TO ROSE STYRON
April 16, 1962 Hotel Lotti, Paris, France
Dearest Mouse: Since I see by the calendar that this is Monday, and since you probably won’t get this until Thursday, this is probably the last letter I’ll be writing. (Incidentally, I hope you’ll be forwarding no more mail to me after receiving this.) I received both your letters this A.M. and enjoyed them both immensely. They breathe Roxbury and I can’t wait to get there and smell the spring. It was also lovely talking to you and the pumpkin-heads yesterday, despite the evil weather both here and there. About the call from Mr. Hadley of the State Dept., tell them I wouldn’t mind seeing the Hollander, provided I don’t have to travel anywhere to see him. I’m utterly tired of traveling, but will have no objection to meeting him on my home turf. You might keep in mind, by the way, that I have to speak to Dick Lewis’ class at Yale on the morning of the 24th, but any other time will be O.K. Meanwhile, my last week here—aside from afternoons with Nat Turner, which keeps me busy—promises to be full. Cordier is giving a dinner for me on Wednesday night at La Grande Severine, the chi-chi restaurant which Maurice Girodias owns. Jules Dassin is going to be there (with the sultry Greek, of course) and other assorted movie cats. Tomorrow night dinner with Paul Jenkins, Thursday night with Abe Rattner + wife + the Joneses, and Friday night some kind of a party chez the uncle of Jean Stein vanden Heuvel, who is passing through with her husband en route to Warsaw, of all places. A busy week, as the French say. The book is still going at a great clip. I got a letter from Maurice Coindreau in Sweet Briar (he sends his regards to you) who said that the greatest review yet was in a journal called Democratic 62 (I haven’t seen it) which said that the book was the most revolutionary foreign book to appear in France since Ulysses. So there, Arthur Mizener. These have been good weeks for me but I’m truly anxious to get home. I have only one question about my arrival. How on earth are you going to get the entire gang into the Mercedes?
Love to you and all the chicks.
B.
TO WILLIAM BLACKBURN
May 2, 1962 Roxbury, CT
Dear Professor: —I had a curious experience last Sunday night, and I thought you might be interested in hearing about it. It does not seem to me quite real, but I shall try to convey my impressions of the event. While I was in France, Rose received an invitation which went: “The President and Mrs. Kennedy request the company of Mr. and Mrs. Styron at dinner, April 29th, in honor of Nobel Prize winners.” Since, aside from James Baldwin,XX I was the only “younger” writer invited to the affair, you can imagine that I was somewhat baffled, if pleased, by the summons (I have also learned that it is considered unpardonable to decline such an invitation—not that I was about to). Anyway, we went, accompanied by Van Wyck Brooks, who was exceedingly nervous, and by Baldwin, a fact which made us both feel somewhat like Huck and Jim. There was plenty of booze, and at the pre-dinner festivities I found myself wedged between Linus Pauling and President Stratton of M.I.T., getting very drunk indeed (I was taking antibiotics for an earache, and I have since discovered that this accelerates the action of alcohol by roughly 100%).YY At 8:20 Jack and Jackie came into the East Room, preceded by flags, and to the sound of “Hail to the Chief.” The receiving line was formed alphabetically (I am always at the end of such lines), and as I staggered past our hosts, I hear Jackie say to me: “Hi there! You’re a friend of John and Sue’s (Marquand)!” I am not being irrelevant—nothing was irrelevant about that evening—since it then occurred to me that perhaps I had been invited because I was a friend of John and Sue’s; but then, why not John and Sue too? At any rate, we went in to dine, and I found myself at Mrs. Robert Kennedy’s table, flanked by the wives of two Nobel prize winning biochemists and physicists, and within whispering distance of, on the right, President Pusey of Harvard and, on the left, J. Robert Oppenheimer, also Ralph Bunche, who I think sensed that I was of Southern origin and therefore paid me no never mind.ZZ Oppenheimer was utterly charming, and I am here to report that Pusey is one of the crashing knuckleheads of all time. The dinner was splendid, including the wine, which because of the achromycin I was taking fogged me up to the point of incomprehensibility. After dinner there was a boring reading by Fredric March of a garbled and wretched piece of an unpublished Hemingway manuscript; it was done in semi-darkness, and most of the Nobel prize winners—many of whom are over 70—nodded off to sleep. That was the end of