By Stuart Mitchner
Only at the end of the book [Lie Down In Darkness]… in Peyton’s Molly Bloom-like monologue, would I finally enter her mind. And I hoped that this passage would be all the more powerful, because it was suddenly and intensely interior and personal.
—William Styron (1925-2006), from a 2002 talk
The girl, Peyton …would have wound up jumping from a window no matter where she came from.
—from Writers at Work (Viking 1957)
Interviewed at a Parisian cafe in the mid-1950s, William Styron is described as “a young man of good appearance, though not this afternoon; he is a little paler than is healthy in this quiet hour.” A few questions later Styron admits, “I like to stay up late at night and get drunk and sleep. I wish I could break the habit but I can’t.”
Styron was 77 when he delivered the 2002 talk at the Whiting Foundation, some 17 years after the battle with suicidal depression that he recounted in Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) and not long before the recurrence of the illness that clouded the last years of his life, which ended when he was 81 in 2006. In the memoir, which first appeared as an essay in Vanity Fair, Styron connects the onset of depression with the realization, “almost overnight” that “I could no longer drink.” It was as if “a comforting friend had abandoned me not gradually and reluctantly, as a true friend might do, but like a shot — and I was left high and certainly dry, and unhelmed.” Worse yet, he hadn’t published a book since Sophie’s Choice in 1979 and would live the last 27 years of his life in the shadow of that fact, which may explain why he devoted the Whiting talk to his first book, Lie Down In Darkness (1951).
The word “darkness” and occasional echoings of the novel’s title recur throughout Peyton’s monologue, a 50-page-long un-indented paragraph, which, contrary to Styron’s framing, has little in common with Molly Bloom’s earthy, life-affirming monologue that famously ends with a simple “Yes.” Peyton’s monologue is bookended by a pompous preface (“Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, strong is your hold O love”) and two fragments, one set above the other, as if thought or cried out in mid-fall: “Oh most Powerful …. Oh must.”
What Happened?
In 2002, Styron claimed the novel’s “entire story” was “building toward” Peyton’s monologue. In fact, the first 330 pages of the narrative had nothing to do with what happened to me when I followed Styron into Peyton’s mind. To this day I can’t explain why I emerged from Styron’s tour de force dazed, excited, my head light, my heart beating fast, having experienced one of the most intense reading experiences of my life.
It’s important to note that I was 20, my first novel had just been published, and I was already writing my second. The previous spring, while finishing the manuscript and looking forward to a summer in Europe, I’d read Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, The Sound and the Fury, and Madame Bovary, all on my own, no classroom tie-in, all absolute knockouts. How could Styron’s account of Peyton’s desperate swerve toward suicide match Emma Bovary’s mad rush in the same direction, where it “suddenly seemed to her that fiery particles were bursting in the air, like bullets exploding as they fell, and spinning and spinning,” and once she fathomed the “abyss” of “her plight,” knowing what had to be done, making the pharmacist’s assistant give her the key to the cupboard where the poisons were kept; then, in Francis Steegmuller’s translation, “she seized the blue jar, tore out the cork, plunged in her hand, withdrew it full of white powder, and ate greedily.”
Nothing in Styron’s performance could compare with Flaubert, or the great moments in Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Faulkner, so why did those 50 pages hit me so hard?
Reading that bravura passage from Lie Down In Darkness over again for the first time in more than half a century, I’ve seen enough to convince me that Styron’s feat inspired a personal breakthrough in the form of a chapter from my unpublished second novel unlike anything I’d ever written before and the only part that found a home in a literary journal with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Robert Bly, and William Carlos Williams.
Thus, on William Styron’s 100th birthday, I’m writing about a mere fragment of his work, rather than The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie’s Choice, or Set This House On Fire, the follow up to Darkness that failed to live up to my expectations. One paragraph worth noting in June 2025: “What this country needs … is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain — something terrible I mean, … so that when the people have been through hellfire and the crucible, and have suffered agony enough and grief, they’ll be people again, human beings, not a bunch of smug contented cows rooting at the trough.”
November 1, 2006
When William Styron died on November 1, 2006, I was in my third year at Town Topics. I’d been hired to write art and book reviews and occasional news stories and features. The day of Styron’s death coincided with my review of a Princeton University Art Museum exhibit featuring “A Painting in Context: Pietro da Cortona’s Saint Martina Refuses to Adore the Idols.” My review was headed “In the Context of Creation: A Fascinating Work of Art” and, as was my habit, I found myself quibbling with the curatorial language. My problem was that the curator’s note downplays the idea of a “refused adoration” and suggests instead that Saint Martina is gazing “in triumph” toward the heavenly vision Cortona chose to paint rather than focusing on the storm that drowned the flames of the pyre. I saw more of awe and stunned submission in her face than triumph. To me it was a wonderful expression, in both senses of the word: wonderfully painted and full of wonder.
The wording in my review sent me back to one of the only places I marked in my recent reading of Peyton’s monologue, which occurs when she visits the painter and former lover she’s hoping will take her in again: “He was painting an old man. In grays, deep blues, an ancient monk or a rabbi lined and weathered, lifting proud, tragic eyes toward heaven; behind him were the ruins of a city, shattered, devastated, crumbled piles of concrete and stone that glowed from some half-hidden, rusty light, like the earth’s last waning dusk. It was a landscape dead and forlorn yet retentive of some glowing, vagrant majesty, and against it the old man’s eyes looked proudly upward, toward God perhaps, or perhaps just the dying sun.” Peyton says, “I think it’s wonderful.”
It was at this moment that my engagement with Peyton’s plight must have taken hold. Whether it’s the coincidence with the date of Styron’s death, or the wording of the review, it gives me an opportunity to cite Styron’s November 2, 2006 obituary, which quotes his rival and sometime enemy Norman Mailer: “I think for years to come his work will be seen for its unique power …. No other American writer of my generation has had so omnipresent and exquisite a sense of the elegiac.”
Styron himself has provided a more personal statement, from from Lie Down in Darkness: “I thought there’s something to be said for honor in this world where there doesn’t seem to be any honor left. I thought that maybe happiness wasn’t really anything more than the knowledge of a life well spent, in spite of whatever immediate discomfort you had to undergo, and that if a life well spent meant compromises and conciliations and reconciliations, and suffering at the hands of the person you love, well then better that than live without honor.”