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described here than a mind like mine, looking for what it is looking for,
can really fathom. Psychiatrists are always on their way down, plumbing
this or that depth ; they don't quite know what to do with someone who
is kicking
his
way
up,
fighting his way to the surface for air and rescue,
for freedom, a word used possessively and cheaply in America to describe
what white men obtained for themselves and denied to all others–
Indians, Negroes, Mexicans.
I suppose it is true that William Styron has also tried to understand
and give expression to the "innermost" feelings of a slave, and by
extension the "real" Negro the rest of us simply fail to acknowledge or
comprehend. In fact, it is a little sad to read some of the good and bad
things said of his new novel, particularly the comments that dwell upon
its psychological accuracy or deplore its historical failures. We hear that
Styron has done the miraculous, transcended race, time and class to reach
Nat Turner's "mind" and put its worst preoccupations and most noble
moments to print. We hear that Styron has shown himself just another
bourgeois writer : he makes something special and different out of Nat
and out of one revolt among manYi and he refuses Negroes their
general
anger and discontent,
in
the face of which the South inevitably had to
be harsh and repressive (and was,
before
Nat Turner's rebellion).
And finally, we are told that Nat is simply not believable: the lan–
guage is obviously Styron's, Styron straining hard rather than Nat talking
naturally. Approved or disapproved as if it were a piece of research
written by a social scientist - its
psychology
is good, its sense of
history
and its
sociology
or
anthropology
excellent or questionable - this is in
fact a novel written by one of our best contemporary novelists. Styron
either comes off knowing the virtually unknowable -for a white man;
or he is told that he needs to know nineteenth-century society much bet–
ter, needs a few "field trips," needs to pick up more of the Negro's
dialect (which he actually uses to great effect) and then draw on
it,
rather than his own voice and style of expression. Styron himself makes
it very clear that he is trying to write a "meditation on history." There is
nothing evasive or sly about the expression; it tells as much or as little
as the word "novel" does. Perhaps the author could not simply assume
the integrity and validity of his own novel because he lives in our time,
when old-fashioned literary critics are less menacing than their more
"objective" successors, who have all those new "methodological tools"
to fall back upon.
On New Year's Day, 1967, in Roxbury, Connecticut, Styron must
have known "deep down" as he wrote his "Author's Note" that he would
be called before Freud, or Marx, or Stanley Elkins, or Frederick Law
Olmstead, or Malinowski or
C.
Wright Mills - even as Oscar Lewis
is
