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Saturday, November 04, 2006

Another Giant Falls

4:27 PM

William Styron 1925 - 2006
My heroes are falling with a quickening, relentless pace these days; it is the natural result of my own aging, of course. The sting is made nonetheless painful for the understanding of it, though. William Styron passed from this life on November 1, my sister's birthday; while that was a special day, I will not need the anniversary of Sylvia's birth each year to remind me of Mr. Styron's passing. I have my memories and his books that will do well enough; but, more surely, my thoughts on those days to come will not be about his death, rather they will celebrate his words and their eternal place in the highest ranks of 20th Century literature post the Second World War.

I got to know William Styron a bit when we both happened to be on book tours at the same time and did a signing or two together. He was touring for his book on the clinical, suicidal depession that kept him from publishing for a decade, "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness" (1990); I for my first work of nonfiction, "The Boys Who Would Be Cubs." For all of the externally gruff and hulking persona he was famous for, he was warm, supportive and full of writerly wisdom for a far less known wordsmith than I had nervously, insecurely expected when I first learned I was going to be sitting alone with him at a small table for hours as we signed.

Almost all of his novels brought him as much peer-proffered defamation and thereby personal pain as they did critical acclaim and financial security. But he stood his ground as bravely as any writer could and, for the most part, answered back the only way a writer should: writing the next book, and the next again.

I will not review William Styron's career in this short post; I will only say that his work taught me much, inspired me more, and challenged me as hugely as any writer of his shining generation of masterful story tellers. I will let another legendary wordsmith, Christopher Lehman-Haupt, do the obituary honors. And then after that excerpt and link to The New York Times, I will send you to a thrilling piece in The Washington Post telling the story of a most unlikely friendship between two of the most influential writers of our times: William Styron and James Baldwin.

William Styron, Novelist, Dies at 81

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Published: November 2, 2006

William Styron, the novelist from the American South whose explorations of difficult historical and moral questions earned him a place among the leading literary figures of the post-World War II generation, died yesterday on Martha's Vineyard, Mass., where he had a home. He was 81.

The cause was pneumonia, coming after many years of illness, his daughter Alexandra Styron said.

Mr. Styron's early work, including "Lie Down in Darkness," won him wide recognition as a distinctive voice of the South and an heir to William Faulkner. In subsequent fiction, like "The Confessions of Nat Turner" and "Sophie's Choice," he transcended his own immediate world and moved across historical and cultural lines.

Critics and readers alike ranked him among the best of the generation that succeeded Hemingway and Faulkner. His peers included James Jones, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.

"I think for years to come his work will be seen for its unique power," Mr. Mailer said of Mr. Styron in a telephone interview a few years ago. "No other American writer of my generation has had so omnipresent and exquisite a sense of the elegiac."

Continue reading at The New York Times (Photo by Kathy Willens/The Associated Press):

And then there is this, in The Washington Post:

A Novel Friendship
Two Writers Bridged Their Differences to Find Their Common Heart

By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 3, 2006

William Styron and James Baldwin, two of this country's greatest mid-20th-century writers, had a brave friendship that swept across decades and the fault line of race and tears in America. With Styron's death Wednesday, the last breath of that remarkable friendship is gone.

The white novelist, Styron, and the black novelist, Baldwin, met in Manhattan in the 1950s. A Virginia-born Southerner and a Harlem-born Northerner. The former Marine and the gay hepcat of Harlem and Greenwich Village coffeehouses.

Styron was the grandson of a slave owner.

Baldwin was the grandson of a slave.

Styron, huge, tall, lumbered around a room; Baldwin, short, slight, flitted birdlike. In 1950s Manhattan, everyone read the big-time magazines: Harper's, the Atlantic, the Reporter. Baldwin, having cracked the magazines, had started to get noticed. And he had read Styron's first novel, "Lie Down in Darkness."

"For all their differences on the surface, they were so in tune inside," Rose Styron, William's widow, recalled from her home yesterday in Vineyard Haven, Mass. "They talked with each other all the time about race, about growing up."

Continue reading at The Washington Post (photo, Los Angeles Times Via Associated Press) :

4:27 PM / Editor / permalink 2 comments

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2 Comments:

But of course he knew Styron.

You didn't expect otherwise, did you?

By Anonymous, at 5:42 PM

With your anonymous credibility already suckling hind teat, surely you don't want to wager what is left by suggesting the incident written about did not happen? A word of caution, there are pictures.

While you might scoff in small-minded, monomanic envy, the commercial book publishing world in America is really quite small. Even mid-list authors for which you have no regard--this one, for example--often enough meet, dine, drink, and commiserate with the best writers in America, and elsewhere on occasion.

Keep coming, sweetheart,

Joseph

By Joseph, at 6:30 PM