Styron, Ellison, and the Difficulties of Friendship

The great wonder about William Styron and Ralph Ellison is that they should ever have been friends at all. They were too much alike. Both men were private, guarded, mistrustful, and reluctant to reveal themselves to others. Both were prickly and withdrawn; both constructed masks and personae behind which to conceal themselves; both had a knack for offending people. Styron and Ellison drew severe criticism for their writings, sometimes from the same sources. Both men were desirous of praise but suspicious when it came. That they became friends is remarkable, but they did—at least for a period during the 1960s. Their relationship tells us something about those times and about the difficulties of friendship between writers—and of course between black people and white people.

Arnold Rampersad’s excellent Ralph Ellison: A Biography, published in 2006 by Knopf, reveals much about Ellison’s friendships with other authors. Rampersad’s book also allows for comparisons to be made from biography to biography, something biographers like to do. In their peregrinations, biographers often travel over the same territory, interview the same people, and visit the same archives; but they approach their subjects from differing angles and with aims and preconceptions that are never identical.

I was especially keen to know what Rampersad had discovered about Styron’s friendship with Ellison. I had not done much with the relationship in my biography William Styron: A Life, published by Random House in 1998. I had concentrated instead on Styron’s friendships with other writers, particularly on those he maintained with James Baldwin, Irwin Shaw, Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, James Jones, and Norman Mailer. Ellison, I knew, had not been close to Styron, but I’ve learned from Rampersad’s book that the two men made more of an attempt at friendship than I had supposed. That’s the way biography operates; it’s a continuing conversation in which one biographer talks to the other, and both speak to the biographers who will follow them.

Styron and Ellison had more ground in common than I had realized. Both men lost parents at vulnerable ages: Ellison’s father died when he was three, Styron’s mother when he was fourteen. The surviving parents, Ellison’s mother and Styron’s father, had to compensate, especially because both boys disliked the stepparents who replaced the parents they had lost. In high school and college both Styron and Ellison were misfits, sensitive and touchy, impatient with conventions and rules. Both sought out mentors; both were musically gifted; both had artistic ability. Both men became wonderful letter-writers, and both leaned to the left politically. Both liked to drink. That’s a lot to found a friendship on.

Their writing careers were remarkably similar. Both published excellent first novels at about the same time. Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness appeared in 1951 and Ellison’s Invisible Man in 1952. Those novels earned important prizes: Lie Down in Darkness the Prix de Rome; Invisible Man the National Book Award. Both books received excellent reviews; in fact, both were overpraised, creating expectations for Styron and Ellison that they had difficulty fulfilling. Styron was seen as the next great southern novelist, heir to William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, a label that he rejected but never entirely escaped. Ellison was seen as the great Negro novelist of his generation and was expected to write a second novel that, as he must have known, would never be seen as the equal of his first.

Styron and Ellison suffered from writers’ blocks, lengthy ones during which they were unable to produce the novels that were expected of them. Styron’s frustration lasted for twenty-seven years—from 1979, when he published Sophie’s Choice, until his death in 2006. Ellison’s period of silence was one of the longest in American literature, some forty-two years, from the publication of Invisible Man in 1952 until he died in 1994. Both men published short stories and nonfiction during those periods, and both appeared frequently on lecture platforms, but both were seen as disappointments because they could not finish their...