TOM PUTNAM: Good evening. Welcome. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. On behalf of my colleague, Tom McNaught, the Executive Director of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I thank you for joining us on this snowy night and acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums: lead sponsor Bank of America, Raytheon, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation, and our media partners, The Boston Globe and WBUR.
Few novelists of the past 50 years have enjoyed the huge success and lengthy renown of William Styron. With Sophie's Choice, Lie Down in Darkness, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron established himself as a masterful chronicler of the American experience. Mr. Styron spoke here at the Kennedy Library in 1997 as part of our annual PEN/Hemingway Award ceremony. It was the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Confessions of Nat Turner and he was commenting on the debates that continued to rage over that book, including some critics who questioned whether a white man should have undertaken to write a first-person narrative in the voice of a slave leading a revolt in Virginia in 1831. Let's listen to the conclusion of those remarks:
–has been its ability to make death-defying leaps into psychic space where a white male playwright miraculously divines a black Othello and a Desdemona in characters with a luminous femininity of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina and Molly Bloom issue forth as living, breathing creatures from the pen of a man. And women have conjured the same reality: Emily Bronte, Edith Wharton, Flannery O'Connor and, recently, Joyce Carol Oates have plainly relished the challenge of creating men whom the reader suffers with and believes in.
This great leap has always involved risk. But when that risk is taken successfully, we are enhanced, both as writers and readers, in our solidarity as members of the human race.
I hold in memory a few words from Jimmy Baldwin, who risked writing about white people and who believed, despite the fury with which he was never quite free, that his own art demanded the search for reconciliation. "Each of us," he wrote, "helplessly and forever, contains the other, male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other." Thank you.
As you may know, the Kennedy Library serves as the home to all of Ernest Hemingway's papers. About a recent publication of Hemingway's letters, Patrick Hemingway, the author's sole surviving son, commented, "When we read a really fine work of fiction, we're always interested in the author for we think how did this person gain the insights and the knowledge to write so well? There must be something about him or her that is unique, and we often look to their letters to learn more."
We're honored to feature tonight William Styron's wife, Rose, and daughter, Alexandra, to discuss the recently published Selected Letters of William Styron, which "narrate one writer's lifelong struggles and joys captured in private dispatches about professional life, friendship and family." The book is on sale in our Museum store and Rose Styron will be happy to sign your copies at the end of the program.
I should note there's a bit of irony to host a session here in Hemingway's shadow for in one letter Mr. Styron expressed his distaste for what he called "the Hemingway tight-lipped mumble school of writing," suggesting instead that a writer should accommodate language and "use great words, evocative words when the situation demands them."
Rose Styron is a poet, journalist and human rights activist. She's published three books of poetry, served on the board of Amnesty International, and chaired PEN's Freedom to Write Committee and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. She's also a member of the Hemingway Council here at the Kennedy Library.
Alexandra Styron is the author of a bestselling memoir, Reading My Father, and a novel, All the Finest Girls. A graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University, her work has appeared in numerous publications. She currently teaches memoir writing in the MFA program at Hunter College.
Our moderator this evening is Robert Brustein. The founder of the Yale Reperatory Theatre and American Reperatory Theatre, Mr. Brustein is a playwright, producer, educator and theatre critic, a longtime friend to the Styron family. We're honored to have him here with us this evening and thank him for stepping in for Scott Simon, who was not able to join us.
Of course, there's also a Kennedy connection to all of this. President and Mrs. Kennedy are mentioned in numerous letters, and the Styrons attended the 1962 White House dinner which honored past winners of the Nobel Prize. "We went accompanied by James Baldwin," Mr. Styron reported, "a fact which made us feel a bit like Huck and Jim."
This year marks the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's most famous speech on the role of the artist in our times. He was dedicating a library at Amherst College in the name of Robert Frost, and what he said about Frost that day could be well applied to William Styron: "He brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society. His sense of human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he knew the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair."
