This Quiet Dust

A picture of my own copy of this book

I have just finished reading the collected prose writings of William Styron, or in full William Clark Styron, Jr. (1925 – 2006) who was a widely recognised American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.  He was best known for his novels, including: Lie Down in Darkness (1951), his acclaimed first novel, published at the young age of 26; The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), narrated by Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 Virginia slave revolt and the famous novel Sophie's Choice (1979), a story "told through the eyes of a young aspiring writer from the South, about a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz and her brilliant but troubled Jewish lover in postwar Brooklyn"  and which became even more famous because the film that was made of this last work. The novel The Confessions of Nat Turner caused a furore when published, as many readers questioned how a Caucasian novelist from the South could get into the head of a nineteenth-century African American Revolutionary.

The present reviewer became aware of Styron having read much of his  Darkness Visible while a patient in a psychiatric hospital for some seven weeks in 1998.  This memoir of depression was published in 1990. It was originally intended as a series of magazine articles, chronicling the author's descent into depression and his near-fatal night of "despair beyond despair."

When I came across a remaindered copy of This Quiet Dust by William Styron some years back I immediately bought it.  Unfortunately, I have to admit that I haven't read any of Stryon's creative work or his novels.  This is something I have to rectify as soon as possible.  If you are a book lover like me, you probably have many books waiting to be read.  However, I like the fact that so many books vie for my attention.  This Quiet Dust was published in 1982 and expanded in 1993.  My edition is the Vintage edition of 2000.

Styron collects much of his published prose throughout his long life.  I especially liked section one which describes well the life of the Southern States of the U.S.  He starts his collected prose with a defence of his great novel The Confessions of Nat Turner.  Styron was a Virginian like Nat Turner and knew well the power of racism, which, of course, he found utterly revolting.  Like any great author, or even lesser authors as a matter of fact, his prose is shot through with searing honesty.  I have long believed that honesty is the hallmark of all good literature.  A work that possesses a tone of dishonesty or inauthenticity is, by that fact alone, simply bad literature.  Styron (in the first essay, written in 1965) admits that as a young lad, he knew very little about black people because such ignorance was fostered by "an almost complete lack of contact." (p.11)  He goes on to call this the prevailing and continuing "apartheid" (p.13) of the South.  He states that what he was about in Nat Turner was "to come to know the Negro" and that this was and is "the moral imperative of every Southerner." (Good to read these words from a 1965 article!)

Then, as always, I love the sheer literary allusion and nearing the end of this first essay he tells us where his title "This Quiet Dust" came from.  Its provenance is in a poem by the inimitable Emily Dickinson.  I'll quote the poem in full here:

This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies
And lads and girls;
Was laughter and ability and sighing,
And frocks and curls;

This passive place a summer's nimble mansion,
Where bloom and bees
Fulfilled their oriental circuit,
Then ceased like these.

Ultimately, all things cease to be and lie silent in "this quiet dust."

There is also a good essay on the addiction to smoking within these covers.  He adverts to our love of risk as human beings and that perhaps this is a big factor in this particular addiction as in any other.  He describes smoking as "a cheerless, grubby, fumbling addiction." (p. 67)  Styron rehearses all the arguments against this nasty habit, not the least its obvious carcinogenic nature, and adds a footnote to this piece from 1963 that many of his friends gave up smoking after reading that piece.  For such an early piece of journalism, it shows extraordinary prescience.  He was obviously proud that the effect of his writing could be so powerful.  His elegy on F. Scott Fitzgerald is informative and extremely moving and well worth reading if you love that particular American author as I do.  Alcoholism and mental illness were the diseases suffered by F. Scott and his wife Zelda respectively.  He offers interesting insights into both these wounded people.  He quotes a beautiful empathetic letter from the hand of F. Scott to a bereaved friend - also well worth reading and contemplating. (See p. 93)  In other words, it takes a wounded healer to show such depths of empathy - there's a lot of truth here!

Among other essays anthologised here, I especially liked "The Joint" which is an account of life in a prison, viz., Jacksonville Jail based on a review of James Blake's book of letters on that same prison.  I loved his terse succinct description of these letters thus: "their consistent readability, the secret of which is a lilting, rueful, bittersweet awareness of the sheer monstrousness of things..." (Ibid., p. 155)  

There are many other interesting and gripping essays in this volume, viz., an Op-Ed article from May 1987 on "Death Row" and another on why "Primo Levi Need Not Have Died."  In this latter, I especially liked his description of his own clinical depression:

"In the winter of 1985-86, I committed myself to a mental hospital because the pain of depression from which I had suffered for more than five months had become intolerable.  I never attempted suicide, but the possibility had become more real and the desire more greedy as each wintry day passed and the illness became more smotheringly intense.

What had begun that summer as an off-and-on malaise and a vague, spooky restlessness had gained gradual momentum until my nights were without sleep and my days were pervaded by a grey drizzle of unrelenting sorrow.  This horror is virtually indescribable since it bears no relation to normal experience.

In depression, a kind of biochemical meltdown, it is the brain as well as the mind becomes ill - as ill as any other besieged organ.  The sick brain plays evil tricks on its inhabiting spirit.  Slowly overwhelmed by the struggle, the intellect blurs into stupidity.  All capacity for pleasure disappears, and despair maintains a merciless daily drumming.  The smallest commonplace of domestic life, so amiable to the healthy mind, lacerates like a blade. " (Ibid., p. 170)

There is much else of worth in this volume, not to mention a good essay on the futility of war.  It is a fascinating read.