Sophie's voice, Tolstoy, film, music: interpreting a leaf from the manuscript of Sophie's Choice.

Cologne-Brookes, Gavin

OF THE 895 MANUSCRIPT LEAVES OF SOPHIE'S CHOICE HOUSED IN THE Special Collections Library at Duke University, few seem as significant as the title leaf of Chapter Four, reproduced here in facsimile. (1) Leaves of this kind survive in each of William Styron's holograph manuscripts. Unlike many novelists, he did not make elaborate notes, keep a journal or generate volumes of reference material. Most of what he would use remained within him as he pondered and developed his characters and themes over the years it took for a novel to reach fruition. Such leaves are all we have of this process. Although there are two of three other leaves of the Sophie's Choice manuscript that lend themselves to interpretation, the handwriting there is comparatively uniform and organized, and at least some of the notes would seem to have been written prior to composition. In contrast, the leaf reproduced here, unnumbered except for the "FOUR" in its center, captures Styron's thoughts, feelings and moods in the white heat of creativity. Evidently, it is a leaf that he himself forgot about as time passed. Reminded of it in 1991, he recalled it with surprise. (2)

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More significantly, this leaf marks a pivotal moment both in the narrative that unfolds and in the way that Styron sets it down. It is the point at which Sophie imposes her personality on the narrative, and the novel, to borrow a phrase from Joyce Carol Oates, starts "to move of its own momentum" (Oates 550). (3) Following Flaubert in being slow and deliberate, Styron felt his way into his novels in his "determination to wrench out of every scene its absolute substance" (Styron, "Appendix" 223). Envisaged as a novella, Sophie's Choice grew chapter by chapter until it reached a shape and size far beyond his original conception. This leaf shows that process occurring even as its jumble of cryptic notes, whether scrawled or set down with contemplative precision, distills the novel itself. The boxed statements bear witness to the author's concentrated energies, while those scribbled across the yellow sheet preserve the sheer excitement of composition. Virtually every important theme and motif is present somewhere in this single space.

Chapter Four opens with a switch from the older narrator's description of his youthful days when he was known as "Stingo" to Sophie's first-person voice and her subtly rendered use of English as a newly learned language. During the chapter, the narrative shifts smoothly back but retains Sophie's point of view, a remarkable piece of legerdemain that may be uniquely Styron's. In the first three chapters, the older narrator has established the story of how he set out to be a writer. For Stingo, these New York days are times of heroic dreams but youthful unease, fraught with barely acknowledged loneliness and uncertainty about a future that seems "as misty and as obscure as those smog-bound horizons that stretched beyond the meadows of New Jersey" (24). Fired from McGraw-Hill, he arrives at Yetta Zimmerman's Pink Palace, befriends Sophie and Nathan, but sees "with a dreamer's fierce clarity" that Sophie is "doomed" (53) and that her prophesy that they three will become "the best of friends" is mere bravado (77). In chapter four, Sophie starts to tell a story that will put Stingo's youthful self-obsession in a new light. But Styron, as he embarks on this chapter, has only begun to see the complex way in which she will reveal her tragedy. He uses this title leaf to gather thoughts that occur as he writes the rest of the novel.

The most significant note on the manuscript leaf is in the top left comer. FATHER REALLY ANTI-SEMITE?" writes Styron in capitals, and next to it: "IMP." Indeed, the importance of this question for the novel's final shape is inestimable. In this chapter, Sophie tells Stingo about life in Cracow before the war, and of how her "religious," "liberal," "pacifist" father, Professor Bieganski, was a defender of the Jews (81-82). Only later will we learn that he was, as she pleads to Commandant of Auschwitz Rudolph Hoss, a "Judenfeindlich" (271) who did not merely seek to collaborate with the Nazis but even produced a pamphlet suggesting "a 'final solution' to the Jewish problem" (276). She will offer Hoss this pamphlet, hidden in a crevice of her boot, in a last vain attempt to see and save her son.

