About your liver ailment: forget it. All French doctors, I found out when I was in Paris, think that my ailment is caused by, and any overindulgence is detrimental to, le foie. You must put fear out of your mind, and resume drinking right away. I really mean this. I know a guy who received the same edict from the doctors, and stopped drinking, and very shortly he died. I am quite serious, James; to be temperate in France is moral and spiritual suicide, and never mind what Montaigne said in regard to wine.‖z I know what I am talking about.
One of the things I wanted to tell you is that there is very shortly coming to Paris for the first time in his life a friend of mine, a writer named Edwin Gilbert and his wife, who live not far from here.‖A You are probably chewing my ass out this very minute for the presumption, but I told him that if he sent you a pneu sometime you would be delighted to see him and show him all the fleshpots. For God sake don’t feel obliged on my account, but he’s a very nice guy and so is his wife, and I think you would like them, and I know they would be tickled to meet you and Moss. He wrote Native Stone and Silver Spoon, both big best sellers. His latest is called The Hourglass (Lippincott) and it should sell a million. Norman knows him well, too, incidentally.
Speaking of Norman, about whom you asked, I have not seen him since I saw you last, and still don’t much care to. He has moved back to New York—the Village, of course—and I hear very little about him. I am quite serious when I say that I think he has flipped his lid, or is gradually flipping it (there are a lot of other stories), and it is all very sad, but it is something I’d rather talk to you about than write about.
My own personal professional-type news is very scanty, except that I’m gradually edging up on the grand climax of my book, and am about to pee my pants with excitement over the fact that it might soon be finished, after four long years. It is about 825 typescript pages with maybe 100 more to go, which falls somewhat short of War and Peace, but it isn’t bad and I’m not really that competitive. The MS got into the hands of the people at ESQUIRE, from whence it came back sort of smeared with Coca-Cola stains and burgers, but for a very stiff fee they are going to run about 20,000 words of the book, starting in the June issue and featuring it and all (they took a very glamorous picture of me, impaled upon a Gramercy Park fence railing), so since I imagine it will be good publicity I am not complaining.‖B Did you read in TIME about Hiram Haydn starting his own publishing house? Much as I care for Hiram I guess I will have to stay at Random House, for this book at least.‖C Anyway, without being cynical, it puts me in a good situation re Random House. I got a love letter from Bennett Cerf the other day, telling me he’d just die to have me stay, etc.‖D So I got him over the old sawhorse. This is probably the bitchiest sort of talk, but I figure that if you work your ass off over a book it’s good to see the publishers scramble for you. There are few enough delights for a writer these days. N’est-ce pas?
I’ve heard some very fine things, incidentally, about THE PISTOL recently—nothing official, that is, but from various people I’ve run into. In other words, it’s being read, which is the main thing and all that counts. I hope you’re still staggering along somehow and keeping at it. I don’t know exactly why I say this but I think writing in general is very subtly enjoying some sort of renaissance and is due for a real breakthrough soon. I think people are just really fed up to the teeth with TV, Kirk Douglas, Norman Vincent Peale, and other such imposters, and are ready for the real scoop. I don’t mean tomorrow, but soon. It can’t be any other way, I figure, else everybody will have to slit their throats—and I don’t mean just writers.
Now that we have started on this correspondence, send me a billet-doux sometime. Susanna, Polly, and Rose send their dearest best to both of you and ask me to tell you that they won’t be too upset if in the midst of Martha’s Vineyard I just fly over by myself and take a piss in the Seine from your balcony.
Ever yours,
Billy
TO GEORGE PLIMPTON
May 11, 1959 Roxbury, CT
Dear George:
I hate to be a pain in the ass about this thing.‖E Your own comments—and Peter’s—were most sensible and also very sympathetic. I don’t think I would be nearly so adamant about my position in this matter had it not been for Train’s puerile and pedantic and really quite insulting remarks.‖F I was told by you and Peter not to take Train seriously. Yet on second thought, it comes to this: if he is not to be taken seriously in a matter like this he seems hardly in any position to be an editor of the magazine—a serious business, or so I’ve always thought.
