My Father’s House

Alexandra Styron was the last born of the late William Styron’s four children, arriving long after the other three. She was not her father’s favorite, and she knew it. Yet she also knew, as she wrote in her journal in 2000, “that I, at the last, will have to tell this story. Someday.”

Reading My Father represents her effort to do so. It’s the story of a talented but troubled man and his much abused wife and children. William Styron was, by his daughter’s account, a tyrant and a bully in his own home, even as he was being lionized in the larger world for his charm and wit and novel-writing skills. At home he was the Great Man who was not to be disturbed on any account while he pursued his muse. His wife, Rose, bore the brunt of his verbal attacks, but the children also came in for their share. At age sixty, forced by his failing health to give up the alcohol that had long fueled him, he cracked up and fell into a deep clinical depression. But, being Bill Styron and the gifted writer that he was, he managed to capitalize even on that grim situation by writing Darkness Visible, which became a surprise best seller. His daughter, after poring over the hundreds of letters from troubled readers of the book she found in her father’s archives at Duke University, was moved to ask herself: “How could a guy whose thoughts elicit this much pathos have been, for so many years, such a monumental asshole to the people closest to him?”

William Styron, at least in his daughter’s version, was in many ways a man at war with himself. A southerner by birth, reared in Virginia and educated at Duke, he spent most of his adult life living in the Northeast, in places like Brooklyn and Manhattan, and in the family homes in Roxbury, Connecticut, and on Martha’s Vineyard. Buoyed by the success of his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, he married Rose Burgunder, a department-store heiress from Baltimore, in 1953; and, despite the household cruelties and his many infidelities, the marriage would endure until his death in 2006. Together the two of them embarked on a life among the rich and famous at the time: the youthful hell-raising Teddy Kennedy was a favorite neighbor on the Vineyard; Arthur Miller a friend and neighbor in Connecticut; Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, James Jones, Mike Nichols, Carlos Fuentes, Willie Morris—the list of pals and drinking buddies goes on and on. But the man little Alexandra Styron saw when he came home was not the bon vivant, not the literary man about town. “My father used to scare the crap out of me,” she told the mourners at a memorial service for him in 2007, and then she related how he used to come into her room at night and tell her stories about ghosts and demons in the Roxbury house, leaving her lying there shivering in the dark. Once, when she was eight and in a girlish horse-loving phase of her life, he told her that the governor of Connecticut had banned horses in the state and then left her alone to deal with that. She could never decide whether he was being consciously cruel or merely carelessly indifferent. “He’d lob his invective into the room, storm away, and leave everything behind him in flames,” she writes.

Styron had been a Marine Corps officer in the waning months of World War ii, but, like Scott Fitzgerald before him in World War i, did not experience combat then or in Korea. This appears to have been critical to his development, both artistically and emotionally. Mailer and Jones had served overseas and had come back home to write big best-selling novels about their experiences. War was to be the theme for writers of his generation, Styron saw; and he wanted, his daughter says, “to paint on that...