This is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.
Copyright © 2015 by Rose Styron
Foreword copyright © 2015 by Tom Brokaw
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the University of South Carolina Press for permission to reprint four lines from “In the Tree House at Night” by James Dickey (from The Complete Poems of James Dickey, copyright © 2013 The University of South Carolina)
Photograph on this page © Mariana Cook 1982
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Styron, William, 1925–2006, author.
[Essays. Selections]
My generation : collected nonfiction / William Styron; edited by James L. W. West III.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-8129-9705-7
eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9706-4
I. West, James L. W., editor. II. Title.
PS3569.T9A6 2015
814′.54—dc23
2014038029
eBook ISBN 9780812997064
www.atrandom.com
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Jo Anne Metsch
Cover design: Anna Bauer
Cover photograph: © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos
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Foreword
TOM BROKAW
A few years ago I made a pilgrimage to Rowan Oak, the stately but deserted home of William Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi, and wandered through the great man's library.
Even in midday light it was a dim, dusty room with no furniture, but the shelves were lined with books. By chance, one caught my eye: Lie Down in Darkness, the first novel by my friend Bill Styron of the Virginia Tidewater.
In his inscription which as I recall Bill addressed to “Mr. Faulkner,” Styron introduced himself a young Southern writer and explained that this was his first novel.
It was thrilling just to hold the book and imagine the day Faulkner received it, smoking his pipe, turning it over, reading the inscription, perhaps carrying it into the room where I now stood.
That and more came back to me as I read Bill's account for Life magazine of Faulkner's death and funeral. It was Styron as reporter, gracefully moving through the “hot, sweaty languor bordering on desperation.”
“People in Mississippi have learned to move gradually, almost timidly, in this climate,” he wrote. “Black and white, they walk with both caution and deliberation.”
And in this collection of nonfiction about his generation and time, Styron is deliberate but neither cautious nor timid.
He writes about his generation, the South, and race with a voice that is at once lyrical and unsparing. Bill, the grandson of a slave owner, describes himself as practically a brother to James Baldwin, the tiny, fiery African American who wrote with uncompromising passion about the long overdue need for racial equality.
As you might expect, there are several references to The Confessions of Nat Turner, Styron's initially successful novel based on the true story of a rebellious slave in the nineteenth century who led a revolt against slave owners.
It was scheduled to become, as they say, a major motion picture, but by then the black consciousness movement was in full voice and Styron was condemned as a “whitey,” incapable of writing about a black hero.
Race is a continuing theme for this son of the South, as it has been for many white Southern writers, and Styron takes it north, into his adopted state of Connecticut, to the murder trial of a mentally challenged black man with a lifetime of poverty. His guilt was indisputable, but a death sentence—was that justice? Would it have been for a white defendant with the same limits?
Reading this evocative collection reminded me of the excitement I felt as a young man in the fifties, knowing that James Jones would be out with a new novel, or Truman Capote, James Dickey, Terry Southern, Nelson Algren, Philip Roth. They're all here, Styron's boon companions, and by extension ours as well.
It was a golden time in American literature, as this new generation took hold of social issues and made them the stuff of great books. They also were masters of the nonfiction form, as Styron is here.
Mailer's provocative essays on Vietnam. Capote on murder in Kansas. Roth on social issues. John Updike's peerless farewell to Ted Williams at Fenway. They made way for Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion, who moved gracefully between fiction and nonfiction.
In another nonfiction book, Bill wrote about his bout with depression, a haunting and yet instructive guide for others who were dealing with similar issues. Two of his closest friends were also struggling with depression. Art Buchwald and Mike Wallace often walked the beaches of Martha's Vineyard with Bill as a kind of three-man support group.
Art later complained, in his Buchwaldian way, “We all had depression, but Bill was the only one who made money out of it.”
Styron was meant for the literary life and the people who occupy it. Here he pays tribute to their work and personalities. He also shares his affection for his life-mate, the indomitable Rose, and their four spirited children. Styron would be incomplete without them.
Thank you, Bill, for sharing.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword by Tom Brokaw
Editor’s Note
Apprenticeship
Autobiographical
The Prevalence of Wonders
Moviegoer
Christchurch
William Blackburn
Almost a Rhodes Scholar
A Case of the Great Pox
The South
The Oldest America
The James
Children of a Brief Sunshine
Race and Slavery
This Quiet Dust
A Southern Conscience
Slave and Citizen
Overcome
Slavery's Pain, Disney's Gain
Our Common History
Acceptance
In the Southern Camp
A Voice from the South
Nat Turner Revisited
Final Solutions
Auschwitz
Hell Reconsidered
Auschwitz and Hiroshima
A Wheel of Evil Come Full Circle
Disorders of the Mind
Why Primo Levi Need Not Have Died
Prozac Days, Halcion Nights
“Interior Pain”
Warfare and Military Life
MacArthur
The Red Badge of Literature
A Farewell to Arms
Calley
Arnheiter
The Wreckage of an American War
A Father's Prophecy
Prisoners
The Death-in-Life of Benjamin Reid
Benjamin Reid: Aftermath
Aftermath of “Aftermath”
The Joint
A Death in Canaan
Death Row
Presidential
Havanas in Camelot
Les Amis du Président
François Mitterrand
Family Values
Clinton and the Puritans
Reports
Chicago: 1968
Down the Nile
Literary
Lie Down in Darkness
“I'll Have to Ask Indianapolis—”
Letter to an Editor
The Paris Review
The Long March
We Weren't in It for the Money
The Book on Lolita
Fessing Up
The MacDowell Medal
Antecedents
William Faulkner
“O Lost!” Etc.
