Sophie's Choice (Open Road)

by William Styron

  I’m serious, it must be the longest literary work ever set down by human hand. I took it over to the mail room and had the boy there weigh it—35 pounds, seven Hammermill Bond boxes of five pounds each, a total of 3,850 typewritten pages. The saga itself is in a species of English, one would think it was written by Dryden in mock imitation of Spenser if one did not know the awful truth: those nights and days and twenty years on the frigid Dakota steppe, dreaming of ancient Norway, scratching away while the wild wind out of Saskatchewan howls through the bending wheat:

  “Oh thou great leader, HARALD, how great is thy grief!

  Where be the nosegays that she dight for thee?”

  The aging bachelor edging up on Stanza 4,000 as the electric fan stirs the stifling prairie heat:

  “Sing now, ye trolls and Nibelungs, sing no more

  The tunes that HARALD made in her praise,

  But into mourning turn your former lays:

  O blackest curse!

  Now is the time to die, Nay, time was long ago:

  O mournful verse!”

  My lips tremble, my sight blurs, I can go on no longer. Gundar Firkin is at the Hotel Algonquin (where he took a room at my heartless suggestion) awaiting a telephone call I am too cowardly to make. Decision is to decline with regret, even with a kind of grief.

  It may have been that my standards were so high or the quality of the books so dreadful, but in either case I do not remember recommending a single submitted work during my five months at McGraw-Hill. But truly there is some irony in the fact that the one book that I rejected and—at least to my knowledge—also later found a publisher was a work which did not languish unknown and unread. Since those days I’ve often fantasized the reaction of Farrell or one of the other higher-ups when this book came out under the imprint of a Chicago publisher, a year or so after I had long vacated McGraw-Hill’s oppressive pile. For surely my report must have registered in the memory of someone of the senior echelon, and just as surely this old-timer must have returned to the files, and with God knows what cruel mixed sensations of dismay and loss, reread my cool dismissal with its cocksure, priggish and disastrous cadences.

  ... so it is of some relief after these bitter months to discover a manuscript containing a prose style that does not cause fever, headache or retching, and as such the work deserves qualified praise. The idea of men adrift on a raft does have a certain appeal But for the most part this is a long, solemn and tedious Pacific voyage best suited, I would think, to some kind of drastic abridgement in a journal like the National Geographic. Maybe a university press would buy it, it’s definitely not for us.

  This was the way I dealt with that great classic of modern adventure, Kon-Tiki Months later, watching this book remain first on the best-seller list for unbelievable week after week, I was able to rationalize my blindness by saying to myself that if McGraw-Hill had paid me more than ninety cents an hour I might have been more sensitive to the nexus between good books and filthy lucre.

  Home for me at this time was a cramped cubicle, eight by fifteen feet, in a building on West Eleventh Street in the Village called the University Residence Club. I had been lured to this place, on my arrival in New York, not alone by its name—which conjured up an image of Ivy League camaraderie, baize-covered lounge tables littered with copies of the New Republic and Partisan Review, and elderly retainers in frock coats fretting over messages and catering to one’s needs—but by its modest rates: ten dollars a week. The Ivy League business was, of course, an imbecilic illusion. The University Residence Club was only one small cut above a flophouse, differing from Bowery accommodations to the extent of nominal privacy in the form of a locked door. Nearly all else, including the tariff, fell short of resemblance to a flophouse only by the most delicate of degrees. Paradoxically, the location was admirable, almost chic. From the single grime-encrusted window in my rear fourth-floor cubicle I could stare down into the ravishing garden of a house on West Twelfth Street, and occasionally I glimpsed what I took to be the owners of the garden—a youngish tweedy man whom I fantasized as a rising star at The New Yorker or Harper’s, and his lively and astonishingly well-proportioned blond wife who bounced around the garden in slacks or in a bathing suit, disporting herself from time to time with a ridiculous, overgroomed Afghan hound, or lying asprawl on an Abercrombie & Fitch hammock, where I fucked her to a frazzle with stiff, soundless, slow, precise shafts of desire.

