William Styron

From Philosopedia

Styron, William C. (11 June 1925 - 1 November 2006)

The son of a shipbuilder, Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia. His family had roots in Virginia's colonial era. His mother, Pauline Margaret Abraham, died when he was 13, after which he became what he called a "hell-raiser." His father, William Clark Styron, sent his increasingly rebellious son to Christchurch School, an Episcopal University-preparatory school in the Tidewater region of Virginia.

He enrolled in Davidson College but dropped out to join the Marines toward the end of World War II. Although he became a lieutenant and was being sent to Japan, the war ended before his ship left San Francisco, after which he enrolled in Duke University.

To the Associated Press in a 1980 interview, Styron observed,

Some of my problems, I think, came from a continuing anguish over my mother's death and if I had gotten shot it would have been, I suppose, some kind of completion. . . . It's hard to say how that would have worked out. . . . When I was a young Marine platoon leader, there was this incredible sense of fate. The myth at that age is you're going to live forever. Well, I never believed that and my friends didn't. I thought I was going to die.

After graduating from Duke University in North Carolina, he then briefly worked in New York as a copy editor at McGraw-Hill, where he was fired for "slovenly appearance, not wearing a hat, and reading the The New York Post ", which then was known for its left-wing politics.

Memories of His Childhood

Tony Gabriele of Newport News on 3 November 2006, a few days after Styron's death, wrote from Styron's home town:

When Barbara Smith of Newport News met William Styron in 1989 at an appearance by the author at Old Dominion University, she told him she'd just read his novel Lie Down In Darkness.

His reply, she says, was: "You mean somebody's still reading that?"

Indeed they were, especially in this part of Virginia.

The famed writer, who died Wednesday, recalled his hometown of Newport News repeatedly in his novels and short stories. And his hometown has remembered him - not always fondly.

Lie Down in Darkness, the 1951 novel that Styron set in a fictionalized version of Newport News, "made a lot of people mad," says Elsie DuVal, a lifelong city resident who knew Styron's family. "Some of them hated him to the day they died."

But he's been honored here, too, with the spiffy Port Warwick development taking its name from that same novel. It's all part of a long, complicated relationship between the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and the town where he grew up.

William Styron was born in 1925, in the old Buxton Hospital on Chesapeake Avenue. His father was a shipyard engineer, and the Styrons lived in an apartment on 35th Street. When young Styron was 6, the family moved to Hilton Village. There, he attended Hilton Elementary School, swam in the James River off the Hilton Pier, was a teenage usher at the Village Theater, and delivered newspapers that he picked up at a store which is now the Hilton Country Club.

When he was 14, his mother died after an agonizing bout with cancer. According to his biographer, James L.W. West III, it might have been a harsh psychological blow to the boy. And when his father later remarried, he didn't get along with the stepmother.

DuVal agrees. "My mother and his mother were good friends. I remember taking some homemade food over to Mrs. Styron" when she was ill, she says, "I remember thinking how emotional it was for him, losing his mother."

Greig Shelton, a schoolmate of Styron at Hilton, has a happier memory. "He was a lot of fun, but very serious, too," she says. "I liked him very much."

She remembers a school pageant, preserved in an old photograph, in which she was the Queen of the May and Styron was a member of her court. "He was in the group, wearing short pants and long white stockings. I think he hated that outfit."

Styron went away to school, served in the Marines in World War II - returning for a second stint during the Korean War - and settled up North to pursue the writer's life. But his childhood memories remained strong.

The harsher side of those memories appeared in Lie Down in Darkness, his first novel. It's a grim story of dysfunctional families, centered around the suicide of a young woman, Peyton Loftis. What dismayed many people in Styron's hometown was that some of those unattractive people seemed to be modeled on real-life residents.

"Everybody in Newport News read it when it came out," recalls Mary Sherwood Holt. "It was the talk of the town."

Holt attended First Presbyterian Church and its Sunday school with Styron. He was a few years older, she says, and she didn't know him well. But there's one thing she feels certain about Styron and his book.

"It is an autobiographical novel," she asserts. "The major character in that book is Billy Styron."

The Peyton Loftis character, Holt says, "has some of the external trappings of a local person - the family, the school - but the character, the emotions, they are Bill Styron.

