Styron's Survivor: An Honest Witness

SOPHIE’S CHOICE (Random House, $12.95), William Styron’s fifth book, is chiefly about Europe, Jewry, and the Holocaust, and the choice of subjects is likely to puzzle readers who know the author’s earlier work. His career began with Lie Down in Darkness, a family chronicle set in the South and composed in a Gothic-Faulknerian mode; fame and the Pulitzer prize arrived with the appearance of the controversial Confessions of Nat Turner, a historical novel about a slave rebellion; neither these nor Styron’s other books connect, in substance or manner, with Sophie’s Choice.

Everyone familiar with the shameful media treatments of Nazidom over the years has to have felt an obligation to protest. (To cite just one example, there’s a long-rerunning TV sitcom featuring laff-riot SS men—Hogan’s Heroes—that qualifies as a minor national disgrace.) But I wouldn’t have predicted that, among American fictionists of established reputation, the author of Set This House on Fire would have been the figure who met that obligation. And certain signs in Sophie’s Choice suggest that Styron isn’t entirely at ease in his role.

We notice these signs because in this book we often notice William Styron himself. When first glimpsed, the narrator is a provincial youngster in Greenwich Village dreaming of writing the great American novel. The time is 1947. The character’s name is Stingo and the reader is encouraged in a dozen ways to identify him with the author. (Like the young Styron, Stingo hails from Virginia, is a graduate of Duke, served in the Marines, and did a term as a junior editor at McGraw-Hill; like Styron the novelist, Stingo begins his career with a family chronicle set in the South and composed in the GothicFaulknerian mode, and wins fame later with a controversial novel about Nat Turner.) The reader is also encouraged—strongly at the start, intermittently throughout—to regard Stingo the autobiographee as a pivotal person in the tale. In the course of Sophie’s Choice, several members of Stingo’s family are introduced, most notably his father, a southern gentleman of liberal cultivation and some humor. Stingo’s old girlfriends, former bosses, and treasured ancestors (Civil War heroes) — not to mention his hypochondria and drinking habits —are reviewed at length. Chapters are devoted to his bizarre and comic passage through the straits of virginity. And there are many reminders of his effort to writediscussions of obstacles, progress reports, hints of future success. (A trusted friend remarks, after reading the first third of the manuscript of Stingo’s Gothic novel: “That’s the most exciting hundred pages by an unknown writer anyone’s ever read.”)

Yet while the narrator’s perfectly conventional frustration and aspiration are always in the picture, his life furnishes much less of the material of the story than do the lives of people distant from Virginia. In an early chapter of the work, Stingo, fired by McGraw-Hill and lent breathing space by a tiny legacy, moves from Manhattan to a rooming house overlooking Prospect Park in Flatbush, ready to commence writing in earnest. Above him, as he discovers, lives a young, extraordinarily beautiful, polylingual Polish widow named Sophie—Zofia Maria Bieganska Zawistowska—a survivor of Auschwitz whose American sanctuary is a job as secretary to a Queens chiropractor. Stingo meets her and quickly becomes her friend; her life, revealed sometimes through her monologues, sometimes through his historical reconstructions, gradually emerges as central in the book.

A fearful and ponderable life it is, almost from the beginning. Born in Cracow, where both her parents—practicing Catholics—are members of the Jagiellonian University faculty, Sophie is afflicted with an anti-Semitic father, a Germanophile sexist and pedant who dominates her marriage as well as her childhood (her husband is also a university professor and the couple has two children), simultaneously mocking her as an inferior intelligence and indoctrinating her in the language and culture of the super-race. And her entire life is dogged with ironies in which antiSemitism is mysteriously pervasive. Her father, author of a pamphlet advocating the extermination of the Jews, is himself murdered by the Nazi invaders (Sophie’s husband perishes in the same execution). Sent to Auschwitz with her two children as punishment for smuggling meat to her consumptive mother, Sophie tries in desperation to use her father’s wretched writings as part of a mercy plea addressed to the camp commander; the effort crazily backfires. In America, having survived (as her children did not) the abominations of the concentration camp, Sophie comes under the protectorship of one Nathan Landau, self-identified as a scientistonly to learn, in a final crisis, that she still isn’t free of the coils of Antisemitismus. Landau, it appears, is both more and less than a savior; he’s a drug addict, an obsessive, a sadomasochist— and, in his own concept, an avenger of the slain Jews. He perceives Sophie as a soulless hypocrite, one whose survival is proof of her participation in the unspeakable atrocities committed by her captors. (Landau is a second link to Stingo; all three principals of Sophie’s Choice live in the same Flatbush rooming house and are, briefly, an inseparable trio—music enthusiasts, Coney Island fans, confidants.)

