文章基本信息

标题：Yourcenar, et al.: Styron's Sources for The Confessions of Nat Turner.
作者：West, James L.W., III
期刊名称：The Mississippi Quarterly
印刷版ISSN：0026-637X
出版年度：2016
期号：December
出版社：Mississippi State University

Yourcenar, et al.: Styron's Sources for The Confessions of Nat Turner.

West, James L.W., III

Most of the attention given to the sources for William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner has been focused on historical and quasi-historical documents. Among the most important of these are Thomas R. Gray's original Confessions (1831), Frederick Law Olmsted's A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), and William S. Drewry's The Southampton Insurrection (1900). Styron read all three before he began composing The Confessions of Nat Turner and incorporated text from all three into his narrative. He relied upon these writings for information, language, atmosphere, and detail; they were useful to him in establishing the chronology of the Nat Turner rebellion and in creating historical verisimilitude. (1)

In this essay I want to investigate a different group of "sources." I will consider four books that Styron read and drew upon, not for information about the Nat Turner rebellion but for ideas about how to recapture the past and how to recreate Nat Turner's voice. I believe that these four books had at least as much influence on the shape and intent of Styron's narrative as did the historical documents mentioned above. The books are Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, and Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian (1951, 1963); Erik H. Erikson's Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958); Stanley M. Elkins's Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959); and Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).

The Confessions of Nat Turner, published in 1967, belongs in company with these books. All four were innovative and controversial when published. All four were anchored in the distant or recent past but had broad contemporary resonances. Styron wanted to write this kind of book--not a conventional historical novel but, to use his term, a "meditation on history" that would speak to the present moment. As he observed in his "Author's Note" to the first edition, "The relativity of time allows us elastic definitions: the year 1831 was, simultaneously, a long time ago and only yesterday" (ix). By attempting to recreate his protagonist's voice Styron was seeking not factual or verifiable truths but a broader set of truths about race, society, and humanity. The four books discussed in this essay, all of which Styron read while composing The Confessions of Nat Turner, were useful to him as models. The authors of these books were in pursuit of the same goals and ends that he sought.

Memoirs of Hadrian

Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987), born in Belgium to a French father and a Belgian mother, wrote in French but lived for more than half of her life in the United States. She was an author, a student of ancient history, and a teacher of comparative literature. Something of a recluse, perhaps because of her bisexuality, she lived for almost forty years with her companion and translator, Grace Frick, on a remote island off the coast of Maine. In 1951 she published Memoires d'Hadrien with Librairie Plon in Paris. The book, which can best be described as a biographical novel, is an attempt to recreate the life and voice of a subject from the distant past, in this case the Roman emperor Hadrian (76-138 A.D.). Memoires d'Hadrien was an immediate success in France, earning Yourcenar awards, honors, and praise--including, eventually, membership in the Academie francaise. Reviews of the book in 1951 were almost uniformly laudatory. The only sour notes were from archaeologists and historians who questioned Yourcenar's methods. One of these critics suggested that she owed an apology to Clio, the Muse of History (Picard 85). Memoires d'Hadrien was translated into English by Frick and published in England in 1954 by Seeker and Warburg under the title Memoirs of Hadrian. Farrar, Straus brought out an American edition of the book in 1963.

It was this edition that Styron read while he was composing The Confessions of Nat Turner. (2) We know that he read Memoirs of Hadrian because he set down a reference to the book in his manuscript. The handwritten drafts of The Confessions of Nat Turner are among a large collection of Styron's papers at the Library of Congress. In the left margin of the initial page, Styron has written: "MUST QUOTE: 1st part of 'Author's Note." (3) from Hadrian's Memoirs for my own Author's Note." While gathering material for a biography of Styron in the spring of 1990, I came across this marginal note. A few months later I asked Styron about Yourcenar's book. Yes, he told me, he had indeed read Memoirs of Hadrian in 1963 and had thought it a brilliant piece of writing. He had been struck immediately by the similarities between Yourcenar's endeavor and his own.

Memoirs of Hadrian is a remarkable performance. It is cast in the form of a lengthy letter set down by Hadrian during the final months of his life. The letter, which is retrospective, meditative, and digressive, is addressed to Marcus Aurelius, Hadrian's adopted grandson and eventually his successor as emperor. There is no plot in the conventional sense. Hadrian reviews his life, recounts his experiences as a Roman soldier and commander, traces his rise to power, and describes the defeat of his rivals. Hadrian's great love for the Greek youth Antinous permeates the narrative; his grief over the early death of the boy is a melancholy leitmotif on many pages. Hadrian reflects on the power of love, the burdens of authority, and the inevitability of death.

