Please do let me know soon about how the school goes, and how you like it, etc. I have a sneaking feeling that you’re not going to find it like Harvard, but as you are well aware the most important thing for you at the moment is simply to be located in the heart of Europe with the opportunity to spend this extra year learning Italian and perfecting your French and seeing the continent. You shouldn’t take too lightly, however, what Franklin has to offer, because I also have a feeling that, even if it’s a new school just feeling its way, it may have some very valuable things to give and you shouldn’t overlook them. But also, have a good time; having a good time is, I’ve noticed, an activity at which generally speaking you’re very proficient—and that’s all to the good. And don’t forget reading, but I think that’s already in your blood.
Well, I really miss you awfully, but it does my weary heart good to at least know that you’re contented. Don’t forget to write. Mummy comes up on week-ends, and I imagine I’ll be here for several more weeks, so you’ll know where to write. John Marquand said for me to give you an epistolary hug, which I do.
Much love,
Daddy
TO SUSANNA STYRON
October 12, 1971 Vineyard Haven, MA
Dear Sue (Cara figlia mia):
Two pieces of good news I’ve received in the past couple of days. The first probably won’t interest you too much since it has to do with my taxes. Anyway I got the bill for my Vineyard Haven tax for this year and found they had been reduced by $800. Isn’t that extraordinary? It has to do with re-evaluation and other complex things, and the fact that we on the waterfront had been paying a larger share of tax than we should have for many years; but the important thing, as far as you’re concerned, is that it will make it a whole lot easier for me to pay for that new car of yours. So hooray for the new V.H. taxes.
Item No. 2: Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, through their company, have bought JPM’s and my script, DEAD!—A Love Story for $125,000.‖ff Isn’t that something? The news just came the other day. Actually, it’s only an option arrangement with a percentage down payment, but that is the usual thing in the movie business nowadays, and my agent, Don Congdon, is very optimistic about them actually doing the movie. More importantly, though, is the general feeling that they are going to try to do an honest movie with respect for the script itself. I talked to Newman over the phone, and he was very enthusiastic, giving me all sorts of assurances that the movie would be made in a way that honored the tragicomic nuances of the script, etc., and maybe I’m a sucker but I truly believed him. Now with your newly acquired cinematic expertise, you will have to be hired on this project as an advisor in some sort of capacity. Wouldn’t it be exciting if sometime next year when you are back in this land and the movie is being made (the bucolic scenes around Roxbury), you could be taken on in some sort of groovy, integral capacity.
So there is something to think about. In the meantime, I want to say that I really love your letters, with their splendidly detailed account of your goings-on, your new apartment, your encounter with Proust (I greatly approve of this), and all the other exciting things that are happening to you. How I envy you, and with what amazement I think back on my own self at 16, and realize that I wasn’t half as grown-up as you are now, and would have been paralyzed with anxiety and embarrassment when faced with trying to do and accomplish 1-10th of what you are doing.
I love and cherish your descriptions of Pascal Tone and his Heming-wayesque panache, also your sketches of the other Franklin characters.‖gg By now, I’m sure that you and your beloved Mom will have thoroughly “done” the Lugano scene, and I can’t wait for her to return (day after tomorrow) to tell me everything in detail. She may have told you about some ghastly Kennedy Foundation symposium that I am supposed to take part in in Washington. That’s this week-end and I’m going to try to weasel out of it so that we can stay up here on the island instead and she can tell me all about your adventures together. The idea of engaging in a symposium with a bunch of biologists on the subject of birth defects, and then being loaded on a bus to go to a black-tie dinner at the Shrivers, depresses me so much that it makes my back teeth ache. I’m going to try and worm out of it somehow.
I’ve got almost 50 pages done on the play—that’s about half—and the progress I’ve made makes me feel very happy. Incidentally, this is more about hospital life than about the military, but in any case I have found that I have always written best when thinking about places and events that caused me misery.