the evening—or so I thought. Just as I, with all the rest, was preparing blearily to make my departure, I was accosted by an Army major in full dress (they are all over the place and act as a kind of chaperone) who said (I will swear to this on a stack of bibles): “The President would like you and Mrs. Styron to join him upstairs in his private quarters.” In my drunken state it then flashed over me meanly: “Aha! It’s just as I suspected. The son of a bitch is after my wife.” Anyway, we went upstairs in the private elevator, to the tootling of the Marine Corps band, and entered Kennedy’s drawing room. Those selected for this special treat numbered only six: Rose and myself, Mr. and Mrs. Lionel Trilling, Robert Frost, and Fredric March.*aa A motley crew indeed. I was sitting in the presidential rocking chair when His Excellency entered. The obvious parallel is an obscure poet lolling on the throne of Louis XIV. Rose tells me that when we rose to greet him I was so blind out of my skull that I simply sank back into the rocking chair. Kennedy took this with remarkable (and democratic) grace: he sat down on a couch and began talking with Robert Frost (it turns out that it wasn’t Rose at all he was after, or perhaps not). Diana Trilling had the look of a woman who had just been struck a glancing but telling blow by a sledgehammer; Lionel was nervous, but reasonably urbane. One had the feeling (though I confess I shared the feeling to some degree) that for Diana, at least, it was all a dream. Presently then the Palace Guard came in: Pierre Salinger, Bobby and Ethel, one of the other sisters, the simple-minded brother-in-law who runs the peace corps, etc.*bb I spent most of the hour talking with Jackie, who I must say has a great deal of charm, and I treasure her promise to take us out on the presidential yacht when we are across the Sound from Hyannisport this summer. At about midnight, turned once again into a pumpkin or whatever it was Cinderella turned into, this phase of the party broke up; we bade our host and hostess adieu, and were conveyed in the limousine of the Attorney General (he reminds me of nothing so much as a young lion cub, hot-eyed and panting) to the home of Arthur Schlesinger in Georgetown, and there from Schlesinger himself, an affable gent, I learned why I had been so honored this evening. It turns out, according to Schlesinger, that Set This House on Fire is, and has been for some time, the most “controversial” book that the intellectuals at the White House have been reading.*cc Some of them hate it, some of them love it passionately, but it causes constant and violent arguments, and they have just wanted to get a look at the instigator. Never underestimate the power of the written word. At any rate, it was a jolly time, but in case you feel I have been overly detailed, I would like to say that I just wanted to get it down in writing; it’s not just like every Sunday dinner, after all.
I don’t know if you got my cable from Rome or not, announcing what happened to STHOF (“La Proie des flammes”) in France. Quite simply, it made the biggest splash there of any American novel since Faulkner. The reviews were unanimously overflowing with praise, almost embarrassingly so; they were all so sanguine that I began to get suspicious and even hankered for a small word of disfavor. L’Express, for instance, which next to Le Monde is the most important paper, called the book “the most optimistic and intelligent of the great American tragedies.” Le Monde itself, in a rather unprecedented full page review which was more like a news story, simply called it “a very great book, a vast allegory of the American condition.” As a result of all this, the book last month was #3 on L’Express’s monthly best seller list (a compendium of all books, fiction and nonfiction) and is expected to be #1 this month—something which has happened to no American book, fiction or non-fiction, in the 12 years L’Express has been running,
and something which happened to only one other non-French book—Dr. Zhivago. Guy Schoeller, who runs Hachette which in turn owns Gallimard, my publisher, said he was fully confident that by the end of the year (sales are somewhat slower in France) the book will have sold between 70–80,000 copies. This would be the equivalent in America of a quarter of a million (Bennett Cerf just told me that the Random House edition sold something less than 18,000, which is a reflection on something). After having been treated by the American critics as a somewhat more clumsy Richard Ruark, I expect you can understand how I feel zestily vindicated. I wish there were some way I could rub Arthur Mizener’s nose in it all, but I suspect this victory is its own reward.