The note on the leaf captures what would appear to be Styron's first query as to whether Sophie might be lying about her father. In turn, this possibility will raise far-reaching questions about the nature and significance of her narration to Stingo, and about the themes of the novel as a whole. At first, Sophie's father's anti-Semitism is only a question in Styron's mind, and certainly a possibility Stingo is blind to. The "IMP." may even have been added later, perhaps along with the box around the question, as a kind of affirmative answer. For Sophie is lying, despite Styron's being "so sucked into" his "imaginative rendition of her monologue" that he "believed in it" up to "a very important moment" when he asked himself the question (Styron, "Looking Back" 504). She will eventually admit to being "the avatar of menteuses" (245), and this confession, which has implications for her own sense of guilt at attempting to collaborate in a situation that swallowed up both her children, will articulate a truth that, once acknowledged, proves too hard for her to bear. (4)

So when Sophie begins to tell her story, two important things are happening. One is that we hear her voice directly, as if the narrator can recall it verbatim decades later. The other is that, along with Stingo and the reader, even the author at first accepts Sophie's version of her past. This moment therefore involves sophisticated deception by both Styron and, it turns out, by his character. He persuades his reader to accept an impossibly direct rendition of Sophie's narrative, even as Sophie seduces her audience--ostensibly Stingo, but in fact also the author and reader--into believing things about her father that will turn out to be lies. Sophie's first-person narration continues for the opening five thousand words of an approximately fifteen thousand-word chapter. The rest of her past will primarily be told, with very occasional repeats of her first-person narrative, in the same way as the rest of the chapter, by way of the third-person rendering of her experiences and innermost thoughts in Stingo's voice. But the initial, lengthy "recording" of her actual voice establishes the reader's trust that Sophie's direct account is the source of the older Stingo's detailed information about what happened.

That it also sows seeds of doubt about testimony, reliability and factual data will add vital nuance to Styron's depiction of the Holocaust as for most readers an unknowable experience hidden, even as it is revealed, by layers of testimony, opinion, excuse, confession, correspondence, and other forms of official and unofficial documentation. It links, too, with Styron's determination to ensure that "you never ever in the whole book actually enter Auschwitz" (Styron, "Appendix" 246). For the point, as George Steiner put it, is "to discover the relations between those done to death and those alive then" (182): those who are victims, perpetrators and accomplices of atrocity, and those whose involvement is tangential, entirely innocent, or even heroically engaged in preventing or mitigating atrocity. Sophie's, Nathan's, and Stingo's very different kinds of unreliability show them all to be flawed individuals with complex perspectives on and connections to the events that unfold both in Poland and New York.

Sophie's character and history thus not only come dramatically to life even as she, like Styron himself, begins to fabricate, but her need to fabricate is largely what causes the novel "to move of its own momentum." It is as if we witness the character's impulse to fictionalize taking place within the author's impulse. "All fiction is fiction," writes Vladimir Nabokov. "All art is deception" (146). In this case, Styron's art is as audaciously deceptive as Sophie's deception is artful. If this framing technique has its roots in nineteenth-century realism, Styron takes the device further and with more success than any previous novelist. He experimented with the technique as early as Set This House on Fire (1960), in which he sought to create "a narrator who, beginning in the first person, could convincingly end up in the third person, the story so merging and mingling that one might accept without hesitation the fact that the narrator himself knew the uttermost nuances of another man's thought" ("William Styron to Publishers Weekly" 55). (5) But what is a cumbersome technique in the earlier novel reaps dividends in Sophie's Choice.

