Reading My Father.(William Styron's 'Sophie's Choice')

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 The difficult vocabulary and the historical references eluded me, page after page, until, at last, I let them sail by unchallenged.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.