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Day after day in the late afternoon, after listening to classical music, William Styron, intrepidly trudged up to his loft study. An alcoholic and depressive like Sexton, Styron desperately wanted to write the next great American novel. Pacing back and forth, he would ponder dialogue, scenery, and character motivation. Then he would pick up a no. 2 pencil and slowly write a sentence, perhaps a paragraph, crossing out and editing before getting back to thinking about what would come next. On a good day, he might have finished a couple of paragraphs on his yellow legal pad. As his daughter recalled, he strove for “extreme perfection.”1 What he had committed to paper by the end of the day, with few exceptions, went unrevised. Emerging from his cocoon by eight or nine o’clock, he would have a scotch or two, then join his wife and family for a late dinner and relaxation.2
For five years in the early 1960s, Styron had been composing The Confessions of Nat Turner. The book was “a meditation upon history,” according to Styron, an attempt, he claimed, “to walk myself through a time and place” in order to imaginatively capture “what it must have been to have been a slave.”3 When completed, the book questioned the traditional lines drawn between history and fiction. As suggested by the title, the novel was “confessional,” written in the first person, presumably reflecting the viewpoint of a slave. Styron recognized and relished the dangers of such an approach. The confessional form seemed contemporary, given the poetry of Sexton or the advertisements of Mailer; for Styron it was “a peculiarly 1960’s form of address.”4
The idea for a book on a bloody slave rebellion led by a mysterious figure named Nat Turner had long steeped in Styron’s mind, at least since the late 1940s. He remarked, too, about having an abiding sort of “amateur interest in slavery.”5 He had begun working on the novel in 1952, while living in Paris and later in Rome, after his book Lie Down in Darkness had been published. That novel, filled with existential dread and suicide, was beautifully written and garnered the types of reviews that for most first-time novelists exist only in their dreams.6 But a problem arose: How do you follow a successful first novel? Only by upping the ante, only by dangling closer to the edge of the creative cliff.
A novel about a slave rebellion offered heady challenges for Styron. He was, after all, a son of the white South, raised not far from the epicenter of the rebellion. His grandmother as a young girl, he recalled, had owned slaves. Although he had been afflicted with racial bigotry—of a “foolish and fangless” variety as a youngster—he felt he had outgrown it, thanks to his “groping for enlightenment.”7 More importantly, he wanted to be recognized “as a writer who is versatile enough to tackle everything.”8 His Nat Turner would be no empty caricature, but instead a man exemplary of the “human condition”—fitted with a desire for freedom.9 There was a hint of impracticality to the project, because Styron was living in Europe. He pestered his correspondents in the United States to procure research materials for him. “I don’t know whether I’m plunging into something over my depth,” he confided to his father, “but I’m fascinated anyway.”10
The fascination never receded, but other projects dampened his enthusiasm and distracted his attention. Progress was spotty as he struggled, he wrote, “to regain my vision” for the book.11 In the interim, he worked on a novella, The Long March (1953). By early spring 1953, he finally admitted that the Nat Turner novel “lies idle; Lord knows when I’ll wrestle w/that; perhaps not for years.”12 He found himself depressed, “dangerously suicidal,” and in full-throttle crisis of confidence. “I am as inspiration-less as a newt.” He did not want to demean himself by turning out “drivel”—he raised the stakes too high for that and suffered as a result.13 If the first page was not “a real sockeroo,” he wrote, “then I tend to give up in anguish.”14
By 1954 Styron had refocused. But not on the Nat Turner project. He was now composing what would become his second full novel, Set This House on Fire, which was finally published in 1960, to generally dismal reviews.