An Elegy for F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Second Flowering
A Literary Forefather
Friends and Contemporaries
My Generation
Robert Penn Warren
Lillian's Bosom
Irwin Shaw
Jimmy in the House
Celebrating Capote
James Jones
Transcontinental with Tex
Peter Matthiessen
Bennett Cerf
Bob Loomis
Philip Rahv
Remembering Ralph
C. Vann Woodward
It Cannot Be Long
My Neighbor Arthur
Big Jim
The Contumacious Mr. Roth
Crusades, Complaints, Gripes
If You Write for Television…
Fie on Bliss
The Habit
Cigarette Ads and the Press
Too Late for Conversion or Prayer
Bagatelles
The Big Love
Candy
Amours
Virginia Durr for President
My Daughters
Our Model Marriage
In Closing
Walking with Aquinnah
“In Vineyard Haven”
Acknowledgments
William Styron's Nonfiction: A Checklist
Notes
By William Styron
About the Author
Editor’s Note
My Generation includes all individual pieces of writing from William Styron's two previous collections of nonfiction: forty-four items from This Quiet Dust and fourteen from Havanas in Camelot. To these have been added thirty-three new items—essays, memoirs, op-eds, articles, eulogies, speeches—seven of them previously unpublished. The result is a comprehensive collection that covers a period of fifty years, from October 7, 1951, when Styron published an autobiographical note in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, to August 19, 2001, when he delivered a tribute to Philip Roth at the MacDowell Colony. My Generation is not, however, an omnium gatherum. A full listing of Styron's published nonfiction is provided in the back matter of this book; his papers at Duke University contain additional items that have not yet seen print. Most of these writings will likely be included, some years hence, in a collected edition of Styron's works. For now, My Generation brings together his most important essays, reviews, and memoirs and demonstrates the high quality and wide range of his achievement in nonfiction.
This Quiet Dust, the only nonfiction collection that Styron published during his lifetime, exists in two editions. The first was published by Random House in 1982, the second by Vintage Books in 1993. For the Vintage edition Styron added six previously uncollected essays and substituted a later reminiscence of his friend James Jones for the memoir that he had included in the 1982 edition. Styron prepared a good deal of new writing for the edition of 1982: a “Note to the Reader”; separate introductions to three of the sections; and a further report on the fate of Benjamin Reid, the prisoner whose cause he had originally taken up in 1962. Of these materials only the report on Reid, called “Aftermath of ‘Aftermath,’ ” is included here. The other pieces were prepared specifically for This Quiet Dust and belong with that volume, which remains in print. Havanas in Camelot, published in 2008, two years after Styron's death, is also still in print, as is Darkness Visible, Styron's memoir of depression, a separate work of nonfiction that is one of his great achievements.
Styron organized the items in This Quiet Dust into eleven sections. Following his example I have grouped the writings in My Generation into sixteen categories. Most of the items within each category are presented chronologically, by date of composition or publication, but I have departed from this practice occasionally to allow items to play against one another or to show the progress of Styron's thinking on a particular issue over time.
For previously collected items in My Generation, I have followed the texts from This Quiet Dust and Havanas in Camelot. For heretofore uncollected writings, I have used the texts of first periodical or newspaper appearances. When a manuscript or typescript version of an individual item survives in Styron's papers, I have checked the published text against that earlier text. Apart from a few typos, however, I have found no significant variations. Occasionally a magazine or newspaper was compelled to shorten a piece of writing for space; in these cases the longer version is published here. The texts of the previously unpublished items are taken from manuscripts or typescripts among Styron's papers. A citation giving date of publication or composition appears within brackets at the end of each item. Styron's annotations from This Quiet Dust have been preserved. I have added several editorial annotations, marked by my initials. A few other notes and citations appear in the back matter of the volume.
