The Barnes & Noble Review
I was born 60 miles down the road and 40 years after William Styron into a world remarkably unchanged. Jim Crow had been legally abolished in Virginia, but maiden aunts still pointed out with solemn reverence the weed-like Confederate violets that straggled across the yard At eight, I memorized rebel victories and had a Confederate flag hanging in my bedroom.
Like Styron, I moved north in my late adolescence, never to return, my bags packed with all the belligerence and feelings of fraudulence so many of us carry around when we rebel and leave home, wherever home is. What I knew of my new adopted borough of Brooklyn, I'd received not through Malamud or Mailer but from Styron's Stingo, and my first glimpse of the Brooklyn Bridge filled me with both awe and an unsettled feeling that this was where people came to flirt with suicide. In my mind it was inextricably linked with another northern bridge where a prototypical -- if fictional -- displaced southerner took his own life, weighted down with irons in his pockets. For years the Anderson Bridge in Cambridge had affixed to it an epitaph: "Quentin Compson, drowned in the odour of honeysuckle. 1891-1910."
And now I find myself holding a different sort of epitaph in the form of a posthumously published collection of essays, Havanas in Camelot, most written by Styron in the years after the publication of Darkness Visible, his watershed book on depression, and collected in the months leading up to his final illness. Anticipating Prozac Nation and the slew of mental illness confessionals that followed, Darkness Visible, which allowed an entire generation of aging men to claim their vulnerability, was alternately transcendent and guilt-wracked, brave and peevishly naïve. Those powerful contradictions set the tone for the essays that make up Havanas in Camelot.
More than journalism or fiction, the personal essay as a form invites us directly into the writer's psyche both by its emphasis on the selection of subjects and the manner in which the author chooses to engage with them. The collection of already published work invites the further question: Why these now? What is an author reaching for? I don't believe anyone would make the claim that the essays in this slender volume stand with Styron's most ambitious or successful work. And so why read them? Are we to take them, as one reviewer has suggested, as a life lived in good company? Or are we to recognize Styron's troubled reflection as he stood, at the end of his life, leaning over the bridge?
Originally published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Egoiste, these pieces are meditations on smoking cigars with JFK, drinking whiskey with James Baldwin, touring a Chicago prison with Terry "Tex" Southern. There are; disquisitions on embarrassing medical near-misses -- the longest revisits the false diagnosis that inspired his play In the Clap Shack, and the shortest graphically details some minor prostate trouble anticlimactically cleared up with a pill. Throughout, the author seems always to be reaching for something external: jockeying for position, finding identity through company, trying to identify those (or those parts of him) that are authentic, that have access to the Truth as opposed to those that are mistaken and must be dismissed.
"Of the many dreadful manifestations of the disease, both physical and psychological, a sense of self-hatred -- or, put less categorically, a failure of self-esteem -- is one of the most universally experienced symptoms." Styron wrote in Darkness Visible, and the failure of self-esteem thrums through these pieces like a mournful bass note. In the title essay, John Kennedy and his inner circle smoke embargoed cigars, while Styron on the outskirts, clings to his "miserable cigarettes." in "A Case of the Great Pox," he details with forced humor the humiliation of being placed in a syphilis ward, forced to wear a yellow V for "Venereal," held prisoner by an evil, all-powerful military doctor. There is a self-lacerating yet self-serving quality to the way he tells the story, as in his encounter with a second army physician who, recognizing a misdiagnosis, releases Styron from the crippling shame of syphilis: "I sensed a comradely affinity," he writes of the second doctor, "and it was denunciation enough, a spiritual handclasp.": A kind of medical absolution by the "good" doctor is required to let Styron down from the cross upon which he's hung himself.
