Biography
William Styron was born William Clark Styron, Jr., on June 11, 1925, in Newport News, Virginia, which he later called “a very Southern part of the world.” His mother, Pauline Margaret Abraham Styron, was from the North, but his father, William Clark Styron, Sr., a shipyard engineer, came from an old, if not aristocratic, land-poor Virginia family. Styron remembers his grandmother telling him as a little boy of the days when the family owned slaves, a memory he was to incorporate years later into Sophie’s Choice. Styron’s father was a “Jeffersonian gentleman,” liberal in his views for a southerner, who implanted in his son much of the philosophical curiosity that characterized the young Styron’s novels. His mother, a gentling influence, died when Styron was twelve years old, after a long, painful siege with cancer, an experience that was also to leave a mark on his fiction in the form of an almost obsessive concern with physical pain and suffering and the vulnerability of the flesh.
After his mother’s death, Styron began “going wild,” and his father sent him to an Episcopal boys’ school in Middlesex County, where he was an indifferent student but a voracious reader. After graduating, he enrolled in Davidson College during World War II but soon dropped out to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Styron’s stint in Officer Candidate School marked the beginning of his writing career, for while there, he enrolled in a creative writing course at Duke University under William Blackburn, whom Styron acknowledges as the most powerful formative influence on his work. One of his stories, about a southern lynching, similar in tone and execution to William Faulkner’s “Dry September,” appeared in a student anthology, Styron’s first published fiction. At the tail end of the war, Styron was commissioned and was stationed on a troop ship in the San Francisco Bay, but the Japanese surrendered before he ever left port. Styron was to speak later of his sense of guilt at not having seen action, as well as his feeling of horror at the waste and destruction of the war and the terrible, almost casual way in which life could be lost. Styron condemned the absurdity of Marine Corps life, but he praised the tough training that transformed him physically and mentally.
Styron resumed his program at Duke and graduated in 1947. He took a job in New York as an associate editor in the book division at McGraw-Hill. His senior editor and immediate superior was Edward C. Aswell, the august second editor of Thomas Wolfe and an éminence grise to rival editor Maxwell Perkins; Aswell was to appear grotesquely as “The Weasel” in an autobiographical passage in Sophie’s Choice nearly thirty years later. The callow young Styron found McGraw-Hill humorless and confining, and after six months he was fired.
Living in a Brooklyn boardinghouse on a tiny financial inheritance from his grandmother, Styron took another creative writing course, this time from Hiram Haydn at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. He began work on his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, the story of a star-crossed upper-middle-class southern family whose failure to find love and meaning in life drives the sensitive daughter, Peyton Loftis, to insanity and suicide. The complex treatment of time in the novel and its high southern rhetoric showed the influence of Faulkner, whom Styron had been reading intensely, but Lie Down in Darkness was manifestly the work of a powerful and original talent.
At first, Styron found the writing of the book slow and difficult. Two years after leaving McGraw-Hill, he had written only a few pages that were usable. After Styron made drastic changes to the novel, dropping the original title (Inheritance of Night), eliminating the character Marcus Bonner, shifting the point of view to an omniscient narrator, and withholding the reader’s knowledge of Peyton Loftis, Styron found the writing went surprisingly fast—he finished the book and saw it accepted for publication by Bobbs-Merrill before he was recalled by the Marine Corps for service in the Korean War. The novel was published in 1951. Styron was then on active reserve duty, from which he was eventually discharged for an eye problem; his experiences in the reserves became the basis for his second novel, The Long March.
Lie Down in Darkness was an immediate critical success and a moderate popular one, winning the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1952. At that time, Styron had decamped to Paris and fallen in with a young crowd of American expatriate intellectuals, many of whom would later make names for themselves in literature. George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen were at the center of a moiling, motley, talented crowd that included Harold Humes, John P. C. Train, Donald Hall, and, on the fringe, writers such as James Baldwin, James Jones, and Irwin Shaw. In 1952 and 1953, the group began compiling a literary magazine, The Paris Review, which was to become one of the most influential literary periodicals of the postwar period. Plimpton became the first editor and Matthiessen the fiction editor, and Styron wrote the statement of purpose for the first issue. He also gave the periodical one of the first of its famous “Writers at Work” interviews. It was recorded by Matthiessen and Plimpton at Patrick’s, the Paris Review crowd’s favorite bar, and in it Styron claimed that “this generation…will produce literature equal to that of any other generation” and that “a great writer…will give substance to and perhaps even explain all the problems of the world.” From the start, his ambitions were large.