The first-person voice, though fabricated, is entirely convincing. Only a few bits of primary textual evidence survive from Hadrian himself: some quotations from a lost autobiography; a scattering of administrative correspondence; a few fragmentary reports and discourses. Hadrian's voice in Yourcenar's book is therefore an invention, a product of the imagination of a Belgian expatriate writing in French, a bisexual woman imagining the emotional life of a bisexual man, and a student of Roman history pursuing a subject across a distance of some eighteen centuries.

Yourcenar lacked primary material, but the absence of such sources was more than made up for by the wealth of other knowledge available to her about the Roman Empire of Hadrian's time. Details of governance, military conquest, taxation, law, and religion are employed in the narrative with telling effect. Information about domestic life, food, clothing, marriage, sex, games, and entertainments is interwoven throughout the chapters. Hadrian was a farsighted leader, remembered today for having erected the Pantheon in Rome and Hadrian's Wall in Great Britain. He brought about peace with many of the peoples whom his predecessor, Trajan, had attempted to subdue by force. He improved the lot of women in Rome, introduced reforms in the Roman system of slavery, and made changes in the organization and financing of the army. Yourcenar brings Hadrian to life in a convincing act of verbal legerdemain, a performance that attests both to the depth of her historical knowledge and the boldness of her imagination.

Aware that her methods would be questioned, Yourcenar appended to all editions of her book a lengthy "Bibliographical Note" listing her sources, primary and secondary, and mentioning other evidence that she had used, such as reliefs, statues, hieroglyphs, coins, and inscriptions. In this note Yourcenar explains the approach she has taken: A reconstruction of an historical figure and of the world of his time written in the first person borders on the domain of fiction, and sometimes of poetry; it can therefore dispense with formal statement of evidence for the historical facts concerned. Its human significance, however, is greatly enriched by close adherence to those facts. (Memoirs of Hadrian 299)

These two sentences were likely the text that Styron thought of quoting. Other sentences also resonate strongly when applied to The Confessions of Nat Turner. For example: "History has its rules, though they are not always followed even by professional historians; poetry, too, has its laws. The two are not necessarily irreconcilable" (312). In impersonating Hadrian, Yourcenar tells her readers that she chose "the moment when the man who lived that existence weighs and examines it, and is, for the briefest span, capable of judging it" (321). Her aim (like Styron's) was to create a "Portrait of a voice" (329). She concludes: "the more I strive for an exact portrait the farther I diverge from the kind of book, and of man, who would please the public. Only a few students of human destiny will understand" (339).

Despite these many similarities, Styron decided in the end not to quote from Yourcenar in his "Author's Note." His approach to Nat Turner would have to stand on its own, independent of her approach to Hadrian. Styron also decided not to include a list of historical sources in the back pages of his book. Such a list, appearing at the end of a work of the imagination, and directly after Nat Turner's death, would have broken the narrative spell that he had created. Such a list would also have plunged Styron into the morass of argument and counter-argument characteristic, then and now, of research into the history of American slavery.

The challenges that Styron and Yourcenar faced were similar. Few original documents survived about the Nat Turner rebellion; nothing in Nat's unmediated voice was known to exist. A great deal, however, was known about American slavery, Southern plantation life, Virginia politics, and antebellum social and religious customs. Styron made use of this information, filling his narrative with details about crops, food, livestock, tools, dress, money, credit, and law. Like Yourcenar, Styron was recreating a time and location from the past. He was also creating, sui generis, a synthetic voice and a language for his protagonist. Like Yourcenar, he was attempting to penetrate the mind of an historical figure and was creating characters from little more than names in the historical record. Styron was a white Southerner of the twentieth century; Nat Turner was a black slave of the nineteenth century. Styron was forcing the past into confrontation with the present. He was bringing history alive, as Yourcenar had done, through an act of literary ventriloquism.

