By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 3, 2006; C01
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.
"Bill just treasured his humor," Rose Styron says.
Styron was working on a novel in that Connecticut home, the book that would become "The Confessions of Nat Turner" and win him the Pulitzer Prize. Styron would later confess that it was Baldwin who convinced him -- what the hell! -- that he could write about Turner, the leader of a slave rebellion, to enjoy being white Bill Styron writing about black Nat Turner.
The book was published in 1967, a year of rioting in Newark, in Detroit, blacks demanding equal rights, things on fire, as Jimmy had predicted.
Styron's big novel received critical acclaim, but not on the street, not with "the brothers and the sisters." Not with Styron's black slave lusting after white women.
There was a mean backlash. At some readings Styron was screamed at, young black toughs wearing dashikis staring him down. Another book was published: "William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond."
Two black writers, however, came to Styron's defense, Jimmy Baldwin and historian John Hope Franklin. Baldwin told folks that Styron was a novelist, that he had license, that he had produced art.
"I thought it was a good novel," Franklin recalled yesterday. "It was a novel. Styron had a right to take liberties, like any novelist."
"It was a brave thing of Baldwin to do -- defending the novel," says novelist Reynolds Price, who knew Styron for many years. "For years after it was published, it all still haunted Styron."
Baldwin wouldn't recede in his defense of Styron. "He has begun the common history -- ours," Baldwin said of Styron's novel.
"It meant so much to Bill," Rose Styron says of Baldwin's voice, "because Bill was crushed emotionally and critically by those 10 black writers' response."
Baldwin ran into Styron not long after the book's publication. "If you were just darker it would be you, not me, who was the most famous black writer in America," Styron recalled Baldwin saying.
"Theirs was a remarkable friendship," says Rose Styron. "It's the best of humanity when that happens." The two men seemed beyond jealousy, which can stymie writers. "There was never any malice between them," says Rose.
Baldwin eventually moved to France, where he died in 1987. The Styrons attended Baldwin's New York funeral. Rose says her husband was quite moved by the beautiful beat of the African drums that echoed through the church. Big William Styron leaned on a pillar inside the church. "It was too crowded to find seats," says Rose.
Styron once said that he and Baldwin were connected by a "boundless and defiant ambition . . . to break through the imprisoning walls of color and into the alluring challenge of alien worlds."
Baldwin once said: "Each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other -- male in female, female in male, white in black, and black in white. We are part of each other."
It is not too much to say that they loved each other. And that they were each American to the bone.