A year later, in 1961, he returned to the never-say-die Nat Turner book. Styron wanted to write a book about “noble” themes, one that stretched his talents as a writer and spoke to the present moment. He was actually pleased by the paucity of primary material, feeling that it allowed him as a writer-cum-historian to comprehend the motivations of the leader of a rebellion. In some ways, he acknowledged, the novel was “historical” but also “psychological,” even a story of “redemption.”15
As the civil rights movement revved up in the South, a headier topic could hardly be imagined. An additional factor in Styron’s return to the subject may have been his ego. While he often proclaimed distance from the New York literary scene, he craved recognition and respect from that writerly and intellectual community, especially after his former friend Mailer had “evaluated” him as a novelist.16 Did Styron, as Mailer wondered, have the “moral courage” to “turn the consciousness of our time, an achievement which is the primary measure of a writer’s size”?17
Months before this screed appeared, Styron noted that Mailer had “flipped his lid,” because of excess drinking and drug-taking.18 Once he and pal James Jones had read their evaluations, they were relieved to have been skewered less than most other novelists. But Mailer simply increased Styron’s own worry that “the only way to become a major writer is to write books” so important that they catch “the consciousness of our time.”19
Over the next five years, beginning at Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 1962, after the critical failure of Set This House on Fire, Styron spent “afternoons with Nat Turner.”20 He was impelled to prove to himself and Mailer that he could produce a novel with lofty qualities and popular appeal. At first, Styron moved with calm assuredness, piling up pages. Soon he complained: “I didn’t know how to go on.” Sometimes, casting about for an angle to take, he found inspiration in the oddest of places. Watching Orson Welles’s classic film Citizen Kane, Styron realized that he had to take a “plunge” into memory, into the hidden, deep sources of what made Nat Turner tick.21 The end was in sight by fall 1966, as Styron felt “a blind rush of creativity” and began composing the bloody passages dealing with the rebellion. By the end of January, the book was finished and the champagne uncorked.22
Before its official publication date of October 9, 1967, Styron was supremely confident that The Confessions of Nat Turner would be a success. An excerpt from the novel had appeared in Harper’s, netting Styron a cool five thousand dollars. More impressively, the Book of the Month Club featured the novel and paid the author $150,000—“quite a chunk to earn off a slave’s back,” chirped Styron. In late November, Styron reported that the book was “approaching 100,000” copies sold. And his agent had just sold the film rights for $600,000, enough, Styron wrote, to “keep me in sour mash for the next couple of years.”23
An avalanche of publicity and favorable reviews greeted the novel. Raymond A. Sokolov in Newsweek called it “the book of the year, and more than that … an act of revelation to a whole society.”24 Philip Rahv in the New York Review of Books praised Styron’s ability to realize slaves as complex human beings. He found the work teeming with revolutionary possibility and meaning for the present. In a Sunday New York Times book review, Wilfred Sheed considered the novel “a kind of historical tone poem,” although he had problems with the voices employed in the work. Eliot Fremont-Smith, also in the New York Times, remarked that Confessions was “one of those rare books that show us our American past, our present—ourselves—in a dazzling shaft of light.”25
Perhaps the high point of renown arrived when Styron graced the cover of Newsweek magazine for October 16, 1967. In the foreground, at once surly and serene, of middling age, he looks boyishly pudgy and self-satisfied, clad in cardigan. In one hand he holds an ashy stogie; the other grasps a copy of his burnt-orange-covered novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Out of the book, mysteriously, rise two black-eyed Susans, perhaps a reference to their association with justice.
