†AA Styron refers to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, published just a month earlier to great acclaim and commercial success.
†BB Stephen E. Smith (1927–90) was the husband of Jean Kennedy Smith.
†CC “Rose pregnant the fourth time the winters of Connecticut are terribly cold.”
†DD Frederick Childe Hassam (1859–1935), American impressionist painter and a founding member of the influential artists’ group The Ten. Winslow Homer (1836–1910), the preeminent American landscape painter and printmaker in the nineteenth century.
†EE Styron published the “Virginia: 1831” section of the novel in The Paris Review 9 (Winter 1966): 13–45.
†FF Styron refers to the Supreme Court decision of March 21, 1966, Memoirs v. Massachusetts, which tried to clarify the early obscenity decision of Roth v. United States (1957). The Memoirs case concerned John Cleland’s novel Fanny Hill, or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749) and failed to resolve what was or was not obscene.
†GG John W. Aldridge’s Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novel in Crisis (New York: David McKay, 1966) contains the essay “William Styron and the Derivative Imagination.” Also see Aldridge, “Highbrow Authors and Middlebrow Books,” Playboy (April 1964).
†HH Unknown.
†II William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, Human Sexual Response (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966).
†JJ Alfred C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia, W. B. Saunders Co., 1948).
†KK The Elizabeth Islands.
†LL Maurice Girodias (1919–90) was the founder of the Olympia Press in Paris.
†MM Michael Mewshaw (b. 1943) is the author of eleven novels and eight books of non-fiction, and best known for his novel Year of the Gun (1984). He wrote his master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation on William Styron.
†NN Mewshaw published this letter (with lengthy commentary) in his memoir, Do I Owe You Something? A Memoir of the Literary Life (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003).
†OO Mewshaw’s wife, Linda.
†PP Styron’s letter of March 24, 1966, explained that Harington might receive a Rockefeller grant.
†QQ Stanley Kunitz (1905–2006) was a poet who won the National Book Award in 1995.
†RR Izaak Walton (1593–1683), English writer and author of The Compleat Angler (1653).
†SS Willie Morris (1934–99) was a writer, editor, and longtime friend to Styron. In 1967, Morris was made the youngest editor in chief ever at Harper’s Magazine. Styron attached Larry L. King, “The Ole Country Boys,” Texas Observer, June 24, 1966, a kind of glass-menagerie treatment of the Southern expatriates living in New York and Connecticut: Willie Morris, Styron, C. Vann Woodward, and Robert Penn Warren. “Red Warren was born in Kentucky,” King wrote. “Bill Styron grew up in the Tidewater Country of Virginia. Vann Woodward in Arkansas. Ole Country Boys. Take away their Pulitzers, Rolls-Royces, and legions of adoring fans, and they are just the same as you and me.” Lawrence Leo King (b. 1929), American novelist, journalist, playwright, and coauthor of the Broadway musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, was a featured writer at Harper’s throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
†TT Richard Goodwin, Lillian Hellman, Robert Brustein, Philip Roth, Jules Feiffer, and John Updike. Robert Sanford Brustein (b. 1927) has been a theater critic, producer, playwright, and educator. He founded the Yale Repertory Theatre and American Repertory Theater. He was dean of the Yale School of Drama from 1966 to 1979.
†UU Bennett and Phyllis Cerf.
†VV A mass market paperback published by Signet in 1966, edited by Albert H. Morehead, Harold J. Blum, and others.
†WW In a letter of August 1966, Harington had recommended several books to Styron on the subject of Turner and “the Southampton incident”: G. P. R. James’s 1856 novel The Old Dominion; or The Southampton Massacre: A Novel (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856), Arna Bontemps’s novel about Gabriel Prosser’s slave rebellion, Black Thunder (New York: Macmillan, 1936), and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Co., 1856).
†XX Donald Harington, “A Second Career,” Esquire (January 1967).
†YY John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy; or The Revised New Syllabus (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966) was a satirical novel about American campus culture.
†ZZ Pier Paolo Pasolini, dir., The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964).
