00:00: Charlie Rose: William Styron, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, died of pneumonia Wednesday afternoon in Martha's Vineyard where he lived with his wife Rose. He was 81 years old. Bill Styron is the author of "Sophie's choice," "The Confessions of Nat Turner" and "Lie Down in Darkness." His explorations of difficult historical topics usually set in his native South earned him a place among the leading writers of the post-World War II generation. He's often been compared to Faulkner and Hemingway. Norman Mailer said of Styron, "No other American writer of my generation has had so omnipresent and exquisite a sense of the elegiac." Kurt Vonnegut, Styron's longtime friend said, "He was dramatic, he was fun, he was strong and proud, and he was awfully good with the language." In 1990, Bill Styron published "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness" about his struggle with mental illness. Our thoughts this evening are with his wife, Rose, his four children, Alexandra, Susanna, Paula and Thomas and his eight grandchildren. We remember him with a look at one of several conversations we had together on this broadcast. When do you write, in the morning?
01:06: William Styron: I write in the afternoon. My head is fuzzed in the morning. And I have a lot of stuff that I do in the morning, and I -- I wait until my body clock gets turned up, which happens around two or three in the afternoon. And then I start --
01:21: Charlie Rose: You're not sleepy from a nice lunch?
01:23: Ws: No, I usually eschew alcohol at that time, so I'm not sleepy. I'm ready to go.
01:28: Charlie Rose: Tell me about "Three Tales From Youth: A Tidewater Morning." This area is an area that I know very well. So, tell me about these three stories.
01:37: William Styron: Well, they were stories that were written independently. They -- they had to do with -- the first one has to do with a remembrance I had as a young Marine --
01:46: Charlie Rose: Yes.
01:48: William Styron: -- at the age of 19 or 20.
01:51: Charlie Rose: About ready to land on Okinawa?
01:54: William Styron: About ready to land on Okinawa and the kind of engulfing home sickness that overtook me at that time, a reflection on my childhood, my mother and my father. In other words, all of these stories have a locale. And the locale is -- is the same one. It is Tidewater, Virginia --
02:11: Charlie Rose: Yeah.
02:14: William Styron: -- the area near the James River that I -- I was born and reared.
02:19: Charlie Rose: Do you have some sense of that -- that this is your geographical area -- Faulkner was Mississippi, Price is -- is North Carolina. But the Tidewater is where you are, the sort of you are the voice of the Tidewaters, so to speak.
02:31: William Styron: I think so, in the sense -- you know, Hemingway said that we are the products of our first 25 years. That as writers, we feed off those first 25 years.
02:40: Charlie Rose: For the rest of your career.
02:42: William Styron: Yes, for -- and I think there's some truth in that. I would even shorten it. I would say the first 17 or 18 years of one's life, and those first 17 or 18 years of my life were spent in this region along the James River, the estuarial part of -- of the Tidewater --
03:04: Charlie Rose: Close into the Norfolk and Newport News and Portsmouth there, right where Virginia and North Carolina come together.
03:10: William Styron: Exactly. Yeah.
03:13: Charlie Rose: You -- the themes that you continue to explore are present here -- death and race.
03:17: William Styron: Death and race. Well --
03:21: Charlie Rose: Or immortality -- or mortality.
03:22: William Styron: Yes, they have preoccupied me most of my life, I guess.
03:25: Charlie Rose: Why is that?
03:29: William Styron: I don't know. I - I suppose growing up in Virginia, in the '30s, in a totally segregated society, I became intensely aware of this extraordinary social injustice. I don't mean to sound like I'm a politically correct writer -- I don't think I am. But the disparity between what I saw -- that is this - this freedom for whites and a kind of apartheid for blacks imprinted itself on my brain very early. And I -- it haunted me. I was haunted by what the French would call "negritude", the sense of blackness being part of my experience, and yet being a separate part of my experience.
04:14: Charlie Rose: The sense of blackness meaning --
04:16: William Styron: The sense of - of racial -- that I was surrounded by blacks --
04:21: Charlie Rose: Right.
