William Styron, a Leading Novelist, Dies at 81

Wed Nov 1 18:59:06 CST 2006

William Styron, a Leading Novelist, Dies at 81
NY Times
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
William Styron, the novelist from the American South
whose explorations of difficult historical and moral
questions earned him a place among the leading
literary figures of the post-World War II generation,
died today in Marthas Vineyard, Mass., where he had a
home. He was 81.

The cause was pneumonia, coming after many years of
illness, his daughter Alexandra Styron said.

Mr. Styrons early work, including Lie Down in
Darkness, won him wide recognition as a voice of the
South and the heir to William Faulkner. In subsequent
fiction, like the critical and commercial success
Sophies Choice, he transcended his background and
moved across cultural lines.

Critics and readers alike ranked him among the best of
the generation that succeeded Hemingway and Faulkner.
His peers included James Jones, Gore Vidal and Norman
Mailer.

I think for years to come his work will be seen for
its unique power, Mr. Mailer said of Mr. Styron in a
telephone interview. No other American writer of my
generation has had so omnipresent and exquisite a
sense of the elegiac. That is no mean virtue in these
years of oxymoronic uproar.

For Mr. Styron, success came early. He was 26 when
Lie Down in Darkness, his first novel, was
published, in 1951. It was a brooding, lyrical
meditation on a young Southern girls suicide, as
viewed during her funeral by various members of her
family and their friends. In the narrative, language
played as important a role as characterization, and
the debt to Faulkner in general and The Sound and the
Fury in particular was obvious. A majority of
reviewers praised the novel for its power and
melodiousness  although a few complained of its
morbidity and its characters lack of moral stature 
and the book established Mr. Styron as a writer to be
watched.

Although elated by this response, Mr. Styron balked at
being pigeonholed as an heir to Faulkner. I dont
consider myself in the Southern school, whatever that
is, he told The Paris Review in the spring of 1953,
during one of the earliest of that magazines
celebrated Writers at Work interviews. Only certain
things in the book are particularly Southern. The
girl, Peyton, for instance, he said, didnt have to
come from Virginia. She would have wound up jumping
from a window no matter where she came from.

Besides, he could have added, he had been reared in
Newport News, Va., a city of the New South, not the
Old, whose leading industry was the shipyard where Mr.
Styrons father worked. And while historically rich,
it was an area Mr. Styron wanted to escape and a
history that he wanted to explore from a distance.

So after moving north and writing Lie Down in
Darkness in (and just outside) New York City, he
traveled to Paris in 1952 and wrote a novella based on
his experiences in the Marines. Published in 1953 in
the first issue of the journal Discovery under the
title Long March, it appeared as a Vintage paperback
in 1955 under the title The Long March.

After a year in Italy, in 1954 he bought a house in
Roxbury, Conn., and set about completing his second
novel, Set This House on Fire. A technical advance
over Lie Down in Darkness, this novel was richer in
its storytelling and distinctly not Southern, full as
it was of the latest in Continental existentialism.

And it sold well. But still it remained a somewhat
melodramatic portrait of a group of Americans in
Italy, and while it was admired in France, it got
largely negative reviews in the United States.

In 1960, Mr. Styron returned home in his imagination
by undertaking a project he had contemplated since his
youth: a fictional account of an actual violent
rebellion led by the slave Nat Turner that occurred in
1831 not too far from where Mr. Styron grew up.

The timing of the book was superb, appearing in 1967
on the crest of the civil rights movement. Mr. Styron
prepared for it by immersing himself in the literature
of slavery.

The reaction to The Confessions of Nat Turner was at
first enthusiastic. Reviewers were sympathetic to Mr.
Styrons right to inhabit his subjects mind, to speak
in a version of Nat Turners voice and to weave a
fiction around the few facts known about the uprising.
George Steiner, in The New Yorker, called the book a
fiction of complex relationship, of the relationship
between a present-day white man of deep Southern roots
and the Negro in todays whirlwind.

The book sold well all over the world, and it won the
1968 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 1970 William
Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters.

But as the social turmoil of 1968 mounted, a negative
reaction set in. Influential black readers in
particular began to question the novels merits, and
Hollywood, reacting to the furor, decided against
making a movie version. In August, some of the angrier
criticisms were published in a book edited by the
African history scholar John Henrik Clarke entitled
William Styrons Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers
Respond.

