Styron's choice: Darkness Visible

SPEAKING VOLUMES

The greatest achievement of William Styron's life may have been that he managed a normal death, at the age of 81, of pneumonia. Styron wrote rather less than one would have expected of an author of his astonishing calibre, his fiction consisted of equivocal masterpieces, and the gaps between his published works are eloquent of the alcohol abuse and depression that marked his life. His father was, like him, diagnosed with clinical depression; his mother died of cancer when he was in his teens.

He began spectacularly, publishing Lie Down in Darkness to widespread critical acclaim when he was in his early twenties. That was swiftly followed by another book, and by 1953, he was friends with George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, and was one of the midwives of the influential literary magazine The Paris Review.

His third book, the melodramatic Set This House on Fire, was slammed by critics. Styron took a while to recover from this critical mauling""his next book, the controversial Confessions of Nat Turner, appeared seven years later. Some critics attacked him for his "presumption" in creating black characters; a few were appalled by a passage where Nat Turner, the leader of a real-life slave rebellion in Virginia, fantasises about raping a white woman. Many feel that Confessions was better than the book for which Styron is remembered today, Sophie's Choice.

Those who remember Sophie's Choice primarily as a terrible parable about World War Two, where a Polish woman is forced to choose which of her two children will live, miss out on the dark humour of the novel. Styron drew from his stint in publishing""he was fired from McGraw Hill for releasing balloons out of the window""to create Sophie's admirer, Stingo: "At 22, struggling to become some kind of writer, I found that the creative heat which at 18 had nearly consumed me with its gorgeous, relentless flame had flickered out to a dim pilot light registering little more than a token glow in my breast..." Instead, Stingo works as a reader of manuscripts such as Tall Grows the Eelgrass by Edmonia Kraus Biersticker and The Plumber's Wench by Audrey Wainwright Smilie.

More than the moment of choice that rules Sophie's life, Styron's focus is on her depression, on the days she spends in despondency, unable to escape the consequences of an action forced on her. As a writer, he was drawn to characters on the edge of despair all through his career""Peyton Loftis, the protagonist of Lie Down in Darkness, commits suicide, Cass Kinsolving, the failed American artist who bears fuddled witness to a rape and murder in Set This House on Fire is a depressive alcoholic.

After Sophie's Choice, there was nothing of note from Styron in the way of fiction""a few short stories, a collection of miscellaneous writings. Despite the continuing popularity of Sophie's Choice, in part due to the film version, Styron's writings are almost forgotten today. Like so many others before him""W Somerset Maugham, Anthony Trollope, George Bernard Shaw""he has joined the ranks of authors still honoured in every way except by being read. But of all his works, the one that deserves to endure is the remarkable, 84-page memoir of depression and madness he wrote in 1990, Darkness Visible.

In 1985, Styron had a severe breakdown after travelling to receive a literary award""he insulted his hosts, lost the cheque and then descended into such terrible despair that he contemplated suicide. He didn't kill himself because he couldn't write a satisfactory suicide note: "It turned out that putting together a suicide note, which I felt obsessed with a necessity to compose, was the most difficult task of writing that I had ever tackled. There were too many people to acknowledge, to thank, to bequeath final bouquets. And finally, I couldn't manage the sheer dirgelike solemnity of it...[there was] something degrading in the prospect of a testament, which I wished to infuse with at least some dignity and eloquence, reduced to any exhausted stutter of inadequate apologies and self-serving explanations."

From 1990 to his death in 2006, Styron published and wrote almost nothing of note. But as he chronicles in Darkness Visible, he had managed to find a kind of peace, to come to some sort of understanding with the demons in his past, to silence the echoes of depression, death, despair and suicide that had haunted him all his life. These were the fuel for his writing, and once he had exorcised their ghosts, perhaps it left him with nothing else to put down on paper. It did, however, keep him alive.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com