Young Man Luther

Erik H. Erikson (1902-1994) was among the most famous developmental psychologists in America during the 1950s and 1960s. He was born in Frankfurt, Germany, to a Danish-Jewish mother, Karla Abrahamsen, who was estranged from her husband, a German-Jewish stockbroker named Valdemar Salomonsen. Almost nothing is known about Erikson's biological father, only that he was a Danish gentile. The child was given the surname Salomonsen at birth; in 1908 he was adopted by his mother's second husband, a Jewish pediatrician named Theodor Homburger, whom she had married in 1905 after the death of her first husband. The boy was known during his youth and young manhood as Erik Homburger. He was troubled by questions about his identity: tall, blond, and blue-eyed, he was teased at temple school for being Nordic and taunted at German grammar school for being Jewish.

In the late 1920s Erikson studied child psychology at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. He underwent a "training analysis" by Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund Freud; later he was mentored at the Institute by the psychologists August Aichhorn, Heinz Hartmann, and Paul Federn. In 1933, by now married to the Canadian artist and dancer Joan Serson, Erik Homberger fled from Vienna to escape persecution and the coming war. He settled eventually in Boston, where he taught at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. In the late 1930s he became a naturalized United States citizen and chose this moment to rename himself. He became "Erik H. Erikson," a self-invention that allowed him to settle, in his own mind, questions about his identity. In the 1940s Erikson taught and practiced at Yale and Berkeley; in the decade that followed he worked and taught at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Erikson is remembered today for introducing the term "identity crisis" into the parlance of academic and popular psychology. In his teaching and writing he emphasized the importance of childhood experience on the formation of adult character. His two most influential books in the field of child psychology were Childhood and Society (1950) and Identity: Youth and Crisis ( 1968); but it was his second book, Young Man Luther (1958), that had the strongest impact on Styron and on his attempt to recapture Nat Turner's voice. Erikson's book was recommended to Styron, and loaned to him, by the historian C. Vann Woodward. Styron returned Woodward's copy to him on January 16, 1963, about seven months into the composition of The Confessions of Nat Turner. In an accompanying letter to Woodward, Styron remarked that he had read Young Man Luther "at one long day-long sitting" and that he had particularly admired Erikson's intuitive insights. "In terms of Nat Turner," he added, "the effect is, as you surmised, quite startling." On page 66 of Woodward's copy, Styron marked several lines that had especially caught his attention, a passage in which Erikson remarked upon Luther's father, Hans Luder, who had subjected his son to alternate periods of "violent harshness" and "sentimental" regard--"a deadly combination," in Erikson's view. In his letter to Woodward, Styron wrote that this passage had sent "a chill up the spine" (Selected Letters 342).

Erikson's subtitle, A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, suggests why Young Man Luther appealed to Styron. Erikson, investigating the historical record left by a religious rebel across a distance of some 450 years, insisted that a psychological analysis of Luther could be made, despite the fact that almost nothing was known about his childhood. (The same is true of Nat Turner's childhood.) Erikson believed that Luther's identity crisis could be traced to an incident in his early or middle twenties. While in the choir of his monastery at Erfurt, Luther fell to the floor and shouted "Non sum! Non sum!" The Latin words are usually translated as "I am not!"--an enigmatic utterance subject to many interpretations (Young Man Luther 23). Erikson dates Luther's rebellion against the Catholic Church from this moment and attributes much of Luther's psychic unrest to conflicts with his father. Erikson argues more broadly that any great rebel must initially believe in the system against which he later rebels. The prototypical rebel does not erupt immediately into action. Many years are spent in a passive state, contemplating revolt and fantasizing about the great changes that rebellion will bring about.

The reception of Young Man Luther was lively. Reviewers (and, later, essayists) took the book as an occasion to discuss the legitimacy of "psychohistory." Erikson's book generated much controversy. A useful book-length collection of reactions is Psychohistory and Religion: The Case of Young Man Luther (1977). (4) Erikson continued to practice psychohistory and to produce psychoanalytical portraits of major historical figures. His book Gandhi's Truth: On the Origin of Militant Nonviolence (1969), similar in approach to Young Man Luther, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1970.

