Word: styron
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Nieman Foundation. His 8,000-word account of the year, "Blowing My Mind at Harvard," appears in the current Harper's. For the CRIMSON, Mr. King has added to his memoirs by filling in the details of the visits he arranged here for writers Norman Mailer and William Styron. The following is the concluding part of this account, which began in yesterday's CRIMSON...
...bank clerk's belly. Age had performed interesting surgery on his face: cast him as a cab-driver, Chicago alderman, Irish cop, dart-champion in a workingman's pub, sly old convict; his face, like that of the late Everett Dirksen, told something of where he had been. Styron's face was a gentle mystery. Smooth for its forty-five years, it had of late come to look maybe a touch soft-trough so unblemished you wondered if his secret picture, like Dorian Gray's, bled and festered somewhere in the attic. There was something of the Frat Rat about...
...flesh, deep in their eyes, Mailer was suspiciously aggressive where Styron was aggressively suspicious. Mailer hoped to get in the first blow; Styron hoped you would not steal his pocketbook. In private moods, one imagined, Mailer threw hot coals of rage where Styron brooded and sulked. One saw Styron in repose turning inward into himself, Mailer turning outward against the world; the first was sad and the second was angry...
Mailer's easy verbal facility made listening to him hard work: required a mental mountain goat to jump from this theoretical jut to that craggy intellectual ledge. Styron was easier listening: he told you anecdotes in the familiar idioms of home, and you could rest during his pauses for verbal regroupings: he had the virtue of relaxing you more-though when you reached your bed it likely would be Mailer's words that nagged and clanged and rumbled hotly through your mind. Had Heaven planted them as religious saplings, Mailer might have grown into Elmer Gantry or have taken...
...bore no small personal grudge against these old heroes. Mailer, at a Manhattan party in his honor promoting The Armies of The Night, when we were both independently drunk, smote me a kidney-punch which may have been intended as friendly, but it hurt like hell and angered me. Styron, having written a private letter in praise of my first novel, hit me with a negative response when I inquired whether his endorsement might be converted to promotional purposes. I no longer pretend that Styron's blow was not the more painful. Still, I thought enough of both as artists...