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me now in welcoming Robert Brustein and Rose and Alexandra Styron to the Kennedy Library. [applause]
ROBERT BRUSTEIN: Many thanks for that eloquent introduction. And let me begin by saying how very happy and proud I am to be on this platform with my old, dear friend Rose Styron, talking about my dear, departed friend Bill Styron. And with my son's old girlfriend [laughter], Alexandra Styron. The testimonies of that relationship when they were nine and six are recorded in this book where Bill refers to Al knitting a jockstrap -- crocheting a jockstrap -- for her young boyfriend and pulsing with amorous desire. [laughter]
Can I tell one story about the Kennedys before we begin? We share this story; I don't know if you remember it. Teddy Kennedy had come over on his yacht, the Curragh, and invited us all out on a cruise with him, and along with the Styrons was Kay Graham. As we were going past Vineyard Haven, up Oak Bluffs, we came towards Edgartown and Kay Graham said, "Well, isn't that Chappa– whoop!" [laughter] So we sailed into Chappawhoop and had a high, old time.
Let me begin by asking both Rose and Al if they learned anything new about their husband and father from the pages of this book.
ROSE STYRON: Me first?
ROBERT BRUSTEIN: Yes, you first.
ROSE STYRON: I learned a lot. First of all, it never occurred to me that all those years when I thought he was upstairs being lonely, writing his books -- and it took seven years for Sophie's Choice, et cetera -- half the time he was writing letters. And he was obviously writing them because he'd get stuck in his fiction, and then he'd want a little reality to come into it. And so he wrote I think every day because he certainly went to the post office once or twice every day.
But I hadn't really thought about that until one day after he had died and I sent all his papers to Duke, and then I opened the bureau drawers of our daughter Polly's – her older sister – childhood bedroom where Bill had decided to write the last few years instead of his dark study across the lawn. And there were scores of letters that he had stashed in there, letters to him, and postcards from all his favorite friends, and pretty recent ones. So it was Mia Farrow and Philip Roth and Arthur Miller. And he'd saved a few old ones from John Updike and James Jones and Peter Matthiessen. It was fascinating to me.
Once I read them and sent them to Duke, I thought, “Wow, I wonder what he wrote to all these people that prompted those letters.” So I talked to his old editor, Bob Loomis, who thought it was a good idea to collect them, and he said, "We can do a volume." And I said, "Well, shall I do two-way correspondence between Bill and his writer friends?" Because the letters I read were filled with the craft of writing and the ideas and thoughts about their own writing, about other contemporaries' writings and older folks' writings. And he said, "No, no, don't do that. Let's do it as collected letters in chronological order."
So I put out a call for letters and every time I would go to a little country mailbox in Roxbury, Connecticut, it was like the Sorcerer's Apprentice and letters would stream out of the mailbox when I opened it. Pretty soon I had 1,500 letters. And I said to Bob, "I think that's enough." And he said, "I think that's three times too many. Go edit them." This isn't the old days in publishing; we're not going to have three volumes.
So I set about editing them, and of course then I had to really read them closely. And I discovered that the whole time that I had been running around being a multitasking mom, or whatever I was doing, and paying no attention to anything serious – except when we would sit down at night by the fire and he'd read to me what he'd written that day and I typed it the next morning – that he was recording our entire lives together and writing about our lives to all his friends. And he remembered everything. I didn't.
He was so tender about and amused by all the children and even amused by me. And this was in spite of the fact that he always thought they were too noisy and bumptious and wanted to tell them horror stories. He lashed out at lots of people, certainly including me and us. I'm sure Bob remembers, too. But he wasn't serious about it; it was all over in a minute.
But I had no idea until I read all these letters what his deep thoughts were about the family, about our life, about the writing of his individual close friends and how much he cared about each one of his friends individually and lastingly. So that was what I learned.
ROBERT BRUSTEIN: Al, you've written two books, which are either directly or indirectly about your family.
ALEXANDRA STYRON: The first one much less so. The second, the memoir I wrote, is very much about my father. And I think the discovery I made, going down to Duke when I started researching my book, and then that sort of unfolded in a whole other way, on the other side of the coin, in the book that Mom put together.
I think the discovery for me -- I've had a bunch of discoveries, but one of them, which I think is really borne out in this book, is what an extraordinary friend he was. And as with one's parents, you get this very narrow view of them and it takes a long time, I think, to separate and become … and for many of us, we don't. One of the great gifts of getting to write a memoir about a parent after they've died is that you really begin to see them as people, separate from you. Or I did anyway. And that allowed me to write a book that I felt told the story that wasn't kind of narrow-focused, but had a large element of biography.