Perhaps the most disturbing note struck is Stryon's casual sexism and jarring Negro-speak in an essay published in 1996. ("Dese is two writer gentlemen," he has a black prison guard say, "Doin' de VIP tour." More benign is the frequent presence of straightforward envy: In Paris, Styron and Terry Southern sit "smirking" at the faux-Hemingway "poseurs." At JFK's White House, as Styron and the other "scullions" lit up their cigarettes, "I noticed with my usual sulkiness and envy that many gentlemen at the tables around the room had begun to smoke cigars; among them was Kennedy..." There are those who belong and those who do not, and while Styron is in agony to identify where he and others are on either side of that divide, he cannot seem to let go of the Divide itself.
Here we get at that particular brand of depression most familiar to self-exiled intellectual southerners like Styron and Quentin Compson and myself, anyone reared in the conservative tradition who has had the bad manners to leave home. For someone caught up in this anxiety, rebellion is less the throwing off and more the exchange of shackles. We are all too conscious of the self-delusion and reliance on absolutism that propelled our ancestors' revolt; the cult of victimization made possible only by an aggressive rejection of self-examination. How can one be both victim and perpetrator? One must be one or the other. Real rebellion for a person raised in this atmosphere becomes the perpetual examination and re-examination of ones motivations, accompanied by the knowledge that to rebel is also to be heir to defeat, humiliation, and substitute enslavement in line with Jim Crow.
Rejecting his family's expectations, coming north to pursue a career in writing, Styron considered himself a rebel and as such entitled to speak as one. But the world did not see him as such. It recognized and rewarded him, and he both craved this admiration and was tortured by it. As a "rebel" Stryon saw himself as both hero and traitor, and in these essays, at least, we see him actively at war, always conscious of who is to be left out, fearing always, it will be him, obsessed with sorting and ranking, inclusion and exclusion. In fiction, Styron was free to farm out his conflicting selves to a multitude of characters, and it is to Styron's credit that he challenged himself, and even in his failures, he is illuminating. What makes these essays often frustrating is that he seems to want too much credit for the attempt; he can't completely let go of his desire to be liked and seen as a good guy, to have his hard-won truth be The Truth.
"The collecting of a writer's pieces is a difficult business," wrote Anatole Broyard in an 1982 review of Styron's first book of personal essays, This Quiet Dust. "While he sees each one in a rich context of personal associations that give it a universal -- even an eternal -- application, the reader of such a collection is likely to look upon it with a narrower eye and may even be rude enough to wonder why the author saw fit to preserve and perpetuate such occasional writing." Twenty-six years after Broyard posed the question, it's still too easy to wonder, and I wish the publisher had not thrown these essays so naked into the world. They could have benefited greatly from context, biographical and psychological. They do not stand up as the great explorations of personality and prejudice the author would like them to be; they are valuable not so much as an examination of the prejudices Styron could articulate, but as a fascinating glimpse into those he could not. They read like a man reaching for the strength to stay on the right side of the bridge. --Sheri Holman
Sheri Holman is the author of the novels A Stolen Tongue, The Dress Lodger, and The Mammoth Cheese, which was shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction.
From the Publisher
After the great success in 1990 of Darkness Visible, his memoir of depression and recovery, William Styron wrote more frequently in an introspective, autobiographical mode. Havanas in Camelot brings together fourteen of his personal essays, including a reminiscence of his brief friendship with John F. Kennedy; a recollection of the power and ceremony on display at the inauguration of François Mitterrand; memoirs of Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Terry Southern; a meditation on Mark Twain; an account of Styron’s daily walks with his dog; and an evocation of his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard.
Styron’s essays touch on the great themes of his fiction–racial oppression, slavery, and the Holocaust–but for the most part they address other subjects: bowdlerizations of history, literary lists, childhood moviegoing, the censoring of his own work, and the pursuit of celebrity fetish objects.
These essays, which reveal a reflective and humorous side of Styron’s nature, make possible a fuller assessment of this enigmatic man of American letters.
The New York Times Book Review -
David Leavitt
…[a] charming collection of essays…at once laconic and taut, urbane and modest.
