William Styron
Interviewed
by Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton
The Art of Fiction No. 5
William Styron is the first of the 'young writers' to be interviewed by
this magazine. He was born 28 years ago in Newport News, Virginia, a section he
grew up in and which provided the locale for his first novel—Lie Down in Darkness. This
novel, published three years ago, won Styron immediate standing about the best
of contemporary writers, and besides critical acclaim gained him the Prix de
Rome for Literature.
He was interviewed in Paris, in early
autumn, at Patrick's, a café on the boulevard Montparnasse, which has little to
distinguish it from its neighbors—the Dome, the Rotonde, Le Chapelain—except a
faintly better brand of coffee. Across the boulevard from the café and its
sidewalk tables, a red poster portrays a skeletal family. They are behind bars,
and the caption reads: Take your vacation in happy Russia! The lower part of the poster has been
ripped and scarred and plastered with stickers shouting: Les
Américans en Amérique! U.S. go home! An adjoining poster advertises
carbonated water. Perrier! It sings. L’Eau
qui fait pschitt! The
sun reflects strongly off their vivid colors, and Styron, shading his eyes,
peers down into his coffee. He is a young man of good appearance, though
not this afternoon; he is a little paler than is healthy in this quiet hour
when the denizens of the quarter lie hiding, their weak night eyes insulted by
the light.
INTERVIEWER
You were about to tell us when you started
to write.
WILLIAM STYRON
What? Oh, yes. Write. I figure I must have
been about thirteen. I wrote an imitation Conrad thing, “Typhoon and the Tor
Bay” it was called, you know, a ship’s hold swarming with crazy Chinks. I think
I had some sharks in there too. I gave it the full treatment.
INTERVIEWER
And how did you happen to start? That is,
why did you want to write?
STYRON
I wish I knew. I wanted to express myself,
I guess. But after “Typhoon and the Tor Bay” I didn’t give writing another
thought until I went to Duke University and landed in a creative writing course
under William Blackburn. He was the one who got me started.
INTERVIEWER
What value has the creative writing course
for young writers?
STYRON
It gives them a start, I suppose. But it
can be an awful waste of time. Look at those people who go back year after year
to summer writers’ conferences, you get so you can pick them out a mile away. A
writing course can only give you a start, and help a little. It can’t teach writing.
The professor should weed out the good from the bad, cull them like a farmer,
and not encourage the ones who haven’t got something. At one school I know in
New York, which has a lot of writing courses, there are a couple of teachers
who moon in the most disgusting way over the poorest, most talentless writers,
giving false hope where there shouldn’t be any hope at all. Regularly they put
out dreary little anthologies, the quality of which would chill your blood.
It’s a ruinous business, a waste of paper and time, and such teachers should be
abolished.
INTERVIEWER
The average teacher can’t teach anything
about technique or style?
STYRON
Well, he can teach you something in
matters of technique. You know—don’t tell a story from two points of view and that
sort of thing. But I don’t think even the most conscientious and astute
teachers can teach anything about style. Style comes only after long, hard
practice and writing.
INTERVIEWER
Do you enjoy writing?
STYRON
I certainly don’t. I get a fine, warm feeling
when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of
getting started each day. Let’s face it, writing is hell.
INTERVIEWER
How many pages do you turn out each day?
STYRON
When I’m writing steadily—that is, when
I’m involved in a project that I’m really interested in, one of those rare
pieces that has a foreseeable end—I average two-and-a-half or three pages a
day, longhand on yellow sheets. I spend about five hours at it, of which
very little is spent actually writing. I try to get a feeling of what’s going
on in the story before I put it down on paper, but actually most of this
breaking-in period is one long, fantastic daydream, in which I think about
anything but the work at hand. I can’t turn out slews of stuff each day. I wish
I could. I seem to have some neurotic need to perfect each paragraph—each
sentence, even—as I go along.
INTERVIEWER
And what time of the day do you find best
for working?
