William Styron's gift of darkness

William Styron's first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, is about suicide. I've not read it and probably wouldn't. I'm sure it's written powerfully because everything Styron ever wrote was written powerfully, but at this time in my life spending a couple of days pouring over a book that features the darkness is not particularly compelling. 

At one time, I did read his memoir about depression, his depression--Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, which wasn't at all pleasant, but moving and memorable, what a memoir should be. Being young is a heady advantage when it comes to appreciating writing that's all about darkness, a subject Styron used his immense literary power to create and to examine throughout his life.

Strangely enough, he wasn't afraid to go where few writers dared. The Confessions of Nat Turner examined slavery through the eyes of a Black man. Styron was white. That he could go, with authority and power, into African-American experience and consciousness the way he did is a measure of the sheer power of his work. The novel is convincing despite the fact that it's a white guy creating the voice of a black man. Very, very few can do that convincingly.

He did it again in with Sophie's Choice, a novel about the holocaust, thought to be the province of Jewish writers alone, not a Gentile like Styron. In 1995, I taught a "special topics" class in the literature of the Holocaust, fifty years after the whole world discovered the stark evil Hitler's hate had designed and created. It may well have been the best classroom experience of my entire teaching career. Community members showed up for a host of specials like local vets who had, half a century earlier, stumbled unknowingly into concentration camps, survivors from near and far, WWII historians. The class met at night, seven to nine, during a year in which the country was remembering not to forget World War II. 

Every week, a book. The Assault, a Dutch novel, documents the aftermath in liberated Holland, where the war continued between the resistance and the collaborators long after the Nazis had left; Elie Wiesel's Night, my own Things We Couldn't Say, short stories by a Polish survivor whose unpronounceable name I couldn't spell and can't remember, a collection of fables written by Hassidic Jews, The Diary of Anne Frank, holocaust cartoons in Maus I, and more.

But it was the worst of times too, at least in my soul. Personally, I hit a wall sometime towards the end. With maybe a month left to go, I began to feel as if the Creator of Heaven and Earth had put a governor in me, a thick iron door that swung closed after some predetermined amount of lit documenting holocaust horror. I simply could no longer read the very material I had required. I did--I didn't quit, didn't drop out of my own class; but I couldn't go on. I'd suffered through so much horror, if only as a reader, that I hit a wall.

Even today, amid all those searing stories, Styron's Sophie's Choice preserves the most abhorrent moment: a young mother, under penalty of the death of her entire family, forced to choose which of her two children would live and which would not. Sophie's Choice is set after the war, but that moment in Auschwitz is what Sophie, a Polish Catholic, can put behind her, Styron suggests, only by ending her life. Styron's novel was best because, in unforgettable ways, it was worse than all the others.

Back then, in literary circles, there was much talk about the futility of literature of the holocaust. Some survivors angrily claimed nothing on paper, nothing anyone remembered or imagined, could come anywhere close to the reality of suffering undergone by so many millions. Some claimed all holocaust literature failed.

That may be true, but Styron's Sophie's Choice left its mark on me. It's a memorable, powerful story that I will never read again. 

Just about everything Styron wrote is dark and manic, as was his life. That having been said, for all the dark grimness of his life and work, our world is a far better place for the stories he told. 

Today is Anne Frank's birthday. Yesterday, it was William Styron's. He would have been 94 years old.