In the spring of 1989 Styron was invited to review Michael Shnayerson's biography of Irwin Shaw for Vanity Fair. Styron began writing the review and set down some two thousand words, intending to provide a full reminiscence of his friend, who had served as an early supporter and mentor. At this point Styron was informed by the editors at Vanity Fair that the magazine wanted only one thousand words. Styron recalibrated and produced a review of that length, much shorter on incident and detail. This review appeared in the August 1989 issue. For this volume, I have combined the original two-thousand-word beginning, previously unpublished, with an abbreviated version of the Vanity Fair text. The abbreviations eliminate repetitions; the juncture between the two versions is indicated by three asterisks. This portmanteau text appears in the section “Friends and Contemporaries.” Manuscripts of both versions survive in Styron's papers at Duke, and the full Vanity Fair text is available online at the website of that magazine. The original two-thousand-word beginning appears in My Generation in its entirety.
Styron was primarily a novelist, but he took quite seriously his role as a public author and invested a good deal of effort and energy in the composition of his nonfiction. He was closely attuned to the issues and concerns of his time: as the years passed and he found himself unable to move forward with his fiction, he turned increasingly to the essay and op-ed forms to put his ideas on the record. He was also a good memoirist and found the form an agreeable one in which to write. During his last years he produced much excellent nonfiction, including “Nat Turner Revisited,” “Prozac Days, Halcion Nights,” “Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” “A Case of the Great Pox,” “Havanas in Camelot,” and “A Wheel of Evil Come Full Circle.” All of these pieces are included here, together with much other noteworthy writing from earlier in his career. It is my belief that he would have been pleased by the publication of this volume.
J.L.W.W. III
May 1, 2014
Apprenticeship
Autobiographical
I was born in Newport News, Va., in June of 1925, and after two and a half years in the Marines and a brief editorial job, I met Hiram Haydn, who encouraged me to start a novel, which I did. It took me three years to finish, writing steadily and living variously in Durham, N.C., Nyack, N.Y., and on West 88th Street. The process of writing the book was very painful. I wrote it in longhand on large yellow sheets, and some days, after three or four hours of pacing and thinking and listening to music, I managed to put down as much as forty or fifty words. Toward the end, though—last winter—the thing became clearer to me, and the Marine Corps was breathing down my neck again, so I began to write pretty fast; the final seventy or eighty pages, in fact, I wrote in less than three weeks.
I was called up last spring to the 8th Marines training at Camp Lejeune, N.C. Though I have now been returned to inactive duty, like all my fellow Marine reservists, who for the second time in ten years have had their families, jobs, and lives generally disrupted, I am pretty much i
n the dark about the future.
I would like to go to Europe, and to read a lot more than I've been doing lately. I would like to discover the moral and political roots of our trouble, and to learn why it has come about that young men, like my friends at Lejeune and, more particularly, in places like Korea, have to suffer so endlessly in our time. If I found out why all this has come about I'd be able to write intelligently and without so much of the self-conscious whimper that characterized a lot of the writing of the ’20s, and consequently perhaps I'd be able to commemorate not a lost generation but a generation that never was even found, and work out, to my own satisfaction at least, a vision of hope for the future. But it will require more study and more thinking.
[New York Herald Tribune Book Review, October 7, 1951. Written for the publication of Lie Down in Darkness, by invitation from the newspaper.]
The Prevalence of Wonders
Rome
I hardly think that anyone in so short a space can do much justice to what he believes, and perhaps least of all should this be attempted by any writer, whose works, finally, should be sufficient expression of his credo. Lots of writers find themselves hopelessly baffled when it comes to dealing with ideas, and even though I suspect that this is a grave and lazy weakness, I nonetheless count myself among the group and, in a symposium of this sort, flounder about in a vague wonderland of notes and inconclusive jottings. But I was asked to write a “frank and honest statement of your feelings about your art, your country, and the world,” so I will proceed, as frankly and as honestly as I can.
About my art: I know little of the mechanics of criticism and have been able to read only a very few critics, but I respect those people—critics and readers—who feel that the art of writing is valuable, since, like music or sailing or drinking beer, it is a pleasure, and since, at its best, it does something new to the heart. I for one would rather listen to music or go sailing, or drink beer while doing both, than talk about literature, but I am not averse to talking about it at all, just as lawyers talk about law and surgeons about surgery. And I take it quite seriously. I have no conscious illusions of myself as teacher or preacher; I do know that when I feel that I have been writing my best I am aware of having gathered together some of the actualities of myself and my experience, projected these whole and breathing on the page, and thereby have enjoyed some peculiar poetic fulfillment. This is a self-indulgence; but I trust that it sometimes approaches art, a word which I'm not ashamed to use from time to time, and I trust that it might also please some reader, that person who, in my most avid self-indulgence, I am not so ingenuous as ever really to forget. So I might say that I am not interested in writing propaganda, but only in that sort of personal propaganda engendered by afternoons of vicious solitude and the weird, joyful yearning which it pleases oneself to think, just for a couple of seconds, that Bach must have felt. If out of all this, placed as vividly as I can place them in their moment in time, there are people who emerge worthy of a few moments of someone's recollection, I am satisfied. Good people and bad people—bad enough to justify the truth at every signpost in one's most awful nightmares, good enough to satisfy every editor on Time magazine and so much the worse.