A life well lived is the phrase that comes to mind reading Rose Styron’s new book, “Beyond This Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart.” Styron takes us through her very full life with chapters chock-full of details about the who, whats, whens, and wheres of particular episodes, and great black-and-white photographs augment the stories.
Styron opens with a bang, telling us of her intrigue-ridden trip to Pinochet-ruled Chile as a founding member of Amnesty International USA. The scene begins with her in a pool, tossing around a big red beach ball with some Chilean women, gathering information about imprisoned or “disappeared” ministers, artists, and American students to bring back to First Lady Hortensia Allende for her speech at the U.N. What follows reads like an espionage novel. Styron gives us a good many examples of these types of adventures in numerous repressive regimes around the world, where her life was in danger in the pursuit of the work to which she has been profoundly dedicated.
There’s plenty, of course, about her and her famous writer husband Bill’s life, starting with their courtship and marriage. The very first time Styron met him, she was unimpressed, writing, “I don’t recall even shaking hands.” But when seeing Styron again, this time with Truman Capote, she writes that Capote “piped up in his high-pitched Southern voice, ‘Bill, you out to marry that girl!’” At the time, she hadn’t heard of his highly acclaimed recent book, “Lie Down in Darkness,” and went out to buy a copy.
Styron shares honestly about Bill and their love, as well as the challenges in their marriage, including his disinterest in her own writing, and his tremendous anxiety whenever she traveled afar and, at times, just out and about for her political work. The chapters on his first and second depressions, which included electroshock therapy, convey the intensity of the experience for him and the impact on her and the family. Styron writes candidly, “For me, one of the worst side effects … was that it stimulated in Bill a pathological guilt about all the ways he thought he had wronged the family and me over our many years together. Though my suffering was nothing compared to what he was enduring, I had lost my equilibrium. I took one hour at a time. His going over his affairs, his selfishness, his cruelties felt overwhelming and unbearable … I’m sure it was harder for the children. And of course we had lived in a code of silence. I had always needed to look forward to keep our glass half full. I don’t know how the children handled his confessions … We all just tried to keep our heads above water. I regret having said over and over, in effect, that everything had been okay. Pollyanna couldn’t handle it.”
Styron writes equally as revealingly about the unfolding of Bill’s death, as well as how she mourned and began to heal, which included solace in writing poetry again: “After Bill’s death, I stayed on the Vineyard, writing poems every morning, creating a year’s diary of grief and healing noted from the window of our bedroom overlooking the ever-changing harbor … Following Bill’s death, poetry flowed once more. I moved full circle back to my poet self that existed before I met Bill, though its raiments were, of course, different.”
Throughout, Styron writes about their many well-known friends, ranging from those in the arts to literature and politics. Just a taste includes Peter Matthiessen, Václav Havel, Arthur Miller, George Plimpton, Carly Simon, and James Baldwin — who encouraged William Styron to write “The Confessions of Nat Turner” in the first person. Among the many others were Ted Kennedy and his family, who came for boisterous sleepovers, Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra, and Robert Penn Warren. There is a particularly amusing story of hosting a dinner with President Clinton and Gabriel García Márquez, and another where Styron and Kay Graham rush around here on the Vineyard readying a house for Bill and Hillary Clinton, since they would be staying at Bob McNamara’s place, which was inconveniently unoutfitted.
Styron, of course, is known in her own right as a poet. We learn that her love of words began early, reading and writing by 4 years old, and later studying poetry at Wellesley, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins. She began publishing poetry as a young woman, although put it aside when marrying and raising the children, not returning to it assiduously and considering herself a poet again until the end of the 20th century. She writes, “I slid the poems I still wrote regularly into a drawer, and there they sat. I didn’t read those poems to Bill. He was happy that I was writing, but he wasn’t involved in my work. It hurt my feelings a lot at first, but I put it down to his writer’s natural narcissism. I didn’t know how to have a good marriage and an independent, time-consuming literary career.”
But Styron also makes no bones about how her outside life — not just with Amnesty, but also as the chair of the PEN America Freedom to Write Committee, and part of the Council on Foreign Relations — meant making trips to places such as war-torn El Salvador, Belfast, Moscow, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Bosnia, and there was her and Kurt Vonnegut’s trip to Poland, which like the others, was full of intrigue. She also loved to travel, and did a good deal of it with friends and family.
Styron writes about the Vineyard a good deal, and the importance of their home and life here. On their initial visit, it was Lillian Hellman who encouraged Bill and Rose Styron to rent a place, which they did from 1960 to 1963. Next, they bought a vacation home here, where Styron now lives year-round. She writes with great affection, “The Vineyard this half-century has awarded me scores of close friends and interesting co-conspirators young and old, besides my beautiful burgeoning family.”
“Beyond This Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart” by Rose Styron, available at Bunch of Grapes and Edgartown Books.
Rose Styron will appear at the West Tisbury library in conversation with Vicky Wilson, senior editor and vice president at Knopf, on July 31, at the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival in early August, and at Islanders Write, in an interview with James Lapine, on August 21.
