Rose styron: the little friend of all the world | thearticle

At a party I attended in Alabama in 1992, before the guest of honour arrived, the drunken hostess announced in a strong Southern accent: “Bill Styron’s bin in luv with me fo’ 50 yeahs!” 

When the author arrived, she embraced him, like a snake gripping Laocoön, as he struggled to escape.  He’d just emerged from a deep depression, described in _Darkness Visible_ (1990), and

squirmed with polite embarrassment. The life of William Styron (1925-2006) has been thoroughly discussed in his memoir, his biography by James West (2010), _Reading My Father_ by his

daughter Alexandra (2011) and his _Selected Letters_, co-edited by his wife Rose (2012).  But Rose Styron’s 336-page autobiography, with the sinking subtitle _Beyond the Harbor: Adventurous

Tales of the Heart_ (Knopf, 2023), adds very little to what is already well known.  As Samuel Johnson observed in _Rambler _93: “To commence author is to claim praise, and no man can justly

aspire to honour, but at the hazard of disgrace.” The first and last pages express the tone of her book.  She exceeds decent limits by dedicating it to a dozen “extraordinary, loving,

splendid, caring” children and grandchildren.  The four pages of Acknowledgements show how many people adore and serve her.  Several friends absolutely insisted that she write her memoir and

she graciously acceded to their wishes. They do not deserve to be thanked.  Rose also offers, as an epigraph and in the text, samples of her poetry: “there’s no one old as me” and “the

folly wrangle of their sibling day.”  Though she knew a handful of poets who make cameo appearances, she has nothing to say about their work. Rose begins with a heartfelt chapter on Chile,

where she’d been sent in 1974 by Amnesty International.  She hoped to gather and bring back data about Salvador Allende’s ministers, who’d been imprisoned or killed—like Allende

himself—after the coup by General Augosto Pinochet.  Naïve but determined and aware that she’s being spied on, she assumes a transparent disguise of wig, hat and sunglasses, and talks to

informants in a Santiago swimming pool.  But her amateurish eavesdropping, like the manoeuvres of the bumbling spies in Graham Greene’s _Our Man in Havana, _was absurd compared to the

expertise of American residents with inside information.  She was most useful as a courier of forbidden documents, and would have provided valuable publicity if she had also been captured or

killed. Rose’s friends are hierarchically divided into real, longtime, dear, intimate, close, closest and best.  They fall into two main categories: folks, students, children, her daughters

and Paul Newman, all of whom are “wonderful”; friends’ daughters, family, gardens, resorts, books, even jet planes, are “beautiful.”  Hosts are gracious, blondes attractive, daughters

brilliant.  Rose is thrilled in “wondrous Mexico . . . lost in the wonder.”  Lunches, cousins and minor friends are merely “fun.”  When she runs out of adjectives—_all_ should have been

cut—she resorts, at least ten times, to lists of big names.  A typical sentence (in both senses) sounds like a first-grade reader: “Carly and I got to be friends, James and I got to be

friends, and Bill was friends with each.  Bill and I saw Carly often when she was married to James.”  (Question: how many friends did each friend have?)  Though chummy with the Kennedys and

the Clintons, Rose was not a princess, nor was meant to be, but an attendant lady meant to swell a panel or a dinner party.  She includes 71 snapshots to certify her presence at these gala

occasions. Rose met everyone worth meeting, but repeatedly says she doesn’t remember what they said.  She teasingly notes: Jackie Kennedy had great conversations, John Kennedy laughed, Ted

Kennedy also had a great laugh, Kurt Vonnegut’s good humour flowed.  Warren Beatty popped up, John Huston was a great raconteur, Richard Widmark was hilarious, James Dean drummed on a

wastebasket, Lech Walesa was relaxed.  Yevgeny Yevtushenko had multiple conversations, Robert Penn Warren gave unspecified advice, Gabriel García Márquez was “beloved” whenever he turned up.