Although Styron later said he drank enough brandy in bistros to develop a crise de foie and spent months in the summer of 1952 on a sybaritic “Ovidian idyll” on the Riviera with Humes, he also was writing at top speed during this period. In just six weeks, he wrote a novella based on his Marine Corps training-camp experience, The Long March, and it was accepted for publication in the fall by discovery, a literary magazine (Knopf would publish it as a book four years later). In 1953, he used the money from his Prix de Rome to travel in Italy, an experience that laid the groundwork for his 1960 novel of expatriates, Set This House on Fire. During this time he met Rose Burgunder, a Jewish poet with some family money from Baltimore, whom he soon married. They returned to the United States, to Roxbury, Connecticut, which would remain Styron’s home and where he began work on the “big novel” that he planned to follow up the success of Lie Down in Darkness.
This big novel was Set This House on Fire, a sprawling account of American intellectuals living a life of self-indulgence and self-destruction in postwar Italy. The book contained fine lyrical passages of description, particularly of the physical beauty of Italy and the horrifying squalor and suffering of its people, but as Styron later admitted, the novel was seriously flawed—undisciplined and melodramatic. The reviews were very mixed, and some of them savage. Styron’s former friend, Norman Mailer, called Set This House on Fire “a bad, maggoty novel,” suggesting that Styron could “write like an angel about landscape, but like an adolescent about people.” The novel was better received by Styron’s European critics—it remains highly regarded in France—but Styron was wounded by his first really bad press, and he retreated to Roxbury to work on his next book, a novel he resolved to make so thoroughly a work of craftsmanship as to defy criticism.
The Confessions of Nat Turner took years to research and write, and true to Styron’s expectations, it was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece. For years, Styron had his mind on Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion as a subject for fiction. It had taken place close to his own Tidewater, Virginia, home, and Styron saw the suffering, the violence, and the misunderstanding of the revolt as emblematic both of the South’s guilt and pain and of his personal concerns as a writer. Styron claimed that reading Albert Camus’ L’Étranger (1942; The Stranger, 1946) furnished him with the technique he was to use in presenting Nat’s story—the narrative persona reflecting from jail—and there is no doubt that much of the novel’s perspective on black people and black problems was derived from Styron’s friend, the black writer James Baldwin, who was a guest of Styron for months while he was writing Another Country (1962), Baldwin’s first major novel about black and white relations.
Styron called The Confessions of Nat Turner “less a ’ historical novel’ than a meditation on history,” but despite critical accolades, including the praise of Baldwin, who suggested that the novel might be considered the beginning of a “mutual history” of blacks and whites, Styron became the target of a group of critics who protested vehemently Styron’s depiction of Nat. These critics assaulted Styron in print, accused him of racism and of attempting to demean the reputation of a great hero of black history, and hounded him at meetings, readings, and lectures. Ironically, Nat, as Styron presented him, was a strong and sensitive character, unquestionably the hero of the novel, but so volatile was the political climate of the United States in the late 1960’s that for some critics, any black character who was not a warrior saint was unacceptable as a fictional creation.
The critical assaults provoked by The Confessions of Nat Turner left Styron bruised, but he was encouraged by the praise for the novel’s powerful rhetoric and masterly structure, not to mention its enormous financial success. Of the controversy, he said, “It really had very little effect on me…largely because of the fact that I knew that it was politically motivated and hysterical, and that I had not violated any truth that a novelist is capable of doing.” He turned to new work, first to a lengthy projected novel, tentatively titled “The Way of the Warrior,” a novel that explored the psyche of a career Army officer, then to Sophie’s Choice. While in Martha’s Vineyard, Styron dreamed of Sophie, a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz whom he had met in Brooklyn in 1949. He woke with a vision, seeing her name on a door; he decided that the book would focus on a mother who is forced to send her child to death.
The book began as an autobiographical reminiscence of Styron’s aimless days as a junior editor at McGraw-Hill, when he found himself frustrated artistically, philosophically, and sexually. As he worked through his memories in the character of his narrator, Stingo, whose fictional background is almost identical to his own, he found his real theme: the life and eventual death by suicide of a woman who survived the Nazi concentration camps but emerged terribly scarred emotionally. This woman, the Sophie of the title, becomes the vehicle through which Stingo confronts the potential horror of life, and through her he matures.
