Old fan mail to Bill Styron
June 16, 2009
Dear Mr. Einhorn:
I was a friend of the late author William Styron. In helping Styron’s widow to gather his letters for publication, I’ve come across a remarkable letter you wrote to him in 1962 about his novel Set This House on Fire. I feel certain that Styron would have responded to your letter (especially considering the hostile treatment his book elicited from mainstream critics), so I’m writing to ask if you have any recollection of his reply or any notion of whether it still exists – and if so, where?
I’m somewhat familiar with your case and am aware of the confiscation of your private diaries (and other papers?) by the authorities, so I realize this is a shot in the ark and that it’s unlikely you either have Styron’s letter or can help me to obtain a copy. But there’s always a chance, and no harm trying. I’d be willing to sort through evidence files if that would be permitted.
Your letter to Styron is among his papers at Duke. I enclose a copy, restoring at least this tiny portion of your writings to you.
February 2, 1962
Dear Mr. Styron,
A short note of thanks for the beauty that you have created in Set This House on Fire! Rarely have I been so overwhelmed by any experience as that provided by your powerful novel. The time that you spent in writing is obvious on every page, for the precision which you obtain is rare in modern writing; but more important, to me, is the message – a message which only a man who has gone through the hell of self-discovery is agile to convey.
The tears which instantaneously flooded my eyes, along with the shock which traversed my entire body, as I read the words of Luigi describing this prison called life came from deep within as I realized that Cass would not be allowed to end his pilgrimage as the hero of Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano (a haunting novel which your book, especially the ramblings of Cass, brought to mind) in suicide (symbolical in the case of Cass); but would be forced to face the task of creating his own existence in full knowledge of the nothingness of anything but what he created as you so perfectly state through him at the end of the novel. He can’t fall back upon repentance (in an external sense) like Raskolnikoff but rather must impose his own restrictions on the freedom which being conveys upon us. No external means can provide us with satisfaction or salvation for the self is all we possess. To throw off the illusion of the necessary casual relation between his crime (so called) and his supposed external-imposed repentance is to throw off the fetters of conventions which prevents us from seeing the difference between morality and moral justice is fickle along with everything else that man has created. To know this is to advance in the game of life.
Your plight, to be misunderstood by all the reviewers who read with their eyes instead of their hearts, shared by William Gaddis who wrote The Recognitions (a man whom I feel, along with yourself, is capable of making a lasting contribution to the American novel) is not to be assuaged by my meagre word of thanks, but I hope your patience lasts, for six years is will worth the waiting for a work of such stature as Set This House on Fire.
The Long March which I also recently read is masterful, for as the French translator of your books has said: not a word can be left out. Incantation is the only word to describe your writing – please continue.
I constantly wrote letters to those whose books I read in a large number of disciplines, particularly to those that I thought were not adequately received by their peers.
It often led to a correspondence or a friendship: Thomas S. Kuhn, John Cage, Norman O. Brown, Stafford Beer, Andrija Puharich are five prominent examples among many.
I am now being contacted about those letters, see the recent letter from a friend of Bill Styron as example and my letter. His name is withheld for reasons of privacy and should serve only as an example.
All of my papers were taken in March of 1979 during an illegal search of my apartment. The DA refused to return them. They have no legal argument for keeping them, but the law in Pennsylvania is now so hypocritical, along with many other aspects of America life (what the bankers are getting away with for example) that people should be in the streets waving red, white and blue scarves rather than watching the Iranians waving green scarves on TV.
It is time to wake up to the growing irreality of American life, in spite of the election of a wonderful president.
A paradoxical statement, perhaps, but it is from paradox that we learn.
