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February Book Review
by Anne Morris Gordon
Lie Down in
Darkness
by William
Styron
The debut of William Styron's first novel, Lie Down in Darkness,
NY, Bobbs-Merrill, 1951, was heralded with lavish praise by more than a
dozen critics. Their exuberant verbosity included phrases such as: "one
of the few completely human and mature novels published since WW2", "a
born writer...of exceptional, extraordinary talent", "a new writer of so
fertile and magnificent a gift .." etc, etc. The book was eagerly
awaited by readers in Newport News, since the writer himself had said
it was "a mirror of the family life I myself put up with". I remember
sitting around our dining table while my aunts filled us in on the real
identity of Mr. Styron's supposedly fictional characters.
Set in the hypothethical ship building town of Port Warwick, the book is
the story of the Loftis family, their friends and servants. It is
written in the Southern Gothic tradition, showing effects of the past
combined with the characters' moral degeneration in the present - not a
pretty picture, no matter how well written. The reviewer in the Daily
Press in 1951 described the characters as "maladjusted, demented,
perverted or combinations thereof...I feel like a prissy spinster for
saying it is a pity he did not write about somebody nice."
There is some fine and forceful writing, the plot is well put together,
and the characters have all the qualities of realism, but in the end, I
didn't care much what happened to these weak and unattractive people.
The quantities of alcohol and prescription drugs consumed throughout the
book was an eye-opener to those who were not aware of the seamier side
of peninsula high life in the 1950s.
However, I was most astonished by his portrayal of the black characters.
The description of their odors, sweatiness, stupidity, and primitive
gullibility was really offensive. It was no wonder that in the 1960s,
when Styron announced that he was writing a history of Nat Turner and
the 17th c. slave rebellion, many serious black writers strongly
objected. In all fairness, he did do a credible job of it: perhaps his
attitudes to the race question had changed by then.
All in all, I think it is a testament to the difference air-conditioning
has made to life in southern Virginia.
Comments by Other Classmates
Comments of Jim Michie:
Anne was much more generous
than I could be. I found Styron's dated style so tough and his
characters so despicable in conception that I had a hard time finishing
the book, even with its fascinating view of life during the forties for
the James River Country Club set and the University of Virginia's party
scene. The slides back-and-forth between Victorian flowery and
stream-of-consciousness confusing while constantly shifting character
points of view was just too overwhelming for my simple brain.
Comments of Jay Burke:
I read it; some parts twice and in a very
few instances, thrice. Where shall I start?
Not a style of presentation I find either
easy to track/follow or enjoy. I felt throughout that the writer was
often straining to get his composition in a state that even he was
comfortable with. It was overly wordy and agonizingly repetitive,
beating his particular point-to-make frequently to a pulp of reader
frustration. The book contained an artificial arrangement and assortment
of main characters that exceeds a reasonable probability they could
exist in any setting as a social entity much less a family to the extent
that the reader is unable to get more out of the writing than studies of
very neurotic, selfish, weak, paranoid, alcoholic and/or control driven
individuals miserably failing at the writer's every transparently
contrived junction of interaction. I mean these folks couldn't go to the
bathroom without a crisis.
That the writer was from Newport News and
used his familiarity with the area was, in my opinion, incidental to the
story; it could have been set anywhere. Unless he had a neurotic dislike
for Newport News or the people in it and used his novel as a vehicle to
parade his anger or hatred of them in a public forum, I read nothing
into the setting. To do so would require me to know Newport News in the
time frame of his up-bringing and early career years and the townees of
the time, and I don't.
I do feel he did not develop nor portray
the blacks accurately nor with any kind of understanding other than of
the most shallow and biased kind. Considering how well he infused the
key white characters with very complex emotions and behavior known to
plague the insecure and troubled (they had life and depth
notwithstanding whatever one may think of them), the black characters
were steam rolled flat and cookie-cut from a comic book. Not good, and
reflects badly on the writer in a number of ways: was he knowledgeable
of but too lazy to develop the black characters; too indifferent and
dismissive of their humanity or just ignorant of it; so biased that he
believed them not worth the effort or to be truly simpletons? If it is
possible to believe the complexity of the white characters and the story
line, it is not possible, how ever ignorant one may be, to believe the
presentation of blacks in this novel. Take your pick.
I found this novel a truly unpleasant
read and would not recommend it to anyone other than a severely
depressed individual that I wished to make suicidal. It was so awful
that I could go on and on about everything from the stilted dialogue
(truly on a beginning writer's level, especially Milton's old man and
the moronic portrayal of the blacks), to the half-ass abbreviated love
passages (no wonder pornographic photos have such power—either the
author never engaged in a teenage seduction or it was so impacting as to
wipe his memory of what it was like), to characterizing all Virginian's
as something cloned in a whiskey bottle; not my recollection at all. But
what’s the point? Jay Burke
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NNHS Class of '55 Reunion Activity
