In my few ill-considered public appearances that year, when I was unwise enough to accept invitations to defend my fictional choices in front of predominantly young black audiences, and tried to show the inner logic that dictated my interpretation of Nat Turner and some of his relationships, the result was disastrous. Writers of novels should never defend themselves but this was a somewhat special case. In these often raucous sessions, where the gathering was drenched with hostility, I would attempt to explain why I had made certain decisions. I observed, for example, that in the matter of one of the most inflammatory issues—that of Nat’s wife—the ten black writers had simply got it wrong. There was no documentary evidence of a wife, or the equivalent, and if there had been, my conscience would have compelled me to give him one, even though as a novelist I had no such strict obligation. Likewise Margaret Whitehead. A careful reading, I insisted, would show that Nat’s motivation was complex, flowing from a relationship containing hatred as well as love, but not the simple-minded lust claimed by the critics. This made little impression, the response was pitched between sneering disbelief and incomprehension; and for the first time in my life I began to share the clammy chagrin of those writers and artists who have stood before whatever intimidating tribunal, hopelessly defending their work to cold-eyed political regulators. By this time I was being stalked from Boston to New Orleans by a young dashiki-clad firebrand, who unnerved me. Somewhat belatedly, I realized that Nat Turner was not, in this case, an aesthetic object but a political whipping-boy—the most prominent one that the black activists possessed at the moment—and I quickly backed off from public view, letting others act as counsel for the defense.
I received as strong and vigorous a defense as a beleaguered writer could expect. I was especially well served by Eugene D. Genovese—who was then on his way to becoming the preeminent historian of American slavery, and whose devotion to the black cause could scarcely be questioned—when he issued a massive rebuttal to the black essayists in The New York Review of Books; clearly as much dismayed as angered by the book’s irrationality and philistinism, Genovese took up its main arguments one by one and effectively demolished them. This inflamed the black critics and their colleagues even more, and in counter-rebuttals that filled the back pages of The New York Review the ugly debate raged on. Inevitably the storm died down, but the controversy has remained at a slow simmer until this day. Literally hundreds of articles have been written about the dispute, and at least four full-length books have appeared, including a ponderous encyclopaedic study of the entire affair that appeared in 1992. Amid this vast scholarly debris it is possible to salvage at least a few commentaries whose insight and wisdom are worth preservation, and one of these is the Gross-Bender essay. Like Genovese, the historians deal harshly with the ten black writers, and briskly dispose of their charges, but they have further illuminating things to say about the perennially enigmatic figure of Nat Turner and his place in our history.
They make the point that while Nat Turner was relatively obscure until my book appeared, he had “always belonged to those who used him—as a myth, as an imagined configuration of convictions, dreams, hopes and fears.” What has helped make the man such a fascinating subject for speculation is his very inaccessibility. Neither historians nor writers of fiction have ever been able really to make much sense of the original document, or to draw from it an identity with which everyone can agree by concluding: this is the historical truth. No firm truth can be established from such an incoherent text, nor from the silhouette of the man, and therefore Nat has been the subject of wildly varying interpretation. One of the most prominent black historians of the nineteenth century, William Wells Brown, sallied forth on an ostensibly historical account but ended up drawing an elaborate imaginative portrait that resembled fiction; like me, he was repelled by Nat’s religious mania, and like me he minimized or softened his Biblical bloodthirstiness. In most other respects this chronicle, by an historian plainly baffled by the obscurities and paradoxes of the record, is as novelistic as mine. And Brown makes no mention of a Mrs. Nat Turner.
On the other hand, the illustrious Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ardent champion of black rights, was fascinated by Nat Turner and did supply the hero with a spouse in his account, which was quasi-historical or semi-fictional, depending on the reader’s definition of this blurred region, but in any case almost totally fanciful. Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Washington Williams, and numerous other writers of the last century, both black and white, tried to pin Nat down; but this “black Spartacus”, as he was termed by one commentator, utterly evaded a consistent portrayal; the fabled insurrectionist, mad or sane or simply beyond comprehension, was truly a chameleon. As recently as 1992, in an off-Broadway play about the insurrection by a black playwright, Nat Turner’s ultimate motivation for violence is the rape of his “wife” by a slaveholder—acceptable enough if one subscribes to the principle of artistic license, but a far more flagrant deviation from the prima facie evidence than anything in my own work. Gross and Bender conclude that my own attempt was “very much part of a tradition. Styron has ’used’ Nat Turner as Gray, Higginson, Wells Brown, and, indeed, the accusing critics themselves have used him—reading into him, and out of him, those usable truths which seemed to him to coalesce about the image he was contemplating.”
