William Styron Interviewed

 Growing up, I knew of William Styron - The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie's Choice. I even had a copy of The Confessions of Nat Turner, one that was unread at the time of my arrest and subsequently became one of my missing books. I have yet to read it. As for Sophie's Choice, I saw the movie version on cable forty some years ago. 

I did not read Sophie's Choice until prison. The Confessions of Nat Turner either disappeared from the prison library, or COVID arrived and blockaded our access to its books. But before that I read This Quiet Dust and Other Writings, of which I chiefly recall him making me rethink Thomas Wolfe. (After reading the New Times review to which I linked, I have to agree with the reviewer about the writer's humanity, a feeling of which returned to me as I read the review.)

Today, The Paris Review freed its interview of Styron (1999) from its pay wall. I found the whole rather interesting, educational, but this practical advice jarred me:

INTERVIEWER

If you had to build a sort of composite writer, what attributes would you give him?  

STYRON

I don’t know exactly, but first would be a background in reading. A writer must have read an enormous amount by the time he begins to write. I remember when I first wanted to be a writer, at the age of eighteen, just immersing myself in books—marauding forays I made at the Duke University library. I read everything I could get my hands on. I read promiscuously: I read poetry; I read drama; I read novel after novel. I read until I realized I was causing damage to my eyes. It was a kind of runaway lust.

The second thing is that you must love language. You must adore language—cherish it, and play with it and love what it does. You have to have a vocabulary. So many writers who disappoint me don’t have a vocabulary—they don’t seem to have much feeling for words.

Those are two of the most important things for a writer. The rest is passion and vision; and it’s important, I think, to have a theme. Melville said, probably in a grandiose way, To write a mighty book you must have a mighty theme. I do think there is something to that. You need not have a grandiose theme but you must have an important theme. You must be trying to write about important things, although a truly fine writer will deal with seemingly unimportant matters and make them transcendentally important.

This passage jarred me because I had not realized this was what I found in prison. When younger, I lacked a theme, or a theme I understood. I do not recommend that path to anyone. 

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