Book review: Rose Styron’s ‘Beyond This Harbor’

The separate writing areas were short-lived, as Rose was soon immersed in raising four children. Marriage and motherhood had a chilling effect on her budding literary career. When she met Styron she had a master’s degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins and two “tentative” book contracts, but her pursuits were stifled by her husband’s lack of interest. “He wasn’t involved in my work. It hurt my feelings a lot at first, but I put it down to his writer’s natural narcissism,” she says before admitting that she “basically didn’t write until he died.” A book of poems published by Viking in 1973 was the result of Jerzy Kosinski’s snooping in her desk and insisting he take the pages he found to his girlfriend to have them typed up.

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That book, “Thieves’ Afternoon,” was followed by a few others published sporadically over the years, most notably “By Vineyard Light,” with Craig Dripps, a poetic and photographic homage to the island where she lives. Instead, Styron turned her attention to activism on international human rights, becoming a founding member of Amnesty International. In “Beyond This Harbor,” Styron, 95, looks back at her life before, during and since her marriage to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who was both her anchor and her obstacle.

Styron’s memoir gets off to a terrific start with an anecdote that reminds readers right off that she is more than just Styron’s wife: Around New Year’s 1974, Rose and her daughter Susanna were in a hotel swimming pool in Chile, batting around a big red beach ball with some new friends. In fact, the purpose of this innocent-looking game was so that these women could whisper details to Styron about how their husbands were being tortured. Styron and her daughter were not mere tourists in Chile but were there to gather information about Augusto Pinochet’s “dirty war” for Amnesty.

While Styron knew that everything she did in Chile was being watched by government agents, she had yet to fully comprehend how dangerous her information-gathering mission was. If she had, she confesses, she might not have brought her teenage daughter along, though the latter’s fluency in Spanish was a big help, and her perspicacity saved the day during their flight from the city.

From there, the book unfolds chronologically, as Styron takes us back to her privileged Depression-era childhood in a secular Jewish family in Baltimore. Educated at the local Friends School, she credits her Quaker education for her dedication to activism and service. By Chapter 3, she’s graduated from Wellesley, gone on to study poetry at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, and has met Styron and many of his illustrious friends.

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As much as the author may have hoped to avoid giving this impression, marriage to William Styron sounds like quite a slog. Yes, he was a great lover, as she notes more than once, but he was also the man who invented the depression memoir — “Darkness Visible” — and the toll taken by his two major breakdowns and terrible experience with electroshock treatments came on top of his basically just being an old sourpuss. She reports, for instance, that he rarely attended any of their kids’ activities and that a psychologist friend recently called his parenting “egregious.”

Her way through life was significantly eased by dozens of friendships and social connections. In the summer of 1965, Rose became lifelong friends with Mia Farrow and her then-boyfriend, Frank Sinatra, who was “great fun.” Her circle also includes seemingly every major writer and intellectual of the 20th century, among them Peter Matthiessen, Sandy Calder, Arthur Miller, Mike Nichols, James Baldwin, Art Buchwald, Katharine Graham, Carly Simon, the Clintons and many more. She has sharp words about a few: Lillian Hellman cheated at Scrabble and “was always trying to separate Bill and me.” Norman Mailer tried to inveigle his dinner guests into an orgy, and not long after wrote a cruel letter to Styron, breaking off their friendship. Philip Roth may have told his biographer that Rose had forgiven him for failing to visit Bill in his final months, but he was wrong about that. “Bill was truly saddened by Philip’s absence,” she says.

And for those who don’t remember how she feels about Henry Kissinger, she offers a reminder: A few years ago, at the 90th birthday party for diplomat William Luers, she was mortified to see the former secretary of state seated across the table from her, so she hid: “I grabbed the big vase of flowers decorating the middle of the table and pulled it right in front of me so we did not have to look at each other.” Thus culminates her almost comic determination to dodge him as he continually pops up in her social circle on Martha’s Vineyard.

The opening chapter in Chile is probably the most adventurous of the adventurous tales promised in her subtitle. The book also includes what turns out to be a characteristically incisive precis of the situation in Chile — she does the same, later in the book, with Yugoslavia and Cuba — as well as details of the horrors she turned up while there, the basis of articles she wrote for the New York Review of Books and Ramparts. Later chapters with titles like “Impromptu Dinner Parties, Martha’s Vineyard and Havana” and “Selling Roxbury, Life on the Vineyard Fulltime” contain too many repetitive stories about her many friends and their pursuits. Still, Styron clearly took to heart the lessons of stewardship and community she absorbed from the Quakers, expressing them over decades of activism and friendship. She has lived a life in interesting times, among legendary characters, a life well worth telling — and reading about.

Marion Winik, host of the NPR podcast “The Weekly Reader,” is the author of numerous books, including “First Comes Love” and “The Big Book of the Dead.”

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