In his 1965 essay "This Quiet Dust," an account of his preparations for writing The Confessions of Nat Turner, Styron paid tribute to Erikson's study of Luther. In the essay Styron mentions Luther in company with other revolutionary figures, including Robespierre, Danton, and Fidel Castro, who reached a "decisive moment of their insurgency" during their early thirties. This asterisked footnote appears after Luther's name: * See Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther for a brilliant study of the development of the revolutionary impulse in a young man, and the relationship of this impulse to the father-figure. Although it is best to be wary of any heavy psychoanalytical emphasis, one cannot help believing that Nat Turner's relationship with his father, like Luther's, was tormented and complicated, especially since this person could not have been his real father, who ran away when Nat was an infant, but the white man who owned and raised him. (Harper's 139)

Styron's Nat Turner never knows his biological father, a slave who has escaped from bondage. His surrogate father is his second owner, Samuel Turner, who has him trained to read and encourages him to distance himself from the field hands on the plantation. Turner transforms young Nat into a performer. Turner wishes to demonstrate that Negro slaves can be educated for entry into white society. Nat performs tricks of recitation and arithmetic for white visitors to the Turner "big house." Some years later, Samuel Turner promises Nat freedom from slavery, a heady prospect that excites the young man's dreams and hopes. Under economic pressure, however, Turner's good intentions evaporate. He lies to Nat and abandons him, selling him to the Reverend Alexander Epps, a hard master who subjects Nat to a mean and lonely existence, with no possibility of manumission, and who sells him a few years later to a slave trader. Nat's anger results in an identity crisis: he changes from a compliant servant, desirous of freedom and achievement within the system of slavery, to a bitter revolutionary who waits for a sign from God to lead a bloody rebellion against his white masters. Nat withdraws from slave society to fast, pray, and meditate; he leads a monkish and celibate existence and hides behind a mask of compliance. In February 1831 the Lord finally sends a sign to him, a blood-red eclipse of the sun that galvanizes him into action and brings about the murderous uprising of August 1831.

Slavery

The American historian Stanley M. Elkins (1925-2013) was a scholar and public intellectual. He had a classic academic career. After serving in the US Army during World War II, Elkins attended Harvard University and took an AB degree in 1949. He went on to earn an MA and a PhD at Columbia University under the tutelage of the historian Richard Hofstadter, who had by then already won the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes. Elkins taught at the University of Chicago from 1955 to 1960; he joined the faculty at Smith College in the fall of 1960 and remained at Smith for the rest of his career. Over the course of his academic life Elkins was much honored: he was awarded fellowships by the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the J. S. Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is remembered today not only as the author of Slavery but also as the co-author, with Eric McKitrick, of The Age of Federalism (1993), a widely praised volume that won the Bancroft Prize in 1994.

Slavery, based on Elkins's doctoral dissertation, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1959. The book is an attempt to account for deep-rooted problems in African American life: cyclical poverty, criminal behavior, lack of education, and weakness of traditional family structures. For Elkins these problems had their origins in nineteenth-century American slavery, a dehumanizing system that broke apart families and robbed African Americans of willpower and dignity. At its worst the system produced what Elkins called, in an unfortunate choice of words, the "Sambo personality"--servile, malingering, cooperative, and docile.

Elkins was among the first historians to compare slavery in the United States to slavery in Latin America. He observed that the Latin American system, though ostensibly open and humane, produced wider discontent and rebelliousness than did the more tightly regulated American system. After slavery had been abolished in Latin America, however, successful polyracial societies (as in Brazil) were established. Elkins believed that in the Latin American system, slaves were considered to be moral beings with basic human rights. In the American system slaves were thought of only as property. In addition, Elkins pointed out several parallels between American slavery and the Nazi concentration camps of World War II. The cooperation of many Jews with their captors and the absence of organized rebellion in the death camps was analogous, Elkins believed, to similar features of American slavery. (5)

Elkins was a persuasive writer, not least because he possessed a supple and evocative prose style. Among those most heavily influenced by Slavery was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor under Lyndon B. Johnson when he first read the book. The "Moynihan Report"--formally titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965)--followed Elkins in attributing many then-current problems in black communities to psychological damage inflicted by antebellum slavery. Moynihan's arguments, presented with vigor and conviction, had a strong influence within the federal government, especially on the affirmative action and poverty programs of the 1960s and 1970s.

