Can a memoir flecked with famous personalities—Frank Sinatra, Jackie Kennedy, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Mike Nichols, Carly Simon, the list goes on—be less of a name-dropping vehicle than an organic reflection of the memoirist’s vital and singular life? If the memoirist in question is Rose Styron, the 95-year-old author of Beyond This Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart, the answer is almost unaccountably yes.
Her book traverses 50 years and many countries in the course of recording an enviably charmed life. Then again, charmed lives don’t just happen; they are created in part by the sort of people—rarer than one might think—who have a gift for riding halcyon moments to their heights and weathering the difficult moments with a certain sprezzatura.
Beyond This Harbor begins, with a touch of narrative brio, in January 1974, when Rose is in her mid-40s, tossing a red beach ball around in a hotel swimming pool on the outskirts of Santiago with “some new Chilean women friends.” Yet this is not the ordinary tourist fun it appears to be. Rose, a member of Amnesty International, and her eldest daughter, Susanna, are there for a more serious purpose: to smuggle documentation of Pinochet’s “dirty war” back to America. Not long before, Pinochet had led an American-backed military coup and sent tens of thousands of people linked to the former Marxist president, Salvadore Allende, into torture centers, where many of them died.
The red ball is in fact a signal to the wives of detained former officials; the women are in disguise, wearing “wigs, hats, glasses, padded bathing suits,” and one by one, they get into the pool and take turns whispering details of their husbands’ situations to Rose and to Susanna, who knows Spanish.
“It was all quite James Bond,” Rose recalls, “and we Americans were amateurs,” but she is not a person to be deterred by the potential risks involved in undercover work. “I had no sense of fear,” she declares, which explains a certain quality of brazenness she displays throughout her life. She is unencumbered by the conflicts and hesitations that often deter more introspective types—cold-calling Ted Kennedy, for instance, when she returns to American soil from Chile and requesting a meeting to discuss her mission.
Rose is a protean creature if ever there was one: a gifted poet, famous beauty, congenital flirt, human-rights activist, investigative journalist, co-founder of the American branch of Amnesty International, beloved friend, mother of four, and, last but not least, wife of the writer William Styron. She succeeds in endearing herself to readers despite her privilege, her glittering social set, her impressive access to those in power, and even despite a sometimes disconcerting lack of self-reflection notwithstanding her considerable intelligence.
Charmed lives don’t just happen; they are created in part by the sort of people—rarer than one might think—who have a gift for riding halcyon moments to their heights and weathering the difficult moments with a certain sprezzatura.
Rose Styron (née Burgunder) was born in Baltimore in 1928 to a wealthy and loving German-Jewish family, the youngest of three siblings. One of her maternal great-grandfathers started Kann’s department store, where her father worked and eventually took over the reins. “We were not rich but lived comfortably,” she writes of her childhood circumstances, which seems a deliberately hazy description of a household that included steamer trunks full of “satin and velvet” dresses for her mother’s trips abroad with Rose’s father; a nanny; a “marvelous” cook; and a “light-skinned” maid who also happened to be “one of Mother’s best friends.” (What disparities in class, color, and social standing are skimmed over in that carefree description!)
Rose applied to seven colleges and was “surprisingly accepted by all.” She chose Wellesley, not for its academic standing but in characteristically light-hearted fashion because “it had the most beautiful campus and was near Harvard.” Four years later, Rose enrolled at Harvard, where she took poetry courses with John Crowe Ransom and Richard Wilbur. After earning a master’s in creative writing from Johns Hopkins (honoring her mother’s request that she move back to Baltimore), she jaunted off to Europe. It was in Rome, in 1951, that she met “tall, slim, sandy-haired” Bill, who had just published his best-selling debut novel, Lie Down in Darkness, and was staying at the American Academy.
During her first dinner with Bill, who had brought Truman Capote along, she very briefly mistook her future husband for gay before succumbing to his charms by the end of the evening. “He seemed sensitive, was humorous, with great timing and an offbeat imagination,” she writes. The two entered into a fast friendship and an even faster sexual liaison, despite Rose’s being underwhelmed by his novel. “He’s cute but he can’t write,” she thinks to herself, before realizing that she was reading another novel with the same title. After Bill gives her a copy of his book, she quickly became absorbed, extolling its “long adjective-rich sentences.” Before long, the two were engaged.
Far from being excited by the news, Rose’s mother hired a private investigator to look into her future son-in-law’s background. Meanwhile, Bill’s “wicked stepmother,” Elizabeth, wrote Rose a letter informing her that her stepson was “lazy and shiftless” and would make a “terrible husband.” (Elizabeth’s dire hostility toward Bill might have been as much of a factor in his future depressions as his withdrawing from alcohol, which is the cause he gives in Darkness Visible, but neither Bill nor Rose are of an etiological turn of mind.)
