The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron tells the tale of an 1831 slave rebellion; the story is recounted in first person, in Nat’s voice, by its white author.  After the novel's  publication in October of 1967 it became quickly embroiled in a controversy animated by the outrage of black and white intellectuals— critics, historians, novelists and the reading public—that, in many ways, continues even today. 

During my first and only visit to Southampton County, Virginia, where the infamous slave revolt took place nearly one hundred eighty years ago, I wrote this about a similar "investigation" that Styron undertook while researching his book:  "Leaving Southampton that morning, turning over the novel and the rebellion in my mind, I was still looking for Turner, just as Styron did.  Even after my work to synthesize Styron, the South, and the novel’s role in the fractious late sixties through the supposed analytical distance of academic writing, I am still seeking myself in Turner's Rebellion just as Styron did."  At just a short remove--two hours' drive--from the liberal discourse on the novel in which I'd immersed myself, I felt a perverse kind of kinship with the author. [1]  I sympathized with his fetishization of the rebel slave and his irrepressible urge to search for the revolt’s tangible artifacts--the vestiges of a home Nat's band ransacked, the swamp lands where the rebels would've taken their first night’s respite.  I knew what it was to seek a re-invention of my identity as a Southerner in Nat's history.  However, I also knew that the way that Styron's search--broadcast as it was in his novel portraying a pyschologized, pathologized slave South--was received in 1967 articulated the fundamental social, political, and cultural dilemmas presented by that regional identity in 1967.  The novel's role in throwing into high relief these already obvious "dilemmas" is certainly no revelation in itself (and hasn't been since the fury erupted in earnest with the publication of William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond in 1968).  However, Styron's recent death provides us with welcome impetus to examine his life and perhaps best-known work.  Instead of putting his intentions, his execution of them and his personal politics on trial for the thousandth time, whether it be to glorify or condemn, perhaps we might consider The Confessions of Nat Turner as a chance, as yet unseized, to learn something about what it is to be a Southerner and the stories that the South still struggles to tell a waiting nation.

William Styron has his origins in a long line of Southerners; his paternal grandmother, Marianna Clark, came of age on a North Carolina plantation seemingly as extravagant and ill-fated as Belle Reve.  James West, Styron's biographer, does not hesitate to mention Marianna’s two slaves, Drusilla and Lucinda, with whom she spent carefree afternoons "plaiting their hair with ribbons, and knitting woolen socks for them"(West, A Life 7).  This decadent domestic life, however, vanished with the Yankees and the denouement of the Civil War-Reconstruction period; by the time Styron's father was born, the family possessed only modest financial resources.  W. C. Styron met William's mother Pauline in Newport News, Virginia, a year after the U.S. entered World War I.  William was born in June of 1925 and would spend his childhood and adolescence there, fascinated by its boisterous shipyard culture and, as West writes, its "large population of black people"(West, A Life 35).

Styron's early interest in the blacks of Newport News and in Nat Turner's story is specifically legitimized and framed by Styron himself through two well-practiced rhetorical acts that occur not just around Turner, but wherever the subject is the South.  The aforementioned slaves--Drusilla and Lucinda--also open, for example, Styron's 1963 review of a book on slavery (Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas by Frank Tannenbaum): "I can recall with clarity from childhood my North Carolina grandmother's reminiscences of her slaves"(Styron, Dust 35).  This invocation of his relative "closeness" to slavery—like his suggestion in the "Author's Note" that 1831 was both "a long time ago and only yesterday"--captures what being a white Southern liberal means to him.  Styron's is a professed intimacy with slavery that is both subverted and reified by his moral denunciation of and admitted identification with antebellum social relationships. 

In his second oft-repeated recollection, he speaks of a suspiciously fleeting mention of the Nat Turner Rebellion in his "grammar school" textbook on Virginia history--"I do not think it unlikely that it was the very brevity of the allusion . . . which captured my attention and stung my curiosity"(West, Conversations 9).  He goes on to loosely "quote" the passage, which features, in his rendition, words like "fanatical," "terrible" and "cruel" in describing Nat, "give or take," Styron adds, "a few harsh adjectives"(West, Conversations 9).  Such a shaping by Styron of this recollection positions him as a potential redeemer--astute enough, even as a young boy, to recognize the way the white world wished to jettison, to obliterate even, the Southampton Insurrection and to appreciate a lurking power in the tale waiting to be unleashed. 