So I must repeat: I am perfectly willing to make the one or two major changes you + Peter suggested but I must insist that I cannot let the piece be published if any of Train’s changes are heeded (with the one or two exceptions, the grammatical errors listed below). I am sorry to have to put it that way, but if you want the piece you will either have to want it as I substantially wrote it, or get Train to write it for you. To my mind Train is and always has been an arrogant and supercilious little prick—but I’ve told you that before. If I felt that except in one or two minor points Train was right about this piece I would have the grace to admit it. But in every basic criticism he is simply wrong. Therefore, I hope you see my position in the matter.
… If you’ve got any questions about this please give me a ring and I’ll be glad to iron out any details. I’ll be coming in town no doubt in a week or two and hope to see you. Meanwhile, watch the burbling.
All the best + say hello to Bob
Bill
TO JOHN P. MARQUAND, JR.
June 10, 1959 Roxbury, CT
June 10, tomorrow I’ll be 34 sob!
Dear Marchand
Many thanks for your splendid vote of confidence in the Esquire piece; I’m deeply grateful since I respect your opinion as I do few others. I don’t know but whether you aren’t a bit premature, though, since the rest of the book upon recent re-reading seems solemn, pretentious and windy beyond all countenance. However, I am working hard to salvage something out of the wreckage before the Vineyard and Mrs. Tynan set in. I am very much looking forward to the beach. My esteem for John Welch has gone up 1005%. Love to Sue and the miraculously redeemed bush baby.
B.S.
I have a terrible feeling that Normie is going to show up on the Vineyard, along with several other hippy studs.
TO CLAIRE WHITE
June 14, 1959 Roxbury, CT
Dear Claire,
Thanks so much for all the spooky, ritualistic, Catholic information, which I really do need to get on properly with this godforsaken novel I’m writing now. It is already something that I’ve used to fine effect (how I could have thought that Ash Wednesday came in Holy Week I’ll never know) and if the book sells 100,000 copies, as I passionately am certain, it will all be due to you.
I think you know it, but let me repeat—we are expecting all of you for the Fourth of July. Rose says come any time after the First, and she adds that Stephanie can stay here in the “big house” (plantation talk), and if you want to you + Bobby can take your repose with the other two (excuse me, three) in what we are pompous enough to call the cottage. Anyway, we’re looking forward to seeing you all, and though it’s sad to me that due to your condition we probably won’t have much sexy nude swimming together I console myself with the notion that perhaps I can use you for a float.
Kiss Bobby for me + tell him we have his Lambretta picture hung up in the new living room, which he’ll see.
Love + XXX
Bill
Thomas Styron was born August 4, 1959.
TO JAMES JONES
September 15, 1959 Roxbury, CT
Dear James:
I just talked on the phone with Tom Guinzburg, who is at this moment unfortunately languishing in Harkness Pavilion with a thrombosis in his leg. It is something he has had for a long time, on and off, and I gather it isn’t gravely serious—there are drugs now to loosen the clot—but he said if I wrote you to say hello. So hello. He
also said that he had seen you holding court in front of Doney’s with a bunch of your usual sycophants and worshippers and free-loaders, and that both you and Moss looked fine.‖G Though I don’t particularly envy you an entourage made up in any part of Ed Trzcinski or however the hell you spell it, I do envy you in general—Rome, Portofino, etc.—and I’d give a gonad, both of them, to be over there right now.