04:24: William Styron: -- who had no relation to me, nor did I have any relation to them, this apartheid. It became almost an obsession with me as a very young person.
04:31: Charlie Rose: Yes.
04:33: William Styron: And of course that's what started me, I guess, writing eventually many years later the Confessions of Nat Turner.
04:40: Charlie Rose: Where you - I want to come -- I'm jumping around but I'll just stay with it since you brought it up now. Were you surprised that the reaction it had and some of the criticisms you took for that? For the "Confessions of Nat Turner?"
04:53: William Styron: Yes, I was surprised --
04:55: Charlie Rose: And disappointed.
04:57: William Styron: And disappointed, and quite shocked, yes. I took it in my stride because I -- I realized I had done nothing either morally or esthetically improper. But it was a disappointment because I hoped to write a book about slavery, in which I - I covered as much as I could about - about that dreadful institution, I tried to explore it to the best of my ability and tried to show the tragedy of that institution. But it was -- the book was misconstrued. It was called racist. And that disappointed me.
05:24: Charlie Rose: Did you come back to this notion here in the story of Shadrach?
05:29: William Styron: Yeah.
05:30: Charlie Rose: Yeah. Tell me that story, which is in here, one of the three stories.
05:33: William Styron: Well, about 20 years ago I was visiting back in Virginia. I met a boyhood friend of mine who - who said, "Do - do you remember, or did you ever hear about that old black man who came all the way from Alabama and stay - and came to our house and - and revealed to us that he had come from Alabama in order to die in Virginia, where he had been born a slave." And this to me was such an astounding story, that I just developed it into this story called "Shadrach", which is of course is about a 99-year-old one-time slave, born in Virginia, reared in Alabama, and - experiencing most of his adult life in Alabama coming back, feeling destiny's bones and coming to Virginia to die on the ground that he had been born.
06:20: Charlie Rose: In your technique, you just take a central idea of a young - you were at Okinawa, but you were in the Marines, early - at an early age, fought in World War II, you take just that and your own feelings. Here you just take the idea of Shadrach, someone expresses this idea to you, and then you move and your sense of connection to reality is only --
06:41: William Styron: Well --
06:43: Charlie Rose: -- is only the idea for the story.
06:46: William Styron: Yeah. In the case of Shadrach I had so many things involved. This is an ancient, old man, he's 99 years old. Well, just by coincidence, my father, who lived to be almost 90, was at that moment in my life, dying --
06:59: Charlie Rose: Yeah.
07:02: William Styron: -- himself. He was -- he had -- you know, reached the end of his life. And he was -- he was living with us. And -- and the connection was obvious. I saw this dying white man and I transposed him into - into the body of this dying black man. So, there were a lot of things like that that enter into one's creative process, the sort of subconscious, I guess.
07:25: Charlie Rose: Yeah. And the third one is about mothers and death.
07:30: William Styron: Yes, it's the death of my mother, I guess, when I was 13. And that is very -- quite autobiographical. Although, none of the -- none of the incidents in that story actually took place as I described it. It's an amalgam of - of a lot of impressions brought together in what I hope is a coherent story.
07:51: Charlie Rose: How do you think your generation of writers -- you -- who else will we put there? Philip Roth, Saul Bellow. I mean, you know --
07:59: William Styron: Mailer.
08:01: Charlie Rose: Norman Mailer. I may have mentioned Philip Roth. Who else? Who am I missing?
08:06: William Styron: Updike.
08:08: Charlie Rose: John Updike.
08:09: William Styron: Yeah.
08:10: Charlie Rose: Compare with the previous generation of Hemingway and Faulkner and others?
08:16: William Styron: Well, I -- it's a very difficult question because I don't -- I don't even know if it's answerable. I would say this that -- that, you know, that - that we were, in a sense, the - the epigones, the -- the descendants of Faulkner and Hemingway and company. I think what Faulkner an Hemingway achieved individually was - was a breakthrough in terms of -- almost revolutionary breakthrough. Hemingway, especially, was this extraordinary ability to almost re-conceive the English language. And his impact was enormous, and so was Faulkner's. I - I think that --
08:52: Charlie Rose: But in terms of the use of language, Hemingway was more powerful than Faulkner.