Slavery received much praise upon first publication, but soon a backlash set in, exposing Elkins to severe criticism for the thinness of his research and the prejudices and presuppositions said to underlie his thesis. A summary of the disagreements can be found in The Debate over Slavery: Stanley Elkins and His Critics (1971)--a volume quite similar to Psychohistory and Religion, the collection of essays on Erikson's Young Man Luther mentioned above. One of the contributors to the Elkins collection is Eugene D. Genovese, a major voice in the controversies during the late 1960s over Styron's novel. Elkins himself contributes a new essay, partly personal in tone, entitled "Slavery and Ideology." The Erikson and Elkins collections bring to mind three volumes generated by Styron's book: William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968); William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner: A Critical Handbook (1970); and The Nat Turner Rebellion: The Historical Event and the Modern Controversy (1971).

Styron was reading Slavery as early as February 1963. In that month he wrote to Elkins, praising the book and asking whether there were plans to bring out a paperback edition. Elkins's reply on March 20, which Styron saved, is preserved among his papers at Duke University (Box C-2, General Correspondence). Elkins thanks Styron for his interest and his compliments; Grosset and Dunlap has acquired paperback rights and will publish a softbound edition by the end of the year. Elkins is cordial and witty in his letter: he tells Styron that he regrets missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a historian--to be discovered by an eminent novelist. Styron continued his interest in Elkins's book. On January 15, 1964, he sent a copy to the writer Donald Harington, calling it an "eye-opener" and inviting Harington to "read it and see what you think" (Selected Letters 357-58). (6)

Styron's attitude toward slavery was certainly colored by Elkins's book, but the extent of the influence is difficult to measure. Styron mentions Elkins in the 1965 Harper's text of "This Quiet Dust" with particular emphasis on Elkins's depiction of American slavery as "despotic," "emasculating," and "unique in its psychological oppressiveness" (138). But Styron seems not to have been wholly won over by Elkins's assertions; in the 1982 collected text of "This Quiet Dust" Styron adds this footnote after Elkins's name: There are several references to Elkins in these essays. Elkins' work has undergone such severe revision by other historians as to make my own responses to his theories appear perhaps a bit simplistic. Nonetheless, his work remains important and most of his insights are still valid. (This Quiet Dust 14)

The slaves in The Confessions of Nat Turner are a varied group. One sees a range of personality types: officious old uncles, benign mammies, fawning house servants, unruly field hands, bitter insurrectionists, and murderous rebels. The character who conforms most closely to the Elkins stereotype is Hark, the child-man who becomes Nat's trusted lieutenant but who retains a tendency to dissemble and grovel around white people. Even Nat humbles himself to whites when it suits his purposes. He understands that his owners regard him as property--as "animate chattel" (21), a legal term that Thomas R. Gray applies to him in his jail cell, early in the narrative. The slave owners in The Confessions of Nat Turner are a miscellaneous lot, some of them mean, ignorant, and petty, others full of feckless good intentions, still others oblivious to the damage that slavery has done to owner and slave alike. But all of Styron's white characters are alike in one respect: they are unable to treat slaves as fellow human beings. Despite their protestations to the contrary, the white men and women in Styron's narrative see Negro slaves as property to be bought and sold. The psychological damage to slaves and to their society is profound. On this point Styron and Elkins would have agreed.

Eichmann in Jerusalem

The philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was born in Germany into a family of secular, assimilated Jews. At the University of Marburg she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger; later she moved to the University of Heidelberg and wrote a dissertation on St. Augustine under the direction of Karl Jaspers. She left Germany in 1933 and, after spending time in Czechoslovakia and Switzerland, settled in Paris. In 1941, after being interned for a brief period by the German occupying forces as an "enemy alien," she left France for the United States. Eventually she became an American citizen. She made her way as a writer and a teacher at Notre Dame, Berkeley, Princeton, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and other institutions.

In 1961 Arendt was assigned by the New Yorker to report on the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, an SS officer who, during the 1940s, had directed the deportation of many thousands of European Jews to the Nazi extermination camps. Eichmann had been apprehended in Argentina in 1960 by the Israeli Security Service and had been brought to Jerusalem to stand trial for "crimes against humanity." Arendt's accounts of the trial appeared first in the New Yorker during February and March of 1963; two months later the accounts were published in book form by Viking Press as Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Arendt presents a psychological portrait of Eichmann. She describes him as a bureaucrat of limited intelligence who justified his actions by claiming that he was simply following orders and performing his duties as a soldier. He was fearsomely effective and well organized, transforming what had been a haphazard process into a smoothly running and efficient bureaucracy that divested Jews of their property and shipped them off quickly to concentration camps. Eichmann had been a lifelong joiner of organizations and causes; these had provided him with ready-made patterns for thinking and behavior. Eichmann's speech was filled with evasions, platitudes, and cliches. Arendt portrayed him as neither a psychopath nor a particularly committed anti-Semite but as a "clown" (49). Eichmann had no sense of the Jews as human beings. He was for Arendt the embodiment of "the banality of evil," a phrase that she incorporated into her title. The phrase is still in use today, in many contexts. (7)