Along narrative (more than 500 oversized, tightly printed pages), circumstantially detailed, Sophie’s Choice has defects as a work of fiction. About many events in the heroine’s life the narrator has no direct knowledge, which means that Sophie must tell all, slipping into a volubility awkward in someone first presented as a human being of style and dignity. (Stingo asks us to believe that a taste for American bourbon, rather than a spell of the novelistic clumsies, lies behind Sophie’s garrulousness, but he’s unconvincing.) The events are both hideous and unsurprising. At Auschwitz, with the smoke of burning Jews in her lungs, Sophie is raped by a female guard, obliged to choose which of her children will be murdered first, and endures unimaginable degradation—yet scarcely a word of what happens to her is new to print. And the narrator is hyperconscious of this, alluding often to the literature of the Holocaust—works by Hannah Arendt, Bruno Bettelheim, George Steiner, and others—for parallels to, and commentaries on, Sophie’s case.

Subtler problems grow from these roots, erupting from page to page and frequently disengaging the reader’s feelings. The author’s honorable sense of responsibility to sources leads to incongruous, reductive juxtapositions. At one of the most intensely imagined moments in the book, Sophie, at work in the camp headquarters, suddenly hears sacred music issuing from a phonograph that usually plays nothing but dreck:

The Elysian chorus, thrusting itself up through the muttering chatter of [the camp commandant] and his aide below, stabbed her with such astonished exaltation that she rose spontaneously from her seat at the typewriter, as if in homage, faintly trembling. What on earth had happened? . . . The ecstatic hosanna moved across her skin like divine hands, touching her with ecstatic ice; chill after chill coursed through her flesh; for long seconds the fog and night of her existence, through which she had stumbled like a sleepwalker, evaporated as if melted by the burning sun.

She goes to the window and finds the seasonably drab natural world outside—bare meadow, grazing livestock, autumnal woods beyond —“transmuted by the music’s incandescence into a towering frieze of withering but majestic foliage, implausibly beautiful, aglow with immanent grace.” She begins to pray, but the music is abruptly cut off, stopping the words of the paternoster in her throat, and, as she remembers later, “it was at that moment that I [began] to lose my faith. ... I felt this emptiness. It was like finding something precious in a dream where it is all so real —something or someone, I mean, unbelievably precious—only to wake up and realize the precious person is gone.”

After a second or so the phonograph resumes, this time with “The Beer Barrel Polka” —a touch of the banality of evil that fascinated Dr. Arendt—but it’s not the musical banality that dissipates the force of the scene. It is instead an academic banality. One moment after seizing the imagination with a vision of Sophie at the borders of unbelief, the narrator launches a discourse on treatises concerning the technology of depots of mass murder. (“ . . . Richard L. Rubenstein has written in his masterful little book The Cunning of History,” etc.) Ears tuned to the Elysian chorus and the powerful purities of Psalms, caught and held by the sound of an inner shattering of faith, adjust only with difficulty to the judgmental tinkle of “surveys of existing scholarship.”

Uneasy disengagement is one result, as I say. Another is a tic of skepticism—fear that the novelist, when he undertakes to probe the foundations of individual behavior, is settling too quickly for the received wisdom of those who have preceded him in the “field.” Why does Sophie hang on so doggedly with Nathan Landau, her accuser and tormentor? How can love nourish itself on insult and mauling? Obvious: she’s victimized by a survivor’s sense of guilt; feels vulnerable because, where millions were slain, she escaped; knows that, had she dared to risk herself fearlessly, she might have helped someone else to live. This is the “answer” ratified in Holocaust literature—nothing sounder, nothing more psychologically right, than the theory of survivor guilt. Yet the answer feels, in this context, pat and unparticularized—too much like a solution to a problem, too little like an entrance into the full mystery of a unique self.

