My Generation

by William Styron

  I would like to say something in regard to my feelings about America. I have lived in France and Italy for something over a year now—not a long time but long enough for me to feel well ahead in my postgraduate education. I have been here under a large handicap, though a handicap which, as I will try to demonstrate, might have its redeeming qualities. This handicap may be explained simply by the fact that I am one of those people who are unable to enjoy a painting, a piece of sculpture, a work of architecture, or, for that matter, practically any visually artistic representation. To suffer such a lack while in Italy is somewhat like being let loose, while suffering from ulcers, on one of those wonderful, large West Side delicatessens; yet, as Clive Bell, to whom I have run for refuge as apologist, so sympathetically points out in his essay called “The Aesthetic Hypothesis,” there are people congenitally incapable of such an experience, just as there are people born without the sense of smell, and no more to be blamed than their equally sensitive friends who can visualize in the aerial, clear abstractions of a Vivaldi concerto, only horses galloping, nymphs and shepherds, or the first girl they ever kissed.1 So, deprived as I am in a place so rich in wonders as Rome of the means to assimilate those wonders, I have been thrown a bit on my own devices, so that my viewpoint, as an American living abroad, has probably often been closer to Burbank and his Baedeker among the ruins of Venice than any number of generations of comfortably adjusted artists.2 Many people can feel the true rapture at the façade of Chartres, and these are no doubt a step further toward an affection for France and its people than the aesthetically more limited who, attuned to the nightclubs of Montparnasse or escargots primarily, are outraged, stricken, and resentful when it dawns upon them that the French consider them jackasses. Not all art lovers, of course, are nice people. But a warm and tolerant feeling of brotherhood for man is, I believe, often measured by the extent of one's love for man's monuments and man's artifacts; and not a few American tourists, like myself, don't know a Piero from a peanut.*

  I think this blindness of mine, though, has had its worthy effects, for if it has helped to keep me from understanding the more beautiful things about Europe it has also conspired with a sort of innate and provincial aloofness in my nature to make me much more conscious of my modern environment, and self-consciously aware of my emotions as an American within that environment. And thus at last, after more than a year, I think that I am as “adjusted” as I ever will be, having succumbed neither to the blandishments of exile nor to any illusions of a faultless America. There cannot be much dogma about nations when one lives in One World, eighteen hours from home, and for me now things are pretty well balanced.

  The “U.S. Go Home” signs no longer offend me, since I have learned that they are the work of Communists and don't mean me but the American army encamped nearby. I have even come to the point where I can sympathize with the signs and ask myself: “Suppose New York were full of Swedish soldiers all mouthing orders for beer in an alien, thick, jaw-breaking tongue. Would I not want to scrawl ‘Swedes go home!’ on every available wall?” I have learned, too, that anti-Americanism is many different things: unjustified among the spoiled and snobbish Italian upper class, with whom it's currently in vogue, and among whom was the famous actress heard at a party recently to utter the most slanderous anti-American remarks, and enplane the next day, via TWA, for New York; justified when a Parisian reads about McCarthy in Le Figaro, or when our most widely read weekly editorializes upon France and compares it to a whore; nonexistent, finally, among most Italians whose happiest tradition has been an inability to be anti-anything and each of whom has a cousin in Brooklyn.

  What I suppose I've really learned is the elderly truism that all of us can learn something from each other. That whereas our radios are better, no car from Detroit can match a fleet, shiny Alfa Romeo; that our planes work, crack up less often, and are generally on time, but that the dreadful snarl on Madison Avenue might be alleviated by a study of the marvelous Paris bus system; that, on the other hand, a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape is ambrosia, indeed, but that there's still nothing like a Coca-Cola on a hot summer day, as every Frenchman knows but won't admit; that the man from Chicago gobbling hamburgers on the Champs-Élysées is undoubtedly a fool, but there is something wonderful to be said about his brother, the July tourist with his straw hat and his lurid tie and his camera, and his almost pathetic eagerness to find, in a strange land, some kind of dazzling and miraculous enlightenment: sometimes his manners are bad but he's making the effort at least, and one finds few French tourists outside of France; that our mass production is the world's finest: “Oh,” says the American, “your Italian sports cars are great, but in the States everyone can own a car.” “But Signore,” is the reply, “here not everyone wants a car”; that our Park Avenue head-feelers are the very best: “But Signore, here we do not need psychoanalysis.” It's simply a matter of balance.