STYRON
The afternoon. I like to stay up late at
night and get drunk and sleep late. I wish I could break the habit but I can’t.
The afternoon is the only time I have left and I try to use it to the best
advantage, with a hangover.
INTERVIEWER
Do you use a notebook?
STYRON
No, I don’t feel the need for it. I’ve
tried, but it does no good, since I’ve never used what I’ve written down. I
think the use of a notebook depends upon the individual.
INTERVIEWER
Do you find you need seclusion?
STYRON
I find it’s difficult to write in complete
isolation. I think it would be hard for me on a South Sea island or in the
Maine woods. I like company and entertainment, people around. The actual
process of writing, though, demands complete, noiseless privacy, without even
music; a baby howling two blocks away will drive me nuts.
INTERVIEWER
Does your emotional state have any bearing
on your work?
STYRON
I guess like everybody I’m emotionally
fouled up most of the time, but I find I do better when I’m relatively placid.
It’s hard to say, though. If writers had to wait until their precious psyches
were completely serene there wouldn’t be much writing done. Actually—though I
don’t take advantage of the fact as much as I should—I find that I’m simply the
happiest, the placidest, when I’m writing, and so I suppose that that, for me,
is the final answer. When I’m writing I find it’s the only time that I feel
completely self-possessed, even when the writing itself is not going too well.
It’s fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as
I am most of the time—for jittery people. Besides, I’ve discovered that when
I’m not writing I’m prone to developing certain nervous tics, and hypochondria.
Writing alleviates those quite a bit. I think I resist change more than most
people. I dislike traveling, like to stay settled. When I first came to Paris
all I could think about was going home, home to the old James River. One of
these days I expect to inherit a peanut farm. Go back home and farm them old
peanuts and be real old Southern whisky gentry.
INTERVIEWER
Your novel was linked to the Southern school
of fiction. Do you think the critics were justified in doing this?
STYRON
No, frankly, I don’t consider myself in
the Southern school, whatever that is. Lie Down in Darkness, or most of it, was set in the South,
but I don’t care if I never write about the South again, really. Only certain
things in the book are particularly Southern. I used leitmotifs—the negroes,
for example—that run throughout the book, but I would like to believe that my
people would have behaved the way they did anywhere. The girl, Peyton, for
instance, didn’t have to come from Virginia. She would have wound up jumping
from a window no matter where she came from. Critics are always linking writers
to “schools.” If they couldn’t link people to schools, they’d die. When what
they condescendingly call “a genuinely fresh talent” arrives on the scene, the
critics rarely try to point out what makes him fresh or genuine but concentrate
instead on how he behaves in accordance with their preconceived notion of what
school he belongs to.
INTERVIEWER
You don’t find that it’s true of most of
the so-called Southern novels that the reactions of their characters are
universal?
STYRON
Look, I don’t mean to repudiate my
Southern background completely, but I don’t believe that the South alone
produces “universal” literature. That universal quality comes far more from a
single writer’s mind and his individual spirit than from his background.
Faulkner’s a writer of extraordinary stature more because of the great breadth
of his vision than because he happened to be born in Mississippi. All you have
to do is read one issue of the Times Book Review to see how much junk comes out
regularly from south of the Mason-Dixon line, along with the good stuff. I have
to admit, though, that the South has a definite literary tradition, which is
the reason it probably produces a better quality of writing, proportionately.
Perhaps it’s just true that Faulkner, if he had been born in, say, Pasadena,
might very well still have had that universal quality of mind, but instead of
writing Light in August he would have gone into television or
written universal ads for Jantzen bathing suits.
INTERVIEWER
Well, why do you think this Southern
tradition exists at all?
