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The confessions of William Styron
He misses Jimmy. William Styron can still see him sloshing across the snow in back of his house in Connecticut. And himself, the white Southerner, wondering, thinking - Lord, what deep thoughts must be driving that little black man, that onetime preacher, that symbol, that haunted man and lovely writer. "In the mid-'60s, you could say he was the most famous man in America," Styron says of James Baldwin, who died in France in 1987. Well, you certainly could say such a thing and not be far from the truth. He misses Willie. Willie Morris just closed his eyes at his desk one afternoon last August. Something about the heart giving out. They were a couple of brilliant white guys, Styron and Morris, finding themselves in the heady New York City of the 1960s. "To me, he was the liberated Southern intellectual," William Styron says of Morris. "He had almost none of the backward or retrograde aspects of some Southern intellectuals, who can still tend to be hidebound and stupid." They were cementing their reputations with a literary magazine and books. The magazine was Harper's, and Morris was the editor, and, in 1967, he gave space to a 40,000-word excerpt of Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner. That particular issue is harder to find now than coins in snow. He misses Faulkner. "I had lunch with him back in the '50s. It was fascinating. He was about ready to go cover the Kentucky Derby for some magazine. He talked about horses. He also talked about Truman Capote, whom he didn't like. He said Truman was like a big flea that gets on your skin and annoys you." Styron got himself down to Oxford, Mississippi, when Faulkner died in 1962. Browsing in the dead writer's bedroom, Styron noticed a half-empty bottle of Old Crow and the last book Faulkner was reading, a biography of Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general. Styron wrote about Faulkner's funeral for Life magazine: "Though it is now past two-fifteen, the stores are still shut up, and the sidewalks are thronged with people. White and Negro, they stand watching the procession in the blazing heat, in rows and groups and clusters, on all sides of the courthouse and along the sidewalks in front of Grundy's Cafe and Earl Fudge's Grocery and the Rebel Food Center." William Styron lives. So many of his contemporaries are gone. There is luck and glory in mere survival. He's writing again, heaving another book out of his 74-year-old soul, something about World War II and the atomic bomb and his own butt possibly being saved because of that savage piece of metal. He doesn't promise, but he thinks he'll have the new book finished by year's end. One of his big books, Sophie's Choice, is about to get a celebrated republication, a 20th-anniversary affair. And his home state, Virginia, has announced a series of celebrations next year to commemorate his work. A half century's worth of writing behind him. The same wife, Rose, beside him. Enough money in the bank. Hollywood supplied some of the dough. Faulkner hated Hollywood. Baldwin said doing work there was doing "the devil's work." But Hollywood has been sweet to William Styron. He's got a home in Vineyard Haven, another one in the west-central Connecticut town of Roxbury. He's even got a Democrat from Arkansas in the White House supplying him with a feeling of kinship and warm Southern blood. That's not to say there hasn't been darkness, namely the pitch-black darkness of depression. Nearly a decade ago, Styron was a man who was wrestling with demons. He had been hospitalized, and a literary life was suddenly thrown into disarray. But that's behind him, he says, with as much certainty as you can give something so unpredictably wicked as depression. Hell, the things tried to drown him. Just dropped him into the ocean with a body cast on. But he's emerged like some great big white whale. William Ahab Styron. Writing every morning. His generation of writers gets smaller now by the year. "A lot of us are gone," Styron says. "You can't help but have a sense of loss. However, I coexist with a sense of serene survival." Writers need lairs, places to get away to. The world can be so noisy. Baldwin liked the South of France. Hemingway liked Cuba and Idaho. Mississippi was always quiet - at least before the 1960s thundered across its red dirt - so Faulkner did his writing there without much complaint. William Styron loves his view of the Atlantic, and Martha's Vineyard offers him his cup of ocean. The island used to be a lot less in vogue than it is nowadays. There used to be more trees than people. "We discovered this place in 1959. It was then an island no one ever heard of," Styron says. "You'd go to New York after the summer, run into someone, and they'd say, `Where