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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn. , --"Sophie's Choice."
The first time I read that line, the opening of "Sophie's Choice," I was thirteen years old. My father's novel, which he had spent most of my childhood writing, had just arrived in bound-galley form. Curious and proud (the advance word on the book was, I knew from talk around the house, excellent), I took a copy to school in my book bag. During recess and study hall, I began to read "Sophie's Choice" in a conspicuously serious fashion, hoping to attract interest in me and what I believed was my father's extremely important achievement. As it turned out, no one was very interested, least of all me. I found the book unbelievably boring. The difficult vocabulary and the historical references eluded me, page after page, until, at last, I let them sail by unchallenged.
And then I got to page 45, where Stingo, the narrator, who so obviously stood in for my father, lapses into a dream he describes as "the most ferociously erotic hallucination I had ever experienced." Further on, he elaborates, in extended libidinal detail: "She wiggled toward me, a wanton nymph with moist and parted mouth, and now bending down over my bare belly . . . " If you've read the book, you probably remember this reverie, along with other interludes so vivid and numerous that I can think of few similar literary novels that compare in sheer volume of sexual documentation. If you read the book, you probably laughed. I remember leaning against a railing outside the locker room and hoping not to throw up on my Bass Weejuns. "Calm down," I told myself, furtively peering again under the mint-green paper cover. "This is fiction. Daddy didn't really do all these things."
Mortified, I put the galleys back on the kitchen sideboard. I didn't finish "Sophie's Choice" for twenty-five years.
My father, William Styron, died just over a year ago. Famous by his mid-twenties, he helped create the cliche of the gifted, hard-drinking, bellicose writer which gave so much of twentieth-century literature a muscular, glamorous aura. He was not an engaged parent: he didn't eat dinner with us or attend school plays. He never threw a ball, built a tree house, or tucked us into bed. I can't remember him teaching me how to do anything except open a wine bottle, a job that I did on my tiptoes and with great dedication each night before I went to bed.
I guess I always knew that this was eccentric. The Styrons--me, my father, my mother, Rose, and my older siblings, Susanna, Polly, and Tom--were definitely different. Not that we were special, or necessarily unique in the world, but, from a child's point of view, it was pretty clear who the statistical outliers were. Roxbury, Connecticut, where we lived, is now a hamlet of second homes and impeccably renovated Colonial manors in the southern hills of Litchfield County. But when my parents arrived, in the mid-fifties, Roxbury was still both simple and remote.
They had met in 1951, when Bill Styron, the twenty-six-year-old author of "Lie Down in Darkness," spoke to a graduate writing class that Rose Burgunder was taking at Johns Hopkins. The following autumn, Rose, travelling in Italy, dropped a note in Bill's box at the American Academy in Rome, where, as a Prix de Rome winner, he was living and writing. In May of 1953, they were married at the Campidoglio in the company of a small party of friends that included Peter Matthiessen, Irwin Shaw, and John Marquand, Jr.
Born into a family of wealthy, assimilated Jews in Baltimore, Mum had earned her widowed mother's displeasure by falling in with a struggling artist. When their engagement was announced, my grandmother hired a private detective to go to Virginia and dig into my father's background. Her meddling nearly derailed their romance. Later on, however, particularly when my father's success confirmed the wisdom of her daughter's heart, Nana developed a strong affection for her unusual son-in-law.
My parents' European honeymoon stretched into a year; it was followed by a brief residency in New York and then the move to Connecticut. Settling in Roxbury, among farmers and tradesmen, they found themselves in a pastoral outpost far from the distractions of city life. They bought an old farmstead on a dirt road and, in the early days, let the cows stay on, grazing outside their window. The house, painted a cheerful yellow and added on to over the years, creaked beneath the feet of their growing family. There was a tennis court, and a pond for ice-cold swims. Lilacs and apple trees bloomed in the spring. A giant willow stood at the bottom of a gently sloping hill. My mother and father spent fifty years there, fashioning a life that ministered to the frequently incompatible pursuits of child rearing and artistic creation. Daddy's work was always the fulcrum, while Mum--cheerfully, giddily, perilously--manned the controls. It was a world of privilege and irregularity.
In stark contrast to my father's cerebral reserve stood my mother's comprehensive generosity. Her profligacy was--to my father's frequent horror--also the signal force of our family life. She used her checkbook to paper over the cracks in our lives, to buy us the good times she felt we were entitled to. She denied us...
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