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Natural Arena. Styron calls The Confessions of Nat Turner not a historical novel but a "meditation on histo ry." There are echoes in it of Melville's Benito Cereno, a tale of a Negro slave rebellion at sea. Like Melville, Styron is fascinated by the evil of slavery and its inevitable connection with violence and corruption. The novels of the Puritanical giants of the 19th century were propelled by the driving force of implacable fate; so is Nat Turner. But here Styron makes his own departure. In Melville, Hawthorne and Twain, there is always at least a memory...
...memorable characters. Styron's achievement is that his one towering figure dominates the entire book. But for both writers, the land is the natural arena for terror, and not since the lynching of Joe Christmas in Faulkner's Light in August has savagery been so harrowingly described. Nat's blood, like Joe's, is part of the American soil...
...lose it," wrote Faulkner about white men's memory of their own violence. "In whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever places and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes." Between disaster and hope, Nat Turner will find his way into the American consciousness...
...Like Nat Turner, Styron grew up in the Tidewater country, and Turner's story preoccupied him long before he began work on the book. From the time he studied writing at Duke University, through tentative years as a part-time manuscript reader for a New York publisher, Styron kept turning back to Nat. "The melodramatic side attracted me first," he says, "which is why I waited. If I had written it as a younger man, it really would have been gothic...
...told, Nat Turner was five years in the writing. Styron worked in a small studio at his 13-acre estate in Roxbury, Conn., where he lives with his wife and four children. While the book was in progress, Negro Author James Baldwin paid him a five-month visit, and Styron acknowledges that "some of Jimmy's fiery, passionate intellect may have rubbed off on Nat...