Looking back: a conversation with William Styron.

Cologne-Brookes, Gavin

WILLIAM STYRON AND I RECORDED THE FOLLOWING CONVERSATION ON THE lawn of his summer home on Martha's Vineyard in the late afternoon of Wednesday, 29 July 1998. Three years earlier, I'd published a book containing an appendix of conversations with Styron recorded between 1988 and 1991 ("Appendix" 213-47).

GCB: I thought we'd discuss two related things here. One is how you translate your life and experiences into art. The other is how you now see that artistic journey. Perhaps we can begin with the writing process and allow that to bring us to your retrospective thoughts on your work.

WS: Okay.

GCB: Your later writings, notably Sophie Choice, A Tidewater Morning, and Darkness Visible, obviously have an autobiographical element. The first two are fiction, while the third is a non-fiction narrative that makes use of fictional techniques. The title story of A Tidewater Morning would seem to be close to autobiography. What kinds of decisions are you making when you rum memory into fiction?

WS: The first thing that came into my mind when I began to write A Tidewater Morning was to make a statement about the effect on me of the death of my mother. That was the energizing force behind the story. I also wanted to make a statement about my father. As a kind of unifying element I chose to write about a fictional, mythical, hypothetical day in the life of me, based very loosely on this newspaper route I had at about that time. I thought that if I could interweave that paper route, purely fictionally, around the death of my mother and the beginning of the war then I would have a coherent story.

GCB: So you're looking for unity and find it in the paper route. Also presumably you conflate the mother's death and the start of the war.

WS: Yes. Another theme was the context of history. At this very moment the backdrop in Europe, the beginning of the war, was cataclysmic. I have a glimmer of a memory about my paper route, and taking papers around during that period when the war in Europe was beginning. I particularly remember something about the Italians and, if I'm not mistaken, something about Albania, but I don't recall the actual headlines.

GCB: In terms of "A Tidewater Morning," though, the newspapers Paul Whitehurst is carrying give you the historical context.

WS: That's right. I remember during that time of my paper route--which was maybe six or eight months--that the headlines very vividly reflected the fear in the United States: these banner headlines about what was going on in Europe, the sense that war was approaching at a rapid pace and that we in the United States were bystanders but still very much aware of it. I wanted that to be an element.

GCB: Another part of the story is Quigley and his store: his meanness, the pulsing beer sign with one light out. How much of that is deliberate fiction and how much drawn from memory?

WS: The store was very much as I describe it, but of course I invented a lot of details. I don't remember if the beer signs were there, but something like them were there.

GCB: There's tension between Quigley and Paul Whitehurst. Is this something you created consciously for the sake of the fiction?

WS: It was a kind of subtext or subplot. I do remember a shop owner who was very much like the man I described. He didn't abuse his newsboys but he took advantage of us. There was no generosity in his spirit. But it's maybe a reflection also on another historical fact.

The Depression was a period of great financial unhappiness, so his meticulous checking off of a five-cent drink was both a reflection on his parsimony and on the era. I mention that his wife, by contrast, despite the Depression, would be a little bit more generous and give us a Coca-Cola.

GCB: Did you have any false starts with A Tidewater Morning?

WS: I had it pretty well under control from the beginning. I saw the route. My mother in actuality did not die on a Sunday like that. She died. It was the summer. But she didn't die on the day of this paper route with the heavy-duty newspaper editions. In fact, as I remember vividly, she died on a Thursday. But the story is an amalgam.

GCB: Was there much planning involved? Did you sit down and start writing a scene that made you think of turning it into this story, shaping it as you went, or did you plan the Sunday, the context, and so on?

WS: I saw that this would be a morning. I didn't have that title in mind, but I saw that the dramatic elements should be contained within the time that Paul wakes up in the morning and the time when he comes back--after throwing the papers in the river--and sees his father confronting the minister. The story had a trajectory that was fairly well laid out from the beginning without many difficulties or turnings along the way. I didn't think of each element. They come to you out of your subconscious.

