My Generation

by William Styron

  But what about Lie Down in Darkness, also published in that turning-point year of 1951? As it developed, while I was with the Marines in North Carolina, Hiram Haydn was having trouble with Indianapolis. The powers that be at Bobbs-Merrill were getting upset over a few of the situations and the dialogue in my about-to-be-published manuscript. Unlike Mailer and Jones, I was writing of a domestic fictional milieu in which the common four-letter words were not employed frequently, at least at that time, but I had retained a few of the more or less milder dirty words, as they were called then, and several erotic situations that by present-day standards would seem amusingly tame. Nonetheless, Hiram Haydn, representing the New York office, found himself in conflict with the higher-ups in the Midwest office, and down in the Carolina boondocks I was caught in the cross fire. I remember some of Hiram's messages, which in those days, particularly because of my frequent inaccessibility, reached me by telegram. Once again the name of the capital city of Indiana took on the quality of an incantation. “Indianapolis,” the wire would read, “suggests page 221 drop the word ass. Would you consider bottom?” Or, “Indianapolis concerned phrase page 140 felt her up too suggestive. Would you think of alternative?” And once I got a message that read, “Indianapolis will accept big boobs but will you still revise bit about the open fly.”

  Fortunately, these strictures and reservations did no permanent damage to my text; nor did I feel that my work suffered any major violation. I mostly managed to knuckle under for Indianapolis without complaint. But what I've said does show you how, at midcentury, there still existed in certain quarters in America a point of view about free expression that was severely circumscribed, still profoundly in thrall to nineteenth-century standards and to a prudery that now seems so quaint as to be almost touching. It could be said, of course, that we have gone over the edge; indeed, there have been some books published in recent years that I’ve found so scabrous and loathsome that I've yearned, at least for a moment, for a return to Victorian decorum and restraint. Yet my yearning is almost always short-lived. People, after all, are not forced to read garbage, which, even if it overwhelms us—or seems to at times—is preferable to censorship.

  And this brings me to a consideration of what my chronicle of Lie Down in Darkness and its problems has been leading up to—and that is, in fact, freedom of expression in our time, and the importance of libraries to our culture, and the danger that exists to the written word, whether those words be dirty or clean, simple or sublime. For it goes without saying that the written word is in peril, and its enemies are not just the yahoos and the censors but those who dwell in the academic camp.

  Let me relate what recently happened to me. If you write long enough you will inevitably suffer the misfortune of having your words subjected to scholarly scrutiny. This is much worse than getting bad reviews. Not long ago I received in the mail a two-hundred-page thesis from a graduate student at a California university that bore the following title—I quote verbatim: “Sophie’s Choice: A Jungian Perspective.” Beneath this was the description “Prepared for Karl Kracklauer, Ph.D., for Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Course ‘Therapeutic Process.’ ” I will now quote from the first page of the introduction: “As Styron's Sophie is a complicated character, and because her relationships are multifaceted and equally complex, I focus primarily on a single event in Sophie's life in order to gain entry into her psyche. In analyzing Sophie I rely on Greek mythology, Greek artwork and Jungian psychology.” The important line: “In this paper I analyze the character Sophie from the movie ‘Sophie's Choice.’ ” There was a footnote to this statement that read: “Where the movie was vague I referred to the book, Sophie’s Choice, for clarification.”

  This, it seems to me, is the ultimate anti-literary story. It follows logically that I should want to say a few words about the most pro-literary of institutions, the library. After all, we're gathered here in behalf of a library. I'd like to describe how in my early life the library evolved from a forbidding place, ruled by frightening Minotaurs and guardian demons, into a refuge, the center of my soul's rescue, the friendliest place on earth.

  When I was fourteen John Steinbeck's epic novel The Grapes of Wrath was published, to mixed reviews. While it was generally praised as a literary achievement, there were dissenters who were profoundly offended by some of the coarsely realistic language. It should be noted that this language is totally innocuous by present-day standards, containing none of the wicked four-letter vocables that have even plopped onto the pages of the new New Yorker. Still, the book had created enormous protest in some quarters; like many works of the period it had been threatened by a ban in—where else?—Boston. My schoolmate Knocky Floyd had somehow briefly gotten hold of a copy of The Grapes of Wrath, and he told me that if I, too, could obtain the book I would find on page 232 the word condom. Or perhaps it was in the plural—condoms. It was a word that was nowhere, even in the dictionaries of those pre–World War II years, nor was another Steinbeckian sizzler, that is, whore; the idea of seeing these words in print made me nearly sick with desire, though in fairness to myself I also wanted to read the story of the suffering Joad family. The elderly Miss Evans, God rest her soul, was the librarian who presided over the public library in my hometown in Tidewater Virginia, and it was she whom I confronted when, on a lucky day, I managed at last to find on its shelf one of five or six already smudged and dog-eared copies of this incredibly popular book. As she finished stamping the back page she handed me the book with an intense scowl and asked me my age; when I replied fourteen, she gave a kind of squeal and began to snatch the volume away. “Unfit! Unfit!” Miss Evans cried. “Unfit for your age!” There was a tugging match that both embarrassed and horrified me—she kept repeating “Unfit!” like a malediction—and I finally let her grab the book back in triumph.

  The next episode in my depraved quest for sensation took place a year later, when I was fifteen, in New York City. It was my first trip to the metropolis, a vacation at Christmastime from my Virginia prep school. I had a single goal. More than the Statue of Liberty, more than Times Square, my mind was set on one thing. On my second day I trudged through the snow past the icicle-clad lions of the New York Public Library and into the catalog room, where I thumbed through the cards in search of a volume that had been spoken of at school as one of the most erotically arousing works ever printed. I don't exaggerate when I recall my heart being in a near-critical seizure when I located the card and the name of the author, Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902), and the title, almost brutal in its terrifying promise, Psychopathia Sexualis. Every schoolboy of that time wanted to read this Germanic compendium of sexual horrors. With the scrawled Dewey decimal number and the title in hand I made my way to the circulation desk. Miss Evans would have approved of her much younger male counterpart: his face wore a look of lordly contempt. He was tall; in those days I was short. He looked down at me as, in my changing voice, I croaked out my request; he said scathingly, “This book is for specialists. Are you a specialist in the field?”

  “What field?” I replied feebly.

  “Abnormal psychology. Are you a specialist?”

  His tone and manner had so smothered me with humiliation that I was speechless; after a silent beat or two he said: “This book is not for young boys seeking a thrill.”

  The effect was catastrophic, nearly fatal; I slunk out of the New York Public Library, resolved never to enter a library again.

  These countless years later I've been able to regard those incidents in the way one regards so many experiences that seem tragic at the time they happen; they were both educating and valuable. Recently, when I've pondered the issue of censorship and pornography I've remembered these moments of awful rejection and have seen that they comprise an object lesson. Of course, my own youth was a factor in having been denied, and neither of those books were pornography. Still, there's a point to be made. It was not prurience, not lust that impelled me to seek out these works but a far simpler instin
ct: curiosity. In a puritanical society—and America is, par excellence, a puritanical society—it is the veil of forbiddenness, as much as what lies behind the veil, that provokes the desire for penetration, if I may use the word. Had Miss Evans permitted me to read the word condom, or had I been able to while away a winter afternoon immersed in Krafft-Ebing, whose juiciest passages, I later learned, were obscured in a smoke screen of Latin, I might have fulfilled at least some of my curiosity and then returned to normal adolescent concerns. As it was, I remained heavy-spirited and restless with need. The present-day foes of sexually explicit writing and other depictions of sex, whether art or pornography, and those who would censor such works don't understand this underlying psychological reality and thus undermine their own cause. There is, it is true, a group, probably not very large, of super-enthusiasts for whom pornography is an obsession and a necessity. Joyce Carol Oates has likened these people to religious votaries: one might morally disagree with them even as one scorns so much seemingly displaced heat, but their requirements should be democratically tolerated and finally even respected. At the same time, the nearly universal availability of erotica has allowed most other people to take it or leave it; many find it somehow fulfilling, and there is nothing wrong with that. I suspect that the great mass of people, their curiosity blessedly satisfied, have discovered in the aftermath an excruciating monotony and have signed off for good. The censors who would reestablish the tyranny of my youth should quit at this point, accepting the fact that it's the sordid absolutism of denial—not what is made accessible—that turns people into cranks and makes them violent and mad.