"He was very unhappy when his mother died. This book is a catharsis."

As for other local folks who seemed to be in the book, she says, "there are two families whose physical descriptions and lifestyles are in the book, but they're not the same people. I'm not going to name any names, because they're friends of mine and they've been hurt too much already."

It wouldn't be the last time that Newport News would appear in Styron's writings.

In His Own Words

To Bahgat Einadi and Adel Rifaat in UNESCO Courier (April 1992), Styron described his having been in the Marines and having become one of America's most important and popular writers:

Well, it is not all the exciting. I was born in Newport News, Virginia, in June 1925, and I did get in at the end of World War II. I was seventeen when I joined the Marines and at that time they had a programme, if you were very young, to give you some education before they sent you out to the Pacific to get killed. I was aiming to become a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps and second lieutenants in the Marines had a higher mortality rate than any other grade in the services, but that was all part of being young and "macho".

So I went to Duke University, in North Carolina, for a time, and in 1944 I was transferred to the Marine training camp in South Carolina and then went on to the officers training centre, in Virginia. I was on my way to join the Second Marine Division when the war ended with the dropping of the atomic bomb. My feelings about the atomic bomb are ambivalent because, despite the tragedy of Hiroshima, I think that it saved not only my life but the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men, both American and Japanese.

I came back returned to Duke University and continued my education. When I went back I had an extraordinarily gifted professor, William Blackburn, who became my mentor and who gave me guidance and encouraged me to become a writer. So when I graduated I went to New York and worked briefly for the McGraw Hill Publishing Company as an editor and manuscript reader. I was unhappy and frustrated in the job. I really wanted to be a winter, so I was not very successful as an editor and was soon relieved of my duties, which was a relief.

So I just began write. I then met another remarkable man, Hiram Haydn, who was teaching at the New School of Social Research in New York, and he encouraged me, saying, "I think you should write a novel". So I sat down and wrote a novel. It took me several years, because I wanted to write a full-fledged novel, not a typical young man's novel full of sorrow and sentiment.

The book was published in 1951 under the title Lie Down in Darkness. Amazingly it was a best-seller. I don't mean that it was a "blockbuster," but it sold 35,000 copies, which in those days, and even now was a good sale for a first novel.

It is said of Dostoievsky that when he was writing his novels he used to become very, very overwrought - even a little mad. How are you affected when you are writing, especially a novel as long as Sophie's Choice?

Well, I think I have avoided madness, but every work that I finish leaves me in a state of depression and extreme anxiety about what I have done. It is analogous to the post-partum depression women experience after giving birth. I think there is a very distinct connection. Anything of any great length I have attempted and finished has certainly been succeeded by a mood of severe anxiety, a general sense of let-down - euphoria at first, extreme euphoria, but euphoria followed by a descent into a very deep depressive mood.

How do you live through these creative years? How do you relate to other people during these periods?

It is hard to describe how I live when I am involved in a long continual work, during the days when I am creating in a continuous way. My working periods are very intense and then, when I withdraw from work and live normally through the rest of the day, it is as if the work itself is germinating constantly in my head. I mean, I live a perfectly normal life, visiting friends, driving to New York and so on. But it is as though the work is never too far away from my conscience. I am always thinking about what is to come.

Like pregnancy?

That's right. In a sense it is being conscious of being pregnant, of having it in oneself not yet delivered or not yet about to be delivered but waiting for the day when it will be. I remember when I was finishing Sophie's Choice. I live in two places. I live in Connecticut in winter, early spring and late fall and I live in Martha's Vineyard in late spring, summer and early fall. Just before leaving Martha's Vineyard the year I was to finish Sophie's Choice, I remember standing on the sidewalk and realizing in a flash that I had only two more months to go and it would be done. The sense of deliverance is a very important factor. I remember saying to myself "I am almost done". It must be like a woman saying, "In another month I am going to be delivered".

Could you tell us something about how you come to write The Confessions of Nat Turner? Apart from its importance as a novel, it seems to contain clues about American society and about what slavery did not only to blacks but to whites as well.

