Reading William Styron

Quite by chance, I stumbled upon William Styron recently. I haven’t read any of his novels but I did read his short memoir titled “Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness” (New York: Random House, 1990). In it, Styron reveals the utter alienating experience of depression, which has led him to almost commit suicide.

As I opened the book (it is quite short, just above 70 pages), I was saying to myself “why on Earth are you reading about depression and the possibilities of suicide? Shouldn’t you read something more FUN or relaxing?” Maybe it was my melancholic disposition but I ignored this self-imposed question and continued reading.

I was mesmerized by Styron’s words. They were flowing most perfectly: one word attached to another and another completely and fully meant for one another. I approached this book with caution, like any writer’s confession. Sometimes, writers can be either self-congratulatory or self-pitying and this characterization deters me from reading. But this was not the case with Styron’s memoir. His words were almost journalistic and factual, and yet they were also interlaced with the deep connection to his soul and his soul’s imprisonment by depression.

The prose (I call it prose because it reads that way) of this memoir is exceptional. Styron tells us that he does not live in a vacuum; his depression is not separate from everyday life and his literary life. He quotes Albert Camus who wrote that “judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” Well, I perhaps would not go that far as to say that Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” is fundamental but it certainly maintains a great presence in the philosophical examination of our lives.

Styron’s constant companion was not only depression but its ugly attachments: dread and anxiety. Dread, which I have experienced on many occasions (and wish it happened less) is a strange experience. I do not consider dread to be an entity or to have a “being.” Like evil, I consider it an absence of being, and I think that it needs human soul in order to gain structure. So, how do you even speak of such ghostly attack? Of course, Kierkegaard is one of the first philosophers who truly looked at this reality of dread, so the reader may want to peruse his work on the subject. I have always wondered whether one should even spend time writing (talking) about depression or dread since at times, it can take one into a psychonanalytic dead end. I don’t particularly care for a constant psychologizing of our soul that is present in our society. But this is not what Styron has done. He has simply given voice to his pain and explored the phenomenology of dread in the most honest way.

It is true that he mentions different psychological aspects of depression that have plagued him but he never gives it power. As I read this book, I realized that one needs to truly stay in reality about everything, even if it means acknowledging that there is such thing as dread in one’s life. For instance, Walker Percy lived most of his life in fear that he might commit suicide (especially given his family history). But never did he compromise his faith.

Talk of God in Styron’s memoir is barely visible. It’s only slightly implied. In fact, I don’t even know if he believed in God. But it does strike me as quite interesting that he steers his mind and heart towards the Yes of life, despite the listlessness, the ever-present impending doom and fear of loss that he felt. He writes about the unknowability and blackness of depression and dread and uses the analogy he finds in Dante:

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.

Accepting reality of one’s pain does not mean accepting possible nihilistic outcomes. And Styron does not. He does overcome the plunge towards darkness that was leading him to the seemingly inevitable suicide. He says that “one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul’s annihilation. For those who have dwelt in depression’s dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell’s black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as the ‘shining world’.”

Styron ends the book with Dante: “And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.”