My Generation Read Free Page A

momentary harm. Humans have become involved too much in life, and the wonders are too thick about us, to be daunted by a handful of madmen who always, somehow, fall. The hope of heaven has flowered so long among us that I just can't envision that hope blighted out in our time, or any other, for that matter; perhaps the miseries of our century will be recalled only as the work of a race of strange and troublous children, by the wise men in the aeons which come after us. Meanwhile, the writers keep on writing, and I should like to think that what we write will be worth remembering.
    [
Nation
, May 2, 1953. This was Styron's contribution to a symposium on creativity. The other contributors were James Jones, Maude Hutchins, Leonard Bishop, Jefferson Young, and John H. Griffin.]
    ----
    * Piero della Francesca (ca. 1415–1492), Italian painter of the early Renaissance period.—J.W.

Moviegoer
    F or seven or eight months during my fourteenth year I kept a diary. This was in the late 1930s, when I was living in southern Virginia with my father and a male cousin a little older than I—my mother having died a year before. Because of the absence of my mother there was considerably less discipline in the household than there ordinarily might have been, and so the diary—which I still possess—is largely a chronicle of idleness. The only interruptions to appear amid the daily inertia are incidents of moviegoing. The diary now records the fact that hardly a day went by without my cousin and me attending a film, and on weekends we often went more than once. In the summertime, when we had no school, there was a period of ten days when we viewed a total of sixteen movies. Mercifully, it must be recorded, movies were very cheap during those years at the end of the Great Depression. My critical comments in the diary were invariably laconic: “Pretty good.” “Not bad.” “Really swell movie.” I was fairly undemanding in my tastes. The purely negative remarks are almost nonexistent.
    Among the several remarkable features about this orgy of moviegoing there is one that stands out notably: nowhere during this brief history is there even the slightest mention of my having read a book. As far as reading was concerned, I may as well have been an illiterate sharecropper in Alabama. So one might ask: how does a young boy, exposed so numbingly and monotonously to a single medium—the film—grow up to become a writerof fiction? The answer, I believe, may be less complicated than one might suppose. In the first place, I would like to think that, if my own experience forms an example, it does not mean the death of literacy or creativity if one is drenched in popular culture at an early age. This is not to argue in favor of such a witless exposure to movies as I have just described—only to say that the very young probably survive such exposure better than we imagine, and grow up to be readers and writers. More importantly, I think my experience demonstrates how, at least in the last fifty or sixty years, it has been virtually impossible for a writer of fiction to be immune to the influence of film on his work, or to fail to have movies impinge in an important way on his creative consciousness.
    Yet I need to make an immediate qualification. I do not wish to argue matters of superiority in art forms. But although I cannot be entirely objective, I must say here that as admirable and as powerful a medium as the cinema is, it cannot achieve that complex synthesis of poetic, intellectual, and emotional impact that we find in the very finest novels. At their best, films are of course simply wonderful. A work like
Citizen Kane
or
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(by one of the greatest of directors, John Huston, who, interestingly enough, began his career as a writer) is each infinitely superior, in my opinion, to most novels aspiring to the status of literature. But neither of these estimable works attains for me the aesthetic intensity of, say,