GCB: What mistakes do people make in turning autobiography into fiction?

WS: One mistake is getting too close to the material, not distancing oneself far enough from the event, so that it has a kind of smothering effect.

GCB: Perhaps we can talk now about distancing of another kind. Looking back on your earliest work and the trajectory of your literary output, how do you feel?

WS: I have mixed feelings, you know. You reflect on your work and certain things are very favorable. I'm always pleased--more and more pleased--when Lie Down in Darkness is referred to with admiration and affection after all these years. It's a kind of mixed thing. On the one hand, my early work doesn't pop up immediately on the screen. People leave it in the shadows. On the other hand I see Lie Down in Darkness as a work that has affected a lot of people.

GCB: It seems, ostensibly, to be the most complexly structured of your novels and yet it's the one that you wrote when you were inexperienced as a writer.

WS: Yes. It was my maiden effort and I haven't reread it carefully, but by and large it seems to be an effective work. People who've not read it before tell me they are reading it and how effective it is still, and that pleases me enormously. Many first novels are just the famous fledgling effort that is regarded as juvenilia, but this book is not. I wanted to write a mature first novel, and I'm rather pleased that I did.

GCB: The complexity of the design is probably what allowed you to avoid the pitfalls. WS: As we all know, first novels tend to be works by young people about young people's lives, and very introspective and subjective.

As a consequence they have little that is fresh or new. I realized that, so when I set out to write Lie Down in Darkness I made a deliberate effort not to write the kind of book I've just described and to write about a fully-fledged, grown-up family situation.

GCB: What you effectively did was to deflect the young person's angst by concentrating on other characters' viewpoints until Peyton's final monologue.

WS: That's it, exactly. I tried to objectify it by creating adult characters in adult situations.

GCB: If we jump forward to Sophie's Choice, is the same kind of objectification going on? Do you recall the kinds of decisions you made in terms of fictionalizing events that had an autobiographical element? For instance, alcohol clearly plays a big part in that novel. Stingo's a beer guzzler and Sophie has a drinking problem. WS: She does have a drinking problem.

GCB: And Nathan has drugs of another sort. So things that subsequently come to the surface in your life are there in a novel that is about the Holocaust bur also about other things. Have you any reflections on all that now?

WS: Some of that alcohol stuff may have arisen from my own problem, if indeed I had that kind of problem. But it also arose from the characters. The Polish women that I have encountered have been drinkers. One of them was Wanda Malinowska, who was my girlfriend back in the old days, and another was Joanna Rostropowicz Clark, who was very, very influential because she fed me so much information here on the island while I was writing the book. Jim West mentions her in the biography. She was younger than I was, but she had been in Warsaw during the war, and the huge amount of information she provided was invaluable. The fact that she had a drink problem perhaps affected how Sophie developed.

GCB: Would you change anything about the novel if you were writing it now?

WS: I don't think I would substantially change anything. I think the novel succeeds in part because it has this leavening effect of a youthful narrator who is merely describing his self-preoccupation. I think this gives it verisimilitude. It gives the book its momentum because if I had not established that voice of the young man I doubt it would have been convincing. The reader needed to be engaged in the young man's trials totally aside from Sophie, so that when Sophie arrives on the scene the reader should be sucked into that narrative, that situation.

GCB: Are you conscious of characters being composite figures from your past, of using information that people give you, or do you see them in the end as entirely autonomous, original beings?

WS: They're all composites. Sophie, I realized after I got into her, was part me. To some degree she was really a part of this Wanda Malinowska who I had this long affair with when I was twenty-three, twenty-four years old, before I went to Europe or lived in New York. She was totally anglicized. She had been brought up in London and India. Bronislaw Malinowski, her father, was one of the great pioneering anthropologists and a very distinguished man. He had left his Polish roots before World War II and had come, via the London School of Economics, to Yale. So Wanda, his daughter, although totally anglicized, Americanized, had some Polish stuff in her, and became an automatic model for Sophie, or for aspects of Sophie.

