William Styron, a Leading Novelist, Dies at 81

[rich]

sophie's choice is beyond heartbreaking.
truly sad and beautiful


r.i.p.
rich


On 11/1/06, Billy Sprangs <billysprangs at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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 Martha's 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. Styron's 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
> "Sophie's 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 girl's 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 don't
> 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 magazine's
> celebrated Writers at Work interviews. "Only certain
> things in the book are particularly Southern." The
> girl, Peyton, for instance, he said, "didn't 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.
> Styron's 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.
> Styron's right to inhabit his subject's mind, to speak
> in a version of Nat Turner's 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 today's 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 novel's 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 Styron's 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, "Sophie's
> 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 Lengyel's memoir of her family's internment in
> Auschwitz, "Five Chimneys," which had haunted him
> since he first became aware of it decades earlier.
> Hannah Arendt's "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
> Sophie's tragedy with the comic rite of his own sexual
> initiation.
>
> Once again, Mr. Styron achieved commercial success and
> won prizes. "Sophie's Choice" rose to the top of The
> Times Book Review's 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. Styron's 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. Styron's 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 school's 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 Japan's 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 year's
> 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 Martha's
> 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 mother's 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 family's 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 depression's 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 hell's 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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