Eichmann in Jerusalem was praised and cited almost from the moment of its initial publication, but the book was also subjected to heavy criticism, especially from within the Jewish community. Arendt was accused of ideological blindness, flawed interpretations of Eichmann's testimony, and anti-Semitism. A good starting point for study of the controversies is "The Excommunication of Hannah Arendt," an essay by Amos Elon that has appeared in paperback editions of the book since 2006. For a comprehensive summary of the long-running controversies over the book, see Michael Ezra's article "The Eichmann Polemics: Hannah Arendt and Her Critics" in the Summer 2007 issue of Democratiya. Arendt's study of Eichmann is still a polarizing work, frequently taught in college courses on Hitler's Germany and sometimes assigned in classes on moral philosophy. (8)

Styron and Arendt became friends in 1969, two years after the publication of The Confessions of Nat Turner. By then, Styron recalled, Eichmann in Jerusalem had become for him an intellectual touchstone, "a kind of handbook" (My Generation 180). Both Styron and Arendt were serving on the editorial board of the American Scholar, which met twice a year, alternating between New York and Washington, DC. In "A Wheel of Evil Come Full Circle," an account of the composition of Sophie's Choice, Styron recalls discussions with Arendt, over scotch and cigarettes, of the similarities between the critiques of Eichmann in Jerusalem and the attacks on The Confessions of Nat Turner. In his recollection of their friendship Styron credits Arendt with encouraging him to write about the Nazi genocide and the death camps at Auschwitz, despite the fact that he had been severely criticized for writing about slavery from Nat Turner's perspective. Styron, a gentile, had no direct experience of what was then beginning to be called the Holocaust. Arendt dismissed Styron's apprehensions, telling him that "An artist creates his own authenticity." What mattered was not direct experience but "imaginative conviction and boldness, a passion to invade alien territory and render an account of one's discoveries" (My Generation 182).

The influence of Eichmann in Jerusalem on Sophie's Choice is readily apparent. Among other things, the central dilemma of the novel, the choice that Sophie makes on the train platform at Auschwitz, was taken by Styron from the story, told by Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem, of a gypsy woman at Auschwitz who was forced to make the same decision (Lewis 258). The connections between Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Confessions of Nat Turner are not as apparent, but the two books exhibit many similarities. Both authors seek to penetrate the mind of a historical figure across a distance of time. Arendt does not create a language for her protagonist as Yourcenar and Styron had done, but she attempts a psychological portrait in the manner of Erikson, and she comments on group psychology, as Elkins had attempted to do. Both Arendt and Styron depict the behavior of people who, caught up in the mechanisms of history, cooperate with their captors. Some Jews assisted the Nazis in rounding up victims and transporting them to the death camps; some slaves served their masters as drivers and disciplinarians. Both Arendt and Styron describe systems that rob human beings of free will and choice. Both authors make the point that historical actors are often neither fiends nor psychopaths but are ordinary people who, inexplicably, harbor a deep capacity for cruelty and evil. *****

I first read The Confessions of Nat Turner in the fall of 1967, shortly after its initial publication. During my long involvement with the book, I have always thought of it as a work of fiction. I see now that The Confessions of Nat Turner can be read and understood in another way. Styron's book can be seen as a hybrid, a narrative masquerading as a novel, more closely akin to these works by Yourcenar, Erikson, Elkins, and Arendt than to any conventional work of fiction. The comparisons I have made in this essay are meant to be suggestive only; there are many other similarities among these books. Thinking of The Confessions of Nat Turner together with Memoirs of Hadrian, Young Man Luther, Slavery, and Eichmann in Jerusalem has been an illuminating exercise. Reading these books together, and against each other, has helped me to understand more fully what Styron meant when he called his book on Nat Turner a "meditation on history." Styron was not so much seeking to recapture a place and time-Southampton County, Virginia, in the summer and fall of 1831--as he was attempting to recreate the mind and voice of a rebel slave, a kinsman of sorts who had revolted against a system of oppression that was inhuman during its historical moment and that was still very much alive in Styron's own time.

