Styron Scholar Finds Author’s Letters Moving
LEXINGON, Va., March 4, 2010 -- For 10 years, between 1943 and 1953, author William Styron wrote a letter each month to his father, also named William Styron. The letters – “almost formal documents” – make “a kind of autobiography” of the author “during 10 very formative years,” observed Styron biographer James L.W. West III, editor of the recently published Letters to My Father.
West discussed the life of Styron, a native of Newport News, Va., and author of Sophie’s Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner, during an address to the Friends of Preston Library and the Institute Honors Program March 3 at the library.
These “very moving” letters, each opening with the phrase “Dear Pop,” represent honest, detailed summaries of what the author was doing, seeing, and thinking about in the period just before handwritten letters began to be superseded by other forms of communication.
The letters begin with Styron a 17-year-old freshman at Davidson College and end as he settles at 27 in Roxbury, Conn., with his wife, Rose Styron. Communication with his father in later years was increasingly by telephone, said West.
West, who is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, said the letters touch on every work of fiction Styron wrote. They encompass Styron’s service in the Marine Corps during World War II and Korea, the basis for The Long March (1953); his time in New York City working for McGraw-Hill, from which he drew material for Sophie’s Choice; and his years in Paris and Rome, during which he wrote Lie Down in Darkness (1951) and conceived the idea for The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). The time in Europe also formed the basis for Set This House on Fire (1960).
Some of the experiences of the 10 years covered by the letters were thus transformed into novels during that time, but others took much longer to mature.
“Those early years imprint experiences on [writers] … and emotions that they never really get rid of,” noted West.
West showed slides of several of the letters, including one from 1947 that mentions Sophie, though the book Sophie’s Choice wasn’t published till 1979. “That stayed in Styron’s mind a long time,” said West.
West noted that Styron’s father saved all of the letters, though the author did not save many of those of his father. It is the task of the biographer, he said, cooperating with the author’s estate and heirs, to decide what to do with the writing left behind after an author’s death. Styron died in 2006.
“Letters are such a marvelous source for learning about people,” he observed, noting that Styron’s letters depict an unusually comfortable relationship with his father. The disapproval of parents of other noted American authors, such as Poe, Wharton, Faulkner, and Hemingway, is nowhere visible in these letters, which portray a father unusually supportive of his son as he develops into a writer.
Also, he said, the letters constitute the only extended series from a son to a father in American literature.
-VMI-
