William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (229 page)

It all sounded very convincing to me. He was as brilliant on Dreiser as he was on Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. Or the theme of suicide, about which he seemed to possess a certain preoccupation, and which he touched on more than once, though in a manner which skirted the purely morbid. The novel which he esteemed above all others, he said, was
Madame Bovary,
not alone because of its formal perfection but because of the resolution of the suicide motif; Emma’s death by self-poisoning seeming to be so beautifully inevitable as to become one of the supreme emblems, in Western literature, of the human condition. And once in an extravagant piece of waggery, speaking of reincarnation (about which he said he was not so skeptical as to rule it beyond possibility), he claimed to have been in a past life the only Jewish Albigensian monk—a brilliant friar named St. Nathan le Bon who had single-handedly promulgated that crazy sect’s obsessive penchant for self-destruction, which was based on the reasoning that if life is evil, it is necessary to hasten life’s end. “The only thing I hadn’t foreseen,” he observed, “is that I’d be brought back to live in the fucked-up twentieth century.”

Yet despite the mildly unsettling nature of this concern of his, I never felt during these effervescent evenings the slightest hint of the depression and cloudy despair in him which Sophie had alluded to, the violent seizures whose fury she had experienced firsthand. He was so much the embodiment of everything I deemed attractive and even envied in a human being that I couldn’t help but suspect that the somber side of her Polish imagination had dreamed up these intimations of strife and doom. Such, I reasoned, was the stock-in-trade of Polacks.

No, I felt he was essentially too gentle and solicitous to pose any such menace as she had hinted at. (Even though I knew of his ugly moods.) My book, for example, my flowering novel. I shall never forget that priceless, affectionate outpouring. In spite of his earlier remonstrances about Southern literature falling into desuetude, his brotherly concern for my work had been constant and encouraging. Once one morning during our coffee
shmooz
he asked if he might see some of the first pages I had written.

“Why not?” he urged with that swarthily intense and furrowed expression which so often caused his smile to resemble a benign scowl. “We’re friends. I won’t interfere, I won’t comment, I won’t even make any suggestions. I’d just love to see it.” I was terrified—terrified for the straightforward reason that not a single other soul had laid eyes on my much-thumbed stack of yellow pages with their smudged and rancid margins, and my respect for Nathan’s mind was so great that I knew that if he should show displeasure with my effort, however unintentionally, it would severely dampen my enthusiasm and even my further progress. Taking a gamble one night, however, and breaking a romantically noble resolution I had made not to let anyone look at the book until its final sentence, and then only Alfred A. Knopf in person, I gave him ninety pages or so, which he read at the Pink Palace while Sophie sat with me at the Maple Court, reminiscing about her childhood and Cracow. My heart went into a bumping erratic trot when Nathan, after perhaps an hour and a half, hustled in out of the night, brow bedewed with sweat, and sprawled down opposite me next to Sophie. His gaze was level, emotionless; I feared the worst.
Stop!
I was on the verge of pleading.
You said you wouldn’t comment!
But his judgment hung in the air like an imminent clap of thunder. “You’ve read Faulkner,” he said slowly, without inflection, “you’ve read Robert Penn Warren.” He paused. “I’m sure you’ve read Thomas Wolfe, and even Carson McCullers. I’m breaking my promise about no criticism.”

And I thought: Oh shit, he’s got my number, all right, it really is just a bunch of derivative trash. I wanted to sink through the chocolate-ripple and chrome-splotched tiles of the Maple Court and disappear among the rats into the sewers of Flatbush. I clenched my eyes shut—thinking: I never should have shown it to this con man, who is now going to give me a line about Jewish writing—and at the moment I did so, sweating and a trifle nauseated, I jumped as his big hands grasped my shoulders and his lips smeared my brow with a wet and sloppy kiss. I popped my eyes open, stupefied, almost feeling the warmth of his radiant smile. “Twenty-two years old!” he exclaimed. “And oh my God, you can write! Of course you’ve read those writers, you wouldn’t be able to write a book if you hadn’t. But you’ve absorbed them, kid,
absorbed
them and made them your own. You’ve got your own
voice.
That’s the most exciting hundred pages by an unknown writer anyone’s ever read. Give me more!” Sophie, infected by his exuberance, clutched Nathan’s arm and glowed like a madonna, gazing at me as if I were the author of
War and Peace.
I choked stupidly on an unshaped little cluster of words, nearly fainting with pleasure, happier, I think—at only small risk of hyperbole—than any single moment I could then remember in a life of memorable fulfillments, however basically undistinguished. And all the rest of the evening he made a glorious fuss over my book, firing me with all the vivid encouragement which, in the deepest part of me, I knew I had desperately needed. How could I have failed to have the most helpless crush on such a generous, mind-and-life-enlarging mentor, pal, savior, sorcerer? Nathan was utterly, fatally glamorous.

