In 1967, when William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner was published, it seemed for a moment that a white southern liberal might have found an ideal story to tell a country torn apart by racial strife. Styron’s subject was a little-known historical event: America’s bloodiest slave revolt. He told it in the imaginary voice of the virginia slave turned preacher who had led the rebellion. and the novel’s early readers, including some of the most discerning literary minds of the day, were overwhelmed. “I was surprised by page ten,” John Cheever wrote to Styron after reading an advance copy, “and this situation escalated to the end. I kept screaming. . . ‘can’t go on like this, can’t, can’t’, but he went up and up. It is what literature should be and it is so few times that I was in disbelief. I think it’s a work of genius.”
There are dozens more letters like this in the papers Styron left for his alma mater, Duke University, before his death in 2006: mixed notes from people like Carlos Fuentes, Willie Morris, Richard Yates, Wallace Stegner. and louis. auchincloss to read them is to enter into a kind of literary ecstasy. Nat Turner’s Confessions was not only a good novel, but an excellent one, the best since Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (wrote Yale scholar R. W. B. Lewis), since Saul Bellows Herzog “and probably better” (Robert Lowell declared ), and it seemed like “an American classic written by a contemporary of hawthorne and melville.”
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styron, according to his mentor robert penn warren, had created the template for “a new kind of novel”. for francine du plessix gray it was a spiritual milestone; In a handwritten note, she told Styron, “I can only compare it to reading the Bible.” and black author and journalist alex haley, moved to read a newspaper interview with styron, sent these words of companionship and gratitude: “i don’t know if i have ever seen captured so succinctly what i also feel are the essence of our condition ethnicity, and the true motivations of the social tragedies of recent times.”
nat turner’s confessions fell off the curricula a long time ago, replaced by other exploits like toni morrison and edward p. jones is the known world. however, the styron theme is fresher than ever. pre-war slavery is on many minds: its sins and crimes, its irreducible impact, its consequences that divide us to this day, evident in the recent bloodshed in ferguson and baltimore, dallas and baton rouge, and in the rise of the black lives matter movement.
Every week, it seems, another headline screams at us: Confederate flags finally removed from southern statehouses after mass murder of African-American worshipers in Charleston; the founding Jesuits of Georgetown University who paid off their debts by sending slaves, including children, to hellish plantations in the Deep South; battles for john c. Calhoun at Yale and House Masters Dormitory at Harvard. the legacy of slavery informs recent novels (homegoing; grace) and movies (the free state of jones; the ava duvernay documentary the 13th), as well as the new national museum of black history & culture, opening in washington in september.
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Meanwhile, Styron’s leading man Nat Turner has been revived in Birth of a Nation, a feature film set for release in October and already being discussed as a serious contender for next year’s Oscar. The star of it, director and screenwriter, Nate Parker, is an African-American who grew up in Virginia, like Turner and Styron. (At 36, Parker is a year older than Styron was when he began work on his novel in 1960.) And, in some respects, the film fulfills Styron’s original ambitions. Parker, who spent years researching Turner’s life and times, dismisses Styron’s effort, echoing many in the 1960s. “Styron’s novel sparked a well-deserved criticism by annihilating Turner’s character. . . parker says. “[Her] [Turner’s] reinvention of him played directly on the fears and anxieties of white Americans around the intent and potential of the contemporary black man.”
but this harsh judgment is based on an indelible truth. It was William Styron, the product of what he ironically called an “absolutely flawless wasp background,” who unearthed the buried nugget of Nat Turner’s rebellion and polished it into a modern day parable. this was the reason for the initial praise of him, from both black and white readers. but it also became the reason for the surprising reversal of fortune that followed. nat turner’s confessions remains the most vivid case of a literary work that came to glory—critical praise; a Pulitzer Prize; No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, only to be consumed by forces greater than its creator, for all his imaginative powers, did not see coming. In August 1967, the Times would describe Styron, without irony, as an “expert on the condition of the Negro.” Six months later, he was considered by many to be a raging racist, accused, as Styron bitterly recalled, of having written “a malicious piece of work, deliberately falsifying history.” he had, as he later said, “unwittingly created one of the first politically incorrect texts of our time.”
today the rage over nat turner’s confessions is more relevant than ever. The questions Styron wrestled with continue to provoke us. Who is the “owner” of American history? who can tell which stories and why? Is artistic license a sacred precept or a stale presumption? bill styron learned the answers in the most direct and painful way.
retaliation carnage
The idea had haunted Styron since he was a teenager and saw a sign on Route 58 in Virginia. It briefly commemorated an almost forgotten episode: the failed insurrection, in 1831, organized by “Nat Turner, a Negro”, who had led a small brigade of slaves and freemen on a rampage through 20 miles of Southampton County. Brandishing axes and swords, farm tools and muskets, Turner and his followers massacred the residents of 20 homes throughout the clogged wetlands, leaving 57 corpses, many the remains of women and children, some slaughtered in their beds. After two days, as the insurgents approached the county seat, Jerusalem (later renamed Courtland), they found a well-armed militia waiting.