STYRON
Well, first, there’s that old heritage of
Biblical rhetoric and storytelling. Then the South simply provides such
wonderful material. Take, for instance, the conflict between the ordered
Protestant tradition, the fundamentalism based on the Old Testament, and the
twentieth century—movies, cars, television. The poetic juxtapositions you find
in this conflict—a crazy, colored preacher howling those tremendously moving
verses from Isaiah 40, while riding around in a maroon Packard. It’s wonderful
stuff and comparatively new, too, which is perhaps why the renaissance of Southern
writing coincided with these last few decades of the machine age. If Faulkner
had written in the 1880s he would have been writing, no doubt, safely within
the tradition, but his novels would have been genteel novels, like those of
George Washington Cable or Thomas Nelson Page. In fact, the modern South is
such powerful material that the author runs the danger of capturing the local
color and feeling that’s enough. He gets so bemused by decaying mansions that
he forgets to populate them with people. I’m beginning to feel that it’s a good
idea for writers who come from the South, at least some of them, to break away
a little from all them magnolias.
INTERVIEWER
You refer a number of times to Faulkner.
Even though you don’t think of yourself as a “Southern” writer, would you say
that he influenced you?
STYRON
I would certainly say so. I’d say I’ve
been influenced as much, though, by Joyce and Flaubert. Old Joyce and Flaubert
have influenced me stylistically, given me arrows, but then a lot of the contemporary
works I’ve read have influenced me as a craftsman. Dos Passos, Scott
Fitzgerald, both have been valuable in teaching me how to write the novel, but
not many of these modern people have contributed much to my emotional climate.
Joyce comes closest, but the strong influences are out of the past—the Bible,
Marlowe, Blake, Shakespeare. As for Flaubert, Madame Bovary is one of the few novels that move me
in every way, not only in its style, but in its total communicability, like the
effect of good poetry. What I really mean is that a great book should leave you
with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several
lives while reading it. Its writer should, too. Without condescending, he
should be conscious of himself as a reader, and while he’s writing it he should
be able to step outside of it from time to time and say to himself, Now if I
were just reading this book, would I like this part here? I have the feeling
that that’s what Flaubert did—maybe too much, though, finally, in books like Sentimental
Education.
INTERVIEWER
While we’re skirting this question, do you
think Faulkner’s experiments with time inThe
Sound and the Fury are
justified?
STYRON
Justified? Yes, I do.
INTERVIEWER
Successful, then?
STYRON
No, I don’t think so. Faulkner doesn’t
give enough help to the reader. I’m all for the complexity of Faulkner, but not
for the confusion. That goes for Joyce, too. All that fabulously beautiful
poetry in the last part of Finnegans Wake is pretty much lost to the world
simply because not many people are ever going to put up with the chaos that
precedes it. As for The Sound and the Fury, I think it succeeds in spite of
itself. Faulkner often simply stays too damn intense for too long a time. It
ends up being great stuff, somehow, though, and the marvel is how it could be
so wonderful being pitched for so long in that one high, prolonged, delirious
key.
INTERVIEWER
Was the problem of time development acute
in the writing of Lie Down in Darkness?
STYRON
Well, the book started with the man,
Loftis, standing at the station with the hearse, waiting for the body of his
daughter to arrive from up North. I wanted to give him density, but all the
tragedy in his life had happened in the past. So the problem was to get into
the past, and this man’s tragedy, without breaking the story. It stumped me for
a whole year. Then it finally occurred to me to use separate moments in time,
four or five long dramatic scenes revolving around the daughter, Peyton, at
different stages in her life. The business of the progression of time seems to
me one of the most difficult problems a novelist has to cope with.
INTERVIEWER
Did you prefigure the novel? How much was
planned when you started?
STYRON
Very little. I knew about Loftis and all
his domestic troubles. I had the funeral. I had the girl in mind, and her
suicide in Harlem. I thought I knew why, too. But that’s all I had.
INTERVIEWER
Did you start with emphasis on character
or story?
