My Generation: Collected Nonfiction

by William Styron

  My Daughters

  The relationship of fathers and daughters has been a significant theme in world literature. Consider the stage alone. The theme has arrested the attention of playgoers at least since the time of Sophocles and Euripides, who wrote of the intertwined fates of Oedipus and Antigone, and of Agamemnon and Electra. In a companion play Euripides told of how the tormented Agamemnon was forced to appease the wrath of the goddess Artemis by sacrificing another daughter, Iphigenia. One of the most anguished cries in an ancient theater renowned for its anguished cries is that of Iphigenia in Tauris: “My life hath known no father; any road to any end may run!” Shakespeare's world teems with father-daughter groupings, of which King Lear and his confounding bevy of girls make up only the most famous. Think of Hamlet’s Polonius and Ophelia, the Duke and his Rosalind in As You Like It, the great Athenian and his Marina in the eponymous Pericles. Shylock and Jessica of The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest’s lyrically linked Prospero and Miranda.

  In modern times one has only to remember Ezra and Lavinia in O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra or Boss Finley and his daughter in Sweet Bird of Youth by Tennessee Williams or Shaw's Major Barbara, whose title character is the offspring of the unforgettable Undershaft. The connection is there in much European and American fiction: Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (Jean Valjean and Cosette, his surrogate daughter, were among the first fictional characters I encountered), Faulkner's Will Varner and Eula. In modern poetry two instances of the kinship come quickly to mind: John Crowe Ransom's poignant “Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter,” in which a father's grief for his dead daughter is expressed by the poet's voice and, somewhat perversely perhaps, the later poems of Sylvia Plath, which articulate a discomforting daughterly rage against daddy.

  In brooding over this remarkable portfolio of photographs by Mariana Cook, which includes my own familial cluster, I was reminded more than once of how the theme of fathers and daughters gained a prominent place in my work over the years. In the early 1950s, quite some time before I had a daughter myself, I finished a first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, which is in large part the story of a father's obsessive love for his firstborn girl, a love which may have (according to some critics) incestuous overtones but which in any case helped precipitate her early death by suicide. I was quite young—twenty-five—when I completed this book and, as I say, had no experience in parenting; still, putting aside the incest motif (which was always problematical anyway), it was the emotional interplay between father and daughter which I believe was among the most successfully rendered parts of the book. I like to think that such imaginative empathy helped prepare me for the real role of being father to three daughters.

  Whatever, the theme never really left my consciousness and in fact reappeared, somewhat menacingly, in my later novel Sophie’s Choice. There I attempted to create a relationship in which the father's attitude toward his daughter—harsh, judgmental, and authoritarian—could be seen as part of a complex metaphor for Polish anti-Semitism, through which, at Auschwitz, Sophie and her children became the unintended but certain victims of that vicious oppression of Jews her father so passionately espoused. Thus, though her doom and that of her children had its origin in other causes, it was truly sealed by the absence of that affection and decency that binds father to daughter, daughter to father, and both to the natural world.

  American fathers possess a peculiarly bifurcated attitude when it comes to the matters of gender in their offspring. Fathers, in other words, are supposed to be loving and supportive toward their daughters, but both the joys and burdens of parenthood fall chiefly upon the mother. This concept springs from a culture in which masculinity and femininity are polarized to a rather intense degree; a father may be profoundly fond of his daughter, but to immerse himself too thoroughly in his daughter's concerns is to risk emasculation, or at least a form of sissification. Better that he focus his interest on a son, or sons. Many cultures have practiced infanticide of daughters (it is still shockingly prevalent in parts of India), and while our own overall view of the worth of a child's gender is, largely speaking, free of prejudice, it is still a matter of jocular folklore that a son is to be preferred. The celebratory cigars and the joyous announcement, “It's a boy!” composed a ceremony that spoke volumes, at least until recently, when our changing mores would make it appear appallingly sexist.