Sophie’s Choice was five years in the writing, but Styron was richly rewarded when it was finally published in 1979. A few critics, notably John Gardner, raised questions about its structure and about the sometimes jejune intrusions of the shallow Stingo, but for the most part the novel was accepted as a fine and satisfying offering by a major writer. “It has the feel of permanence,” Peter Prescott wrote. The gratifyingly large sales were capped by a spectacular sale of the film rights. In 1983, Meryl Streep won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Sophie in that film.
In 1985, Styron was hospitalized with acute clinical depression. His struggle to overcome his suicidal feelings and to return to health are recounted in his memoir Darkness Visible, published five years later. Styron credited the peaceful seclusion of his hospital stay and the loving patience of his wife and grown children (three daughters and a son) as the principal factors in his recovery. After his hospitalization, Styron immediately wrote “A Tidewater Morning,” a long short story that fictionalized the death of his mother. After writing Darkness Visible, he returned to his work on a novel set during World War II. Styron died of pneumonia in 2006 after a long period of failing health.
Analysis
The informing patterns of William Styron’s fiction are by no means self-evident, and they may not yield themselves readily to the casual critic. Unlike William Faulkner, whom he often resembles in style and technique, his subjects are radically diverse—a doomed southern family, the intellectual jet set of American expatriates, a historical slave revolt, the horror of the Holocaust. He can shift stylistically from the direct “plain style” of The Long March to the purple rhetoric of sections in Set This House on Fire, and he moves easily from romantic abstraction to concrete objectivity.
Styron is preeminently, almost self-consciously, a writer of “big” novels of weighty moral significance—a fictional homme sérieux, as the French say (which may account for some of Styron’s great popularity with French critics). The eternal verities embody themselves relentlessly in Styron’s writing. Death, suffering, the silence of God—grave truths lumber ponderously and insistently at the reader in each novel, mercifully relieved by flashes of humor and lyrical passages of poetic beauty, which spare Styron the gray fate of being a sort of American Thomas Mann. Still, the metaphysical predominates in Styron’s books.
Strongly underlying all of Styron’s novels is a concern with the past, not so much in the form of the passage of time, but rather an awareness that it is either lost or potentially reclaimable. Each of the major novels moves from the present to the past in an attempt to explain or understand how things came to be as they are. Lie Down in Darkness, with its relentless burrowing in the Loftis family past, looks backward to explain Peyton’s death. In Set This House on Fire, Peter Leverett moves very deliberately into the past in pursuit of a piece of himself that is missing, and his whole purpose in dredging up the Italian incidents that form the body of the novel is to reveal the past so that he may deal with the present. Both The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice are historical novels concerned with the actual past and with what Robert Penn Warren has called “the awful burden of history.”
Styron’s fiction is historical, but in an intensely personal and psychological way. Each exploration of the past is filtered through the consciousness of aprotagonist—Milton Loftis, Cass Kinsolving, Nat Turner, Sophie—and strongly colored by the neuroses of those characters. The alcoholism of Milton and Cass, Nat’s brooding rage, and Sophie’s aching guilt over her murdered child—at the core of each novel is psychological exploration rather than historicalexposition. Historical process is only the context within which individual psychologies grope for resolution. Each of Styron’s characters lives on the verge of apocalyptic catastrophe, always on the edge of mental breakdown. Each of his protagonists is close to outright insanity. Two actually commit suicide (Peyton and Sophie); Nat essentially does; and Cass of Set This House on Fire is only saved from it by the thinnest of margins. His people may be constantly close to madness, yet Styron makes the reader feel that the madness is legitimate, for his characters search for meaning in a mad world, and only when they fail to find it do they become deranged. Peyton’s loveless family, Nat’s unjust world, and the horrors of the concentration camp for Sophie are atmospheres in which genuine sanity is difficult, if not impossible.
Perhaps the most representative Styron “hero,” though, is Cass of Set This House on Fire, the only protagonist who is a philosopher as well as a sufferer. Cass’s madness derives from his contemplation of the horror of human life and misery, and he staggers drunkenly around postwar Italy demanding a teleological answer for the chaos of existence in which God is silent; “you can shake the whole universe and just get a snicker up there.”
Perhaps it is this tendency to project the struggles of his characters beyond the ordinary world and to magnify them to the borders of melodrama that gives all of Styron’s novels powerful religious overtones. Some of this tendency derives from Styron’s own Episcopalian background, which is strongly echoed in the style of Lie Down in Darkness and Set This House on Fire and is particularly evident in the rhetoric of Nat, who is stylistically more Anglican than Baptist. The central problem in these novels is the conspicuous absence of God from human life. Styron’s world is one in which, as Cass says in Set This House on Fire, “God has locked the door and gone away to leave us to write letters to Him.” They are unanswered. By the time Styron comes to reflecting on the horror of the Holocaust in his last book, it seems no answer is possible.