But this book I think really shows the evidence of this remarkable talent he had for being … If he wasn't always a great father, he was pretty consistently -- and I think you would bear that out, Bob -- a terrific friend and a really extraordinary mentor. There are letters in here to writers like Mike Mewshaw and Donald Harington and Gavin Brookes. He was just so incredibly thoughtful and helpful. He was always putting people up for awards, and helping people get fellowships, and writing to editors, and helping writers get their work out in the world, and encouraging them. And I was so touched by it. It really gave me the sort of opportunity to see him in a whole different light and put to bed a lot of complicated feelings because I could see the man in the whole. And I think that this book Mom put together really shows that.
ROSE STYRON: And also shows his humor. There's such funny stuff in here, and it's all very individualized, depending on who he was writing to, stuff that he never would have said aloud that made me laugh when I read it. So it was a great gift.
ALEXANDRA STYRON: Very naughty sense of humor.
ROBERT BRUSTEIN: He wrote his letters has as he wrote his books, by hand, if I'm not mistaken. And he labored over his books. He used to spend years on a single book. And it would show; it would be exquisitely created, beautifully written. And he must have labored over his letters as well because those are beautifully written and exquisitely created. He had two famous literary feuds. One was with Lillian Hellman, and that was over chicken, I think.
ALEXANDRA STYRON: Ham.
ROBERT BRUSTEIN: A ham [laughter] that he put in a refrigerator and she claimed that it was her own ham, that it wasn't his. And they didn't speak for a little while. And then there was Norman Mailer. Would you like to talk about that? Because that runs throughout this book pretty much like a malignant lion.
ROSE STYRON: You mean the cause of the feud?
ROBERT BRUSTEIN: Yes.
ROSE STYRON: Or the progress of the feud.
ROBERT BRUSTEIN: The cause and the progress. That's a story in itself.
ROSE STYRON: Well, Bill and Norman were very good friends before I met them. And the third member of the triumvirate was James Jones. And they were sort of young literary lions in the early '50s down in Greenwich Village. And after everybody married and came back and lived in the United States, we moved up to Roxbury. Pretty soon Norman and his wife, Adele, moved up quite near us and became our neighbors in Bridgewater. And James Jones moved to Paris, but he came to Roxbury all the time when we went there.
Before he went, I think it occurred to Norman that Jim and Bill were getting to be better friends, or getting more attention than he and Bill, or he and Jim. Norman was lots of fun, but very competitive. I've never forgotten at his memorial -- his first memorial at the library, the Boston Public Library, after they had made up, after their 25-year feud, how Norman came up to the podium and said, "Bill Styron was the most competitive man I ever met," and began to tell about his competitiveness at croquet and things like that.
Anyway, Norman got to feeling that he had to really prove himself. This is my take on it. And so when he came to our fifth anniversary party in Roxbury, where my mother and Bill's father and Bennett Cerf, the publisher, and everybody, where Norman was going to make a wonderful statement. And so aside from all the arm-wrestling that he challenged everybody to, which went on endlessly, he had persuaded his quite beautiful wife Adele, who he had given … She was from Puerto Rico initially, and I think there was a Mexican, I don't know, episode or something there. He had given her lessons in painting with Hans Hofmann, so the little tiny country saltbox they lived in had these huge, bright paintings which we all admired a lot. But he still wanted her to make her mark. So he had her dress up – I think you would call it a Mayan, this wonderful black lace dress with a huge skirt and a high tiara – and make herself very seductive, which indeed she was.
When the party was over, a short time later our daughter Polly was born in the hospital in New York and the Joneses were leaving for Paris, and they came to say goodbye the afternoon Polly was born. And Bill, who had been there earlier, came back looking so glum that I was kind of upset. I said, "What's going on?" And he said, "I have gotten the worst letter I've ever gotten in my life and it's from Norman Mailer who says that I have said terrible things about his wife, and he not only challenges me to a duel, but that he has said the most awful things about me you can imagine." And believe me, he did.