  For then sex, or rather its absence, and this insolent and gorgeous little garden—together with the people who inhabited it—all seemed to merge symbolically to make ever more unbearable the degenerate character of the University Residence Club and to aggravate my poverty and my lonely and outcast state. The all-male clientele, mostly middle-aged or older, Village drifters and losers whose next step downward was skid row, emitted a sour smell of wine and despair as we edged past each other in the cramped, peeling hallways. No doting old concierge but a series of reptilian desk clerks, each with the verdigris hue of creatures deprived of daylight, mounted guard over the lobby where one small lightbulb pulsed dimly overhead; they also operated the single creaking elevator, and they coughed a lot and scratched in hemorrhoidal misery during the interminable ascent to the fourth floor and the cubbyhole where, night after night that spring, I immured myself like a half-mad anchorite. Necessity had forced me to this, not only because I had no extra money for entertainment but because, as a newcomer to the metropolis, less shy than simply proudly withdrawn, I lacked both the opportunity and the initiative to make friends. For the first time in my life, which had for years been sometimes witlessly gregarious, I discovered the pain of unwanted solitude. Like a felon suddenly thrown into solitary confinement, I found myself feeding off the unburned fat of inward resources I barely knew I possessed. In the University Residence Club at twilight in May, watching the biggest cockroach I had ever seen browse across my copy of The Complete Poetry and Prose of John Donne, I suddenly encountered the face of loneliness, and decided that it was a merciless and ugly face indeed.

  So during those months my evening schedule rarely varied. Leaving the McGraw-Hill Building at five, I would take the Eighth Avenue subway train (a nickel) to Village Square, where, after debarking, I made straight for a corner delicatessen and bought the three cans of Rheingold my severe and budgetary conscience permitted me. Thence to my roomlet, where I would stretch out on the corrugated mattress with its Clorox-fragrant sheets laundered to transparency and read until the last of my beers grew warm—a matter of an hour and a half or so. Mercifully, I was at that age when reading was still a passion and thus, save for a happy marriage, the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay. I could not have made it through those evenings otherwise. But I was an abandoned reader and, besides, outlandishly eclectic, with an affinity for the written word—almost any written word—that was so excitable that it verged on the erotic. I mean this literally, and were it not for the fact that I have compared notes with a few others who have confessed to sharing with me in their youth this peculiar sensibility, I know I would now be risking scorn or incredulity by stating that I can recall the time when the prospect of half an hour’s dalliance with a Classified Telephone Directory caused me a slight but nonetheless noticeable tumescence.

  In any case, I would read—Under the Volcano was just one of the books which I remember held me captive that season—and at eight or nine o’clock would go out for dinner. What dinners! How vividly there still lingers on my palate the suety aftertaste of the Salisbury steak at Bickford’s, or Riker’s western omelette, in which one night, nearly swooning, I found a greenish, almost incorporeal feather and a tiny embryonic beak. Or the gristle embedded like an impacted tumor in the lamb chops at the Athens Chop House, the chops themselves tasting of old sheep, the mashed potatoes glutinous, rancid, plainly reconstituted with Greek cunning from dehydrated government surplus filched from some warehouse. But I was as innocent of New York gastronomy as I was of a lot of other things, and it would be
a long time before I would learn that the best meal for less than a dollar in the city was a couple of hamburgers and a slice of pie at a White Tower.

  Back in my cubicle, I would savagely seize a book and plunge once more into make-believe, reading into the early hours of the morning. On several occasions, however, I was forced to do what I had come distastefully to regard as my “homework,” that is, composing jacket blurbs for forthcoming McGraw-Hill books. As a matter of fact, I recall that I had been hired in the first place largely on the basis of a trial blurb I had written for an already published McGraw-Hill tome, The Story of the Chrysler Building. My lyrical yet muscular copy had so impressed Farrell that it not only was an important factor in my getting the job but obviously made him feel that I could produce similar wonders for books about to be published. I think it was one of his major disappointments in me that I couldn’t repeat myself, not a single time; for unbeknownst to Farrell, and only partly apparent to me, the McGraw-Hill syndrome of despair and attrition had set in. Without being willing quite fully to admit it, I had begun to detest my charade of a job. I was not an editor, but a writer—a writer with the same ardor and the soaring wings of the Melville or the Flaubert or the Tolstoy or the Fitzgerald who had the power to rip my heart out and keep a part of it and who each night, separately and together, were summoning me to their incomparable vocation. My attempts at jacket copy filled me with a sense of degradation, especially since the books I had been assigned to magnify represented not literature but its antipodean opposite, commerce. Here is a fragment of one of the blurbs I was unable to finish.