Mr. Styron was accused of having misunderstood black
language, religion and psychology, and of having
produced a whitened appropriation of our history. In
the furious debate that followed, several admirers of
Nat Turner recanted, and the question was raised
whether white people could even understand black
history  a position that to some seemed racist in
itself.

Embittered, Mr. Styron withdrew from the debate and
gradually moved on to his next project, Sophies
Choice, a novel about a fictional Polish Catholic
woman, Sophie Zawistowska, who struggles to survive
the aftermath of her wartime internment in Auschwitz.

Once again Mr. Styron read extensively, beginning with
Olga Lengyels memoir of her familys internment in
Auschwitz, Five Chimneys, which had haunted him
since he first became aware of it decades earlier.
Hannah Arendts Eichmann in Jerusalem suggested the
central plot development. After reading the memoirs of
Rudolf Höss, the actual commandant of Auschwitz, Mr.
Styron made him a character in the novel.

Working slowly and deliberately, Mr. Styron evolved a
complex narrative voice in the novel, more Southern
and garrulous than any he had used before. This voice
ranged so widely that Mr. Styron was able all at once
to answer the critics of Nat Turner and to document
his extensive reading of Holocaust literature while
distancing himself ironically from a youthful,
somewhat callow version of himself, a central
character who somehow mixes up his revelation of
Sophies tragedy with the comic rite of his own sexual
initiation.

Once again, Mr. Styron achieved commercial success and
won prizes. Sophies Choice rose to the top of The
Times Book Reviews best-seller list, won the 1980
American Book Award for fiction and was made into a
successful movie, starring Meryl Streep and Kevin
Kline, and an opera by the English composer Nicholas
Maw. And once again, Mr. Styrons project aroused
controversy.

The initial reviews were mixed. Some critics seemed to
find the complexity of the narrative troubling. But in
time, critics focused on two particular objections.
One was that the Holocaust so surpassed moral
comprehension that it could not be written about at
all; the only appropriate response was silence. The
other was that even though non-Jews had also been
victims of the death camps, for Mr. Styron to write
about one of them, a Polish Catholic, was to diminish
the true horror of the event, whose primary purpose,
these critics pointed out, was the destruction of
European Jewry.

Mr. Styron stood his ground. To the criticism that the
Holocaust was beyond art, he told an interviewer that
however evil the Nazis were, they were neither demons
nor extraterrestrials but ordinary men who committed
monumental acts of barbarism. To the comment that he
was wrong to write about a non-Jew, his response, set
down in an essay on the Op-Ed page of The New York
Times, was that the Holocaust had transcended
anti-Semitism, that its ultimate depravity lay in the
fact that it was anti-human. Anti-life. William Clark
Styron Jr. was born on June 11, 1925, in Newport News,
Va., the only child of William Clark Styron, a
shipyard engineer with roots so deep in the Old South
that his mother had owned two slaves as a child, and
Pauline Margaret Abraham Styron, whose ancestors were
Pennsylvanians.

Mr. Styrons childhood was in some ways idyllic. Doted
on by his family, precocious, an early reader
fascinated with words, he made friends easily and
happily explored the waterfront and environs of
Newport News. In 1940, his father sent him off to
Christchurch, a small Episcopal preparatory school in
West Point, Va., for his last two years before
college. He graduated in June 1942.

World War II shaped his college career and military
training, which matured him and prepared him to be a
writer. He started at Davidson College, a conservative
Christian school, only a few days after graduating
from Christchurch. But following an unhappy year of
chafing at the schools strict religious and academic
standards, he was transferred to Duke University by
the Marines in June 1943.

Active duty followed in October 1944, and after nearly
a year of hard training, he was commissioned a second
lieutenant in late July 1945 and assigned to
participate in the invasion of Japan. A month later,
the atomic bomb attacks forced Japans surrender, and
he was discharged in December, feeling relieved yet
frustrated by his lack of combat experience but proud
of having survived his training.

He returned to Duke in the fall, where he renewed his
friendship with Prof. William Blackburn, who had
become his devoted writing mentor. Graduating in the
spring of 1947, he came away with a lasting contempt
for academic criticism and a determination to be a
novelist.

. Mr. Styron moved to New York City (I just found
intellectual life here more congenial, he told an
interviewer years later.) After completing Lie Down
in Darkness, he put in a second, three-month stint in
the Marines in the summer of 1951. When the novel won
the Prix de Rome, which entailed a years
expenses-paid residence at the American Academy in
Rome, to begin in October 1952, he spent the preceding
summer in Paris.