  Traditionally, fathers preferred to beget sons rather than daughters. The chief reasons for this desirability are embedded in the generally patriarchal nature of human society stretching back to pre-antiquity: sons carry on the family trade or craft, continue to make the money, are the entrepreneurs and explorers, the movers and shakers. Daughters, necessary for procreation, nurturing, and housekeeping, fulfill a lesser role; to all but the most intransigently hidebound fathers, girls are welcome all the same, and are even greatly beloved. This is monumental condescension but it is also a measure of history's cruelty that for most of its course such has been the prevailing view.

  What a pleasure it was for me to step outside history and greet my three daughters when they arrived during the decade between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s. First, there was Susanna. In her prenatal months (this was before amniocentesis might have permitted me to divine her sex), I lived in a state of happy ignorance as to what I might expect on the day of genesis. I was also honestly indifferent as to whether I might be presented with a boy or girl. Insofar as the baby's sex was concerned I must admit, however, to a small prickling of self-concern, so that when the doctor announced, “It's a girl!” I knew I'd be relieved of certain obligations. I knew I would not be expected to go hunting or to play softball or involve myself companionably at any deafening spectator sport, especially professional football, which I despise.

  Susanna is the young lady in the top right of Mariana Cook's vivid photograph. I'm astonished when I think that this immensely poised and accomplished person is the same human being, in extenso, as the squirming pink and squalling bundle of flesh I beheld for the first time, my heart pounding with apprehension and wonder, in the days of my hopeful youth. I have no favorites among my delightful daughters but one's firstborn commands a special place in memory, if only because the very novelty of her presence provoked an exquisite concern. What was she crying about? What about that cough? I was always worried about her health, and was in constant consultation with the era's guru, Dr. Spock. I needn't have worried. She was as spunky and resilient in those days as she now triumphantly appears.

  If I were to write a verse about Polly, daughter number two (seated at my knee), it would be to rhyme her name with melancholy. She has a dark streak of this mood, inherited from me, and has fought at least one tough battle against it, but lest one think it might have been a ruinous burden to her, or afflicted her in some unyielding way, these confident and humorous eyes should put the idea to rest. Again, those early years are hard to reconcile with the present image but I keep remembering a droll fact of her babyhood: she produced the loudest sounds ever heard in a small human being. These shrieks were not a product of her melancholy but of her lung power and healthy rage, lusty fishmonger's cries totally at odds with the image of the grown young woman, soft of speech, a slim dancer of remarkably supple grace.

  Alexandra, the youngest (top left), is a young lady of saucy wit, pleasantly rambunctious, one whose adhesive good humor (though she, too, has a dark side) has kept the family sanely united at moments of stress. She is an actress, and Mariana Cook has captured the gleams of expressiveness that help make her a very good one. Al came late to the family and therein lies an instructive tale. We must remember, while we're on the subject of daughters, that there are also sons. Tom, my only boy, was born shortly after Polly, and became odd man out in a family which, except for the paterfamilias, was exclusively female, including dogs, cats, birds, and even boa constrictors. Gentlemen do not have an entirely carefree time in such an environment.

  Tom pined during most of his first seven years f
or a baby brother, and I'll never forget the note of piping grief and anguish in his voice when, calling him from the hospital after Alexandra's birth, I told him he had yet another sister. (“Daddy! Daddy, no!”) I rather feared for his sanity when the next day, en route to his little workshop in the cellar, he asked me for the following items: rope, nails, a piece of lead, a sharp blade. I was certain he was building a torture device for his baby sister. But in fact, after a long and sinister silence, he emerged with a wondrous artifact: a wooden bird with metal wings, a gift for Alexandra, and tribute to the fact that even he, after all his isolated maleness, wished to celebrate the arrival of another sister, my new daughter. He does not, of course, belong in these pictures but I can't help seeing his ghostly outline here, smiling as he fills out the family portrait of a kind of obverse King Lear, composed and untormented, in the company of his joyous and (one hopes) grateful daughters.

  Mariana Cook has, in this portfolio of pictures encompassing so many fathers and daughters, achieved a substantial miracle of photography. There is not only a remarkable clarity of technique and vision, but an ability to capture the nuances of relationship: one can assume that these moments, electric and vivid, are created out of that intuitive grasp of the revealing instant possessed only by the most accomplished artists. There is nothing lax or dilatory in any of these pictures; each has both precision and luminosity, and in each of them one can perceive the nearly visible energy that flows from the intimacy of kinship. That all of these images and arrangements are not entirely harmonious, not without emotional tension, adds to their appeal, and to their honesty. What matters is the poetic grace with which the artist has arrested for a moment the humor, the tenderness and, most often, the love that underlie one of the best of all human connections.