If writing a novel involves choosing the right words and episodes, it also involves choosing the right approach. Concerning the central matter of Sophie's voice, the manuscript leaf shows that Styron contemplated a different decision. "WARSAW-CRACOW: in form of diary?" be writes in a boxed note third down on the left. At that point he had clearly not opted either to recreate Sophie's direct voice as told to Stingo, or the subsequent third-person viewpoint, and might have used the diary technique he elsewhere employs to reveal Stingo's direct, youthful voice. It is easy to guess why he did not; even if he could convince us that Sophie's supposed diary survived with her, it would in any case have been written in Polish or German and so would have needed translating. Probably casting aside this option for logistical reasons, therefore, Styron decided to present Sophie's unmediated narration and her third-person viewpoint. This decision enabled him to dramatize Sophie's role as "both victim and accomplice" (219): a sufferer at the hands of the Nazis but also capable of manipulation in her fight for survival in Poland and in post-war New York. Had he chosen a different approach, Sophie's deception of Stingo, which proves so integral to the novel, could not have happened, and the novel would have been very different from the Sophie's Choice we now have. (6) The leaf thus shows how a work of art comes into being as the result of numerous apparently minor bur ultimately crucial decisions that fundamentally shape a narrative over which its author has only partial conscious control. (7)

The leaf is important, then, for what it illustrates about Styron's particular approach to composition and perhaps about the creative process in general. In our conversations in the 1980s, Styron's own metaphors for the process varied. Sometimes writing felt like chess. Elsewhere it felt "like a jigsaw puzzle" (Styron, "Appendix" 244). He would write his handful of manuscript leaves a day as if deciding between moves on a board or pieces in a picture. "I have to pick and choose among words so meticulously, and writing doesn't come easily," be said. "When I let it flow, I find myself writing like an idiot" (Styron, "Appendix" 217). But while be "knew where it was headed," Sophie's Choice "was a tabula rasa except for certain things" (243-44). Not knowing what "was going to come" be "just started inventing." It was "a matter of choice," not just of words but also of "the right episodes" (244). This way of creating had its problems. A common difficulty was "to find a framework" for his vision: "the architecture of the work which allows you to thread your various visions and perceptions about life into a fabric that makes a coherent whole" (232). If that "fully established metaphor" proved elusive he would find himself with writing that did not add up to a novel (as, one suspects, with his unfinished work, The Way of the Warrior) or simply producing a work of "perhaps a less substantial quality" like Set This House on Fire (221-22). At other times, though, writing novels felt like a form of theater. He would direct and observe his characters. But, whatever the metaphor, the manuscript leaf reproduced here tells us at least as much as Styron himself could explain.

With regard to the creative process in general, this example of a character's hoodwinking an author who has supposedly "created" her raises an intriguing question. If a character can deceive her creator then should we consider this to be a form of self-deception? Clearly, Sophie's lies are a form of self-defense and we might take this further and describe Sophie's Choice as Styron's self-defense. It is not so much that Sophie needs to deceive Stingo, whom after all she need not speak to at all about her past, as that she needs to construct a version of herself that she can live with. Stingo thus acts as a kind of mirror for her. At the same time, Sophie acts as a mirror for her author.

To take Sophie and Stingo first, this use of other characters as mirrors provides one of many useful comparisons with a key precursor, Anna Karenina. Of all Sophie's resemblances to Tolstoy's tragic heroine a foremost example is their shared sense of an identity shattered by unforeseen events. This fact leads each to construct and present a false new self. In each case, the author focuses on his heroine's face to express this facade. Anna's eyes, in particular, are fundamental to Tolstoy's conveying of her beauty, vivacity, and clarity of intellectual and emotional vision up to the point when she meets Vronsky and of her subsequent need to deceive both others and herself. Just as "her bright grey eyes" attract Vronsky (61), so they reflect her deception and self-deception once she has committed adultery and lost her son, her place in society, and her integrity. She screws them up as if to avoid seeing things as they are. On the one occasion when she meets the Tolstoyan mouthpiece, Constantine Levin, her eyes trouble him both in her portrait and in the woman he meets. Levin glances "from the portrait to the original" and "a special brightness" lights up her face when she feels "his eyes upon her" (692). But as he departs, Anna screws up her eyes again. She has "involuntarily done all in her power to awaken love in Levin" (697), Tolstoy tells us, but as soon as he has gone she "cease[s] to think about him" (698). Her seductive nature is an involuntary defense mechanism that seems at once to affirm her own worth and to confirm the worthlessness of love. Prior to her death she feels that what she sees "clearly in the piercing light" reveals "to her the meaning of life and of human relations" (755). Sophie with Stingo is not unlike Anna with Levin. She attempts to project an image that Stingo will accept as her real self. If Stingo accepts it so can she. But just as Stingo walks in to find Sophie turning "from the mirror with a startled gasp" to reveal her actual, denture-less countenance to be that of "an old hag whose entire lower face had crumpled in upon itself" (131) so too her verbal and emotional deceptions, and self-deceptions, implode.

