"Sophie's Choice" came out in 1979, and for the rest of his life — more than 25 years — Styron produced nothing of scope or serious ambition. Writer's block was one reason, depression another. For younger people, I suspect he may actually be best known for "Darkness Visible," an 80-page essay, published in 1990 as a small book, about his battle with suicidal despair — and his eventual, if temporary, recovery.
However posterity judges Styron as a novelist, he was certainly an exceptionally smart and amusing correspondent. His many letters tend to be long, detailed and zingy with shrewd, lewd and funny remarks. He must have spent a serious portion of his day just on his mail. Many of his best letters are to his father, William C. Styron Sr., and his mentor William Blackburn, the legendary creative writing teacher at Duke whose students included Mac Hyman ("No Time for Sergeants"), Reynolds Price, Fred Chappell and Anne Tyler. In later years, Styron wrote regularly to novelists James Jones ("From Here to Eternity") and Philip Roth, to his editor Robert Loomis (whom he had met at Duke) and to his daughter Susanna.
Personalia, literary gossip and stylish prose are what make reading collections of letters fun, and Styron's contain all these. What writer today would dare say, as the youthful Styron does, that Eudora Welty's short stories are "fairly pale. She doesn't want to commit herself to anything, emotionally or intellectually, either, and thereby commits the crime" — and here young Bill is about to get himself into trouble — "of women writers in general — seeing life through pastel-tinted spectacles, lovely in its way but not in clear white focus." Having finished Saul Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March," he notes, "It's been a long time since a book has bored me so."
0 comments:
Post a Comment