Sophie's Choice - William Styron [70]
But then—and oh, how true it is that most writers become sooner or later the exploiters of the tragedies of others—came (or went) Maria Hunt. She had died just at that moment when I most needed that wondrous psychic jolt known as inspiration. And so during the next few days after getting news of her death, as the shock wore off and I was able to adopt what might be called a professional view of her grotesque ending, I was overtaken by a fabulous sense of discovery. Again and again I pored over the newspaper clipping my father had sent, becoming warm with excitement as the awareness grew that Maria and her family might serve as the exemplary figures for the novel’s cast of characters. The rather desperate wreck of a father, a chronic lush and also something of a womanizer; the mother, slightly unbalanced and a grim pietist, known throughout the upper-middle-class, country-club and high Episcopal echelons of the city for her long-suffering tolerance of her husband’s mistress, herself a social-climbing dimwit from the sticks; and the daughter finally, poor dead Maria, doomed and a victim from the outset through all the tangled misunderstandings, petty hatreds and vindictive hurts that are capable of making bourgeois family life the closest thing to hell on earth—my God, I thought, it was perfectly marvelous, a gift from the sky! And I realized to my delight that, however unwittingly, I had already put together the first part of the frame to surround this tragic landscape: my dog-eared train ride, the passage I had cherished and reread with such daft absorption, would now represent the arrival in the town of our heroine’s body, disinterred from the potter’s field in New York and shipped in a baggage car for final burial in the city of her birth. It seemed too good to be true. Oh, what ghoulish opportunism are writers prone to!
Even before I put my father’s letter down for the last time, I breathed a delicious sigh and felt the next scene hatching, so palpable I could almost reach up and fondle it, like a fat golden egg in my brain. I turned to my yellow legal pads, lifted a pencil. The train would be arriving in the riverside station, a dismal quay filled with heat, commotion, dust. Awaiting the train would be the bereaved father, the importunate mistress, a hearse, an unctuous mortician, perhaps someone else... A faithful retainer, a woman. An old Negro? Scratch scratch went the virginal Venus Velvet.
I remember those first weeks at Yetta’s with remarkable clarity. To begin with, there was that magnificent surge of creative energy, the innocent and youthful abandon with which I was able to set down in so short a time the first fifty or sixty pages of the book. I have never written fast or easily and this was no exception, for even then I was compelled to search, however inadequately, for the right word and suffered over the rhythms and subtleties of our gorgeous but unbenevolent, unyielding tongue; nonetheless, I was seized by a strange, dauntless self-confidence and I scribbled away joyously while the characters I had begun to create seemed to acquire life of their own and the muggy atmosphere of the Tidewater summer took on both an eye-dazzling and almost tactile reality, as if unspooling before my eyes on film, in uncanny three-dimensional color. How I now cherish the image of myself in this earlier time, hunched over the schoolmarm’s desk in that radiant pink room, whispering melodiously (as I still do) the invented phrases and sentences, testing them on my lips like some obsessed verse-monger, and all the while remaining supremely content in the knowledge that the fruit of this happy labor, whatever its deficiencies, would be the most awesome and important of man’s imaginative endeavors—The Novel. The blessed Novel. The sacred Novel. The Almighty