William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (287 page)

In one of the Cadillacs, sitting next to Morty, I leafed through the Untermeyer American poetry anthology I had brought along, together with my notebook. I had suggested to Larry that I read something, and he had liked the idea. I was determined that before our last leave-taking Sophie and Nathan would hear my voice; the indecency of the Reverend DeWitt having the final word was more than I could abide, and so I thumbed diligently through the section generously allotted to Emily Dickinson, in search of the loveliest statement I could find. I recalled how, at the Brooklyn College library, it had been Emily who had brought Nathan and Sophie together; I thought it fitting that she should also bid them farewell. Euphoric, inebriate glee welled up in me irresistibly when I found the appropriate, or, should I say, perfect poem; I was softly cackling to myself at the moment that the limousine rolled up to the graveside and I spilled myself out of the car, nearly sprawling on the grass.

The Reverend DeWitt’s requiem at the cemetery was a capsulated version of what he had told us at the mortuary. I had the impression that Larry had hinted to him that he might do well to be brief. The minister contributed a tacky liturgical touch in the form of a phial of dust, which at the end of his talk he extracted from his pocket and emptied over the two coffins, half on Sophie’s and half on Nathan’s, six feet away. But it was not the ordinary humble dust of mortality. He told the mourners that the dust had been gathered from the six continents of the world, plus subglacial Antarctica, and represented our need to remember that death is universal, afflicting people of all creeds, colors and nationalities. Again I had a wrenching remembrance of how in his lucid periods Nathan had so little patience for DeWitt’s brand of imbecility. With what joy he would have mocked and skewered, on the genius of his mimicry, this ponderous charlatan. But Larry was nodding in my direction, and I stepped forward. In the stillness of the hot, bright afternoon the only sound was a soft thrumming of bees, lured by the flowers banked at the edge of the two graves. Wobbling and rather numb now, I thought of Emily, and bees, and their immensity in her song, their buzzing metaphor of eternity.

“Ample make this bed.

Make this bed with awe;

In it wait till judgment break

Excellent and fair.”

I hesitated for some time before I continued. I had no trouble shaping the words, but hilarity halted me, this time mixed with grief. Wasn’t there some inexpressible meaning in the fact that my entire experience of Sophie and Nathan was circumscribed by a bed, from the moment—which now seemed centuries past—when I first heard them above me in the glorious circus of their lovemaking to the final tableau on that same bed, whose image would stay with me until dotage or my own death erased it from my mind? I think it was then that I began to feel myself falter and fail, and break slowly apart.

“Be its mattress straight,

Be its pillow round;

Let no sunrise’ yellow noise

Interrupt this ground.”

Many pages ago I mentioned the love-hate relationship I maintained toward the journal I kept in those days of my youth. The vivid and valuable passages—the ones which in general I refrained from throwing away—seemed to me later to be the ones having to do with my emasculations, my thwarted manhood and truncated passions. They involved my nights of black despair with Leslie Lapidus and Mary Alice Grimball, and they also had a legitimate place in this narrative. So much of the rest of what I wrote was made up of callow musings, pseudo-gnomic pretentiousness, silly excursions into philosophical seminars where I had no business horning in, that I decisively cut off any chance of their perpetuation, by consigning them, a few years ago, to a spectacular backyard auto-da-fé. A few random pages survived the blaze, but even these I kept less for any intrinsic worth than for what they added to the historical record—the record, that is, of myself. Of the half-dozen or so leaves I’ve kept from those final days, for instance—beginning with the frenzied scribbling I made in the latrine of the train coming up from Washington and extending to the day after the funeral—there are exactly three short lines I’ve found worth preserving. And even these have interest not because there is anything about them that is close to imperishable, but because, artless as they now seem, they were at least wrung like vital juices from a being whose very survival was in question for a time.

Someday I will understand Auschwitz.
This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been:
Someday I will write about Sophie’s life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world.
Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.

The query: “At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?”

And the answer: “Where was man?”

The second line I have resurrected from the void may be a little too facile, but I have kept it.
Let your love flow out on all living things.
These words at a certain level have the quality of a strapping homily. Nonetheless, they are remarkably beautiful, strung together in their honest lumplike English syllables, and as I see them now on the ledger’s page, the page itself the hue of a dried daffodil and oxidized slowly by time into near-transparency, my eyes are arrested by the furious underlining—
scratch scratch scratch,
lacerations—as if the suffering Stingo whom I once inhabited, or who once inhabited me, learning at firsthand and for the first time in his grown-up life about death, and pain, and loss, and the appalling enigma of human existence, was trying physically to excavate from that paper the only remaining—perhaps the only bearable—truth.
Let your love flow out on all living things.