When I mentioned James Baldwin earlier, it was with the memory of our friendship and of the time when he was encouraging me to do what at first caused me hesitation, and that was to take on the persona of Nat Turner and write as if from within this black man’s skin. Baldwin was wrestling with his novel Another Country, which deals intimately with white characters, and we both ultimately shared the conviction that nothing should inhibit the impulse that causes a writer to render experience which may be essentially foreign to his own world; it is a formidable challenge and among an artist’s most valuable privileges. Baldwin’s determination to pursue this course aroused the ire of many militant blacks, who saw such a preoccupation as frivolous and a betrayal of a commitment to the black cause. He stuck to his belief though his conscience and his persistence brought him rebuke and bitter alienation. My attempt, of course, was an even greater effrontery, and after Nat Turner was published, Baldwin told an interviewer most accurately: “Bill’s going to catch it from black and white.” Some months later, when I saw him, he offered me congratulations on the book’s success, and commiseration on the uproar, adding with the voracious full-throated Baldwin laughter that was one of his trademarks, “If you were just darker it would be you, not me, who was the most famous black writer in America.” It was at least partly true: my problem was less that of my work than that of my color.
Color and its tragedy, in these troubled years, has made me think often of James Baldwin and the stormy career of The Confessions of Nat Turner. Naturally I didn’t create the book with a political or social agenda in view but, as Georg Lukács points out, historical novels which have no resonance in the present are bound to prove of only “antiquarian” interest; certainly in the back of my mind I had hoped that whatever light my work might shed on the dungeon of American slavery, and its abyssal night of the body and spirit, might also cast light on our modern condition, and be understood by black people, as well as white, as part of a plausible interpretation of the agony that has bound the present to the past. But while the book remains alive and well and widely read by white people, it is, as I say, largely shunned by blacks, sometimes with amazing hostility neither articulated nor explained, as if the admonitions of those ten black writers a generation ago still provided a stony taboo. I am less bothered by this boycott in itself—for despite what I’ve just said, I am far from believing that my book, or any novel, has any real relevance to the contemporary crisis—than the way in which it represents a continuation of that grim apartness that has defined racial relations in this country and which seems, from all signs and portents, to have worsened over the years since The Confessions of Nat Turner appeared. That year much of Newark and De
troit burned down; in 1992 the fires of Los Angeles seemed anniversary fires too cruelly symbolic to accept or believe.
It was typical of Jimmy Baldwin’s intransigent spirit that he never truly abandoned hope. I doubt that he would give up hope, even today. In a recent essay on Baldwin, there were quoted some brave and lovely words of Jimmy’s that reminded me of the time when he and I, with our boundless and defiant ambition, were both setting out to break through the imprisoning walls of color and into the alluring challenge of alien worlds: “Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other.”
William Styron
Sophie’s Choice
William Styron
To the Memory of My Father
(1889-1978)
CONTENTS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Wer zeigt ein Kind, so wie es steht? Wer stellt es ins Gestirn und gibt das Ma? des Abstands ihm in die Hand? Wer macht den Kindertod aus grauem Brot, das hart wird,—oder läβtihn drin im runden Mund so wie den Gröps von einem schönen Apfel?... Mörder sind leicht einzusehen. Aber dies: den Tod, den ganzen Tod, noch vor dem Leben so sanft zu enthalten und nicht bös zu sein, ist unbeschreiblich.
Von der vierten Duineser Elegie
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Who’ll show a child just as it is? Who'll place it within its constellation, with the measure of distance in its hand? Who’ll make its death from grey bread, that grows hard,—or leave it there, within the round mouth, like the choking core of a sweet apple?... Minds of murderers are easily divined. But this, though: death, the whole of death,—even before life’s begun, to hold it all so gently, and be good: this is beyond description!
From the fourth Duino Elegy
—translated by J. B. Leishman
and Stephen Spender
... je cherche la region cruciale de I’âme,
où le Mal absolu s’oppose à la fraternité.
—André Malraux, Lazare, 1974
... I seek that essential region of the soul
where absolute evil confronts brotherhood
1
IN THOSE DAYS cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn. This was in 1947, and one of the pleasant features of that summer which I so vividly remember was the weather, which was sunny and mild, flower-fragrant, almost as if the days had been arrested in a seemingly perpetual springtime. I was grateful for that if for nothing else, since my youth, I felt, was at its lowest ebb. At twenty-two, struggling to become some kind of writer, I found that the creative heat which at eighteen had nearly consumed me with its gorgeous, relentless flame had flickered out to a dim pilot light registering little more than a token glow in my breast, or wherever my hungriest aspirations once resided. It was not that I no longer wanted to write, I still yearned passionately to produce the novel which had been for so long captive in my brain. It was only that, having written down the first few fine paragraphs, I could not produce any others, or—to approximate Gertrude Stein’s remark about a lesser writer of the Lost Generation—I had the syrup but it wouldn’t pour. To make matters worse, I was out of a job and had very little money and was self-exiled to Flatbush—like others of my countrymen, another lean and lonesome young Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the Jews.
