My Generation: Collected Nonfiction

by William Styron

  That we are near the end of an era, that the novel is moribund or irrelevant, that writing itself is in peril, that the creation of fiction is a marginal occupation, that literature is due to be vaporized in a cosmic swarm of delights—these reports keep up their tedious buzz. Not too long ago I heard Philip himself utter a chillingly bleak pronouncement about the future of the Word, and I thought: well, maybe he's got a point. Later, though, I had second thoughts, and backtracked in the realization that I may be far more of an optimist than I care to admit. My provisional cheer is based largely on a subjective view of imaginative writing but I think it might be shared by some of you today who truly value reading and the immeasurable rewards of great fiction. Of course we prize the novel for many good reasons: for the special authority of the writer's voice; for its style, whether low-keyed or rambunctious or seductively lyrical; for its philosophical challenge or subtlety; for its uncanny rendition of a sense of place; for the authenticity of its dialogue—the list goes on; usually our pleasure comes from an amalgam of all these things. But one feature of great fiction seems to me so central, so essential that it reduces all the others to secondary roles. I'm thinking of the astounding invention of human beings. That a mob of vital creatures could spring from the synapses of the brain of a sleepless, overcaffeinated Balzac strikes me as one of the great and beautiful mysteries. Ever since the beginning of the novel we have embraced with passion these flesh-and-blood offspring of their creators’ fantasies, reacting to the most memorable among them with the same relish and admiration, disappointment and suspicion, perplexity and chagrin—and ultimate awe—that we feel for grand historical figures. These people (“characters” if you will) have also been essential in establishing our own identity as members of the human race. Whether commonplace or noble, shady or godly, princes or putzes, whether they are named Emma Bovary or Raskolnikov, Huck Finn or Jay Gatsby, Molly Bloom or Rabbit Angstrom, they have made claims on our allegiance, and even our capacity for love, which we would honor only a touch less readily than those of cherished family members. Why great fiction will never die, I feel certain, is because the inhabitants of fiction's pages—and often sublime figments we've come to know as Dilsey and Ahab and Sancho Panza—are profoundly mortal even in their immortality; they are perishable just as we are perishable. We shall ever refuse even to think of consigning these creatures, and the books in which they dwell, to oblivion. To do so would be to signal our own deaths.

  Philip Roth in his long and productive career has written book after book in which his scrupulous artistry has allowed us a unique vision of the times—the nearly half century—we've lived in. He has been one of the most penetrating witnesses to the flagrant disasters and precious conquests of our boisterous era. He has conveyed his vision in ever-shifting modes of hectic comedy and somber tragedy, delighting countless readers even as he mercilessly rattled their bones, and they've deserved both. But at last, more importantly, he has caused to be lodged in our collective consciousness a small, select company of human beings who are as arrestingly alive and as fully realized as any in modern fiction. Among their names are Swede Levov and his daughter Merry, Coleman Silk, Brenda Patimkin, Eli the Fanatic. And still there are more: a special group named Peter Tarnopol, David Kepesh, Alexander Portnoy, and Nathan Zuckerman. It is the author's triumph that he has placed these figures firmly among the world's fictional immortals, and this despite our knowledge that they are merely models of their creator's greatest character, Philip Roth.

  [Read by Styron at the Awards Ceremony, MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire, August 19, 2001.]

  Crusades, Complaints, Gripes

  If You Write for Television…

  SIRS:

  As one who has felt the hand of television upon his own work, I would like to endorse Frank R. Pierson's lucid analysis of television censorship.1

