Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 813.54 STY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 813.54 STY | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
After the great success in 1990 ofDarkness Visible, his memoir of depression and recovery, William Styron wrote more frequently in an introspective, autobiographical mode. Havanas in Camelot brings together fourteen of his personal essays, including a reminiscence of his brief friendship with John F. Kennedy; a recollection of the power and ceremony on display at the inauguration of François Mitterr∧ memoirs of Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Terry Southern; a meditation on Mark Twain; an account of Styron's daily walks with his dog; and an evocation of his summer home on Martha's Vineyard. Styron's essays touch on the great themes of his fiction--racial oppression, slavery, and the Holocaust--but for the most part they address other subjects: bowdlerizations of history, literary lists, childhood moviegoing, the censoring of his own work, and the pursuit of celebrity fetish objects. These essays, which reveal a reflective and humorous side of Styron's nature, make possible a fuller assessment of this enigmatic man of American letters. From the Hardcover edition.
Author Notes
William Clark Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia on June 11, 1925. He attended Duke University and took courses at the New School for Social Research in New York City, which started him on his writing career. He was a Marine lieutenant during World War II and while serving during the Korean War, was recalled from active duty because of faulty eyesight. After leaving the service, he helped start a magazine called the Paris Review and remained as an advisory editor.
His first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, was published in 1951. His other books include The Long March and Set This House on Fire. He won several awards including the Pulitzer Prize for The Confessions of Nat Turner and the American Book Award for Sophie's Choice, which was made into a movie in 1982.
His short story, A Tidewater Morning, was the basis for the movie Shadrach, which Styron wrote the screenplay for with his daughter. He also wrote several nonfiction books including The Quiet Dust and Other Writings and Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. He died on November 1, 2006 at the age of 81.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"I was aware that this was a contraband item under the embargo against Cuban goods and that the embargo had been promulgated by the very man who had just pressed the cigar into my hand," writes Styron about John F. Kennedy in the title essay of this fine new collection of mostly previously published work. Combined with Styron's muscular yet subtle language, a sense of self-revelation and insider clarity infuses the 14 essays like a lungful of fresh, crisp air. Mostly assembled by Styron shortly before his death in 2006, these perfectly crafted and deeply expressive essays range effortlessly from smoking the aforementioned stogies with JFK to his run-ins with editors during the editing of his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness. In one essay he describes a visit to Marilyn Monroe's grave with noted literary hellion Terry Southern: "he was scowling through his shades, looking fierce and, as always, a little confused and lost but, in any case... like a man already dreaming up wicked ideas." Styron is known to most readers for his bestselling novels and painful etching of his bouts with crippling depression in Darkness Visible. These essays open up an entirely new territory to explore and appreciate for the fan and general reader alike. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
In his last year Styron (1925-2006) was working on a retrospective collection of personal essays from the 1980s and 1990s, a project subsequently completed by his widow, Rose. The result is an exhilarating parade of pithy, wry, and revealing true tales that remind us with a jolt of just how spirited, incisive, and spit-shined a writer Styron was. A southerner and the grandson of a slave owner, he joined the marines at 17, published his first novel at 26, chafed at being hailed as an heir to Faulkner, and stirred up considerable controversy with The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Sophie's Choice (1979). In his essays, Styron is strategically charming. The collection's curious title is plucked from an arresting remembrance of President John F. Kennedy and his passion for Cuban cigars. Styron also pays piquant tribute to Mark Twain, Truman Capote, and James Baldwin; praises walking as a catalyst for creativity; and tells harrowing, hilarious, and socially incisive tales about a youthful medical scare and a trip to Chicago to visit Nelson Algren, whose idea of fun was a tour of Cook County Jail's Death Row. Beneath the wonderfully diverting dazzle of his wit and virtuosity, Styron addresses crucial matters of freedom, art, and empathy.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THERE used to be a time when writers, purely on the basis of the books they had published, were invited to eat dinner with presidents. By his own estimation, the novelist William Styron, who died in 2006, was one of the last of his kind to enjoy an honor more likely, "since John F. Kennedy at least," to be bestowed upon "rock stars, stand-up comedians and golf champions." "Havanas in Camelot," his charming collection of essays, recounts two such dinners, one with Kennedy, whose fondness for cigars both impressed and intimidated the cigarette-addicted Styron, and the other with François Mitterand, after which Styron, Arthur Miller, Carlos Fuentes, Elie Wiesel and the Greek politician Andreas Papandreou had to be rescued from an exuberant crowd of Mitterand's admirers by a resplendent Melina Mercouri: "A heady and thrilling moment indeed, even when - as Fuentes pointed out - the crowd surely thought that the five gentlemen in their raincoats were Mercouri's bodyguards." Styron's brief, affectionate portraits of both presidents establish the tone that predominates in these essays: at once laconic and taut, urbane and modest. Despite their monumentality, all three of the novels for which he is famous - "Lie Down in Darkness," "The Confessions of Nat Turner" and "Sophie's Choice" - derive their power from Styron's capacity to combine intimate experience with an authoritative grasp of 20th-century history. Styron was bold enough, despite being a white, Protestant Southerner, to write from the point of view of a black slave and to enter the imagination of a Polish woman who survived Auschwitz. He was also bold enough to publish, long before it became fashionable to do so, a harrowing and redemptive account of his experience of depression, "Darkness Visible," thereby ushering in an era's worth of such memoirs, few of which have equaled, much less surpassed, his own. Not surprisingly, the difficulty of balancing two very different identities - that of Styron the public figure and Styron the intensely private, highly self-conscious writer - is evident throughout. It's no coincidence that he shows us Kennedy at a rare moment when the president didn't realize he was being watched, standing "at the bottom of a flight of stairs looking momentarily lost and abandoned"; nor that Mitterand most captivates Styron when, despite the French leader's reported indifference to food, he actually seems to enjoy his dinner: "One could tell from the gusto with which he put away the elegant white spears of asparagus that he cares at least as much about eating as he does about attractive young women." It's essential to Styron that these larger-than-life figures be shown, even at the pinnacle of their public glory, as creatures of uncertainty and appetite, just as it's essential that we see Styron himself not merely on the podia of lecture halls or in his booklined Martha's Vineyard study but suffering the depredations of chronic prostatitis. (By the way, Styron's essay on the prostate, originally published in France, is one of the funniest and wisest in the book; I doubt any male reader will walk away from it unaffected.) Urogenital horrors also inform "A Case of the Great Pox," an eloquent account of Styron's skirmish with a diagnosis of syphilis during World War II that incorporates a lucid meditation on the disease's rich and terrible history. Here, as in his novels, Styron demonstrates his genius for revealing the inextricability of the personal from the global. "Havanas in Camelot" includes three essays in which Styron recounts his friendships with other writers: Truman Capote, James Baldwin and Terry Southern. Of the three, Southern comes across with particular vigor, a Texas libertine whose passionate admiration for, of all people, Henry Green leads him to write a novel called "Flash and Filigree." "I trust then, Bill," he remarks, after giving Styron the manuscript, "that you think this will put me in the quality lit game?" Southern is first seen as part of George Plimpton's crowd of expatriate carpetbaggers, living in postwar Paris at a moment when "the U.S. dollar was ... in a state of loony ascendancy, for which the French have been punishing us ever since." Later, Southern accompanies Styron and his wife, Rose, on a trip across the United States that reaches its climax in Chicago with a visit to Nelson Algren, who arranges for his guests to be taken on a creepy - and comical - tour of the Cook County Jail. ("Dis yere," their guide, Captain Boggs, tells them, "is where de inmates pays off they debts to society.") Styron's portrait of the African-American Boggs, not to mention the casualness with which he renders the rhythms of his speech, is just one element in an extended discourse on race that runs through "Havanas in Camelot," culminating in an essay that celebrates "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (one of whose main characters, Jim, speaks just as Boggs does) even as it excoriates John H. Wallace, a black educator who published a version of Twain's novel "from which every