The background drawing, in black and white, depicted slaves in threadbare clothing, seething with righteous anger. In conspiratorial darkness, slaves huddle around Nat Turner as he unveils a plan for rebellion. His eyes burn with zeal, his left arm points in the direction of freedom road. A handful of slaves on that sultry evening in August 1831, in Southampton County, Virginia, had joined Turner in a bloody and doomed dash for retribution and freedom. The slaves murdered over fifty whites: “It was my object,” Turner confided, “to carry terror and devastation wherever we went.”26 Finally, the slaveholding class regrouped and exacted its own gory toll. All the rebels, fifty-six in number, were executed. White bloodlust ran hot, and perhaps two hundred innocent slaves and free blacks were murdered. Draconian slave laws were passed, and whatever hopes might have been entertained for the freeing of slaves in the upper South were forgotten. Nat was captured and later tried and hanged, but not before he supplied lawyer Thomas Gray with a slim and incomplete account of his life and rebellion.27
Storms quickly threatened to rain on Styron’s parade. The Newsweek article had predicted as much. One of the novel’s greatest supporters was James Baldwin, then at the epicenter of the civil rights struggle. Growing up in Harlem, he had been burdened by poverty and domestic difficulties. He was odd in appearance—short and wiry, and his eyeballs seemed to enter the room before he did. After a brief stint as a fifteen-year-old Pentecostal preacher, Baldwin meandered his way toward a writing career. Disgusted with racism at home, in 1948 he emigrated to France, where he lived for close to a decade—an existence that granted liberation but at the cost of abysmal poverty. He published a moving, semiautobiographical novel in 1953, followed by Giovanni’s Room in 1956, a novella of extreme beauty and sadness about a doomed homosexual relationship. He, along with Styron, maintained proudly: “Artists are here to disturb the peace.”28
By the fall of 1962, Baldwin had laid it on the line about America’s racial problem. In a letter composed to his fifteen-year-old namesake nephew, Baldwin with “brutal clarity” explained how whites viewed blacks as “worthless.”29 The subjection of the African American and the puffery of white notions of inherent superiority had defined race relations. The black past had been “rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone.” Hardly surprising, then, that members of the Nation of Islam (about whom Baldwin wrote at length) were not alone among blacks “to think of white people as devils.”30
In the end, Baldwin knew only one possibility—liberation. It would be costly and difficult, occurring “before the law, and in the mind.” But the time for justice was not in some distant future. Consciousness must be transformed in America. White America must “end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.” This was plain to see, so Baldwin famously concluded his book with biblical prophecy, as rendered in a slave song: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”31
Baldwin had lived in Styron’s Connecticut homestead in the fall of 1960; the two often found themselves “drinking whiskey through the hours until the chill dawn.” Recalling those days, Styron claimed to have been “reluctant to try to enter the mind of a slave.” But Baldwin offered “encouragement” for the task, feeding Styron’s own sense of “audacity” about the course he was taking. He may have included aspects of Baldwin in the character of Nat. “There’s some of me in Nat Turner… . If I were an actor, I could play the part,” maintained Baldwin.32
Baldwin, well-schooled in literary and racial politics, worried that many African Americans, in the midst of their own freedom struggle and in the process of defining their identities, would take umbrage at Styron’s appropriation of a revolutionary black figure—with good reason. The New Sensibility, with its emphasis on breaking the bonds of bourgeois narrowness and traditions concerning art, identified with African Americans, alas, often in a simplistic manner, as with various beats and Mailer. For his own part, Styron generally avoided drawing explicit parallels between his version of Nat Turner and the current moment—a time he later referenced as one of deeply “chaotic racial politics.”33 But Baldwin knew that Styron was “going to catch it from black and white.”34 He had struck a tender nerve.
In Styron’s telling, Nat Turner was a precocious and coddled house slave. He was educated at the behest of an enlightened slave master, who believed that slaves had intellectual potential and made of Nat an experiment to prove his point. Nat cherished the promise of freedom from bondage that his master had once promised for him. But cruel reality intervened, and Nat was sacrificed at the altar of economic necessity and the limits of benevolence. Nat’s “most incredible, crucial psychological betrayal,” this “manhood destroyed” moved Nat from normality to derangement, from religious belief to the religious zealotry of an “avenging Old Testament angel.”35 He imagines God’s voice beckoning him to rebellion. Once the rebellion begins, Nat is at best a perturbed leader. Bloodthirsty Will threatens his leadership. When Nat’s turn to kill comes twice, his sword proves as blunt as his will. Only when he confronts Margaret Whitehead, a young white girl whom Nat desires sexually, according to Styron, does he finally summon the terrible strength necessary to vanquish all that he had held dear. By murdering Margaret, he breaks his ties with his past and humanity—which he comes, apparently, to regret.