This interlude involved him in the founding of The
Paris Review; made him lifelong friends among the
expatriate literary set there, among them Peter
Matthiessen, George Plimpton and Irwin Shaw; and gave
him the time to write The Long March. The year in
Italy provided him the material for Set This House on
Fire, and it was in Rome that he became reacquainted
with Rose Burgunder, at the American Academy, after
having been introduced to her the previous fall in her
hometown, Baltimore.

They were married in Rome on May 4, 1953. She survives
him. Besides Alexandra Styron, of Brooklyn, Mr. Styron
is also survived by two other daughters, Susanna
Styron, of Nyack, N.Y., and Paola Styron, of Sherman,
Conn.; a son, Thomas, of New Haven; and eight
grandchildren.

When the Styrons settled in their Connecticut
farmhouse and began a family, his life became the
ideal of any aspiring writer, productive yet relaxed,
sociable yet protected. On the door frame outside his
workroom he tacked a piece of cardboard with a
quotation from Flaubert written on it: Be regular and
orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that
you may be violent and original in your work.

The precept seemed to work for him, but it was an
unconventional routine he stuck to: sleep until noon;
read and think in bed for another hour or so; lunch
with Rose around 1:30 p.m.; run errands, deal with the
mail, listen to music, daydream and generally ease
into work until 4 p.m. Then up to the workroom and
write for four hours, perfecting each paragraph until
200 or 300 words are completed; have cocktails and
dinner with the family and friends at 8 or 9 p.m.; and
stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning, drinking and
reading and smoking and listening to music.

With Rose to guard the door, run the household,
organize their busy social life and look after the
children, Mr. Styron followed this routine over the
next 30 years. He turned out his novels slowly, yet he
found time not only for occasional short stories,
novellas, a movie script and a play about his wartime
scare with venereal disease, In the Clap Shack,
produced by the Yale Repertory Theater in 1972, but
also for essays, reviews and occasional pieces, the
best of which he collected in This Quiet Dust and
Other Writings (1982).His life seemed to expand
outside the door of his workroom as well. In 1966, he
bought a house on harbor-front property on Marthas
Vineyard, where the family regularly vacationed and
where he began to live from May through October. His
circle of friends grew over the years to include
people like Lillian Hellman, Art Buchwald, Philip
Roth, James Jones, James Baldwin, E. L. Doctorow,
Candice Bergen, Carly Simon, John F. and Jacqueline
Kennedy, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Mike Wallace and
even Norman Mailer, with whom he had feuded fiercely
early in their acquaintanceship.

He traveled abroad frequently, especially to France,
where he continued to be admired and where Lie Down
in Darkness was chosen as one of the books on the
reading list in English for a comprehensive
examination taken by all candidates for teaching
positions in French universities. Mr. Styron was the
only living author on that list and one of only three
Americans, the others being Poe and Hawthorne. He
befriended President François Mitterrand, who
presented him with the medal of the Commander of the
Legion of Honor to go with his accumulating American
awards.

Yet if the aura of his life was golden, it was also
bordered with dark shadows. At only 13, he suffered
the trauma of his mothers death, which, perhaps
because of the time and place he lived in, he was
never allowed to mourn properly. A predisposition to
depression was evident in his familys emotional
history. For whatever reasons, suicide is a recurrent
theme in his fiction. By his own admission, he drank
as heavily as he did in part to ward off ghosts.

In the summer of 1985, when he turned 60, he suddenly
found that alcohol no longer agreed with him. But
giving it up brought on mood disorders for which he
had to be medicated. These drugs in turn produced
destructive side effects, and he was dragged into a
deep, prolonged suicidal depression that did not lift
until he was hospitalized from December through early
February 1986.

He recovered and wrote a harrowing account of his
experience, which began as a lecture and became the
best-selling book Darkness Visible: A Memoir of
Madness (1990). Three years later he collected three
stories previously published in Esquire magazine in a
volume titled A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales From
Youth (1993), each of which treats the confrontation
of mortality and the title story of which deals with
the death of his mother.

But depression continued to stalk him, and he was
hospitalized several more times. In Darkness
Visible, he concluded, referring to Dante: For those
who have dwelt in depressions dark wood, and known
its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is
not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and
upward out of hells black depths and at last emerging
into what he saw as the shining world. There,
whoever has been restored to health has almost always
been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy,
and this may be indemnity enough for having endured
the despair beyond despair.

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