  One must end a credo on the word “endure,” but I think we will do just that—Americans and Italians and Frenchmen, in spite of all those who threaten us momentary harm. Humans have become involved too much in life, and the wonders are too thick about us, to be daunted by a handful of madmen who always, somehow, fall. The hope of heaven has flowered so long among us that I just can't envision that hope blighted out in our time, or any other, for that matter; perhaps the miseries of our century will be recalled only as the work of a race of strange and troublous children, by the wise men in the aeons which come after us. Meanwhile, the writers keep on writing, and I should like to think that what we write will be worth remembering.

  [Nation, May 2, 1953. This was Styron's contribution to a symposium on creativity. The other contributors were James Jones, Maude Hutchins, Leonard Bishop, Jefferson Young, and John H. Griffin.]

  * * *

  * Piero della Francesca (ca. 1415–1492), Italian painter of the early Renaissance period.—J.W.

  Moviegoer

  For seven or eight months during my fourteenth year I kept a diary. This was in the late 1930s, when I was living in southern Virginia with my father and a male cousin a little older than I—my mother having died a year before. Because of the absence of my mother there was considerably less discipline in the household than there ordinarily might have been, and so the diary—which I still possess—is largely a chronicle of idleness. The only interruptions to appear amid the daily inertia are incidents of moviegoing. The diary now records the fact that hardly a day went by without my cousin and me attending a film, and on weekends we often went more than once. In the summertime, when we had no school, there was a period of ten days when we viewed a total of sixteen movies. Mercifully, it must be recorded, movies were very cheap during those years at the end of the Great Depression. My critical comments in the diary were invariably laconic: “Pretty good.” “Not bad.” “Really swell movie.” I was fairly undemanding in my tastes. The purely negative remarks are almost nonexistent.

  Among the several remarkable features about this orgy of moviegoing there is one that stands out notably: nowhere during this brief history is there even the slightest mention of my having read a book. As far as reading was concerned, I may as well have been an illiterate sharecropper in Alabama. So one might ask: how does a young boy, exposed so numbingly and monotonously to a single medium—the film—grow up to become a writer of fiction? The answer, I believe, may be less complicated than one might suppose. In the first place, I would like to think that, if my own experience forms an example, it does not mean the death of literacy or creativity if one is drenched in popular culture at an early age. This is not to argue in favor of such a witless exposure to movies as I have just described—only to say that the very young probably survive such exposure better than we imagine, and grow up to be readers and writers. More importantly, I think my experience demonstrates how, at least in the last fifty or sixty years, it has been virtually impossible for a writer of fiction to be immune to the influence of film on his work, or to fail to have movies impinge in an important way on
his creative consciousness.

  Yet I need to make an immediate qualification. I do not wish to argue matters of superiority in art forms. But although I cannot be entirely objective, I must say here that as admirable and as powerful a medium as the cinema is, it cannot achieve that complex synthesis of poetic, intellectual, and emotional impact that we find in the very finest novels. At their best, films are of course simply wonderful. A work like Citizen Kane or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (by one of the greatest of directors, John Huston, who, interestingly enough, began his career as a writer) is each infinitely superior, in my opinion, to most novels aspiring to the status of literature. But neither of these estimable works attains for me the aesthetic intensity of, say, William Faulkner in a book like The Sound and the Fury, or comes close to the profound beauty and moral vision of the novel that, more than any other, determined my early course as a writer: Madame Bovary.