08:55: William Styron: No, I wouldn't -- I'm not trying to say that at all. I'm not trying to make a comparative judgment. I'm merely saying that I do think that - that in terms of his impact on the English language, Hemingway --
09:07: Charlie Rose: Yes.
09:10: William Styron: -- was - was revolutionary in a most extraordinary way. What I'm trying to -- to -- when I make the leap to this generation, our generation, I don't believe that we had any such figure in our generation. I think our work stands on its own.
09:24: Charlie Rose: As a body of work that every bit as important and - and --
09:29: William Styron: I would like to think so, yes.
09:31: Charlie Rose: Yeah.
09:33: William Styron: I think taken in aggregate; it's a very powerful body of work.
09:38: Charlie Rose: Getting to this notion that you once wrote a letter to the "Paris Review" I think in which you expressed a notion that it was a generation in waiting.
09:43: William Styron: Yes.
09:46: Charlie Rose: What did you mean?
09:49: William Styron: Well, I think writing that as I did in the early '50s, 1951 or '2, I really think I just meant what I said that we didn't - we were then in our 20s, roughly. We didn't know what the hell we were waiting for, but we were waiting for something to happen because I think we had had an enormous trauma happen to us in the form of World War II.
10:06: Charlie Rose: Yeah.
10:09: William Styron: It was a hellish war. I mean, not all of us went into combat. I did not, nor did I ever claim to. But I came damn close to it. I had the -- I had a lot -- I was scared.
10:21: Charlie Rose: Yeah. And formed the basis of Mailer's first breakthrough.
10:26: William Styron: That's right. And I think because of this trauma, we - we were waiting around to -- to -- to let the -- let our thoughts settle, to let our spirits determine where we were going in the future. And I think that's what I meant by the waiting generation. Of course, eventually, we di begin to make our own impact.
10:45: Charlie Rose: Do you know -- can you point to who the new generation is that succeeded you know, from Faulkner, pre-war whose generation, you know, sort of been between the wars, so they made their mark in the '40s and '50s --
10:58: William Styron: Yeah.
11:00: Charlie Rose: -- and then you come along, and you and all those we talked about. Who is the new generation of writers in America?
11:07: William Styron: I hesitate to answer a question like that because I get bugged down and --
11:11: Charlie Rose: In forgetting somebody.
11:13: William Styron: -- in forgetting somebody or not getting the right names. I think there is certainly a lot of good work being done.
11:18: Charlie Rose: Yeah.
11:20: William Styron: I think of younger writers like Anne Beatty, this comes to mind. But - but I share this with a lot of people, writers of my generation, who when faced with this - faced with this question, always draw a blank --
11:33: Charlie Rose: Yeah.
11:35: William Styron: -- for some reason.
11:37: Charlie Rose: You -- does writing get easier?
11:39: William Styron: Writing gets harder.
11:41: Charlie Rose: Others have said that to me. It doesn't get any easier.
11:44: William Styron: I don't know why it doesn't get easier, but it certainly doesn't. I think it just doesn't come with the - with the exuberant flow that it once did. The --
11:55: Charlie Rose: What does that mean, an urgency --
11:57: William Styron: Well --
12:00: Charlie Rose: -- an excitement, a passion, or what?
12:03: William Styron: A kind of euphoric passion, if you will. I used to have this kind of exuberance, and I still -- I still accept the active writing with equanimity. It's not that - that I shrink from it. But I don't have that same goaded desire --
12:26: Charlie Rose: But is it a complacency?
12:30: William Styron: It's not complacency, no, I think it's
12:33: Charlie Rose: You've made your mark, you've written well, and people have acknowledged you as a man of letters in America, and so therefore, what else do I have to prove. Thank you very much, Michael Jordan.
12:44: William Styron: Rest on one's laurels.
12:46: Charlie Rose: Yes, rest on one's laurels.