  Last fall CBS bought my short novel The Long March for production on Playhouse 90. Somewhat like the draftee protagonist of Robert Dozier's A Real Fine Cutting Edge*—a “daring” work, perhaps, but one which, as Mr. Pierson ruefully points out, was finally broadcast only because the network censor mistakenly believed that it had the approval of the Army—my story's hero is also a rebellious soul, a young Marine reserve officer whose mutinous rage against authority in general, and his commanding officer in particular, leads to his own downfall. Unlike the hero of Cutting Edge, however, my captain loses. He resists the System and it is his ruin. You cannot buck the System—I think that is what I was trying to say, for if you do you will pull disaster down upon your head….At the end of my story the captain (who is not without his foolish, impulsive moments), having faced down his commanding officer at the conclusion of a senseless and brutal hike ordered by the same CO, stands ready to receive a court-martial. The tragedy is implicit here. At the same time, however, the commanding officer is treated with sympathy and, all things considered, the Marine Corps gets off probably with more grace than it deserves. You might think that even Procter & Gamble and the manufacturers of Prestone (this was October, remember, and anti-freeze was getting the hard sell), would have been satisfied with some honest and straightforward treatment of this story, which attempts to demonstrate the truth known perhaps, far down, even to Union Carbide vice presidents: that military life corrupts and we would be a lot better off without it.

  But how naïve. I shall leave out the esthetic side of the televised version—the script, the acting, the direction—which was catastrophically bad even for television (my grocer, who ordinarily admits to watching everything, turned the program off mid-way and asked me indignantly the next day if I was planning to sue). Just as importantly, or even more so, the show simply suggested that Mr. Pierson knows what he is talking about when he maintains that television is “in fact officially censored and colored to show authority in a favorable light.” Because the script was submitted to the Marine Corps. Naturally, it had to be, not only because, as Mr. Pierson points out, all scripts that touch on government matters are submitted to authority but also because the story calls for masses of marching men, which the brass—after approving the script with what I suppose amounted to some glee—handily provided. One can imagine what was left of my hero after this collusion of Public Information Office second lieutenants, ad men, and soap peddlers had done with him. My bedeviled, desperate captain had become a self-pitying zero who, far from eliciting the viewer's sympathies, really deserved all the punishment that the Marine Corps could heap upon him. Further, rather than end the show upon the same note that my story ended (a very simple note of defeat, really, with the captain in ruin and promised a court-martial), the powers that arranged the TV version saw fit to stage an actual military trial in which it was safely pointed out that the Marine Corps is still pretty much tops any way you look at it.

  I understand that in making these comments I am in that position known to anyone who has trafficked with TV or Hollywood, which is somewhat like that of a woman who cries rape when in fact she acquiesced freely and received good money for the undertaking. In reality, however, my heart was not greatly troubled by this travesty of my work; a book remains a book. Also several thousand dollars remain several thousand dollars. But one or two disturbing questions haunted my mind, and Mr. Pierson's article sheds considerable light upon the mystery of why it is that any attempt to grapple on TV with problems dealing with the military is doomed to failure from the start.

  My most bothersome question, of course, was the ancient one: why did they do it at all? The Long March is not (unfortunately) a celebrated work, bound to attract millions of viewers by its very name. Divorced of its philosophical content, the narrative becomes utterly routine, so routine indeed that it is difficult to see why, instead of “adapting” my story, the producer did not just hire some accomplished hack to compose a nice slick original script glorifying the Marine Corps. The producer himself is an intelligent, decent, well-intentioned man, with many worthwhile things in television to his credit; honestly caring for my s
tory as much as he did, it is difficult to believe that it was any such simple matter as a final lapse of taste on his part which caused the disaster. (Actually I must confess that I was so dazzled by his sincerity and good intentions that, reading the script just prior to the broadcast—cold with horror, yet still somehow unable to believe that what I beheld on the printed page could be transmitted in all of its sordidness to the tiny screen—I wired the producer a demented, “Well done.”)