I will not try to apologize for not writing in so long (I do still love you), except to say that in the interim since your last letter I have, consecutively, had a young son (Thomas, born August 4) and a novel (tentative title: Veronica and Her Uncle Max, brought to a close only a week ago). The former is now eight pounds, red, ugly, and has a huge cock; all I can say about the second is that it is 961 ms. pages long and, whatever its worth, it is my baby and I love it. It will be out in the spring. So before you curse me for my silence, please take all this into account and realize that I have really been beset, and that I haven’t been tooling around all over Europe ruining my liver and living like King Farouk.‖H Though I have been, God knows, doing no good to my liver here; I thought I’d taper off bourbon now that the strain is mostly over, but no, I booze it up all that much more, part of some sort of semi-mystical act, I suppose, to convince myself that the book really is as good as Stendhal—which it isn’t—but at least as good, say, as Sloan Wilson and Herm Wouk.‖I What a pile of crud, unmitigated crud, this writing dodge is. I thought I would get a big bang out of finishing this book, but all I have is a feeling of exhaustion, and a sense of extreme foreboding as I wait for the Prescotts to devour me and the highbrows to ignore me and the public, as usual, to not buy me (current total sale of Modern Library Long March: 4,523; that is not a misprint; I hear Leon Uris’ latest excresence has just topped a cool million copies).‖J
Well, I’m going to stop whining for a minute, and tell you that otherwise everything has been pretty good. We spent part of the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, where we were neighbors of Lillian Hellman’s; I don’t know if you know her or not, but she is a fine lady, and a great friend to the younger literary generation. She’s a staunch admirer of your work, incidentally. We were also neighbors of Elaine Tynan,‖K who is indeed a somewhat different story than Lillian. I gather you two were living it up in Germany with Kenneth while we two had the decided burden of the distaff half; she is straight out of Scott Fitzgerald, though without some of the dew and freshness, and is possessed of what I can only describe as a kind of morbid carnality. She drops names like pennies, and perhaps it sums her up to say that she is the only person I have ever seen drop with an immense glow of self-satisfaction the name of George Axelrod.‖L We had a very full summer.
Rose and I definitely plan to come to Europe next year—probably in the spring, if we can swing it to leave one or two of the kids with Gran’ma—and hope to make it to Paris first. As an old Paris hand I do not feel like a visiting fireman, and I trust you will treat us with the proper respect. Are you still going to be there then? I do hope so, as both Rose and I have missed seeing you all. We’ll tell you when to lay in a supply of Old Forestry.‖M
I have not seen hide nor hair of Norman, except to hear that he has coming out soon an anthology of his work called Advertisements for Myself, a characteristically self-effacing title, which includes a 75,000 word essay, heretofore unpublished, about the problems facing a man who wishes to become a “major” writer in our time. The sad, sad thing is that Norman could be a major writer, but I don’t see how he can be one if all his energy is thrown into crap like this. Who gives a damn about the problems of becoming a major writer? Nobody. Except maybe a few other writers. The only way to become a major writer is to write books.
Incidentally, God knows why, but I have become literary adviser to Harper & Brothers. I realize that this is in the best tradition—Eliot, Graham Greene, Moravia, etc.—but I can’t help but feel slightly creepy about it all. Like I should start wearing a bowler hat and umbrella. Anyway, if you have any loose manuscripts hanging around …
Look, James, tell Moss that I think of her with hard despondent lust at all hours. I really miss that girl. I miss you too, and I hope that this one time you will forgive me for my lapse in correspondence. I will certainly do better, much better, from now on out. Swallow your pride, you bastard, and send me a letter.
Love,
B.S.
I hope this gets to the address Guinzburg gave me.
TO EDGAR HATCHER
September 23, 1959‖N Roxbury, CT
Dear Hatcher:
I appreciate and was greatly tickled by the seminal intelligence you sent me, which puts my mind at ease about a great many nagging worries I have had about certain obese women in my past.‖O I have sent the piece on to Tom Guinzburg, who needs it, since he is at present recuperating from phlebitis at Harkness Pavilion.