12:48: William Styron: No, I don't feel that at all. I feel like I've got a lot more to say. But I do think that there is a diminution of the - that old juicy passion that one once had. And virtually every writer I know of my vintage --
12:58: Charlie Rose: Feels it.
12:59: William Styron: Feels it. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's just there.
13:03: Charlie Rose: What do you fear?
13:04: William Styron: What I do fear? I suppose I fear dying in some obscene and crippled way.
13:07: Charlie Rose: And painful --
13:08: William Styron: Yeah.
13:09: Charlie Rose: -- way that --
13:10: William Styron: Yeah. That's speaking of my own self, if that's what you mean.
13:13: Charlie Rose: Yeah. Well, I just wondered, as you think about where you are in your skills and the kinds of things you're doing - you know, I once had a moving conversation about depression, which later -- not my conversation, but your experiences led to the book.
13:23: William Styron: Yeah.
13:25: Charlie Rose: Do you still -- do you still - depressed about?
13:27: William Styron: I have not suffered a real, profound -- if you want to call it clinical depression, since I experienced the one that I wrote about.
13:33: Charlie Rose: It was so pain - and so painful that you just screamed out.
13:38: William Styron: Yeah, well that was -- that's an experience I wouldn't wish on -- on Heinrich Himmler. As I kept saying to myself.
13:44: Charlie Rose: The most evil person you could think of?
13:46: William Styron: Yeah.
13:48: Charlie Rose: You wouldn't wish they've got to go through --
13:49: William Styron: No, it's unbelievable torment.
13:52: Charlie Rose: Yes.
13:54: William Styron: But as I tried to point out in the book, "Darkness Visible," it is a -- an ordeal from which most people do recover, and if they're in the midst of this, they have to remember that they most likely will recover.
14:02: Charlie Rose: And if they're in the midst of it, will they know for sure?
14:07: William Styron: Will they know what?
14:09: Charlie Rose: That they're in the midst of it?
14:11: William Styron: Oh, yes. If you --
14:15: Charlie Rose: It's the pain, and an excruciating --
14:17: William Styron: If you're in the midst of it, it is indistinguishable from any other pain you can possibly --
14:22: Charlie Rose: What kind of mail did you get? What kind of response did it generate for you to be public about this?
14:30: William Styron: Well, you know, all writers of any -- I guess note eventually get rather a heavy amount of mail. But in all my life I've gotten a sort of a flow, but this was a deluge. This --
14:41: Charlie Rose: "Sophie's Choice" and --
14:42: William Styron: Yeah.
14:44: Charlie Rose: "Nat Turner" and all of that --
14:46: William Styron: Yeah.
14:47: Charlie Rose: -- you have written things that resonated in American --
14:51: William Styron: Well, this was - this was just overwhelming. I -- it was just by the thousands the letters came in.
14:54: Charlie Rose: Saying understand --
14:56: William Styron: Yeah.
14:58: Charlie Rose: You told my story, and that kind of thing?
14:59: William Styron: Yeah. And phone calls and the whole thing. It's -- it was very touching to me that I -- I had not really realized that I was going to touch that kind of a nerve.
15:07: Charlie Rose: Did it make you want to write nonfiction more?
15:09: William Styron: Not particularly. I think one's nonfiction or fictional subjects sort of choose themselves. But it certainly demonstrated that -- that the written word is still a very powerful vehicle for reaching out.
15:21: Charlie Rose: How about memoir?
15:23: William Styron: Memoir? Well, I think that "Darkness Visible" in a sense was a memoir.
15:28: Charlie Rose: Everything you write in part is autobiographical.
15:32: William Styron: It has been. It seems to me that I do touch on that, the autobiographical mode quite a bit. I don't know what precipitates that, but it's there.
15:41: Charlie Rose: Because a writer knows what - I mean you are shaped by your own experience.
15:45: William Styron: You are shaped by your own experiences. The important thing is not whether you do it, but whether you do it well. And it seems to me --
15:53: Charlie Rose: -- that's true about a lot of things.
15:54: William Styron: Like most things.
