Styron, as givingashe was lyrical

Like star athletes, celebrated writers suffer several deaths before they finally die. Even at the apogee of their careers, they’re subject to killing reviews, competitive jealousy and the occasional creative misfire. Then, unless they’re extraordinarily lucky, they lose their imaginative powers and/or their readers. Even a novelist as exceptional as William Styron could not escape this melancholy fate. In 1980, with the publication of “Sophie’s Choice,” he was a bestselling author and a figure of international renown, the topic of gossip columns as well as doctoral dissertations. Nobody could have guessed it was his last novel or that the last impression he would leave with the general reading public would be “Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness,” a magazine article expanded into a book about his personal Calvary of depression.

This pains me deeply, as does the news of his passing, which reached me in Rome, a city where Bill lived as a young man at the American Academy. It is a city whose dense golden contours he lovingly evoked in “Set This House on Fire” and the place where, in the early 1980s, he, Pat Conroy and I and our wives lingered over dinner and saluted a new day from the Janiculum Hill. “I haven’t been up this late,” Bill said, “since I was a sophomore in college.”

That got a good laugh. Nobody believed him. For long stretches of his life, he was a night owl, a gourmet diner and, until he turned 60, a dedicated drinker.

I remember him at a party in Austin, Texas, with a guest list I’d like to imagine has never been equaled in that town. Molly Ivins, Ronnie Dugger, Willie Morris, James Fallows, screenwriters William Broyles and William Wittliff, Bud Shrake and former Lt. Gov. William Hobby convened at my house after Bill had given a reading at the university. It was impossible in that crowd to squeeze a word in edgewise, especially since a loquacious fellow with a guitar insisted on alternating country wisdom with country songs. Exasperated, Bill barked, “Look, man, sing or talk. Don’t try to do both.” So Jerry Jeff Walker did what he habitually does when in doubt; he broke into his signature song, “Mr. Bojangles.”

In another city, on another indelible occasion, Bill welcomed me to Paris with lunch at La Coupole. The year was 1968 and the streets of Montparnasse bristled with riot police poised to suppress a student insurrection at the Sorbonne. As a Fulbright Fellow on a stipend of $200 a month, I could never have afforded the snails that he taught me how to winkle out of their shells. As a 25-year-old unpublished author, I could never have hoped to meet James Jones, whom Bill invited to join us. The meal and the meeting with Jones struck me then, and still do today, as emblematic of Styron’s magnanimity. He may not have been aware of it, but all my encounters with him were signal events. He was forever opening doors and escorting me into a new world.

Our friendship began in Charlottesville and at the University of Virginia. As a grad student, I was dispatched to the airport to serve as his chauffeur. But like any single-minded aspiring writer, I was also dead set on serving my own purposes. Powerless in the grasp of a compulsion and in the presence of a famous writer, I no sooner had Bill a prisoner in the car than I blurted, “Will you read the manuscript of my novel?”

He would have been within his rights to demand that I drive him straight back to the airport. Judging by the pained expression on his slightly asymmetrical face, he might have been about to shoulder open the door and roll out onto the highway. Instead, in a quiet voice that retained faint vestiges of a Tidewater accent, he said, “I can’t do it now. I’m finishing ‘The Confessions of Nat Turner.’ Send it to me at the end of the summer.”

To any sane person this would have sounded like a brush-off. Indeed, it sounds like the sort of dodge I’ve used on importuning authors. But Bill meant it. Even more remarkable, after reading my manuscript, he didn’t respond with polite evasions and platitudinous good wishes. He sent a three-page letter, enumerating the book’s flaws, identifying its few strengths and explaining what I needed to do to grow as a writer. I can’t imagine a better example of Styron’s generosity, his professional collegiality and his willingness to encourage a neophyte for no better reason than that we both, though vastly different in talent, temperament and age, were committed to writing.

Tributes to dead writers have a troubling habit of turning into self-aggrandizement ... as in “The best thing about my late friend was how he encouraged my greatness.” So let me make it clear that while I value my relationship of 40 years with him, what I truly esteem is his work.

“Lie Down in Darkness” remains one of the most accomplished first novels ever written, and although I, along with millions of readers, identified with its depiction of a tormented child trapped in a family riven by alcoholism and emotional illness, it is the book’s artistry, its elegiac lyricism, that has kept it alive and fresh for half a century.

Now as the nation is embroiled in yet another intractable military conflict, Americans could scarcely do better than reread Styron’s perfectly crafted novella, “The Long March.” In little more than 100 pages, this story of a Marine Corps field exercise in what passes for peacetime speaks volumes about the human penchant for seeking simple answers to complex questions. It dramatizes the influence that wars, hot and cold, have had on our country and on Styron’s work. For a man who never saw combat himself and never courted the image of a two-fisted brawler, his books teem with violence, tumult and death. He didn’t need to go to war. It was, as he revealed in “Darkness Visible,” inside him. Small wonder then that he could give voice to a suicidal adolescent, a condemned slave and a Holocaust survivor.

But if there was darkness, there was also light and music and poetry in William Styron, and although he endured the little deaths, then the big one, that every writer confronts, he lives on. For as a mutual friend, James Salter, has written, life passes into pages if it passes into anything.

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Michael Mewshaw is the author of 10 novels and seven books of nonfiction, including “If You Could See Me Now: A Chronicle of Identity and Adoption” and “Do I Owe You Something? A Memoir of the Literary Life.”