I really miss you but, as you say, it won’t be too long before we’ll be together again and chew over our various experiences. Do take care of yourself. DRIVE CAREFULLY (slowly mainly), and keep reading. And WRITE me from time to time. I love you very much.
XXXXX
Papa
TO SUSANNA STYRON
November 10, 1971 Roxbury, CT
Dear Sue:
I’m writing this while you are undoubtedly in the depths of some Turkish opium den, and hope the mails are fast enough so that this will reach you in Lugano around the time of your arrival. We received your itinerary of the trip throughout Greece and Turkey and it sounds fabulous. Also received was your postcard from Greece with your description of your ouzo-drinking bout below decks with the crew. You sure do get around for a gal of sixteen.
Your ma and I went to a preview of Neil Simon’s new play,‖hh directed of course by M. Nichols, and then (this was last night) went out with Mike for dinner—a fine time, really, but as usual I am getting more and more fed up with Fun City and can’t wait to get back here in the country. The play was funny enough, but instantly forgettable—not at all like the drama of your paw’s, which is nearing completion; that is, I’m about halfway through the second of two acts. It’s both very sad and very funny, this play I’m writing, and the best news I can send you so far is that Bob Brustein—of or than whom there is no finer judge in the world—listened to me read the first act not long ago, and absolutely adored it, instantly offered to stage it at Yale, where no doubt it will be put on late this spring. Naturally, to get Bob’s kind of professional reaction and to find it so wholeheartedly positive and favorable is an enormous boost to my morale and I am proceeding in high spirits.
Little wildly interesting news otherwise, except to say that we all miss you very, very much and can’t wait to see you. As for the African trip of mine—as you know it was postponed, not cancelled; Myles Turner still earnestly wants to make the safari, and it now looks as if we will probably go around the 20th of January. That means that I’ll be able to drop in on you in Lugano either after the trip or before, probably the latter. I am very much looking forward to seeing your groovy school and meeting your pals and associates. Among other things, this is the longest stretch of time in about 20 years that I have not been to Europe and I am getting a real pang of longing for the old country. Your brothers and sisters are all fine and they send you their fondest love. The Montessori teachers wrote a note home saying that Al was going through, or had started just today, a phase which Maria Montessori had called “immersion in reading.” Indeed, the teacher said that Al had gotten so infatuated with the printed page that she had really embarked upon a veritable “reading drunk,” which is O.K. with me. I don’t know what she’s been reading—probably not Tolstoy—but I’d rather her turn into an alcoholic on print than to ruin her little eyes squinting at the boob tube. Sundance and Juniper are well and happy and send their love too.
Much love,
Daddy
TO ROBERT PENN WARREN
November 22, 1971 Roxbury, CT
Dear Red: Sorry not to have answered your rich and abundant letter sooner, but I have been spending a lot of my time this fall in the house on the Vineyard (toward the year’s end, or after the end of summer, I find I get a good amount of writing done living up there for a few weeks as a bachelor) and somehow your letter got delayed in being forwarded. Anyway, I enjoyed the hell out of it, reading your account of life in that part of France and I??
?m delighted that things seems to be going so satisfactorily, if not downright buoyantly for la famille Warren. What a gas, as the kids would say, that you are living as nostalgically, within the shadow of Stendhal. I don’t quite know what my own reaction would be to such proximity—probably it would at least have me off re-reading The Red and the Black and countless Beyle-can works I have too long neglected also.‖ii
Which brings me to a much belated need to tell you how much I liked Meet Me in the Green Glen.‖jj I had finished it—in a glow of excitement and just before I left the Vineyard a week or so ago, wanted to write you about it, didn’t have your address (your misplaced letter not being in my hands), tried to call Albert, missed him, etc.—a whole comedy of communication-failure. Anyway, I want to say here and now how strong a work I think it is—the language as usual rich and flowing and superbly suited to the subject-matter, the characters (especially the amazing Cassie) brilliantly alive, and all welded together by the infallible Warren narrative drive. I envy the consistent energy of the book, there never seems to be the slightest let-down in the forward thrust of the story, and as always brooding over all, is that moral imagination which has made you the unique writer that you are. The trial—to cite just one fine sequence in the book—is one of the best episodes of its kind I’ve ever read. I could go on and on, and want to talk to you about it sometime soon, but hope it’s O.K. if I leave you for the moment simply with the impression of how enormously impressed with the novel I am—if that means anything. Not only impressed, to repeat myself once more, but truly bouleversé which is what I think the French say when they mean even more than that.
