Styron’s Choice

Nineteen sixty-eight began as a promising year for William Styron. After six years of intense work, he had published, the previous fall, the novel he thought would cement his reputation: “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” an account of an 1831 slave revolt in Southampton County, Va., narrated in Turner’s voice. It was a risky, even provocative book — he’d always known it would be — but the gamble appeared to have paid off. “The Confessions” got excellent reviews, appeared on the best-seller list, was sold to 20th Century Fox and won a Pulitzer Prize. Best of all, Styron said, was the response from many African-Americans. Later in life (Styron died in 2006) he recalled traveling to a historically black college to receive an honorary degree shortly after “The Confessions” was published: “I felt gratitude at their acceptance of me,” he wrote, “and, somehow more important, at my acceptance of them, as if my literary labors and my plunge into history had helped dissolve many of my preconceptions about race that had been my birthright as a Southerner.”

And then history intervened.

Amid the upheavals of the spring and summer of 1968 — Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April, Robert Kennedy’s in June, rioting in American cities, the disastrous Democratic convention in Chicago — Beacon Press published a slim volume of essays called “William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond.” Almost overnight, “The Confessions” became the center of a debate that has helped shape American literature ever since.

“The Confessions of Nat Turner” is based, very loosely, on a “confession” Turner gave to his court-appointed lawyer, Thomas Gray, shortly before his execution. Gray later published the confession. Styron wrote that the Turner he found in Gray’s text was a “dangerous religious lunatic, . . . a psychopathic monster”; rather than expand on the historical record, he chose to write a meditation on history, giving him “dimensions of humanity that were almost totally absent in the documentary evidence.” In the novel, Turner is a young slave brought up as a domestic servant in the household of a wealthy, altruistic plantation owner who decides to teach Turner to read as proof that slaves are capable of “cultivation.” In Styron’s depiction, Turner is pious, even saintly, with no romantic entanglements other than a chaste attachment to a young white woman who secretly holds abolitionist views.

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Styron was a close friend of James Baldwin and drew inspiration from Baldwin’s novel “Another Country” (1962), which depicted interracial romance in late 1950s New York from the perspective of both black and white characters. Baldwin, in turn, praised “The Confessions,” observing that Styron had “begun to write the common history — ours.” But in the broader African-American intellectual world, the novel was widely condemned. “Ten Black Writers Respond” has to be read in light of this history: as a polemic and corrective that introduced a spectrum of opinion mostly ignored in the mainstream press. “For all its prose power and somber earnestness,” Loyle Hairston wrote, “Styron’s novel utterly fails the simple test of honesty.” “This is meditation mired in misinterpretation,” Charles V. Hamilton wrote, “and this is history many . . . black people reject.” John Oliver Killens: “In terms of getting into the slave’s psyche and his idiom, it is a monumental failure.” The 10 writers — magazine editors, psychiatrists, librarians, academics — argue with Styron’s rejection of the historical record, his interpretation of Turner’s scriptural and religious inspirations, his use of African-American dialect and his invocation of inflammatory stereotypes in both black and white characters. The book’s tone at times echoes avant-garde manifestoes and agitprop pamphlets, but just as often it is pained, searching and evenhanded. Mike Thelwell wrote that “The Confessions” “demonstrates the persistence of . . . myths, racial stereotypes and literary clichés even in the best intentioned and most enlightened minds. . . . The real ‘history’ of Nat Turner, and indeed of black people, remains to be written.”

“Ten Black Writers Respond” was met with a counterblast of scorn from the establishment, most famously a long essay in The New York Review of Books by Eugene Genovese, who dismissed Styron’s critics as censorious radicals opposed to racial dialogue. At public forums, young activists shouted Styron down when he tried to defend himself. After protests from Ossie Davis and other African-American actors, the planned movie was shelved. Styron retreated into private life and for many years remained embittered and unrepentant; in a 1992 afterword to the novel, he wrote that he had “unwittingly created one of the first politically incorrect texts of our time” and dismissed “Ten Black Writers” as “intellectual squalor.” Late in life, however, he was gratified to hear younger African-American scholars, including Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr., address the novel in more favorable terms. Gates even encouraged Spike Lee to consider making a film of “The Confessions”; Lee did consider it but later abandoned the project for financial reasons.

Over the decades, “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and “Ten Black Writers Respond” together helped create an explosion of interest in slave narratives and in 19th-century African-American literature, and made the study of slavery a vibrant field in American history. Not coincidentally, these same decades saw the emergence of what scholars call the “postmodern slave narrative”: a genre that includes Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Charles Johnson’s “Middle Passage,” Edward P. Jones’s “Known World” and Sherley Anne Williams’s “Dessa Rose.” Williams, speaking for many writers of her generation, identified “The Confessions” as a source — albeit a negative one — for her novel, writing that she no longer wanted the African-American experience to be, as she put it, “at the mercy of literature” written by others.

But it would be a mistake to describe the “Confessions” controversy only as a struggle over who has the right to tell the story of slavery. (“I do not believe that the right to describe . . . black people in American society is the private domain of Negro writers,” the novelist John A. Williams wrote in “Ten Black Writers Respond.” “I cannot fault Styron’s intent.”) Styron himself admitted that his novel was an effort to adapt Turner’s sensibility and language to the 20th century, and it was the artificiality of this adaptation that most infuriated his critics. The prevailing mode of much historical fiction since then has been precisely the opposite: to take a term from the Russian literary theorist Viktor ­Shklovsky, novelists have wished to “defamiliarize” history by making it unrecognizable, unknowable, fantastic, brutal. “Beloved,” with its harsh, fragmented narration of infanticide, is the most obvious example, but consider also Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” which portrays the Mexican frontier in the 19th century as an apocalyptic wasteland populated by psychopaths and mystics. Whether these novels are more honest than “The Confessions of Nat Turner” is perhaps an unfair question — honesty in fiction is a moving target — but they do embody a radically different sensibility, one that refuses to collapse the past into the present and that makes history almost fetishistically “different,” difficult to accept or assimilate.

It may be unfair to celebrate a writer for being so publicly rejected and railed against, but 40 years’ perspective should allow us to credit Styron for taking the risk of writing “The Confessions” and to appreciate the courage of the 10 writers who dissected it in searing detail. Their confrontation helped shatter the idea that there can or should be one version of “how slavery was”; now we have a hundred different versions — some omnipresent, some long silenced, some real, some fictional — telling a messier, trickier, less comforting story. This may not be the “common history” James Baldwin spoke of, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.