Rose Styron: the little friend of all the world

At a party I attended in Alabama in 1992, before the guest of honour arrived, the drunken hostess announced in a strong Southern accent: “Bill Styron’s bin in luv with me fo’ 50 yeahs!” 

When the author arrived, she embraced him, like a snake gripping Laocoön, as he struggled to escape.  He’d just emerged from a deep depression, described in Darkness Visible (1990), and

squirmed with polite embarrassment.

The life of William Styron (1925-2006) has been thoroughly discussed in his memoir, his biography by James West (2010), Reading My Father by his daughter Alexandra (2011) and his Selected

Letters, co-edited by his wife Rose (2012).  But Rose Styron’s 336-page autobiography, with the sinking subtitle Beyond the Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart (Knopf, 2023), adds very

little to what is already well known.  As Samuel Johnson observed in Rambler 93: “To commence author is to claim praise, and no man can justly aspire to honour, but at the hazard of

disgrace.”

The first and last pages express the tone of her book.  She exceeds decent limits by dedicating it to a dozen “extraordinary, loving, splendid, caring” children and grandchildren.  The four

pages of Acknowledgements show how many people adore and serve her.  Several friends absolutely insisted that she write her memoir and she graciously acceded to their wishes. They do not

deserve to be thanked.  Rose also offers, as an epigraph and in the text, samples of her poetry: “there’s no one old as me” and “the folly wrangle of their sibling day.”  Though she knew a

handful of poets who make cameo appearances, she has nothing to say about their work.

Rose begins with a heartfelt chapter on Chile, where she’d been sent in 1974 by Amnesty International.  She hoped to gather and bring back data about Salvador Allende’s ministers, who’d been

imprisoned or killed—like Allende himself—after the coup by General Augosto Pinochet.  Naïve but determined and aware that she’s being spied on, she assumes a transparent disguise of wig,

hat and sunglasses, and talks to informants in a Santiago swimming pool.  But her amateurish eavesdropping, like the manoeuvres of the bumbling spies in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana,

was absurd compared to the expertise of American residents with inside information.  She was most useful as a courier of forbidden documents, and would have provided valuable publicity if

she had also been captured or killed.

Rose’s friends are hierarchically divided into real, longtime, dear, intimate, close, closest and best.  They fall into two main categories: folks, students, children, her daughters and Paul

Newman, all of whom are “wonderful”; friends’ daughters, family, gardens, resorts, books, even jet planes, are “beautiful.”  Hosts are gracious, blondes attractive, daughters brilliant. 

Rose is thrilled in “wondrous Mexico . . . lost in the wonder.”  Lunches, cousins and minor friends are merely “fun.”  When she runs out of adjectives—all should have been cut—she resorts,

at least ten times, to lists of big names.  A typical sentence (in both senses) sounds like a first-grade reader: “Carly and I got to be friends, James and I got to be friends, and Bill was

friends with each.  Bill and I saw Carly often when she was married to James.”  (Question: how many friends did each friend have?)  Though chummy with the Kennedys and the Clintons, Rose was

not a princess, nor was meant to be, but an attendant lady meant to swell a panel or a dinner party.  She includes 71 snapshots to certify her presence at these gala occasions.

Rose met everyone worth meeting, but repeatedly says she doesn’t remember what they said.  She teasingly notes: Jackie Kennedy had great conversations, John Kennedy laughed, Ted Kennedy also

had a great laugh, Kurt Vonnegut’s good humour flowed.  Warren Beatty popped up, John Huston was a great raconteur, Richard Widmark was hilarious, James Dean drummed on a wastebasket, Lech

Walesa was relaxed.  Yevgeny Yevtushenko had multiple conversations, Robert Penn Warren gave unspecified advice, Gabriel García Márquez was “beloved” whenever he turned up.  Philip Roth,

known for his singular wit, appeared on a rainy afternoon.  James Baldwin, who lived with the Styrons for nine months, discussed—vaguely and predictably—race, history and writing.  Rose

never explains the reasons for Norman Mailer’s notorious and apparently unprovoked attack on Styron, which concluded: “I will invite you to a fight in which I expect to stomp out of you a

fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit!”