July came, bringing varied weather—hot days, then oddly cool, damp days when the wanderers across the park muffled themselves in jackets and sweaters, finally several mornings at a stretch when thunderstorms grumbled and threatened but never broke. I thought that I could live there in Flatbush at Yetta’s Pink Palace forever, or certainly for the months and even years it would take to finish my masterpiece. It was hard to hold to my high-minded vows—I still fretted over the lamentably celibate nature of my existence; this aside, I felt that the routine I had established in company with Sophie and Nathan was as contented a daily state as any in which a budding writer could possibly find himself. Buoyed up by Nathan’s passionate assurance, I scribbled away like a fiend, constantly lulled by the knowledge that when the fatigue of my labors overtook me I could almost always find Sophie and Nathan, singly or together, somewhere nearby ready to share a confidence, a worry, a joke, a memory, Mozart, a sandwich, coffee, beer. With loneliness in abeyance and with my creative juices in full flow, I could not have been happier...

I could not have been happier, that is, until there came a bad sequence of events which intruded themselves on my well-being and made me realize how desperately at odds Sophie and Nathan had been (and still were) with each other, how unsimulated had been that quality in Sophie of foreboding and fright, together with the hints she had let fall of bitter discord. Then there was an even more sinister revelation. For the first time since the night of my arrival at Yetta’s house over a month before, I began to see seeping out of Nathan, almost like some visible poisonous exudate, his latent capacity for rage and disorder. And I also began gradually to understand how the turmoil that was grinding them to pieces had double origins, deriving perhaps equally from the black and tormented underside of Nathan’s nature and from the unrelinquished reality of Sophie’s immediate past, trailing its horrible smoke—as if from the very chimneys of Auschwitz—of anguish, confusion, self-deception and, above all, guilt...

I had been sitting one evening at around six o’clock at our usual table at the Maple Court, sipping a beer and reading the New York
Post.
I was awaiting Sophie—due at any moment after her day at Dr. Blackstock’s office—and Nathan, who had told me that morning over coffee that he would join us around seven, following what he knew would be an especially long, rugged day at his laboratory. I felt a little starched and formal sitting there, because I had on a clean shirt and tie and was wearing my suit for the first time since my misadventure with the Princess of Pierrepont Street. I was somewhat dismayed to discover a smear of Leslie’s lipstick, stale but still flamboyantly vermilion, on the inner edge of the lapel, but I had managed with a lot of spit and a certain readjustment to make the stain practically invisible, or enough so that my father would probably not notice. I was dressed this way because I was due to meet my father at Pennsylvania Station, where he was arriving by train from Virginia later on in the evening. I had received a letter from him only a week or so before in which he said he was planning to pay me a brief visit. His motive was sweet and patently uncomplicated: he said he missed me and since he hadn’t seen me in so long (I calculated it had been nine months or more) he wanted to reestablish, face to face, eyeball to eyeball, our mutual love and kinship. It was July, he had vacation time; he was coming up. There was something so infrangibly Southern, so old-fashioned about such a gesture that it was almost paleological, but it warmed my heart deeply, even beyond my very real affection for him.

Also, I knew it cost my father a great deal of emotional capital to venture into the great city, which he loathed utterly. His Southern hatred of New York was not the primitive, weirdly solipsistic hatred of the father of a college friend of mine from one of the more moistly paludal counties of South Carolina: this countryman’s refusal to visit New York was based on an apocalyptic and ever-haunting fantasy-scenario in which, seated at a Times Square cafeteria minding his own business, he finds the chair next to him preempted by a large, grinning, malodorous male Negro (politely or rudely preempted, it doesn’t matter; propinquity is the sole issue), whereupon he is forced to commit a felony through the necessity of seizing a Heinz Ketchup bottle and bashing it over the black bastard’s head. He then gets five years in Sing Sing. My father had less mad strictures about the city, though still intense ones. No such monstrous figment, no werewolf of race stalked the imagination of my father—a gentleman, a libertarian and a Jacksonian Democrat. He detested New York only for what he called its “barbarity,” its lack of courtesy, its total bankruptcy in the estimable domain of public manners. The snarling command of the traffic cop, the blaring insult of horns, all the needlessly raised voices of the night-denizens of Manhattan ravaged his nerves, acidified his duodenum, unhelmed his composure and his will. I wanted to see him very much, and was enormously touched that he would make the long trip north, endure the uproar and dare shoulder through the swarming, obstreperous and brutal human tides of the metropolis in order to visit his only offspring.

