In late middle age, William Styron was struck by a disabling illness, when everything seemed colourless, futile and empty to him. In fact, as he recalled in Darkness Visisble (1990), he was suicidally depressed. So when he died in 2006, at the age of 81, it was assumed he had taken his life. His father, a Virginia-born engineer, had, moreover, been a depressive himself, and maybe a suicidal tendency had transmitted down the generation, like a dangerous gene? In reality, the author of Sophie’s Choice had died of pneumonia, complicated by alcoholism and addiction to tranquilisers.
A lifelong malcontent, Styron indeed had few reasons to be cheerful. In The Suicide Run, a posthumous collection of short stories, he chronicles his gruelling experience in the US marines during the second world war. As a platoon leader stationed in Okinawa, Styron grew to detest the enemy (‘I caught the contagion of Jap hatred’), and says he would happily have killed.
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