As for Sophie as a mirror for Styron, in hindsight he realized that his composition of Sophie's Choice functioned, in part, as a survival mechanism. In Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990), he not only laid bare his demons bur also made painfully clear that there are links between Sophie's Choice and his personal history. He did not state it so baldly as what follows, but the parallels include the loss of his mother to cancer when he was thirteen (Stingo); his bouts of clinical depression, or "madness" (Nathan); and his heavy drinking and sense of worthlessness (Sophie). The extent to which Styron employed self-deception to medicate his own troubled psyche by writing the novel would take up another essay. Suffice to say that he admits that prior to the illness he "never gave much thought" to his work "in terms of its connection with the subconscious," whereas after his return to health he "began to see clearly" both "how depression had clung close to the outer edges" of his life for years, and how persistent a theme suicide had been in his books (78). In particular, he saw how his real alter egos in his first and last novels were his doomed heroines and was "stunned to perceive how accurately" he "had created the landscape of depression in the minds of these young women, describing with what could only be instinct, out of a subconscious already roiled by disturbances of mood, the psychic imbalance that led them to destruction" (79).

Writing novels would seem to have enabled Styron to adopt a mask of self-delusion even as he explored the pain he denied. His descent into a devastating suicidal depression in the fall of 1985 and the recovery that led to the writing of Darkness Visible finally allowed him to understand his own inability, up until then, to face the forces that drove his creativity. The irony, however, as his daughter Alexandra writes in a poignant account of Styron's battles with unipolar depression, was that facing his demons altered him permanently. "The sorrow, fear, and guilt that Daddy had held at bay for half a century were never truly banished again" (57). "Never again was he the raging brute of my childhood," she writes. "But neither was he the sure-footed literary lion." In her view, "writing, which had always been hard for him, became a nearly impossible task, perhaps because he could no longer compartmentalize the emotions that his work inspired" (58). Not unlike Sophie, once able * to admit and articulate the source of his turmoil, he could no longer artistically conjure up the characters and scenarios that he had used to disguise it. His writing career was over.

In Vital Lies, Simple Truths, psychologist Daniel Goleman says of self-deception that, "by its very nature," it "is the most elusive of mental facts. We do not see what it is that we do not see" (12). He also points out that "the theme of the devastating impact such buried secrets can have is so familiar in literature that it suggests the universality of the experience" (16). Styron's creation, at the height of his literary powers and scant years before his implosion, of a character with secrets so deeply buried that she could temporarily deceive her own author would seem as extraordinary an example of this phenomenon as exists anywhere in literature.

While the choice Styron made about Sophie's voice and the implications of that choice are critical to the shape and meaning of the novel, there is much else of interest on this manuscript leaf. For instance, it provides an explanation for how Styron could triumph with these shifts of narrative perspectives between first- and third-person narratives when no earlier novelists had ever attempted it in quite so bold a way. The answer is cinema. In a note bottom left, Styron describes Nathan and Sophie's meeting as being "like the movies, Cary Grant & Myrna Loy, but then life often imitates the movie." This is presumably a reference to their 1947 movie The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. In an essay called "Moviegoer," Styron reveals the early influence of film on his writing, explaining how in the wake of his mother's death he and a male cousin spent an indolent summer in which hardly a day went by without their attending a film, including a ten-day period when they "viewed a total of sixteen movies." For Styron, his experience demonstrates how from the mid-twentieth century onward it has "been virtually impossible for a writer of fiction to be immune to the influence of film on his work, or to fail to have movies impinge in an important way on his creative consciousness" (104).