Rose does not realize that her endless name-dropping and trivial gossip only exposes her egoism and conceit.  She tells us what they wear but not what they say, and does not reveal anything

significant about these famous people.  She’s so besotted by celebrities that she even courts the revolting Lillian Hellman.  Rose’s book is a feeble contrast to Eileen Simpson’s intelligent

and perceptive memoir, Poets in Their Youth (1982), about her suicidal poet-husband John Berryman and his circle of talented and troubled friends.

If I were writing my own memoir, using the style of Rose Styron, I could truthfully say: “During my heartfelt and adventurous life I have met many illustrious writers in the Hamptons,

Massachusetts, Colorado, Canada, France and Greece.  They were all beautiful people in wonderful places or wonderful people in beautiful places.”

Copy-editors pull up your socks, there are many errors: Edgar Poe’s poem is “Annabel Lee”; Harry Levin was head of Comparative Literature (not Russian studies); Bronislaw Malinowski was an

anthropologist (not an archeologist); Pablo Neruda was a communist (not a progressive); William Wordsworth was buried in the Lake District (not in Rome); there are no Van Eycks in the

Hermitage Museum (the Soviets sold the  Annunciation to Andrew Mellon in 1930).

This book becomes momentarily more interesting when Rose quotes what the celebrities actually said.  Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Defense (i.e. of War), began to cry when

he met the Russian dissident Andrei Sakharov, “ ‘that great man,’ and how bad he felt about his own less-than-noble role in the Vietnam War.”  The Czech dissident and president Václav Havel,

asked what he thought of the students protesting for freedom in 1968, remarked: “I don’t think much of them, because every time they demonstrate I get put into jail.”

Rose was a devoted wife and mother of their four children, and the best part of her book describes Styron’s severe mental breakdowns in 1985 and 2000.  He had always read his daily writing

to her every evening, when she cheered him on and typed it up.  But, completely absorbed in his own work and unwilling to be distracted by a rival, he hurt her feelings by showing no

interest in her poetry.

She confesses that she was tempted to sleep with his great friend Peter Matthieseen, and had “one-or-two night stands with sometimes well-known guys”—though she can’t recall the exact

number. She doesn’t explain her motives for infidelity, but was probably retaliating for his affairs, for ignoring her poetry, for the loss of his sexual desire and to prove that she was

still attractive to men.

There’s a tremendous contrast between her idealistic worldwide crusades on behalf of imprisoned and tortured prisoners, and Styron’s fearful depression that made him reluctant to leave the

sanctuary of his home.  He was anxious about his daughters’ horseback riding, refused to ski, hated travel and became frantic with worry when Rose was absent or late.  When she was away he

begged her: “Come home.  I need you.  I’m breaking down.  I just fell apart—I don’t know what’s going on.”  Electro-convulsive shock treatments made him “increasingly goofy and zombielike”.

  His second breakdown, coupled with physical illness, frailty and the next round of agonising shock treatments caused serious damage, made him catatonic and nearly destroyed him.  He kept

repeating, “They have stolen my brain.”  Like Franz Kafka, he could scream at his doctor: “Kill me, or else you are a murderer!”

Rose mentions that Paul Theroux visited Styron during his last illness but doesn’t describe it.  At the time Theroux wrote to me that Styron “was a very fragile and needy man— although his

aura was that of a prince—handsome, highly intelligent, very funny and a great mimic.”  When severely depressed “he was conversational but said once, ‘I am talking to you and it may seem

that nothing’s wrong, but it is very bad inside my head.’ ” On another occasion: “This is worse by far than anything I described in Darkness Visible.”

Jeffrey Meyers will publish both James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Hitler to Arbus and Plath with Louisiana State University Press in 2024.

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