This is Styron’s theme—the absence of God and the meaninglessness of life. Consistently, he approaches it through a single technique, the presentation and contemplation of pain and suffering. Styron’s novels are catalogs of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, some physical, some mental, and some simply the result of an empathetic identification with the suffering state of humankind.
On its most elemental level, Styron’s depiction of suffering is as pure physical pain. Peyton is tortured by the ache in her womb, the soldiers of The Long March by the agony of their exhausted bodies, Nat by the cold of his cell and the torments of his imprisonment, and Sophie by the tortures of the concentration camp. In Set This House on Fire, physical suffering is Styron’s primary metaphor for the pain of humankind’s empty relationship with the universe, and the novel is shot through with characters in various stages of suffering from “abuse of the carnal envelope.”
Vivid as the physical suffering of Styron’s characters is, it is nothing compared to their mental and emotional anguish. Often, this mental anguish derives from their acute sense of alienation—from one another and from God. Milton, Peyton, Cass, Nat, and Sophie writhe painfully and actively, aware of a pervasive emptiness in their lives.
Lie Down in Darkness
The structural complexities of Lie Down in Darkness, combined with the florid rhetoric of the novel, obscure for many readers the essentially simple causality that underlies the book. It is the story of how and why Peyton Loftis becomes insane and kills herself, tracing the roots of her tortured madness to her father’s weakness and her mother’s inability to love. Peyton’s father, Milton, showers her with an excessive adoration that is one facet of his alcoholic self-indulgence; he smothers his daughter with a sloppy, undemanding adulation that counterpoints his wife Helen’s psychotic frigidity. Helen is only able to show love in terms of compulsive formal discharge of parental obligations, bitterly resentful of the martyr role she has chosen to play. Eventually, Peyton instinctively rejects both her father’s almost unnatural affection and her mother’s unnatural lack of it.
By the time Peyton cuts herself loose, however, she has been emotionally crippled, unable to accept any genuine love from a series of lovers, including the Jewish artist she marries and who might have brought her peace. She retreats deeper and deeper inside herself, watching first other people and finally the real world recede before her disintegrating mind. The last major section of the novel is her tormented, insane monologue, a brilliant tour de force reminiscent of the Benjy sections of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929).
When Lie Down in Darkness was published in 1951, it was widely hailed as a significant addition to the southern school of writing led by Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow, Flannery O’Connor, and Thomas Wolfe. Thematically, Lie Down in Darkness is not a markedly “southern” novel. Although the Loftis family is from Tidewater, Virginia, and there are mannerisms described in the book that are definitively southern, Milton’s weakness, his wife’s cold rage, and their daughter’s breakdown are in no way regional. The story could as easily be that of a New England family, such as Eugene O’Neill’s Manions. What is actually distinctive about the tragedy of the Loftises is how much it is exclusively their own, rather than a product of the dictates of fate or society. In this respect, the novel differs from Styron’s later works, in which he increasingly attributes humanity’s sufferings to forces beyond the individual. While the novel is a tragedy of a single family, Styron is condemning an entire generation that lost its children. In describing her parents’ generation as lost, Peyton says, “They thought they were lost. They were crazy. They weren’t lost. What they were doing was losing us.”
If Styron traces a source of the Loftis family’s deterioration, it is perhaps in their lifestyle. On one level, Lie Down in Darkness is almost a novel of manners, for in keeping with the Loftises’ “country club” lives, much of the novel delineates social activity—parties, dances, dinners. Emblematic of this are three scenes in which Milton, Helen, and Peyton go through the motions of conventional social rituals while they are torn by violent emotions lying beneath the facade of meaningless behavior. The first of these is a dance at the country club at which Peyton tries to play the role of belle-of-the-ball while her father makes drunken love to his mistress in a cloakroom and Helen seethes at both father and daughter in a jealous rage. Later, a Christmas dinner turns into a grotesque, painful fiasco, as Helen screams insults at her daughter while Milton slobbers drunkenly. Finally, Peyton’s wedding becomes a nightmare when Milton again gets drunk and sloppy, and Helen, as always thinly concealing a bitter resentment of Peyton, finally cracks, screaming “Whore!” at her daughter. In a rage, Peyton claws her mother’s face with her nails and flees the family forever.