were you this summer?' You'd say, `Martha's Vineyard.' And they'd say, `Where's that?"' He spends nearly half of the year on the Vineyard, and it is where much of the writing gets done. His is a turn-of-the-century white-shingle house with three bedrooms and a porch, located just off a narrow unpaved road. The rest of his time is spent at his home in Connecticut. The writer loves the porch. He's sitting on the porch in Vineyard Haven now. Yards away, the sea rolls. He's in a cottony blue shirt and khakis. He's sockless and wearing black sneakers. He's tall enough so that when he's seated, it looks as if he's been folded into the chair. William Styron says friends on this island - along with his wife, Rose - saved his life when the disease of "madness" struck him. The illness, of course, was nothing to trifle with. It has sent people plunging through windows, overdosing on pills. Right into coffins. He's got high-profile friends: the likes of Mike Wallace and Art Buchwald, both of whom have been laid low by their own severe bouts of depression. "He was in bad shape," Buchwald recalls of Styron. "I talked to him every day. He was suicidal. I was trying to get him into the hospital. When you get someone into the hospital, they don't have to make the decisions." Styron calls Buchwald's support "priceless." "Everybody on the Vineyard is family," says Buchwald. "And Rose runs our lives - and I say that in a nice way." Life never was less than precious, but now it's nearly glorious for Styron. "Just the act of living, to come through this ordeal of a near-death experience - it doesn't alter your personality," he says, "but it does give you infinitely greater compassion for those who suffer mental illness. Not to say I was contemptuous before, but now I'm acutely aware of the precariousness of the human mind." He wrote a book about the illness, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. A slim thing, less than 90 pages. But a powerful thing to its readers. "A classic," Buchwald calls the book. It became a bestseller, was translated into many languages. It was as if he were pulling all those pained souls, from all around the world, close to him, comforting them. Loads of money poured in. "I felt I earned it," Styron says. "It was payback for the suffering." William Styron's upper body looks powerful. But he confesses he's never been athletically graceful. When he was little and other boys were out running and playing in backyards, he was singing old Negro spirituals. He couldn't have been happier. This is how William Styron spends his days on the island. He rises early. He takes a walk - "religiously every day" - up and down island roads. He checks his mail. He does some reading. "Then I do some puttering around, taking care of the dogs." Then lunch. It is after lunch that he vanishes into the little cabin built out back of the house. He's marching back there now. The cabin is small, with just a couple of small windows. He doesn't have a view of water but of trees. It's sparse and spartan, the kind of place a man might come to pay penance. He writes in longhand on an old school desk he bought a long time ago for 15 bucks. His handwriting is elegant, very decipherable. If he gets 500 words a day, he's happy. "I wrote most of the books right here," he says. The desk is neat. There's white lined paper atop it. Books are everywhere. There's a bed, a white blanket made up on it. Some evenings, when he's finished writing, when he's given the blank page the words and sentences he hopes will be for keeps, there just isn't enough left in him to retreat back to the house, so he just collapses here. Rose checks up on him. What with the illness, with the way clouds can just start gathering, anytime, Styron doesn't mind her checking up on him. He's back on the front porch. The interior of the house is well-lit, full of light-colored furnishings. It looks as if people might just float around inside. He points next door. Lady Bird Johnson was there a week earlier. She still travels with Secret Service agents. "She comes every summer," he says. He invites her for lunch. For years, William Styron has been enamored of White House occupants, albeit Democrats. He's sailed with John F. Kennedy. There's a line in the 1964 Civil Rights Act - the epic bill that Lyndon Baines Johnson got passed with his legendary vulgar magic - that Styron can claim responsibility for. "Richard Goodwin wrote part of the bill right in here, on the table," Styron says, pointing inside. "I said to him, `Anything that ends with "Our unending search for justice" will sound good,' so he put it in." He's dined with Bill and Hillary Clinton too many times to remember. Atop the mantel, there's a photo of the president and the writer taken inside the house. It's the issue of race that he says bonds him