use of the word 'nigger' has been expunged." For Styron, those who complain about Twain's occasional descents into racism fail to appreciate "that his upbringing and experience (including a brief stint in the Confederate Army) should have left Mark Twain so little tainted with bigotry." The same might be said of Styron himself. As he reminds us several times, his grandmother owned slaves, a fact that became a crucial element in his friendship with Baldwin, the grandson of a slave, whose encouragement - "so strong that it was as if he were daring me not to" - finally persuaded Styron to undertake "The Confessions of Nat Turner." "A common conviction dominated our attitude toward the writing of fiction," he explains, "and this was that in the creation of novels and stories the writer should be free to demolish the barrier of color, to cross the forbidden line and write from the point of view of someone, with a different skin. Jimmy had made this leap already, and he had done it with considerable success." Here Styron is referring, of course, to "Giovanni's Room," whose narrator is white (as Baldwin was not) and gay (as Baldwin was). Oddly, though, Styron never mentions Baldwin's homosexuality. Is this elision symptomatic of that notorious intolerance by omission that so often characterized the attitude of '60s "sexual revolutionaries" toward male homosexuality, and that was all the more pernicious for its resistance to exposure? Such a conclusion is difficult to avoid, especially when one considers the posture Styron takes in his essays on syphilis and censorship - that of an ardent advocate of sexual liberation and freedom of expression. STYRON'S most winning essays consider the literary life and sometimes come to unexpected conclusions about it. A brief account of his childhood fascination with the movies, for instance, ends up challenging the myth that submersion in popular culture sounds the death knell of literary aspiration. On the contrary, he argues, the impulse to think cinematically can have a distinctly positive effect on a writer's work. Equally engaging is a semi-apology for the role Styron played in creating the Modern Library's disastrous and controversial list of the 100 best novels written in English in the 20th century. And toward the end he includes a lovely paean to walks, especially with dogs, that incorporates a warning against the dangers of jogging, especially for writers. Reproductions of pages from manuscripts and corrected galley proofs punctuate "Havanas in Camelot," accentuating our sense of Styron as someone always intensely aware of his fallibility. If he made it in the "quality lit game," it wasn't only because he was a good writer; it was because he was an imperfect man. David Leavitt's most recent novel is "The Indian Clerk." He teaches at the University of Florida.
Kirkus Review
Slim but substantial gathering of personal pieces by the late novelist and memoirist. Not long before he died, Styron (1925-2006) began assembling this collection, a task completed by his widow Rose and biographer James L.W. West III. Several pieces appear here for the first time; all bear the hallmarks of Styron's better work: fresh language, self-deprecation, unpretentiousness, wry liberalism, candor and, at times, an anger burning like magma beneath a deceptively placid surface. Most originally appeared in the 1990s; they deal with subjects as varied as the obsession for cigars that permeated the JFK Administration (the title essay), a bout with syphilis (sort of) in the Marines, walks with his dog, the importance of libraries, urological problems. This last subject provides one of his best lines: "I declared to the bishop that the nonexistence of God could be proved by the existence of the prostate gland." There are some pieces about experiences with other writers, including a liquor-soaked cross-country train ride with Terry Southern and his long friendship with James Baldwin. Styron (A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth, 1993, etc.) praises the work of some contemporaries, most notably Norman Mailer, James Jones and Truman Capote. (Styron confesses to jealousy when he first read Other Voices, Other Rooms.) A swift tribute to Mark Twain points to some similarities. Both grew up near rivers (Styron by Virginia's James), and both, in Huckleberry Finn and The Confessions of Nat Turner, touched the most sensitive of American nerve endings. Styron ruminates about his boyhood diary--why wasn't he reading more, he wonders?--slams Disney for their planned Virginia theme park, has kind words for the French and recalls in several pieces his work on his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951). He also toys with the very funny image of assorted solemn intellectual figures--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Mann, Immanuel Kant--in jogging attire. A poignant reminder of the power and appeal of a voice now silent. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