Styron's fashioning of these early encounters with the historical event presents Turner as a specter with which the author, in a sense, grew up.   Turner and the rebellion were a character and drama--ever evolving in his consciousness--that others overlooked or forgot, but which remained in his memory ready for resurrection.  And finally, perhaps most revealingly, is Styron's own depiction of his not-so-subtle fascination with the black people around him in his native Newport News.  West quotes him as harkening back to Jim Crow Virginia through a highly romanticized montage of memories: "Why were Florence the cook, whom I was so fond of, and old William who mowed the lawn and told me funny stories, finally such strangers, disappearing at night into a world of utter mystery"(West, Conversations 38)?

Styron goes on to admit:

My feelings seem to have been confused and blurred, tinged with sentimentality, colored by a great deal of folklore and wobbling always between a patronizing affection, fostered by my elders, and downright hostility.  Most importantly, my feelings were completely uninformed by that intimate knowledge of black people which Southerners claim as their special patent: indeed, they were based on almost total ignorance.(West, Conversations 10-11)

Despite the successful deployment of these anecdotes and recollections in countless interviews, Styron proved often a reluctant son of the South.  He rather inexplicably refused critics’ attempts to name him as the heir apparent to Faulkner: when asked by George Plimpton in a 1954 interview in the (then-fledgling) Paris Review if Styron approved of being linked to the “southern school” of writing, he responded, "no frankly I don't consider myself in the Southern school, whatever that is.  Lie Down in Darkness[2] or most of it, was set in the South but I don't care if I never write about the South again"(West, Conversations 11).  He asserted that the "tidewater" Virginia setting was incidental to the story, and that only "leitmotifs," such as "the negroes" were "particularly Southern"(West, Conversations 11).

Although a decade separates this interview from the period when he began intense research for The Confessions, it is difficult to imagine that Styron wasn’t processing, as a young writer, the very fixations that are reflected in his memories of his great-grandmother or that irresistibly mysterious mention in a grammar school history book.  One might successfully argue that to be obsessed by Nat Turner (so fully as to have assumed his persona in a novel) is to be obsessed by the South.  Admittedly, Styron was still a very young man when he turned his nose up at the "southern school."  (Perhaps only a suddenly famous twenty-five-year-old author, smoking a cigarette in the Paris sun with another member of the literati could so felicitously contradict himself: just moments later he mused on missing "the old James River" and his hope to "inherit a peanut farm and farm them old peanuts and be real old Southern whisky gentry"(West, Conversations 11)).  He was new to and fashionably critical of any literary "establishment," but his early unwillingness to identify with his native region and later his disgust at "that bastion of prejudice"(French, Rebellious 238) were perhaps the hairline cracks that foretold a broadening gulf.  This gulf stretched between what Styron and The Confessions came to stand for in the political and cultural firestorms of the late sixties and what they might’ve represented in our age-old plight to make sense of the South and successfully integrate it into our national past and present.

Even if only in his most whimsical moments did Styron publicly ally himself with the South, critics were eager to do so in their reviews.  For them, Styron's lineage and upbringing were crucial qualifications—"born and raised not far from Southampton County," quipped reviewer Phillip Rahv, making Styron singularly able as a "white Southern writer" to have "brought it [the novel] off"(Rahv, Confessions).  Now, as then, Styron is regarded as “a graceful, high-minded Southern writer"(Deseret News, Classic A16) and "the logical literary successor to fellow southerner William Faulkner,"(Irish Times, Successor 14) and finally a writer animated by "a Southerner's fierce sense of history [and] guilt over the region's legacy"(Kakutani, Visible E2).  Styron likely considered himself more an ex-patriot than a Southerner by the time Confessions was published, having spent time in Paris and Italy and eventually settling in Massachusetts.  Yet, his "impersonation" of Nat—as he was fond of deeming it—cannot be, at least for the critics, separate from the very stark facts of his whiteness, his Southernness and his determination that the novel could shoulder the region's, the nation's, and the century’s albatross.  The novel, Styron hoped, would allow "both black and white to courageously venture into each other's consciousnesses"(West, Conversations 109). 