A case in point would be the free rein Styron gives to Sophie's voice, thanks to the changing nature of what a reader will accept. Sophie's Choice is an eminently cinematic novel, in which, as John Gardner notes, "scene after scene comes back" to the reader long after the book itself has been put down (245). It is also written with conscious reference to cinema. Stingo's first response to Sophie is to react to her distress by silently giving her his handkerchiefi "the clumsy thing they often do in movies at such a point, when dialogue is a problem" (49); Nathan describes his first meeting with Sophie as "cinematic" (99); and the narrator describes Dr. Jemand von Niemand as "a B-grade movie Nazi Schweinhund" (481). One reason why the sudden direct rendition of Sophie's voice, in Styron's words, "has never been questioned by anyone who's read the book" is our familiarity with film (Styron, "Looking Back" 504). We accept Sophie's detailed account of Cracow, despite the decades separating the narrator from the events, because we imagine her as we would a character on screen. Sophie's Choice is a realist novel as much indebted to Madame Bovary as to Anaa Karenina, and not just in having a central, tragic heroine. A novel built on detail, scene by meticulous scene, it is shaped by what Flaubert called le mot juste and Tolstoy referred to as "the tiny bits." (8) But as a late twentieth-century novel it differs in significant respects, not the least being this narrative approach. In Flaubert and Tolstoy, the omniscient narrator's voice--essentially Flaubert's and Tolstoy's--is ever-present, and Emma and Anna are always she, never I, unless momentarily in the act of thinking. Like Sophie, both women become liars but unlike Sophie they never get to narrate. Sophie tells her own story, the narrator either setting it down in the third person or, as in the first section of chapter four, retreating to the shadows--as it were, into the darkness behind the camera.

Beyond the question of the novel's arrangement of voices and its broad themes there are several other important notes on the leaf. These include the references ("Steiner p. 163-4-5 (vii), 99") to George Steiner's 1967 book, Language and Silence. If on the one hand Sophie's Choice is an eminently filmable novel full of vividly realized scenes, its discursive, sometimes essayistic style is distinctly beyond the reach of movies. The references suggest that, even while writing chapter four, Styron is considering Steiner's view that the Holocaust may be beyond art--a debate that actually takes place at the start of chapter nine, in the very core of the novel. For those who accept Styron's approach, Sophie's Choice at least demonstrates the viability of the attempt to situate the atrocity within the context of everyday human behavior so as to make some sense of what otherwise appears incomprehensible. Indeed, Gardner's view in the early eighties, that perhaps Styron "stands alone," outside of diarists and memoirists, as a writer who could fully dramatize the horror, the complexity, and something at least approaching the full historical and emotional meaning of the thing" would seem all the more sound over three decades after its publication (245). Either way, this leaf shows Styron's gathering comments on the question of how to express what some saw as inexpressible. Just above the center of the leaf, he notes W. H. Auden: "Christmas & Easter can be subjects for poetry, bur Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible, it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith." Theodor Adorno's statement "No poetry after Auschwitz" is cited, too, top right, and lower down a statement suggesting explanations for the Nazi mindset: "Nazis' initial victims, people thinking they were chosen people: Jews, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses." Finally, Styron scrawls his response to Steiner, Auden, and Adorno across the lower center of the leaf: "NOT Silence, bur curiously enough, only thing worth Risking a word." (9) To the right of the capitalized "FOUR" that denotes the chapter, he has written, "Let it go!!" with another arrow to the word, "dialogue." We can only guess his precise thoughts here, or what the words refer to, but their juxtaposition with the Auden quotation would seem to relate to the tension between meticulous contemplation and the need to depict the situation not, for the most part, as essay bur as human drama.