And they didn't speak for 25 years. They made up, interestingly enough, because each of them had supported a man in prison who had been sentenced to death or life for murder. And Bill and Norman each got these guys off and had them come to live nearby, except that Ben Reid, who Bill had proved the innocence of, never made it to our house because when they released him he went off and raped a neighbor woman and they took him back, and we never saw him again.
But Norman's writer, who he got out of prison, came to live with Norman and his children. And he went off and killed a waiter who didn't wait on him fast enough, and they sent him back to prison. Everybody was down on Norman for having done something so stupid, and Bill came to his verbal rescue. They became friends again, and so they had a nice time the last decade or two.
ROBERT BRUSTEIN: In that letter, Norman used a lot of words that he couldn't use in The Naked and the Dead. [laughter] And Bill was really outraged, as well he should have been, because Norman was really half-crazy at this point. And he was threatening all kinds of violence and that seemed to permeate throughout those years until there seemed to be a reconciliation, as you said. And he did get up towards the end of his life, Norman, one of the last things I think he did was to give that memorial speech in Boston.
ROSE STYRON: Yes. That was pretty good.
ROBERT BRUSTEIN: Do you want to read some letters?
ROSE STYRON: Sure. We're in the JFK Library, so I'm going to read a letter; I'm just going to read part of it. Bill wrote very, very long letters. This is the White House dinner that we were invited to, where President Kennedy stood up and said, "There are more fine minds in this room than there have ever been since Thomas Jefferson dined alone." And I think everybody knows that line.
ROBERT BRUSTEIN: Famous line.
ROSE STYRON: So this is a White House dinner which we were invited to, and Bill writes about it. He writes it to his professor, William Blackburn. There are lots of letters in here early on to Professor Blackburn, who was his mentor at Duke. This is May 2, 1962, from Roxbury, Connecticut:
Dear Professor, I had a curious experience last Sunday night, and I thought you might be interested in hearing about it. It does not seem to me quite real, but I shall try to convey my impressions of the event. While I was in France, Rose received an invitation which went: “The President and Mrs. Kennedy request the company of Mr. and Mrs. Styron at dinner, April 29th in honor of Nobel Prize winners." Since, aside from James Baldwin, I was the only “younger” writer invited to the affair, you can imagine that I was somewhat baffled, if pleased, by the summons. (I have also learned that it's considered unpardonable to decline such an invitation -- not that I was about to.)
Bill always declined invitations when he could.
Anyway, we went, accompanied by Van Wyck Brooks, who was exceedingly nervous, and by Baldwin, a fact which made us both feel somewhat like Huck and Jim. There was plenty of booze, and at the pre-dinner festivities, I found myself wedged between Linus Pauling and President Stratton of MIT, getting very drunk indeed. (I was taking antibiotics for an earache, and I have since discovered that this accelerates the action of alcohol by roughly 100%.) [laughter] At 8:20 Jack and Jackie came into the East Room, preceded by flags, and to the sound of “Hail to the Chief.” The receiving line was formed alphabetically (I am always at the end of such lines), and as I staggered past our host, I hear Jackie say to me, "Hi there. You're a friend of John and Sue (Marquand)!." I'm not being irrelevant -- nothing was irrelevant about that meeting -- since it then occurred to me that perhaps I'd been invited because I was a friend of John and Sue's; but then, why not John and Sue, too? At any rate, we went in to dine and I found myself at Mrs. Robert Kennedy's table, flanked by the wives of two Nobel Prize-winning biochemists and physicists, and within whispering distance of, on the right, President Pusey of Harvard, and on the left, J. Robert Oppenheimer, also Ralph Bunche, who I think sensed that I was of Southern origin and therefore paid me no never mind. [laughter] Oppenheimer was utterly charming, and I am here to report that Pusey is one of the crashing knuckleheads of all time. [laughter] The dinner was splendid, including wine, which, because of the achromycin I was taking, fogged me up to the point of incomprehensibility. After dinner, there was a boring reading by Frederic March of a garbled and wretched piece of an unpublished Hemingway manuscript. It was done in semi-darkness and most of the Nobel Prize winners -- many of them are over 70 -- nodded off to sleep.
