Book World: Selected letters of William Styron are a trove of amusement
While on a trip to England, Styron glimpses T.S. Eliot on the subway, “as large as life (bigger, in fact, than I’d imagined him) with a kindly, sad face and a sort of melancholy stoop.” He visits Daphne du Maurier in Cornwall and comments that “she seems very nice, would still, I think, be good for a fair-to-middling roll in the hay.” In Paris, he calls on the aged Tristan Tzara, the founder of dada, and in Ravello, Italy, he reminds us that it was there that Wagner composed “Parsifal.”
Not everything is so literary and artsy. Because Styron’s agent asked him to buy her a bottle of it, I learned that Lanvin once sold a perfume with the wonderful name “Pretexte.” He’s often very funny, too: Styron stays in a villa that “has a couple of servants whose obsequiousness would make Uncle Remus look like a Prussian.” His baby daughter, he writes, “is quite handsome, I think, although she is so far completely inarticulate and has all of the moist habits of one so young.” When his second novel, “Set This House on Fire,” is blasted by the critics, he confesses: “I did get one good review, however, in Amarillo, Texas, and I cherish it like an amulet, and someday, if you ask, I may show it to you.”
(Random House) - ’Selected Letters of William Styron’ by William Styron, edited by Rose Styron and R. Blakeslee Gilpin (Random House. 672 pp. $40.).
As early as age 27, Styron is worrying that he is “a wash-up as a writer and fit only to do the ‘Recent & Readable’ part of the book section in Time.” Later, he complains that he should have majored in business administration: “A fifth-rate entertainer on TV has more tangible and satisfactory rewards than a novelist.” He recognizes his “appalling logorrhea” and natural bent for the rhetorical, while stressing that he’s “not a devotee of the Hemingway tight-lipped mumble school,” and “eventually when I mature and broaden I expect to use the language on as exalted and elevated a level as I can sustain.”
Throughout his life, Styron goes out of his way to help other writers, singing the praises of Guy Davenport’s first novel (the never-published “Effie Garner”), recommending Mary Lee Settle for a fellowship, encouraging that still-undervalued novelist Donald Harington, analyzing at considerable length the strengths and weaknesses of Michael Mewshaw’s early fiction. Nonetheless, Styron is exceptionally prickly about any criticism of his own work: When Maxwell Geismar praises his first books, he’s the best critic around; when he lambastes “Nat Turner” as a “product of the Plantation School of Southern Liberals,” he is cast into outer darkness, along with other Styron detractors, whether envious hack reviewers or those narrow-minded academics who somehow prefer the novels of Saul Bellow or Norman Mailer, the latter initially a friend, then a bitter enemy.
Many of the letters quietly crow about book sales and movie deals. Styron actually takes one Random House advance in the form of stock from its parent company, RCA. These pages also chronicle an upward social success: a big house with 11 acres in Roxbury, Conn., and a summer place on Martha’s Vineyard, invitations to the Kennedy White House, friendship with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Mia Farrow and Carlos Fuentes and Lillian Hellman, cruises to Europe, a Jaguar. When Styron decides to write a play, “In the Clap Shack,” Robert Brustein of the Yale Drama School immediately wants to stage it. The first blurb on the back cover of these letters is from President Bill Clinton, no less.
But why shouldn’t a novelist be sociable, make money, enjoy worldly success? A serious author has only one important obligation: to write the best books he can. Which is just what Styron clearly did. Along the way, he also took time to dash off these terrifically enjoyable letters.
Dirda reviews books for The Washington Post every Thursday.
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