Death was never very far from his mind. “Once, when serving with the Marines, Styron was stationed on a desolate island in New York City’s East River where unclaimed bodies of the dead were buried.” So went my intro to an interview he gave me many years ago. (He died yesterday at 81.)
“This equivalent of potter’s field had such a profound effect on him that a long description of it in ‘Lie Down in Darkness,’ his first novel, is arguably the most evocative passage in the book.” And, I continued,
It revealed how readily Styron escaped purely Southern locales even in what he agrees was his most Southern novel, and how masterly he was in transforming a brief experience into a lasting theme. When the body of the young heroine Peyton Loftis, who has killed herself, is brought from the morgue and interred in an unmarked grave, it is not simply a crowning indignity for the tormented Loftis family, but Styron’s tragic statement of how close we all are to oblivion.
Peyton’s husband restores order, albeit in a small way, to the irrational universe of that novel when he exhumes the body and ships it home to her distraught father for a proper burial. And, in a larger way, Styron reclaims history’s victims for literature by performing a memorial service, as it were, through the ceremony of his art.
Styron insisted he didn’t choose his subjects. It was the other way around. “The subject often chooses you,” he said.
I find that I’m interested in all my work in human domination and why people try to dominate one another. I mean it politically and on a personal level. It’s just an area of consciousness that has intrigued me. I don’t think it’s a bizarre thing. Maybe it’s just where the tensions reside that motivate me to write.
The interview took place in Chicago. He had come to celebrate publication of the collected works of Herman Melville by the Library of America. Styron, then 57, was at the height of his fame. Later that night, while watching the Academy Awards on television, he was to see Meryl Streep thank him for writing “Sophie’s Choice” as she accepted an Oscar for her performance in the film adaptation of that novel.
Styron was wearing a gray robe over a starched white shirt and trousers, and had just finished lunch in a suite at the Whitehall Hotel. He and Saul Bellow were going to speak at the Newberry Library, where the definitive Melville texts were prepared.
It was a good excuse to ask him to single out the writers who influenced him. (No profile of Styron ever left out the fact that he kept a famous saying by Gustave Flaubert on the wall of his study: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”) But he was reluctant to say.
Pressed, he gave in a bit.
Flaubert would be one, but I can’t answer the question. I’m sorry. The field is too great. I’d have to write several essays just to locate myself. I still read a considerable amount, but at one time in my life, from about 18 to 28, I read everything, and I’m only barely exaggerating. I read all the writers who were worth reading. Plainly, I must have had some very important influences.
He finally began to list writers by nationality. It was a mainstream selection. Among the Russians: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekov. Among the French: Chateaubriand, Stendahl, Balzac. He halted at Zola and put his hand to his temple. “I don’t mean to sound like this,” he said, “but I’d have to give you a list of a hundred writers, which would be silly to do.”
As the obituaries have pointed out — here, here and here — Styron was in declining health for a long time before he died. Earlier, in his 60s, depression had nearly driven him to suicide.
A few months ago I chanced to meet his wife Rose Styron. Knowing he was ill, I mentioned to her that I had just enjoyed reading what is possibly his least-known book, “The Long March,” a slim novella about a pair of Marines in conflict with their commanding officer. Her face lit up. “He’ll like that,” she said. “I’ll tell him.” I hope she did.
