On Writers and Writing by John Gardner

Author:John Gardner
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2010-07-20T16:00:00+00:00

Sophie’s Choice

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WHEN HIS 1979 NEW YORK TIMES BOOK Review piece on Sophie’s Choice was chosen to be reprinted in Critical Essays on William Styron (Casciato and West, eds., 1982), John Gardner requested that the following statement precede the original text.

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Book reviews are necessarily written under pressure; at most one has a matter of days to figure out what one thinks and feels about a book that may have, like Sophie’s Choice, taken years to write. After this review, I received a good deal of angry mail from Polish Americans, which makes me sorry I was not more careful to show my sympathy with the Polish and my large dependence on Mr. Styron’s carefully documented and immensely sympathetic account. But what I regret most of all was my review’s disservice to Styron himself.

Though I recognized the power and beauty of Sophie’s Choice, I did not guess, at the time I wrote, the novel’s staying power. Scene after scene comes back now, long after I last read the book, with astonishing vividness—perhaps the most obvious mark of a masterpiece. I think the reason is not solely that one of the novel’s important subjects is the holocaust. Very few writers have been able to deal with the red-hot subject without in the end being burnt up by it. In retrospect I would say Styron succeeded where many failed, and, more than that, that among the few who succeed he stands alone—if one does not count personal diaries or memoirs—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. He found the connections between the vast historical horror and the psychological equivalents in ordinary life, not to mention the eerie connection between what happened in Germany and what happens in these divided United States. But as I was saying, it is not just this subject matter that makes Sophie’s Choice memorable. His descriptions of Brooklyn life and scenery have a vividness just as uncanny, and his analysis of the young writer’s anxieties (any young writer’s, not just Stingo’s), to say nothing of his psychologically original and convincing analysis of Nathan and Sophie, make one look at people—and oneself—in a new way.

I regret, too, that I did not mention the novel’s humor. I suppose I was overawed by the horror; but the fact is that one of the reasons Styron succeeded so well in Sophie’s Choke is that, like Shakespeare (I think the comparison is not too grand), Styron knows how to cut away from the darkness of his material, so that when he turns to it again it strikes with increasing force.

Another of my regrets is that I read the book with a somewhat bigoted Yankee eye. I will say the inevitable: Some of my best friends are Southerners. Nevertheless, I reacted with disbelief and distaste to some extremely Southern material—for instance Stingo reading the Bible with an old black woman. If Styron had been faking the scene, I would have been right.

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