Do you think you could come visit us at the Vineyard again this summer? We don’t have the same house, unfortunately, and we would have to put you up in a place nearby, but we would love to have you. Try to make it. I will have a larger sailboat, a more comfortable one so there will be no risk of spilling overboard in the channel. I’m delighted, while I think about it, over the reception Reynolds Price’s book has been getting; it certainly deserves it, and Hiram told me that it is selling well, which means the most important thing—readers.
Let me hear from you soon.
As ever,
Bill
PS: I think the boy in Hartford is going to escape the electric chair. There has been a tremendous ruckus up there since that article.*dd Again, never underestimate the power of the written word, learned at the Blackburnian knee.
TO ELIZABETH MCKEE
May 6, 1962 Roxbury, CT
Dear Elizabeth: This is going to be an extraordinarily difficult letter for me to write, since I might as well say at the outset that it is to inform you that I am leaving the Agency. I have the deepest and warmest feeling for you personally, as you must well know, and that makes it all the tougher for me.
Primarily, the difficulty for me stems not so much from the Agency itself, or from your management of my literary affairs, but from my foreign rights, which I sincerely believe have been badly mishandled. This occurred to me for the first time the year before last when both Plon and Robert Laffont in France were haggling over Set This House on Fire. At that time, you will recall, I was in Ravello and you were in Milan. It was about the first time I really had had a crisis over any of my books, and I called you on the phone to ask you to straighten it out for me. About halfway through the conversation I was interrupted—and rather brusquely, too, I might add—by Ted, who informed me that you were going to the opera. And that was the end of that. By great luck, several days after that Gallimard stepped in from the outside and saved the situation nicely, but I was left with the distinct feeling that had that not happened I would have been left to cope with the Plon-Laffont difficulty myself. And at that time it not unnaturally occurred to me that I was paying a whopping 20% of my foreign rights income to people who not only were not helping me a bit but were actually impeding my progress. Recently, when I was in Frankfurt, Mrs. Fischer told me something else which jarred me. She said that after Lie Down in Darkness came out she wrote repeatedly to your office, asking what the German rights situation was, and received no answer. I know this must be true, because she offered to show me copies of the letters. At any rate, the upshot was that I was published by a lousy little house in Geneva and was wretchedly translated to boot. I have no idea who was to blame in this matter of the letters—I rather suspect it was the Horch office—but in any event it couldn’t have been handled worse.
The success of Set This House in France (I hardly need emphasize that I handled personally all negotiations with Gallimard) has certainly made me aware of the importance of foreign rights; in fact, since I’ve already sold more copies in France than any of my books sold in their original editions in the U.S., I feel that my foreign rights are even more important than my domestic affairs. In Paris I met a lady, who shall remain nameless (not Mrs. Bradley), who when I told her I had no translations in Holland, Israel, Poland, Yugoslavia, etc., was astounded. She handles, incidentally, foreign rights for American writers, and said that she could sell the rights to all of my work in the countries just named within a week. I believe her, as she has done just this for two writers I know very well. She was further surprised that neither you nor Horch had made any attempt to sell my Esquire piece on capital punishment, which she had just read, and which she said she was positive she could sell the rights for in 15 languages.
I am writing Horch—Roz Siegel, that is—telling them that I am terminating my relationship with them at this date. I won’t go into any details with Roz, and trust you will eventually tell her why. I could not feel more certain that my foreign rights have been badly handled.