[laughter]
That was the end of the evening, or so I thought. Just as I, with all the rest, was preparing blearily to make my departure, I was accosted by an Army major in full dress (they are all over the place and act as a kind of chaperone) who said (I will swear to this on a stack of bibles): "The President would like you and Mrs. Styron to join him upstairs in his private quarters." In my drunken state it then flashed over me meanly: “Aha! It's just as I suspected. The son of a bitch is after my wife.” [laughter] Anyway, we went upstairs in the private elevator to the tootling of the Marine Corps Band and entered Kennedy's drawing room. Those selected for this special treat numbered only six: Rose and myself, Mr. and Mrs. Lionel Trilling, Robert Frost and Frederic March. A motley crew indeed. I was sitting in the Presidential rocking chair when His Excellency entered. The obvious parallel is an obscure poet lolling on the throne of Louis XIV. Rose tells me that when we rose to greet him, I was so blind out of my skull that I simply sank back into the rocking chair. Kennedy took this with remarkable (and democratic) grace. He sat down on the couch and began talking to Robert Frost. (It turns out that it wasn't Rose at all he was after; well, perhaps not.) Diana Trilling had the look of a woman who had just been struck a glancing but telling blow by a sledgehammer; Lionel was nervous but reasonably urbane. One had the feeling, though I confess I shared the feeling to some degree, that for Diana at least it was all a dream. Presently then the Palace Guard came in: Pierre Salinger, Bobby and Ethel, one of the other sisters, and the brother-in-law who runs the Peace Corps, etc. I spent most of the hour talking with Jackie, who I must say has a great deal of charm, and I treasure her promise to take us out on the Presidential yacht when we are across the Sound from Hyannis Port this summer. At about midnight, turned once again into a pumpkin or whatever it was Cinderella turned into, this phase of the party broke up. We bade our host and hostess adieu, and were conveyed in the limousine of the Attorney General – he reminds me of nothing so much as a young lion cub, hot-eyed and panting – to the home of Arthur Schlesinger in Georgetown, and there, from Schlesinger himself, an affable gent, I learned why I had been so honored this evening. It turns out, according to Schlesinger, that Set This House on Fire is, and has been for some time, the most “controversial” book that the intellectuals at the White House have been reading. Some of them hate it, some of them love it passionately, but it causes constant and violent arguments, and they had just wanted to get a look at the instigator. Never underestimate the power of the written word. At any rate, it was a jolly time, but in case you feel I have been overly detailed, I would like to say that I just wanted to get it down in writing; it's not just like every Sunday dinner, after all.
[applause]
That's about the first quarter of the letter.
ROBERT BURSTEIN: One thing that struck me from these letters, which was not clear in Bill's personality in public because he was always the most stoical of men, as you saw in that clip, but he was very sensitive to criticism, as we all are and as well he might be when you put so much time and effort into writing a book.
But these pages almost vibrate with rage sometimes, at the fact that a particular work of his was not well enough acknowledged. And did you feel that at home? Did he let go when he was at home, about the way he felt about that creep who reviewed his book?
ROSE STYRON: Oh, sure. Well, he claimed he never read them, and then he would rant and rave at the bad reviews he got. So the continuation of that letter I read is a really very happy piece of writing about how well Set This House on Fire was received in France. It was the best seller there for a long time, but it did not do so well in the USA, where the critics took after it. That was his second long novel after Lie Down in Darkness, which had gotten high praise. But he was suffering over the reviews for Set This House on Fire, which Bennett Cerf kept sending him when we were in Rome trying to enjoy ourselves.
He was very sensitive to it. And he was very sensitive about slams that the critics gave to his friends, to other writers. And there's a long letter in here to Philip Roth, which is pretty interesting. It's for Philip's 40th birthday and Bill is saying, "Oh, my god, wait until you're as old as I am. I'm 47."
ROBERT BURSTEIN: He's about to have his 80th birthday.
ROSE STYRON: It's his 80th birthday coming up, right. And he comforts Philip for the bad reviews he's gotten and says "You've got to grow up and be tough and take this, and it's okay." And then he closes the letter closes with, "Yours in the slime we sometimes find ourselves up to our asses in, Bill." [laughter]
ALEXANDRA STYRON: I seem to remember him saying, even though he might have said in another breath that he didn't read his reviews, that he could remember every single word of every bad review he ever got and not a thing about any of the good ones. [laughter]
ROSE STYRON: That's true. I remember being extremely surprised two weeks ago when we got a really good review in the London Review of Books for this book. Bill was never as popular in London or in England as he was in Italy or France or the USA. And it really made him smart, and for a long time he just didn't want to go to England at all; he had nothing to do with the English.
