Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron
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(Paperback)
- Pub. Date: January 1990
- 96pp
- Sales Rank: 20,623
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: January 1990
- Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
- Format: Paperback, 96pp
- Sales Rank: 20,623
- Series: Vintage Series
- ISBN-13: 9780679736394
- ISBN: 0679736395
- Edition Number: 1
Synopsis
A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force, this bestseller is Styron's true account of his descent into a crippling and almost suicidal depression. Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression's psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Annotation
A great novelist describes his devastating descent into depression, taking the reader on an unprecedented journey into the realm of madness. The author of Sophie's Choice was overtaken by persistent insomnia and a troubling sense of malaise--the first signs of a deep depression that would soon engulf his life and leave him on the brink of suicide.
Publishers Weekly
A meditation on Styron's ( Sophie's Choice ) serious depression at the age of 60, this essay evokes with detachment and dignity the months-long turmoil whose symptoms included the novelist's ``dank joylessness,'' insomnia, physical aversion to alcohol (previously ``an invaluable senior partner of my intellect'') and his persistent ``fantasies of self-destruction'' leading to psychiatric treatment and hospitalization. The book's virtues--considerable--are twofold. First, it is a pitiless and chastened record of a nearly fatal human trial far commoner than assumed--and then a literary discourse on the ways and means of our cultural discontents, observed in the figures of poet Randall Jarrell, activist Abbie Hoffman, writer Albert Camus and others. Written by one whose book-learning proves a match for his misery, the memoir travels fastidiously over perilous ground, receiving intimations of mortality and reckoning delicately with them. Always clarifying his demons, never succumbing to them in his prose, Styron's neat, tight narrative carries the bemusement of the worldly wise suddenly set off-course--and the hard-won wisdom therein. In abridged form, the essay first appeared in Vanity Fair. (Sept.)
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Whether fictionalizing a slave uprising in The Confessions of Nat Turner or breaking the silence on clinical depression, William Styron's work inspired not only accolades but national dialogues.
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The Plight of an Artist Turns Tragicby Anonymous
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October 25, 2007: Darkness Visible is a radical narration about a dark dreaded disease written by someone who had the skills to spin an emotional yarn about it. In October of 1985, William Styron took a trip to Paris to accept the Prix Mondial Cino del Duca award for humanism. Styron?s First novel, Lie Down in Darkness, was one of del Duca?s offerings. Styron?s state of mind on the 4-day turn-a-round was not good and he would not have accepted the honor at all had he known just how sick he was. The point of revelation came in December the same year. During the time he was in Paris, Styron was taking a minor tranquilizer, Halcion. His pain closely resembled the feeling of drowning or suffocation or being in a trance. One in ten suffer from the illness and artistic types, especially poets, are particularly vulnerable to the disease which takes twenty percent by way of suicide, some of the more well-known are: Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. Styron thinks seeds of the illness take root in childhood. Styron was sixty when the disease struck in unipolar form ? straight down. Styron abused alcohol for forty years. He said many writers use alcohol as a magic conduit to fantasy and euphoria and enhancement of the imagination. He used it in conjunction with music as a means to let his mind conceive visions that the unaltered, sober brain has no access to. Alcohol was an invaluable senior partner of his intellect. In June before Styron entered the hospital in December, his body rejected alcohol ?the daily mood bath. The checklist of function failures Styron listed are: disappearance of voice, which becomes wheezy and spasmodic, libido makes an early exit, appetite is lost, sleep disrupted and there is a complete absence of dreams. Exhaustion overtook him, and he got only two or three hours of sleep with the aid of Halcion. Experts in psychopharmacology have warned that the benzodiazephone family of tranqilizers of which Halcion is one (also Valium and Ativan) is capable of depressing one?s mood and even precipitating a major depression. One night after contemplating suicide, he woke up his wife and was admitted to the hospital the next day. By February, Styron emerged into light, still shaky but, as he described it, the body?s sweet juices were flowing again. Styron ponders the reason for his illness whether the abrupt withdrawal from alcohol, turning 60, being disconcerted with the way his work was going or the onset of inertia in his writing life. Suicide had been a theme in his books and three major characters killed themselves. Depression had been tapping at his door for decades. Styron?s father had battled depression and his mother died when he was thirteen. Unable to achieve the catharsis of grief, he carried within himself a burden of rage and guilt. He says many famous writers and artists gave us hints of the vast metaphor of depression in their work: Job, Sophocles and Aeschylus were chroniclers of the human spirit, wrestling with vocabulary to give proper expression to the desolation from Hamlet to Emily Dickinson Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Donne to Hawthorne, and Dostoevski and Poe, Camus and Conrad and Virginia Woolf and even Albrecht Durer?s engraving. The most faithfully represented is that of Dante, ?In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, For I had lost the right path.? For those who have dwelt in depression?s dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony,...
I'm right here, MRS. BROWN ! ! ! ! !by Anonymous
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January 29, 2005: Darkness Visible is a fascinating modern memoir of a man and his ability to survive his debilitating depression by the end of a thread. The plot slowly unfolds from Styron's mild discontent, and soon spirals into a series of brutal and suicidal tendencies. Styron, very humbly, shows his pure strength as a man struggling for survival from his mental disease. His story offers a very unique look at the dangerous conflicts of mental illness and the affect it has on the person and on the world. At times the reader is almost cetain that Styron cannot possibly make it through the torture he is enduring, but his burden is soon subdued by the thriving will power that Styron ever displays throughout the memoir. Darkness Visible offers a riveting account of a man's personal struggle with mental illness, yet also serves as a message of hope to those who have succumbed to this crippling disease. I thought Styron's briliiant use of convoluted vocabulary sufficiently regulated the tone of the story and kept the reader wanting to find out more. However, the book (although short) seemed to drag at times because of its habit of repeating facts and feelings already read earlier in the book. Despite its habit for repetition, the book suffciently keeps the reader interested and manages to convey a very specific point in time accurately, and with very little words. The book is ridiculously short, but it has to be, considering that if Styron would have made it any longer, the reader probably would have lost interest in the subject all together. Having had the 'joys' of depression all of my life, this memoir was moving and inspired me never to give up hope, even in my darkest hours. Not bad, Bill!
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