TO JAMES AND GLORIA JONES
March, 1960 Hotel de la Ville, Rome, Italy
Dear James + Moss:
Well, the last of the big spenders has really just about gone completely through his National City Bank travelers’ checks, having stayed in more exorbitant hotels than he ever cares to count or remember. We are now at this big inn in Rome and have already been billed $25.00 for the upholstery they (the kids) ruined with butter, minestrone, and modeling clay. If this traveling doesn’t stop soon I’m going to go flat-and-straight out of my mind. Right now we are looking for an apartment and we seem to have several good leads; they don’t appear to be hard to get and, from the examples I’ve seen, some really rather sumptuous ones are available at not too high a price. In spite of all the miseries of hotel living I’m getting a really big boost out of Rome and so is Rose. It is of course totally different from Paris and has its lacks, but what a really spectacular place it is, after all! The light and the buildings—they’re all still here, and it’s as if the city didn’t mind it a bit when I left here seven years ago. We haven’t been here long enough to tell the calibre of the social life but I am trusting that it will be somewhat less hectic than in Paris. Rose and I really had a ball in Paris, seeing you and Gloria especially, but I think a few more 4 A.M. soirees with those Left Bank cats would have left me limp as an old tampax. Both of us hope you will come down here for a visit soon. Get on a jet in Paris and you’ll be here in less than two hours. Rose asked me to tell you that her mother is arriving here on Mr 31, staying with the ambassador, and then on April first she is leaving for Greece and won’t be back until April 17. But anytime you want to come will be fine with us. We’ll line up a hotel for you and by that time we will be in socially to the hilt with various counts and countesses, movie no-counts, diplomats, and all sorts of other trash, so you may expect to have a good time. We do hope you’ll try to make it.
I’ve gotten several advance comments on my new book which are so ambiguous as to tend to depress me far more than if they had been violently unfavorable. John W. Aldridge doesn’t much care for it, I gather, but Max Geismar thinks it’s swell, though not as good as “Darkness.” This pre-publication period is a depressing drag and sometimes I really know it would have been better to go with B.B.D.+O.kk Besides, what does it all mean? What does it all mean?
Hope you will write soon (this address, but it will be forwarded) and we’ll see you. The kids are fine and send slobbery love to all.
Bill
TO MRS. FRANZ J. HORCH
March 12, 1960 Hotel de la Ville, Rome, Italy
Dear Maria,
I got your letter yesterday, and appreciated it, and want to take the opportunity now to tell you how I feel vis-à-vis the French publishers. As you well know, I was first offered a proposition by Robert Laffont, when at that moment I was told by an acquaintance, Annie Brierre who works for Plon, that Plon would very much like the book. So I sent back the Laffont contract and signed a contract with Plon for publication of The Long March and an option on Set This House on Fire. However, when I got to Paris I discovered several malheureux facts. First, through Mme. Brierre, that the readers at Plon were far from unanimous in their enthusiasm for the book. Second, that they wished to publish the book only after making extensive cuts. Third (this acquired by talking to people who know French publishing well), that Plon was notoriously slow in publishing, even to the extent of violating the time limit in contracts (Bellow’s Augie March, for instance, was not published until five years after acceptance). Naturally all this made me very unhappy, and in the meantime I met Jean Rosenthal of Laffont, who had wanted to publish the book in the first place. He was still most enthusiastic about the possibility of Laffont publishing the book, and I was so impressed by his attitude (a verbal promise, for instance, that Laffont would make no cuts at all) that I could not help but wish that I had not changed my mind and signed with Plon.
Naturally, I don’t want any cuts made in my book and I am most disappointed with Plon’s entire attitude toward the book. Further, after getting your letter, I am extremely opposed to Plon’s really outrageously binding option clauses. So I have written Mlle. Bataille in Paris, telling her that as much as I regret causing all this trouble I hope she will do everything she can to prevent Plon from taking the book. Possibly she will have to be adamant about not allowing cuts, or perhaps she will have to set a prohibitively high price on the book. At any rate, I hope Laffont gets the book, as I think they are in every way more capable, more enthusiastic, more everything. There is of course the possibility that Laffont will refuse the book after reading it, but I do think that this is a slim possibility indeed, and in any case Gallimard or someone else would doubtless take it eventually.
I hope this is not too confusing, and now I dearly wish I had signed with Laffont at first, but I think you can understand how completely in the dark I was about Plon. But I wanted you to know the situation. Are you coming to Europe this year?
All the best,
Bill Styron
TO ELIZABETH MCKEE
March 12, 1960 Hotel de la Ville, Rome, Italy
Dear Elizabeth:
I got your letter yesterday at the Majestic, which is on the Via Veneto and exceedingly noisy it is too. So we have moved here, where we’ll be for another week or so, I imagine. I have arranged, however, to collect any mail which you may already have sent to me c/o the Majestic or Mrs. Zellerbach. We expect to get an apartment soon. This hotel traveling a la the Duke of Windsor is straining my bank account fearfully.
I read the letter to you from Mark Hamilton and as far as I can see it looks very good. So you may tell Mark Hamilton that I accept Jamie’s offer. Actually, I was pleasantly surprised at the £1,000 advance. That’s $2,800 and will pay for quite a few hotel rooms. Indeed, I thought that for England the whole proposition was quite O.K. In Paris I saw the Hamilton catalogue and though to be sure they were jumping the gun, the stuff they wrote about the book made it appear that this time they may get off their asses and go all out for S.T.H.O.F. So bully.
I’ve run into a few complications with my French publishers. Plon wants extensive cuts and naturally I don’t want any made, but I’m putting the whole thing in the hands of Franz Horch + Mlle. Bataille in Paris.
Write me here with any news, good, bad or indifferent, and I’ll let you know later my final address. Rose + the kids are fine + send love. B.
TO JEAN ROSENTHAL
March 13, 1960 Hotel de la Ville, Rome, Italy
Dear Mr. Rosenthal,
I thought you might like to know that recently, while I was in Geneva, I wrote to Mlle. Bataille, telling her that I hoped she would take every measure possible to see to it that Plon did not publish Set This House on Fire, and that you should get a chance to see the book as soon as it could be arranged. In a very few days there should be bound copies available in New York, and I have instructed my editor at Random House that you receive a copy by airmail at once. I need not describe again to you my extreme disappointment with Plon. Also, since I saw you my agent in New York sent me a copy of Plon’s contractual terms and they seem to me—as to my agent—almost ludicrously unacceptable, tying me up by option for not just my next book but the next three, etc. Also, they still definitely wish to make extensive cuts. Needless to say, I was most impressed by your own attitude toward such matters as mutilating a book in this manner, so I do hope you like the book and will decide to publish it.
I will be here for another week or so, but after that should you care to get in touch with me you may send any communication here and it will be forwarded to my permanent address in Rome. It was a pleasure meeting you in Paris and I hope we shall see each other again.
Sincerely,
Wm Styron
TO MAXWELL GEISMAR
April 4, 1960 Via San Teodoro, 28, Rome, Italy
Dear Max:
Though I suspect that my erstwhile pal, Norman Mailer, would consider a letter like this simply another example
of literary politicking, I wanted to write and tell you how really pleased I was by your reaction to SET THIS HOUSE ON FIRE. Bob Loomis delightedly sent me your quote and I think I can say without qualification or sentimentality that it touched me like nothing in a long time to see how you responded to the book, and how you understood it. Though I’m all too well aware that the book has its faults, in my better moods I believe in this work, and think it will eventually get its just due and recognition; you have been one of the very few people who professionally has cared for my work, and has spoken up for me, so I would like to think that this new book—and your understanding of it and belief in it—will eventually prove to be vindication for both of us. Loomis tells me that John Aldridge didn’t particularly go for the book, having gotten hung up on, of all things, “Mason’s repressed homosexuality,” an infinitesimal factor in the book which here perhaps reveals a lot more about the secret life of Aldridge than it does about Mason, or the book. Naturally, and as usual, I am looking forward to being ignored by the Partisan highbrows, etc. In an age when horrifying anal fantasies like The Naked Lunch are all the rage, I have no doubt that the schoolmasters will find this book of mine too broad, too “social,” in short, too full of life. But most of the time I find myself feeling so much faith in the book that it really doesn’t matter. I can only sense a certain kinship with Stendhal and say to myself: “My work is there. Try to move it, you bastards, try in vain.”
