Make This Bed With Awe
In memory of William Styron
I wrote my first fan letter when I was thirty years old, and despite my efforts at adult restraint, it was as gushing, as fawning, as passionate as any letter from a teenage girl to her rock star idol. It was, in short, fanatical, and writing it gave me that cathartic feeling one sometimes gets when confessing a long-held and secret love. But it was to no music icon, or movie goddess, or charismatic leader that I wrote, but rather to a writer, a writer's whose books have been the shapers of the man I've faced the world for the past fifteen years--William Styron.
I first bumbled across Styron when I was twenty years old-in April, the day after I resigned my Anthropology major and formally committed to English for good. I had only recently given myself to the idea and romance of being a writer, despite all the risks, despite the near nonexistent chance of happiness or success-and this mad and idiotic career choice was roundly encouraged by my best friend and roommate, Fred, himself a chemistry major. He may regret it now. I sometimes do.
With my new writing career in mind, I had gone to the university library to pick a writer I had never read and was thumbing through the stacks when I stopped, for some reason, on Sophie's Choice. As with most life-altering events, at least, my life altering events, it was utterly and completely random. I had never heard of the book or movie, and Styron's name I knew, for some reason, only because of his novella, The Long March. In short, I checked the book out on a complete whim. But then, looking back from the decrepit age of thirty-five, it seems less like a whim than it does a Zen-like bit of serendipity--a fateful confluence of several different subconscious streams in my life gushing together in this novel to create a deluge.
This was at the University of Central Florida-at the time, a relatively new university in Orlando still on the edge of the swamps, scrubs, and cow prairies that made up the Florida that was still very much tangled in the world of the rural South. At night, we had possums, armadillos, and wild boar all over campus. I had grown up in a southern family-eating grits and catfish and attending revivals and church suppers. My brother and brother-in-law both rode in rodeos and used dip. We punctuated any gathering, whether baby baptism or mass funeral with a gargantuan dinner. The South was very much bonded into every cell and bone, but at 20, it was something I was also trying to escape. Like any kid, I wanted more than anything to travel and expand; to just move. Yet another best friend, Jessica, with a singular passion for family and region that still impresses, had begun to make me see what was beautiful and magical about our sometimes benighted homeland. Jessica was also Fred's girlfriend, now wife, and the three of us had a rather hurricane-like dynamic at times.
Also, that March, a photo exhibition about Auschwitz had been staged on the first floor of the same library and the thirty some odd pictures of bodies stacked in enormous tormented mounds had profoundly shaken me. I sat out on the front steps for a long time with my head in my hands, trying, through the heat of the spring Florida sun, to burn off the sticky something that seemed to seep in and stain my very skin. And so, reading through the book jacket of Sophie's Choice, I suppose it answered some questions that I did not even know how to ask-a young expat Southern writer, the Holocaust, a beautiful woman and her charismatic chemist lover.
I started the book on a Saturday, after dinner. Fred was away at a chemistry conference of some sort, and I was alone for the whole weekend. I picked through the first chapter-stopping to brush my teeth or go out for a walk-but by the time Stingo first heard Sophie and Nathan humping upstairs, I was hooked, but hooked in the sense that a fish is hooked. Something sharp and painful had entered my flesh, and when it was torn out, there would be blood and wounds and scars.
I swept through the rest of the book with a maniacal zeal I have never since matched. I skipped classes and meals. I read on the toilet. I read while walking. At two o'clock on Tuesday morning, a little over forty-eight hours after starting chapter two, I closed the cover on the last page, turned off all the lights, threw on a CD of Mozart's Symphony Number 40 in G minor and literally sobbed till sunrise. When morning came-a bright, golden, Florida spring morning, "excellent and fair"--I was a different man. Not a day has passed since, not in fifteen years, when I have not thought of Sophie, Stingo, and Nathan.
For a long time now, I have been trying to pinpoint the source of that fugue of weeping. Whenever I think about it, the phrase that surfaces is a simple one, a cliché-but it keeps popping up in my thoughts-the Death of Innocence. Innocence killed or murdered or, more accurately, willingly laying itself down to sleep to make room for another more painful thing. But I have not thought of innocence as a good thing in a long time. It's a kind of ignorance really, a blithe, potentially dangerous unawareness of one's own potential to become either a monster or saint. In a book I read recently by Ziauddin Sardar, the author says that any seeker of God-in his case, through Islam-must have above all self-doubt and forgiveness. The innocent are able to believe in their own righteousness, and wielding it as a weapon, judge others. Those who invoke the innocence of children forget the fights, the humiliations, the emotional torture that children visit on one another. Perhaps childhood often seems idyllic because we didn't know what we were doing to each other. Innocent.