An immensely complex character—sexually, religiously, and psychologically, Styron’s Nat Turner was brilliant and deluded, revolutionary and hesitant, chaste and in sexual turmoil. Nat was a hero of sorts, in Styron’s opinion, but also “very definitely a psychopath, dangerously over the edge.” Perhaps this was in part what attracted Styron to Nat in the first place.36
A slim volume, William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, appearing in 1968, angrily rejected this presentation of Nat Turner as nothing more than a “Sambo” figure, a creation by a white southern writer. Lerone Bennett Jr. argued, “Nat Turner does not speak in William Styron’s Confessions.”
The voice in this confession is the voice of William Styron.
The images are the images of William Styron.
The confession is the confession of William Styron.
The “real” Turner, according to Bennett, “was a virile, commanding, courageous figure.”37
Styron, in contrast, had “emasculated” Nat, depicting him as unmarried and a virgin; he had even manufactured a homosexual frolic between Nat and another slave. Nor had he discussed the time that Nat ran away, a common form of slave rebellion.38 Further, he had ignored many other “facts”: that Nat had grandparents that encouraged him to read, that there was no evidence that Nat was in love with Margaret Whitehead or any white woman.
Although Styron admitted he had “no proof” of a relationship between Nat and Margaret, he posited “a very guarded sexual relationship.”39 In discussing the dynamic between Nat and his fellow rebels, Styron had “explained” what “I smell it to be true.”40 After reading the galleys of William Styron’s Nat Turner, Styron was disgusted, finding it dishonest from the first to the last page and deeply upset by being called a racist.41 He turned the table on his critics by denouncing them as the real racists for their inability to accept that “a writer, black or white, must be able to write about any human being of whatever color.”42
The critics in general he called “brainwashed” and “black philistines.”43 After all, Styron claimed that Martin Luther King Jr., just prior to his assassination, had read the book “and admired it very much.” Showing how tone-deaf Styron was to the black liberation movement and the tempo of his times, he predicted that the whole tumult would “blow over” soon.44
He was wrong, and he outrageously told a reporter, “For the last six months, I’ve felt like the only white man with Negroes on my back.”45 By the fall of 1968, a “stalker” seemed to be on Styron’s trail. He realized this at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in New Orleans. A panel titled “The Uses of History in Fiction” had been convened, featuring Styron along with fellow novelists Robert Penn Warren and Ralph Ellison. C. Vann Woodward, a distinguished historian of the South, served as the moderator.46
Ellison provocatively announced that novelists were simply born liars; that’s what they do for a living; hence they “should leave history alone.” Warren, who had chronicled in fiction the rise and fall of Louisiana politician Huey Long, maintained that good history combined imagination and fact. Woodward agreed, calling for historians to shed the armor of social scientific ideals (then in vogue) to see themselves as novelists narrating the past. Styron was clearly nervous, prattling on about Marxist theorist of literature George Lukacs and stating that the historical novelist should avoid having a “promiscuous blindness” to the facts.47
The proceedings heated up when the panel took questions from the audience. The first questioner challenged Styron for claiming that Turner was unmarried. Since the “original” confession made no mention of a wife, Styron felt he had no obligation to give him one in the novel. The questioner forced Styron to admit that Nat’s obsession with the slaveholder’s daughter Margaret Whitehead was “part of [his] fictional imagination.” It was his novelistic choice to make her into something that might not have been a reality. It allowed Styron to offer redemption rather than senseless violence as the keynote for his novel.48
The second questioner was the “stalker.” Styron recognized him as the dashiki-wearing protestor he had confronted earlier that year at Harvard University. Now he was in New Orleans to call Styron a liar once more.49 He was incensed that Styron had reduced “the revolutionary black figure” Nat Turner to a man obsessively lusting after a white woman. Perhaps seeking to lessen the tension, Styron sadly referred to his African American antagonist as “my bête noire.” They wrangled over Styron’s intentions and implications in the book. Styron defended his “artistic needs”; the questioner condemned him for producing a work that “whites wanted to read.” According to the critic, Turner was a revolutionary, pure and simple. In contrast, Styron drew Turner as “a ruthless and perhaps psychotic fanatic, a religious fanatic” with an unrealistic plan that led to further violence. This was a wrong-headed “white impression,” in the words of his angry interlocutor.50
The battle lines on a host of issues had been drawn.