I waited a little restlessly for Sophie. Then my eyes lit upon something which totally captured my attention. On the third page of the
Post
that evening was an article, accompanied by a most unflattering photograph, concerning the notorious Mississippi race-baiter and demagogue, Senator Theodore Gilmore Bilbo. According to the story, Bilbo—whose face and utterances had saturated the media during the war years and those immediately following—had been admitted to the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans to undergo surgery for cancer of the mouth. One of the inferences that could be drawn from the piece was that Bilbo had left to him very little time. In the photograph he looked already a cadaver. Great irony in this, of course: “The Man” who had gained the loathing of “right-thinking” people everywhere, including the South, by his straightforward promiscuous public use of words like “nigger,” “coon,” “jigaboo,” contracting cancer in that symbolic portion of his anatomy. The petty tyrant from the piney woods who had called Mayor La Guardia of New York a “dago” and who had addressed a Jewish congressman as “Dear Kike” suffering a ripe carcinoma which would soon still that scurrilous jaw and evil tongue—it was all too much, and the
Post
laid on the irony with a dumptruck. After I read the piece, I gave a long sigh, thinking that I was awfully glad to see the old devil go. Of all those who had so foully tarnished the image of the modern South he was a leading mischief-maker, not really typical of Southern politicians but because of his blabbermouth and prominence rendering himself, in the eyes of the credulous and even not so credulous, an archetypal image of the Southern statesman and thus polluting the name of whatever was good and decent and even exemplary in the South as surely and as wickedly as those anonymous sub-anthropoids who had recently slaughtered Bobby Weed. I said to myself, again: Glad to see you go, you evil-spirited old sinner.

Yet even as the gentle brew took hold, softly marinating my senses, and I ruminated on Bilbo’s fate, I was overtaken by another emotion; I suppose it might be called regret—faint regret perhaps, yet regret. A lousy way to die, I thought. Cancer of that kind must be ghastly, those monstrous metastasizing cells so close to the brain—hideous little microscopic boll weevils invading cheek, sinuses, eye socket, jaw, filling the mouth with its fulminating virulence until the tongue, engulfed, rotted and fell dumb. I shuddered a little. Yet it was not simply this agonizing mortal blow which the senator had suffered that caused me my odd and vagrant pang. It was something else, abstract and remote, intangible yet worrisome to my spirit. I knew something about Bilbo—something more, that is, than was known by the ordinary American citizen with even a marginal concern with politics and doubtless more than the editors of the New York
Post.
Certainly my knowledge was not profound, but even in the superficiality of my understanding I felt there had been revealed to me facets of Bilbo’s character that gave the heft of flesh and the stink of real sweat to that shingle-flat cartoon of the daily press. What I knew about Bilbo was not even particularly redeeming—he would remain a first-class scoundrel until the tumor strangled off his breath or its excrescence flooded through the portals of his brain—but it had at least allowed me to perceive human bones and dimensions through the papier-mâché stock villain from Dixie.

In college—where, outside of “creative writing,” my only serious academic concern had been the study of the history of the American South—I had hacked out a lengthy term paper on that freakish and aborted political movement known as Populism, paying special attention to the Southern demagogues and rabble-rousers who had so often exemplified its seamier side. It was hardly a truly original paper, I recollect, but I put a great deal of thought and effort into its making, for a lad of twenty or so, and it earned me a glowing “A” at a time when “A’s” were hard to get. Drawing heavily on C. Vann Woodward’s brilliant study of Tom Watson of Georgia and concentrating on other hagridden folk heroes like “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman and James K. Vardaman and “Cotton Ed” Smith and Huey Long, I demonstrated how democratic idealism and honest concern for the common man were virtues which linked all these men together, at least in their early careers, along with a concomitant and highly vocal opposition to monopoly capitalism, industrial and business fat cats and “big money.” I then extrapolated from this proposition an argument to show how these men, basically decent and even visionary to begin with, were brought down by their own fatal weakness in face of the Southern racial tragedy; for each of them in the end, to one degree or another, was forced to play upon and exploit the poor-white rednecks’ ancient fear and hatred of the Negro in order to aggrandize what had degenerated into shabby ambition and lust for power.