None of the characters in Sophie's Choice are wholly innocent-not the heroes, not the villains, not the victims nor the saved. Guilt abides. Stingo, my doppelganger, abandoned his cancer ridden mother at a crucial point in her disease. Moreover, he is entangled by birth with the racial violence then ravaging the South. In his youthful quest for sex, he even abandons his doomed friends at the fatal moment when he might have saved them. Sophie, the ultimate victim as a survivor of Auschwitz, had an anti-Semitic father who helped foment a pogrom against the Jews in Krakow. By virtue of her fluent German, she was made secretary for Rudolf Hoess, Commandant Chief Butcher of the death camp, and relished this collaboration as an opportunity to save her children. Nathan, the Jewish chemist, loves and charms both Sophie and Stingo, yet, because of his schizophrenia, cannot stop hurting them. There are countless other sins and betrayals, large and small, but all of them stand in the shadow of Auschwitz, like little saplings around the parent tree, and are unified by it, absorbed in it, so that although the great crime against humanity seems like an almost otherworldly thing in its horrid Satanic evil, it becomes deeply linked to all those other small evils and betrayals that we, that I commit every day, that I commit every day.
Styron, in Sophie, was often taken to task for emphasizing the plight of non-Jews at Auschwitz-an insipid criticism, one harkening back to the tribal thinking that helped make the death camps possible in the first place--as if such a monstrosity could be the sole property of any one race when our century has delivered up others to the slaughter house, Armenians, Sudanese, Rwandans, Bosnians, etc. etc. What was really revolutionary about Sophie's Choice was not the universalization of the death camp experience, for it takes no great leap of imagination to think of oneself as a victim, but rather the universalization of the Nazi experience. We could all be monsters, every innocent one of us. I had always seen myself as a basically good guy. I was a Southerner, but not a racist. I did not betray my friends. I would never have participated in the death camps, and neither would have anybody I loved. But Sophie's Choice intertwined the great evils with the small little ones I knew and I saw that not only could I do these things, but I did do these things, that some of my flaws were not just flaws but seeds, that, given the right soil, would bloom me into a soldier of the SS. And that this was also true of anyone I loved. This revelation was both crushing and liberating, crushing because I could never escape guilt for things others did-ever after when I read of various slaughters big and small, whether Abu Ghraib or The Killing Fields or Rwanda or Lebanon-I could never really identify with the victims. I always knew that a part of me was the perpetrator as well. And liberating because from it flowed this great desire to love the world has hard as I possibly could.
So many never learn this simple thing, that they could just as easily be the monster. No one commits evil because they enjoy evil-the Nazis could kill Jews and Slavs because they told themselves they were saving the German race. The English colonists murdered Native Americans because they were pagan enemies of Christ. The Stalinists were cleansing society of the classes that brought it to its knees and on and on and on, and in Sophie's Choice I saw it clearly--how easy it was to be the well meaning destroyer, even of those you loved most fiercely. And if I was implicated in Auschwitz by analogy, then my closeness to Stingo sucked me into a much more private metaphor, and I saw a vicarious vision of myself through him as the unwitting doom of my friends Fred and Jessica through sins so accidental that I might never notice until it was too late. Private and world grief came rushing together, and I started to see what loss was, what there was to lose and how God did not save us from either loss or causing our own loss, and if it didn't teach me humility (even now, I am in effect, bragging) it at least taught me the need for humility-for self doubt and forgiveness. And how else would I have found it out without being taken through the lives of these people, without living behind the eyes of Stingo and through him, the life of this one woman as she struggled to survive one of the most barbaric soul-eating moments in history?
This has become a fan letter to a book, when what I meant to do was praise my favorite author. Certainly, Styron's other books are ethical atomic bombs as well. I recently reread his book of essays, This Quiet Dust, and found myself enraged over a piece on William Calley, my fellow Floridian redneck who led the murders at My Lai. Kick in the edit function on your PC, find and replace Vietnam with Iraq, My Lai with Abu, Nixon with Bush, and the essay is just as relevant today. Styron begins his evisceration of Calley with this hefty sentence: "Whole seas, one feels, could not contain the tears humanity must shed at the horrors of My Lai." A Biblical invocation if there ever was one, bringing down the Isaiahic language of the Old Testament God down upon this massacre. It's a very Southern thing to do and well appreciated by this former Baptist, for all the dry analysis in newspapers and histories sometimes lacks the raw, vital, damning power. Styron was the voice of Yahweh cutting through his follower's bullshit with good old fashioned fire and brimstone, but also, with humor, mercy, and humility.
So when last Tuesday morning, I opened an email from a writer friend living in Vietnam and saw these words in the first line: "I'm sure you saw that William Styron died," I was dumbstruck. In a completely spontaneous, dramatic gesture, my fingertips flew to the screen and I managed to choke out a "what?" My boss whirled around in her chair, "Something wrong?" Nothing, I answered. Nope. For what is there to say? I have lost a father, a grandmother, and countless friends, and now a man I do not know is dead and I feel like someone has hit me in the stomach with a bat.
At thirty, I mailed off my fan letter to Styron feeling more than a little ridiculous. I'd sent it in care of his publisher, not even sure it would reach him. Imagine how gratified and delighted I was to get a reply not two weeks later, hand-written. "I'm most grateful to you for your generous letter," he wrote. I was already blushing. "It heartens me to get a letter like yours since I get discouraged from time to time about the future and value of fiction and about the hard job of writing; words like yours are like a good dose of adrenaline and allow me to take hope. It's important-essential I should say-that books, which are lifelines to the future-continue to be written and read. I hope you'll continue to explore, as you put it, the darkest side of humanity, and that you will find the right way of expressing what you have to say. I'm touched to think my work may have helped in that valuable process."
His death makes one less moral force moving across the American landscape. I hope we can be worthy heirs. |