ROBERT BURSTEIN: He was a total Anglophobe. He didn't want to go near them.
ROSE STYRON: He was a total Anglophobe.
ROBERT BURSTEIN: And a total Francophile, because of the good reviews he used to get there.
ROSE STYRON: He was a total Francophile.
ROBERT BURSTEIN: But ironically, one of the last works that was produced in relation to his work was the opera of Sophie's Choice that you went over to see.
ROSE STYRON: That's right, down at Covent Garden.
ROBERT BURSTEIN: Covent Garden, yes.
ROSE STYRON: So he changed his mind about England. He loved it.
ROBERT BURSTEIN: Was he ready to move?
ALEXANDRA STYRON: One of the things that was interesting to read, there's a letter in here from Daddy to Bob Loomis, his editor, and this is a sort of signal issue in my father's career. And for me, in the process of writing the book I wrote, it became the kind of throughline in the thesis, was the recognition of the pain he had in not being able to finish the last novel he wrote.
He spent the last 27 years of his life in one fashion or another trying to write another great, big novel, and it just wouldn't come. And I think that the despair of being an artist who lives for his art and not being able to create the work that he once created on that scale, I think, was truly devastating for him.
There's a letter in here that he wrote to Bob Loomis, and I remember having a conversation with Bob when I interviewed him about having given a chunk of that manuscript to Bob. And it was the first time that Bob ever really said, "You know what, Bill? This isn't good." And the letter in here takes Bob to task. You can see an artist defending his work in this letter. But when you know what came after it, which was this gradual loss of confidence, it's deeply painful to read. But it's also fascinating because you can sort of see the trajectory of a man struggling to make this thing work. But it's hard not to also see that he doth protest too much, that when you're not so confident about your work and you feel like you have to explain yourself, that that becomes … You can see the truth as a kind of line through that. It's heartbreaking, but also fascinating to watch the trajectory of that in these letters.
ROSE STYRON: That was the first moment when Bob and I read that piece of the book – and there are many versions and many long pieces of that book that he didn't publish that I found -- that we talked about. A little piece of it was excerpted in the New Yorker. But it was reading that piece, which he took Bob to task for, that Bob and I both thought – and it was about a medical incident -- when I first thought, oh, oh, he's going into a depression. Because it was the first time he hadn't written like Bill Styron.
ROBERT BURSTEIN: He had two other passions: one was for boats. We owned a boat together called the Diabolique, which Bill named because it was the twin, it was a lobster boat twin of a boat called L'Homme à Dieu, which was owned by an Anglican cleric on the Island. And l'homme à dieu is, of course, man of God, and so Bill wanted to speak up for the devil with our boat.
And the second thing he adored, aside from his family, was dogs. Or dawgs, as he called them – "I'm going to take my dawg for a walk." And he walked his dog to the post office. The dogs were always named after some place in Martha's Vineyard, like Tashmoo. What were some of the others?
ALEXANDRA STYRON: Aquinnah.
ROBERT BURSTEIN: He was a lovely man. Any questions from the floor? I guess we're reaching the end of our time. Yes?
Q: My question has to do with the book that your husband/dad wrote dealing with his own depression and his own challenges. And I can't help but notice that in today's Globe there's an editorial precisely on that topic about Patrick Kennedy, the fact that he brought his own personal story publicly, which is not an easy thing to do, and the editorial really asks for more of a public discussion of those kinds of issues, in fact raising it to the level of a civil rights issue. Beyond that, my simple question, did he discuss with you the reasons for writing that book and how he felt about deciding to do it? What was that all about?
ROSE STYRON: Well, he had come out of his depression, which lasted a while. And he was on an even keel for 15 years after the first session. And he wrote a piece which Tina Brown asked him to publish in Vanity Fair, which was musings on what it had been like.