Call me Stingo, which was the nickname I was known by in those days, if I was called anything at all. The name derives from my prep-school days down in my native state of Virginia. This school was a pleasant institution to which I was sent at fourteen by my distraught father, who found me difficult to handle after my mother died. Among my other disheveled qualities was apparently an inattention to personal hygiene, hence I soon became known as Stinky. But the years passed. The abrasive labor of time, together with a radical change of habits (I was in fact shamed into becoming almost obsessively clean), gradually wore down the harsh syllabic brusqueness of the name, slurring off into the more attractive, or less unattractive, certainly sportier Stingo. Sometime during my thirties the nickname and I mysteriously parted company, Stingo merely evaporating like a wan ghost out of my existence, leaving me indifferent to the loss. But Stingo I still was during this time about which I write. If, however, it is perplexing that the name is absent from the earlier part of this narrative, it may be understood that I am describing a morbid and solitary period in my life when, like the crazy hermit in the cave on the hill, I was rarely called by any name at all.
I was glad to be shut of my job—the first and only salaried position, excluding the military, of my life—even though its loss seriously undermined my already modest solvency. Also, I now think it was constructive to learn so early in life that I would never fit in as an office worker, anytime, anywhere. In fact, considering how I had so coveted the job in the first place, I was rather surprised at the relief, indeed the alacrity, with which I accepted my dismissal only five months later. In 1947 jobs were scarce, especially jobs in publishing, but a stroke of luck had landed me employment with one of the largest publishers of books, where I was made “junior editor”—a euphemism for manuscript reader. That the employer called the tune, in those days when the dollar was much more valuable tender than it is now, may be seen in the stark terms of my salary—forty dollars a week. After withholding taxes this meant that the anemic blue check placed on my desk each Friday by the hunchbacked little woman who managed the payroll represented emolument in the nature of a little over ninety cents an hour. But I had not been in the least dismayed by the fact that these coolie wages were dispensed by one of the most powerful and wealthy publishers in the world; young and resilient, I approached my job—at least at the very beginning—with a sense of lofty purpose; and besides, in compensation, the work bore intimations of glamour: lunch at “21,” dinner with John O’Hara, poised and brilliant but carnal-minded lady writers melting at my editorial acumen, and so on.
It soon appeared that none of this was to come about. For one thing, although the publishing house—which had prospered largely through textbooks and industrial manuals and dozens of technical journals in fields as varied and as arcane as pig husbandry and mortuary science and extruded plastics—did publish novels and nonfiction as a sideline, thereby requiring the labor of junior aestheticians like myself, its list of authors would scarcely capture the attention of anyone seriously concerned with literature. At the time I arrived, for example, the two most prominent writers being promoted were a retired World War II fleet admiral and an exceptionally flyblown ex-Communist stool pigeon whose ghostwritten mea culpa was doing middling well on the best-seller lists. Of an author of the stature of John O’Hara (although I had far more illustrious literary idols, O’Hara represented for me the kind of writer a young editor might go out and get drunk with) there was no trace. Furthermore, there was the depressing matter of the work to which I had been assigned. At that time McGraw-Hill & Company (for such was my employer’s name) lacked any literary éclat, having for so long and successfully purveyed its hulking works of technology that the small trade-book house in which I labored, and which aspired to the excellence of Scribner or Knopf, was considered something of a joke in the business. It was a little as if a vast huckstering organization like Montgomery Ward or Masters had had the effrontery to set up an intimate salon dealing in mink and chinchilla that everyone in the trade knew were dyed beaver from Japan.
So in my capacity as the lowest drudge in the office hierarchy I not only was denied the opportunity to read manuscripts even of passing merit, but was forced to plow my way daily through fiction and nonfiction of the humblest possible quality—coffee-stained and thumb-smeared stacks of Hammermill Bond whose used, ravaged
appearance proclaimed at once their author’s (or agent’s) terrible desperation and McGraw-Hill’s function as publisher of last resort. But at my age, with a snootful of English Lit. that made me as savagely demanding as Matthew Arnold in my insistence that the written word exemplify only the highest seriousness and truth, I treated these forlorn offspring of a thousand strangers’ lonely and fragile desire with the magisterial, abstract loathing of an ape plucking vermin from his pelt. I was adamant, cutting, remorseless, insufferable. High in my glassed-in cubbyhole on the twentieth floor of the McGraw-Hill Building—an architecturally impressive but spiritually enervating green tower on West Forty-second Street—I leveled the scorn that could only be mustered by one who had just finished reading Seven Types of Ambiguity upon these sad outpourings piled high on my desk, all of them so freighted with hope and clubfooted syntax. I was required to write a reasonably full description of each submission, no matter how bad the book. At first it was a lark and I honestly enjoyed the bitchery and vengeance I was able to wreak upon these manuscripts. But after a time their unrelenting mediocrity palled, and I became weary of the sameness of the job, weary too of chain-smoking and the smog-shrouded view of Manhattan, and of pecking out such callous reader’s reports as the following, which I have salvaged intact from that dry and dispiriting time. I quote them verbatim, without gloss.
William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice Page 157