“Jeff, oh, Jeff,” the minister exclaimed, “you’re not the first Christian to doubt God’s wisdom and the inscrutable mystery of his ways in the face of bitter grief. But always there is this wondrous return to faith—”
“Enough!” my father cried. “Enough! Please get the hell out of here! Vain and silly quack anyway!” The glass fell from between his fingers and soundlessly collided with the carpet, missing by a hair one of Dr. Taliaferro’s brown-and-white wing-tip shoes. “Nietzsche said it in a word about men like you. You make me want to wash my hands!”
I fled. I fled running at top speed. Anything to get away from that discord. I ran in a seizure of fright, wanting to escape from the little house that I loved, shrouded with its dark calamity. I ran down a sycamoreshaded street, listening to the pop-pop of my sneakers against the sidewalk, running in the windless heat until the heat itself, thick as fur, slowed me down to a listless walk. The village was coming awake. Those sentinel radios had begun to blare from the open windows. I heard hallelujahs as some evangelist got down to work. The air was starting to bloom with the Sabbath’s twitter and cacophony—Sunday school choruses, pipe organs, Baptist hymns, the croon of preachers. I scuffed along aimlessly up one light-dappled street, then down another, a somnambulist; never had I felt so tired. As they did every Sunday, Flying Fortresses in formation from the Army airfield droned low over the village, the engines a massed mutter at first, then swelling into a racket that hurt the eardrums, deafened. For a long moment the planes darkened the sun and the sycamores quivered beneath a torrent of vibrations. I stopped and stood still, peering upward through the shadows cast by the wings, waiting for the flight to pass. In a quick hallucination, vivid and unalarming, I saw the planes transformed: a flock of Nazi bombers dumping their cargo over the village, then vanishing like birds.
I’m not teasing, Jeff You will want to marry someone like Martha Flanders. She’s a great beauty.
Not as beautiful as thee, my darling. But let’s not talk about that—
She has an eye for you, I know. She has gorgeous legs. I've seen her in a bathing suit A very naughty divorcee. I’m sure she’s going to want you.
Addy, dear, let’s not talk about that
I resumed walking and saw Bruce Watkins coming down the far side of the street, a fishing pole over his shoulder. He had changed from his paper-route trousers into swim trunks and T-shirt, and his face had a look of worry.
“Hellfire, Paul!” he said. “Where you been? Old Man Quigley’s about off his rocker trying to figure out where you went to.”
“I don’t care,” I answered.
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I got tired.”
“What happened to your papers?”
When I didn’t reply and walked on, Bruce said: “Old Man Quigley’s in a real fit. First he was mad, then he got kind of scared. He was saying, ‘Think of the hell to pay, one of my employees gets kidnapped—’ ”
“I don’t care,” I said. I turned around. Something impelled me homeward. Bruce called to me again, but I didn’t hear the words. His cry trailed me through the phantasmagoria of the morning, a landscape made more strange because of my jittery exhaustion and my scratchy, unfocused eyes, which changed the known into the bizarre: a spaniel panting on a stoop into a leering zoo carnivore, flower beds into a blur of Technicolor, lawn sprinklers into grandiose fountains. Once in my near-trance I stumped my toe against the sidewalk’s upthrust warp and came close to sprawling on the grass.
Then, just as I reached the house and took a step onto the lawn, I heard my mother singing. I stopped. Chill after chill coursed through me at the sound of that anthem, soaring clear and jubilant in the still air, undiminished in strength and certitude, incantatory as ever in the way it voiced its utterance of loving praise. Mother is going to live, I thought feverishly. She’s risen from bed. She’s singing. She’s going to be well like Florence said she’d be.
Ist auf deinem Psalter, Vater der Lie-be …
Yet the moment of astonishing joy into which I had been freed was, like the voice itself, an illusion, and this I realized almost immediately, sensing the foolishness of my expectation and the mistake. For why would a chorus of men be accompanying my mother, as it was now, and an orchestra too? Hope evaporated, disappeared. I went into the house, passed through the living room and down the hallway to my mother’s sanctuary, from which the music was coming, and then heard the familiar tick-tick of the worn record, spinning on the turntable of the phonograph. I crept into the music room, trying to make no sound. There my father stood with a hand propped against the wall, brooding on the sun-drenched lawn and the flower beds while the steel needle tracked its way across the sizzling shellac grooves and let the room fill with this final passage of Brahms, turned up to the highest volume, so that the hymnal sonorities of the music, enveloping all—the busts of Schubert and Brahms and Beethoven, the portraits of the great virtuosi, the image of my mother herself, captured in a flicker of bygone merriment—shook me again with such ferocity that for an instant I thought I could see her there, seated at the piano by the window, her voice raised exultantly as it had been long before. But then the record came to an end and Papa removed the needle.
