William Styron, Renée Vivien, Jean-Pierre Chabrol, Sophie van der Stap

 De Amerikaanse schrijver William Styron werd op 11 juni 1925 in Newport News in de staat Virginia geboren. Zie ook alle tags voor William Styron op dit blog.

 

Uit: Sophie’s Choice

 

In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn. This was in 1947, and one of the pleasant features of that summer which I so vividly remember was the weather, which was sunny and mild, flower-fragrant, almost as if the days had been arrested in a seemingly perpetual springtime. I was grateful for that if for nothing else, since my youth, I felt, was at its lowest ebb. At twenty-two, struggling to become some kind of writer, I found that the creative heat which at eighteen had nearly consumed me with its gorgeous, relentless flame had flickered out to a dim pilot light registering little more than a token glow in my breast, or wherever my hungriest aspirations once resided. It was not that I no longer wanted to write, I still yearned passionately to produce the novel which had been for so long captive in my brain. It was only that, having written down the first few fine paragraphs, I could not produce any others, or-to approximate Gertrude Stein’s remark about a lesser writer of the Lost Generation-I had the syrup but it wouldn’t pour. To make matters worse, I was out of a job and had very little money and was self-exiled to Flatbush-like others of my countrymen, another lean and lonesome young Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the Jews. Call me Stingo, which was the nickname I was known by in those days, if I was called anything at all. The name derives from my prep-school days down in my native state of Virginia. This school was a pleasant institution to which I was sent at fourteen by my distraught father, who found me difficult to handle after my mother died.”

 

 

William Styron (11 juni 1925 – 1 november 2006)

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