We have the whole gang over here in a nice apartment overlooking the Forum. The reason I am here is mainly to get away from Roxbury for a while—from the scene of my wrestling for so long with Cass and Mason—and to get a breath of fresh air, a momentary new slant on things. Loving Italy as much as I do, I am no expatriate, and I have no doubt that we will be back in the U.S. toward the end of this summer. The book will be published around the first of June and I am of course going to be very interested in seeing how it goes. It would be fine if Fate ordains that you review it for the Times, but those things as we both well know are in the hands of God + Francis Brown. Give my very best to Ann. Rose sends love, as do I, and I hope you’ll let me hear from you.
All the best, Bill
TO JOHN P. MARQUAND, JR.
April 4, 1960 Via San Teodoro, 28, Rome, Italy
Dear John
Bennett Cerf–baby just the other day sent me a package containing three copies of my new book. To be sure, the package came first class airmail, but nonetheless it may be an indication of the colossal size of this work of fiction when I tell you that I counted the postage and found that it totaled $28.80. I am being utterly serious when I tell you that, hefting this mammoth excrescence of mine, I have never been so utterly bereft and depressed in all my life. Who, in God’s name, is in this day and age going to sit down and read 507 pages of haggard, neurotic outpouring when they can go see Tony Curtis or learn to water-ski or fly to the Bahamas or read something slim and jazzy by John Updike? How and why do we make the fatal mistakes we make? Please, John, I implore you—this book you’re completing, for your own sake and for the sake of literature, try to keep it down to a manageable size: 350 pgs. is about tops. If you’ll just do that, I won’t even nag at you to finish it. I have never been so disconsolate over anything in my life as the concrete proof, between hard covers, of my own appalling logorrhea.
But now I am so heartbroken over the whole thing I don’t even want to talk about it, but instead will try to forget it by telling you about more mundane and credible matters, chief among them that we are now settled in Rome in a chic, hideously expensive apartment owned by Prince Paolo di Borghese, whose wife Marcella is a sort of mouthpiece for Revlon’s quality line of cosmetics. He is a fat little guy, totally impoverished, who makes a living off of renting this apartment to American fly-by-nights like myself; he is of course several miles to the right of Louis XIV and it might amuse you to know that previous tenants were John Wayne, Rock Hudson, Van Heflin, Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay—all of whom I presume nodded off to sleep, as I do, over such books in his library as Mussolini’s memoirs and tracts like “Il Destino d’Italia: Monarchista o Fascista?” But there is a maid named Virginia and a boy from Capri named Paolino who cooks fine spaghetti, and everything has been all right so far except that Susanna has knocked over and broken a $500 Della Robbia vase.
We saw a lot of Jim + Gloria Jones in Paris. They were in great form. Gloria is successfully pregnant and they have bought an enormous new apartment on the Île St. Louis, where I presume they intend to stay for the rest of their natural lives. They both speak an extraordinary brand of French, well larded with shits and fucks, but they make themselves understood easily enough and they both know everyone in Paris. It might interest you to know, by the way, that while in Paris I attended a jazz-poetry session presided over by Gregory Corso. All the international hip set was there and afterwards I fell into company with Bill Burroughs. He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola and a hideously tailored 1925 shit-colored overcoat and scarf to match and a gray fedora pulled down tight around his ears. He reminded me of nothing so much as a mean old Lesbian and is a fantastic reactionary, very prim and tight lipped and proper who spoke of our present Republican administration as that “dirty group of Reds.” I thought he was kidding but he was not; he is as mad as a hatter and after the jazz session a photographer from Paris Presse buttonholed Corso, Burroughs, and myself and took our picture (in front a charcuterie), later captioned—so help me God—“Les ‘Beats’ à Paris.” I’ll send you a copy if you don’t believe me.