  After saying this, however, I feel obliged to confess without apology to the enormous influence the cinema has had on my own writing. Here I am not speaking of films in any large sense contributing to my philosophical understanding of things; even the films of Ingmar Bergman and Luis Buñuel, both of whom I passionately admire, fail to achieve that synthesis I mentioned before. While a fine movie has changed my perceptions for days, a great novel has altered my way of thinking for life. No, what I am speaking of is technique, style, mood—the manner in which remembered episodes in films, certain attitudes and gestures on the part of actors, little directorial tricks, even echoes of dialogue have infiltrated my work.

  I am not by nature a creature of the eye (in the sense that I respond acutely to painting or pictorial representation; I vibrate instead to music) but I'm certain that the influence of films has caused my work to be intensely visual. I clearly recollect much of the composition of my first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, which I finished when I was twenty-five. So many scenes from that book were set up in my mind as I might have set them up as a director. My authorial eye became a camera, and the page became a set or soundstage upon which my characters entered or exited and spoke their lines as if from a script. This is a dramatic technique that by no means necessarily diminishes the literary integrity of a novel; it is, as I say, a happy legacy of many years of moviegoing, and it has resonance still in my latest work, Sophie’s Choice. For example, I wrote the scene toward the end of the film where Stingo ascends the stairs in the rooming house to view the dead bodies of Sophie and Nathan with such an overpowering sense of viewing it through the eyepiece of a movie camera that when I saw the episode re-created in the film I had a stunning sense of déjà vu, as if I myself had photographed the scene, directed it, rather than written it in a book.

  Indeed, the film version of Sophie’s Choice gives me an excellent opportunity to sum up my attitudes toward the relationship between literature and the cinema. Alan Pakula's production is, I think, a remarkably faithful adaptation of the novel, the kind of interpretation that every writer of novels ideally longs for but almost never receives. When I first saw the film it was a joy to note the smooth, almost seamless way the story unfolded in scrupulous fidelity to the way I had told it; there were no shortcuts, no distortions or evasions, and the sense of satisfaction I felt was augmented by the splendid photography, the subtle musical score, and, above all, the superb acting, especially Meryl Streep's glorious performance, which of course is already part of film history. What then, when it was all over, was the cause of my nagging uneasiness, the sense that something was missing?

  Suddenly I realized that much that had been essential to the novel had been quietly eliminated, so much that I could scarcely catalog the vanished items: the important digression on racial conflict, the philosophical meditations on Auschwitz, the intense eroticism between Sophie and Nathan, the exploration of anti-Semitism in Poland, even certain characters I had considered crucial to the novel—these were but a few of the aspects which were gone. Yet in no sense did I feel betrayed. After calm reflection I understood the necessity for the absence of these components: many things had to go; otherwise a ten-hour film would have ensued. But more significantly, those elements which had been so carefully integrated into the novel, and which were so important both to its execution and to that sense of density and complicity which makes a novel the special organism it is, were those which most likely would have ruined the film had there been an attempt to include them.

  Thus the film had to be not a visual replica of the novel—such was impossible—but a skeleton upon which was hung only the merest suggestion of the novel's flesh. For me it illustrated more graphically than anything the necessity for not expecting a film to perform a novel's work. The two art forms—basically so different—coexist but rarely achieve a coupling. At best, a film (like Sophie’s Choice) can take on a felicitous resemblance, as in a fine translation of a poem from a difficult language. And that is no small achievement. But even the most satisfied moviemaker will say, if he is honest, that for the true experience one must return to that oldest source—the written word—and confront the original work.

  [Le Figaro, May 7–8, 1983.]

