When Alexandra Styron, the youngest of novelist William Styron’s four children, was growing up, she writes in her new memoir, there was one inviolate rule in the house: “Don’t ask Daddy about his work.”
This was no simple edict to live by. Styron (1925-2006) toiled on his major books for a decade or more, and his roiling moods were determined by how well a day’s writing had gone. The Next Book always became, she writes, “a kind of stolid permanence in our home, like a sofa around which we were subconsciously arrayed.” His kids tiptoed around like wary cats.
Styron’s ardent, sophisticated memoir, Reading My Father, is a pointillistic accounting of the drama that brewed throughout her young life. That drama was dictated, she writes, by the “cloven-footed madness” that sometimes took root in her father’s cranium.
On one level, Styron, now 44, and her siblings led charmed, sun-kissed, haute bohemian lives. Their handsome father was a major novelist, the author of the elegiac Lie Down in Darkness (1951), written when he was 26, and other books. Their mother, Rose Styron, was beautiful, wealthy and charming, and so big a believer in fun, Styron writes, that she “would have let me set my hair on fire if I told her that I wanted to.” The Styrons had big houses in Connecticut and on Martha’s Vineyard. They had herds of pets. The children had little adult supervision and were allowed to grow like weeds. The author was 12 when her father published Sophie’s Choice (1979), the novel that — partly because of the success of the film version, starring Kevin Kline and Meryl Streep — brought him “an extraliterary measure of fame.”
A ferocious social whirl spun over the Styron siblings’ heads. Their parents’ dinner parties were renowned. “People came from great distances for an evening at the Styrons,” Alexandra Styron writes, summoning “the candlelit table groaning with food; great, running rivers of alcohol; and guest lists that were rarely less than Olympian.”
William Styron, of course, fell into a depression in the late 1980s, an implacable funk that led to his best-selling book Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990). His daughter writes with incisiveness and compassion about his mental illness and the events that drove him toward it, which included his inability to finish a novel during the final 27 years of his life.
Well before his depression, he could be appalling to be around. He was a man who “consecrated himself to the Novel,” everything else be damned. He flew into rages at the slightest provocation, like a kind of emotional suicide bomber.
“A toy left in his path, a pencil with no point, a departure delayed by some bit of domestic business,” Styron writes. “These were the kinds of catalysts that could suddenly pull the pin on my father’s temper. He’d lob his invective into the room, storm away, and leave everything behind him in flames.”
Alexandra Styron is the author of a novel, All the Finest Girls, and her touch throughout this memoir is quite fine and very sure. As tough as she is on her father, she sees clearly the better man he could sometimes be. He was a good friend to his own many friends. After the success of Darkness Visible, suicidal men would sometimes ring him on the phone. He would calmly talk them down. He could be warm with his children.
Reading My Father is not just a stroll across the lawns and wooden floorboards of Styron’s memories. She spent a good deal of time in the Duke University archives, poring over her father’s papers.
Leaning on James L.W. West III’s biography William Styron: A Life (1998), she deftly sketches the contours of his life, from his childhood in Virginia, through his service in the Marines during World War II (he never saw combat), through his participation in the founding of The Paris Review, and beyond. She notes that he was decidedly not born great; he worked, like a man digging a firebreak, for everything he achieved as a writer.
You stick with Reading My Father not for this overview but for the restrained agility of Styron’s own prose. She catches how, in his satyric appearance — “hooded eyes, shirts unbuttoned to the navel” — Styron seemed to be “telegraphing his other, more private life.” (His one marriage lasted more than 50 years, until his death, but he had many affairs.)
Poring over the pages of his unfinished work, including a much-revised World War II novel he intended to call The Way of the Warrior, she says: “The whole huge pile vibrated with the strength of his effort. And with a certain madness.”
She writes well about the Great Male Novelists of the mid-20th century and the messes they left behind. This memoir has its sentimentalities and infelicities and narrative eddies, but few that distract you from its flowing course.
Styron is darkly funny about reading, as a teenager, the intense sex scenes in her father’s work, scenes that made her try “not to throw up on my Bass Weejuns.” She is more painfully funny about lessons she learned by watching her older sisters and their boyfriends.
“A wary beau would get the skinny soon enough,” Styron writes. “You could sleep with Bill Styron’s daughters as often as you pleased, just as long as you were amusing and you didn’t eat the last drumstick in the fridge.”
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