I should start by saying that I was brought up in the South, during the 1930s, in the days of segregation. Virginia, like every other ex-Confederate State, had legal sanctions against blacks. It was literally against the law to mingle. When you got on a bus, and if you were white, you sat up front, black people sat at the back. In small towns, if you went into a movie theatre black people were always in the balcony and white people below. In larger cities, like Newport News where I lived, black people had their own theatres, and most public facilities, from restaurants to drinking fountains, were labelled "coloured" or "white." It never crossed your mind to go to school with a black child.

His Books

Lie Down in Darkness (1951)

Styron's first novel, it launched his career. The work earned him the American Academy's Prix de Rome and tells of the suicide of a young woman raised in a troubled Virginia family, one suffering from alcoholism, incestuous longing, madness, and suicide. Using flashbacks that describe the day of their daughter's funeral, the family is confronted with understanding why their daughter jumped out a window to her death and why it has come apart and where it now is. To critics who suggested he was William Faulkner's heir, he responded in a spring 1953 issue of Paris Review, "I don't consider myself in the Southern school, whatever that is. Only certain things in the book are particularly Southern. [Peyton] didn't have to come from Virginia. She would have wound up jumping from a window no matter where she came from."

The Long March (1952)

Because some critics had described his 1951 work as over-rhetorical and melodramatic, Styron, Martin Seymour-Smith in Who's Who in 20th Century Literature (1976) said that Styron, to correct this tendency, wrote The Long March, " his best work" and "a demonstration of semi-psychotic Southern ferocity (in the form of a colonel of Marines) and the tragic collapse of liberal decency in direct confrontation with it."

Set This House on Fire (1960)

Evil and redemption are themes of the work, set in Italy and describing an alcoholic and troubled artist by the name of Cass who meets an old friend, Mason Flagg, in an encounter with evil. Seymour-Smith found the work "extremely readable and intelligent," but it is very long and "it fails to cohere: it is over-ambitious in trying to portray, in three characters respectively, the essence of American evil, the torments of the artist, and a less fully imagined and more intellectually contrived authorial 'point of view'."

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)

The work won a Pulitzer Prize in 1968. But after the work’s initial praise by authors such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, many African American intellectuals objected to the novel’s recreation of the 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia, claiming that as a white man he was unable to depict a black man’s experiences. This despite his statement that blacks had “a constant hold on my boyhood” and “black experience motivated much of my writing.” One defender, Henry Louis Gates Jr., remarked, “He set himself up as a sacrificial victim, and I believe he knew it. A black hero as gay? Of course, he knew it.” Gates deliberately did not include Styron in his Dictionary of Global Culture (1997). Deflecting such criticism, Styron defended his showing how slavery corrupted innocence and Christian idealism.

In the Clap Shack (1973)

As Susan Sontag has shown in Illness as Metaphor, her study of the mythology of disease, all the major illnesses have prompted a moralistic and punitive response, and have given rise to entire theoretical systems based on phony psychologizing. The bubonic plague implied widespread moral pollution; tuberculosis was the product of thwarted passion and blighted hopes, or sprang from ‘defective vitality, or vitality misspent’; out of emotional frustration or repression of feeling has come the curse of cancer, whose victims are also often demonically possessed.”

Sophie's Choice (1979)

The title has come to be an idiomatic way of expressing a tragic decision, for the choice Sophie Zawistowska - a Polish Catholic who survived Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp - has to make is difficult and involves what it is that results in one's choosing death over life. Nathan, a Jew, is shown as unable to accept Sophie's ability to side with the sufferings of European Jews while he because of mental illness cannot enlist into the military. How the two lead to their both being destroyed is tragic.

This Quiet Dust: And Other Writings (1982)

A collection of non-fiction, the essays include how Styron searched for the historic Nat Turner, how he studied about Auschwitz, how he thought of Vietnam and Chicago in 1968, and what he found in the works of Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, James Jones, and Robert Penn Warren.

Conversations with William Styron (1985)

The work includes interviews Styron had, revealing his thoughts about a white speaking as a black in Nat Turner, as a non-Jew writing about Auschwitz in Sophie's Choice, and as one author speaking to another (Arthur Miller) about his mentors and models.

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990)

'The work describes his bout in 1985 with clinical depression, one in which he had been prescribed the drug Halcion, leading almost to his killing himself instead of checking into a hospital. Using anecdotes, he tells what he felt, eventually being happy that he recovers. Links are made to similar experiences suffered by Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, Abbie Hoffman, and others.

