Missing Styron

We had a lot in common, Bill Styron and me. We both loved Vineyard Haven. We both lived in Connecticut. He was a Marine and my father was a Marine. And, on a spring evening in 1999, we were both on the steps of West Hartford’s Town Hall, where we had our first and only private conversation. The occasion was National Library Week, and this was my first big show for the West Hartford Public Library. You know how it is when you are the one in charge of getting an author for a library appearance? Everyone is expecting no less than Stephen King, (because we know that all authors are just dying to speak for free at a library,) but your budget would barely cover the local unpublished poet. But somehow that year we got Styron’s publicist to agree to considerably less than his usual speaking fee for him to be driven from his home to Roxbury down to West Hartford.

It was magical night. Styron, looking and sounding like all of the Virginia gentleman that he was, closed the evening by reading a long passage from his unpublished manuscript about his experiences as a young Marine Second Lieutenant in 1945, poised with his even younger men to invade Japan. His Chesty Puller-like commanding officer came to speak to his young officers who had just been through the hell of the Pacific campaign. He told them that what they had experienced in Okinawa, Peleliu, Tarawa, and Iwo was easy compared to what they would experience in the invasion of the mainland. They must be prepared for a house-to-house bloodletting beyond even their war weary imagination. And then we dropped the bomb. They didn’t have to go, be terrified, question their own manhood, or lose a limb, an eye, or a life. It is the story that has never been told, the story of these exhausted, spent young men who wouldn’t have to go because our nation did the unthinkable. We created an inferno for the people of two cities and their future generations, but we saved our own, and Styron was one of them. And who else but Styron to tell their story? That night in West Hartford, Styron told us that his book would be published the following fall. My father had been a grunt in the Pacific campaign, a kid from the streets of New York whose education was completed at Guadalcanal. I had just finished following his course of study through William Manchester’s remarkable (and now sadly out-of-print) Goodbye Darkness, an account of his own experiences as a Seond Lieutenant with my father’s First Marine Division. I couldn’t wait to read the story that Styron would tell, and which demanded no less a storyteller than he. I waited for it that fall, and the next, and now I know that we will never have it, the story of these young men who welcomed someone else’s atrocity because it saved them from their own. I hope that the reason we never got that book was not because Styron had once again descended into a darkness visible, but because, as Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times on Friday, “a writer’s career is not ‘a series of mountain peaks,’ but rather a ‘rolling landscape’ with vistas perhaps less spectacular, yet every bit as resonant as those ‘theatrical Wagnerian dramas with peak after peak.’”