My own work, speaking of work, has taken a rather bizarre turn. I am within a few pages of finishing, of all things, a full-length play, entitled IN THE CLAP SHACK, set in the venereal disease ward of a Naval Hospital during W.W. II. I’ve astonished myself by doing this thing but felt irresistibly compelled to do so and am rather tickled that Bob Brustein likes what I’ve done so far well enough to have offered to stage it at Yale this coming spring. This means of course that the novel I’ve been doing has been temporarily put aside but I expect to get back to it this winter. Playwriting I’ve found is a remarkable experience—tough in many ways, the need for discipline great but in certain aspects so free and easy that I wonder why I didn’t take it up a long time ago.
Things are about the same, meaning getting worse, with people running amok on the streets, pollution, and Nixon. However, all the family here is fine and miss the Warrens—will especially miss your annual December shebang. Susanna has orbited out of sight, having already this fall been to Turkey and Greece but is now back in Lugano, where I feel she may be a little lonely in her bachelor girl’s apartment after the first flush of freedom. I’m sure she’d be panting to see you if you get to that part of Swizzera and her address is Franklin College, Lugano.
Incidentally, I’ll be proud to be in your anthology, and suggest you write my agent for the business side of the thing: Don Congdon, c/o Harold Matson Co., 22 East 40th St., N.Y. 10016.
Hope we can link up over there before long. Keep in touch and love to you all from all of us.
Bill
TO SUSANNA STYRON
December 2, 1971 Roxbury, CT
Dear Sue:
I’ve been a terrible correspondent these past few weeks but I have of course thought of you every day—sometimes 5 or 6 or even 7 times a day—and if there’s any such thing as telepathy I think you would know about it and respond to my vibrations since when I think of you I really DO THINK. For one thing, your Ma and I were just a tiny bit made morose over the tone of one of your last letters—you seemed lonely in your single gal’s apt. and I began to wonder if we had done the right thing in agreeing to let you live alone—and so I thought a lot about you then. But then Barbie, whom we saw over here one week-end, said she’d gotten a letter from you at about the same time, and you didn’t sound lonely at all, and then your MA got that call from you over Thanksgiving in Baltimore, and she said you sounded very cheery, so my sadness about you was alleviated. One thing I don’t want you to feel is real regret perhaps over having made the wrong decision about living by yourself. Having lived alone myself in Paris, I know what it is of an evening to look at the four walls, as they say. Yet on the other hand I’m very much aware of the fact that you do have a bunch of good friends and the opportunity to see them most any time you want to, so I’m sure that takes up a lot of the strain, and makes most of your solitariness a passing thing. But if it does get to be too much of an emotional hang-up, living like that, please don’t hesitate to change your rooming arrangements, either now or next semester. There is no point in being even the slightest discontented when there’s no need for it and you can get around it.
But the main thing is—and it is very hard to believe—you will be here very, very soon. I am stunned by the notion that once again the hideous season of Christmas is upon us, but knowing that you will be here warms the cockles of my old heart, and if for no other reason than to please my darling daughter I PROMISE that on Xmas day I will be nice, courteous, loving, trustworthy, jolly, outgoing, forbearing, sweet, tender, generous, affable, and a saint. I can’t wait to see you, and my impatience is shared by at least 7 other members of this family, human and non-human, and countless other denizens of this county, commonwealth and nation. I will have my play done by then, God willing, and since anytime I finish a work I dwell in a kind of (perhaps misguided) ecstasy for several weeks you will find me in even more of a jolly Santa Claus mood than you ever thought possible.