Whether this ambition constituted a racist’s vilest arrogance or an artist’s best intentions has already been the subject of what Styron and others have accurately called a "cottage industry."  The conflagration following the book's publication and glowing reception would've been easy to predict (in fact, Styron's close friend and impugned-for-it ally James Baldwin remarked memorably, "Bill's going to get it, from blacks and whites"(Plimpton, Fiction 10)).  Perhaps it would've been unreasonable to ask, in that astonishing historical moment—what I like to think of as Styron and Stokely Carmichael on American history's most disastrous blind date—for the conversation to have taken a broader view, or perhaps a narrower one, and asked what the novel meant to our understanding of the South and its unlikely emissary. 

The closest that either "side" really came to an intellectually rich, rather than politically polemical exchange was a dialogue between historian Eugene Genovese and one of the essayists of Ten Black Writers, critic Vincent Harding.  Genovese questioned the capability of black intellectuals to plumb their own history for its epic heroes and battles as effectively as Styron's novel had.  In answer, Harding wondered what right Genovese had to "arrogate to himself the task of deciding what is in 'obscurity' and what is alive and well in the continuing traditions of black America"(Genovese, Exchange 35).  Their repartee leads us to the heart of the late-sixties dialogue: whites were no longer free to represent black history and black identities with impunity.  But need that have been the final revelation?  The South--albeit ensconced by Styron's descriptions in "taffeta," "verandas" and "gennelmens' brandy"--had found, in many ways, an unexpected ambassador in William Styron(Styron, Confessions 29, 307, 55).  However, present-day commentary on and discussion around the novel and Styron's death reveal that the conversation never expanded—that we didn’t take the opportunities given us in 1968 or since to better understand what Styron and Nat could tell us of the paradoxical and problematical South.

The title of author and critic Dorothy Bryant's as-yet unpublished work--Literary Lynching--highlights the premise of her argument that Styron was a victim of politically and culturally-motivated censoring.  She allows an oft-quoted remark from famed scholar Henry Louis Gates to articulate her thesis: "Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice, and it's just as disgusting when blacks do it as whites"(Bryant, Lynching).  In a similar vein, The Guardian's 2003 profile of Styron quotes critic Michael Anderson: "This country would have been better off if more of its novelists had explored interracial territory . . . Identity politics in politics is stupid enough; in art, it’s execrable"(Campbell, Tidewater).  In the space between censorship and identity politics, contributor to Ten Black Writers and novelist John A. Williams voices a simpler and yet somehow more poignant suggestion: "it was a kind of a native thing, him being a Southerner.  Styron comes out of that seething period of change in American race relations, desegregation in the South, and there's bound to be some baggage you can't get rid of"(Campbell, Tidewater).  Williams is correct; it was a "kind of native thing" but he did not "come out" of that period of change.  Quite the opposite--he, the South of Styron's boyhood and the South of his imagination collided with "that seething period of change" which was taking its own place in the national imagination and initiating a new dialogue between Styron's verandas and the rest of the country.   

Later in her chapter Dorothy Bryant recounts the slow transformation of her attitude toward the novel; finally, she writes, "I had to abandon my politically correct judgment of Styron's racism" borne out of a desire "to placate my increasingly distant black colleagues and my increasingly volatile black students" and instead adopt the "other" view of the novel(Bryant, Lynching).  She lauds "Styron's effort to create a complex, archetypally American hero whose struggle illuminates a central tragedy of our common history"(Bryant, Lynching).   Styron himself made a parallel assertion at the height of the controversy in reply to the suggestion by his interviewer that "Nat was a particularly American type of hero—more or less a-racial."  Nat, claimed Styron, "could not have existed anywhere outside America, even if he were white.  His problems are truly American . . . he reflects a peculiarly frontier sort of experience"(West, Conversations 96). Even at its surface, this is a highly disingenuous musing on his protagonist, yet we might bring it productively to bear on the author’s later lament in his forward to the 25^th Anniversary edition of the novel: "I am less bothered by this boycott [by black readers] in itself . . . than the way in which it represents a continuation of that grim apartness that has defined racial relations in this country and which seems, from all signs and portents, to have worsened over the years since The Confessions of Nat Turner appeared"(Styron, Confessions vi). 

