William Styron's Sophie's Choice : Poland, the South, and the Tragedy of Suicide

Although his revelation came late in his life, few twentieth-century writers can match the candidness of William Styron regarding his inclination to depression. In recent years he seems to have relished the chance to make the recovering melancholic a figure of valor and dignity. Moreover, his novels, most especially Sophie's Choice, show that when under artistic discipline personal issues of this kind can inform and even inspire the writing of fiction. What settings could be more suitable for a literary artist tormented by that poorly understood mental disorder than the Nazi death camps, the stark grayness of wartime Poland under occupation, and the American South where the narrator, a Virginian, has to confront the racial sins of his native land? In addition, Styron creates two memorable figures, Sophie Zawistowska and Nathan Landau. The latter is a victim of extreme madness and Sophie, a former captive of the Holocaust, is still undergoing the agony of that terror. One suspects that Styron's concentration upon near alcoholism and the many manifestations of madness, to which his characters are subject, helps him ride down the fury of his own inner demons. Stingo, the Styron-like hero--Stingo was Styron's nickname at Duke University (West 238)--also has moments of deep and debilitating gloom and anxiety.

The decision to compose Sophie's Choice may well have stemmed from three interrelated factors: Styron's own emotional difficulties; his interest, typical of so many southern writers, in the culture and experience of East Europeans, Russians, and Poles; and his desire to probe, in as dramatic and bold a fashion as he could, the sensitive twentieth-century issue of ethnic tension, prejudice, and gross inhumanity. To explore how the domination of one people over another can destroy the spiritual wholeness of both becomes his chief moral theme. Styron hoped to reach as many reading Americans as possible. By and large he saw his fellow countrymen as morally innocent, grossly unenlightened of history, and oblivious to their own ethical failings and overcharged biases. At one point, Stingo proposes, "My ignorance of the anguished hovering like a noxious gray smog over places with names like Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen was complete. But wasn't this true for most Americans, indeed most human beings who dwelt beyond the perimeter of the Nazi horror?" (Sophie's Choice 235). In Sophie's Choice, the character Morris Fink, who lodges at Yetta Zimmerman's pink Brooklyn establishment in 1947, two years after the war, has never heard anything about Auschwitz. After the appearance of Sophie's Choice, a fan congratulated Styron for calling attention to the subject of the Nazi terror. He remarked, "The absence of any historical memory in this country is simply bizarre" (Wytwycky).

Styron's own emotional life was a basic factor in his uncanny ability to reconstruct the lives of his troubled fictional figures. Long after Sophie's Choice appeared, he at last disclosed his own experience with the illness that crippled them. His autobiographical reference to the problem of mental illness was prompted by the alleged suicide of Primo Levi in 1987, long after Styron's major novels had been published. Levi's brilliant and moving accounts of his life at Auschwitz had established him as one of the most enlightening and valorous authors of the century. In preparing the novel, Styron read Levi's classic memoir, If This Is a Man (1959). Levi had plunged for several stories over the balustrade of his apartment building to the bottom landing and died of internal injuries. In November 1988, a gathering of the New York intelligentsia honored Levi's memory at New York University. From the podium, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, and others expressed their dismay and bewilderment over the manner of his death. It seemed unbelievable that someone who had braved homicidal Nazism had mysteriously lost his nerve and...