and Clinton. Few will deny that Bill Clinton, son of a segregated South, has waded with passion into the American racial dilemma. The results have been mixed, which is to say some folk listened to him, others turned a deaf ear. But most will agree some candles were lighted. For Styron, it goes back further. When Clinton was fresh from Yale Law School and was cupping a Rhodes scholarship in his hands, he ventured to New York City. He was a reader of Harper's and wanted to meet Willie Morris, the Southern-born editor of the magazine. "Willie told me how impressed with Clinton he was," says Styron. Morris talked to Clinton about race and a lot of other things. Styron and Morris talked about race often. "The South has produced people of a humane tradition," Styron says. His voice has suddenly gone soft and nearly inaudible. He doesn't suffer illusions about race in America. The issue has crawled up inside of him as it has so many of his countrymen. "Race in this country is our wound," William Styron says. "It remains that way. Our wound." A world of feelings and emotions sailed forth from the heart and mind and soul of little Billy Styron, playing and dreaming as he did, all alone. He was an only child. He was as lonely as a Boy Scout lost in woods. He was born in Newport News, Virginia, on June 11, 1925. "As an only child, I remember this envy and longing I had in this little village I grew up in, right on the James River, where there were large families of four and five children," he says. "I had this longing to be in a family with brothers and sisters. I had this sense of isolation." Women with tender voices doted on him. A friend of his mother's taught him to read early. He began hanging onto words as if they were tree limbs. "I was always a little behind my contemporaries athletically. I skipped first grade. I was bright. I learned to read before I went to grammar school." Having skipped ahead a grade, he would forever be arriving at places a year early. He was in a hurry even if he didn't wish to be. There were blacks who glided in and out of the Styron household every day of Billy Styron's growing-up life. They clothed him, served him sweet potatoes, poured gravy atop his chicken, sliced his corn bread. They were stronger than ghosts but they were like ghosts. They were the household help. "My little family - mother, father - always had a black cook working for us. But it would be a long time before I had a real relationship with a black." There they were: black folk. Someone black cutting the grass. Someone black stirring food in the kitchen. Someone black passing by on a Sunday morning, tipping a hat, helloing the Styrons. The 1930s, and hard times, and Negroes everywhere. "I was intensely aware I lived in a world of two groups of people, white and black," Styron says. "And there were different rules for different groups. I began to be haunted by the presence of black people. It became almost exotic and romantic. For instance, their music. It was a different kind of music than I was accustomed to. I was interested in Negro spirituals. I remember there was a program called Wings Over Jordan, broadcast every Sunday morning. I forget which network. They would have choirs from Hampton Institute, from Howard University. I was devoted to listening to these programs. I was touched by it. That was one measure I felt between my whiteness and this need to understand the souls of black people." There'd be times he'd just watch blacks, their world folding and unfolding right in front of his world. It was like a newsreel come to life. He couldn't get behind the screen but he'd hear their voices clearly enough: "Yes, ma'am." "No, ma'am." "'Night, Mr. Styron." "'Night, Billy." "There was this enormous fact of segregation. There was no impulse to bridge the gap. That was the curse of segregation. But I always had this profound and curiously romantic desire to understand what black life was like. It was a constant need." He went to Morrison High School in Warwick County, Virginia. Clutching his books, he'd glance out the school-bus windows at the black world flashing by like postcards. "I remember vividly riding my school bus to my high school, and on the way we would pass the black high school that was in wreckage. They had outhouses. They didn't have plumbing. That's how striking the difference was." William Styron's mother, Pauline, had been a sickly woman for much of his youth. She died when he was 13 years old. She loved the music he loved. He no longer had her voice to rush into, her hands to clasp, her gaze to judge if he had done right or wrong. His world was suddenly cut in half. And his father, William Clark Styron, watched the rest of his world bleed away when his only child went off to Davidson College in North Carolina in 1942. Davidson was mostly Southern