America lost one of its great writers in 2006. Styron, perhaps best remembered as the author of Sophie's Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner, published several other books of note as well as numerous essays and musings throughout his career. This collection brings together 14 of Styron's published and unpublished essays, which range from his musings on JFK (reflected in the book's title), to his being treated for a mysterious disease in his early days in the U.S. Marines, to his friendship and competition with Truman Capote. The reader gets a rare and disarmingly personal glimpse of Styron's family relationships and friendships with people both famous and less well known, all told in Styron's clear, distinctive voice. His easy prose, highly personal reflections, and unassuming wit make this collection eminently readable, whether by a fan or a Styron novice. Recommended for all libraries.--Jan Brue Enright, Augustana Coll. Lib., Sioux Falls, SD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Havanas in Camelot Like millions of others, i watched transfixed in late April 1996 as the acquisitive delirium that swept through Sotheby's turned the humblest knickknack of Camelot into a fetish for which people would pony up a fortune. A bundle of old magazines, including Modern Screen and Ladies' Home Journal , went for $12,650. A photograph of an Aaron Shikler portrait of Jackie--not the portrait itself, mind you, a photo --was sold for $41,400. (Sotheby's had valued the picture at $50 to $75.) A Swiss "Golf- Sport" stroke counter, worth $50 to $100 by Sotheby's estimate, fetched an insane $28,750. But surely among the most grandiose trophies, in terms of its bloated price, was John Kennedy's walnut cigar humidor, which Milton Berle had given the president in 1961 after having attached a plaque reading "To J.F.K. Good Health--Good Smoking, Milton Berle 1/20/61." The comedian had paid $600 to $800 for it in that year. Thirty-five years later, poor Berle tried to buy the humidor back at Sotheby's but dropped out of the bidding at $185,000. The winner was Marvin Shanken, publisher of the magazine Cigar Aficionado , who spent $574,500 on an object the auctioneers had appraised at $2,000 to $2,500. Even at such a flabbergasting price the humidor should prove to play an important mascot role in the fortunes of Shanken's magazine, which is already wildly successful, featuring (aside from cigars and cigar-puffing celebrities) articles on polo and golf, swank hotels, antique cars, and many other requirements for a truly tony lifestyle in the 1990s. After all, John F. Kennedy was no stranger to the nobby life, and what could be more appropriate as a relic for a cigar magazine than the vault in which reposed the Havanas of our last genuine cigar-smoking president? I never laid eyes on the fabled humidor, but on the occasions I encountered Kennedy I sensed he must have owned one, protecting his precious supply, for he approached cigars with the relish and delight of--well, an aficionado. Indeed, if I allow my memory to be given a Proustian prod, and recollect Kennedy at the loose and relaxed moments when our lives briefly intersected, I can almost smell the smoke of the Havanas for which he 'd developed such an impetuous, Kennedyesque weakness. After the clunky Eisenhower years it was wonderful to have this dashing young guy in the spotlight, and soon there was nothing unusual in seeing the president posed, without apology or self-consciousness, holding a cigar. I had become friendly with two members of the Kennedy staff, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Richard Goodwin, both of whom were so passionate about cigars that smoking appeared to me to be almost a White House subculture. They would lecture me about cigars whenever I saw them in Washington. Havanas were, of course, the sine qua non, and, as an ignorant cigarette smoker still clinging miserably to an unwanted addiction, I found myself fascinated but a little puzzled by all the cigar talk, by the effusive praise for a Montecristo of a certain length and vintage, by the descriptions of wrappers and their shades, by the subtle distinctions made between the flavors of a Ramon Allones and a Punch. Stubbornly, I kept up my odious allegiance to cigarettes, but in my secret heart I envied these men for their devotion to another incarnation of tobacco, one that had been transubstantiated from mere weed into an object plainly capable of evoking rapture. in late april of 1962 I was one of a small group of writers invited to what turned out to be possibly the most memorable social event of the Kennedy presidency. This was a state dinner in honor of Nobel Prize winners. Schlesinger and Goodwin were responsible for my being included--at the time, Kennedy didn't know me, as they say, from Adam--and it was a giddy pleasure for my wife, Rose, and me to head off to the White House on a balmy spring evening in the company of my friend James Baldwin, who was on the verge of becoming the most celebrated black writer in America. I recall that it was the only time I ever shaved twice on the same day. Before dinner the booze flowed abundantly