  Christchurch

  In December of the second of my two years at Christchurch, there occurred an event which would decisively alter my life and the lives of my friends here at school and indeed people everywhere. On that day—it was a mild and golden and cloudless Sunday—I had taken illegal leave of the campus and had gone on a gently beer-soaked automobile ride through this incomparable Virginia countryside, which was beautifully forlorn and wild-looking in those days. It was a wintry, leafless afternoon—very bright, as I say—with no hint in it of menace. My companions on the ride that afternoon were a classmate named Bill Bowman and two girls from Urbanna, who even at this late date shall remain nameless. Bowman, besides being a year older than I was, was a native of New York City, and thus I trusted him in sophisticated matters, such as beer. The beer we were drinking out of brown bottles, purchased stealthily the day before at Cooks’ Corners, was a vile concoction called Atlantic, so crudely brewed that gobbets of yeast floated in it like snowflakes. I earnestly hope it is no longer being manufactured. At any rate, our car and its occupants finally ended up down the road in West Point, where, inhaling the sweet fumes of the paper mill's hydrogen sulfide (intense and ripe even on the Sabbath), we dismounted at a seedy little café for hamburgers. It was while we were in this dive, eating hamburgers and surreptitiously swilling the foul Atlantic, that the waitress came to the table and announced the perplexing and rather horrible radio news. I’ll never forget her homely face, which was like a slab of pale pine with two small holes bored in it, nor her voice, which had all the sad languor of the upper Pamunkey River. “The Japanese,” she said, “they done bombed Pearl Harbor.” Her expression contained a certain real fear. “God help us,” she went on, “it's so close. Imagine them gettin’ all the way to South Carolina.”

  That woman's knowledge of geography was only a little less informed than our own, and the next day—as we sat in study hall listening to the radio and President Roosevelt's call for a declaration of war against the Axis powers—few of us sitting there could realize how irrevocably things would be changed—for us and the world—and how all of our lives thenceforth would be in one way or another determined by the existence of war.

  I would not be so fatuous as to say that when I was here all was perfect bliss, that in this garden of earthly delights high above the Rappahannock a scuffed toe would not have uncovered a toad or two. But of all the schools I attended, including the three institutions of higher learning I went to subsequently in the South and North, only Christchurch ever commanded something more than mere respect—which is to say, my true and abiding affection. I think that much of the warmth and sweetness I felt and still feel for Christchurch has to do with the fact that when I was a student the place was very small and resembled a family—a sometimes tumultuous and quarrelsome, always nearly destitute but at the same time close-knit and loyal family. There were
, I believe, only fifty-odd boys. We were poor. The school was poor. Many schools at the end of the Depression were poor, but the threadbare nature of Christchurch was almost Dickensian in its pathos. The library, for instance. At sixteen, I had a natural inclination for geography and I loved to pore over maps, but in the library there was only one geography book. It was not a bad atlas, had it been left undamaged, but it had been divested of Africa and all of Eastern Europe—something which to this day has produced significant gaps in my knowledge of the earth. The works of American literature stopped with Jack London—no Hemingway, no Fitzgerald, no Thomas Wolfe, no Theodore Dreiser; in compensation, we had that laudable work Tom Sawyer, but even this boy's classic palled upon perhaps the fifth reading. The Encyclopaedia Britannica was of such antique vintage that its information in the technological sphere alone ceased, I remember, with the invention of the telegraph and the diving bell. The pride of the entire library was a complete twenty-volume Shakespeare, but at least three volumes had been left out in the rain and the pages were stuck together, while someone else had stolen both King Lear and Richard III. Despite all this deprivation, I managed to get educated enough to pass on to college and acquit myself with at least passable honor. Our masters, good-natured and hideously underpaid drudges who possessed nonetheless high ideals and admirable patience, dispensed as much learning as was within their power. I still salute them in memory. When out of sheer exhaustion the teachers flagged and stumbled, the brotherly family-like nature of the school allowed us to teach each other. My classmate Tommy Peyton taught me all the trigonometry I ever knew. Langley Wood tutored me in chemistry, also about the girls in Richmond. It was in Jimmy Davenport's late-evening seminar that I learned how to beat the dealer at blackjack.