Survivor syndrome

In late middle age, William Styron was struck by a disabling illness, when everything seemed colourless, futile and empty to him. In fact, as he recalled in Darkness Visisble (1990), he was suicidally depressed. So when he died in 2006, at the age of 81, it was assumed he had taken his life. His father, a Virginia-born engineer, had, moreover, been a depressive himself, and maybe a suicidal tendency had transmitted down the generation, like a dangerous gene? In reality, the author of Sophie’s Choice had died of pneumonia, complicated by alcoholism and addiction to tranquilisers.

A lifelong malcontent, Styron indeed had few reasons to be cheerful. In The Suicide Run, a posthumous collection of short stories, he chronicles his gruelling experience in the US marines during the second world war. As a platoon leader stationed in Okinawa, Styron grew to detest the enemy (‘I caught the contagion of Jap hatred’), and says he would happily have killed. In pages of pungent prose, he conjures the ‘hot funky stench’ of jungle warfare in the Pacific and the terror of amphibious landings in the face of Japanese fire.

After the nightmare intensity of the marines, however, his release back into civilian life in America was even more traumatic. Like all exiles, he felt he had come home to a different world. Everywhere he went in his native Virginia, people spoke fearfully of Russia’s atom bomb and asked how long it would be before a Red Square appeared in Washington. Styron felt unable to share in the instinctive anti-Communism and, he writes in ‘Marriott, the Marine’, this only added to his feeling of loneliness and alienation. In ‘My Father’s House’, begun as a novel in 1985, he recalls his state of ‘shock’ following his Pacific ordeal and his attempts afterwards to find relief in sex and booze.