and the atmosphere crackled with excitement as J.F.K. and his beautiful lady joined the assembly and presided over the receiving line. Jack and Jackie actually shimmered . You would have had to be abnormal, perhaps psychotic, to be immune to their dumbfounding appeal. Even Republicans were gaga. They were truly the golden couple, and I am not trying to play down my own sense of wonder when I note that a number of the guests, male and female, appeared so affected by the glamour that their eyes took on a goofy, catatonic glaze. Although I remained in control of myself, I got prematurely plastered; this did not damage my critical faculties when it came to judging the dinner. I'd spent a considerable amount of time in Paris and had become something of a food and wine snob. Later, in my notebook, I ungratefully recorded that while the Puligny-Montrachet 1959, served with the first course, was "more than adequate," I found the Mouton-Rothschild 1955, accompanying the filet de boeuf Wellington, "lacking in maturity." The dessert, something called a bombe Caribienne , I deemed "much too sweet, a real bomb." Reviewing these notes so many years later, I cringe at my churlishness (including the condescending remark that the meal was "doubtless better than anything Ike and Mamie served up"), especially in view of the thrilling verve and happy spirits of the entire evening. Because of the placement of the tables I was seated at right angles to the president, and I was only several feet away when he rose from his own table and uttered his famous bon mot about the occasion representing the greatest gathering of minds at the White House since "Thomas Jefferson dined here alone." The Nobelists roared their appreciation at this elegant bouquet, and I sensed the words passing into immortality. The White House was anything but smoke-free, and the scullions among us lit up our cigarettes. I noticed with my usual sulkiness and envy that many gentlemen at the tables around the room had begun to smoke cigars; among them was Kennedy, who was engaged in conversation with a stunning golden-haired young woman and plainly relishing her at least as much as his Churchill. Following coffee, we moved into the East Room for a concert of chamber music. After this, just as the party was breaking up and we were about to be converted into pumpkins, I was astonished to learn from an army captain in full dress that Rose and I were invited upstairs for something "more intimate" with President and Mrs. Kennedy. Although I had an instant's impish fantasy about what "more intimate" implied--this was, after all, the dawn of the Swinging Sixties--I was in fact rather relieved to discover that the small room into which we were ushered was filled with cigar smokers and their lady companions. The president hadn't arrived yet, but Jackie was there, as were Goodwin and Schlesinger and Bobby Kennedy and Pierre Salinger, together with their wives, and all the men were focusing on their Havanas with such obvious pleasure that one might have thought the entire Nobel dinner had been arranged to produce this fragrant climax. Only in fine Paris restaurants, where--unlike in America--cigar smoking was encouraged, had I inhaled such a delicious aroma. I had by this time taken aboard too many of the various beverages the White House had provided, including the dessert champagne (Piper-Heidsieck 1955), and sank down unwittingly into the president's famous rocking chair. Rocking away, I talked with Lionel Trilling, the renowned critic; he and his wife, Diana, were the only other literary people invited upstairs. He was also the only other cigarette smoker, as far as I could tell--indeed, a real chain-smoker, with a haggard, oxygen-deprived look-- and we made book chat and indulged in our forlorn habit while the others convivially enjoyed their great cigars. It was not until Schlesinger discreetly asked me to let the president sit down in the rocker, for the sake of his dysfunctional back, that I realized that J.F.K. had been standing in the room for some time, too polite to shoo me out of his chair. When I leapt up, mortified, and Kennedy apologetically took my place, I noticed that he was still fondling his Churchill. The leader of the Free World wreathed in smoke, gently rocking: this was the relaxed and contented image I took away with me when, well after midnight, we wobbled our way homeward from one hell of a party. From the Trade Paperback edition. Excerpted from Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays by William Styron All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Publisher's Note | p. vii |
Havanas in Camelot | p. 3 |
A Case of the Great Pox | p. 19 |
"I'll Have to Ask Indianapolis-" | p. 65 |
Les Amis du President | p. 81 |
Celebrating Capote | p. 89 |
Jimmy in the House | p. 95 |
Transcontinental with Tex | p. 103 |
A Literary Forefather | p. 121 |
Slavery's Pain, Disney's Gain | p. 127 |
Too Late for Conversion or Prayer | p. 133 |
Moviegoer | p. 139 |
Fessing Up | p. 145 |
Walking with Aquinnah | p. 151 |
"In Vineyard Haven" | p. 159 |