GCB: Do you know the point in a novel when the characters take off and begin to become themselves?

WS: Oh, yes, absolutely. What's fascinating to me is the moment fairly early in the book when that happened with Sophie. I had established her to my satisfaction. I'd written the early pages where Stingo encounters Sophie and Nathan in this ghastly turmoil that they're in before the book properly gets under way, and off they all go to Coney Island. My strategy was direct and simple. In order to get into her mind I had to establish her identity so strongly in terms of her own telling of the story to Stingo that when I switched from the first person to the third person you'd believe it automatically. That's always seemed to me to be one of the things that makes the book work.

GCB: You tried that innovation in Set This House on Fire, and it's perhaps one of the things that make those two novels distinctive. It's an age-old framing device in some respects, but the narrator's extended rendition of Sophie's voice seems rather different from anything attempted by any other novelist.

WS: Yes, and this has never been questioned by anyone who's read the book, never caused the slightest problem. I know it works. But it took the strong individual voice of Sophie, and it occurs in chapter four, which begins with her talking about her childhood in Cracow. I had been to Cracow and I knew what it was like, just as a visitor, so I was able to invent her childhood. But this first monologue of hers is a fairly long passage, and she begins to talk about her father and how he had done these remarkable things during the war to save Jews and what a wonderful man he was. Now I really began to believe that. I was so sucked into my imaginative rendition of her monologue that I believed in it until a very important moment when I said to myself, she's lying. She's telling me a lie, she's telling Stingo a lie, she's telling the author a lie. And I realized that one of the secrets that she would cough up later on in the book would be that she had lied and that her father was a rabid anti-Semite.

GCB: And the book would not have been the Sophie's Choice that it is without that happening.

WS: Absolutely.

GCB: So the book wasn't planned out.

WS: No, no, no.

GCB: And the excitement in novel writing is in the unexpected? WS: Exactly. Surprise to Bill Styron, surprise to Stingo, surprise to the reader.

GCB: Actually you have that as a note at the start of chapter four in the manuscript. You have a question boxed in the top left of the page, querying whether her father is an anti-Semite.

WS: That's interesting. I hadn't realized that.

GCB: Do you set down a lot of planning notes beyond those recorded on the manuscript? Are you both writing and thinking ahead in terms of plot?

WS: Pretty much. I'm prefiguring things in my mind.

GCB: And is that part of the process of actually sitting down to write each day?

WS: It often takes me a very long time to get moving.

GCB: Do you just sharpen your pencils and sit? WS: Yes, and whine, "the horror, the horror," or follow that famous reflection of Conrad's. He said that writing for him was so difficult that almost never did he approach his writing desk without the urge to burst into tears. I always loved that.

GCB: How about Darkness Visible? Is writing non-fiction different, or do you approach it in a similar way? For instance, were you conscious of trying to tell a story? WS: The form really came of its own accord. It wrote itself. I don't mean to say it was easy to write. But once I sat down and realized what I was going to do, I found the tale very easy to spin out. You can probably tell from my introduction that I wrote the last two-thirds of it before I wrote the first third. I produced the latter sections originally for Vanity Fair magazine, where space was more limited, then wrote about the Paris horror afterwards. GCB: The use of a vivid scene to set things going is a technique used in fiction.

WS: I always had in the back of my mind that that was a critical moment in the progression of this illness in my head, but I didn't put it in the Vanity Fair part because I had other things to say. When I realized that I was going to write a small book, I saw that to start describing that terrible time I had in Paris was a perfect lead-in.

GCB: So in all these pieces--A Tidewater Morning, Sophie's Choice, and Darkness Visible--one strategy that seems important is to capture a personality in a vivid context. Is that a technique that would hold true for a great deal of dramatic writing?

WS: I think so. Everyone has a different strategy and I can't lay down the law.

GCB: Are there any particular new contemporary writers whose novels excite you, who make you think that there's something new that can be done with the novel form?