ALEXANDRA STYRON: It was a talk; he gave a talk at the National Suicide Foundation that Tina Brown …
ROSE STYRON: Oh, that's right, and Tina published it.
ALEXANDRA STYRON: And Tina approached him. She was there because she had had some severe depression in her family. And she then approached him.
ROSE STYRON: Thank you for reminding me.
ALEXANDRA STYRON: So she said, "Would you turn that into a piece for Vanity Fair?" ROSE STYRON: Right. And so the piece got a lot of attention and he was asked to expand it a bit into a book, which is how it came about. It was a real kind of healing process for him to write it, and the response he got was totally positive. There weren't any bad critics on that book. Instead, there were dozens and dozens of people who called him up and thanked him and said, "You've saved my life. You've made me understand my son. I dragged my sister off the Brooklyn Bridge because I had read your book," and so forth. So he got a lot of good feedback. I think that really helped him to have a good 15 years before he had another crash.
Q: It was interesting to hear, like Jefferson, he was a Francophile and an Anglophobe. Was this reflected at all in his political philosophy or his outlook on life?
ROSE STYRON: Well, he became a great pal of President Mitterrand, and went to his inauguration and did a little introduction to the English translation of Mitterrand's book. But as far as politics goes, well, he was a fan of the French Revolution and the American Revolution and the Civil War, of course. And the French were involved with America in ideas.
Q: That's maybe why he got along with Jackie.
ROSE STYRON: Yeah [laughter], exactly. And he cheered Jackie on in her success in France.
And so did Jack. He thought that was pretty good, too.
Q: Rose, how long did it take you to put this book together? With 1,500 letters, how long did it take you and was it really difficult to choose which ones to include and which ones to omit?
ROSE STYRON: Yes, and I'm not sure I did the right ones. I mean, when Bob said cut it down to 500 pages … And I had a wonderful, young editorial helper who had just gotten his PhD at Yale, Blake Gilpin. He helped me, because he transcribed all these letters which were all handwritten on yellow pads, in various faded shades of yellow. He deciphered everything he could, asked me about what he couldn't and because he was very young, he didn't know who a lot of the people were. But I had the final talking with him, and then he transcribed them all and put them in order.
And I guess it took, what would you say, Al, three years? With a lot of help. And a lot of discussion about what to include and what not to include with this editor, Bob Loomis, who unfortunately retired in the middle of the process. We were left on our own.
Q: Could I ask, Rose, which of his novels was the happiest writing experience for him?
ROSE STYRON: For him?
Q: For him. And which did he think was his best work?
ROSE STYRON: It's a very good question, and I don't know if I can answer it.
ALEXANDRA STYRON: Happy writing experience sounds like an oxymoron to me. [laughter]
Q: In a relative sense, I guess. Was it one of the three iconic ones?
ROSE STYRON: I think he was happiest when he finished Sophie's Choice. It seems to me he put you up on the mantelpiece then when you were …
ALEXANDRA STYRON: I think that was The Confessions of Nat Turner.
ROSE STYRON: Was that The Confessions of Nat Turner? You see, I have no chronology.
ALEXANDRA STYRON: I was still a baby when Sophie's Choice came out.
ROSE STYRON: Oh, okay. Anyway, I think he was happiest when he finished Nat Turner and Sophie's Choice. I didn't know him when he finished Lie Down in Darkness, so I don't know how that went. But he always dreaded going up to his office or over to his study and writing and said again and again what a horrible task it was, but that it was the only thing that made him happy and made him feel worthwhile.
Q: Did he have a favorite or one that he thought was the very best of Bill Styron?
ROSE STYRON: I think it was whatever he had last written. I don't know how to answer that. I think he was most buoyed by the success of Sophie's Choice and by the film that it was made into because he loved Meryl Streep. And Meryl would not have been in the film if … Meryl, of course, we met through Bob at the Yale Reperatory Theatre when she was acting there and we would dash over from Roxbury any time we heard she was performing for Bob. Then one day she came to Bill and said, "I know they're going to make a film, that Alan Pakula is going to do Sophie's Choice. I'd really like to play Sophie. Could you get me an audition?" And Bill said, "They've already cast Sophie. I don't know if I can do that. She's a Czech actress." And we had seen the little run-throughs of the auditions and liked her. But, of course, we loved Meryl. And Bill said, "Well, I'll try." So Alan Pakula said, "Well, I've already casted, but sure, send her in." And Meryl went in to audition and the rest is history. I don't even remember the name of the Czech.