  After I experienced rejection, acceptance, and total immersion in reading, the United States Marine Corps introduced me to the glories of the library. During World War II, at the age of seventeen, I joined the Marines but was deemed too young to be sent right away into the Pacific combat. I was delivered for a time, instead, to the V-12 program at Duke University, which then, as now, possessed one of the great college libraries of America. I'm sure it was at least partially the Zeitgeist that led me into a virtual rampage through those library shelves. When one has intimations of a too early demise it powerfully focuses the mind. The war in the Pacific was at a boiling fury, and there were few of us young marines who didn't have a prevision of himself as being among the fallen martyrs. I was taking a splendid course in seventeenth-century English prose and I'd hoarded an incantatory line from Sir Thomas Browne: The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying. This, of course, is British understatement. I wanted desperately to live, and the books in the Duke University library were the rocks and boulders to which I clung against my onrushing sense of doom and mortality. I read everything I could lay my hands on. Even today I can recall the slightly blind and bloodshot perception I had of the vaulted Gothic reading room, overheated, the smell of glue and sweat and stale documents, winter coughs, whispers, the clock ticking toward midnight as I raised my eyes over the edge of Crime and Punishment. The library became my hangout, my private club, my sanctuary, the place of my salvation; during the many months I was at Duke, I felt that when I was reading in the library I was sheltered from the world and from the evil winds of the future; no harm could come to me there. It was doubtless escape of sorts but it also brought me immeasurable enrichment. God bless libraries.

  It's hard for me to realize that this was exactly fifty years ago, perhaps to this very night. Truly still, the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying. I forgot to mention that among the books at the Duke library I desperately wanted to read in those days, but was unable to obtain, were Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. I did, however, see them incarcerated, immobilized like two child molesters, behind heavy wire grillwork in the Rare Book Room. I've learned that they were finally set free some years ago with an unconditional pardon.

  [Traces (Indiana Historical Society), Spring 1995.]

  Letter to an Editor

  Dear—:

  The preface which you have wanted me to write, and which I wanted to write, and finally wrote, came back to me from Paris today so marvelously changed and reworded that it seemed hardly mine. Actually, you know, it shouldn't be mine. Prefaces are usually communal enterprises and they have a stern and dull quality of group effort about them—of Manifesto, Proclamation of Aims, of “Where We Stand”—of editors huddled together in the smoke-laden, red-eyed hours of early morning, pruning and balancing syntax, juggling terms and, because each editor is an individual with different ideas, often compromising away all those careless personal words that make an individualist statement exciting, or at least interesting. Prefaces, I'll admit, are a bore and consequently, more often than not, go unread. The one I sent you, so balanced and well-mannered and so dull—I could hardly read it myself when I finished it—when it came back to me with your emendations and corrections I couldn't read it at all. This, I realize, is the fault of neither or none of us; it's inevitable that what Truth I mumble to you at Lipp's over a beer, or that Ideal we are perfectly agreed upon at the casual hour of 2 A.M. becomes powerfully open to criticism as soon as it's cast in a printed form which, like a piece of sculpture, allows us to walk all around that Truth or Ideal and examine it front, side, and behind, and for minutes on end. Everyone starts hacking off an arm, a leg, an ear—and you end up with a lump. At any rate, I'd like to go over briefly a few of the things you questioned; we'll still no doubt disagree, but that's probably for the better. There are magazines, you know, where a questioning of words amounts to dishonesty, and disagreement means defection.