As the 1960s progressed, African Americans organized and pushed for equality. In 1960, direct action—beginning in Greensboro and followed by other sit-ins—brought the struggle to light. Many well-meaning whites, especially during the Freedom Summer drive of 1964, threw themselves into the battle for black equality. Stokely Carmichael, in the early 1960s, worked with the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the South to integrate facilities and register blacks to vote. In 1967, with coauthor Charles V. Hamilton, he published Black Power, which, as its name suggested, and as Carmichael’s increasingly incendiary prose hammered home, meant that the liberation of blacks must occur by their own actions, under their own leadership, and, if necessary, with recourse to violence (this was in strong contrast to Martin Luther King Jr.’s view of how to fight for freedom). The age of Black Power and identity politics had begun—and it did not take kindly to Styron’s appropriation of a black hero and black voice rendered into a bundle of neuroses.
A sea change of controversy also rocked the study of slavery. For many years—with the exception of the work of African American scholars such as W. E. B. DuBois and Benjamin Quarles, joined by the white Marxist Herbert Aptheker—historians (such as U. B. Phillips) had presented slavery with a humane face, finding it a relatively benign institution that had brought discipline and religion to a race otherwise destined for savagery. This view was challenged for a mainstream audience in the preface to A Peculiar Institution (1956) by Berkeley historian Kenneth Stampp. He presumed that negroes and whites were cut from the same cloth, without significant racial distinctions other than patina of skin color.51
Historian Stanley Elkins published Slavery in 1959, a book Styron found “quite an eye-opener.”52 Influenced by literature on the Holocaust and concentration camps, particularly the work of Bruno Bettelheim, Elkins maintained that slavery was a total institution designed to demean any human, bringing them to “the level of an animal.”53 Bettelheim famously observed—he had been briefly placed in a concentration camp—that some inmates who had been broken in soul became passive and childlike, looking to the concentration camp guards as figures deserving authority and even admiration.
Elkins turned this perspective to the slave system in the United States, arguing that the cruelty of the institution had rendered many African Americans into Sambo figures, docile and loyal to their owners—just as concentration camp prisoners identified with their oppressors. Borrowing from this material, Styron wrote of slaves remaining loyal to their masters, rallying to fight against Turner and his rebels. But Styron also realized that these slaves had been wise to avoid a rebellion that had slim chance of success.54
So long as one presumed that the concentration camp experience was analogous to slavery, such a view had logic and historical value. But the connection and its implications came under attack by African American historian John Blassingame and white historian Eugene Genovese. Slavery was horrible but not a total institution. Differences existed from plantation to plantation (depending on their location, size, and crop). Slaves, blessed with the human spirit to persevere, in Blassingame’s view, carved out spaces for communities that maintained dignity and acts of rebellion (disobedience, running away, and much more). In Genovese’s rather complex interpretation in Roll, Jordan, Roll, slave owners upheld a paternalistic perception of themselves, which fed into an ideology that stressed the laziness and childlike qualities of the slaves. In return for not challenging the system by outright rebellion, slaves created clever ruses to win some rights, haggle for others, and gain humanity. In sum, slaves maintained their dignity in a system rife with inequity and contradictions.