The loss of love, or rather the failure to find it, informs the entire book. The three Loftises grope at one another in despair, reaching out to one another in their separate, psychologically crippled ways for an understanding and affection that will bring them some sort of emotional peace. That peace, though, is impossible because their psychic natures are flawed beyond redemption. Sigmund Freud spins the plot: Milton loves Peyton not wisely, but too well, as she uncomfortably senses, so his love of her must always seem unrequited, and he is destined to be deserted by her at the last; Helen suffers a patent jealous hatred for Peyton, who has a capacity for love that Helen lacks, and who is stranded between the two poles of her parents’ emotional inadequacy. The result is endless pain and ultimately annihilation. As Milton wails, “It was awful not to be able to love. It was hell.”
It is not hell, though, but obliteration—nothingness—that truly underlies this novel. In the opening scene, Milton meets the train that brings Peyton’s body home for burial. The final scene is her throwing herself to her death from a New York City rooftop. Everything between, the whole body of the novel, is an explanation of that death, and the knowledge of Peyton’s unavoidable extinction hangs heavily during the entire book. The title is taken from Sir Thomas Browne’s gloomy Hydriotaphia: Or, Urn Burial (1658), a seventeenth century meditation on the inevitability of death, and the “darkness” of the title is that of the grave. Images of death haunt the dreams of the tortured characters, and the reader is never allowed to forget the ultimate negation implicit in the agony of life.
The Long March
The agony of life, more than the nullity of death, became the focus of Styron’s fiction following Lie Down in Darkness. His short novel The Long March serves almost as a précis for the motif of pain that came to dominate Styron’s writing. Not much longer than a substantial short story, The Long March stands between the turgid psychological weight of Lie Down in Darkness and the ponderous solemnity of Set This House on Fire like a breath of fresh air. Short, clean, concise, and plotted without a wasted word, this unpretentious novella contains some of Styron’s most disciplined and readable prose. He trimmed away all the heavy rhetorical and philosophical baggage of his “big” novels, leaving before the reader only his lean and awful central subject—pain and suffering. Appropriately, the pain here is of the most basic and primitive sort—pure physical agony. Stylistically, Styron’s writing of the book in 1952 was anomalous in the development of his career, for it was at this period that he was gearing up to write Set This House on Fire, and the stylistic and structural complexities of Lie Down in Darkness were being inflated to match the ambitious range of the novel to come.
Like the best of Ernest Hemingway, The Long March is deceptively simple—a step-by-step account of a thirty-six-mile forced march inflicted on some Marine reserves by their mindless officers and endured by the men with varying degrees of courage or cowardice, acceptance or rejection, but mainly endured with pain. The march itself is relentlessly real for the reader on page after page, the physical pain of the characters becoming a kind of rhythmic pattern in the book. If the novel has a “message,” it is embodied in the final lines, in which Captain Mannix, who has undergone the march protesting its sadistic insanity, swollen and aching, confronts a sympathetic barracks maid who asks if it hurts: “His words [were] uttered…not with self-pity, but only with the tone of a man who, having endured and lasted, was too weary to tell her anything but what was true. ’Deed it does,’ he said.”
Set This House on Fire
After the critical success of Lie Down in Darkness and the artistic success of The Long March, there followed the better part of a decade before the 1960 publication of Set This House on Fire. Comfortably ensconced in Roxbury, prosperous, rearing a family, and moving into the center of the New York literary world, Styron’s reputation grew steadily, although his literary output did not. His house, along with Plimpton’s New York City apartment, became one of the new camping grounds for the old Paris Review crowd, and Peter Matthiessen, James Jones, and James Baldwin were frequent visitors. Throughout the late 1950’s, word of his forthcoming big novel spread as Styron gave private readings from it, and the publication of Set This House on Fire was eagerly awaited.
The novel was indeed big; actually, it sprawled embarrassingly. In place of the personal, family tragedy of Lie Down in Darkness, Styron broadened his scope by giving the suffering in this novel a universal dimension and by exploring the metaphysical bases of it. It is not a family that suffers, but the world. The reader sees this world through the eyes of Peter Leverett, a Styron surrogate, but the real protagonist is Cass Kinsolving, a sensitive, drunken American artist in Italy in the 1950’s who is aghast by the suffering of humanity. Much of the story is told to Leverett (and the reader) by Cass, who looks for the ultimate implications of every grain of sand. Looking back, he tells Leverett that he remembers Italy as “an infinity of remembered pain,” and he finds divine aspects even in his drunkenness: “God surely had clever ways of tormenting a man, putting in his way a substance whereby He might briefly be reached, but which in the end…sent Him packing over the horizon trailing clouds of terror.” To achieve this broadened projection, Styron enlarges his cast of characters, heightens his rhetoric, and throws the whole show on an enormous stage.
