As in the decade after World War I, when the great American modernists — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein and others — frolicked on the Left Bank, during the 1950s Paris was again the place to be. In Europe following the success of his 1951 first novel “Lie Down in Darkness,” William Styron (1925-2006) drank and partied and became friends with George Plimpton, Truman Capote, Peter Matthiessen, James Jones, Irwin Shaw and many other young writers. He was there at the founding of the Paris Review and was among the earliest authors to be honored with one of the now-famous “Writers at Work” interviews. In Italy, he met a woman named Rose Burgunder, who became his wife and is the editor, with R. Blakeslee Gilpin, of these “Selected Letters.”
Styron’s literary reputation has long been a little unclear, however — rather like those of virtually all his Paris friends. Was he a major artist? “The Long March” — a novella — brilliantly describes a Marine Corps ordeal and its effects on two reserve officers. “The Confessions of Nat Turner” became a huge bestseller, endured many attacks from black intellectuals for its presumption to speak in the voice of a Virginia slave, and won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize. I have a friend, a Southern academic, who ranks “Sophie’s Choice” among the major books of our time. Nonetheless, it and “Nat Turner” were both dismissed by some prominent critics as essentially Book-of-the-Month Club novels.
(Random House) - ’Selected Letters of William Styron’ by William Styron, edited by Rose Styron and R. Blakeslee Gilpin (Random House. 672 pp. $40.).
“Sophie’s Choice” came out in 1979, and for the rest of his life — more than 25 years — Styron produced nothing of scope or serious ambition. Writer’s block was one reason, depression another. For younger people, I suspect he may actually be best known for “Darkness Visible,” an 80-page essay, published in 1990 as a small book, about his battle with suicidal despair — and his eventual, if temporary, recovery.
However posterity judges Styron as a novelist, he was certainly an exceptionally smart and amusing correspondent. His many letters tend to be long, detailed and zingy with shrewd, lewd and funny remarks. He must have spent a serious portion of his day just on his mail. Many of his best letters are to his father, William C. Styron Sr., and his mentor William Blackburn, the legendary creative writing teacher at Duke whose students included Mac Hyman (“No Time for Sergeants”), Reynolds Price, Fred Chappell and Anne Tyler. In later years, Styron wrote regularly to novelists James Jones (“From Here to Eternity”) and Philip Roth, to his editor Robert Loomis (whom he had met at Duke) and to his daughter Susanna.
Personalia, literary gossip and stylish prose are what make reading collections of letters fun, and Styron’s contain all these. What writer today would dare say, as the youthful Styron does, that Eudora Welty’s short stories are “fairly pale. She doesn’t want to commit herself to anything, emotionally or intellectually, either, and thereby commits the crime” — and here young Bill is about to get himself into trouble — “of women writers in general — seeing life through pastel-tinted spectacles, lovely in its way but not in clear white focus.” Having finished Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March,” he notes, “It’s been a long time since a book has bored me so.”
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