The Idea of Hope

THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER by William Styron. 428 pages. Random House. $6.95.

In the summer of 1831, a force of 60 Negroes led by a mad, messianic slave named Nat Turner cut a red swath through the Virginia Tidewater country, slaughtering every white man, woman and child in their path. Although it was suppressed in two days, the rebellion claimed 55 victims. Its leader died on the gallows with 16 of his men. His body was flayed and the flesh rendered into grease; some souvenir-minded Virginian sliced a money purse out of the skin.

History has little more than that to say of Nat Turner's revolt. But readers will not fail to recognize that the shadow of Nat Turner darkened the streets of Newark and Detroit in the summer of 1967--and hovers still. This novel goes beyond a mere retelling of history to show how the fettered human spirit can splinter into murderous rage when it is goaded beyond endurance.

Black Man's Eyes. Styron's narrative power, lucidity and understanding of the epoch of slavery achieve a new peak in the literature of the South. The customary view, whether of willow-shaded plantation avenues or red clay roads leading to sharecroppers' cabins, has been white. Styron surveys the same landscape, but attempts to see it through the eyes of a black man.

Nat Turner's story is told in the first person, and some readers will feel that it is told almost too well; at times the narrator's lyrical style suggests Styron more than Turner. Most of the time, though, the author's impersonation rings true enough. Nat Turner was not only literate but eloquent: he left a 20-page confession, which was published the year after his death. From this personal account, as well as from a thorough familiarity with the literature of slavery and with Virginia's Tidewater region, Styron re-creates the rebel's career.

Nat must have been what the book makes of him: a black man born in bondage, conscious of his chains, but spoiled by the sweet taste of humanity that some of his masters allowed. "I will say this, without which you cannot understand the central madness of nigger existence," he explains. "Beat a nigger, starve him, leave him wallowing, and he will be yours for life. Awe him by some unforeseen hint of philanthropy, tickle him with the idea of hope, and he will want to slice your throat."

Foretaste of Freedom. The idea of hope comes from a kindly farmer, Samuel Turner, whose surname Nat assumes. When the young slave steals a book, his master sees proof that Nat is no less a man than himself. An educational experiment begins, during which the pupil absorbs the rudiments of scholarship along with a bitter truth: "The preacher was right. He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow."

Samuel Turner has plans to free his pet slave. The prospect appalls Nat: servitude and this loving master are all that he has known. Yet the foretaste of freedom, as Styron insists throughout the book, can only excite growing hunger. In one morning, in one glimpse of the possibilities of the future, Samuel Turner converts Nat forever into a hu man being burning to be free.

But the plans fail. The Tidewater land goes sterile and bankrupts Samuel Turner. He surrenders Nat to the cus tody of a Baptist minister--a caricature of ecclesiastical evil--who even tually sells him for $460.

It is still nine years before Nat revolts, nine years in which to feed on the vengeful rantings of Old Testament prophets and to mature a "disbelief which verged close upon madness, then a sense of betrayal, then fury such as I had never known before, then, finally, hatred so bitter that I grew dizzy." The hatred is directed against Samuel Turner, the man who invited him to dream.

This is Nat Turner's message--and Styron's. His story flows relentlessly to its collision with horror. The conspirators hack off heads as if vengeance alone were the insurrection's aim. The de fenders of slavery respond as bloodily; more than 200 Negroes, most of them innocent, die in reprisal. U.S. slavery's only true revolt vanishes into the darkness before the Civil War. "It just ain't a race made for revolution, that's all," says a court officer smugly.

Natural Arena. Styron calls The Confessions of Nat Turner not a historical novel but a "meditation on histo ry." There are echoes in it of Melville's Benito Cereno, a tale of a Negro slave rebellion at sea. Like Melville, Styron is fascinated by the evil of slavery and its inevitable connection with violence and corruption. The novels of the Puritanical giants of the 19th century were propelled by the driving force of implacable fate; so is Nat Turner. But here Styron makes his own departure. In Melville, Hawthorne and Twain, there is always at least a memory of innocence. Not for Nat: for him there is no innocence, no redemption. From the corruptions of childhood, he acts out his damnation. His bloodbath is a black Mass; in Camus' words, he is "a saint without God."

Inevitably, Styron will be compared to Faulkner. He lacks Faulkner's almost fatalistic sense that evil is part of the human condition; he also lacks his facility for creating a whole stageful of memorable characters. Styron's achievement is that his one towering figure dominates the entire book. But for both writers, the land is the natural arena for terror, and not since the lynching of Joe Christmas in Faulkner's Light in August has savagery been so harrowingly described. Nat's blood, like Joe's, is part of the American soil.

"They are not to lose it," wrote Faulkner about white men's memory of their own violence. "In whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever places and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes." Between disaster and hope, Nat Turner will find his way into the American consciousness.

Promise Fulfilled. William Styron, 42, left the South 20 years ago, but he goes home again in his books to stir old ashes. His first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), won for him that dubious badge, "promising." And so the book was--an earnest and sometimes discerning attempt, in the Southern magnolia school of fiction, to deal with the failure of a marriage.

But like many a promising novelist, Styron was less successful with his next two books. The Long March recounted his experiences as a Marine in 1950, when a martinet ordered a 36-mile forced march for his officers and men.

Set This House on Fire was a kind of La Dolce Vita, American style, in which guilt and inadequacy stripped away the power of a creative genius.

Like Nat Turner, Styron grew up in the Tidewater country, and Turner's story preoccupied him long before he began work on the book. From the time he studied writing at Duke University, through tentative years as a part-time manuscript reader for a New York publisher, Styron kept turning back to Nat. "The melodramatic side attracted me first," he says, "which is why I waited. If I had written it as a younger man, it really would have been gothic."

All told, Nat Turner was five years in the writing. Styron worked in a small studio at his 13-acre estate in Roxbury, Conn., where he lives with his wife and four children. While the book was in progress, Negro Author James Baldwin paid him a five-month visit, and Styron acknowledges that "some of Jimmy's fiery, passionate intellect may have rubbed off on Nat."

Mighty Theme. Styron's passions seem to be confined largely to the printed page. The darker emotions--fury, despair, guilt--pour through all of his works, but Styron himself projects the reserved, slightly courtly manner of the storybook Virginian. It is a coincidence that his book should come on the heels of the summer riots. While Styron does not condone the violence, he views it through a chilling perspective sharpened by his five years with Nat Turner. The Negro extremist, says Styron, "is purifying himself by violence of a sense of his own abject self-ratedness."

In the undoubted success of Nat Turner, Styron feels that he has discharged an obligation. "Melville said that for a mighty book you must have a mighty theme. I hesitate to quote that because it sounds pretentious, but my theme was god-sent."

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