15:56: Charlie Rose: Right.
15:59: William Styron: But it means for me doing it so that for the reader it will have another appeal aside from the egocentric, which - which is often a problem.
16:07: Charlie Rose: And what is that other appeal?
16:10: William Styron: Ability to put it down in prose that resonates and that --
16:14: Charlie Rose: That sings.
16:16: William Styron: And that one hopes sings and that people will respond to.
16:20: Charlie Rose: And the people say, "That's my story," or somehow they can feel the emotion of the character.
16:24: William Styron: Yeah, I think that it's - you know, the imaginative act -- is - is just that, is just trying to search for levels of meaning that you are quite unaware that you possess. I mean, this tapping into your subconscious. You sit down, at first you have no idea what you're going to do, and then all of a sudden, after an hour, you suddenly realize you're saying things you had not even known existed.
16:40: Charlie Rose: Yeah.
16:42: William Styron: Because they're down there and somewhere in your subconscious.
16:49: Charlie Rose: I find that a number of writers who have written memoirs, or written nonfiction, will tell me that as they began to write -- and you might have experienced this here because this was in part reflecting your personal experience and certainly your mother's death, and you think about your father dying -- you remember things you had no idea were part of your subconscious. It just sort of floats to the surface.
17:08: William Styron: Absolutely. It - it just -- you don't dredge it up. It pops up. And there's a kind of astonishing -- they're - they're revelations, epiphanies, as George used to call them, these kind of moments that -- I don't mean to sound fancy. They're not - they're not spiritual experiences, but they are enormously fascinating revelations of what goes on in one's subconscious.
17:33: Charlie Rose: Yeah. What's easiest for you? Is it creating character? Creating dialogue, or descriptive narrative?
17:42: William Styron: Well, I think dialogue is probably the easiest of all.
17:46: Charlie Rose: Most people --
17:48: William Styron: Well, it can be done badly, but I think most writers --
17:52: Charlie Rose: But that requires an ear, doesn't it?
17:54: William Styron: It does require an ear, but if you have -- I think if you have an ear for music --
17:58: Charlie Rose: Yeah.
18:01: William Styron: -- and I am lucky, I think, in having an ear for music -- you usually have an ear for dialogue, too. And the rest is -- is just the sheer sweating it out with, you know, I have to confess, sometimes just seeking that absolutely perfect word, which I often find in the thesaurus.
18:18: Charlie Rose: Wait a minute. Pulitzer Prize-winning, acclaimed novelist --
18:23: William Styron: Don't let anyone --
18:25: Charlie Rose: -- goes to the thesaurus.
18:28: William Styron: Don't let anyone underestimate the thesaurus. It's a very important tool for me.
18:34: Charlie Rose: It puts on your menu a word that expresses the emotion that you feel other than one that first came to your mind.
18:43: William Styron: Absolutely, absolutely. It's -- it should be considered one of the great word aides, treasures that we have, Roget's thesaurus. I use it all the time.
18:53: Charlie Rose: When you say you've recovered from clinical depression, meaning you never revisited, or - or that it's the use of pharmaceuticals that --
19:01: William Styron: No, no with me it means -- if my case is of any -- any benefit, I recovered and I have not really suffered a similar.
19:11: Charlie Rose: A relapse.
19:13: William Styron: No.
19:15: Charlie Rose: Now, and what do your doctors tell you about that?
19:19: William Styron: Well, I've been told that it's fairly common for depression to return. The statistics seem to be 50-50. But for me, I've kept it at arm's length. I occasionally get a down moment, but I have never yet suffered the sense that I was going to be plunged into something as -- equivalent to what I went through before.
19:42: Charlie Rose: And what's the message for the family of those who might have a husband or a wife or a brother or sister or father or mother?
19:52: William Styron: Endless patience. My wife, Rose, was the sort of the -- the star of the game.
19:59: Charlie Rose: The exemplar of what you ought to do.
20:02: William Styron: Yeah, because -- because she was always there. And this is very important.
20:08: Charlie Rose: William Styron, dead at 81 years old.