  [Originally written as an introduction to a book of portraits by Mariana Cook called Fathers and Daughters (Chronicle Books, 1994).]

  Our Model Marriage

  Speaking on behalf of me and the missus, I want to thank you all for this demonstration of affection. I'm grateful first to Bill and Wendy for conceiving this beautiful dinner—it was their generous idea—but also to every one of the rest of you, whom Rose and I know and love. Forty years ago on this date, in Rome, I somehow knew that Rose and I would be celebrating, in 1993, the fruits of our model marriage. I know that while in other marriages the partners would, inevitably, be at each other's throats, Rose and I would be throughout the years steadfastly at each other's sides, a constant reproach to those less patient, tolerant, and faithful.

  Philoprogenitive, and sharing a passion for books and pets, we have spent scarcely a night apart, and I hope our example of an almost insanely obsessive monogamy will prove to be an example to the rising generation for whom words like devotion and caring are but cheap coinage. Rose has endured much at the hands of her demanding husband, and for this I bless her. God bless all of you for having been so much a part of our interminable partnership experiences. God bless our noble marriage and, while we're at it, God bless America!

  [Speech on the occasion of the Styrons’ fortieth wedding anniversary—at a dinner hosted by their friends William and Wendy Luers, May 4, 1993. Previously unpublished.]

  In Closing

  Walking with Aquinnah

  For the last four or five years, whenever I am home—which has been most of the time—I have been accustomed to taking long daily walks with my dog, Aquinnah. Our walks are for business and pleasure, and also for survival—interlocking motives that have somehow acquired nearly equal importance in my mind. From the professional point of view, there is nothing better than walking at a brisk pace to force oneself into a contemplative mood. I say force because there is, I'm sorry to relate, an early resistance. I am not by nature a very active person and it's a little embarrassing to confess that after many years of walking, with all sorts of dogs that preceded Aquinnah, it still takes at least a mild act of will to get started on my daily journey. For unlike most purely athletic activities, there is at the outset an element of joylessness in the walking process.

  Strange that this is so. It requires absolutely no skill save the natural one that we all acquire at infancy. Why should the mere act of consecutively putting one foot ahead of the other for mile after mile be in itself so unpleasant an idea as to inspire a reluctance still difficult for me to surmount? But once I get myself going there always comes a breakthrough, after the boredom that usually envelops me like a dank mist during the first quarter of a mile or so of my hike. At the start it is like a faint palpable ache, not in the feet or legs but somewhere around the rim of the cranium. I wonder why, once again, I am engaging in this ponderous movement. My mind is cluttered by a series of the most dismally mundane preoccupations: my bank balance, a dental appointment, the electrician's failure to come and repair a critical outlet. Invariably the first five or ten minutes are filled with sour musings—a splendid time to recollect old slights and disappointments and grudges, all flitting in and out of my consciousness like evil little goblins. They are the grimy bits and pieces of the initial boredom.

  Yet almost without fail there comes a transitional moment—somewhat blurred, like that drowsy junction between wakefulness and sleep—when I begin to think of my work, when the tiny worries and injustices that have besieged me start to evaporate, replaced by a delicious, isolated contemplation of whatever is in the offing, later that day, at the table at which I write. Ideas, conceits, characters, even whole sentences and parts of paragraphs come pouring in on me in a happy flood until I am in a state close to hypnosis, quite oblivious of the woods or the fields or the beach where I am trudging, and finally as heedless of the rhythmic motion of my feet as if I were paddling through air like some great liberated goose or swan.