WS: I'm not that attentive to what's going on. I was very interested to read the recent, rival list done by the students on the Radcliffe Publishing Course in response to the Modern Library list of the top one hundred novels. (1) What impressed me about both lists, but especially the Radcliffe list, which you'd think would have some wild books of recent experimental fiction, is that even that list, while including Naked Lunch and being generally more adventurous, really shows books written in conventional English, with conventional plots. It was put together by a diverse range of young people in their twenties and thirties, but it still contains the likes of James, Conrad, and so on.

GCB: When you're writing a novel, do you consciously think back to how Henry James or Conrad might have done something? Do you think of them as instructors?

WS: Only in my subconscious. It wouldn't be a major factor. GCB: Would you distinguish between the perspective of the William Styron of 1998, as a writer and as a person, and the William Styron of Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, and Nat Turner? Are you essentially the same person in an older body, or do you have a very different perspective on writing and on life? WS: I'm the same person. I'm bifurcated. I'm both more dissatisfied than I thought I would be at this stage in my life, and more satisfied. I don't know how to describe it. GCB: What kind of thing makes you feel dissatisfied? WS: Oh, I'm dissatisfied that I didn't turn out something else, you know. But even as I say that I realize that you shouldn't look at your career as what you failed to do but as what you did do. I feel that to have written as painfully and laboriously as I have--I'm not singing the blues, it's just true; there were extraordinary emotional, psychological difficulties involved in getting these works out--and to have produced what I have, is something I can celebrate. I've done far better than I thought I would ever be capable of doing, and am pleased to have written several books that I think, whatever the ups and downs of the literary marketplace, are secure in the canon. That's another reason I was very pleased with that Radcliffe list. Ten years from now, other lists might put Sophie lower or higher, or they might put Nat Turner in there, or Lie Down in Darkness. The point is that I feel my works have at least acquired a kind of permanence. The rest is in the laps of the gods. You can't do any more, but if you have a fairly sure awareness that your work--and I'm using the word guardedly bur you know what I mean--has a certain permanence, then that is, you know, satisfying.

GCB: It's the nature of the beast that if you're ambitious to fulfil whatever potential you have you are inevitably going to be dissatisfied--because that's what drove you in the first place?

WS: Precisely, and I am dissatisfied. I'm profoundly dissatisfied. But it's a dissatisfaction combined with satisfied acceptance. It's a kind of schizoid feeling that is constantly unreconciled. Sometimes I feel a miserable ... not failure, but a miserable insufficiency about myself. And other times I say, "Man, I've done this. Who else has done that?"

GCB: Has your writing been a staving off of psychological difficulties for many years, or is there something dangerous about becoming so involved in a fictional world?

WS: Oh yes, there are dangers. It's a lonely, neurotic occupation. It's filled with uncertainties. It's like pissing into a windstorm. You just don't know what's going to happen. I don't think that the form itself is in any danger. I have evidence from my own work that people read. They read it, and other writing. They might not read it as much as they look at Seinfeld but that's not the point. I never expected to be read with the avidity that people look at television. That's a different matter.

GCB: There's something ephemeral about television or movies. They ultimately depend upon electricity. But the very fact of the physical form of a book, accessible without being plugged in, as it were, means that you've created something solid out of the years. You can say that that, sitting there, is what I have done. That is my life.

WS: There's a terrific accessibility to a novel. You can just pick it out and instantly start reading it. Despite all the technology that allegedly supersedes it, there's nothing like a beautifully put-together book.

GCB: So if you do have down moments, do you go and look at your books?

WS: Not very often, but sometimes. I was asked to visit a Midwestern college to talk about Sophie's Choice so I had occasion to go over it again. (2) There's a Modern Library edition, wonderful little volume, light and readable. I had to go through it to create a talk, a lecture, and I was very pleased by what came out. There were several places where I wished I'd done things differently, but the general flow of the novel satisfied me.

