Styron writes on race in 'Generation'

By the time of his death in 2006, William Styron had lived large in American letters, producing major novels, affecting memoirs and garnering the sort of rewards and recognition – from best-selling fame to the Pulitzer Prize – that kept him in step with such contemporaries as Philip Roth, John Updike and Norman Mailer.

By now, some critics are quick to demean Styron as a stuffier master than those mercurial peers, and there's some truth to that, especially in his non-fiction, collected definitively in the 600-plus pages of My Generation (*** out of four). But in retrospect, Styron seemed destined for such dismissal.

Born in Tidewater Virginia, he grew up a paragon of white privilege, a Southern gentleman whose grandmother Marianna owned slaves (two girls her own age, Drusilla and Lucinda, deeded to her by her plantation-owning father, adored by and lost to her when the Yankees invaded at the start of the Civil War).

If this racial legacy put Styron somewhat on the defensive as a mid-20th century voice, he responded with deeply humanistic, soul-searching art. His masterworks, Sophie's Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner, potently engaged the enormities of the Holocaust and American slavery.

The latter novel, based on Nat Turner's bloody slave revolt of 1831, was condemned by a score of black critics soon after its publication in 1967. They decried the liberties Styron took with the historical record, but mostly they vilified him for daring to write from a black slave's point of view. As Styron put it in a 1992 essay, "I would experience almost total alienation from black people, be stung by their rage, and finally be cast as an archenemy of the race, having unwittingly created one of the first politically incorrect texts of our time."

Styron writes passionately of the racial storm he weathered. Indeed, the beating heart of My Generation is his ambivalence about his Southern roots. The dozen or so essays that address his Tidewater origins and his haunted sense of blood complicity in the history of American racism are unflinching.

"The Negro may feel that it is too late be known," he wrote in 1965 for Harper's magazine, "and that the desire to know him reeks of outrageous condescension. But to break down the old law, to come to know the Negro, has become the moral imperative of every white Southerner."

Styron is at his most eloquent and most moving in these solipsistic essays, which include his meditative writings on the Nazi horror, Hiroshima or his battle with depression (famously chronicled in a best-selling 1990 memoir, Darkness Visible). One of the most entertaining pieces is a chronicle of his extended stay at a military hospital when, as a naval recruit during World War II, he was incorrectly diagnosed with syphilis by a puritanical medical officer.

Inevitably, there are perfunctory, blandly engaged pieces that don't wear very well. But at its most accomplished, Styron's non-fiction mixes a conscientious, richly traditional prose style with a strong current of fellow feeling, a certain awe at the human condition, which is what gives power to his best fiction.

What's missing is the stylistic audacity and experimental edge of the other Great White Males of his day, as well as of such visionary black authors as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison (who were good friends of Styron, it should be noted). Nonetheless, Styron stood tall in his generation, and the best of him will stand up over time.

My Generation: Collected Nonfiction

By William Styron, edited by James L.W. West III

Random House

3 stars out of four