‡aa William Styron, “Runaway,” Partisan Review 33 (Fall 1966).
‡bb Styron referred to Woodward’s unpublished essay “Genovese, Aptheker, and Heresy.” Eugene Dominic Genovese (1930–2012) was an American historian known for his Marxist approach and his Bancroft Prize–winning work on slavery, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974).
‡cc Robert Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? (New York: Random House, 1965).
‡dd Several of Styron’s compliments are bracketed by publisher Donald I. Fine to use as pull quotes for Jones’s publicity.
‡ee Joseph Conrad left Warsaw when he was four years old in 1861 and became a seaman at sixteen.
‡ff Styron refers to Woodward’s unpublished essay, “The Second Reconstruction in Retrospect” (1966). Styron also refers to Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” originally published in the Summer 1957 issue of Dissent, and separately by City Lights Publishers, then collected in Advertisements for Myself (1959).
‡gg Dwight Lowell Dumond (1895–1976) was a renowned American historian and pioneering scholar of abolitionism and slavery, best known for Antislavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States (1959).
‡hh Styron refers to Woodward’s essay “The Antislavery Myth,” American Scholar (Spring 1962), collected in The Future of the Past (1989). In that essay, Woodward calls Dumond “a modern primitive, a Henri Rousseau of historiography.”
‡ii James M. Dabbs, Jr. (1937–2004), was a professor of psychology at Georgia State University. Dabbs earned his Ph.D. from Yale University and is best known for his book Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (2000).
‡jj Alexandra Styron was born on October 28, 1966.
‡kk As Styron later noted: “I was certain he was building a torture device for his new baby sister. But in fact, after a long and sinister silence, he emerged with a wondrous artifact: a wooden bird with metal wings, a gift for Alexandra, and tribute to the fact that even he, after all his isolated maleness, wished to celebrate the arrival of another sister, my new daughter.” See West, William Styron: A Life (New York: Random House, 1998), 370.
‡ll The postcard image was of a woman’s knees, and Styron had drawn train tracks leading in between them.
‡mm Truman Capote held a masquerade ball, the Black and White Ball, on November 28, 1966. The party was the most desirable social event of the year and only five hundred people were invited.
‡nn Henry Ford II (1917–87), grandson of the founder of Ford Motor Company.
‡oo Styron refers to the old Random House building.
‡pp A male schoolteacher in Maine, dying of cancer, who wrote to Styron to ask for some words of faith.
‡qq Don Congdon (1918–2009), literary agent best known for representing Ray Bradbury, William Shirer, and David Sedaris. Bradbury dedicated Fahrenheit 451 to Congdon.
‡rr Styron is likely referring to William Manchester (1922–2004), the author and biographer, best known for Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (1980), which partly chronicles his serious wounds during the campaign on Okinawa.
‡ss A town in northern Italy at the foot of Mont Blanc.
‡tt Styron refers to György Lukács (1885–1971), Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Styron also refers to an interview that Naim Kattan conducted with Lukács that appeared in La Quinzaine littéraire in December 1966.
‡uu Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry (1871–1945) was a French poet and philosopher.
> ‡vv Marc L. Ratner’s William Styron (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972) was the first study of Styron to be published.
‡ww Michel Mohrt (1914–2011), editor, writer, historian of French literature, and longtime editor at Éditions Gallimard.
‡xx Styron wrote about this trip in “William Styron’s Nile Diary,” Geo 3 (September 1981). Collected in This Quiet Dust.
‡yy Rose had hurt her leg.
‡zz C. Vann Woodward, “Confessions of a Rebel: 1831,” The New Republic, October 7, 1967.
‡AA James Clark (1936–68), British Formula One racing driver from Scotland. He won two World Championships in 1963 and 1965. He was killed in a Formula Two race in Hockenheim, Germany, on April 7, 1968.
‡BB James Jones, Go to the Widow-Maker (New York: Delacorte, 1967).
‡CC William Styron, “The Oldest America,” McCall’s 95 (July 1968). Collected in This Quiet Dust.
