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chapter 8 train to the tidewater A Journey of Rediscovery Awaiting the train from New York to Newport News one mid-September morning, I pondered how to end this critical memoir. If all books are journeys, Styron himself was adept at structures that expressed both the linear trajectory of a life and the cyclical nature of memory. Lie Down in Darkness follows Peyton’s parents through the day of her funeral but also traces her life by way of characters’ reminiscences. Set This House on Fire joins Peter’s and Cass’s ruminations on the events in Sambuco. The Confessions of Nat Turner involves the time present of Nat’s reflections and the author’s implicit meditation on history. Sophie’s Choice, the most complex of all, builds reflections upon reflections; the narrator remembers his young self in Brooklyn and his Virginia childhood as well as Sophie’s revelations that summer as he recalls them across the years. Boarding that train to the Tidewater, I thus decided to reflect upon the literal journey of rediscovery I undertook to research the book. The primary purpose of the trip that September and early October was scholarly . I’d be examining Styron’s correspondence with Random House and with his first agent, Elizabeth McKee, at Columbia University; reading the notes and manuscripts of Set This House on Fire and The Confessions of Nat Turner in the Library of Congress, and those of Sophie’s Choice at Duke University; and trawling through whatever other unpublished material I might find. But I also wanted to remind myself of the man behind the work, both through his correspondence and incidental writings and through the environment of his youth. Like others, I was drawn to the man through the writing rather than vice versa, and while it’s equally true that this physical journey possessed tr a in to the tidewater: a Jour ney of r edisCovery 195 a personal dimension, the archives showed my own responses in context . They confirmed that while Styron’s evocation of apparent intimacy has no home in conventional critical analysis, it nonetheless exists for many a reader. In letter after letter correspondents tell Styron that they are not in the habit of contacting authors but that they must tell him how his writing has affected them. There are letters from high-school and university students, including a 1960s one from Alabama undergraduates apologizing for phoning Styron drunk. A sixty-year-old member of an “American Negro Group” thanks him in 1968 for putting African Americans “smack in the middle of American history.” A man from Lagos asks to live with Styron to learn the craft of writing. A Holocaust survivor praises him for his description of the social structure of the camps and for revealing the way individuals veil bad qualities beneath a guise of benevolence. Barry Hannah writes that Styron and Cormac McCarthy are among the few writers who could capture the American landscape. Dr. Seuss (Ted Geisel) is so moved by the screenplay “Dead!” that he sends “the only fan letter I’ve ever written.”1 Yet more letters simply thank Styron for Darkness Visible as a book that helped to save correspondents’ lives, or at least to restore them to health. And then there are the numerous, more generalized letters from young people, one of whom was me. In turn, Styron’s sense of responsibility toward individual readers is palpable. He routinely instructed his agent to decline requests from organizations . He was not above sending acerbic replies to the more absurd of such letters, such as the one, referred to in an earlier chapter, from the executive director of a library association.2 But as Al Styron attests, her father “responded to almost everyone who wrote him,” and when these were readers moved simply to put pen to paper as a gesture of gratitude or solidarity, regardless of their eloquence or eccentricity, he did so with invariable grace and good humor.3 For what mattered to him as an author was precisely the passionate engagement of the individual reader. That ability to draw people into his writing also drew a number of readers into his actual life. His writing’s blend of insight, intimacy, and compassion forged in some a loyalty to the man, even as his forthrightness and refusal to compromise his vision brought enemies enough, whether among decent people put off by his blind spots or among ideologues , bigots, agélastes, spurned critics, or the occasional...

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