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William Styron was interviewed by this magazine over forty years ago—actually in its fifth issue. It would seem provident enough that he should be interviewed again; his work since that time has placed him in the forefront of contemporary letters. In 1968, he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Confessions of Nat Turner; in 1980, he won the American Book Award for Sophie’s Choice. His account of depression, Darkness Visible, was an acclaimed best-seller. His awards and decorations are many, including the highest rank (commandeur) of the Légion d’honneur from France.

It is especially timely that the interview appear in this celebratory number* since Styron, a friend of the editors, wrote (in the form of a “Letter to an Editor”) an outline of the magazine’s principles in the first issue, back in the spring of 1953.

This interview took place last year in New York City’s 92nd Street YMHA. The place, including the balcony, was packed.

 

INTERVIEWER

When William Styron was interviewed by The Paris Review in 1954, he was the only contemporary the editors knew who actually had written a novel. Peter Matthiessen, one of the magazine’s cofounders, was working on his first novel, Race Rock; Harold Humes, another cofounder, was working on an astonishing novel called The Underground City; I was working on a children’s book called The Rabbit’s Umbrella, a classic known only to those few who have read it. Bill had written this remarkable novel, Lie Down in Darkness; he was the first of a younger generation of writers to join the pantheon of people interviewed by The Paris Review. The interview was done by Peter Matthiessen and myself in a little café called Patrick’s—an odd name for a Paris café. I thought it would be interesting to ask him some of the same questions that he was asked way back then, when he was twenty-eight years old. The first question was, “Why do you write?” You said, “I wish I knew. I wanted to express myself, I guess.” Do you have anything to add?  

WILLIAM STYRON

I think it still applies, but I can’t imagine saying anything so dopey!  

INTERVIEWER

Then we asked, “Do you enjoy writing?” You said, “I certainly don’t.”  

STYRON

That still applies—in spades. I thought that by now it would be a snap, but it’s every bit as hard as it was then, if not harder. It’s hard because there are vast baggages and impediments of one’s personality that one has dragged through life, which intervene rather than open up one’s creative energies—they come between one’s desire and one’s fulfillment.  

INTERVIEWER

What would some of these impediments be?  

STYRON

Probably in my case a chronic history of depression, for which I’ve become, reluctantly, famous.  

INTERVIEWER

I’ve heard you talk about how much music has meant to you. What is your relationship with music?  

STYRON

I’ve said before that I don’t think that I would have been able to write a single word had it not been for music as a force in my life. I come from a musical family: my mother had studied voice in Vienna and she played music a lot. We had a primitive phonograph on which she played classical music, baroque music, romantic music; and she often accompanied herself on piano. I was immersed in music from the beginning and I never lost the sense that music is the ultimate inspiration—the wellspring for my creativity. I became enraptured in my early youth by Country and Western, then called hillbilly music. I remember how appalled my mother and father were when they found out that I was in love with hillbilly music. It disturbed them a little. But for me music has an eclectic appeal—classical, country, jazz, the swing music of the forties, some of the rousing Protestant hymns. At their best all of these modes can transport me.  

INTERVIEWER

Would you rather have been a pianist or a guitar player than a writer? Surely it must have crossed your mind?  

STYRON

No, I don’t think I have the gift for that, although I can still play the harmonica, a talent I acquired when I was around six. Also, my singing voice is reasonably melodious.  

INTERVIEWER

What is the connection between music and writing?  

STYRON

I think it’s the emotion. For many years one of the touchstones of my musical experience has been the Sinfonia Concertante of Mozart for violin and viola. It runs the gamut of human emotion. It’s like opening up windows onto all the magic in the world. I still play it regularly after all these years, responding to it as a writer in terms of the inspiration that it provides me. But there are dozens of compositions—not all of them classical—that come close to affecting me with the same power. In the proper mood I have been as deeply moved by a ballad sung by Emmylou Harris as by the Missa Solemnis.