A vast parade of people moves through Set This House on Fire, many of them poor, sick, or abused, the rest venal and contemptible. The action is lifted from the commonplace to the melodramatic; rape, murder, and mystery dominate. The characters, except for Leverett and Cass’s wife, Poppy, are exotic. Mason Flagg is a monstrous idiot typifying Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831). He is the “super bastard” aesthete rich boy, whose cultivated corruption is nauseating but still rich and strange. Cass deteriorates theatrically, staggering about and raving lines from Greek tragedy, a far cry from the humdrum drunkard Milton Loftis.
Heightened rhetoric is Styron’s principal method of extending the scope of Set This House on Fire. Much of the novel reads like gothic Thomas Wolfe, from Mason’s mother’s description of “the horror” of her son’s expulsion from prep school to Leverett’s account of one of the book’s several nightmares: “an abomination made of the interlocking black wings of ravens crawling and loathsome with parasites…a country in cataclysm and upheaval.” Cass spends much of the book in deliberate blasphemy, “raving at that black, baleful, and depraved Deity who seemed coolly-minded to annihilate His creatures,” when he is not suffering from delirium tremens and seeing visions of a boiling sea, or giant spiders on Mt. Vesuvius.
This rhetoric not only complements, but makes possible, the projection of much of the novel on a dream level. Styron had done this before, in a Freudian fantasy of Helen Loftis’s, in one of Peyton’s lover’s dreams of babies burning in hell, and in Peyton’s entire closing soliloquy. In Set This House on Fire, though, the use of dream, vision, and hallucination is so pervasive that much of the novel approaches phantasmagoria. Leverett dreams of a malevolent fiend for several pages, and has recurrent, elaborately described nightmares; Cass is repeatedly haunted, and his drunken ordeal ends with an extended vision of disaster, a passage drawing heavily on Dante and the book of Revelation. So extensive is Styron’s use of dramatic and fantastic imagery that it is often difficult to tell whether he is presenting the reader with a metaphor or a dream. At one point, when Cass describes himself first making love to a beautiful girl, then suddenly “groping for an answer on some foul black shore,” it is impossible to tell whether he is just thinking or hallucinating again. Cass himself probably does not know.
Although they differ in scope and ambition, Lie Down in Darkness and Set This House on Fire are essentially the same kind of novel. Both are studies in personal alienation and deterioration. Both work through an elevated rhetoric and through psychological revelation. Although Set This House on Fire reaches self-consciously for transcendence and philosophical universality, the novel centers on the psychological aberrations of two characters, Cass and Mason. Similar to the tragedy of the Loftis family in Lie Down in Darkness, theirs are individual, not universal, tragedies. In Lie Down in Darkness, the tragedies are individual, but they represent the failings of a self-indulgent generation. In Set This House on Fire, the tragedies are also individual, yet they represent the tragedies of a hedonistic generation, a generation that was decadent and destructive.
The Confessions of Nat Turner
Styron called The Confessions of Nat Turner “a meditation on history.” Its subject is not only the character of Nat Turner but also the meaning of slavery itself—what it does to people, and to society. Like Styron’s previous novels, the book is a contemplation of horror, with a protagonist who becomes a victim of that horror, but in this case, the horror is not a purely personal one. Significantly, unlike the Loftises and Cass, Nat does not deteriorate, but grows through the course of the book as his comprehension of society and life grows. Nat is the richest and most psychologically complex of Styron’s characters, and the historical subject matter of the work is filtered through his sensitive consciousness to produce a visionary “meditation” on the world of slavery, dreamlike in quality and poetic in execution. Southern Virginia of the 1830’s, the novel’s world, is very much a projection of Nat’s mind—a mind produced by that world, and savaged by it.