  Philip Roth, known for his singular wit, appeared on a rainy afternoon.  James Baldwin, who lived with the Styrons for nine months, discussed—vaguely and predictably—race, history and

writing.  Rose never explains the reasons for Norman Mailer’s notorious and apparently unprovoked attack on Styron, which concluded: “I will invite you to a fight in which I expect to stomp

out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit!” Rose does not realize that her endless name-dropping and trivial gossip only exposes her egoism and conceit.  She tells us what

they wear but not what they say, and does not reveal anything significant about these famous people.  She’s so besotted by celebrities that she even courts the revolting Lillian Hellman. 

Rose’s book is a feeble contrast to Eileen Simpson’s intelligent and perceptive memoir,_ Poets in Their Youth_ (1982), about her suicidal poet-husband John Berryman and his circle of

talented and troubled friends. If I were writing my own memoir, using the style of Rose Styron, I could truthfully say: “During my heartfelt and adventurous life I have met many illustrious

writers in the Hamptons, Massachusetts, Colorado, Canada, France and Greece.  They were all beautiful people in wonderful places or wonderful people in beautiful places.” Copy-editors pull

up your socks, there are many errors: Edgar Poe’s poem is “Annabel Lee”; Harry Levin was head of Comparative Literature (not Russian studies); Bronislaw Malinowski was an anthropologist (not

an archeologist); Pablo Neruda was a communist (not a progressive); William Wordsworth was buried in the Lake District (not in Rome); there are no Van Eycks in the Hermitage Museum (the

Soviets sold the  _Annunciation_ to Andrew Mellon in 1930). This book becomes momentarily more interesting when Rose quotes what the celebrities actually said.  Robert McNamara, Lyndon

Johnson’s Secretary of Defense (i.e. of War), began to cry when he met the Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov, “ ‘that great man,’ and how bad he felt about his own less-than-noble role in

the Vietnam War.”  The Czech dissident and president Václav Havel, asked what he thought of the students protesting for freedom in 1968, remarked: “I don’t think much of them, because every

time they demonstrate I get put into jail.” Rose was a devoted wife and mother of their four children, and the best part of her book describes Styron’s severe mental breakdowns in 1985 and

2000.  He had always read his daily writing to her every evening, when she cheered him on and typed it up.  But, completely absorbed in his own work and unwilling to be distracted by a

rival, he hurt her feelings by showing no interest in her poetry. She confesses that she was tempted to sleep with his great friend Peter Matthieseen, and had “one-or-two night stands with

sometimes well-known guys”—though she can’t recall the exact number. She doesn’t explain her motives for infidelity, but was probably retaliating for his affairs, for ignoring her poetry,

for the loss of his sexual desire and to prove that she was still attractive to men. There’s a tremendous contrast between her idealistic worldwide crusades on behalf of imprisoned and

tortured prisoners, and Styron’s fearful depression that made him reluctant to leave the sanctuary of his home.  He was anxious about his daughters’ horseback riding, refused to ski, hated

travel and became frantic with worry when Rose was absent or late.  When she was away he begged her: “Come home.  I need you.  I’m breaking down.  I just fell apart—I don’t know what’s going

on.”  Electro-convulsive shock treatments made him “increasingly goofy and zombielike”.  His second breakdown, coupled with physical illness, frailty and the next round of agonising shock

treatments caused serious damage, made him catatonic and nearly destroyed him.  He kept repeating, “They have stolen my brain.”  Like Franz Kafka, he could scream at his doctor: “Kill me, or

else you are a murderer!” Rose mentions that Paul Theroux visited Styron during his last illness but doesn’t describe it.  At the time Theroux wrote to me that Styron “was a very fragile

and needy man— although his aura was that of a prince—handsome, highly intelligent, very funny and a great mimic.”  When severely depressed “he was conversational but said once, ‘I am

talking to you and it may seem that nothing’s wrong, but it is very bad inside my head.’ ” On another occasion: “This is worse by far than anything I described in _Darkness Visible_.”

_Jeffrey Meyers will publish both _James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist _and_ Parallel Lives: From Freud and Hitler to Arbus and Plath_ with Louisiana State University Press in 2024._

_ _ A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we

need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation._