University of Virginia Library

Southern Concern Revealed

Photo By John Buescher

William Styron, author of
Lie Down in Darkness, Set This
House on Fire and The
Confessions of Nat Turner, will
speak Wednesday, March 22, at
8 p.m. in Cabell Hall
Auditorium.

Growing up in what Robert
Penn Warren described as
"almost the last moment when
it was possible to get,
first-hand, a sense of what
old-fashioned Southern life had
been," Styron has since relied
heavily on his Southern
background in writing his
various books and articles.

With Lie Down In Darkness,
a tragically human story of a
Tidewater family torn by
alcoholism and insanity, Styron
succeeded in publishing his
first major work (1951).
Praised as a great new talent
from the South, his prose was
compared by critics to that of
Thomas Wolfe and William
Faulkner, a comparison so
striking that Styron himself
admitted that Faulkner's
influence was so strong at the
outset that he had had to
completely rewrite the first
part of the novel.

Certainly Styron's most
controversial book, The
Confessions of Nat Turner was
also the longest in evolution.
From the beginning of his
writing career in the late
1940's, Styron intended to
exercise his obsession with the
Southampton County slave
rebellion through a fictional
recreation of the bloody event.

From childhood, Styron
remembers well his
grandmother's stories about
the slaves she once owned, and
while writing The Confessions of
Nat Turner, he admitted that
"I have a sense of being
constantly surrounded by
Negroes, having Negroes who
burned me, rubbed me with
soap, but never making
contact, they were another
presence, and on the other
hand they were part of me."

The main problem in
writing the novel, since the
guide lines were supplied by
the story's basis in fact, was
one of technique-how best to
transmute the raw facts into
plausible and compelling
fiction. The solution came to
Styron after reading Albert
Camus' The Stranger.

In an interview for the New
York Times Book Review, he
told George Plimpton: "There
was something about the
poignancy of the condemned
man in The Stranger sitting in
his jail cell on the day of his
execution—the existential
predicament of the man that
hit me. And so did the use of
the first person... I suddenly
realized that my Nat Turner
could be done that way."

But for a white man to
write a first person account of
a black man, a black slave to
boot—necessitates the
realization of the many risks
involved. One, problem,
recognized by William Miller, is
that "one can't believe in the
main character ...One's
objection is not at all that a
white novelist shouldn't try to
get inside a Negro's
consciousness, but rather that
when a sophisticated modern
man writes from the point of
view of a necessarily very
limited nineteenth-century
one, he shouldn't take his
modern sophistication along
with him."

So be it. But the fact
remains that The Confessions
of Nat Turner is a very popular
and successful novel, one in
which Styron reveals his deep
personal, if Southern, concern
for interracial understanding
and one which also fulfills
James Baldwin's prediction
that "Bill's going to catch it
from both black and white."

Rather than just give a strict
lecture, Styron has stated in
correspondence that he would
prefer to have a discussion type
format along with a brief
speech. Tickets are available at
the usual places and are priced
at $1.00.

Styron: Compared To Wolfe And Faulkner