Darkness Visible

Styron recalls how, as a young writer, he felt a connection to Camus’s novel, The Stranger. Deeply affected by Meursault’s “cosmic loneliness” (Meursault is The Stranger’s protagonist who, alone in his cell, faces execution), Styron chose a protagonist who was likewise facing execution to narrate his novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Styron identified both protagonists—Meursault and Nat Turner—as “likewise condemned and abandoned by God” (21).

Additionally, Camus’s “Reflections on the Guillotine,” an essay about capital punishment, had utterly convinced him that the death penalty was a barbaric practice. Styron sees Camus as someone who cleansed Styron’s intellect, forced him to rethink stale ideas and inspiring him to optimism.

Styron nearly met Camus in 1960. His friend, writer Romain Gary, knew that Camus had read and enjoyed one of Styron’s novels. Styron would be in France, so Gary planned a dinner, but Camus died in a car accident before the meal could take place. Styron wonders if Camus’s death, riding in a vehicle driven by someone who was known to be reckless, was at all suicidal; he bases this musing both on Camus’s writing and on comments Camus made. In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus addresses suicide as a philosophical problem and contemplates whether life is worth living. Although Styron hadn’t realized it at the time, the protagonist of Camus’s novel The Fall seems to be suffering from depression. Additionally, according to Gary, Camus sometimes suggested that he was depressed and joked about suicide.

Camus never attempted suicide, and in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” he argues that people must continue to live, even without hope. Styron also acknowledges that Gary’s presumptions about Camus’s potential depression may have arisen because Gary himself as well as his ex-wife, actress Jean Seberg, also suffered from depression. At the time, Styron didn’t understand the nature of depression and the way it causes the mind to melt down. But on that evening in Paris in 1985, Styron was himself melting down. Riding back to the hotel, he experienced a moment of clarity, something that commonly happened in the evenings through the constant cycle of “alternating periods of intensity and relief” (26). These moments were usually a relief, but this time, Styron found himself thinking about Gary and Seberg.

A year after Styron last saw her, Seberg committed suicide by overdosing on pills. A year later, Styron met Gary for lunch. The grief of losing his ex-wife had devastated Gary, intensified his depression, and aged him considerably. Styron never saw Gary again because in 1980, Gary shot himself in the head and died. Once again, Styron passed the hotel he remembered from his happier trip to Paris in 1952; at this critical moment, Styron felt sure that he would never see Paris again.

Although he had thought fleetingly about suicide before, Styron was struck by the understanding that very soon, when the depression overtook him, he would be forced to answer Camus’s central question about whether life was worth living.  

Styron remembers the 1989 suicide of political activist Abbie Hoffman. Although he didn’t know Hoffman well, Styron was especially affected by his death. When someone commits suicide, the typical response is denial and a refusal to accept what happened, as though suicide taints the character of the person who has died. Hoffman’s brother insisted, until the coroner proved otherwise, that Hoffman probably overdosed by accident. Styron argues this denial is a natural result of the guilt that many survivors feel when someone close to them commits suicide; they feel guilty because they didn’t prevent it.

Similarly, when poet Randall Jarrell died in 1965, although evidence suggested that Jarrell purposely walked in front of the vehicle that killed him, his widow wrote an impassioned letter to Newsweek insisting that Jarrell did not die by suicide. With the outcry of protest, the coroner ruled the death an accident, even though Jarrell had been hospitalized for depression and previously attempted suicide. Although Jarrell exhibited clear signs of severe depression, “the stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs” (31). Styron acknowledges that Jarrell most likely did commit suicide, not out of cowardice or moral weakness, but because the pain was so great that Jarrell could no longer endure it

Following the 1987 suicide of Primo Levi, an Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor, Styron felt disturbed by baffled responses to Levi’s death:

as if this man whom they had all so greatly admired, and who had endured so much at the hands of the Nazis—a man of exemplary resilience and courage—had by his suicide demonstrated a frailty, a crumbling of character that they were loath to accept (32-33).

Levi’s suicide spurred Styron to write an op-ed for The New York Times about the nature of depression. In the op-ed, he argues that those who haven’t felt depression cannot imagine its depths, and that suicides will continue until people acknowledge and appreciate the pain of depression. Although many survive depression with medical care, Styron says that those that don’t are no different than those who die of cancer.