‡DD Styron refers to the Greek military coup that began on April 21, 1967. Four colonels in the Greek army took control of the country, beginning a seven-year period of military rule.
‡EE Styron is likely referring to Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, which was not published until 1968. This nonfiction novel went on to win the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Mailer’s novel Why Are We in Vietnam? was published in 1967, but is not about Lyndon Johnson.
‡FF Robert Silvers (b. 1929), editor of The New York Review of Books since 1963.
‡GG Robert Penn Warren used this information for “William Styron,” Book-of-the-Month Club News (October 1967).
‡HH Styron refers to Warren’s poem “Where the Slow Figs Purple Sloth,” which appears in John Burt, ed., Selected Poems of Robert Penn Warren (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001).
‡II Boyd Martin Coyner, “General John Hartwell Cocke of Bremo: Agriculture and Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South,” unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 1961.
‡JJ This piece never materialized.
‡KK Mewshaw reprinted this letter in his memoir and reflected on its influence on his career: “Disappointed as I was that he didn’t like the novel, and although I questioned how much encouragement to draw from his comments, I realized something remarkable had occurred. It wasn’t just that Styron believed I was ‘quite obviously a writer’ and would ‘do the big thing in the fullness of time.’ It was that he had done more than skim the manuscript and respond with polite evasions and tepid good wishes. He identified its flaws as well as its few strengths, and took the time to discuss what I could do to grow as a writer. What moved me most—and does so every time I reread the letter—was Styron’s generosity of spirit, his collegiality and readiness to assume an obligation to a neophyte for no better reason than that we both, though vastly different in talent and temperament and age, were committed to writing.
“The letter reveals volumes about William Styron—the seriousness and integrity he has always brought to his fiction, the kindness and concern he has shown lost souls, no matter whether they languished in jail, on death row, or in the Laocoon coils of their own unrealized ambitions. It also proves, if such proof is required, that he wasn’t the spoiled rich boy and literary networker his critics accused him of being.”
‡LL Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The Confessions of Nat Turner, ‘Finest American Novel in Years,’ ” Vogue 150 (October 1, 1967).
‡MM Frantz Fanon (1925–61) was a Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer who supported Algerian independence and helped conceptualize postcolonialism.
‡NN Schlesinger wrote Styron on July 27, 1967, telling him that Confessions “is a marvelous book.” On the Vogue review, he added, “I would wish that I had had more space (and a different audience).” He continued: “I would be curious to know sometime why you decided not to use the episode described in the ‘Confessions’ when, apparently in 1825, Nat ran away from an overseer ‘and after remaining in the woods thirty days, I returned, to the astonishment of the Negroes on the plantation, who thought I had made my escape to some other part of the country, as my father had done before.… And the Negroes found fault, and murmured against me, saying that if they had my sense they would not serve any master in the world.’ This seemed to me to yield an interesting insight both into Nat and the general slave mood.”
‡OO Styron is likely referring to the 1967 translation of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.
‡PP Philip Rahv, “Through the Midst of Jerusalem,” The New York Review of Books (October 26, 1967).
‡QQ Marke was an editor at The New York Times Book Review.
‡RR Styron’s response, along with one from his eldest daughter, Susanna, was published in “Books to Send to a Distant Planet,” The New York Times Book Review, December 3, 1967.
‡SS George Steiner, “The Fire Last Time,” The New Yorker (November 25, 1967); John Thompson, “William Styron,” Commentary, vol. 44, no. 5 (November 1967).
‡TT Styron was awarded the degree by Wilberforce on November 21, 1967. He recounted the experience in “Nat Turner Revisited,” American Heritage (October 1992).
‡UU The bathroom in the Styron home where many of Bill’s awards were displayed.
‡VV In “Styron’s Golem” (The Minority of One, December 1967), Geismar wrote, “It has already been decreed, for example, by all these interlocking cultural institutions—from the publishers and the Book Clubs to the critics and The New York Times reviewers—that William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, a rich and ripe if not fruity product of the Plantation School of Southern Liberals, is to be the book of the year … only a Virginia gentleman who has grown up with the Southern Negro and who speaks his language can dare to penetrate his servile heart.”