The New York Times -
Michiko Kakutani
…most of the essays in this slender volume—which serves as a kind of bookend to the author's 1982 collection, This Quiet Dust—are personal reminiscences that open windows on different periods of Styron's life while shedding light on his ambitions and inspirations as a novelist: his early love of language and the magic tricks it could perform; his acute visual sense, developed during his orgy of moviegoing as a teenager; his attraction to the grand themes of crime and punishment and redemption, and big-boned historical narratives…Styron's portraits of…literary friends are equally evocative.
Publishers Weekly
"I was aware that this was a contraband item under the embargo against Cuban goods and that the embargo had been promulgated by the very man who had just pressed the cigar into my hand," writes Styron about John F. Kennedy in the title essay of this fine new collection of mostly previously published work. Combined with Styron's muscular yet subtle language, a sense of self-revelation and insider clarity infuses the 14 essays like a lungful of fresh, crisp air. Mostly assembled by Styron shortly before his death in 2006, these perfectly crafted and deeply expressive essays range effortlessly from smoking the aforementioned stogies with JFK to his run-ins with editors during the editing of his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness. In one essay he describes a visit to Marilyn Monroe's grave with noted literary hellion Terry Southern: "he was scowling through his shades, looking fierce and, as always, a little confused and lost but, in any case... like a man already dreaming up wicked ideas." Styron is known to most readers for his bestselling novels and painful etching of his bouts with crippling depression in Darkness Visible. These essays open up an entirely new territory to explore and appreciate for the fan and general reader alike. (Apr.)
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Jan Brue Enright
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Library Journal
America lost one of its great writers in 2006. Styron, perhaps best remembered as the author of Sophie's Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner, published several other books of note as well as numerous essays and musings throughout his career. This collection brings together 14 of Styron's published and unpublished essays, which range from his musings on JFK (reflected in the book's title), to his being treated for a mysterious disease in his early days in the U.S. Marines, to his friendship and competition with Truman Capote. The reader gets a rare and disarmingly personal glimpse of Styron's family relationships and friendships with people both famous and less well known, all told in Styron's clear, distinctive voice. His easy prose, highly personal reflections, and unassuming wit make this collection eminently readable, whether by a fan or a Styron novice. Recommended for all libraries.
Kirkus Reviews
Slim but substantial gathering of personal pieces by the late novelist and memoirist. Not long before he died, Styron (1925-2006) began assembling this collection, a task completed by his widow Rose and biographer James L.W. West III. Several pieces appear here for the first time; all bear the hallmarks of Styron's better work: fresh language, self-deprecation, unpretentiousness, wry liberalism, candor and, at times, an anger burning like magma beneath a deceptively placid surface. Most originally appeared in the 1990s; they deal with subjects as varied as the obsession for cigars that permeated the JFK Administration (the title essay), a bout with syphilis (sort of) in the Marines, walks with his dog, the importance of libraries, urological problems. This last subject provides one of his best lines: "I declared to the bishop that the nonexistence of God could be proved by the existence of the prostate gland." There are some pieces about experiences with other writers, including a liquor-soaked cross-country train ride with Terry Southern and his long friendship with James Baldwin. Styron (A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth, 1993, etc.) praises the work of some contemporaries, most notably Norman Mailer, James Jones and Truman Capote. (Styron confesses to jealousy when he first read Other Voices, Other Rooms.) A swift tribute to Mark Twain points to some similarities. Both grew up near rivers (Styron by Virginia's James), and both, in Huckleberry Finn and The Confessions of Nat Turner, touched the most sensitive of American nerve endings. Styron ruminates about his boyhood diary-why wasn't he reading more, he wonders?-slams Disney for their planned Virginia theme park, has kindwords for the French and recalls in several pieces his work on his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951). He also toys with the very funny image of assorted solemn intellectual figures-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Mann, Immanuel Kant-in jogging attire. A poignant reminder of the power and appeal of a voice now silent.
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