{"id":42867,"date":"2012-12-05T10:00:14","date_gmt":"2012-12-05T15:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=42867"},"modified":"2013-02-03T03:47:54","modified_gmt":"2013-02-03T08:47:54","slug":"william-styron-in-letters-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/12\/05\/william-styron-in-letters-part-3\/","title":{"rendered":"William Styron in Letters, Part 3"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

William and Rose Styron.<\/p><\/div>\n

To Norman Mailer<\/strong><\/p>\n

June 1, 1953 Rome, Italy<\/p>\n

Dear Norman:<\/p>\n

I note that you began your last letter: \u201cI\u2019ve been kind of depressed lately,\u201d and by way of preface to this letter I should say that I\u2019ve been both depressed and elated since you last heard from me\u2014elated at having just married a most admirable girl (perhaps you\u2019ve gotten an announcement) and depressed because for roughly your own sort of reasons\u2014an inability to get going again at this writing game. To complicate the situation, a few days ago, barreling down the Autostrada in an effort to catch up with Irwin Shaw\u2019s Ford convertible (we had been on a two-car picnic at Angio) I smacked into a motorscooter going full tilt and glued an Italian all over the front end of my car. The guy was made of brick and will survive with nothing more than lacerations, and fortunately for the legal end of the thing it was his own fault (he was a moron, for one thing, and for another had been driving with a glass eye) but such incidents always leave me spookily aware of just how vulnerable we all are. Perhaps they\u2019re valuable as such from an ah-tistic point of view, but I doubt it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

At any rate, having descended from my earlier manic phase, I can easily appreciate your present dif\ufb01culties. In waiting for my car to recover from its wounds (which were much more grievous than the Italian\u2019s) so that we can go to Ravello, I\u2019ve been futilely trying to get started on something\u2014another novelette, I think\u2014and the complications arising from the thing certainly support that old saw about the more you go along in writing the more dif\ufb01cult it gets. I admire your tenacity; at least in this book you\u2019re doing you seem to be plunging ahead. As for me, if I don\u2019t feel that my very \ufb01rst page is a real sockeroo then I tend to give up in anguish\u2014which is an attitude that is fatal and will, if anything, if I don\u2019t snap out of it, be my downfall. It certainly justi\ufb01es your earlier comment about a peculiar tendency I have to invent and manner the style; indeed, I\u2019m beginning to see that everything I write and my whole timorous approach to writing is of the same rough pattern of my day-to-day life\u2014that being one of caution, trepidation and cowardly fears. No self-con\ufb01dence. How do you beat it? Perhaps I\u2019ll change some as I get older but it seems to me that life (and I wonder how closely it parallels the experience of other men) is a long gray depression interrupted by moments of high hilarity. No wonder Time<\/span> magazine is forever complaining about young writers re-writing their own tangled neuroses. However, I should add (in a brief \ufb02icker of exaltation, and bugger Time<\/span>) that any writer worth 10\u00a2 has written out of nothing much more than his own neuroses; and I have no doubt that this summer\u2014prompted by the absence of whiskey (most of us drink too much), a set of tennis each day, and wife who will rout me out of my slothful, womb-like sleeping habits sometime before noon\u2014I\u2019ll do that novelette somehow<\/span>, cautious and fearful as it may turn out to be when it\u2019s \ufb01nished. Incidentally, while I think of it, I\u2019m \ufb02attered about your supposition about reading my book; I reread part of it for the \ufb01rst time again not long ago, and while I\u2019m certainly not ashamed of lots of it, I can realize why quite a few of the critics took it to task, for much of it is dreadfully self-indulgent, and cluttered up with all these fears and cautions I have.\u00a0 Not that I\u2019m going to start writing big, hopeful books for Harrison Smith, but there seems to me now to be far too much agonizing in it: Anyway, I shouldn\u2019t feel timid about reading it if I were you, who, as I said before, are one of the tiny number of contemporary writers who have a solid, unshakable, recognizable style. By the way, these lousy war novels still seem to be coming out, don\u2019t they? \u201cBattle Cry.\u201d \u201cBy a man who loves the Marines.\u201d Jesus!<\/p>\n

Your problem of point-of-view confronts me, too. You\u2019re right about the 3d person and the world-view, yet I should think that after so effectively achieving a welding of the two in Naked<\/span> that it shouldn\u2019t be too rough on you now. I know too, though, how one\u2019s attitudes change. Me, I\u2019ve never been successful with 1st person, mostly for the reasons you describe. One gets to love-scenes, for instance, and if the \u201cI\u201d happens to be the hero-narrator, as is often the case, the result is: \u201cI took her in my arms and felt her responsive belly scalding mine; she looked at me with adoration and desire and with a tremendous whimper of love said \u2018Darling Bill,\u2019 and slid onto my pulsating pecker.\u201d Which seems self-centered. Anyway, Norm, I shouldn\u2019t worry about the \u201cfundamental poverty of imagination\u201d you assign to yourself; that\u2019s the kind of talk I indulge in. Keep at it, and let me hear how things are going. My address after the 10th will be c\/o Hotel Palumbo, Ravello (Salerno) Italy. Best to you, and to all.<\/p>\n

Bill<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

From <\/a><\/em>Selected Letters of William Styron<\/em><\/a>, edited by Rose Styron with R. Blakeslee Gilpin. Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Rose Styron. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To Norman Mailer June 1, 1953 Rome, Italy Dear Norman: I note that you began your last letter: \u201cI\u2019ve been kind of depressed lately,\u201d and by way of preface to this letter I should say that I\u2019ve been both depressed and elated since you last heard from me\u2014elated at having just married a most admirable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":445,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1900],"tags":[9374,4766,182,1437,11],"class_list":["post-42867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-correspondence","tag-harrison-smith","tag-irwin-shaw","tag-letters","tag-norman-mailer","tag-william-styron"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWilliam Styron in Letters, Part 3 by William Styron<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"December 5, 2012 \u2013 To Norman Mailer June 1, 1953 Rome, Italy Dear Norman: I note 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