When Styron’s op-ed came out, he felt stunned by the massive response from readers who had been afraid to talk about their depression but had seen themselves in Styron’s description: “It is the only time in my life I have felt it worthwhile to have invaded my own privacy, and to make that privacy public” (34). Realizing that sharing his experience might help the many people who suffered from depression, Styron decided to write an account of his experiences with mental illness. He reports that depression is much more common than most realize, affecting millions of people, including an estimated one in 10 Americans, with serious depression possibly claiming at least 20% of its victims by suicide. Styron feels that severe depression is particularly prevalent in creative people. He wonders about the roots of depression and why some survive while others don’t. 

When he was first diagnosed with depression, Styron took issue with the word itself. He found the word too bland to describe what the intensity of severe depression, preferring instead the antiquated word “melancholia” as “a far more apt and evocative word for the blacker forms of the disorder” (37). Styron tries to think of a better word, and although “brainstorm” already has a meaning, he asserts that it is a much better choice to describe what depression feels like.

The word “depression” has both a clinical usage and a colloquial usage. The colloquial usage—temporary sadness or malaise—tends to make people minimize clinical depression. Styron, who was 60 when he first experienced a major depression, notes that his depression is unipolar; there is no manic side.

Additionally, it is impossible to know what causes the affliction and if there is any one cause at all: “The greatest fallacy about suicide lies in the belief that there is a single immediate answer—or perhaps combined answers—as to why the deed was done” (39). Despite the lack of real answers, people tend to speculate as to why someone takes their own life. For instance, Abbie Hoffman had a seriously ill mother, a failed book, and a recent car accident. Randall Jarrell’s career was on the downslope, and he had recently received a scathing book review. Primo Levi felt overtaxed as a caretaker for his mother.

Although their circumstances may have exacerbated underlying mental illness, Styron points out that many people endure similar situations without self-harm; in fact, most people do not commit suicide. Styron explains that his spiral into depression began when, after 40 years of alcohol abuse, drinking alcohol began to make him ill. Ostensibly, Styron used alcohol as a creative lubricant, but he admits that he was likely self-medicating for anxiety and depression. The inability to drink alcohol felt traumatic and launched him on a slow trajectory into severe symptoms of depression.

At the beginning, Styron experienced a vague malaise, and the world around him seemed darker. He took less pleasure in his daily activities. Even if alcohol withdrawal were partially to blame, Styron reflects that alcohol had been helping to keep his depression and anxiety at bay by protecting him from fully experiencing reality. After giving up alcohol, Styron started to experience unexplainable aches and pains. He became a hypochondriac, a condition long associated with depression or melancholia. Styron thinks now that the tendency toward hypochondria is rooted in a desire to ascribe one’s pain to maladies that are visible and even curable instead of to the invisible specter of mental illness.

Styron describes living with the growing state of anxiety and dread that comes with hypochondria. One day, he thoughtlessly drank a scotch and soda after abstaining for months. Panicked by the resulting dizziness, he hurried to a physician. After a battery of tests, the doctor declared Styron healthy. When the satisfaction of a clean bill of health faded in a few days, Styron was once again consumed by anxiety and dread. He remembers how his home, a place that he loved and the site of 30 years of happy memories, started to seem wrong and unfriendly. Styron felt lonely, unable to concentrate, and unable to write, and he experienced sudden, unexpected seizures of anxiety.

Although people tend to sanitize language about mental illness, “never let it be doubted that depression, in its extreme form, is madness. The madness results from an aberrant chemical process” (47). Depression causes the mind to turn on itself rather than against others; its symptoms are the antithesis of violence. Depression renders a sufferer incapable of acting and takes a predictable path, causing the body to shut down its faculties. Styron lost his voice, his libido, his enjoyment of food, and, most disturbing, the ability to sleep and to dream effectively. Insomnia medication exacerbated his depression symptoms. Before his diagnosis, Styron took Ativan “as casually as aspirin” (49). Only later did he realize that he was taking a very high dose and that benzodiazepines are only meant to be a short-term solution.

Styron felt tortured by insomnia. He believes that the sudden intrusive thought with which he began the first chapter—that the depression would eventually kill him if it didn’t get better—occurred to him on one of these sleepless nights, probably not long before the Paris trip. At this point, Styron resisted the idea of suicide but knew that soon he would have to deal with a real urge to die. The pain of depression is not clear and easily located like a physical injury. He compares it to “the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room” (50) and suggests that “it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion” (50).