Styron as Muse

...Another major section of This Quiet Dust has to do with capital punishment...

...Styron's description of his conversion is instructive and moving...

...Reacting to David Susskind's question to a group asking them why they, as gentiles, should be concerned about the fate of the Jews, Styron comments: "I could not help thinking whether there was something paradigmatically American (or certainly non-European) in that question, with its absence of any sense of history and its vacuous unawareness of evil...

...Styron argues that we have misunderstood the meaning of Auschwitz, thinking of it only as an extermination camp when it should be viewed as "slavery in its ultimate embodiment," a circumstance "embedded deeply in a cultural tradition which stretches back to the Middle Passage from the coast of Africa, and beyond, to the enforced servitude in ancient Greece and Rome...

...It's not incidental that Reid is a black man, a "victim of foster homes and deprivation" who was inaccurately identified as a mental defective...

...The criticism of Styron raises an underlying issue that has nothing to do with race, bearing rather on the relation between illusion and reality, imagination and experience, and ultimately the creative power of the writer...

...He insists that the Holocaust is a human tragedy rather than exclusively a Jewish nightmare...

...There are other essays and reviews to savor: on the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, on the military, on the founding of The Paris Review, and on the sources of his own work...

...Marine Corps officer, Styron had taken a hard line and even publicly supported the execution of Caryl Chessman, the California rapist who was ultimately executed in the gas chamber...

...Can a man write effectively about a woman...

...There is a close analogy to the more recent case involving Norman Mailer and Jack Henry Abbott, for after escaping the death penalty, Reid walked away from a work detail and raped a thirty-seven-year-old woman in her suburban home...

...The title essay (from an Emily Dickinson poem—"This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies,/ and Lads and Girls") is an intriguing discussion of the controversy raised by his novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), an attempt to penetrate the mind and soul of Styron's fellow Virginian...

...Gene Bluestein (Gene Bluestein is professor of English at the University of California, Fresno...

...The section "Hell Reconsidered" exhibits Styron's obsessive involvement with the Holocaust, both in the historical sense and through his own fictional reconstructions in Sophie's Choice...

...He cites the influence of "Camus's great essay, 'Reflections on the Guillotine,' " but the main change of heart came about through Styron's involvement in the case of a young Connecticut prisoner, Benjamin Reid, whose life Styron probably saved by bringing his case to the attention of the public...

...Styron carefully subtitled his work "a meditation on history" to signal the fictional nature of his study of Turner's life and times...

...But the fact that a white man had made the attempt was bound to provoke an onslaught of ferocious criticism, especially in the midst of the 1960s' burgeoning of black consciousness...

...Sty-ron was first attacked for daring to write about a black man on the ground that no white Southerner could possibly depict the innermost thoughts of a Negro character, especially one like Nat Turner, whose insurrection in 1831 terrified slaveholders everywhere...

...As Alan Tate remarked of Emily Dickinson, who rarely strayed from her little backyard in Amherst, if she had lived in the Seventeenth Century she would have been burned as a witch, for she seemed to know about everything...

...Can a woman write accurately about a man...

...The issue remains almost as hot today although, as I have implied, there is no way to limit the scope of a writer's imagination...

...Agonizing over his defense of Reid, Styron gives a full and honest account of all the issues, but remains steadfast in his refusal to accept vengeance and official murder as a response to violence...

...A Southerner and a former U.S...

...Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage with absolutely no first-hand experience in the Civil War...

...Later he explains, "although I am not nominally a Christian, my four children are half Jewish and I claim perhaps more personal concern with the idea of genocide than do most gentiles...

...Could a great war novel be written by someone who never took part in it...

...Like most important writers who have emerged from the South, Styron first encountered this theme in the context of slavery, and that "peculiar institution" is never far from his mind...

...With the exception of the eulogies, they are all worth reading (or rereading, if you know the originals...

...It is always interesting to encounter the expository views of good writers, especially when they, like Styron, are determined to become involved in the critical and controversial issues of our time...

...for Styron it is "impermissible" to forget the other six million—Russians, Poles, Czechs, French, Gypsies...

...This collection of William Styron's essays and reviews is well worth having in print under one cover...

...I have argued with people who insist that a man shouldn't sing a "woman's blues" and vice versa...

...He notes that not only Jews but millions of gentiles were killed in the Holocaust...

...I would have tried to talk him out of including several eulogies for some fellow writers (the tearful response to the death of James Jones is embarrassing), but his major essays are effective and felicitous insights into what he considers "the most compelling theme in history, including the history of our own time—that of the catastrophic propensity on the part of human beings to attempt to dominate one another...