If I can stay sober long enough, my book will be totally complete within a week or ten days. There is a very minor character in the book whom I have taken the liberty of naming after you.‖P He is quite an old man and his name is Vice-Admiral Sir Edgar A. Hatcher. He is retired and, though vacationing in Italy, his permanent address is Southsea, Hampshire—which is something of the equivalent of La Jolla, where our decrepit seadogs go to die. I was casting about for the perfect name for a British Admiral, and yours simply struck me as being without parallel. If you are offended, or feel that in the future you will wish to sue for invasion etc., let me know so that I can strike it out of the galleys. This Hatcher was once third sea lord of the Royal Navy, in charge of submarines.
When are you all coming up here? The weather is good.
B.S.
TO WILLIAM COLE‖Q
December 1, 1959 Roxbury, CT
Dear Bill:
Now that I have perused Capote’s and Avedon’s OBSERVATIONS which you so kindly sent me I am somewhat inclined to agree with your own acerb observations when I saw you last.‖R Some of the pictures are really quite striking, and every now and then Truman has a sharp thing to say, but there is such a desperate air of vogue and chichi over the whole venture that it all tends to try one’s patience before long. But thank you for sending it; it will adorn my coffee table, and give to our Connecticut homestead a proper air of swank. Incidentally, you might let your copyediting department know, if they care, that in Truman’s prose I found at least five typos and misspellings (especially mistakes in the Italian) after only ten minutes quick skimming.
Thank you mainly for your own book. Just from the little bit of dipping into it I have done already I can tell that it is a lovely anthology, and I plan to take it with me when I go to Europe this winter. I am glad you put in Hoffenstein and especially Walker Gibson’s circus ship poem which I read when it first appeared and have looked for vainly since.‖S
My novel, SET THIS HOUSE ON FIRE, will be in bound books—so I am told—by the latter part of March. I’m sure Jean Ennis will send you a copy and I hope you like it.‖T
All the best,
Bill Styron
PS. It has now occurred to me, after reading the fine section in your book titled “Primitive,” that someday you might want to do an anthology of gruesome verse. Accordingly, I am enclosing the words to an old hymn which was included in an anthology done by an English friend of mine. I think it has real style, and I have copied out a few stanzas for you.‖U The entire poem may be found in Hymns as Poetry, compiled by Tom Ingram and Douglas Newton (London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1956).
TO JAMES JONES
December 7, 1959 Roxbury, CT
Dear Jim:
You’re no doubt as surprised to be getting a reply so soon to your letter as I am to write it. I might as well tell you that what it’s prompted by mainly is the fact that Rose and I have begun to definitely make plans to come over your way, and no doubt you will see us, grinning from ear to ear and dressed like visiting firemen, as we stand on your doorstep sometime early in February. My book is completely finished (I’m going over the galleys at the moment) and it is ma
inly the fact that I’ve been up here in Roxbury for the four-plus years that it has taken me to write the thing that makes me now want to take off from here and get away from the American scene for a good long while. It must be a fairly natural reaction; anyway, though this doesn’t mean a permanent move, it does mean that I am wanting to spend six or seven months in Europe, so as I say Rose and I will come over and scout around for a place toward the end of Jan., or early Feb. We may stay in Paris, we may not—I’ve got my eye on something around Lake Como or the Ticino part of southern Switzerland—but anyway this will be a scouting trip, then I expect I will stay over while Rose goes back to Baltimore and collects our proliferant brood of offspring and comes back and settles down with me wherever it is we plan to stay. However, we definitely expect to use Paris as a command-post, as Hemingway would put it, so I imagine you will be seeing us more often than is decent or healthy for a while.
Rose and I are both delighted about Moss’ condition, which is another reason for this letter, and we want to tell you that we too have our fingers crossed and hope that everything goes well this time.‖V As a father of three I can now attest to the fact that though the traffic-pattern around the house often gets a little congested, and it is sometimes hard on the nerve-ends, there is nothing like one or two of the little monsters to give a kind of roundness to one’s life. If this sounds a little fatuous it is only because most basic truths are fatuous, and difficult to express freshly. Anyhow, I think you will discover this for yourself, and we wish you all the best.