“Paul, son,” he said, “where have you been? You look so tired. You all right? Do you have a fever? You must go to sleep.”
“I was staying down at the pier, Papa,” I replied. “I didn’t want to come home right away.”
“Yesterday she wanted me to play this for her,” he explained, “but I couldn’t. I guess I forgot. I wanted to play it for her anyway. It’s Lotte Lehmann. Her favorite singer, you know.” His voice was clotted with the feeble huskiness of immense fatigue. He tottered and he raised his twitching fingers to his face, alarming me. But then he ran his fingers nervously over his lips as I had seen him do before in these seizures, a pantomime both sly and clumsy, trying to mask the odor of alcohol. He shouldn’t be drinking, I thought again, even now in all of this. Dreading such moments as I did, I shrank from him not through any threat or fear of disorder but because in his new disguise, that of a stranger, he was unpredictable and unfatherly, a freak. And at that instant, as if to demonstrate the outlandish behavior that cowed me and made me want to flee him, he fell to his knees on the floor in front of me and crooked his arm around my waist, pulling me close and pressing his head against my shoulder. The impetuous, almost savage, embrace—his furious gust of emotion—took me off guard and made me give an inward groan. Kneeling, he clung to me as a drowning man would, and for long seconds he felt as if he might pull me down; but then he let go of me, and in the buoyant release I drew back and beheld his rage and pain.
“Paul, son,” he blurted, too loud, “remember this morning! Remember what I have to say! Remember this morning!” And once more he grasped me tightly.
Numb with despair, I could say nothing.
“Repeat these words after me. Are you listening? Although earth’s foundations crumble and the mountains be shaken into the midst of the seas... Are you listening? Say them after me!”
“Although earth’s foundations crumble ...” I faltered and fell silent.
“Say them after me, son!” He gripped me hurtfully.
“Papa!” I implored him, weeping.
“Yet alone shall I prevail! That’s what you must understand, son. Yet alone shall I prevail! Say it after me!”
“Although earth’s foundations crumble and the mountains be shaken ...”
“Into the midst of the seas!”
“Into the midst of the seas!” I echoed.
“Yet alone shall I prevail!”
We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable. Sometimes we can fantasize it out of existence. I recall repeating in bewilderment the words he commanded me to say—“Yet alone shall I prevail!”—while my mind composed such other words as would distract me from the moment’s anguish. My name is Paul Whitehurst, it is the eleventh of September, 1938, when Prague Awaits
Hitler Ultimatum. Thus lulled by history, I let myself be elevated slowly up and up through the room’s hot, dense shadows. And there, floating abreast of the immortal musicians, I was able to gaze down impassively on the grieving father and the boy pinioned in his arms.
A Biography of William Styron
William Styron was born on June 11, 1925, in Newport News, Virginia, to W.C. and Pauline Styron. He was one of the preeminent American authors of his generation. His works, which include the bestseller Sophie’s Choice (1979) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), garnered broad acclaim for their elegant prose and insights into human psychology. Styron’s fiction and nonfiction writings draw heavily from the events of his life, including his Southern upbringing, his mother’s death from cancer in 1939, his family history of slave ownership, and his experience as a United States marine.
Growing up, Styron was an average student with a rebellious streak, but his unique literary talent was markedly apparent from a young age. After high school, he attended Davidson College in Charlotte, North Carolina, for a year in the reserve officer training program before transferring to Duke University, where he worked on his B.A. in literature. Styron was called up into the marines after just four terms at Duke, but World War II ended while he was in San Francisco awaiting deployment to the Pacific, just before the planned invasion of Japan. He then finished his studies and moved to New York City, taking a job in the editorial department of the publisher McGraw-Hill.
W.C.’s recognition of his son’s potential was crucial to Styron’s development as a writer, especially as W.C., an engineer at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, provided financial support while his son wrote his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951). Published when Styron was twenty-six years old, Lie Down in Darkness was a critical and commercial success, and the culmination of years spent perfecting his manuscript. Shortly after the book’s publication, however, Styron was recalled to military service as a reservist during the Korean War. His experience at a training camp in North Carolina later became the source material for his anti-war novella The Long March (1953), which Norman Mailer proclaimed “as good an eighty pages as any American has written since the war, and I really think it’s much more than that.”