I must say goodbye now because I’ve got to write a letter to a lady in Budapest who wrote a fine essay on my work. She also wrote me a letter and sounds very open-hearted and intelligent, so maybe you will want to meet her when you go to Hungary next semester. I won’t say anything about you now—awaiting your approval—but she does sound like someone special and I’m sure she’d like to show you around when you go there.
Everybody sends love—Pete, Tom, Al, Mom and me, Marj, Gino, Juniper, Sundance, the two birds whatever their names are (God, are they noisy!), Tom’s two chameleons, let’s see also Nicky, the milkman, Tommy’s Cleaners, Lloyd Green, New Milford Laundry, Vulcan Basement Waterproofing (I’m going to sue them), and I could go on and on, but am waiting for Xmas.…
10,000 Tons of love,
Daddy
TO SUSANNA STYRON
January, 1972‖kk Goldsboro, NC
Dear Sue:
A sign on the front of the grandest hotel in this part of N.C. reads:
FINEST FOOD IN TOWN
BREAKFAST 60 c
LUNCH 1.00
DINNER 1.50 HP
And it was quite good too!
Love, Daddy
TO CLAIRE WHITE
January 5, 1972 Roxbury, CT
Dear Claire: I don’t mean to mix up metaphors, but thank you for sending me the pleasure of your box. Could this be symbolic? I’ve always wanted a box of yours and now I’ve got it, but never in my wildest dreams did I think it could be so crazy, so beautiful, or so Gothic! It drives me crazy. I’ve wondered what to do with it (knowing only that I want it constantly within my reach) and have decided to use it, on alternate weeks, as a receptacle (1) for small cigars and (2) for used razor blades. Several things about the box remain enigmas to me. The skull is great, but on the other panels I can’t tell the difference between (a) a tit, (b) an ass and (c) a stomach with a navel. However, it all joins into one erotic frolic, and hope I shall have the pleasure of your intimate company soon again.
Much love,
Wm.
TO WILLIE MORRIS
January 25, 1972 Roxbury, CT
Dear Willie:
Here is that piece of Red Warren’s that you wanted, and I hope you can find what you need in it. Send it back at your leisure.‖ll
Rose and I spent last Saturday night at Jason Epstein’s in Sag Harbor and tried to raise you numerous times on Sunday by telephone but to no avail. I’m really
sorry because we all wanted to see you and knock down a Bloody Mary or two. But let’s get together soon.
Louis Rubin wrote to say that you had told the students that you couldn’t come down to UNC in March. I’m not sure whether I want to go either, but I’ll still consider going especially if you’ll reconsider, with the view in both of our minds of putting on a Bill & Willie Show which seemed to be so successful at Duke last year. Let me know if you want to do it and I’ll get to work and line up some good parties, sippin whiskey, handball games, poontang, etc.
My play IN THE CLAP SHACK is going to open the season at the Yale Drama School in the fall and I want you to be there for the first onstage short-arm inspection in American theatrical history. How is your work coming? Let me hear everything.
Rose joins me in boundless affection
Bill
TRICIA LOVES COX‖mm
TO JAMES AND GLORIA JONES
February 4, 1972 Roxbury, CT
Dear James + Moss:
Good news to hear that you are coming over here to this side of the pond later on in the month. We’re really looking forward to seeing you so much—long time, no?—and want to throw a gala party for you all and Irwin + Co., filled with beautiful girls, fancy studs, and all your old good friends. Please let us know immediately when you’ll be here, what your schedule is, etc., so that we can begin laying plans. I have no more money left, since I went crazy and bought a Jaguar XJ6 sedan that cost more than Nixon’s limousine. However, my wife Rose has a few dollars left from Scott Tissue and so we’ll make out all right for a party for you if we stick to beer, and no groovy broads or fancy studs of an order higher than Lila Kelly (remember?) or Ed Trzcinski. I think maybe, come to think of it, we can hire the back end of Clarke’s for about $50. So please communicate right away about arrival time, where you’re staying, how long, etc., so we can do the thing up brown.