Irony infused the debate between Styron and his critics about the “reality” of Nat Turner. Each relied, when it suited their purposes, on the Confessions, a twenty-page pamphlet Turner had dictated to Thomas Gray. Almost nothing is known about Gray, other than the comments he offered within the text of Confessions. Styron presents him as a ravaged, “pockmarked” man, familiar with drink, well-read, unsentimental, given to philosophical speculation.55 Nor is it known whether Gray copied Turner’s comments verbatim or used a loose hand in transcription.56 Probably the latter. In some ways, Gray is the most interesting figure in the novel. A man of some education, conversant with religious issues and given to self-puffery, Gray took as his task to wring a confession and to show how Turner was an aberration among slaves. Otherwise, his actions could upset the presumption that slavery was a benign institution.
In the novel, Gray acknowledges Nat’s intelligence and fanaticism. But he and Nat address one another across an unbridgeable divide. Peppered with questions by Gray, Nat barks, “Leave off studyin’ about all this! We done what had to be done.”57 Gray cannot accept this; he must dig deeper into the meaning of the crime. If it is not a fluke, then it becomes a horrendous augury for the future. As he tells the court, “In the dark and privy stillness of our minds there are few of us who are not still haunted by worrisome doubts.” How could “those very people under whose stewardship they had enjoyed a contentment and tranquility unequaled anywhere among the members of their race” have brought forth such undiluted horror, such an “awful toll in human ruin and heartbreak and bereavement” which presently “haunt us like the specter of a threatening black hand above the sweetly pillowed head of a slumbering babe”?58
Gray contents himself with a mask of contradiction and rationalization, the sort of self-deception necessary to sustain the ideology of the slaveholding class. The essential fact, in Gray’s view, is that the rebellion failed. With the exception of his killing of Margaret Whitehead, Nat was “unable to carry out a single feat of arms! ” Thus,
qualities of irresolution, instability, spiritual backwardness, and plain habits of docility are so deeply embedded in the Negro nature that any insurgent action on the part of this race is doomed to failure; and for this reason it is my sincere plea that the good people of our Southland yield not, succumb not to the twin demons of terror and panic.59
Was this, as some of Styron’s critics maintained, a sly commentary on the racial situation in 1967, an attempt on Styron’s part to quell black revolutionary potential and to uphold the splintering liberal consensus of racial progress through accommodation? He was aware of the bloody rebellion in Africa led by Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961 and of the revolutionary writings of Frantz Fanon, whom he found “very scary.”60 The furor in the black world, remarked Styron, demonstrated how “contemporaneous and universal” his story of Nat Turner was. But in the end, Styron supported evolution, not revolution, as the social and political solution while maintaining the necessity of experimentation and daring in the work of art.61
Was Styron’s “meditation upon history” intended to be more than a consideration of racial issues? Might this rather odd novel be a meditation on the problematic nature of truth, about how the past resists the historian, not simply because the available facts are scanty, as in the case of Nat Turner, or because they are filtered through the amanuensis and mind of men like Gray? Was Styron, in effect, helping to launch the postmodern perspective?