‡WW Postcard is inscribed “Aboard the Rosalie L.”
‡XX The film was released in 1970; Styron did not appear in the final cut.
‡YY Thornton Niven Wilder (1897–1975), American playwright and novelist. His novel The Eighth Day (1967) won the National Book Award.
‡ZZ Eugene McCarthy (1916–2005) was a U.S senator who sought the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1968 on an anti–Vietnam War platform.
§aa Candida Donadio (1930–2001), literary agent with McIntosh and McKee before founding her own agency in 1969. Donadio represented Peter Matthiessen, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth, among others.
§bb Styron received an honorary doctorate from Duke in the spring of 1968.
§cc Richard Gilman, “Nat Turner Revisited,” The New Republic (April 27, 1968).
§dd Schlesinger had written Styron on May 13 asking him to join George Kennan in signing a letter protesting the international publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s writings, which they felt would mute their impact in the Soviet Union.
§ee Eugene D. Genovese, “The Nat Turner Case,” The New York Review of Books (September 12, 1968).
§ff Wertham (1895–1981) was a psychiatrist who became rather infamous for his crusade against violent imagery in the mass media, and particularly comic books.
§gg Styron refers to the riots that began in May of 1968 and continued through Bastille Day.
§hh General Taylor (1901–87) was appointed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff by John F. Kennedy in October 1962. Mortimer Caplin (b. 1916) was U.S. Commissioner of Internal Revenue (1961–64).
§ii Pottsville, Pennsylvania, was Gloria’s hometown.
§jj The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
§kk See Styron’s letter of June 18, 1968.
§ll Larry L. King, “The Grand Ole Opry,” Harper’s Magazine (July 1968).
§mm Larry L. King, “Requiem for Faulkner’s Home Town,” Holiday (March 1969).
§nn This is the only extant letter from Styron to Genovese, a rare typescript from a short period where Styron typed his outgoing mail. Genovese destroyed all of his correspondence in the 1990s.
§oo Styron never employed a secretary, but frequently used the ruse to get rid of various inquiries.
§pp Styron was covering the Democratic National Convention. His article, “In the Jungle,” The New York Review of Books (September 26, 1968), was collected in This Quiet Dust.
§qq Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko (b. 1933), Russian poet and filmmaker who gained great acclaim in Russia and abroad beginning in the 1950s.
§rr Thomas Merton, “Who Is Nat Turner?” Katallagete (Spring 1968). Merton (1915–68), a Catholic monk, wrote nearly seventy books.
§ss Ossie Davis (1917–2005) was an Emmy Award–winning stage, film, and television actor known for his social activism.
§tt The panel, “The Uses of History in Fiction,” was a discussion among Styron, Ralph Ellison, Robert Penn Warren, and C. Vann Woodward at the Southern Historical Association meeting in New Orleans on November 6, 1968. The transcript was published in The Southern Literary Journal (Spring 1969) and in James L. W. West III, ed., Conversations with William Styron.
§uu Styron’s note appears on a copy of a letter of December 2, 1968, to Styron from “President Richard M. Nixon.” Willie Morris was very fond of playing pranks on Styron and had found some vaguely authentic looking letterhead with a letter asking Styron to “recommend exceptional individuals.” Morris’s Nixon wanted “the best minds in America to meet the challenges of this rapidly changing world. To find them, I ask for your active participation and assistance.”
§vv Richmond was the Counselor for Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
§ww Annie Brierre, an editor at Gallimard.
§xx General David M. Schoup, “The New American Militarism,” The Atlantic Monthly, April 1969. The article caused quite a stir, blaming the Vietnam War largely on “pervasive American militarism and inter-service rivalry.” See Howard Jablon, David M. Schoup: A Warrior Against War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 109.
§yy Henry Hyde (1915–97) was a lawyer and American spy who played an essential role in the D-Day landing. See Joseph Persico, Piercing the Reich (1997), and Anthony Brown, The Last Hero: Wild Bill Donovan (1982).