Other problems surface, large and small, none more significant than that presented by the narrator himself—or rather by the immense gap between the youthful Stingo’s level of comprehension and the inexpressible horror through which his friend has passed. William Styron is by no means unaware of this gap. His Stingo quotes an apposite passage in George Steiner which asserts that “it is not clear ‘that those who were not themselves fully involved should touch upon these agonies unscathed.’ ” Stingo hungers to recall what toys held his attention as a southern boy in America on the day Sophie arrived at Auschwitz:

And what, I have asked myself . . . were the activities of old Stingo, buck private in the United States Marine Corps, at the moment when the terrible last dust—in a translucent curtain of powdery siftings so thick that, in Sophie’s words, “you could taste it on the lips like sand”—of some 2,100 Jews from Athens and the Greek islands billowed across the vista? . . .

A letter of his that his father saved discloses that, on the day in question, his entire eighteen-year-old being was focused upon an upcoming Duke versus Tennessee football game. But while Stingo is shaken by this discovery, he isn’t transformed by it; he’s incapable of becoming the fit audience for Sophie’s story because the measure of her tragedy is beyond him. And his weakness inevitably diminishes the emotional impact of the work.

From none of this does it follow, though, that Sophie’s Choice is a failure—merely another of the relentlessly overreaching blockbusters that litter the landscape of late twentieth-century American letters. Looked at in terms of craft, even with defects weighed, it’s a far from negligible enterprise. Three complex stories—the friendship of Sophie, Nathan, and Stingo, Sophie’s youth and her fifteen months at Auschwitz, the chaos and ruin of her love affair with Nathan Landau—are artfully woven into Stingo’s youthful selfabsorption. Changes of key and pace are unobtrusively managed. The principals speak with recognizably personal accents, becoming characters by virtue of possessing individual voices.

And, enormously more important, the book is animated throughout by a courageously judged sense of mission. At times, to be sure, the grip loosens— as when Stingo beamishly concludes that his mission is laboriously to construct his thoughts and actions in the days and years of the Holocaust. But in the main William Styron holds fast to two most urgent and relevant truths. The first is that the task of searching for a language not wholly incommensurate to the slaughter of the six million can never be finished. The second is that, in Western culture, in quarters more influential than those in which sitcoms such as Hogan’s Heroes are manufactured, that search has in recent times taken a turn that is potentially dangerous to the future of our kind.

A widely acclaimed Italian film— Lina Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties— presents the gas chambers as an interlude in an entertainment: absurdist chic in which GIs and Nazi Jew-burners are indistinguishable. A widely acclaimed contemporary historical analysis—Terrence Des Pres’s TheSurvivor— presents the gas chambers as a setting for the triumph of existential heroes (the survivors) over cowardly dwarfs (the slain): a beyond-culture epic in which the arrival of Allied troops is immaterial to those still alive in the concentration camps. A widely acclaimed television program—NBC’s Holocaust—presents the gas chambers as a fadeout to a contest between white hats and black hats: an Old World western that “personalizes” cataclysm. Everywhere, as Bruno Bettelheim points out in a recent essay surveying these and related contemporary intellectual responses to the Holocaust, “the survivors are . . . being used to bear witness to the opposite of the truth.”

No such witnessing occurs in this book. Like several works in the Styron canon, it is smutched in places by morbidity and exhibitionism, and, to repeat, it never takes full command of the heart in the manner of classic fictional achievement. But its reading of mass murder is serious to the core. The portrait of Sophie in terror of the gas chambers reaches toward the full truth of human panic at the edge of oblivion. The portrait of Nathan Landau grasps the maddening force of the “outsider’s” impotent rage at the slaughter of his people. The portrait of Stingo, despite its embarrassments, shows us the lameness of our own incomprehension. And the overall scale and tone, the willingness to ask some height of the reader, the quality of the book’s ambition to be adequate to a major moral challenge, stand forth, well before the end, as thoroughly admirable.

There are successes in letters whose measurement requires alertness first to pressing cultural need rather than to formal excellence and aesthetic accomplishment. Sophie’s Choice is one of them.