Sophie's Choice - William Styron [69]
“What do you mean?” I said with genuine curiosity. “What’s so courageous about writing about the South?” I was pouring the two of us coffee on one of those mornings during the week after our outing to Coney Island. Defying habit, I had for several days risen just past dawn, propelled to my table by the electric urgency I have described, and had written steadily for two hours or more. I had completed one of those (for me) fantastic sprints—a thousand words or thereabouts—which was to characterize this stage of the book’s creation, I felt a bit winded, and therefore Nathan’s knock at my door as he passed on his way to work was a welcome distraction. He had popped in on me like this for several mornings running and I enjoyed the byplay. He was up very early these days, he had explained, leaving for his laboratory at Pfizer because of some very important bacterial cultures that needed his observation. He had attempted to describe his experiment to me in detail—it had to do with amniotic fluid and the fetus of a rabbit, including weird stuff about enzymes and ion transference—but he had given up on me with an understanding laugh when, having taken me beyond my depth, he saw my look of pain and boredom. The failure of any mental connection had been my fault, not Nathan’s, for he had been precise and articulate. It was just that I possessed small wit or patience for scientific abstractions, and this was something I think I deplored in myself as much as I envied the capacious and catholic range of Nathan’s mind. His ability, for example, to switch from enzymes to Quality Lit., as he did now.
“I don’t think it’s any big deal for me to be writing about the South,” I went on, “it’s the place I know the best. Dem ole cotton fields at home.”
“I don’t mean that,” he replied. “It’s simply that you’re at the end of a tradition. You may think I’m ignorant about the South, the way I jumped you last Sunday so unmercifully and, I might add, so unpardonably about Bobby Weed. But I’m talking about something else now—writing. Southern writing as a force is going to be over within a few years. Another genre is going to have to appear to take its place. That’s why I’m saying you’ve got a lot of guts to be writing in a worn-out tradition.”
I was a little irritated, although my irritation lay less in the logic and truth of what he was saying, if indeed logical or true, than in the fact that such an opinionated literary verdict should issue from a research biologist at a pharmaceutical house. It seemed none of his business. But when I uttered, mildly and with some amusement, the standard demurral of the literary aesthete, he outflanked me neatly again.
“Nathan, you’re a fucking expert in cells,” I said, “what the hell do you know about literary genres and traditions?”
“In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius pointed out a very central truth concerning the examined life. That is, that the man of science who concerns himself solely with science, who cannot enjoy and be enriched by art, is a misshapen man. An incomplete man. I believe that, Stingo old pal—which is maybe why I care about you and your writing.” He paused and held out an expensive-looking silver lighter, with which he ignited the end of the Camel between my lips. “May I be forgiven for abetting your filthy habit, I carry this to light Bunsen burners,” he said playfully, then went on, “As a matter of fact, something I’ve concealed from you. I wanted to be a writer myself until halfway through Harvard I realized I could never be a Dostoevsky, and so turned my piercing mind toward the seething arcana of human protoplasm.”
“So you were really planning to write,” I said.
“Not at first. Jewish mothers are very ambitious for their sons and all during my childhood I was supposed to become a great fiddle player—another Heifetz or Menuhin. But frankly, I lacked the touch, the genius, although it left me with a tremendous thing about music. Then I decided to be a writer, and there were a bunch of us at Harvard, a bunch of very dedicated book-crazy sophomores, and we were deep into the literary life for a while. A cute little kindergarten Bloomsbury in Cambridge. I wrote some poetry and a lot of lousy short stories, like all my pals. Each of us thought we were going to outdo Hemingway. But in the end I had enough good sense to realize that as a fiction writer I was better trying to emulate Louis Pasteur. It turned out that my true gifts were in science. So I switched my major from English over to biology. It was a fortunate choice, I