STYRON
Character, definitely. And by character I
mean a person drawn full-round, not a caricature. E. M. Forster refers to
“flat” and “round” characters. I try to make all of mine round. It takes an
extrovert like Dickens to make flat characters come alive. But story as such
has been neglected by today’s introverted writers. Story and character should
grow together; I think I’m lucky so far in that in practically everything I’ve
tried to write these two elements have grown together. They must, to give an
impression of life being lived, just because each man’s life is a story, if you’ll
pardon the cliché. I used to spend a lot of time worrying over word order,
trying to create beautiful passages. I still believe in the value of a handsome
style. I appreciate the sensibility that can produce a nice turn of phrase,
like Scott Fitzgerald. But I’m not interested any more in turning out something
shimmering and impressionistic—Southern, if you will—full of word-pictures,
damn Dixie baby talk, and that sort of thing. I guess I just get more and more
interested in people. And story.
INTERVIEWER
Are your characters real-life or
imaginary?
STYRON
I don’t know if that’s answerable. I
really think, frankly, though, that most of my characters come closer to being
entirely imaginary than the other way round. Maybe that’s because they all seem
to end up, finally, closer to being like myself than like people I’ve actually
observed. I sometimes feel that the characters I’ve created are not much more
than sort of projected facets of myself, and I believe that a lot of fictional
characters have been created that way.
INTERVIEWER
How far removed must you be from your
subject matter?
STYRON
Pretty far. I don’t think people can write
immediately, and well, about an experience emotionally close to them. I have a
feeling, for example, that I won’t be able to write about all the time I’ve
spent in Europe until I get back to America.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel yourself to be in competition
with other writers?
STYRON
No, I don’t. “Some of my best friends are
writers.” In America there seems to be an idea that writing is one big
cat-and-dog fight among the various practitioners of the craft. Got to hole up
in the woods. Me, I’m a farmer, I don’t know no writers. Hate writers. That
sort of thing. I think that just as in everything else writers can be too cozy
and cliquish and end up nervous and incestuous and scratching each other’s
backs. In London once, I was at a party where everything was so literary and
famous and intimate that if the place had suddenly been blown up by dynamite it
would have demolished the flower of British letters. But I think that writers
in the U.S. could stand a bit more of the attitude that prevailed in France in
the last century. Flaubert and Maupassant, Victor Hugo and Musset, they didn’t
suffer from knowing each other. Turgenev knew Gogol. Chekhov knew Tolstoy and
Andreiev, and Gorki knew all three. I think it was Henry James who said of
Hawthorne that he might have been even better than he was if he had
occasionally communicated a little bit more with others working at the same
sort of thing. A lot of this philosophy of isolation in America is a dreary
pose. I’m not advocating a Writers’ Supper Club on Waverly Place, just for
chums in the business, or a union, or anything like that, but I do think that
writers in America might somehow benefit by the attitude that, What the hell,
we’re all in this together, instead of, All my pals are bartenders on Third
Avenue. As a matter of fact, I do have a pal who’s a bartender on Third Avenue,
but he’s a part-time writer on the side.
INTERVIEWER
In general, what do you think of critics,
since they are a subject that must be close to a writer’s heart?
STYRON
From the writer’s point of view, critics
should be ignored, although it’s hard not to do what they suggest. I think it’s
unfortunate to have critics for friends. Suppose you write something that
stinks, what are they going to say in a review? Say it stinks? So if they’re
honest, they do, and if you were friends you’re still friends, but the
knowledge of your lousy writing and their articulate admission of it will be
always something between the two of you, like the knowledge between a man and
his wife of some shady adultery. I know very few critics, but I usually read
their reviews. Bad notices always give me a sense of humility, or perhaps
humiliation, even when there’s a tone of envy or sour grapes or even ignorance
in them, but they don’t help me much. When Lie Down in Darkness came out, my hometown paper
scraped up the local literary figure to review the book, a guy who’d written
something on hydraulics, I think, and he came to the conclusion that I was a
decadent writer. Styron is a decadent writer, he said, because he writes a line
like “the sea sucking at the shore,” when for that depraved bit he should have
substituted “the waves lapping at the shore.” Probably his hydraulic
background. No, I’m afraid I don’t think much of critics for the most part,
although I have to admit that some of them have so far treated me quite kindly.
