Notes
notes chapter one 1. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald Yates and James Irby (1964; repr., Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1987), 66. 2. Henry James, The House of Fiction: Essays on the Novel, ed. Leon Edel (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957; repr., London: Mercury, 1962), 76. James writes that a novelist must achieve “saturation with his idea. When saturation fails no other presence readily avails.” For an example of Styron’s own version of this, see his 16 December 1955 letter in Selected Letters of William Styron, ed. Rose Styron with R. Blakeslee Gilpin (New York: Random House, 2012), expressing his disappointment that Peter Matthiessen has failed to “transform” a scene into “a dramatic powerhouse” with all its “crannies and corners” filled out (216). The value of Styron’s nonfiction is surely enhanced now by the publication of Selected Letters. My scant in-text references to this remarkable volume merely reflect the fact that its publication has come too late for detailed inclusion in this book. 3. William Styron, Letters to My Father, ed. James L. W. West III (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 69, 67. Subsequent in-text references are to this edition . 4. James L. W. West III, “William Styron: Public Author,” Critique 51, no. 2 (2010): 150. 5. Gavin Cologne-Brookes, “Appendix: Extracts from Conversations with William Styron,” in The Novels of William Styron: From Harmony to History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 232, 244. Styron may have acquired the term from Henry James, who writes of Turgenev’s “want of ‘architecture’” in Partial Portraits (New York: Macmillan, 1888), 315. 6. Wallace Stevens, “Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination,” in The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971; repr., New York: Vintage, 1972), 396; David Bromwich, “The Novelists of Every Day Life,” in The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 370–76. For a more detailed explanation of this intellectual position, see Gavin Cologne-Brookes, Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 3–5. 7. Christa Wolf, The Reader and the Writer: Essays, Sketches, Memories (Berlin: Seven 234 notes to Pages 6–17 Seas, 1977), 41–42. 8. Ibid., 43–44. 9. Ibid., 44. 10. Cologne-Brookes, “Appendix,” in Novels of William Styron, 237, 226. 11. William Styron, Sophie’s Choice (New York: Random House, 1979), 512. Subsequent in-text references are to this edition. 12. Pearl K. Bell, “Evil and William Styron,” in “Sophie’s Choice”: A Contemporary Casebook , ed. Rhoda Sirlin and James L. W. West III (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 7. 13. William Styron, This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (New York: Random House, 1982; rev. and expanded ed., New York: Vintage, 1993), 96, 97. Subsequent in-text references are to this edition. 14. Bell, “Evil and William Styron,” in Sirlin and West, eds., “Sophie’s Choice,” 4; Leo Tolstoy, “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?,” in Recollections and Essays, trans. Aylmer Maude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), 81. Tolstoy is citing the artist Bryullov’s making a small change to a pupil’s drawing and telling him that “Art begins where the tiny bit begins.” 15. Notable exceptions are Robert Coltrane, “The Unity of This Quiet Dust,” Papers on Language and Literature 23, no. 4 (1987): 480–88; and Melvin J. Friedman, “William Styron’s Criticism: More French than American,” Delta (Montpellier) 23 (January 1986): 61–67. chapter two 1. William Styron, Grateful Words about F. Scott Fitzgerald, limited-edition pamphlet of an address to the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society (Hempstead, NY, 1997), 5. 2. Borges, Labyrinths, 70; James L. W. West III, William Styron, A Life (New York: Random House, 1998), xii; Arthur Miller in Joel Foreman, “William Styron: A Portrait,” 1982, Box AV 7, William Styron Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC (hereafter Styron Papers, Duke). See also Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 256: “It is just as impossible to forge an identity between myself, my own ‘I,’ and that ‘I’ that is the subject of my stories as it is to lift myself up by my own hair.” 3. Alexandra Styron, Reading My Father (New York: Charles Scribner...
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