boys, and certainly all white. William Styron thought he might like the place. "There were quite a few boys there from Mississippi," he recalls. "I noticed a different attitude about racism. I was racist, but they were really racist. I sensed my need to grow out of the cocoon of racism and their need to sustain their racism. They were committed racists. It was a virulent racism." So he didn't like Davidson as much as he thought he might. Books kept him busy. He was reading Chaucer one day and packing for boot camp the next. World War II came calling. "I got sent to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan and the war ended," he says. "I was incredibly lucky. If I'd been six months older, I'd have probably been in the battle of Okinawa. But the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima." After the Marines, he enrolled at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He began thinking he wanted to write. Just stories. Actually, anything that would fall onto the empty page. Styron took his degree from Duke in 1947. It wasn't long after that he guided himself, his large body, his tallness, his Southern accent, to New York City. Found a place at Lexington and 94th. Told himself he was going to become a writer. Took a writing course at the New School for Social Research. "I had to combat a kind of reverse bigotry," Styron says. "In those days, because I was from the South, it was assumed in this liberal environment that I was a bigot. This was among white Northerners. I remember I got in a shouting match with a black guy in a crowded elevator. He was calling me a racist for no other reason than I had been born in Virginia." The personal affronts aside, it was New York, New York. And writers were everywhere. Styron found himself editing writers. He worked as a low-level editor at McGraw-Hill. He hated the job, and apparently the job hated him: He got fired. His father didn't turn his back on him. He wrote long letters. He sent money. "He was enormously supportive of me as I grew up - unlike many fathers who are skeptical of their sons' writing ability," Styron says. Nights rose and fell around William Styron. He was writing a novel. In New York, everybody was writing a novel. He was working on a novel about a Southern family. "I was determined to have a mature first novel while I was in my 20s," he says. "It was an ambition that drove me." Writing - and not starving - and just writing some more and just honing the discipline of writing. William Styron was a happy young man. Extremely happy when he finished his novel and sold it. Then another war called. It was the Korean conflict, and would-be writers were hardly exempt. "They sent me to Camp Lejeune" in North Ca olina, says Styron. Mud under his nails, on his boots, trying to be a soldier all over again. A package from New York City arrived one day for Styron at boot camp. It was the novel he had written, sent by the publisher, Bobbs-Merrill, so he could give it one final read before publication. So he had to sweat and run and dream about a novel, his first novel, while preparing to go to war. Would he die at war? Would he ever see his novel in a bookstore? All types of questions fastened themselves to him. Then luck: "I had an eye defect. That enabled me to get out. Otherwise, I would have been sent to Korea, a prospect I did not look forward to. "I came back to New York just as the book was published," he says. The year was 1951. The book was Lie Down in Darkness. It measured 400 pages. It's about a Southern family, and love, and the knot of hatred, and a daughter, and all the things that can go wrong in the heart of a family. It became a bestseller. William Styron was 26 years old. "For a bachelor," he says, "I made a little money." He could now write unworried about the next meal. "I was on my way." Twenty-six years old and with a serious novel in the bookstores. He could walk right through the arrogant air of New York City with his head held high. William Styron became a celebrity. He became a celebrity at an age, and in an age, when a person had to do something profound to become a celebrity. Two years later came another book, The Long March. It took seven years for him to produce the follow-up to that novel, which was Set This House on Fire. He has never been a prolific writer. It was then that William Styron started thinking about his childhood, about the black man he had heard about with a kind of fear and danger attached to his name. It was a name still cursed around the parts of Virginia where he grew up. His name was Nat Turner. The white writer fell in love with the black rebel. Turner had led a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831. Blood flowed. Styron saw a historical novel. It's no secret, of course, that blood has long extracted great literature. Ask