JAMES L. W. WEST III

Pennsylvania State University

Works Consulted

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking, 1963.

Braudeau, Michel. "Why I Wrote Sophie's Choice." West and Jacoebee 243-55.

Casciato, Arthur D., and James L. W. West III. "William Styron and The Southampton Insurrection." American Literature 52.4 (1981): 564-77.

Clarke, John Henrik, ed. William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. Boston: Beacon P, 1968.

Drewry, William S. The Southampton Insurrection. Washington, DC: The Neale Co., 1900.

Duff, John B., and Peter M. Mitchell, eds. The Nat Turner Rebellion: The Historical Event and the Modern Controversy. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Elkins, Stanley M. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1959.

Erikson, Erik H. Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Norton, 1958.

Ezra, Michael. "The Eichmann Polemics: Hannah Arendt and Her Critics." Democratiya 9 (Summer 2007): 141-65.

Friedman, Lawrence J. Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson. New York: Scribner, 1999.

Friedman, Melvin J., and Irving Malin, eds. William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner: A Critical Handbook. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1970.

Gray, Thomas R. The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. Baltimore: Lucas and Deaver, 1831.

Johnson, Roger A., ed. Psychohistory and Religion: The Case of Young Man Luther. Philadelphia: Fortress P, 1977.

Lane, Ann J., ed. The Debate over Slavery; Stanley Elkins and His Critics. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1971.

Lewis, Stephen. "William Styron." West and Jacoebee 256-64.

[Moynihan, Daniel Patrick]. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1965.

Olmsted, Frederick Law. A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States: With Remarks on Their Economy. New York: Dix & Edwards, 1856.

Picard, Charles. "L'empereur Hadrien vous parle." Revue Archeologique 43 (Jan.-June 1954): 83-85. [My thanks to Shelley Hooker for a translation of this critique.]

Robinson, Jacob. And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight: The Eichmann Trial, the Jewish Catastrophe and Hannah Arendt's Narrative. New York: Macmillan, 1965.

Rousseau, George. Yourcenar. London: Haus Publishing, 2004.

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

--. My Generation: Collected Non fiction. Ed. James L. W. West III. New York: Random House, 2015. [Includes the first collected appearance of "A Wheel of Evil Come Full Circle."]

--. Selected Letters of William Styron. Ed. Rose Styron with R. Blakeslee Gilpin. New York: Random House, 2012.

--. "This Quiet Dust." Harper's Magazine 230 (April 1965): 135-46.

--. This Quiet Dust and Other Writings. 1982. New York: Random House, 1993.

--. William Styron Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC.

West, James L. W., III. William Styron: A Life. New York: Random House, 1998.

West, James L. W., Ill, and W. Pierre Jacoebee, eds. Conversations with William Styron. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1985.

Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004.

Yourcenar, Marguerite. Memoirs of Hadrian, and Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian. Trans. Grace Frick. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1963.

(1) Gray's prefatory statement "To the Public" is reproduced on pp. xv-xviii of the first edition of The Confessions of Nat Turner; Richard Whitehead's sermon to the slaves on pp. 96-101 is taken from Olmsted; the account of the treatment of Nat Turner's body on p. 428 is from Drewry. Styron's reading about the history of slavery is detailed in West, William Styron 331-43.

(2) Styron began the composition of the book in the summer of 1962, while living on the island of Martha's Vineyard. He finished on January 22, 1967, in Roxbury, Connecticut (West, William Styron 344, 371).

(3) William Styron Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, box 9, folder 1.

(4) A checklist of the major reviews of Young Man Luther is included as an appendix to this book.

(5) Certainly Styron wanted to draw parallels between the American South and Nazi Germany. Thomas R. Gray's boast to Nat that "nigger slavery's going to last a thousand years" (25) is meant to remind the reader of Adolf Hitler's boast, in 1934, that the Third Reich would endure for one thousand years.

(6) Styron gave his copy of Slavery to me in 1996. This copy, unmarked, is in the William Styron collection at the Eberly Family Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University.

(7) For Styron's remarks on "the banality of evil," see Braudeau 249.

(8) I thank Robert Z. Birdwell, my graduate assistant, for research into the reception of Eichmann in Jerusalem, and for other labors on this essay.