Appearing around the time of Confessions were other major works that confounded the issue of truth and that blurred the line between fact and fiction. As noted, this had been done in Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965) where the author’s ample imagination and writerly skills were in evidence. But the question of where imagination began and fact ended haunted the work. The back flap of the book announced that In Cold Blood (which was subtitled A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences) was “the culmination of [Capote’s] long-standing desire to make a contribution toward the establishment of a serious new literary form: the Non-fiction Novel.”62 This new form would also be adopted by Norman Mailer in his Armies of the Night, which had begun appearing in excerpts in 1967. When published as a book in 1968, its subtitle revealed its method: History as a Novel / The Novel as History.63
In similar fashion, Styron sought to mess with existing perceptions of fact and fiction. He appended a brief “Author’s Note” to Confessions. He had labored hard on this single page of text, although he later admitted that it had “buffaloed quite a few people,” himself included: “I’ve never really been able to figure out just what I meant by it.”64
Confessions, as a “meditation,” would avoid the potholes of melodrama and romance associated with historical fiction. Styron considered himself a serious historian—studying the institution of slavery, southern customs, and more. He wanted to evoke a particular moment in history, “to walk myself through a time and place, in a manner of self-discovery.” Such an act was a series of “tightropes” that demanded acute balance.65 Styron wanted it both ways: to depict the facts of a real human being while making him into his own creation. He claimed allegiance to the facts that were available; he had “rarely departed from the known facts about Nat Turner and the revolt.” Yet he acknowledged that he had employed “the utmost freedom of imagination” not just “in re-constructing events” but in delving into Turner’s “early life, and the motivations for the revolt,” which he had discovered in Nat’s “psychology of suffering.”66
Styron had been required to write history in a different key. The imagination of the novelist thus trespassed on the traditional territory of the historian. This resulted in a “work that is less an ‘historical novel’ in conventional terms than a meditation on history.” In a late statement about this “meditation,” Styron was more forthcoming. The novel he had written was, like other historical novels, an “actual flight from facts and the restrictions of pure data,” so long as the task was undertaken without doing anything to “seriously compromise the historical record.”67 Yet listen once more as Styron twists and turns trying to figure things out. Nat was
a projection of my own character of course, like any creation of a writer, but he had to differ from the historical figure as we know him. Otherwise I would have been forced to write a nonfiction biography.68
Does that clarify matters or simply land us in the swamp of blurred genres?
Another distinctive and controversial feature of the novel was its varied voices.69 Styron presented Nat’s consciousness in the first-person. While thinking hard about how to frame the narrative, Styron had read Camus’s The Stranger. He was smitten with how Camus’s main character, Meursault—who like Nat Turner has murdered, albeit for small reasons—narrates the story of his life through flashbacks. The “cosmic loneliness” of Meursault, alone in a jail cell, was what Styron wanted to achieve with Nat. Such an existential imperative fit well with the historical moment of the early 1960s and Styron’s own philosophical proclivities.
It was also, in a way, part of the problem. The human condition was of necessity part of Nat’s pedigree. But to transform Nat into such a singular brooding entity was, in effect, to remove him from the flow of a community, from a particular historical situation, as many of Styron’s critics pointed out.70
Nor did Nat’s voice mimic the cadences of a typical slave. Nat “was educated—not highly educated,” stated Styron, “but a man, I think, of some genius—and therefore one has to allow him a mode of expression which will take in these complexities.”71 The tone was a sort of “fustian Victorianism” that allowed Styron to parade his powers of description and internal analysis. “The round iron stove sizzled and breathed in the quiet,” Turner recalled, “filling the air with the scent of burning cedar.”72 The question that Styron consistently elided was how to grant Nat his own voice yet remain able to insinuate himself into Nat’s reality. Slave dialect and personality were intertwined—and sufficiently complex to have challenged a novelist of Styron’s ambitions.73
When Turner addressed other slaves, his voice was educated but simpler and more direct. Here Styron claimed familiarity with “recent backwoods” southern speech that allowed him to capture Turner’s cadences from 130 years ago—a big presumption.74 Finally, when Turner spoke with whites, his voice sometimes trembled with hesitancies or took on an Uncle Tom style: “Well, mastah, I tell you … it’s always been my idea that a nigger should follow all the rules and regulations so far as he is able.” Styron announced that he had wanted with this novel “to assume the person of a Negro and make it convincing.”75
With no small amount of temerity, Styron boasted to a reporter that he had “absorbed by osmosis a knowledge of what it is to be a Negro.” Indeed, Styron continued without apparent sensitivity to the anguished history of racial masquerades and appropriation, “I said to myself ‘I’m going to be a Negro for this entire book.’ ”76 After all, Styron must have imagined, if Flaubert could become Emma Bovary (“C’est moi”) then why couldn’t he become Nat Turner? The book was an experiment in artistic creation, wasn’t it?, Styron maintained.