As for my relationship with McIntosh-McKee, I am not nearly so dissatisfied; in fact, in most respects I think everything has worked out extremely well. At the same time, I honestly no longer feel the need for an agent. As I have gone along in my literary career, I realize that I am primarily a novelist, working for long stretches on one book, and my relationship with my publishers (especially Random House) is and has always been eminently satisfactory. In other words, with all due respect to you as an agent, I simply do not need you to get $5,000 more out of Bennett Cerf. He is all too happy to give it to me freely at any time. Such few articles as I write and will continue to write for, let us say, Esquire, are articles they are pleased to get out of me, and you have not had to “sell” them. Surely you are aware of this, and I simply cannot see the plain reasonableness of paying the Agency 10% for doing in the end so little work. To be sure, I will be the first to admit that you have done a considerable amount of work for me. I am aware of all the inquiries you have handled and of all the foolish people you have steered off my track, but I cannot help asking myself if the 10% of the money, say, that I made last year—the Agency’s commission being around $3,000, in round-figure terms of my income, that is—is equitable in regard to the services rendered.
Further, I am not at all satisfied with Famous Artists. Abramson is an amiable but total oaf, and Harriet Pilpel has informed me that the contracts they have been drawing up have been near-disastrous. Fortunately, Pilpel saved the day, but again I have to ask myself why I am associated with these characters, people like Abramson. To be sure none of my books have been the hottest thing around in terms of the movies, so this aspect has been difficult all around. Yet now, after seeing what Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst did to my advantage in those contracts, I would far rather have her simply act as my lawyer—I am speaking of Harriet—have her actually draw up the contract and pay her the large but in the end reasonable fee she would ask, than to have a big commission go to an outfit like Famous Artists. These are simple economic facts, and I’m sure you must be aware of the reasonableness of my argument.
Finally, of course, you still in a sense remain my agent. For naturally anything to do with any of my past work (except future foreign rights) will be handled through the Agency. I expect our professional relationship to continue much as it did in the past; because I am such a slow worker, and because all my past works seem still to have so much “Life,” I am sure business will continue to come to me through the Agency. Anything in regard to any of my future work, including “Nat Turner,” I will handle on my own. The Agency will also collect commissions on the English Penguin edition of The Long March, which John Dodds*ee wrote me about, and will collect commissions with Horch and Heath on foreign rights already sold. All future movie rights and all future foreign rights I will also handle on my own. It doesn’t seem nearly so awful as it might have been, does it? At least, that’s the way I feel.
In the end, in case you were silly enough to entertain the notion that there is or was anything personal in all this, or that I bore you any kind of resentment whatever, kindly put it out of your mind.*ff To me you are still one of the prized and valued people I know anywhere, and I shall care very deeply for you always. Enjoy your trip and come back soon to Roxbury.
Love
Bill
/> TO HOPE LERESCHE*gg
May 11, 1962 Roxbury, CT
Dear Miss (or is it Mrs?) Leresche:
Maybe you will remember me from a pleasant evening at James Jones’. I am writing you to tell you that I have terminated my association with both my general agent and my agent for foreign rights, Franz J. Horch Associates of New York. I have done this for the several reasons we discussed that night—mainly the fact that I don’t believe Horch has displayed much initiative in selling my work—and I wonder if you are still willing to take me on as a client for foreign rights. Rather conveniently, in an effort to justify their good works, Horch sent me a list (complete) of the contracts they have concluded for me. The most important one—the Gallimard contract for SET THIS HOUSE ON FIRE—I negotiated myself, as I told you. Perhaps you’ve seen this month’s French Vogue, an article by François Nourrissier who said, quite accurately, that La Proie des flammes is the most successful American novel to be published in France since LOLITA. At any rate, I thought you’d like to see this list so that, in case you decide to take me on, you can determine what gaps there are in my foreign rights. Incidentally, since I am breaking off with my general agent, McKee-McIntosh, this means that I will be breaking off with their corresponding agent in England, which is Heath, so I presume that this means you will become my agent for England, too.
I think we spoke of the Esquire article I did on capital punishment. It has since caused a big commotion here, and it looks as if the condemned boy I wrote about may be reprieved—have his sentence commuted to life, that is. You said that you felt this article might very well be of interest to readers in various countries.*hh I would be glad to have copies of the article made available to you if you think you can use them.
At any rate, if you are agreeable to becoming my English and foreign rights agent for all my future work and past work not already contracted for, I hope you will let me know.*ii