Selected Letters of William Styron

Selected Letters of William Styron Read Free Page A

Book: Selected Letters of William Styron Read Free
Author: William Styron
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friendship, and family. Indeed, in many ways, the stories in these pages were known only in part to Bill’s individual correspondents, and the extent of this writing has surprised even his closest friends.
    Of course, across these pages, certain themes emerge. All the ambitious young littérateurs will be touched by Bill’s self-conscious journey from the Duke classroom to the
New York Times
bestseller list. Styron’s ambitions are captured in a letter to his mentor William Blackburn in February 1950 as he was finishing his first novel,
Lie Down in Darkness
. Acknowledginghis conscious restraint in the book, Styron expressed his lifelong distaste for “the Hemingway tight-lipped mumble school.” “I believe that a writer should accommodate language to his own peculiar personality,” he continued, “and mine wants to use great words, evocative words, when the situation demands them.”
    Styron would spend the next six decades negotiating the tension between the “orotund” and the “spare.” In these intimate snapshots of his interior life, readers will follow the unique circumstances that helped Styron establish himself at the forefront of American letters. These letters are intimate, funny, and profound all at once. One sees his foibles laid bare, his friendships given color and life, and his accomplishments put into sharpest relief. Tracing the deep cultural impact of
The Confessions of Nat Turner
to the harrowingly personal
Darkness Visible
, Styron’s letters help us appreciate the swirl of events that contributed to his creative work, and the struggle that took each project from the germ of an idea to a finished product.
    Unlike some of his contemporaries, Styron approached letter writing rather haphazardly; he seemed to write only when the epistolary muse struck him. A grudging typist, Styron’s handwritten letters are all unique—that is to say, without carbons. With no eye toward posterity, Styron’s extensive archive at Duke consists almost entirely of letters written
to
, not
by
him. As such, the process of assembling this collection has been an ongoing and worldwide search for the scattered but precious words he sent to friends and fans alike. We have been unable, despite Herculean efforts, to track down letters Bill wrote to James Baldwin, for instance, though we know such letters exist. There are surely other gaps and omissions, and so these are William Styron’s
Selected Letters
, for we fear they could never be made truly complete.
    Styron himself spoke to some of these difficulties even in the 1960s. Writing to Blackburn, who was editing the letters of Bill’s Duke classmate, the writer Mac Hyman, Bill mentioned his “surprise” at finding some of their letters in his papers. “During these last years we always spoke to each other by telephone,” Styron explained on March 30, 1965, “the invention which is in the process of killing off all literary correspondence.”
    Fortunately, Styron did not cease writing letters altogether, even when the telephone took over more and more of his friendly and professionalcommunication. The hours he would spend on a given day (letters are often clustered in this manner) speak to the psychological space the activity helped create for him in the midst of struggling with a novel. Again and again in these pages, Styron expressed his belief that writing was “a tedious and agonizing process and I loathe [it] with almost a panic hatred.”
    But in a letter to Hyman in May of 1953, Styron showed his typical ironic self-awareness as he revealed the importance of writing letters to help navigate that tedium and panic.
    All this probably doesn’t interest you in the least, but what it narrows down to is this, if it’ll give you any comfort—that is, if you need any comfort. What I mean is that I think that any writer who ever lived, who was any good at all, has had long long periods of precisely the same sort of strain and struggle that both you and I are

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