Word: styron
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...these semi-illicit gatherings we attracted such figures as Ramsey Clark, Dr. John Knowles, Norman Mailer, FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson, Congressman Morris Udall, Justin Kaplan, literary agent Sterling Lord, Roger Wilkins, William Styron,Professor Howard Zinn of Boston University, and Harvard professors, including Wald, Galbraith, and Riesman. We hosted correspondents fresh from Vietnam, blacks representing all degrees of militancy, students of varied ideological stripes, urbanologists, magazine editors, former ambassadors, and a gaggle of ex-aides to Presidents. These provided the most valuable experiences of the Nieman season and revealed, I think, what the program might become in the hands...
...these frowned-upon seminars was to provide two men large in contemporary American letters, both of whom happened to be my special old literary heroes. Let us here consider the hazards of such an exercise in modern-day Cambridge, digressing to include arbitrary judgments on Norman Mailer and William Styron as man and artists...
...WILLIAM STYRON'S Lie Down in Darkness, published in 1951, was probably the one book that hardened my vague resolve to one day try my own writing hand. In a time when my household bills were not easily met, I thought nothing of buying multiple copies of that book to be thrust upon friends with commands that it be immediately read. Norman Mailer's early novels made their own strong impressions: I came to consider Mailer the American writer who best understood our society as it marched crazily through the present toward that outer rim falling away to fiery voids...
...comparison of the two, as men and artists, was inevitable. If Styron's writing was prettier, then Mailer's had more of blood and tissue in it. Mailer's work was barren of the personal grasses of childhood, while Styron poked in the dusts of his youthful past until one sensed that it haunted him in the night, blew grain-by-gain through his soul; sandpapered it. Mailer wrote of sex in terms of a fifteen-round fight in which red peppers were joyously thumbed into the other fellow's eyes: he saw fucking as vital confrontations. Styron wrote...
...looked ahead, looked out to the horizon at that fiery outer rim: it was important to see who might fall off, and for what mad or ironic reasons, and in what style they would go over: screaming the sissy begging of pardons, or spitting and pissing into the flames? Styron looked South, looked back to where the land was burned out or spiritually polluted or lying fallow, and empty souls stood whispering their personal regrets: for him it was more important to consider what might have been than what might yet be. Mailer might lead you to witness an electrocution...