William Styron: The Absence of Social Definition

Abstract

Norman Mailer, in now legendary and prophetic fit of pique, accused Styron's first novel, Lie Down In Darkness, of lacking three qualities: was not near to creating man who could move on his feet, his mind was uncorrupted by new idea, and his book was without evil.1 At the time, when Styron had yet to publish the overwritten Set This House On Fire and The Confessions of Nat Turner, Mailer's remarks seemed like jealous outrage, inspired, as most of his literary judgments are, by the challenge he feels other writers may offer to his own standing in American letters. Mailer seemed to be ignoring Styron's genuine interest in the loneliness and isolation at the heart of American life masked by those institutions which occupy him: the family, religion, and the state. Yet Mailer's scorn of Set This House On Fire, not wholly unanticipated, seemed to vindicate his earlier view: a bad maggoty novel. Four or five halfgreat short stories were buried like pullulating organs in corpse of fecal matter, overblown unconceived philosophy....2 Mailer was right. Lie Down in Darkness was more promising in its portrayal of the estrangement of its characters, who, at the beginning of the novel, seem ready to be developed as social types in the modern South. It established Styron as potential analyst of the failures of America in her rise to world empire. Yet Set This House On Fire was strangely without coherent point of view or conception of social issues. Irving Howe analyzes very perceptively the failure of the group of young post-modern writers to which Styron belongs. They are vaguely morose, but lack the will to define intelligibly structural weaknesses in the society they deplore;