The Holocaust becomes a breathtaking personal drama, in the midst of a vast cataclysm, in William Styron's Sophie's Choice, a big and questing novel with autobiographical elements and a fearless determination to explore a particular human dimension of a historical nightmare. The novel speaks through the voice of Styron's alter ego, a polite young Tidewater Virginian called Stingo who comes to New York in 1947 in the hopes of being a writer.
With a small legacy that will enable him to devote himself to writing, Stingo lands in a boarding house in deepest Brooklyn. There he befriends an irresistible character named Nathan Landau, a compelling but deeply disturbed Jewish intellectual who has nursed back to health a beautiful Polish war victim, Sophie Zawistowska, who is now his lover. Stingo revels in his time with his new friends but gradually becomes aware of the shadows that surround them. Their relationship is tormented, even violent. Sophie begins to describe to Stingo her experiences during the war, when-as a Polish Catholic, the daughter of a law professor and the married mother of two-she was persecuted with all the viciousness the Nazis could muster. Her husband and father were murdered, and she and her children were sent to Auschwitz. Sophie lived through it, amazingly, but only in the technical sense, an act of survival that begins with an awful decision she was forced to make. With her unstable lover, she now waits for a fate that seems, to Stingo, as inevitable as it is tragic.
Sophie's Choice is a rare event in late-20th-century American fiction-a bold, substantial novel with serious themes that also tells a riveting story. Styron meditates frequently on the historical dimension of the Holocaust and how such a thing could happen, letting the matter resonate with his own knowledge of oppression that occurred in the American South. The characters are powerfully and engagingly drawn, often with wit and humor, and the novel speaks with great humanity. "It belongs on that small shelf reserved or American masterpieces," Paul Fussell wrote in the Washington Post Book World. "'Sophie's Choice' is in the main stream of the American novel. Like 'A Portrait of a Lady' or 'The Great Gatsby,' it is ... wonderfully human."
Excerpts
Chapter 1...
In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn. This was in 1947, and one of the pleasant features of that summer which I so vividly remember was the weather, which was sunny and mild, flower-fragrant, almost as if the days had been arrested in a seemingly perpetual springtime. I was grateful for that if for nothing else, since my youth, I felt, was at its lowest ebb. At twenty-two, struggling to become some kind of writer, I found that the creative heat which at eighteen had nearly consumed me with its gorgeous, relentless flame had flickered out to a dim pilot light registering little more than a token glow in my breast, or wherever my hungriest aspirations once resided. It was not that I no longer wanted to write, I still yearned passionately to produce the novel which had been for so long captive in my brain. It was only that, having written down the first few fine paragraphs, I could not produce any others, or-to approximate Gertrude Stein's remark about a lesser writer of the Lost Generation-I had the syrup but it wouldn't pour. To make matters worse, I was out of a job and had very little money and was self-exiled to Flatbush-like others of my countrymen, another lean and lonesome young Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the Jews.
Call me Stingo, which was the nickname I was known by in those days, if I was called anything at all. The name derives from my prep-school days down in my native state of Virginia. This school was a pleasant institution to which I was sent at fourteen by my distraught father, who found me difficult to handle after my mother died. Among my other disheveled qualities was apparently an inattention to personal hygiene, hence I soon became known as Stinky. But the years passed. The abrasive labor of time, together with a radical change of habits (I was in fact shamed into becoming almost obsessively clean), gradually wore down the harsh syllabic brusqueness of the name, slurring off into the more attractive, or less unattractive, certainly sportier Stingo. Sometime during my thirties the nickname and I mysteriously parted company, Stingo merely evaporating like a wan ghost out of my existence, leaving me indifferent to the loss. But Stingo I still was during this time about which I write. If, however, it is perplexing that the name is absent from the earlier part of this narrative, it may be understood that I am describing a morbid and solitary period in my life when, like the crazy hermit in the cave on the hill, I was rarely called by any name at all.
Synopsis
One of the two or three finest novels about the Holocaust, Sophie's Choice encapsulates through Sophie's anguished story the sweep and brutality of history. The basis for a famed and honored movie with Meryl Streep (Academy Award Winner), the novel has gained in power through the two decades after its original publication.
About the Author
A Southern-born novelist with anything but a predictably Southern voice or style, William Styron (b. 1925) has created a small but remarkable body of work. Styron was born in Newport News, Va., and graduated from Duke University in 1947, after serving in the Marine Corps. He began his first novel Lie Down in Darkness that same year, though it was not published until 1951, establishing him as one of the most important writers of his generation. After a period in Paris, where he co-founded The Paris Review, Styron returned to the U.S., where he published the acclaimed novella The Long March in 1953 and a large-scale novel Set This House On Fire seven years later.
It was the publication of The Confessions of Nat Turner in 1967 that made Styron a cause célèbre in American letters. Hugely controversial, the novel nonetheless was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for 1967 and later the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Another 12 years would pass before Styron's next novel appeared, and Sophie's Choice (1979) -- which dealt with the Holocaust -- drew a reaction virtually as passionate as that which greeted The Confessions of Nat Turner. Sophie's Choice won the National Book Award in fiction in 1980, and it was recently chosen both by the Modern Library and by the Radcliffe Publishing Course as one of the 100 best novels written in English in the 20th century.
In 1982, Styron published a collection of essays entitled This Quiet Dust and Other Writing. For much of the 1980s, he wrestled with clinical depression, an ordeal that he movingly described in Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, published as a book in 1990. The book was an expanded form of a Vanity Fair article that won a National Magazine Award in 1989. His most recent published work A Tidewater Morning includes three stories told by a boy who grows up in the Tidewater region of Virginia. One of the stories has been made into the film Shadrach, directed by Styron's daughter, for which the author collaborated on the screenplay.