If cinema informs the novel's narrative technique and historical research informs the novel's substance, its tone owes much to the motif of classical music. This, too, has a place on the leaf, in a note, bottom right: "Nathan: Can you imagine people being unhappy, listening to Bach? (Being able to listen on records.)" Elsewhere in "Moviegoer" Styron describes his imagination as aural rather than visual; while "certain that the influence of cinema" caused his work "to be intensely visual," he was "not by nature a creature of the eye" responding "acutely to painting or pictorial representation" bur vibrated "instead to music" (105). Sophie's Choice is aural not just in Nathan's noise and Sophie's secrecy bur also in the way music infuses it from the moment Sophie and Nathan enter the frame to the moment they leave it. Just prior to meeting them, Stingo hears from the room above "the ravishing sweet heartbeat of the slow movement of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony from a phonograph" (38). When he last sees them they lie on their deathbed next to a stack of records on that same phonograph, including "Purcell's Trumpet Voluntary, the Haydn cello concerto, part of the Pastoral Symphony," "the lament for Eurydice from Gluck's Orfeo," "the larghetto from the B-flat major piano concerto of Mozart--the last he wrote," and on top of the pile the music Stingo conjectures was the last Sophie and Nathan heard: Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring (508). In between all this the motif recurs in the narrative, from Sophie's "sense of inner solace" on hearing Yehudi Menuhin play Beethoven's violin concerto at Lewisohn Stadium in Manhattan (89) to the "discordant strains of her father's obsession" (243) and "the Beer Barrel Polka" which, while Sophie pleads with Hoss, pounds rhythmically from the phonograph in a room below before being "replaced by a Liederkranz of Tyrolean yodelers" (270). It was no surprise when Nicholas Maw made an opera of the novel, premiered at Covent Garden in 2002. Sophie is of course almost wholly deprived of classical music at Auschwitz, though a snatch of Haydn's Creation enthrals her before someone replaces it with the Polka. But music provides sustenance in her final months. (10) Equally, there is virtually no reference to music in Stingo's New York life prior to his arrival at Yetta Zimmerman's. The sentiments scrawled on the leaf, then, we can assume, were possible lines for reflecting music's relative inaccessibility in that era. Nowadays, we take access to music for granted bur in the 1940s Nathan's lending of his precious records to Stingo so early in their friendship is an act of great generosity.

Sophie's Choice is not just a testament to a historical moment in its subject matter and use of music bur also in its depiction of sexual mores. The graphic depiction of Sophie and Nathan's sexual gusto and of Stingo's sexual angst have provoked plenty of criticism. But Styron had no time for censorship. Once again, among the models for Sophie's Choice are clearly Madame Bovary and Arma Karenina. The authors of these two novels of sexual adventure simply cannot be explicit about the very core of their subject matter. Flaubert therefore opts to describe sex by way of a horsedrawn cab jiggling endlessly around the cobbled streets of Rouen. Tolstoy describes only sexual anticipation and aftermath, and overt sexuality only through such devices as Vronsky's narcissistic flirtation with his horse. In contrast, Styron leaves few details to the imagination. This is not least because he "celebrated the fact" that he "had the choice, in our era, since World War II, which Tolstoy did not have" (Styron, "Appendix" 230). But if Styron's comments show the literary motivation for the novel's detailed depiction of sexuality then the leaf captures his personal motivation, as a product of this "particularly ghastly period for Eros" (121), for this liberation from prudery. The following tines do not appear in the novel but do underscore the drama: "I honestly think I shd not have been--of lust had I not been deprived so often. I should have been--like present day kids." Where Sophie has been deprived of music, Stingo considers himself deprived of sex, and his self-pity has a vaguely sinister side. Beneath beauty, in the novel, is darkness and decay. It is probably no coincidence that under the revelatory query about Sophie's lying is a note to include the fact of "Sophie's false teeth." Stingo's sexual longings discomfort both the reader and the narrator because they hint at the larger evils recorded in the novel. They suggest his role as at once a representative youth of his era, and a flawed, self-oriented individual. As the narrator says of Sophie's role in far more traumatic situations, Stingo is an "accomplice" as well as a "victim."

