A Novel Friendship

Two Writers Bridged Their Differences to Find Their Common Heart

James Baldwin encouraged Styron to write "The Confessions of Nat Turner," the 1967 novel that won Styron a Pulitzer. (Los Angeles Times Via Associated Press)

William Styron and James Baldwin, two of this country's greatest mid-20th-century writers, had a brave friendship that swept across decades and the fault line of race and tears in America. With Styron's death Wednesday, the last breath of that remarkable friendship is gone.

The white novelist, Styron, and the black novelist, Baldwin, met in Manhattan in the 1950s. A Virginia-born Southerner and a Harlem-born Northerner. The former Marine and the gay hepcat of Harlem and Greenwich Village coffeehouses.

Styron was the grandson of a slave owner.

Baldwin was the grandson of a slave.

Styron, huge, tall, lumbered around a room; Baldwin, short, slight, flitted birdlike. In 1950s Manhattan, everyone read the big-time magazines: Harper's, the Atlantic, the Reporter. Baldwin, having cracked the magazines, had started to get noticed. And he had read Styron's first novel, "Lie Down in Darkness."

"For all their differences on the surface, they were so in tune inside," Rose Styron, William's widow, recalled from her home yesterday in Vineyard Haven, Mass. "They talked with each other all the time about race, about growing up."

Race was in the air and dirt of America. They both knew it -- Baldwin before Styron. And both, at a desk, with pen or pencil, could write.

They were born only a year apart, Styron in 1925, Baldwin in 1924.

Styron's first book was a Southern family drama. He was all of 26 years old when it came out in 1951. Baldwin's first book, "Go Tell It on the Mountain," came in 1952, followed by "Notes of a Native Son" in 1955.

Styron had done well enough by the beginning of the '60s to purchase a home in Roxbury, Conn. By then, he had purged himself of narrow racial views and was eager to talk about race and his Southern upbringing at anybody's dinner party.

When the phone rang in 1961, and a mutual friend told Styron that Baldwin was low on dough and needed a place to stay, the Styrons were quick to oblige. There was a guesthouse on their Connecticut property.

Baldwin, who could be absent-minded and mercurial, was always running behind. He would be late for dinner, Rose having set the table for three, time passing, the Styrons shaking their heads, growing angry. Then there he was, poof, that little gnome of a man blowing through the door, grinning, wide-eyed, hugging, begging forgiveness. And Rose would warm the food, and everyone would sip wine and laugh at tales from Jimmy's day. The Styrons and Baldwin listened to jazz, nodding their heads to Nina Simone's sweet voice.