  As the romance of paper is central to the story of the American dream, so is the name Kimberly-Clark central to the story of paper. Beginning as a humble “one-horse” operation in the sleepy Wisconsin lakeside town of Neenah, the Kimberly-Clark Corporation is now one of the authentic giants of the world paper industry, with factories in 13 states and 8 foreign countries. Serving a host of human needs, many of its products—the most famous of which is undoubtedly Kleenex—have become so familiar that their very names have passed into the language...

  A paragraph like this would require hours. Should I say “undoubtedly Kleenex” or “indubitably”? “Host” of human needs or “horde”? “Mass”? “Mess”? During its composition I would pace my cell distractedly, uttering soft meaningless vocables to the air as I struggled with the prose rhythms, and fighting back the desolate urge to masturbate that for some reason always accompanied this task. Finally, overtaken by rage, I would find myself saying “No! No!” in a loud voice to the beaverboard walls, and then hurl myself on the typewriter where, cackling wickedly, I would tap out a swift, sophomoric but blessedly purgative variation.

  Kimberly-Clark statistics are staggering to contemplate:

  —It is estimated that, during one winter month alone, if all the snot blown into Kleenex tissues in the United States and Canada were spread over the playing surface of the Yale Bowl, it would reach a depth of one-and-a-half feet...

  —It has been calculated that if the number of the vaginas employing Kotex during a single four day period in the U.S.A. were lined up orifice to orifice, there would be a snatch long enough to extend from Boston to White River Junction, Vt...

  The next day Farrell, ever amiable and tolerant, would muse wryly on such offerings, chewing at his Yello-Bole, and after observing that “this isn’t quite what I think we had in mind,” would grin understandingly and ask me to please try again. And because I was not yet completely lost, perhaps because the Presbyterian ethic still exercised some vestigial hold on me, I would try again that night—would try with all my passion and might, to no avail. After sweaty hours, I would give up and return to “The Bear” or Notes from the Underground or Billy Budd, or often simply loiter yearningly by the window, gazing down into the enchanted garden. There in the golden spring dusk of Manhattan, in an ambience of culture and unassertive affluence from which I knew I would forever be excluded, a soiree would be commencing at the Winston Hunnicutts’, for that was the swank name with which I had christened them. Alone for an instant, blond Mavis Hunnicutt would appear in the garden, dressed in a blouse and tight flowered slacks; after pausing for a peek up at the opalescent evening sky, she would give an odd and bewitching toss to her lovely hair and then bend down to pluck tulips from the flowerbed. In this adorable stance, she could not know what she did to the loneliest junior editor in New York. My lust was incredible—something prehensile, a groping snout of desire, slithering down the begrimed walls of the wretched old building, uncoiling itself across a fence, moving with haste serpentine and indecent to a point just short of her upturned rump, where in silent metamorphosis it blazingly flowered into the embodiment of myself, priapic, ravenous, yet under hair-trigger control. Gently my arms surrounded Mavis, and I cupped my hands under her full, free-floating, honeydew breasts. “Is that you, Winston?” she whispered. “No, it’s I,” said I, her lover, in response, “let me take you doggie fashion.” To which she invariably replied, “Oh, darling, yes—later.”