Other statements on the manuscript leaf generate interest. "Let's face up to Nathan: he killed Sophie, bur I loved him" is a line that might have survived in Set This House on Fire, where Styron, while anticipating Nathan and Sophie by way of Mason Flagg and Francesca, is much less assured in his artistic processes. But the sentence is far too lacking in finesse to survive in the final manuscript of Sophie's Choice. The sentiment survives bur with splendid eloquence rather than clodhopper prose in what another leaf shows was an added statement that "Nathan was utterly, fatally glamorous" (187; ms leaf 363). That is all we need to be told. Other statements on the leaf show us that Sophie's New York employer, the chiropractor Dr. Blackstock, was originally called Bial ("Nathan rails at Bial for not connecting Sophie's illness with Ausch" and "After Bial's wife's death Nathan suspects relationship"). The phrase "Sophie's rationalization for 'collaboration' is trying to live to see her son Jan" survives as a fact in the novel, while the Flaubertian joke "I am attracted to morbid themes--slavery, concentration camps, military, marriage" survives in altered form. (11) The note, top right, about Sophie as a "slave" and a "slav," too, makes clear Styron's intention of linking the Holocaust and American history by way of slavery.

The title leaf of chapter four of the manuscript of Sophie's Choice, then, is significant both in shedding light on the composition of an important twentieth-century novel and in what it reveals about the creative process. Some of the leafs meaning is lost to time; we cannot connect all the dots. For instante, what of: "Going to Phila, on bus., fried chicken, gambling ['garbling'?], seduced by a queer"? Is this justa discarded idea, an example of an incident subsequently forgotten or rejected? (12) But what the leaf does bear witness to with remarkable compactness is the moment when all the author's ideas began to come together. It captures the way the novel took flight and became the classic work of literature we know today. Finally, it not only shows how the novel documents an era bur is also now itself a document, not just of an era, bur of how novel-writing once was, and perhaps will never quite be again. Most writers now use a personal computer and so mask the editing process. Styron's painstaking, 895-leaf handwritten composition--all those 2B pencils, all those legal pads, he memorializes and celebrates in the novel itself--will feel for many like a practice from a bygone era, never to return, and a leaf such as this one is all the more fascinating for that.

Works Cited

Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. 1856. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1972.

Gardner, John. "Sophie's Choice." Critical Essays on William Styron. Ed. Arthur Casciato and James L. W. West III. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. 245-52.

Goleman, Daniel. Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception. 1985. London: Bloomsbury, 1997.

Nabokov, Vladimir. "Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary." Lectures in Literature. London: Picador, 1983. 125-77.

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Written Interviews and a Conversation with Joyce Carol Oates." Gavin Cologne-Brookes. Studies in the Novel Special Number 38 (Winter 2006): 550.

Steiner, George. Language and Silence: Essays, 1958-1966. London: Faber, 1967.

Styron, Alexandra. "Reading My Father: A Writer's Triumphs and his Torments." The New Yorker 10 December 2007: 50-60.

Styron, William. "Appendix: Extracts from Conversations with William Styron." Gavin Cologne-Brookes. The Novels of William Styron: From Harmony to History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1995. 213-47.

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

--. "Looking Back: A Conversation with William Styron." Gavin Cologne Brookes. Mississippi Quarterly 62.4 (2009): 499-510.

--. "Moviegoer." 1983. Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays. New York: Random House, 2008. 103-07.

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

--. "William Styron to Publishers Weekly." Publishers Weekly 30 May 1960: 55.

Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. 1877. Trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, 1918. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1995.

