and let him slide down to limbo. We had supper with Larry and Barbara last night—a pleasant time. I read his novel finally; it’s really got some good things in it, though awfully spotty.

Say Hello to Lew Allen for me, will you? I owe him a letter from way back. His matador girlfriend got a lot of space recently in the N.Y. paper.

Ars longa. I think we perhaps flagellate ourselves too much. I hope my little critique made some sense to you; at any rate, believe me when I say that everything I said was as honest as I know how. Rose sends her love to both of you and requests that at one time or another you pick an orchid for auld lang syne. Catch me up on everything when you get time.

As ever, Bill

T
O
N
ORMAN
M
AILER

September 28, 1954 [Roxbury, CT]
^§s

Dear Norm

I am writing this from Roxbury, Conn., where Rose and I have set up housekeeping for the past couple of weeks in my agent’s house while she is in California.
^§t
It has been a fairly depressing time, since I started out with high hopes of getting a lot of work done, only to come down with bronchitis, which necessitated my taking aureomycin, which in turn acts violently and horribly upon the system, and seems to reduce the “liver functioning” to nil. At any rate, I’ve recovered somewhat by now, and it might interest you to know that we have bought a big house near-by, a real New England dwelling with an orchard and 11 acres and a dammed-up spring which makes a swimming pool.
^§u
I’ve been alternately elated and appalled by this place, the hideous responsibilities it presents, but having spent a footless and transient existence so far I am hoping that the place will give me some mild sense of rootedness and permanence. It’s 2½ hours from New York, distant enough to give a feeling of isolation and to be removed from the dreary station-wagon community belt, but close enough so that the delights, such as they are, of Manhattan are not too difficult of access. We plan to move in sometime in November or December, and we are hoping that you and Adele and your daughter will favor us with many a weekend; I think you might like the joint.

Since you heard from me I have finally come to the point where I think I can hazard the statement that my next novel is under way. I never thought that a project could be so hellishly difficult or seem to stretch out so aimlessly and vainly toward the farthest limits of the future, but I am embarked, at least, and can begin to hold … I remember your once asking me if it was to be a “major effort”; I don’t know what I said in reply, only now I’m beginning to realize that it is a major effort—major
in the sense that it has become impossible for me to write anything without making it a supreme try at a supreme expression. I don’t want to sound pretentious; it’s only that I’m so unprolific, frightened, and paralyzed most of the time that, once I do start writing, I feel that I owe it to myself to give it my all. The technical problems of this one are not minimized, or enhanced either, by the fact that it’s written in the first person, which, as you once mentioned, rather severely limits what you can do and makes it hard to end up with that quality of richness which you get in the third-person, omniscient narrative. But this one “feels” like a first-person story, and I’m following my instincts. And, incidentally, I took great heart from your encouragement, which reminded me to struggle along while I’ve got “lead in me pencil.” I think probably the saddest thing in life is to reach a certain age and look back and think of all the wasted, ruined time.