  In these demented fantasies I was prevented from immediate copulation on the Abercrombie & Fitch hammock only by the sudden arrival in the garden of Thornton Wilder. Or e. e. cummings. Or Katherine Anne Porter. Or John Hersey. Or Malcolm Cowley. Or John P. Marquand. At which point—brought back to my senses with a punctured libido—I would find myself at the window once more, savoring with longing heart the festivities below. For it seemed perfectly logical to me that the Winston Hunnicutts, this vivid and gregarious young couple (whose garden-level living room, incidentally, afforded me a jealous glimpse of Danish-modern shelves jammed with books), had the enormous good fortune to inhabit a world populated by writers and poets and critics and other literary types; and thus on these evenings as the twilight softly fell and the terrace began to fill with chattering, beautifully dressed sophisticates, I discerned in the shadows the faces of all the impossible heroes and heroines I had ever dreamed of since that moment when my hapless spirit had become entrapped by the magic of the printed word. I had yet to meet a single author of a published book—unless one excepts the seedy old ex-Communist I have mentioned, who once accidentally blundered into my office at McGraw-Hill, smelling of garlic and the stale sweat of ancient apprehensions—and so that spring the Hunnicutt parties, which were frequent and of long duration, gave my imagination opportunity for the craziest flights of fancy that ever afflicted the brain of a lovelorn idolater. There was Wallace Stevens! And Robert Lowell! That mustached gentleman looking rather furtively from the door. Could that really be Faulkner? He was rumored to be in New York. The woman with the buxom frame, the hair in a bun, the interminable grin. Surely that was Mary McCarthy. The shortish man with the wry ruddy sardonic face could only be John Cheever. Once in the twilight a woman’s shrill voice called “Irwin!” and as the name floated up to my grimy voyeur’s perch I felt my pulse skip a beat. It was really too dark to tell, and his back was to me, but could the man who wrote “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses” be that broad burly wrestler hemmed in by two girls, their adoring faces upturned like flowers?

  All of these evening sojourners at the Hunnicutts’, I now realize, must have been in the ad game or Wall Street or some other hollow profession, but then I remained unshaken in my delusion. One night, however, just before my expulsion from the McGraw-Hill empire, I experienced a violent reversal of emotions which caused me never to gaze down into the garden again. That time I had taken my accustomed post at the window and had my eyes fixed on Mavis Hunnicutt’s familiar posterior as she made the little motions which had so endeared her to me—hitching at her blouse and tossing a blond lock back with a finger while chatting with Carson McCullers and a pale, lofty English-looking person who possessed a myopic blink and was obviously Aldous Huxley. What in God’s name were they talking about? Sartre? Joyce? Vintage wines? Summer places in the south of Spain? The Bhagavad-Gita? No, plainly they were speaking of the environment—this environment—for Mavis’s face wore a look of plea
sure and animation as she gestured about, pointing to the ivy-covered walls of the garden, the miniature greensward, the bubbling fountain, the miraculous tulip bed set down in bright Flemish hues here amid these somber urban bowels. “If only...” she seemed to say, her expression growing strained with annoyance. “If only...” And then she whirled in a swift half-circle, thrusting out at the University Residence Club a furious little fist, a darling angry fist so prominent, so bloodlessly agitated that it seemed impossible that she was not brandishing it a scant inch from my nose. I felt illumined as if by a spotlight, and in my pounding chagrin I was certain that I could read her lips: “If only that goddamned eyesore weren’t there, with all those creeps peering out at us!”

  But my torment on Eleventh Street was not fated to be prolonged. It would have been satisfying to think that my employment was terminated because of the Kon-Tiki episode. But the decline of my fortunes at McGraw-Hill began with the arrival of a new editor in chief, whom I secretly called the Weasel—a near-anagram of his actual surname. The Weasel had been brought in to give to the place some much-needed tone. At that time he was chiefly known in the publishing business for his association with Thomas Wolfe, having become Wolfe’s editor after he left Scribner and Maxwell Perkins, and following the writer’s death, having helped assemble into some sort of sequential and literary order the colossal body of work which remained unpublished. Although the Weasel and I were both from the South—a connection which in the alien surroundings of New York more often than not tends initially to cement the relationship of Southerners—we took an immediate dislike to each other. The Weasel was a balding, unprepossessing little man in his late forties. I don’t know exactly what he thought of me—doubtless the snotty, free-wheeling style of my manuscript reports had something to do with his negative reaction—but I thought him cold, remote, humorless, with the swollen ego and unapproachable manner of a man who has fatuously overvalued his own accomplishments. In the staff editorial conferences he was fond of uttering such locutions as “Wolfe used to say to me...” Or, “As Tom wrote to me so eloquently just before his death...”