In other words, Styron then makes more burdensome the cultural, the "moral" weight which many readers, critics and fellow writers had heaped on the novel.  It was more than enough for Styron to issue himself that resonant, oft-repeated challenge (centerpiece of his elegiac essay for Faulkner, This Quiet Dust): "every white Southerner," he declared, must abide a "moral imperative [to] . . . come to know the Negro"(Styron, Dust 14). This was a singular edict; it was from, for and about the South and Southerners.  In the course of the same interview that Styron wrongly assessed Nat as "particularly American" he rightly elaborated on that "moral imperative," this time calling it an "imperious moral duty": "the efforts I made to recreate Nat Turner, to bring him back to life, represented at least partially the accomplishment of an imperious moral duty: to get to know the blacks.  Most southern whites can neither know nor go near blacks out of moral fear"(West, Conversations 81). 

Here we have the startling seeds of a thoughtful, honest, potent dialogue about what it meant to be a white Southerner grappling with history, privilege and, as Styron himself names it, "fear."  Does this constitute an American drama and an American dilemma—a "common history?"  The short answer is no.  But Bryant and Styron, Vincent Harding and Eugene Genovese, Ralph Ellison and Robert Penn Warren and countless other readers and reviewers have allowed the novel to escape its most honest, most rigorous critique—as a novel about the South. This critique, had it been endeavored seriously and without bitterness by the Hardings and Genoveses of the world (neither Southerners themselves), is implicitly that which, at its most expansive, might have mediated the rancor and racket of our contemporary race debates, our "grim apartness."  However, what Bryant misses now and what Styron always had, is that the book is not a reflection of our common history (as even the wise luminary James Baldwin asserted), but of the South's often strange odyssey away from guilt and toward an understanding of its past.  The novel is nothing if not an orison to the sphere of myths, lore and pulp history that we are introduced to as Southern children and carry with us, one way or another, into our adult lives as readers and, in many cases, writers of fiction.

Enter John Railey, thirty-five years old, born and raised in Southampton County Virginia.  (It bears remembering that in the no-man's land of the 1968 fray were Southampton whites, descendents of the victims of the rebellion.  The only mention they warranted, it seems, in the many accounts of the controversy is that because of local outcry against Styron's portrayal of Southampton gentry of the 1830s, it would be impossible to film the movie "on location.")  The obituary Railey penned in the week following Styron's death is a moving account of a young man who, unlike nearly all of us, took Styron and The Confessions for what they were.  He writes, "Some of the victims were the ancestors of my friends, and I grew up thinking of Turner as a monster. But Confessions took me inside Turner's head...I'd never condone Turner's violence, just as I'd never condone slavery or its violence. But after reading Styron's book in 1986, I could understand Turner's rage"(Railey, Renowned 23).  Styron had, unknowingly, bestowed his "imperative" upon young Railey, who took from the book some sense of how to re-imagine his own history, how to negotiate what writer Wallace Stegner called the "guilt" that accompanies the "ghost of slavery"(Deseret News, Classic).

In the obituary Railey goes on to say, "Styron and I talked about the conflicted feelings we shared about our South. He'd long ago left it for Connecticut and Massachusetts, but he still had those feelings--as well as a reverence and respect for his homeland"(Railey, Renowned 23).  Railey’s discussion of his "mentor," as he calls Styron, and his very personal transformation instigated by the novel indicate what, perhaps, we--as a reading public forty years ago and today--could have and should have demanded of The Confessions and of Styron.  The author brought a ready public an offering--his own understanding of the South's difficult, un-reconciled legacy and (perhaps more naively in its ambition) what that legacy means to the rest of the country.  Although one can't expect a five-hundred-word obituary to investigate the nuances of The Confessions and determine just what scholars of Southern history and literature must seek to learn from it, this task is well within the purview of anyone wishing to understand the contemporary South.  It is indeed our "moral duty" to pursue Styron's legacy and that of The Confessions in their fullest complexity to whatever transformation—be it that of the native son or the seasoned intellectual—we’re ultimately guided.