  This, you see, is the delight and the value of walking for a writer. The writer lounging—trying to think, to sort out his thoughts—cannot really think, being the prey of endless distractions. He gets up to fix himself a sandwich, tinkers with the phonograph, succumbs weak-mindedly to the pages of a magazine, drifts off into an erotic reverie. But a walk, besides preventing such intrusions, unlocks the subconscious in such a way as to allow the writer to feel his mind spilling over with ideas. He is able to carry on the essential dialogue with himself in an atmosphere as intimate as a confessional, though his body hurries onward at three miles an hour. Without a daily walk and the transactions it stimulates in my head, I would face that first page of cold blank paper with pitiful anxiety.

  I am lucky to have, in the colder part of the year, a house in the New England countryside, and in the summer a place by the sea. Thus on my walks I am exposed to manifestations of Nature in several of its most seductive moods; the aspects of pleasure and survival I mentioned are connected with being able to walk through serene, lovely, unpolluted landscapes while at the same time feeling throughout my body a diurnal blessing. As any knowledgeable doctor will testify, walking three to six miles or more at a steady pace—fast, energetic, taxing one's self but not to the point of exhaustion—is a motor activity of the most beneficial sort; privately, it is my view that any more arduous form of perambulation (for the middle-aged nonathlete, at least) must be a danger.

  A case in point—perhaps more meaningful because this narrative is about warfare, and specifically the Marines—would be my recollection of Major General Brenton Forbes, United States Marine Corps, whose poignantly familiar countenance peered out at me from the top of the obituary page of The New York Times one summer morning in the mid-1970s. The face of General Forbes, then in his early fifties and recently photographed (one could see the two stars on his epaulet), was the same face, only slightly larded over by the flesh of maturity, of Private “Brent” Forbes, who had shared with me a double-decker bunk at the Parris Island boot camp in 1944. The magisterially handsome man with the heavy eyebrows and humorous eyes and dimpled chin was the grown-up boy who had been the star recruit and superjock in our college-bred platoon, crack rifle shot and natural leader, inevitably destined
to make the Marine Corps his career. It is striking how, if one is at all attentive, one rarely loses sight of the trajectory of the brilliant friends of one's youth, and later I had seen Forbes's name celebrated more than once: during the Korean War, in which as a captain he had won the Medal of Honor, and as a regimental commander in Vietnam, where by way of television one evening I saw, to my exquisite surprise, good old Brent standing beneath the whirling blades of a helicopter, pointing out something on a map to Henry Kissinger. The obituary stunned me—so young, so soon! Now the gorgeous ascent had been arrested close to its zenith, and the commanding general of the First Marine Division, Camp Pendleton, California, had dropped dead, found sprawled on the back lawn of his house in his jogging clothes!

  I don't mean to mock the dead—a residual part of me admires such a man—but I can't help thinking that a program of walking, not jogging, would have allowed him to be alive today. Besides, there is something about jogging that is too trendy, verging on the effete; certainly it is un-Marine. It is inconceivable that an old-time Marine general—Smedley Butler, for instance, that salty old warrior of the early decades of the century—would have ever donned the uniform of a jogger. Walking, yes. Butler was as tough an egg as was ever hatched and—so the chronicles have it—an inveterate walker. Thus one does not visualize him jogging or, God forbid, running; one fancies him, rather, striding purposefully through some Coolidge-era dawn at Quantico or San Diego, thinking important thoughts about the destiny of the Corps, or of Caribbean skirmishes in bygone days, and the tidy machinegun emplacements, and the bodies of Haitians and Nicaraguans mingled with those of his own beloved marines. Jogging would have appeared to Butler an absurdity, not only because the added exertion is unseemly and unnecessary (and, as we have just seen, sometimes lethal) but because it precludes thinking. Many of history's original and most versatile intellects have been impassioned walkers who, had speedier locomotion appeared to be a desirable adjunct to the idea of mens sana in corpore sano, would surely have adopted it, and so it is grotesque to think of Immanuel Kant, Walt Whitman, Einstein, Lincoln, Amiel, Thoreau, Vladimir Nabokov, Emerson, Tolstoy, Matthew Arnold, Wordsworth, Oliver Wendell Holmes, George Gissing, John Burroughs, Samuel Johnson, or Thomas Mann ajog. “Intellectual activity,” wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne, “is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise.” The italics are mine, but they could as well have been supplied by Hawthorne, who was a notorious devotee of walking.