Fathers who are writers and their daughters --- as a writer with a little girl in the house, I find that a fascinating topic. I should think any man who has daughters would, for it's generally understood that there is nothing more important to the development of a girl's healthy self-esteem than her relationship with her father.
And who would be more sensitive to that --- who would have more to teach us about that --- than a writer?
Then there's real life.
When a movie producer offered John Cheever $25,000 for a year's option on a novel, he rejected the offer. But it's how Cheever rejected it that was memorable --- indeed, thirty years after he told me this story, during an interview for a New York Times profile, I can still imitate his patrician honk. "My daughter wrote a book, and she got that much for six months," he told the film producer, "and she's still in the kindergarten."
Writing that, I imagined how Susan Cheever would feel about that cutting remark. Why did I leave it in? Because I was pretty sure it wasn't the first time he'd snarked at her.
John Updike was more paternal. After his death, his son David wrote: "....he was still asleep when we went to school, and was often home already when we got back. When we appeared unannounced, in his office -- on the second floor of a building he shared with a dentist, accountants and the Dolphin Restaurant -- he always seemed happy and amused to see us, stopped typing to talk and dole out some money for movies. But as soon as we were out the door, we could hear the typing resume, clattering with us down the stairs."
William Styron was also asleep when his four kids --- three girls and a boy --- went off to school. In the afternoon, when they returned home, he wasn't to be disturbed. "So it was sometimes not until he came out to prepare dinner or sharpen his pencils that I ever got a glimpse of him," Alexandra Styron writes in her memoir, "Reading My Father." At which point he might tell a story calculated to frighten his youngest daughter. Or ask her to produce a bottle of wine. Which led to a night of drinking and parental conversations on the order of "I can't stand it any more... Oh, Bill, please don't be that way....I'm leaving."
William Styron may have been a Great American Novelist --- he won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and the film of his novel, Sophie's Choice, won multiple Academy Awards --- but he was not, in this account, a nurturing and supportive father. He couldn't be, really. He lived for his work. And that wasn't easy, for in addition to the monumental challenge of writing was a depression so severe he contemplated suicide and had to be hospitalized repeatedly.
Alexandra was the youngest child. Her self-appointed role was court jester: making Daddy laugh, jollying him into a decent mood. It was exhausting work, and she was no match for his despair, his drinking, his affairs --- and that's just the first tier of his flaws as a man, a husband, a father. It was, she says, "a relief" when he breathed his last.
And yet she loved him --- that's the through line of this artful, disturbing, touching memoir. She loved him for his fame, for his circle of celebrated friends, for the sweet life he provided. That is, she loved him for all the wrong reasons. But --- and here's where the book is heartbreaking and important --- she loved him for the right ones too. And this is the glory of her memoir, for as Styron falters, becomes infirm and slides toward death, she finally makes a connection with him.
The chronicle of the lost daughter and the inattentive and creepy father is the reason to read the book. That means you may be tempted to skim the first half of the book --- in those pages, she draws on her father's papers in the library at Duke University to serve up a biography of her father.
And this is a problem, for the harsh truth is that William Styron will not be remembered as a Great Writer. Oh, all his books are in print but twenty years from now the only Styron books that civilians will voluntarily choose to read are his 96-page book on depression, "Darkness Visible," and, because they saw the movie, "Sophie's Choice." The rest will be Required Reading in some American Lit classes.
It's not just Styron who will suffer this fate. Norman Mailer, James Jones --- in a world that has moved beyond macho and boozing and random sex, all those hard-drinking, big-ego writers who sought to tame the Great American Novel are doomed to be footnotes. Alexandra Styron almost makes the case for her father --- of them all, he was the least macho, the most artistic --- but nothing really can make me want to drop everything and read the 480 pages of The Confessions of Nat Turner or the 416 pages of Lie Down in Darkness or even Sophie's Choice, which is a hefty 576 pages.
"Reading My Father" comes to us in 281 pages. Many, as I say, will only appeal to those who are in the William Styron Fan Club. But the passages of a daughter reaching out to her father, not connecting, losing herself for years, drifting, choosing the wrong men and the wrong career, and then, toward the end, learning to forgive, learning how to take his hand --- yes, that's a book I care about. As would any adult who recalls a damaged childhood, as would any parents who want to do better for their kids.