To develop the subtlety of Nat’s mind, Styron drew on all his technical and rhetorical resources. His mastery of time shifts and dream sequences, already amply demonstrated, was enhanced in this novel, and he explored a variety of rhetorical styles, varying from rural black dialect to a high Anglican style echoing Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer (1977) for Nat’s more poetic utterances. Nat’s mind ranges with astonishing virtuosity over his universe—the natural world, the complexities of human relations, the elusive mysteries of God, and the bitterness of mortality. An enormously sophisticated narrative persona, Nat moves fluidly across time, contemplating the painful mystery of the past, represented by his long-dead African grandmother, and of the future, represented by his own forthcoming death. Nat tells the entire novel in flashback, remembering his abortive slave rebellion and the personal and historical events leading up to it, constantly trying to cipher out the meaning of those events.
The novel is a study of the growth of knowledge and of the growth of Nat’s mind. In the introspective isolation of his anguished imprisonment, he reconstructs his lifelong struggle to understand the meaning of existence. He recalls his progression from childhood, when he had no comprehension of what slavery meant, to an early adult period when he accepted his condition either bitterly or philosophically, to a final understanding of slavery in personal, societal, and moral terms. Ironically, as Nat becomes more morally and aesthetically sensitive, he becomes more insensitive in human terms, gravitating toward an acceptance of the violence that finally characterizes his revolt. Only a sudden, visionary conversion to a God of love at the end of the novel saves him from closing the book as an unrepentant apostle of retributory cruelty.
In the process of expanding his knowledge and developing his terrible vision of deliverance from slavery by violence, Nat becomes the spokesperson for two familiar Styron themes—the complexity of human psychology and the mystery of human suffering. The most self-searching of Styron’s characters, Nat exhaustively explores the ambivalence and ambiguity of his feelings about race, sex, religion, and violence. Although he casts himself convincingly as a Christian prophet, Nat is no simplistic fundamentalist, for he recognizes in his own emotional turmoil the personal depths that he can plumb with only partial understanding. His psychology is the battleground of conflicting feelings, symbolized by his powerful attraction to his master’s gentle daughter and his vitriolic hatred for all she represents. When he eventually kills her, neither he nor the reader can discriminate his motives. She dies imploring, “Oh, Nat, it hurts so!” and his realization of her pain is theclimax of his apprehension of the myriad pains of all humankind, particularly those of his own people. In this concern, he is representative of all Styron’s protagonists.
It is almost impossible to deal with The Confessions of Nat Turner without mentioning the storm of controversy that followed its publication and success. A number of critics maintained that the novel was historically inaccurate (for example, it portrayed Nat as having homosexual tendencies but never mentioned that there are records indicating that the real Nat Turner had a wife). Styron was also accused of demeaning a black hero, in that his Nat has reservations about his mission and is squeamish about wholesale slaughter. The real complaint against Styron, though, most thoroughly summarized in a casebook edited by John Henrik Clarke, William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968), was that he was a white man attempting a theme that should be the province of black writers. In answer to the historical criticism, Styron and his defenders point out that The Confessions of Nat Turner is a work of fiction that does not pretend to be straight history, and that it violates no factual information known to Styron at the time of writing.
The second complaint, that it degrades a black hero, is more difficult to understand. Unquestionably, Styron, like any true artist, presents his hero with his neuroses, self-doubts, and weaknesses. In the main, however, Nat is without doubt a positive and even heroic character, arguably the most admirable in all Styron’s fiction. Only a critic in search of a black plaster saint sans peur et sans reproche (without fear and without reproach) could consider the creation of as rich and sensitive a character as Nat a slur. While Styron was researching The Confessions of Nat Turner, Baldwin lived in Styron’s cottage, and Baldwin encouraged Styron to write the book. Although Styron never acknowledged Baldwin as the model for his Nat Turner, there are similarities in thinking and speech, and Turner’s sexual ambivalence may be based on Baldwin. In any case, Styron’s Turner is as much a modern intellectual who ponders the effects of slavery as a historical figure.
Sophie’s Choice
Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice was some twelve years in the works, if somewhat less in the writing, and is in every way as ambitious a novel as The Confessions of Nat Turner, although its rank in the Styron canon is still in question. Having dealt in earlier novels with suicide, physical agony, existential despair, and slavery, Styron chose the Holocaust as the logical next state of human misery suitable for artistic contemplation. For a long time, Styron had been moving his narrative personae closer toward the subjects of his novels, introducing clearly autobiographical narrators in The Long March and Set This House on Fire, and making The Confessions of Nat Turner an intensely personal first-personnarrative.