Look, there’s only one person a writer should listen to, pay any attention to.
It’s not any damn critic. It’s the reader. And that doesn’t mean any compromise
or sellout. The writer must criticize his own work as a reader. Every day I
pick up the story or whatever it is I’ve been working on and read it through.
If I enjoy it as a reader then I know I’m getting along all right.
INTERVIEWER
In your preface to the first issue of this
magazine, you speak of there being signs in the air that this generation can
and will produce literature to rank with that of any other generation. What are
these signs? And do you consider yourself, perhaps, a spokesman for this new
generation?
STYRON
What the hell is a spokesman, anyway? I
hate the idea of spokesmen. Everybody, especially the young ones, in the
writing game jockeying for position to give a name to a generation. I must
confess that I was guilty of that in the preface, too. But don’t you think it’s
tiresome, really, all these so-called spokesmen trumpeting around, elbowing one
another out of the way to see who’ll be the first to give a new and original
name to twenty-five million people—the Beat Generation, or the Silent
Generation, and God knows what-all? I think the damn generation should be let
alone. And that goes for the eternal idea of competition—whether the team of
new writers can beat the team of Dos Passos, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and
Hemingway. As I read in a review not long ago, by some fellow reviewing an
anthology of new writing, which had just that sort of proprietary essay in it
and which compared the new writers with the ones of the twenties, the reviewer
said, in effect, What the hell, there’s plenty of Lebensraum and Liebestraum for everybody.
INTERVIEWER
But you did say, in the preface, just what
we were speaking of—that this generation can and will—
STYRON
Yes, can and will produce literature equal
to that of any other generation, especially that of the twenties. It was
probably rash to say, but I don’t see any reason to recant. For instance, I
think those “signs in the air” are apparent from just three first novels, those
being From Here to Eternity, The
Naked and the Dead, and Other
Voices, Other Rooms. It’s true that a first novel is far from a
fair standard with which to judge a writer’s potential future output, but
aren’t those three novels far superior to the first novels of Dos Passos,
Faulkner, and Fitzgerald? In fact I think one of those novels—The Naked and the Dead—is so
good by itself that it can stand up respectably well with the mature work of
any of those writers of the twenties. But there I go again, talking in competition
with the older boys. Anyway, I think that a lot of the younger writers around
today are stuffed with talent. A lot of them, it’s true, are shameless and
terrible self-promoters—mainly the members of what a friend of mine calls “the
fairy axis”—but they’ll drop by the wayside and don’t count for much anyway.
The others, including the ones I’ve mentioned, plus people like Salinger and
Carson McCullers and Hortense Calisher—all those have done, and will go on
doing, fine work, unless somebody drops an atom bomb on them, or they get
locked up in jail by Velde and that highly cultured crowd.
INTERVIEWER
Speaking of atom bombs and Representative
Velde, among other such contemporary items, do you think—as some people have
been saying—that the young writer today works at a greater disadvantage than
those of preceding—uh—generations?
STYRON
Hell no, I don’t. Writers ever since
writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one
word—life. Certainly this might be an age of so-called faithlessness and
despair we live in, but the new writers haven’t cornered any market on
faithlessness and despair, any more than Dostoyevsky or Marlowe or Sophocles
did. Every age has its terrible aches and pains, its peculiar new horrors, and
every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been
afflicted by what that same friend of mine calls “the fleas of life”—you know,
colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles, and little nuisances of one sort or
another. They are the constants of life, at the core of life, along with nice
little delights that come along every now and then. Dostoyevsky had them and
Marlowe had them and we all have them, and they’re a hell of a lot more
invariable than nuclear fission or the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. So is
Love invariable, and Unrequited Love, and Death and Insult and Hilarity. Mark
Twain was as baffled and appalled by Darwin’s theories as anyone else, and
those theories seemed as monstrous to the Victorians as atomic energy, but he
still wrote about riverboats and old Hannibal, Missouri. No, I don’t think the
writer today is any worse off than at any other time. It’s true that in Russia
he might as well be dead and that in Youngstown, Ohio, that famous police
chief, whatever his name is, has taken to inspecting and banning books. But in
America he can still write practically anything he pleases, so long as it isn’t
libelous or pornographic. Also in America he certainly doesn’t have to starve,
and there are few writers so economically strapped that they can’t turn out
work regularly. In fact, a couple of young writers—and good writers—are damn
near millionaires.
