Word: styron
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cocktail hour, standing pelvis-to-pelvis, while everyone else stood apart to gape and shit-kick like Jimmy Stewart. A voice with liquor and maybe some jealousy in it said too loudly that Mailer was over-rated. The beginnings of bad vibrations tingled my spine, and I wondered whether Styron's doctor might be on call if needed...
...DAYS before the Harvard appearance, Styron telephoned to relate a disturbing experience at Yale: 80-odd blacks had greeted his talk there with invectives and wild hooting, a thing he had grown to expect since publication of his controversial The Confessions of Nat Turner. Black attacks on that book were painful in the extreme to Styron, who had given it seven years in the writing (and twenty years of thought) only to be accused of classic black emasculation. I assured him that such would not be the Harvard case: the audience would be racially mixed, and while he might anticipate...
...more than finished our Faculty Club ice cream than blacks joined the attack. Whites originally sat in silence. Styron, more articulate on paper than from the podium, may have hurt his cause in attempting reconciliations where he might have more profitably fought. Drinks flowed on like the Danube. Voices raised. Temperatures climbed. Whites galloped to Styron's defense. Blacks escalated the tempo. Instant polarizations. Insanity. The black man most critical of Styron's permitting Nat Turner to secretly desire a white woman was himself escorting a stunning blonde. As moderator, I equivocated where I meant to be "objective" or "fair...
...private party, around three o'clock in the morning, Styron experienced a sudden physical collapse. Perhaps this was due to his history of high blood pressure, agitated by all day tensions and whiskey; it may be that our guest had also stood in close proximity to minor clouds of Mexican boo-smoke. Whatever the causes, Styron sincerely believed himself to be dying. He declared himself able to see "the other shore," thought himself a visitor to some strange nether world, and, in general, carried on like a Baptist fanatic. Rescue squads and cops came clanging and banging stretchers and doors...
Only footnotes remain to tidy up the record. Half of official Cambridge became angry over not being invited to private bashes for my two old heroes, and you must here understand that in Cambridge parties are serious matters, indeed. False rumors made the rounds that I had poisoned Styron through dropping LSD into his Scotch; another popular lie ran that Mailer had engaged in pre-dawn fisticuffs with this one or that. Styron, following his sobering experience, has initiated no further contact; Mailer wrote a note apologizing for "my tongue sticking to my mouth," and alluded to a subpar performance...