Faulkner. Ask Baldwin. Styron started moving his big body around Virginia, doing research. "I was very excited by this story," Styron says. "It was part of the mythology of Tidewater Virginia. It was embedded in the folklore. It was so mysterious. The name Nat Turner to me was a kind of mantra. It was a contrast to the living going on around me. I saw black people living in segregation. And, yet, in the past was this historical figure who decided to go on a rampage." It was a black man who led Styron to the black rebel Turner. "Through Hiram Haydn I met J. Saunders Redding, a very distinguished scholar," says Styron. Haydn was a New York editor who had been instrumental in Styron's career. Of Redding, Styron says, "I got to know him quite well. He was teaching English at Hampton Institute, not far from where I grew up. When I told J. Saunders Redding I was interested in Nat Turner, he said, `I think I can help you. You'll find some material in the Hampton Library.' So I would go over there and visit him, and one time he gave me a whole armful of books which were helpful to me in writing Nat Turner." Styron spent nearly a decade reading about slavery. Some mornings he wanted to bound from the research library and just start writing. The story was filling him like helium. "Hiram Haydn prevailed on me not to write it then [the mid-'50s]. He said, `You'll likely turn this into melodrama."' Which is what, soon after its publication in 1967, a lot of blacks determined The Confessions of Nat Turner to be: melodrama. In 1967, race relations were swirling in America. The country, you could say, was at war with itself. It was a risky time to publish a book about the leader of a slave revolt who seems mesmerized by white women. But there was another fact that seemed to gall many blacks: Styron, white, was writing from the perspective of a black man, narrating in the voice of Nat Turner. He had changed his skin color. "By that time," says Styron, recalling 1967 and all the historical weight falling upon everyone's shoulders, "the Black Panthers were making themselves known. There was Stokely Carmichael. All the radical black leaders had emerged. And Watts was burning. All that happened while I was writing the book. It was overnight. It was what my friend Jimmy Baldwin had predicted." The book was published to great acclaim. Then, slowly, a backlash began. It was wonderful for sales - blacks attacking the writer - but terrible on the writer's psyche. "At this incredibly sensitive moment in race relations, here was this book about a slave written in the first person by a white person. It was like a red flag in front of a bull," says Styron. The book kept flying from the shelves. At readings, blacks, some whites, fire in their eyes, were standing up and shouting Styron down. Things got really vitriolic at a reading in New Orleans. It was just the kind of brouhaha the academics loved, and they pounced. "Harold Cruse, who is black, wrote an essay," says Styron, "that said, in effect, `Well, brothers, if you don't like it, write your own version of Nat Turner."' The brothers didn't do that. They did, however, publish an attack against Styron and his book. Their book was titled William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. Styron says that his book "bore the brunt of the prevailing black view that white people had no business dealing with black history." It was Baldwin who came, critically, to the rescue. "It's a very courageous book," Baldwin said shortly after its publication, "that attempts to fuse the two points of view, the master's and the slave's." Baldwin's voice was a '60s voice: It seemed made for the times; it carried weight. "I think he was troubled by the violent response against the book because he saw it as a political attack," says Styron. "He felt it violated the integrity of the book to have it dealt with on this violently political level." The book was sold to Hollywood for $800,000. It won the Pulitzer Prize. And it brought William Styron's father - in the kitchen frying chicken - to tears when he heard news of his son's award. Styron says he was anything but insensitive to the issue of slavery. "My grandmother had owned slaves," he says. "The sheer animal fact that I had a grandmother who actually owned slaves - and I knew her! I don't mean guilt. I never felt any guilt. But I felt responsibility." James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, in Harlem Hospital. His was a hardscrabble upbringing. During the Depression, he was on his knees, preaching, a child, screaming in front of the Fireside Pentecostal Assembly church. The old folk in Harlem would say that the Holy Ghost had seized the child. He worked odd jobs after high school graduation in 1942. Meatpacking plant. Waiter. He got a writing fellowship in 1945. For