INTERVIEWER
Then you believe in success for a writer?
Financial, that is, as well as critical?
STYRON
I sure do. I certainly have sympathy for a
writer who hasn’t made enough to live comfortably—comfortably, I mean, not
necessarily lavishly—because I’ve been colossally impoverished at times, but
impoverished writers remind me of Somerset Maugham’s remark about multilingual
people. He admired them, he said, but did not find that their condition made
them necessarily wise.
INTERVIEWER
But getting back to the original point, in Lie
Down in Darkness didn’t
your heroine commit suicide on the day the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima?
This seems to us to be a little bit more than fortuitous symbolism, and perhaps
to indicate a sense of that inescapable and overpowering despair of our age,
which you just denied was our peculiar lot.
STYRON
That was just gilding the lily. If I were
writing the same thing now, I’d leave that out and have her jump on the Fourth
of July. Really, I’m not trying to be rosy about things like the atom bomb and
war and the failure of the Presbyterian Church. Those things are awful. All I’m
trying to say is that those things don’t alter one bit a writer’s fundamental
problems, which are Love, Requited and Unrequited, Insult, et cetera.
INTERVIEWER
Then you believe that young writers today
have no cause to be morbid and depressing, which is a charge so often leveled
at them by the critics?
STYRON
Certainly they do. They have a perfect
right to be anything they honestly are, but I’d like to risk saying that a
great deal of this morbidity and depression doesn’t arise so much from
political conditions, or the threat of war, or the atom bomb, as from the
terrific increase of the scientific knowledge that has come to us about the
human self—Freud, that is, abnormal psychology, and all the new psychiatric
wisdom. My God, think of how morbid and depressing Dostoyevsky would have been
if he could have gotten hold of some of the juicy work of Dr. Wilhelm Stekel,
say Sadism and Masochism. What people like John Webster and, say, Hieronymus
Bosch, felt intuitively about some of the keen horrors that lurk in the human
mind, we now have neatly cataloged and clinically described by Krafft-Ebing and
the Menningers and Karen Horney, and they’re available to any fifteen year old
with a passcard to the New York Public Library. I don’t say that this new
knowledge is the cause of the so-called morbidity and gloom, but I do think it
has contributed to a new trend toward the introspective in fiction. And when
you get an eminent journal like Time magazine complaining, as it often has,
that to the young writers of today life seems short on rewards, and that what
they write is a product of their own neuroses, in its silly way the magazine is
merely stating the status quo and obvious truth. The good writing of any age
has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull
literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy
chuckleheads.
INTERVIEWER
To sort of round this out, we’d like to
ask finally what might sound like a rather obvious question. That is, what
should be the purpose of a young writer? Should he, for instance, be engagé,
not concerned as much with the story aspects of the novel as with the problems
of the contemporary world?
STYRON
It seems to me that only a great satirist
can tackle the world’s problems and articulate them. Most writers write simply out
of some strong interior need, and that, I think, is the answer. A great writer,
writing out of this need, will give substance to, and perhaps even explain, all
the problems of the world without even knowing it, until a scholar comes along
one hundred years after he’s dead and digs up some symbols. The purpose of a
young writer is to write, and he shouldn’t drink too much. He shouldn’t think
that after he’s written one book he’s God Almighty and air all his immature
opinions in pompous interviews. Let’s have another cognac and go up to Le
Chapelain.
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