I have no idea, really, why I am in Rome, unless it’s only because I felt that after four years solitary confinement in my megalomaniac-dreams of a novel I had to get away, escape the great Eisenhower glut for a while, and regain my bearings. So far we’ve had a pretty good time of it, with no dearth of social life, but I’m astonished even more than I was six years ago at how utterly alike in so many ways Italy and America are. The fucking noise and traffic here are so appalling that New York seems like Roxbury by comparison. Macho-men have taken over, chaos reigns everywhere, and I quite honestly often long for Connecticut—to which we shall doubtless return at the end of the summer. We’ve seen quite a bit of Blair + Nina (who seem to hobnob quite a bit with ducal Italians) and though we only saw the Sims’ once we expect to see them again when they come back from England. She reminds me so much of Suay it’s almost spooky.
We’ve heard from Lillian and understand the play is a great success, which is fine. Kiss Suay for me and the Bush-baby and say hello to the other cats—Harry Hines, Normie, Artie, etc., and drop me a line.
Stybo
TO WILLIAM C. STYRON, SR.
April 17, 1960 Via San Teodoro, 28, Rome, Italy
P.S. Did you read that the two main American Olympic track hopefuls are the Styron twins from Louisiana? I wish them well but am beginning to wonder if they’re white.
Dear Pop:
Well, it is Easter and as usual it rains in Rome on Easter so I’m taking this chance to drop you a short line. Tonight Rose is throwing a party for some people—the Fullers, whom we knew in New York, and their parents (he is Cass Canfield, Sr., who is president of Harper + Bros., and in effect my boss since I have become Harper’s “literary advisor”), and a Count Alvise di Robilant who is married to, of all things, a girl from Lynchburg who went to Randolph-Macon, and Peter Ustinov, the actor, and his wife.ll Since “Virginia Gentleman” costs more than one-third less than it does in Connecticut this party should not tax our resources too greatly: thank heaven for Roman whiskey. Spring has finally arrived in full force in Italy, as have the German tourists; we can hear them twenty-four hours a day beneath our window as they clump through the Forum. The kids seem to be flourishing in this climate. Susanna has begun to chatter in Italian, with the aggravating perfection of accent that children have which their parents never achieve. Polly speaks of “latte” instead of “milk” and even, believe it or not, “frigerifico” instead of “refriger
ator” and as for Thomas I imagine he will start out speaking no English at all. We rented a television set, which the children watch at dinnertime just like they do in Roxbury. The cartoons are the same—Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, etc.—but all the voices are of course dubbed into Italian, and the kids get a big kick out of all this, understanding everything much better than their papa. The apartment itself is quite nice, with a balcony which looks out up toward the Palatine hill and the tiny little ancient church of San Teodoro—the oldest church in Rome (about the 2d century A.D.). We are enjoying ourselves peacefully and I expect we will be here through most of the summer. We might, however, go to somewhere near the sea in July and August … perhaps Ravello. In any case we are fairly certain that we will take advantage of the reservations we have, and come back to the U.S. on the “U.S.” in September. Perhaps, first thing, you will be able to visit us in Roxbury or Baltimore. I think the kids miss their grandparents very much.
I expect that by now you have received a copy of the book from Random House. As you can see, you are one of the dedicatees. I received several copies the other day by air from N.Y., and I agree with Bennett Cerf, who wrote me that he thought that it was one of the handsomest books that Random or anyone else had ever published. Anyway, they are going all out to put the book over with a bang (pub. date is June 3d) and the advance rumor throughout the trade is that it might do extremely well. Keep your fingers crossed.
Rose and the kids all join in sending love to you all in Port Warwick.
Billy
Set This House on Fire was published May 4, 1960—the Styrons’ seventh wedding anniversary.
TO MR. THOMPSON
May 12, 1960 Via San Teodoro, 28, Rome, Italy
Dear Mr. Thompson:
Thank you for sending me a copy of the Book-of-the-Month Club News, containing Gilbert Highet’s perceptive review of Set This House on Fire.mm