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

GAVIN COLOGNE-BROOKES

Bath Spa University

(1) Elizabeth Dunn, Research Services Librarian at the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke, provided this figure. If one includes the 90 leaves of rejected material the figure is 985. My thanks to Rose Styron and Duke University Libraries for their gracious permission to reproduce the title leaf.

(2) These two other leaves are at the front of the first folder, with a note from Styron, dated 1/31/80, to Mattie Russell (at that time director of what was known as the Duke University Manuscript Department) as follows: "The attached may be of interest since it comprises practically all the notes I found it necessary to jot down in preparation for SOPHIE'S CHOICE." The title leaf is covered with notes, with the bottom half mostly taken up with a neatly written list of ideas ticked off. On the verso there is a crossed-out version of the first paragraph. Both sides of the second leaf are filled in a fairly uniform hand with notes separated by vertical lines. When I mentioned the comments that appear on the title leaf of Chapter Four, Styron responded that he'd "forgotten" writing them (Styron, "Appendix" 247).

(3) "A novel must somehow live. It must move of its own momentum, it must breathe. How this happens is a mystery ... frankly, I wish I knew. I only know that the 'story' in conjunction with the 'language' at some point in the dreaming/writing/revising process seems to catch fire, and the novel acquires its own life" (550).

(4) Among the notes on the title leaf of the manuscript are two comments that, contrary to Styron's statement that he wrote these notes "in preparation for" composition, must have been written after he had answered his question about Professor Bieganski in the affirmative. One is: "When caught in Warsaw, Sophie tries to get off by showing Gestapo the anti-Semitic pamphlet of her father's." The other is: "Prof. hates dictator Pilsudski; but because he protected Jews." Sophie tells Stingo early in chapter four that her father, who as a young man risked his life "by hiding three Jewish families from the pogrom, from the Cossacks soldiers," "hated Pilsudski" simply "because he was a worse terror for Poland than Hitler" (82). The full truth of his avocation of "Vernichtung" or "extermination" of the Jews (242) will not be revealed until chapter nine, at the end of which we learn of his fate as a "dismal clone of the insensate leviathan of human affliction" who "protesting to the last that they had the wrong man" dies "in a fusillade of hot bullets against a wall in Sachsenhausen" (251).

(5) In Set This House on Fire, Peter Leverett tells us of Cass Kinsolving's story and then allows Cass to retell it in his own, virtually uninterrupted words. The problem is that Cass does little more than retell a story we have already heard.

(6) As Styron explains in the interview in this volume of the Mississippi Quarterly, his chosen technique drew on extensive conversations with Joanna Rostropowicz Clark, a friend on Martha's Vineyard, who provided both information and a model for Sophie's pronunciation. See also West 420.

(7) See also the note: "SHE TAKES DOWN WHAT JEWISH VICTIM SAYS." Here Styron was also evidently working out not just how to render Sophie's voice but also how she in turn came by and remembered the details she would pass on to Stingo.

(8) In "Why Do People Intoxicate Themselves?" (1890), Tolstoy cites Russian painter K. P. Bryullov, reminding a pupil that "Art begins where the tiny bits begin."

(9) Auden's first sentence also appears on the second of the leaves referred to in footnote 2, but there is no reference there to Steiner or Adorno.

(10) Styron would seem to have had this musical motif in mind from an early stage. Among the notes evidently written "in preparation" for the novel (see footnote 2) is: "Sophie hears one strain of Beethoven at Hoss's house."

(11) "I have always been attracted to morbid themes--suicide, rape, murder, military life, marriage, slavery" (110). A Flaubertian version of ironic, authorial juxtaposition is the chemist Homais's self-promoting example of "a businessman with considerable connections" as "a lawyer, a doctor, a chemist." ("un negociant qui a des relations considerables" as "un jurisconsulte, un medecin, un pharmacien.") (115).

(12) In an oral outline of a novel that bears some resemblance to the unpublished manuscript entitled Journey to Trieste, Styron described a homosexual approach as a central aspect of the action (Styron, "Appendix" 232-34).