Starting in 1952, after his service in the reserves, Styron lived in Europe for two years, where he was a founding member, with George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, of The Paris Review. He also met and married his wife, Rose, with whom he went on to have four children. Styron’s second major novel, Set This House on Fire (1960), drew upon his time in Europe. He spent years preparing and writing the subsequent novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), which became his most celebrated—and most controversial—work. Published at the height of the civil rights movement, the novel won the Pulitzer Prize and was hailed as a complex and sympathetic portrait of Turner, though it was criticized by some who objected to a white author interpreting the thoughts and actions of the black leader of a slave revolt. Styron followed with another bestseller, Sophie’s Choice (1979), the winner of the 1980 National Book Award. The novel, which was made into an Academy Award-winning film of the same name, borrowed from Styron’s experience at McGraw-Hill as well as his interest in the psychological links between the Holocaust and American slavery.
In 1982, Styron published his first compilation of essays, This Quiet Dust. Three years later he was beset by a deep clinical depression, which he wrote about in his acclaimed memoir Darkness Visible (1990). The book traces his journey from near-suicide to recovery. His next book, A Tidewater Morning (1993), was perhaps his most autobiographical work of fiction. It recalled three stories of the fictional Paul Whitehurst, one of which depicted Whitehurst’s mother’s death when he was a young boy, an event that mirrored Pauline Styron’s death when Styron was thirteen years old. The book was Styron’s last major work of fiction. He spent the remainder of his life with Rose, writing letters and dividing his time between Roxbury, Connecticut, and Martha’s Vineyard. William Styron died of pneumonia on November 1, 2006.
William Styron in 1926 at ten months old. He was an only child, born in a seaside hospital in Newport News, Virginia. As an adult, Styron would describe his childhood as happy, secure, and relatively uneventful.
The Elizabeth Buxton Hospital in Newport News, Virginia, in 1927, two years after William Styron’s birth. Styron was born on the second floor, delivered by Dr. Joseph T. Buxton, whose daughter, Elizabeth, would become Styron’s stepmother in 1941.
The house where Styron grew up, in Newport News, Virginia, and where he lived with his family from 1925 until he was fifteen. Styron’s youth in Newport News instilled in him a sense of the tangibility of history that would later form the bedrock of many of his novels.
The photo from Styron’s sophomore-year high school yearbook, taken in 1939. He did poorly in school that year, earning mostly Cs and Ds and getting in trouble for disobedience. His father sent him to Christchurch boarding school in Virginia in 1940 to finish his last two years of high school, hoping the change would make Styron more focused and disciplined.
As a youth, Styron worked at the Hilton Village Movie Theater in Newport News. It was in this theater that he first saw movies such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Grapes of Wrath, which sparked his lifelong interest in film. Today, the building, above, is home to the Peninsula Community Theatre, which presents musicals, dramas, and children’s plays.
It was while traveling as the manager of his high school football team that William Styron, top left in the photograph above, first saw the historical marker commemorating the 1831 Nat Turner slave rebellion that would ultimately inspire his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner.
Styron as a young Marine circa 1944. In training at Parris Island, South Carolina, Styron proved to be a subpar marksman because of a congenital cataract in his right eye, a condition he did not report when enlisting in the military. Determined to avoid getting discharged, the right-handed Styron learned to shoot his M1 rifle left-handed so he could use his left eye as his shooting eye.
In a January 24, 1951, letter to his father, Styron says of his recently completed first novel, “now … I can truthfully feel that I’ve not only written a novel, but a good novel, perhaps even a really fine novel … and I hope it gives some people a pleasure in inverse proportion to the pain it’s caused me in the writing.”
The first galleys of Lie Down in Darkness, 1951, signed by the author. Styron based the novel’s matriarch, Helen Loftis, on his stepmother, Elizabeth Buxton, whom he depicted as a self-righteous, angry, intolerant woman. Other characters in the novel were collages of people Styron had known in his youth.
In a letter to his father dated April 8, 1953, Styron says, “I think it will probably interest you further to know that I am going to get myself married to [a] girl named Rose … suffice it to say that she’s the girl from whose presence I get the greatest sense of well-being and fulfillment that I’ve ever had.”
The announcement of Styron’s wedding to Rose Burgunder at the Campidoglio in Rome on May 4, 1953. The couple spent the early days of their marriage in Ravello, above the Amalfi Coast of southern Italy, hiking, playing tennis, swimming in the ocean, reading, writing, and hosting friends.
The Styron and Peyton families at the Styron home in Connecticut in 1960. Styron named the character Peyton Loftis in Lie Down in Darkness after these close family friends. In front are Thomas Styron, William Styron, Susanna Styron, and Paola Styron. Rose Styron stands behind William on the left.
Styron later in life, when he spent much time outdoors on long walks with Rose or his dogs. His health deteriorated gradually until his death in 2006.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1990 by William Styron
copyright © renewed 2010 by the Estate of William Styron
All photographs courtesy of the Duke University Archives, except photograph of Styron in later years, courtesy of Susanna Styron, and photographs of Styron’s childhood house and the Hilton Village Movie Theater, both © 2010 Open Road Integrated Media, LLC.