  First, I said, “Literally speaking, we live in what has been described as the Age of Criticism. Full of articles on Kafka and James, on Melville, or whatever writer is in momentary ascendancy; laden with terms like ‘architectonic,’ ‘Zeitgeist,’ and ‘dichotomous,’ the literary magazines seem today on the verge of doing away with literature, not with any philistine bludgeon but by smothering it under the weight of learned chatter.” (Perfect beginning for a preface, you may note; regard the arch rhythms, the way it fairly looks down the nose at the reader.)

  All right, then I said, “There is little wonder” (always a nice oblique phrase to use in a preface) “that, faced with Œdipus and Myth in Charlotte Brontë, with meter in Pope and darkness in Dante, we put aside our current quarterly with its two short poems, its one intellectualized short story, in deference to Life, which brings us at least The Old Man and the Sea.” This, of course, as you remember, was only by way of getting to the first brave part of the Manifesto: that The Paris Review would strive to give predominant space to the fiction and poetry of both established and new writers, rather than to people who use words like “Zeitgeist.” Now in rebuttal, one of you has written that it is not always editorial policy that brings such a disproportion of critical manuscripts across the editors’ desks, pointing out that “in our schools and colleges all the emphasis is on analysis and organization of ideas, not creation.” The result is that we have critics, not creators; and you go on to suggest that, since this is the natural state of things, we should not be too haughty in the stating of our intention of having more fiction and poetry in The Paris Review.

  To this I can only say: d’accord. Let's by all means leave out the lordly tone and merely say: Dear reader, The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines and putting it pretty much where it belongs, i.e., somewhere near the back of the book. OK? But as for “Zeitgeist,” which you accuse me of denouncing unnecessarily, I still don't like it, perhaps because, complying with the traditional explanation of intolerance, I am ignorant of what it means. I hope one of you will help me out.

  Among the other points I tried to make was one which involved The Paris Review having no axe to grind. In this we're pretty much in agreement, I believe, although one of you mentioned the fact that in th
e first number of The Exile there were “powerful blasts” by Pound, among others, which added considerably to the interest of the magazine. True, perhaps. But is it because we're sissies that we plan to beat no drum for anything; is it only because we're wan imitations of our predecessors—those who came out bravely for anything they felt deeply enough was worth coming out bravely for? I don't think so. I think that if we have no axes to grind, no drums to beat, it's because it seems to us—for the moment, at least—that the axes have all been ground, the drumheads burst with beating. This attitude does not necessarily make us the Silent Generation (the fact of The Paris Review belies that), or the Sacred Generation, either, content to lie around in one palsied unprotesting mass. It's not so much a matter of protest now, but of waiting; perhaps, if we have to be categorized at all, we might be called the Waiting Generation—people who feel and write and observe, and wait and wait and wait. And go on writing. I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages—the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they're good.

  Finally, and along these lines, I was taken pretty much to task by one of you for making the perhaps too general statement that there are signs in the air that this generation can and will produce literature equal to that of any in the past. Well, I suppose that is another Ringing Assertion, but it's a writer's statement, almost necessarily, and not a critic's. A critic nowadays will set up straw men, saying that Mailer had Ahab in mind when he created Sergeant Croft, that Jim Jones thought of Hamlet when he came up with his bedevilled Private Prewitt, stating further, however, that neither of these young men have created figures worthy of Melville or Shakespeare; they do this, or they leap to the opposite pole and cry out that no one writing today even tries to create figures of the tragic stature of Lear. For a writer, God forbid either course. I still maintain that the times get precisely the literature that they deserve, and that if the writing of this period is gloomy the gloom is not so much inherent in the literature as in the times. The writer's duty is to keep on writing, creating memorable Pvt. Prewitts and Sgt. Crofts, and to hell with Ahab. Perhaps the critics are right: this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation—who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him—but he must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all that he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope—qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for, and are not commonly come by with much ease, either by a critic's formula or by a critic's yearning. If he does not think, one way or another, that he can create literature worthy of himself and of his place, at this particular moment in history, in his society, then he'd better pawn his Underwood, or become a critic.