The couple decided to whoop it up in Paris with Bill’s new Paris Review friends, such as Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton, along with Terry Southern and Irwin Shaw, before breaking up. But they changed their minds once again and were married on May 4, 1953, at the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome. Rose wore a thin blue silk dress, “believing (oh how this dates me) I could not wear white because I was not a virgin.”
Rose’s mother hired a private investigator to look into her future son-in-law’s background. Meanwhile, Bill’s “wicked stepmother,” Elizabeth, wrote Rose a letter informing her that her stepson was “lazy and shiftless.”
In a very funny anecdote (humor being one of her strong suits), Rose recalls: “Officiating was a senior Roman judge (I understood he was the mayor), who wore a wide satin shoulder sash in the red, white, and green stripes of the Italian flag. After the ceremony he went around and shook our party’s hands, each time saying, ‘I hope you will come to my movie theaters.’ Evidently he owned a chain. Possibly it was his only English.”
For the next 50-plus years, the Styrons enjoyed “a deep and satisfying marriage,” albeit one that was dotted by affairs on both sides. There were, however, enough differences between the two of them—“Bill rarely did anything spontaneously, while I latched on to any promised adventure”—to cause Rose to write, in an unguarded, less glass-half-full moment than she usually allows herself, “Sometimes I wonder how we lasted together for more than half a century.”
Evenings at their home in Roxbury, Connecticut, took on a regular rhythm. Over a pre-prandial Jack Daniel’s or Dewar’s, with classical music on the record player, Bill would read aloud his latest pages from that afternoon’s work (he got up at noon), which Rose “unfailingly admired.” Bill, meanwhile, took not a whit of interest in his wife’s poetry, and required Rose to drop her own writing in favor of dutifully typing up “Bill’s yellow-lined pages filled with his beautiful slanted script.” (Another by-product of Bill’s narcissism and “total devotion to his writing” was, as his son Tom characterizes it, “grossly egregious parenting.”)
Rose attributes Bill’s indifference to her poetry to “his writer’s natural narcissism.” But she also blames the model of wifely selflessness her mother set for her. “I didn’t know how to have a good marriage and an independent, time-consuming literary career,” she writes. “I had been taught by my mother … to always let the man lead, to accommodate his needs and promote him.” One senses that it is a compromise that continues to haunt her. Toward the end of the book, she observes ruefully, “I guess the wives of writers were expected to have thick skins, to placate on behalf of our spouses,” adding hopefully, “I believe things have changed.”
After moving to Roxbury, on a whim in 1954, settling into an “old, empty white clapboard house in need of repair, with a crumbling white picket fence, full grape arbor, fragrant pink-rose-covered trellis, and an unkempt lawn,” the Styrons rapidly became the center of a luminous group of creative sorts—including Arthur Miller, Alexander Calder, the theater critic Robert Brustein, and Norman Mailer—who lived in the area or nearby. They would eventually fit out the house, which had an adjoining “Little House” that became Bill’s studio, with a swimming pool, a tennis court, and a staff that included a “summer cook” and a housekeeping couple who ensured that their low-key but incontestably glamorous life was kept running smoothly.
“I didn’t know how to have a good marriage and an independent, time-consuming literary career,” she writes. “I had been taught by my mother … to always let the man lead, to accommodate his needs and promote him.”
Which brings me to a signal gap in the memoir, created by Rose’s circumvention of various issues that she is either uncomfortable with or doesn’t wish to go into. One of them is her Jewish lineage, which she seldom alludes to other than in three paragraphs near the beginning—a de-identification she seems to have imbibed from her parents, both of whom refused to discuss their pasts—and commenting approvingly on Jimmy Carter’s partisan book on the Middle East, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Another is her non-monogamous arrangement with Bill, about which they agreed to maintain a “code of silence,” lest these dalliances disturb family matters. “We both wanted our marriage to continue.”
And yet another is the issue of her family money, which presumably helped pay for some of her well-endowed life, notwithstanding Bill’s success as a writer. On the other hand, one cannot be a true bon vivant, with a second home on Martha’s Vineyard and a taste for lavish celebrations, without taking some things for granted.
Throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the Styrons were engaged politically, traveling to global hot spots together—Moscow and Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Kenya, and Botswana, South Africa, Phnom Penh, El Salvador, Bosnia—but more often, as the years went by, Rose went on her own, sometimes in an official capacity, as a member of Amnesty International and later of the Council on Foreign Relations, and sometimes more informally.