The Long March; And, In the Clap Shack (1993)

A novella, The Long March tells of two Marine reservists who are fighting a colonel to retain their dignity . In the Clap Shack" is a funny tale of a young recruit in a venereal disease ward of a Navy hospital - the work criticizes the Navy for allowing no freedom for individuality.

Inheritance of Night: Early Drafts of Lie Down in Darkness (1993)

Brief, the article appeared in The Mississippi Quarterly.

A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth (1993)

Three stories, originally published in Esquire during the 1970s and 1980s, tell of a person's childhood in Virginia during the Depression; of a dying slave who returns to a dilapidated plantation where he was born; and of a mother who is dying of a painful case of cancer.

A Case of the Great Pox (1995)

In a New Yorker (18 September 1995) article, Styron writes about the patient's perspective. He describes the news that a nineteen-year-old U.S. Marine received from his physician, that he had syphilis and which had been detected by a medical Kahn test that “was so high it had gone off the chart.” It was a time when the very word syphilis was taboo, was uttered sotto voce, if at all, and if cited at all was called a “social disease” or a “vice disease.” Styron explained further: “But it was the doctrine of original sin, falling upon both Catholics and backslid Presbyterians like me, that made the sufferers of syphilis pay a special price in moral blame unknown to those who acquired other diseases. . . . [S]yphilis, in a puritanical culture, [had] a peculiar aura of degradation.

Styron reveals that his stepmother, “an observant Christian, curiously illiberal for an Episcopalian,” considered his own skepticism and fealty to Camus “diabolical.” He thought her a prig. Meanwhile, she disapproved of hearing that he had a fealty to Camus’ Le Mythe de Sisyphe, which he had read “laboriously but with happiness in French at Duke.”

In a secular age, Styron related, “gags were appropriate for an inexplicable calamity that in olden times was regarded as divine retribution. Previous centuries had seen people calling on God for help, and God had not answered.” The physician, he now detected, had had a “personal fixation” about the disease all along. He was “supposed to be free of such proscriptive attitudes, but there are always some who are as easily bent as anyone else by religion or ideology. Klotz (the physician) was one of these . . . a doctor who hated not the disease but its victims . . . . Klotz was obviously the inheritor of a tradition with a firm root in Southern Christian fundamentalism.” It transpired that Styron had had Vincent’s disease, not syphilis, and that it was easily cleared up by old-fashioned applications of gentian violet.

His Impact

Among Styron’s literary admirers have been Peter Matthiessen, Carlos Fuentes, and Arthur Miller.

Asked by Mary B. W. Taylor which writer he wished he could have been and of what book, Styron chose the historian C. Vann Woodward for his The Burden of Southern History: "[I]t is so magisterial in its understanding of the spirit and the traditions of the South and the way they evolved that it’s really kind of a work of almost perfect authority."

When Styron in the 1960's lived in a farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut, he was asked twice by Warren Allen Smith to go on record as to humanism's various connotations. Styron did not respond, although he went on record about other subjects, including being a registered member of the Democratic Party and holding that the Holocaust transcended anti-Semitism, that "its ultimate depravity lay in the fact that it was anti-human. Anti-life." Smith has noted that Styron, who briefly attended a Presbyterian church when a child, had left Davidson College partly because of its religious standards, was not an active member of any of the organized religions, attended religious buildings in order to speak or be on a panel, and was not a dues-paying member of non-believers' various chapters. Like other freethinkers, he wrote about evil not as religionists do but as something caused by personal and institutional protagonists that leave mankind feeling guilty and mortal. "As such," Smith said, "until other details were to show up following his death, he could best be described as being a humanities humanist."

Styron was an advisory editor of Paris Review from 1953 on, was a member of the editorial board of The American Scholar, and was a decorated Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and Commandeur Legion d'Honneur (France). He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of Académie Goncourt.

His Death

Styron died of pneumonia at the age of 81 at his home in Martha's Vineyard. He is survived by his wife of 53 years, Rosa Burgunder, four children, and eight grandchildren.

{Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996; Mary B. W. Tabor, The New York Times, 7 November 1998; WAS}