Selected Letters of William Styron Read Free Page B

going through; I only comfort myself (and God knows it seems like forlorn comfort at times) that it seems to be true that often such periods of doubt and thrashing around eventually produce the best work. They often eventually produce the best work because it is during such periods of struggle (when one is long unpublished or goes through long periods of tortured sterility) that a writer really suffers. A lot of crap has been written about suffering, and the value of it, and in about two seconds I’ll shut up, but every now and then, even in the midst of my most dried-up, sterile depressions, I have a crazy confused moment of joy in the knowledge that anything good I ever did seemed at one time or another impossible of attaining, that it was a hard struggle in getting it out, that it seemed at times to be crushed under the weight of my doubts about it, but if it happened to be good at all it was because of the doubts, and perhaps a little suffering. End of quotation.
    It was in his correspondence where Styron not only sounded out his frequent bouts with “melancholy” and “writer’s block” but helped ease himself out of both predicaments. Indeed, Bill’s self-awareness certainly extended to his letters; he wanted them to be more than scrawled grocery lists. He understood them as part of his oeuvre and expressed definite feelings about the publication of writers’ letters. When Blackburn proposed doing a collection of Styron’s letters in 1966, Bill wrote that “the publicationof personal letters … has somewhat the quality of gratuitous exposure.” Indeed, responding to a letter he had written to Mac in May of 1957, Styron told Blackburn, “when I read that letter of mine which you sent and thought of it appearing in print, I felt terribly naked all of a sudden.”
    Fortunately for those reading this volume, Styron added that “when a writer is dead, certainly that becomes a different matter. Presumably then there evolves enough interest in the writer’s private self that the very publication of his correspondence wipes out the element of gratuitousness … when I myself am dead and someone wants to put my letters together, I couldn’t care less one way or another.”
    Although we have taken Styron at his stated indifference, the hallmark of this volume reveals the very opposite guiding emotion. Styron’s care and concern pulse in each word collected here. My hope is that this invitation to see his “private self” will reveal his concern not just for showing love and friendship to those he corresponded with but for making lasting and worthy art for the readers he cared so much about.
    R. B LAKESLEE G ILPIN
February 2012

EDITORIAL NOTES
 
    A FTER TRANSCRIBING AND ANNOTATING more than one thousand letters, it has been necessary to make certain cuts and edits. Ellipses mark infrequent deletions from the text. We have occasionally included incomplete letters, sometimes missing as much as a page, if the extant contents justified inclusion. Errors in punctuation and spelling have been silently corrected, with the exception of intentionally (often humorously) misspelled words. We have tried to keep explanatory notes to a minimum, identifying the people and books that we have deemed worthy of explanation.
    A small number of these letters have appeared in print prior to being collected in this volume. Fourteen of Bill’s letters to the writer Donald Harington appeared in a special issue of
The Southern Quarterly
in 2002. We have also chosen to reprint several letters that first appeared in Styron’s
Letters to My Father
, ed. James L. W. West III (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009). West’s wonderful collection included all of Bill’s letters to William C. Styron, Sr., from January 1943 to October 1953.
    All the letters follow a basic format:
    Date Written from
    R ECIPIENT
    William Styron dated virtually every letter he wrote during his long life. He also nearly always indicated where