She pops up, like a female Zelig, all over the place—attending conferences, meeting with dissidents and poets (she didn’t especially warm to Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whom she finds “tiring,” and she notes Joseph Brodsky’s suspicion that the poet didn’t defend him when he was being sentenced to exile), investigating human-rights abuses and writing up her findings for Ramparts and The New York Review of Books. Her buoyant spirits and immeasurable curiosity—not to overlook her diplomatic skills, which are considerable—led Ted Kennedy to seek her counsel on whether to run for the presidency after Chappaquiddick. (She “privately thought” the incident would “scotch his chances” but didn’t say so.)
Rose’s understanding of human frailty and ability to overlook bad behavior stands her in good stead, especially with friends like the writer Lillian Hellman, who sounds thoroughly unbearable—cheating at Scrabble, walking out during a dinner with Sinatra because she isn’t the center of attention—but who is the recipient of Rose’s ambivalent affection all the same.
In 1985, Bill suffered from the first of several bouts of depression, casting a shadow over Rose’s golden world. Admitting openly that “I understood nothing about breakdowns’ psychiatric needs,” it took her almost a year to realize that her husband was clinically depressed and needed professional help.
Her buoyant spirits and immeasurable curiosity—not to overlook her diplomatic skills, which are considerable—led Ted Kennedy to seek her counsel on whether to run for the presidency after Chappaquiddick.
They consulted with a psychiatrist in New Haven, the first meeting with whom Rose writes about with an almost comic sense of despair: “We went to his ugly, seedy office, which harbored a big three-quarters-dead potted tree … in the tiny waiting room. I sat on a bench two feet from the plywood-doored wall to his office. Through the wall, I could hear the psychiatrist droning at Bill about age, about lowering his creative expectations—maybe Bill shouldn’t write anymore and should think of things to do.”
Eventually, with the help of medications and therapy, Bill recovered and in 1989 published an account of his ordeal in Vanity Fair that would become his 1990 memoir Darkness Visible. All looked to be fair going until, in 2000, Bill had a second, more serious depression, which included weeks of catatonia. He was given electroshock treatments and got well enough to attend a Paris Review gala in New York, where he was being honored, but he continued to slide into episodes of depression and “never fully recovered after that.”
Bill’s family and friends rallied around—with the exception, Rose notes in a rare moment of payback, of Roth—with Rose keeping close watch over him. His last words to her from his hospital bed were to dissuade her from returning to the hospital after midnight: “Don’t try to come back now. Come back in the morning. I love you, go to sleep, I love you, I love you.” He died at the age of 81, “in the dark,” on November 1, 2006.
Beyond This Harbor is a generous-hearted account of a life rich in affection and interest both toward those nearest to Rose and to strangers as well, all of whom reciprocated her feelings. One of her uncommon qualities is her ability to extend herself beyond the boundaries of her own existence to those in need or peril, wherever they happened to be. There is very little score-settling here, with a few exceptions. She had mixed feelings about “stormy, pugnacious” Mailer, who never gave Adele, the adoring wife he stabbed under the heart with a penknife, any financial support after they divorced.
She also expresses disappointment in and anger toward James Baldwin, who lived with them for a while in Connecticut and distanced himself from Bill’s 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner when it became embroiled after publication in issues of racial appropriation. Baldwin had encouraged his friend to write in Nat’s voice but became more equivocal upon the book’s release. “Bill’s going to catch it from black and white,” he said. “Styron is probing something very dangerous, deep and painful in the national psyche. I hope it starts a tremendous fight, so that people will learn what they really think about each other.” To which Rose appends: “I had never heard Jimmy say that before the novel was published.”
Lastly, there is her abiding hatred of Henry Kissinger, whom she goes out of her way to treat disdainfully every time she comes into contact with him.
She gets some things wrong—the Russian writer Isaac Babel wasn’t merely exiled and banned, but executed—and her unmodulated admiration for Gerry Adams, the former I.R.A. leader who became the president of Northern Ireland’s Sinn Féin political party, is hard to take without a big grain of salt for anyone who has read Patrick Radden Keefe’s account of the Troubles, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Island.
There is no doubt that this memoir, which sometimes gets lost in a welter of names, details, and places, could have used more rigorous editing, which might have resulted in a slimmer but more focused book. Still, as an entrée into a nostalgia-inducing time of summer garden parties where writers, politicians, and people of all stripes gathered on Rose’s sloping lawn at her Vineyard house, and hopefulness about the possibility of peaceful relations between hostile nations still reigned, it is a captivating read by a woman of incomparable grace and purpose.
Daphne Merkin is a Writer at Large at Air Mail and the author of numerous books, including the memoir This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression and the novels Enchantment and 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love