So everything that came out of Sophie was a pleasure for him. Alan asked him to write the script for the movie and Bill said, "I haven't any idea how to do it, you do it." So he did. And then they made an opera of Sophie's Choice, which was, as Bob said, performed at Covent Garden with Trevor Nunn as the director and Simon Rattle as the conductor. And Bill loved that. And he felt, or came to feel about Angelika Kirchschlager, who played Sophie, pretty much the way he did about Meryl. So they all kept friendships afterwards. I think the progressive response to Sophie, which was mostly positive, really buoyed him.
Q: I'd be interested to hear anything you'd like to say, from either of you or both of you, about how you write. A certain time of day, computer or notebook? Do you write with a sense of discipline or just wait for the spirit to move you?
ALEXANDRA STYRON: Oh, my god, you'd never get anything done if you waited for the spirit to move you.
ROSE STYRON: You're asking her, I hope.
ALEXANDRA STYRON: I go and sit at my desk every day whether I want to or not, and I usually don't want to. But I've learned enough to know that you'll never get anything done if you don't put your bottom in the chair. And for me, I spend a good chunk of the day. I take my kids to school and then I go to my office and I stay there. And out of the many hours I spend there, I probably only get a couple hours of work. I think most writers will tell you, unless they're … I think maybe Thomas Wolfe maybe wrote 10,000 words a day, but most people don't. [laughter] So a long day put in for a short, concentrated, hopefully halfway decent couple of pages for me.
ROSE STYRON: Which is very like your father. You have that kind of discipline, and two pages a day was good for him.
Q: That was my question, what influences he may have had on both of your writing, if any. Or if you see any similarities in yourselves with his writing.
ROSE STYRON: That his writing had on my writing? Well, I was a poet, and I'd published a bit before we met and were married. And he wasn't a bit interested in my poetry. [laughter] So I put it in a drawer for quite some time. Then I pulled it out and I had a few books, and that was pretty nice. And he finally got quite interested in it and wanted me to read it to him.
But I think the only influence that he had on my writing was to make me a lot more sensitive to public issues and a lot more eager either to protest or to write prose about certain public issues.
And I've gone on to do … I don't think his writing influenced my career in human rights, but it has influenced me in writing things since. And particularly since I've done this book, I've found myself writing much more internal, thoughtful, although short pieces that I might not have thought to write otherwise.
What about you, Al?
ALEXANDRA STYRON: I think his influence on me is probably genetic as much as anything else. And I don't mean that I compare myself to him as a writer, but because I think I was born into the literature of our home and of the sound of his language. I think I absorbed a certain idea about language and the way it works and hopefully took a handful of good lessons from him by osmosis.
Q: To look at it from the other angle, as you were mentioning, he would often read to you regularly what he had written?
ROSE STYRON: Every night.
Q: Because a lot of writers, I sense, want to wait until it's a complete draft before they do something like that. Were there ever times when you would say, "That doesn't seem to work for me," and he would take it into consideration? Or it was more just for him to read it to you, and that's what it was.
ROSE STYRON: Well, I think for the first decade or so he was just reading it to me and I was typing it in the morning. But then when he started Sophie's Choice, he wrote the choice scene first, and I said to him -- I guess forcefully -- "There's not a mother in America who will read Chapter Two if you start with this because it's too painful." So he put it at the end instead of the beginning and started back somewhere else. But I think that was the only major influence, if you will, or comment that I had. Mostly, I was just quite enchanted with what he'd written. I'm sure I might have said, "Hey, not that word, this." But nothing major.
ROBERT BURSTEIN: Is there anything else you'd like to say before we close the meeting and go to dinner? Well, then, I want to thank our distinguished guests who've given us a really good sense, a good insight into their late husband and father, who is much missed and much lamented by all of us.
And I want to thank you also for your very stimulating questions. Thank you, folks.
ALEXANDRA STYRON: Thank you, Bob.
ROSE STYRON: Thank you. [applause]
THE END