  But then who or what was the real culprit? The sponsors? The network watchdogs? Military censors? A combination of these? I do not know. Nor do I know whether the downright badness of the script with its military yea-saying made approval by authority a foregone conclusion; nor whether a perfectly adequate script became perverted as it went through the labyrinths of sponsor approval and then through the Pentagon mill: either way, what happened to the story in its transformation from an artistic insight to a shoddy lie makes me realize that Mr. Pierson's concern with TV censorship is rather more than academic and that in the instance of The Long March something more dangerous was in operation than a mere failure of talent. Someone somewhere along the line messed it up because someone was afraid….In the end the real culprit in television is not just sponsor approval or official censorship but an ignorant fear of the truth which permeates all other aspects of our society too, and which poisons art at its roots. It is almost as ignoble a censorship as censorship itself.

  [New Republic, April 6, 1959.]

  * * *

  * Dozier's drama was presented on The Kaiser Aluminum Hour, January 15, 1957. The cast included George Peppard, Jack Warden, and Dick York.—J.W.

  Fie on Bliss

  My good friend and fellow writer John Marquand, son of the eminent novelist, retains a blinding image of his childhood and of Christmas. This is the memory of his father, groaning with rage and his face flushed to an alarming crimson, bearing the family Christmas tree—still loaded with its pretty ornaments—to the front door and hurling it out into the snows of Boston. The younger Marquand tells me that he can no longer remember his father's words as he committed this ritual murder. John Jr. was a tiny child at the time and was transfixed with horror at the sight. He only recalls the look of triumph on his father's face.

  The elder Marquand has been a cultural hero to me ever since I heard this reminiscence. Oh how I have longed to do the same to our yule tree, Christmas after Christmas, but have been prevented by cowardice from achieving such a satisfying catharsis. For the fact is that although I loathe Christmas to the nethermost part of me I have never been brave enough either to perform such a soul-satisfying act or to do something even more obvious—and that is simply to get out of there, split, leave home, take flight, abandon Christmas once and for all.

  One more true anecdote will illustrate this latter impulse. Another cherished friend of mine—a distinguished professor of literature, a man of spaciously humane instincts—was faced some fifteen years ago with his first Christmas as a married man. Like me, he had suffered an ever-deepening disenchantment with Christmas as he had grown older but resolved that year to put on a happy face, so to speak, if only to indulge his bride. A person of substantial independent means, he had bought her a bewitching, recklessly expensive watercolor by Paul Klee, and on Christmas Eve he had set it under the tree in a place that would stun her eye. His young wife in turn had bought him a beautifully groomed French poodle, with which she joyously burst in upon him that same night. He admired the poodle, she swooned at the Klee. While they were embracing, giddy with the spirit of the moment, the poodle pranced across the room to the tree and urinated torrentially over the Klee, virtually emulsifying the painting before their horrified gaze. The marriage, however, survived. My friend did not kill the dog. He remembers exclaiming: “All right, that's it! NO MORE CHRISTMAS!” By which he meant that the poodle's act had effectively wiped out Christmas from their lives. He resolved, with his wife's acquiescence, never to celebrate Christmas again. And so each year since then during the holiday season they have stolen away to hideaways devoid of wreaths, tinsel, snow—places like Antigua, Mexico, Curaçao. I might add that their offspring, a charming lad in excellent mental health, clearly has never minded this sort of Christmas a bit.

  A comfortable bank account, you might argue, permits my professor friend his easy escape—an escape which is blessed, or a craven cop-out, depending upon your point of view. But what of those of us who have chosen to man the fort? What of a trapped Christmas-hater like myself, one who through inertia or a sense of tradition or weak-minded familial loyalty allows himself year in and year out to be engulfed by the Yuletide nightmare? What masochism in me lets this dreadful season annually perform its ruinous handiwork on my spirit when perhaps with only a little connivance, a touch of ingenuity, or the manly exercise of my self-respect, I too might escape? Are both my loathing of the holiday and the supine way in which I allow it to overwhelm me the signs of an illness which might be called the “Christmas psychosis”? The terrible thing is that the mood haunts me at certain times all yearlong, not only in December, when naturally the feeling is at its darkest, but even in the summer. More than once, sunning myself peaceably on a beach in July, I have happened upon an odious little notice in a magazine advertising bargain prices for early mail orders of Christmas cards, and have suddenly felt my skin crawl and sensed the summer sky darkening and my soul filling up with despair.