the next several years, he would write touching essays in magazines and periodicals. Then James Baldwin left America. He seemed to love America more than America loved him. He went to Paris. In 1952, he produced his first book, Go Tell It on the Mountain. Notes of a Native Son would come in 1955. They were as much about America as about the black experience in America. You could even say they were about Nat Turner's murderous rage. It was a Baldwin signature: writing so beautifully about things so terrible. "I do not like people who like me because I'm a Negro," Baldwin once said. "Neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." Baldwin and Styron. They were born within a year of each other. When James Baldwin was young and on fire, William Styron was young and on fire. But if Styron had financial success with his first book, Baldwin did not. Baldwin found money hard to come by. Sometimes, he seemed a day away from being in the streets without a place to lay his head. "Jimmy rang me up," says Robert Silvers, a magazine editor in the 1950s and now editor of The New York Review of Books. "He said, `I don't have any place to stay. I can't get any writing done.' I felt that Bill and Rose Styron might be very sympathetic to him. I rang Rose and said, `Jimmy doesn't have a place to stay. I just wondered if you know of some place in the country he might be able to put up for a while.' She said she'd ask Bill. Bill said, `We'd love to have him."' Styron had met Baldwin in New York City. "It was at a party in the 1950s," he says. "I do remember we immediately struck a nice acquaintanceship. Each of us had read the other's work." Styron goes on: "He was having trouble financially. He was responsible for a big family up in Harlem - in addition to his own money problems. So when I was told he needed a refuge, I immediately said it'd be fine with me if he'd like to stay in my guest house." It was 1961 when Baldwin moved into the Styron guest house in Roxbury, Connecticut. It was hardly lost on Styron that they were from two different worlds. "By the time I met Jimmy, it was all gone," Styron says of his once-narrow view of race in America. "I said as much: I had never had any close contact with a black person." Both were fearless writers, writing up and along the trail of blood that had stained so much of American history. "He worked all day, and he'd troop through the snow to my house," Styron says. "We'd play Nina Simone and Chubby Checker records." But Baldwin was reckless in the way of manners. He stood friends up. He forgot appointments. He meant well. His manners simply lagged behind his well-meaning. "He could be very perverse," says Styron. "He was totally unreliable." Styron would arrange to meet Baldwin in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York to drive him back to Connecticut. Styron would be honking, looking for that gnome of a man with the wide eyes and crooked smile - and no Baldwin. He'd wait and wait, and no Baldwin, not even a message left with the concierge or the valet. Maybe Jimmy was in Harlem, having a drink with Harlem friends. Maybe he was asleep on someone's sofa. Maybe he was someplace lost in his own writing, frozen at a desk. Styron would stew. "He was living in my house without paying a nickel for rent, and to have that kind of treatment was enraging," he says. And yet, those who knew Baldwin remember the sweetest man, a genius in his own right. More than that, they are compelled to remember the work, which was "brave and beautiful and, at its best, really incomparable," says Styron. "His manipulation of the English language was incomparable and was delivered with passion and grace." While living with Styron, Baldwin had been working on another book. It was called The Fire Next Time and was published in 1963. The book, in the form of two letters, was a powerful indictment of American racism. It seemed to be the literary scream that would usher in the civil rights movement. James Baldwin landed on the cover of Time magazine. To Styron, the friendship with Baldwin was fascinating. Baldwin helped Styron become a different man. "He dissipated once and for all the cliche that blacks may have not been up to the intellectual standards of whites. I saw this sharp steely intelligence. Because of segregation, I hadn't met black intellectuals. And on the scene came Jimmy, this brilliant mind. It was a revelation to me. It broke through a barrier I had. Here was this astonishing acuity I had rarely met in a white person." If Styron taught Baldwin anything, he says it was this: "So many blacks raised in the North had a cliched image of white Southerners. They did not conclude that white Southerners could be liberated - like myself. I think Jimmy got from me there were decent white Southerners." "I wonder," says Silvers, the New