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'William Styron: A Life' by James West III

Reality Doesn't Do Styron Justice

Sunday, May 17, 1998

By Hilary Masters

	William Styron: A Life By James West III Random House $35.00

James West's biography of William Styron is an immensely readable book, rich in its review of the history and times of its subject and containing the most authentic representation of a writer at work that this reader can remember. Yet with all its fine qualities, this life's story strangely disappoints, through no fault of its author - a professor of English at Penn State University - because the Aristotelian peak we have become accustomed to in novels and movies has been misplaced.

Too bad that Styron did not have his breakdown, which brought him close to suicide, midway in his life, say, just after the publication of "Set This House on Fire," because then the story could have reached a traditional climax and gone on to the triumphs of "The Confessions of Nat Turner" and "Sophie's Choice."

But this is real life, as they say in the movies, and what a life it has been for William Styron. Born and raised in Tidewater, Va., he did not have a typical Southern upbringing - always just a little on the outside even though his college experiences would be at Davidson and Duke, both in North Carolina.

His mother, a native of Uniontown, got him interested in books. Language and a natural wit became useful devices for the young Styron, but he was an indifferent if not rebellious scholar. He all but flunked out of Davidson College, its dreary Presbyterian campus antagonistic to his high spirits. He fled into the Marine Corps, completing officer training even with a bad right eye that forced him to shoot left-handed, not easy to do with the old M-1 rifle. After World War II, he returned to Duke, where the Marine Corps had posted him for part of his officer training, and into the wise and demanding mentorship of William Blackburn.

Blackburn was also an "outsider," never to rise above the rank of associate professor, but he had put together several courses that would now be called "creative writing."

In these, Styron received invaluable demonstrations of style, but especially, he was drilled in the values of discipline and precision of expression, two entities that would sustain and distinguish his work habits and his work. He published several stories in the school magazine.

Like a storybook hero, he came to New York and through Blackburn met Hiram Haydn, an influential editor. The old professor also secured him a job at a publishing house. The doors had opened, and he set about writing his first novel, "Lie Down in Darkness."

In the hand-to-mouth existence in shared apartments and on borrowed couches known to many young unpublished writers, Styron meticulously composed this superb work that he was to publish at the age of 26, but history was about to overtake him. The Korean War broke in 1950, and as a reserve officer, he was called back into the Marines.

He finished the last 100 pages in a sustained burst of determination and energy, suffering a kind of postpartum crackup on the subway ride to turn in the manuscript - a foreshadowing of the severe mental disturbance to come.

West lets us observe the mind and sensibilities of the novelist maturing during his second tour with the Marines and how his attitudes toward the institutions of American society were shaped by mindless events at Camp Lejeune that were to result in his remarkable "The Long March," a book that was to become, for some of us, a "Red Badge of Courage." Styron was to rebel once again, this time against the Corps that he also loved, and claimed his bad right eye to get a medical discharge.

The rest is not only history, but a near-Fitzgeraldian parable, the rise of a golden boy of American literature. "Lie Down in Darkness" was a critical and financial success and was short-listed for a National Book Award. Styron was given a Prix de Rome by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and from here on his ascent was greased with honey; the gods were clearly enamored.

In Rome he meets, for a second time, the beautiful Rose Burgunder, an aspiring poet and something of an heiress. They fall in love and marry. In Paris, on the way to Rome, he encounters Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton and helps them found The Paris Review. Other friends and acquaintances would now or soon after include James Jones, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Terry Southern and James Baldwin; moreover, J.D. Salinger, Carson McCullers and Wright Morris were in waving distance.

Quite a crowd, and it may be interesting to note that there is not a single master of fine arts degree among them (ignoring only for a moment Philip Roth). In addition, it might be instructive to compare their influence and achievements with the likes of Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, John Irving and Jim Harrison - those dour caballeros of contemporary American letters.

Work and personal happiness seemed to fructify each other. Children were born, and the family settled into an old farmhouse in Connecticut - Arthur Miller, Malcolm Cowley, Alexander Calder and other luminaries were village familiars. Later, a summer place in Martha's Vineyard was acquired.

After six years of exacting composition, "Set This House on Fire" was published in 1960 to generally poor reviews. But French critics and readers, who had earlier rescued Faulkner from the dustbin, came to Styron's rescue; he was compared to Camus and befriended by intellectuals and politicians including Francois Mitterrand. Meanwhile, the book had remained on best-seller lists for many week's, and Random House was cleaning up. So, not all bad.

At this point, an image that West has been skillfully slipping into the narrative becomes dominant; it has been stalking Sty ron's imagination since boyhood. The story of Nat Turner, the slave who led a rebellion against white masters in 1831, had first appeared to Billy Styron in a sixth-grade school text. Later, a road sign marking the site of the rebelli on was encountered during a high school football team trip. This stone tablet seemed to permanently inscribe the character into this mind. From that moment on, he began an almost obsessive collection of materials and accounts of the uprising, including Turner's supposed confession just before his hanging.

Also important to his musings were the long conversations with his friend Baldwin, who lived for a time on the Styron farm in Connecticut. According to West, these discussions persuaded Styron to appropriate Baldwin's personality and voice for his fictional Nat Turner - especially the black novelist's "conflicting attitudes toward whites."

The 1967 publication of "The Confessions of Nat Turner" prompted one of the nastiest literary controversies of our time. Initially praised, and with enormous sales and reprintings, the novel eventually sparked a debate about its authenticity, and Styron was particularly damned by several black writers for his audacity as a white author to write in the persona of a black slave.

Mostly, Styron ignored these attacks and refused to proffer the evidence of his considerable research. He further enraged these voices by an author's note in the novel that claimed it to be more a "meditation on history" than a work of fiction.

It is at this point in the biography that the exigencies of real life seem to have conflicted with the rules of narrative. We are but 60 pages from the biography's conclusion, except for its excellent notes, and "Sophie's Choice" and the circumstances of Styron's breakdown and near-suicide have yet to be explored.

"Darkness Visible," Styron's memoir of the circumstances of his illness, is quickly covered to give the biography a happy ending, but it is possible the lopsided effect of t his structure is not due to West's writing or for a sudden disinterest.

James West III is, in all events, an excellent guide for this most amazing trajectory across the American literary cosmos. From "Lie Down in Darkness" through "Sophie's Choice," through good times and bad and now back to good at the age of 73, William Styron's life, his mind and work have been deftly charted and put on display.

Hilary Masters is a novelist and essayist who teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.