Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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It is always sad when the world loses a writer, and a good writer at that. This is what I felt when I read the news of the death of William Styron. Not many of us know a great deal, or even a little, about this great American writer. I could have been one of those who know next to nothing about him, had it not been for a meeting I had with him in 1958 at the first Conference of Afro-Asian Writers in Tashkent. Styron was the only American writer, indeed the only writer from the western world, to be invited to a conference so critical of the USA.

The reason Styron was invited, according to my Soviet interpreter, was that with his novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, he had proved himself to be a liberal, an opponent of slavery and racism. I had the luck of knowing Styron and his charming wife Rose, during the 10-day conference. But it was strange to find an American writer participating in a conference that was set up to denounce neo- colonialism, basically a reference to the role of the USA.

But throughout our conversations in Tashkent, we never once discussed that issue. Our conversation centred on literature and the mutuality of writers from different parts of the globe. Writers, I remember him saying, belong to an international class that makes them empathise with each other.

Styron spoke to me about his novels which, at the time, I had to confess that I had not read. Although his first novels had not received favourable reviews he sat down to write his most successful novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Set in the South, where Styron had grown up, the novel is based on a book which is in turn based on a famous slave insurrection that took place in 1831. The text's themes involve race and racism, integration and separatism, and the use of violent means in order to achieve political and social ends.

What created a controversy at the time was that Styron tells the story from the viewpoint of the slave leader, Nat Turner. Styron's achievement in the novel was that he had not confined his language to the lexicon of plantation slaves in the early 19th century. Instead, to accommodate the complexity of Turner's mind, he cast his reflections in the rich, allusive, polysyllabic mode of the early Victorian novel.

While most reviews of the novel were favourable, describing it as an impressive contribution both to contemporary American fiction and to the knowledge of slavery, there were those who attacked it. It may seem surprising that the attack came from the black separatist movement. The crux of the criticism was that, as a white American, Styron had no right to portray the consciousness of a black revolutionary of a century-and-a-half ago.

An explanation of the attack by numerous black critics, together with some white sympathisers, was that at the time of the publication of The Confessions of Nat Turner the blacks were straining as never before to assert their identity and independence of white paternalism.

I met Styron again in Cairo when he came in the company of Arthur Miller. I was invited, with other literati, to meet them in the office of Rashad Rushdi who was at the time Dean of the Academy of the Arts. Styron and I reminisced about the Tashkent Conference, and he informed me that his wife Rose had published a translation of Palestinian poems.

A famous saying by Styron is that "a great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it". This is exactly what I feel whenever I read his novels.