Whereas Styron stood proud that he had managed to blur genres and speak in varied voices, one black scholar, Michael Thelwell, took him to task. Styron, Thelwell wrote, “straddles two genres” without transcending either. His work, then, served to “combine” the problems of both history and fiction, presenting to the public a work that suggests a certain sagacity and adherence to known facts. In the process, the fruits of Styron’s imagination appear as facts, and the real facts, no matter how scanty, are transformed into fictions.
The very nature of truth, indeed of history, was slipping by 1967, partly as a result of increasing skepticism on the part of many about United States claims in the Vietnam War. Historians were still beholden to a search for truth, but from a new angle, attentive to the history of those excluded from power—an America from the bottom up, an America that was imperialist and racist. While such studies were predicated upon the belief that truth could be uncovered, they raised larger epistemological issues: To what degree is historical truth contingent on the viewpoint of the historian, the institutions within which the historian works, and the ideological constraints (and possibilities) of any historical moment?77
New ideals were slowly filtering into the academic mainstream. Hayden White, a young historian, published an influential paper, “The Burden of History,” in 1966. The notion that history was somehow neutrally perched between social science and literature explained why the discipline was reeling with misdirection, frustrated attempts to nail down truth. The solution he sketched out was to take into account that historical writing consisted of “metaphoric constructions,” no different than any other writing. Historians should be more open to creativity, to the Dionysian spirit. He cited Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death as a serious “meditation” on history. A book of marked brilliance and peculiarities, it was largely ignored by historians. But its essential theme, couched in William Blake’s view that excess is a royal road to wisdom, was part of the New Sensibility.78 Life against Death was an “anti-history” book, which is precisely what made it live as a work of history. White linked the work to the New Sensibility: Brown had achieved “the same effects as those sought by a ‘Pop artist’ or by John Cage” or by a happening. One imagines that White would have been a staunch defender of Styron’s novel.79
In other ways, too, the practice of history was under challenge, especially in terms of its claim to confront the facts and to be objective. At a conference held in Baltimore in October 1966, a young French philosopher mesmerized a crowd at the symposium “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.” Jacques Derrida, whose major book Of Grammatology was about to be issued in French, maneuvered the study of literature into an entirely new direction—one where texts were sites of uncertainty and play, and embedded and durable meaning was an illusion. When asked at the conference about what exactly he was hoping to achieve, Derrida replied, with no small degree of irony: “I was wondering myself where I was going… . I am trying, precisely, to put myself at a point so that I do not know any longer where I am going.”80 For one of the two conference organizers, truth as a transcendental ideal was dead; in its stead was only “radical discontinuity.”81
Postmodernism had alighted upon American shores.
After the publication of Confessions, Styron was unsure what to do next. He worked on a novel about Japan and the warrior practice of bushido. He was nagged, however, by memories of an incident that happened soon after he had arrived in New York City. Living in a boarding house on a quiet street in Brooklyn, Styron had encountered some fascinating individuals with murky pasts. Styron opted to fill in the blanks. At least this time, he worried about the potential of controversy for the project. He intended to deal with the Holocaust through the persona of a non-Jewish victim—a beautiful Polish woman named Sophie, who was forced to make one of the most difficult choices imaginable. Included in the cast of characters would be Sophie’s Jewish lover, a man of brilliance and madness. The novel became a monumental success, and it evoked little controversy and much praise. In part, the lack of furor had something to do with him assuming the voice of Stingo, a young man modeled on himself. By the time of its publication in 1979, doing outrageous things with the novel, assuming the voices of the mad and persecuted without presenting moral solvents, had become part and parcel of the New Sensibility.82