  Or there have been other ghastly harbingers. The sight of those Christmas tree lights in late October, strung up with indecent haste even before the Halloween pumpkins have vanished, casts over me the funereal gloom of certain lines from Emily Dickinson. I dread the coming of Christmas just as I dread the stygian nights and brief days of that solstice season itself, with its sense of things passing away. Those twinkling lights and brave little candles avail nothing against the cosmic darkness. Even booze, I know, will produce no ease, will fail as an anodyne.

  I have searched my innermost depths for an answer to the reason for my phobia, but to no avail. Perhaps the closest to an answer I have is buried between the lines of the following fragmentary transcript of a tape recording—made covertly last Christmas Eve by my teenage son—of a colloquy between myself and my wife, who here is in the process of wrapping presents. She is a good and generous person for whom Christmas provides great draughts of mysterious, uncomplicated bliss.

  SHE: Don't make me cry. I thought we were going to get through it this year without my crying.

  HE: I thought so too. But I'm getting this feeling that I can't stand it. It's stealing over me, that awful creepy feeling.

  SHE: Please, you've been so good up until now. I haven't cried since last Christmas. Don't make me cry now.

  HE: I've tried. But the feeling—it's getting at me. [Pauses.] There are all the boxes again.

  SHE: What boxes?

  HE [voice rising]: What do you mean, what boxes? There are all these boxes, all over the house! By actual count I've counted one hundred and twelve boxes! They're everywhere! They're all over our bed! I can't sleep in that bed!

  SHE: I asked you tonight to sleep in the attic, don't you remember—

  HE [furiously]: I won't be cast out of my own bed, do you hear—

  SHE: Don't raise your voice so! Please! Why oh why do you hate Christmas like this?

  HE: Because of the boxes! These presents! The materialism of it all, that's why! The materialism! I can't stand the commercialized orgy of Christmas, the gross, sordid materialism! You and your wretched catalogues! Ever since Thanksgiving! Saks, Altman's, F. A. O. Schwarz—

  SHE [voice rising]: It's practically all for the children! And don't talk about materialism! What about your materialism? The Mercedes you bought in October, that thermostatically controlled wine vault, the depth finder for the boat—and you've got three digital watches for Christ's sake! At least Christmas isn't that kind of materialism! It's for the children! Oh, I'm going to cry—

  HE [voice edged with rage and despair]: Speaking of
Christ, our Lord and Savior whose birth we celebrate this day, wouldn't He go absolutely crackers, sweet buddy, over this display of useless material things—one hundred and twelve boxes, F. A. O. Schwarz crud and junk, all over the goddamned bed—He who preached moderation, poverty, simplicity—

  SHE [her voice a wail]: And giving! Preached that! Giving! Something you've forgotten! Oh, you insufferable, sanctimonious ass! You—You—well-poisoner! You detestable—You—Oh! Oh! [She bursts into tears.]

  So much for one Christmas Eve. I have a troubled suspicion that this year, in a somewhat modified version, the dialogue will be repeated. Yet there is a more tranquil ending than the foregoing embroilment might suggest. For if Christmases past are any indication of the one impending, our hero—chastened as always by his wife's tears—will wobble quietly to bed. He will sleep in the attic, far away and high over the morning pandemonium, until past noon, when he will make his way downstairs and into the benign chaos of 112 eviscerated boxes. His children, who were briefly awakened by that unseemly squabble, will glare at their father with mean reproach and perhaps a touch of pity, but soon he will allow his rumpled and sourly hungover presence to become absorbed into the day's manic joy. His wife will be amazingly fresh-faced and forgiving. He will be showered with thanks for presents he did not know he was the bestower of, and his ogreish heart will start to glow.