Lie Down in Darkness

A Twenty-Six-Year-Old’s Masterpiece

William Styron was twenty-six years old when Lie Down in Darkness was published in 1951, and the novel’s formal ambition is extraordinary for any age. Working consciously in the shadow of Faulkner — the novel’s structure, its Southern setting, its stream-of-consciousness technique all declare the influence — Styron nonetheless produces something that is not merely derivative: the voice that emerges, particularly in Peyton’s long interior monologue near the novel’s end, is Styron’s own, and the emotional intelligence of the family portrait has a specificity that Faulkner’s more mythological approach does not always achieve.

The title is from Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial: “Since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementoes and time that grows old itself bids us hope no long duration: diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation.” The Loftis family is dying: Milton, the father, is an alcoholic whose love for his daughter Peyton is possessive and destructive; Helen, the mother, is cold and competitive and resents Peyton for the love Milton gives her; Peyton herself, the beautiful, troubled daughter, is caught between two parents whose conflict has made normal life impossible for her.

The Structure of Destruction

The novel begins with Milton waiting for a train carrying his daughter’s body. Peyton has died in New York — the method and circumstances emerge gradually — and the Loftis family is assembling for the funeral. Lewis organizes the novel around this framing: we know from the first pages that Peyton is dead, and the rest of the novel moves backward through time to account for how the family arrived at this destination.

The technique is borrowed from Faulkner, but Styron uses it differently. Where Faulkner’s temporal dislocations serve a mythological purpose — the past is not past, it is always happening simultaneously — Styron’s serve a tragic one: the ending is known, and the novel’s work is to make the destination feel both inevitable and not inevitable, to show how a family’s destruction followed from specific choices made by specific people who might, at each stage, have chosen otherwise.

Peyton’s Monologue

The novel’s formal peak is Peyton’s interior monologue — forty pages rendered in stream-of-consciousness from inside her fragmented, desperate consciousness on the day of her death. The technique demands comparison with the Benjy section of The Sound and the Fury, and the comparison is not embarrassing: Styron renders a consciousness in extremis with a precision and music that holds the sequence together even as Peyton’s mind is breaking apart.

The monologue achieves what the earlier sections of the novel are working toward: the reader is inside the experience of a person destroyed by exactly the forces the novel has been tracing. The family pathology that seemed, from outside, like a series of choices and failures becomes, from inside, a series of experiences that no consciousness could have borne intact. Peyton is not simply a victim, but she has been made what she is, and Styron does not allow the reader to forget it.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — The most accomplished American debut novel of the postwar period — written at twenty-six with the formal control and emotional intelligence of a mature master.