GCB: Your novels certainly stir up debate. What you've not turned out to be is a novelist who writes about the contemporary. Apart from Lie Down in Darkness, which is social satire in some ways, you've not really gone down that path of being the contemporary observer, except implicitly with Nat Turner, in historical disguise. You've always gone back into the past. Yet the issues clearly resonate in contemporary terms. Whatever response readers have to your work, in my experience it is rarely indifference.

WS: I think I've fastened myself onto history in almost everything I've written. I hope that's helped give some permanence to my work. I hope there's some viability in Nat Turner by virtue of that fact. And with Sophie I feel that, after all these years, if the book had not achieved a kind of responsible vision, it would long ago have disappeared.

GCB: The integrity of the vision is important?

WS: Yes. I think the integrity is there, and the accuracy is there, and therefore it represents a kind of critical statement about that Nazi period. Not that I'm in competition or that I give a damn, but I don't think there are many other novels that are comparable in approach. They could still be written--I'm not saying they can't--but as you get further away from that period it's going to be more and more difficult.

GCB: Any thoughts nowadays on Nat Turner?

WS: You know, I'll be quite frank with you, as I have been. It's been a huge pain to have felt that I'd written a work which for the wrong reasons not only alienated bur absolutely enraged people, when it should not have.

GCB: Yet that's helped keep the novel alive in people's consciousnesses, however they may use it, or choose to teach it. For this reason, there may come a time when people say, well, hang on, maybe it's not the kind of book it's been portrayed as being. WS: Yes, and I've probably defended myself beyond the point that I should have. Still, there is nothing in the book that corresponds to the accusations against it.

GCB: This brings us back to where we started. In order to write a novel, whether you use autobiography or historical documentation, the novelist has to shape that into a dramatic form. Presumably that's what you're doing in Nat Turner?

WS: I hope that eventually readers will come to regard this as a book that has fruitful things to say about slavery and black and white relations. If you read the book carefully, there is no crude pandering to cliches or stereotypes. The situation between Nat Turner and Margaret Whitehead, for instance, was a human relationship that was far less provocative than it was made out to be, a relationship which really reflected more on the evils of a system which permitted a young girl to flaunt herself in front of a black man than anything about a black man's lust for white women.

GCB: Finally, what is for you, as a novelist, most satisfying? What makes you happiest? WS: I treasure the ability--if I may sound a little extravagant--to have been able to transport people. It is extremely valuable to my own emotional well-being to know that all this effort and agony produced something that people regard as important in their lives.

GCB: It's that more than the writing itself? Is the writing, the being in that world, less appealing?

WS: In the end you realize you have gotten yourself involved in that world for an ulterior motive--to make other people feel that ultimate emotional and intellectual effect.

GCB: There are other novelists who would say that they only get satisfaction from the final product for a few minutes. It's really the writing of the novel that is more important.

WS: That could be. I'm sure that's a genuine motive. I have no quarrel with it, but for me it's the effect on others.

Works Cited

Burroughs, William. Naked Lunch. Paris: Olympia P, 1959.

Cologne-Brookes, Gavin. "Appendix: Extracts from Conversations with

William Styron." The Novels of William Styron: From Harmony to History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1995. 213-47.

Styron, William. The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Random House, 1967.

--. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. New York: Random House, 1990.

--. "Fessing Up." 1998. Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays. New York: Random House, 2008. 145-49.

--. Lie Down in Darkness. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951.

--. Set This House on Fire. New York: Random House, 1960.

--. Sophie's Choice. New York: Random House, 1979.

--. A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth. New York: Random House, 1993. West, James L. W. III. William Styron, A Life. New York: Random House, 1998.

GAVIN COLOGNE-BROOKES

Bath Spa University

(1) On July 20, 1998, the Modern Library published a list of the twentieth century's top one hundred English-language novels as selected by the ten members of its editorial board, one of whom was Styron. On July 21, the Radcliffe Publishing Course responded with its own list. Styron wrote about the two lists in "Fessing Up," in the New Yorker, August 17, 1998. The essay has subsequently been reprinted in Havanas in Camelot.

(2) This refers to an invitation from Paul Olsen, Professor of English at Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.