William Styron by James West

Author:James West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2010-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

19

Marriage and Ravello

AFTER ROSE’S DEPARTURE, Styron hit rock bottom. He decided that the year, thus far at least, had been an utter waste. He had been ill for much of the fall and winter, and he was beginning to have pains in his legs that he thought might be evidence of blood clots. He had not written anything, partly because of his involvement with Rose but partly also because no idea for a novel had seized him and made him sit down at his desk. Throughout his career it would be this way with Styron: he had to see a novel whole in a burst of insight—had to know how it would begin and progress and almost where the last word would fall—before he could write. Probably he did not yet realize this about himself, but several false starts and aborted drafts over the decades that followed would teach him the lesson. What he really wanted to do now was to write about Nat Turner, but he knew that he was not prepared to do it. He therefore drifted and produced nothing of consequence.

One problem was “Long March.” Haydn had praised the novella, but Styron did not want to issue it alone, in a slim volume. He wanted instead to follow Lie Down in Darkness with another full-length novel. He thought that he might write several short stories, publish them in periodicals, and then put them together in a collection of shorter fictional works, with “Long March” as the title piece. He had been working, in a desultory way, on a few short-story ideas, but none of these had panned out. He had also had some offers to write articles on the European scene for Mademoiselle, Holiday, and Harper’s Magazine. These propositions had stirred his interest a little, but he did not really need the money, and no good article ideas had come to him. He described his state of mind in a letter to the critic Maxwell Geismar, whom he had met in New York in the fall of 1951: “I used to snicker when I read about the anguish writers had whenever they found themselves bone-dry, but I snicker no longer. It’s hell the way these days go by with nothing accomplished and, seemingly, with nothing to anticipate in the future. I am as inspiration-less as a newt.”

It had been an unproductive period as far as writing was concerned, but at least Styron had been reading. He usually began his days by reading in bed, and he often read again in the afternoons, sitting in the reading room of the Academy or, if the weather was good, moving outside to the gardens of the Villa Aurelia a half-block away. Some of this reading was light—magazines and newspapers—but most of it was not. At no time in his life did Styron read lightweight fiction or inconsequential journalism: as a man in his sixties he was hard-pressed to recall the title of a single detective novel or science-fiction yarn that he had ever read.

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