Friday, Jul. 12, 1968

Will the Real Nat Turner Please Stand Up?

WILLIAM STYRON'S NAT TURNER: TEN BLACK WRITERS RESPOND. Edited by John Henrik Clarke. 120 pages. Beacon Press. $4.95.

The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron's novel about the 1831 slave uprising in Virginia, won the Pulitzer Prize, has sold over 175,000 copies so far, and is still comfortably at home on the bestseller lists. On this evidence alone, the book would seem to deserve at least respectful attention; indeed, it seems to have been the right novel at the right time. But, peculiarly, Nat Turner has provoked an astonishing amount of wrath from black militants, as well as a nasty exchange in The Nation between Styron and Communist Theoretician and Historian Herbert Aptheker, who claims that the novel is inaccurate.

That dispute has now led to this angry polemic from ten Negroes. They accuse Styron of distorting history when he describes the rebellion as "the only effective sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery"; they maintain that there were numerous others. They dispute Styron's judgment that the rebellion was put down with the help of loyal slaves. They bitterly question the mise en scene that depicts most slaves as complaisant plantation Sambos; on the contrary, say the critics, the slaves were constantly plotting insurrections. Finally, they complain that Styron in effect emasculated Turner by portraying him as a celibate harboring onanistic fantasies, whereas the truth, according to Styron's critics, is that Turner was the husband of a black woman on a nearby plantation.

Telling Blows. It is always possible to attack a historical novel on grounds of inaccuracy and faulty detail. It is particularly difficult in this case, since there is actually very little known about Turner himself or the rebellion. But since the ultimate sources of characterizations and events in fiction lie deep in the creative unconscious, such arguments, even if historically true, border on irrelevancy. The essayists, led by John Henrik Clarke, an editor of the militant Negro magazine Freedomways, repeat the same points endlessly and separately, but this does not necessarily validate them. Nor does a reprinting of the full text of the original confessions of Nat Turner seem in any way to enhance their position.

Indeed, the most telling and effective blows unleashed against Styron's Nat Turner are those leveled in terms of literature, not history. Novelist John Williams (The Man Who Cried I Am) criticizes Styron for offering too many characterizations based on traditional Southern regional cardboard stock. Mike Thelwell, a teacher at the University of Massachusetts, reasonably suggests that black slaves developed two languages, "one for themselves and another for white masters," and that Styron has captured neither. Thelwell argues that the more public form is the familiar dialect found in the works of Southern-dialect humorists. The other, "the real language," was the stuff of spirituals that has informed the sermons of preachers from the earliest days down to Martin Luther King; this undoubtedly was the diction used by Turner and his fellow insurrectionists. Thelwell charges that Styron's idiom, at once baroque and Latinate, Old Testament and Victorian, rendered Nat Turner in "a white language and a white consciousness."

Too Familiar. Too often, however, the contributors to this book are simply blinded by their own racism. The fact that Styron is a Virginia-born white seems to discredit him instantly in the eyes of more than one essayist. Rather typically, Political Scientist Charles Hamilton (Black Power) peevishly sees Styron involved in a white man's plot to divest black people of their "historical revolutionary leaders." Novelist John O. Killens ('Sippi) writes: Styron "is like a man who tries to sing the blues when he has not paid his dues." And several essayists, without even the leavening grace of black humor, dryly accuse Styron's Turner of lacking rhythm in his speech. In fact, these black literary jurors are so outraged that a white man should dare to write about a black, they forget that perhaps the best portrait of a Negro woman in American literature was drawn by Gertrude Stein in Melantha.*

Perhaps the most absurd criticism comes from a Boston psychiatry professor, Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, who with utter seriousness takes Styron to task for referring to Nat Turner by his first name. "Is this familiarity by the author part of intuitive white condescension and adherence to Southern racial etiquette? Is this reference and the entire book an unconscious attempt to keep Nat Turner 'in his place'? Would the novelist expect Nat Turner to address him as 'Mr. Styron'? Perhaps no one can ever know the answers to these questions."

The important question to ask is: What is Styron's own attitude on ra- cial questions? The Confessions of Nat Turner is a clear enough reply. Styron obviously believes in a darkly militant way that any brutish black uprising is the inevitable result of white persecution. The effect of both, the persecution and the uprising, adds up to tragedy.

*This novella, a study of a Negro girl's mind as told through her speech rhythms, appeared in 1909 and was one of the earliest and best of Gertrude Stein's countless experiments. Richard Wright called it "the first long serious treatment of Negro life in the United States."

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