It was the nightmare that had long afflicted the South: field workers suddenly seizing their implements and turning on their masters. and when that fear became reality, it unleashed an orgy of retaliatory killings. vigilantes killed as many as 200 black men and women, some tortured, mutilated, and beheaded. at least one head was mounted on a stake like a ghastly totem and warning. (A local road still bears the infamous name: black dotted signpost.)
The turner himself, captured after a two-month search, could have been erased from history. But Thomas Grey, a mysterious lawyer from Baltimore, had visited him in his prison cell and made a record of his exchanges. met a man he described as a literate “slave preacher” who “certainly never had the advantages of education, but can read and write (taught him by his parents) and by his natural intelligence and quickness of comprehension, he is surpassed by Few men I’ve seen. In a gray moment he asked if he had been wrong in his rebellion, given the result. “Wasn’t Christ crucified?” Turner replied. He had mastered the Bible and sounded like an Old Testament prophet.” while working in the fields, i discovered drops of blood on the corn like dew from heaven, and reported it to many, both black and white, in the neighborhood,” he told gray, or so gray recorded it “totally and voluntarily,” as he put it in Nat Turner’s Confessions, a pamphlet published at the time.
Within a few days, Turner was hanged and quartered. but he had defied slavery in a way that foretold his doom. After the revolt, the Virginia Legislature seriously debated the abolition of slavery. the measure was defeated, and instead the slave states tightened their regimes, which only fueled the growing protests of those who were convinced that slavery was a moral stain on the republic. It is no exaggeration to say that the Turner Rebellion, by hardening public sentiment about slavery, helped move the nation toward civil war.
an auspicious guest
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in 1960, when william styron began work on his novel, the country was in the midst of the civil rights movement or, as many called it, the “revolution”. Its leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., exuded a “conciliatory quality,” as Styron would later recall, “a spirit of friendship, concord, and the hope of mutual understanding.”
It was in a similar spirit that Styron, active in liberal causes and democratic politics during the 1960s, surmised that he could reconstitute the mentality of a black man from the 1830s. And in the summer of 1960, back from a trip to paris and rome, and after the disappointment of an ambitious but poorly received book on expatriate life, set fire to this house, began collecting material on “wild nat turner, that fanatical black demon whose ghost had scorched my imagination throughout my childhood and youth,” as it would have its narrator, stingo, recall in the 1979 novel, sophie’s choice.
Styron, that September, had just begun to sink into his background reading when his wife, getting up, picked up the phone. He was Robert Silvers, a 30-year-old magazine editor and part of the Paris magazine crowd, along with George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, and Styron himself. Today, Silvers is best known as the editor of the New York Book Review, which he helped found in 1963. But in 1960 he was at Harper’s and editing James Baldwin, who was trying to finish an essay on Dr. . king. “I worked very closely with him on a flat he then owned in West Village,” Silvers recalls. “He told me that he was exhausted and tired of New York and that he wanted to leave, and it occurred to me that Bill, with whom he had talked about Jimmy’s job, might want him to stay [at his house in Roxbury, Connecticut.” ].”
Styron offered Baldwin his guest house, a small barn, which was close to the main house with a gazebo in the middle. It was normally Styron’s work space, but he moved into a spare room on the top floor of the spacious farmhouse. For the next eight months, Baldwin occasionally stayed with the Styrons and his three young children, working on his novel Another Country. The two writers kept separate schedules, meeting Rose for dinner around nine, the start of a long afternoon in the quiet rural night, amidst six acres of gently rolling farmland.
The three of them would retire to the living room at the back of the house, with its high ceiling, stucco walls, and glass doors. Styron served Jack Daniel’s in the Pine Bar, and on frigid winter nights a fire roared in the great fireplace as the two men smoked nonstop and talked late into the night. They were both talkative, though of different kinds: Styron was a storyteller, deliberate, measured, almost shy, as he carefully formed his sentences, pausing between thoughts; Baldwin, brimming with nervous energy, had dark, glittering eyes and a silky voice, rough with drink and Marlboros. “I think Jimmy broke the last shred,” Styron said, “of any final problem of southern prejudice that he might have had. . . .”
It was more friendship than literary society. “We never talk about our work, or very rarely,” Baldwin later told Paris Review. “It was a wonderful time in my life, but nothing literary. we sang songs, drank too much, and sometimes chatted with people who came to see us.” It was a curious couple, Harlem and Tidewater. Baldwin’s grandparents had been slaves; Styron’s grandmother had owned slaves. this history brought them closer together by the calculation of liberal high optimism in the early ’60s, when civil rights had become not just an issue or a cause, but a call to ennoblement. “They talked about their black-and-white southern history,” Rose Styron, 88, now recalls, “and how similar and different they were, but also how they understood the same culture.” nat turner’s story was about slavery and race, but just as deeply about the south.
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