But there are a couple of problems about this precept of mine. The first is, of course, that it is not mine. It springs from the universe and is the property of God, and the words have been intercepted—on the wing, so to speak—by such mediators as Lao-tzu, Jesus, Gautama Buddha and thousands upon thousands of lesser prophets, including your narrator, who heard the terrible truth of their drumming somewhere between Baltimore and Wilmington and set them down with the fury of a madman sculpting in stone. Thirty years later they are still abroad in the ether; I heard them celebrated exactly as I have written them in a splendid twangy song played on a country-music program while I drove through the New England night. But this brings us to the second problem: the words’ truth—or, if not their truth, their impossibility. For did not Auschwitz effectively block the flow of that titanic love, like some fatal embolism in the bloodstream of mankind? Or alter the nature of love entirely, so as to reduce to absurdity the idea of loving an ant, or a salamander, or a viper, or a toad, or a tarantula, or a rabies virus—or even blessed and beautiful things—in a world which permitted the black edifice of Auschwitz to be built? I do not know. Perhaps it is too early to tell. At any rate, I have preserved those words as a reminder of some fragile yet perdurable hope...

The last words I’ve kept from the journal comprise a line of poetry, my own. I hope they are forgivable in terms of the context out of which they arose. For after the funeral I drew a near-blank, as they said in those days about drunkenness in its most amnesic mode. I went down to Coney Island by subway, thinking to somehow destroy my grief. I didn’t know at first what had drawn me back to those honky-tonk streets, which had never seemed to me to be among the city’s most lovable attractions. But that late afternoon the weather held warm and fair, I was infinitely lonely, and it seemed as good a place as any to lose myself. Steeplechase Park was shut down, as were all the other amusement emporia, and the water was too cold for swimmers, but the balmy day had attracted New Yorkers in droves. In the neon glare at twilight hundreds of sports and idlers jammed the streets. Outside Victor’s, the drab little café where my gonads had been so chimerically agitated by Leslie Lapidus and her hollow lewdness, I paused, went on, then returned; with its reminder of defeat it seemed as good a place as any to let myself drown. What causes human beings to inflict upon themselves these stupid little scissor snips of unhappy remembrance? But soon I forgot Leslie. I ordered a pitcher of beer, and then another, and drank myself into a nether world of hallucinations.

Later in the night’s starry hours, chill now with the breath of fall and damp with Atlantic wind, I stood on the beach alone. It was silent here, and save for the blazing stars, enfoldingly dark; bizarre spires and minarets, Gothic roofs, baroque towers loomed in spindly silhouette against the city’s afterglow. The tallest of those towers, a spiderlike gantry with cables flowing from its peak, was the parachute jump, and it was from the highest parapet of that dizzying contraption that I had heard Sophie’s peals of laughter as she sank earthward with Nathan—falling in joy at the summer’s beginning, which now seemed eons ago.

It was then that the tears finally spilled forth—not maudlin drunken tears, but tears which, beginning on the train ride from Washington, I had tried manfully to resist and could resist no longer, having kept them so bottled up that now, almost alarmingly, they drained out in warm rivulets between my fingers. It was, of course, the memory of Sophie and Nathan’s long-ago plunge that set loose this flood, but it was also a letting go of rage and sorrow for the many others who during these past months had battered at my mind and now demanded my mourning: Sophie and Nathan, yes, but also Jan and Eva—Eva with her one-eyed
mís
—and Eddie Farrell, and Bobby Weed, and my young black savior Artiste, and Maria Hunt, and Nat Turner, and Wanda Muck-Horch von Kretschmann, who were but a few of the beaten and butchered and betrayed and martyred children of the earth. I did not weep for the six million Jews or the two million Poles or the one million Serbs or the five million Russians—I was unprepared to weep for all humanity—but I did weep for these others who in one way or another had become dear to me, and my sobs made an unashamed racket across the abandoned beach; then I had no more tears to shed, and I lowered myself to the sand on legs that suddenly seemed strangely frail and rickety for a man of twenty-two.

And slept. I had abominable dreams—which seemed to be a compendium of all the tales of Edgar Allan Poe: myself being split in twain by monstrous mechanisms, drowned in a whirling vortex of mud, being immured in stone and, most fearsomely, buried alive. All night long I had the sensation of helplessness, speechlessness, an inability to move or cry out against the inexorable weight of earth as it was flung in
thud-thud-thud
ing rhythm against my rigidly paralyzed, supine body, a living cadaver being prepared for burial in the sands of Egypt. The desert was bitterly cold.

When I awoke it was early morning. I lay looking straight up at the blue-green sky with its translucent shawl of mist; like a tiny orb of crystal, solitary and serene, Venus shone through the haze above the quiet ocean. I heard children chattering nearby. I stirred.
“Izzy, he’s awake!” “G’wan, yah mutha’s mustache!” “Fuuu-ck you!”
Blessing my resurrection, I realized that the children had covered me with sand, protectively, and that I lay as safe as a mummy beneath this fine, enveloping overcoat. It was then that in my mind I inscribed the words:
’Neath cold sand I dreamed of death / but woke at dawn to see / in glory, the bright, the morning star.

This was not judgment day—only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.

W
ILLIAM
S
TYRON
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.