“[The zoologist George Schaller and I] had walked away from civilization through mythic mountains and ancient villages in clear October light—but what a pity to say that to each other!”

On when he writes: “I like to stay up late at night and get drunk and sleep late. The afternoon is the only time I have left. ”

Old Man William Brown at Half Way Creek, he liked the way I went about my business. He liked my style and saw some future for me so he took a down payment on a wornout schooner. 

We took the sailing skiff. There was no wind. In the light of the moon, I rowed Papa upriver on the incoming tide and on past Possum Key to the eastern bays. 

Sea birds are aloft again, a tattered few. The bone white terns look dirtied in the somber light and they fly stiffly, feeling out an element they no longer trust. Unable to locate the storm lost minnows, they wander the thick waters with sad muted cries, hunting signs and sea marks that might return them to the order of the world.

In the gray light, a yacht, decrepit. Her varnished cabin sides are patchy and her white hull is stained with rust; her after deck, under a torn flapping canopy, is littered with cartons and refuse. A few 

Assunta speaks: One day my father threw me out of his house. And he threw me out even though, at that time, our family life had achieved a certain harmony; we had forsworn love of one another in favor of a new era of politeness and reserve. 

Toward the end of the war, a certain Headquarters retreated across the Rhine, leaving behind one officer and a garrison of local conscripts. The officer had asked to be left, yet could give no reason; it was said that he was ill, and there was no time to investigate the matter.

 

Q: James Dickey feels that Far Tortuga is a turning point in the evolution of the novel, that you are “creating our new vision.” Would you say something about this book’s development?

When Tom Guinzburg became president of The Viking Press in 1961, its editors and other staff were, of course, people his father had hired. But Tom rapidly put his own personal stamp on Viking. No books were signed up that he didn’t personally approve, no advances against earnings offered that he didn’t authorize, no publicity plans and marketing arrangements plotted without his knowledge. And he made the often humdrum procedures quite dashing, being dashing himself.

In early spring of 1952, one William Styron, sallow, dark-haired, in his mid-twenties, bearing a scrawled note of introduction, turned up on the landing of the top-floor cold-water walk-up at 14 rue Perceval in Montparnasse that was to serve as the first home of a new and as yet unnamed literary review.