Yorker who knew both writers in the 1950s, "how different they were really. Writers have a very high awareness. They shared a whole literary culture. They shared a certain sense of America. I don't think, in sensibility, they were that different." They both stared down the curse of fame. "Jimmy was a supercelebrity because he was a cultural necessity America needed at that moment - an articulate, poetic interpreter of black life," says Styron. "Jimmy was white America's interpreter of the black experience." Styron adds: "Historically, the way we were - him the grandson of a slave and me the grandson of a slave owner - had an interesting irony." William Styron says he would like to have seen Baldwin get the Nobel Prize in Literature. "Each of us," Baldwin once said, "helplessly and forever contains the other - male in female, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other." The big literary awards came to Styron. Not Baldwin. Baldwin didn't seem to mind. As for the French, that was another matter: They loved him and showed a huge appreciation for his literary talents. In 1986, Baldwin was made an officer of the Legion of Honor; President Francois Mitterrand bestowed the award. Baldwin died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, on December 1, 1987. William Styron got himself down to New York City for the funeral of James Baldwin at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine. No one asked him to speak. "It was an absolutely stunning ceremony. Those African drums that heralded the march into the cathedral was one of the most dramatic things I'd ever seen." ufdropp,2The cook has prepared a lunch and brought it to the porch. Bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches. Tall glasses of lemonade. A whiff of ocean air. The tomatoes are home-grown; the sandwiches are delicious. There are just-picked raspberries for dessert. Rose Styron has arrived from playing tennis. She's an elegant woman and a poet. There are those who are close to the Styron marriage who say that, were it not for Rose, William Styron might not have become William Styron. And he might not have overcome his illness. After lunch, William Styron lumbers into the house, vanishing upstairs. Rose Styron recalls when she first met the man. It was in 1952, when he had a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters to study at the American Academy in Rome. "He was handsome," she says. "He was tentative and vulnerable. I had been spending my time with poets, because I was a poet. He had a beautiful singing voice. We used to do a lot of musical stuff - hymns or country music." The Styrons had four children. Rose Styron says that, years later, she couldn't see her husband's depression coming, just as he couldn't see it coming, dropping all around them like the sky itself. "It was very interesting," she says. "He has an interesting mind. I had no idea what was happening to him. I couldn't get through. I was watching a man I knew and loved go into a state of catatonia. But it was constantly fascinating. I was totally ignorant - and so was he - about what was going on." Rose Styron felt herself engaged in a death watch. "He was suicidal," she says. "He had a very stupid shrink someone had found for him. They said, `Don't put him in the hospital. It'll stigmatize him."' The family put the writer and father and husband in the hospital, and he stayed seven weeks, and he seemed a man who had found both comfort and himself on those white sheets. "He should have gone much sooner," Rose Styron says. "Soon as he got to the hospital, he felt safe." William Styron is not in touch with anyone in Virginia much anymore. His father died in 1978. He doesn't even travel down South much anymore. There are the funerals that do pull him back to the land. Otherwise, he thinks the place has gone mad with strip malls in places where the land used to roll green as far as the eye could see. On evenings now, you can hear the screen door creaking to the cabin out back. Styron is liking the book he's at work on. "It's about World War II, about being slated for Japan and having one's life saved by the atomic bomb," he says. "The moral resonance is of the implication of the bomb. My own life was altered by that bomb. I would have probably been in the invasion of Japan." So the screen door gently slapping open and shut now represents a wonderful sound, almost musiclike. The writer is writing, trying to keep the sound of gunfire and heroic soldiers on the page, curling his big raw hand around his pencil. "It ain't over yet. That's the thing you have to continue to hold on to," Styron says of his long and big writing life, sounding like a Marine trudging uphill into the sheer hoped-for beauty of another day of life itself. |
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