For Sophie’s Choice, Styron turned to the confessional form plied by novelists as various as Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer and poets such as Robert Lowell. The narrator of Sophie’s Choice, a young southerner named Stingo, is, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from the young Styron. A young artist manqué in New York, Stingo meets and is fascinated by Sophie, a beautiful survivor of a Nazi concentration camp who is psychologically scarred by the horror she has undergone, the most ghastly aspect of which was being forced to decide which of her two children would live and which would die. Stingo is the ultimate naïf: sexually, emotionally, morally, and artistically immature. As he comes to know Sophie, he comes to know himself. Stingo is an artist in search of a subject, as Styron evidently felt that he himself had been.
Styron’s problems with finding subject matter commensurate with his talents as a technician have been pointed out by William Van O’ Conner in “John Updike and William Styron: The Burden of Talent” (1964) and by other critics. Styron himself acknowledged his concern with finding a fit subject for his early fiction, but he also felt that a concern with pain had been central to his earlier work. In 1970, he said, “Consciousness of pain and suffering has informed my work.…I hope my present work will not be so preoccupied.” At that time, he was working on his military novel “The Way of the Warrior,” which he eventually abandoned to write a book that returned to the pain motif with a vengeance, along with the other leitmotif of Sophie’s Choice, that of the artist’s finding of himself.
The emotional pain of Peyton Loftis is alienation from family and love. Cass Kinsolving suffers from guilt brought on by self-hatred and contemplation of human suffering. Nat Turner’s ultimate pain derives from his isolation from all humankind and God. Sophie and Stingo suffer the pain of guilt. Stingo, the apotheosis of Styron’s autobiographical white, Protestant characters, feels he has not “paid his dues,” suffered as others have suffered, and he learns of Sophie’s anguished life with a guilty voyeurism. Sophie’s guilt has a specific origin in her hideous and impossible choice to doom one of her children. She also feels ashamed that in Auschwitz she somehow “suffered less” because she was the commandant’s mistress and finally survived when others died. Constantly and compulsively her mind plays over the fates of those dead—her little girl, her tortured friends, and the gassed millions whom she never knew. Even memories of her murdered husband and of her father, both of whom she despised, bring her reproach and grief. The knowledge that she did what she had to gives no relief. She says, “I see that it was—beyond my control, but it is still so terrible to wake up these many mornings with the memory of that, having to live with it…it makes everything unbearable. Just unbearable.” Soon, she will kill herself to stop the pain.
After Sophie’s death, the shattered Stingo, who had just become her lover, walks on the beach trying to find some sort of personal resolution and acceptance of a world in which horror and anguish such as Sophie’s exist. Her message, though, has been clear: There is no resolution. Madness and suffering of the magnitude represented by the Holocaust can be neither accepted nor understood. Sophie, like Herman Melville’s Ishmael, realizes that “there is a wisdom that is woe, and there is a woe that is madness.” Stingo has come to know it, too.
With the death of Sophie, Styron seems to have come full circle in his exploration of human suffering and his search for meaning in a flawed and painful world. Both Sophie and Peyton Loftis find death to be the only release from lives so agonizing and painful as to be unbearable. In both his first novel and this one, Styron leads the reader to the edge of the grave and points to it as the goal of life—“therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes.” The crucial difference between Sophie’s Choice and Lie Down in Darkness, however, is the character of Stingo, who like Ishmael escapes to tell the tale. The earlier novel leaves the reader in desolation, but the latter, through Stingo, holds forth the possibility of an alternative existence, one not horribly haunted by the knowledge of pain. Stingo’s life is hardly one of euphoria, but it is a tenable existence compared to Sophie’s untenable one. To some degree, Stingo has paid his dues through her; he has come to know pain and evil through her sacrifice, and therefore he is sadder and wiser, but not destroyed as she is. His survival counterpoints her destruction; the novel that Stingo will write grows out of her ashes and becomes her immortality.
Sophie’s Choice is not a cheerful novel, or even an affirmative one, but it is not nihilistic. Perhaps Stingo’s optimism at the close is unjustified. A number of critics feel that when Stingo walks on the beach after Sophie’s death and finds the morning “excellent and fair,” anticipating his own promising career, Styron is simply tacking on an upbeat ending hardly defensible in view of the horror explored by the novel. Similarly, Cass in Set This House on Fire never satisfies his thirst for metaphysical answers to terrible questions, but simply decides to stop thirsting and take up fishing. In each of Styron’s novels, characters suffer, and some suffer unto death. These tragedies reveal an unjust world, not a nihilistic one—Styron’s tragedies are moral pronouncements. As moral pronouncements, the novels point to the possibility of a better way.
