In an introductory note to The Confessions of Nat Turner, his brooding story of the Negro preacher who led the only significant slave revolt in American history, William Styron wrote that he had tried “to produce a work that is less an ‘historical novel’ in conventional terms than a meditation on history.” His new novel, Sophie’s Choice,¹ is also, in part, a meditation on history, a gravely ambitious attempt to confront the truth of the Nazi death camps and to define the moral legacy of the Holocaust not only for the Jews but for all of humanity.

The Nazi slaughter of eleven million European Jews and Gentiles may seem a curious choice of subject for William Styron, ah Anglo-Saxon Presbyterian from Virginia whose previous work derived in one way or another from personal experience: his Southern upbringing (Lie Down in Darkness and The Confessions of Nat Turner), his brief stint in the Marines toward the end of World War II (The Long March), and a year spent in Italy after he won the Prix de Rome (Set This House on Fire). Yet each of these novels was charged with an apocalyptic sense of evil, and this may perhaps explain Styron’s fascination now with the most diabolical events of the century.

Sophie’s Choice, more frankly autobiographical than the earlier novels, provides a memoir of the summer of 1947. Styron has recently come to New York from Virginia, “a lean and lonesome young Southerner wandering in the Kingdom of the Jews.” Living in a rooming house in Flatbush, he has just embarked on the Faulknerian tale of family damnation that will become Lie Down in Darkness, and we are told a great deal about the genesis and composition of the book. Yet as a lifelong captive of historical memory, he is also haunted by the stories of the Turner revolt he has heard since boyhood, and Stingo, as young Styron is called in Sophie’s Choice, frequently declares that someday he will “write about slavery . . . make slavery give up its most deeply buried and tormented secrets.”

Here Styron displays the two sides of his literary imagination in high relief. In the course of his career, he has been strongly attracted to the flamboyant melodrama peculiar to Southern romance, a regional genre awash in the morbidity of ruin, guilt, and decay. He has also been deeply engaged with the actualities of history. The lure of Gothic sensationalism was responsible for his worst book, Set This House on Fire, a synthetic Sturm und Drang about American expatriates in Italy; but this was followed by The Confessions of Nat Turner, whose poignant exploration of the humiliations of slavery and densely textured rendering of the ante-bellum landscape and of plantation life made it his most powerful piece of work. (What infuriated the black nationalists who excoriated Nat Turner as a “vile racist myth” was not so much the liberties Styron took with the known facts about the slave leader, but the presumption that any white man could understand the soul of a black slave.) Caught between the inconsonant seductions of Gothic romance and the realities of history, Styron has now tried to resolve this creative dilemma by plunging into the actuality of the death camps.

In Sophie’s Choice, history assaults the provincial innocence of Stingo by accident. Twenty-two years old in 1947, he is just out of Duke and, fired by familiar dreams of literary glory, has made his way to the big city. But as a junior reader at McGraw-Hill, he finds himself squandering his education and taste on witty rejection letters to tenth-rate authors. Sickened by his sexless isolation in Manhattan, Stingo is soon liberated by a windfall from his father. After moving to Flatbush, he settles down to write that first novel, and is befriended by the woman living above him, Sophie Zawistowska, a survivor of Auschwitz. In the course of the tempestuous summer, the young novelist, “a stranger to love and death,” learns about the recent horrors of wartime Europe.

Sophie is a Polish Catholic whose golden beauty captivates Stingo, though he is struck by a strange quality of her body, “the sickish plasticity . . . of one who has suffered severe emaciation and whose flesh is even now in the last stages of being restored.” In the deceptive tranquility of Brooklyn, Sophie slowly unfolds her terrible story to Stingo in bursts of memory expelled like poison from her soul: her father and husband shot by the Nazis in Sachsenhausen, even though they were rabid anti-Semites who worshipped Hitler; her craven refusal to help her friends in the Warsaw resistance for fear that it would endanger her children’s safety; her arrest when she was caught smuggling meat to her dying mother; the journey to Auschwitz, and the loss of her two young children there.

The ravaged woman remains a prisoner of her past. As with many survivors, guilt at being alive has reduced her to a victim yearning for punishment, and this she finds in masochistic abundance through her Jewish lover, Nathan Landau, a brilliant but violently mercurial intellectual who enters her life as a savior only to become her doom. A Harvard-educated research biologist who claims to be within sight of cures for cancer and polio, Nathan is a polymath who can range with miraculous ease over the world’s body of knowledge, “as brilliant on Dreiser as he was on Whitehead’s philosophy.” To the bedazzled Stingo he is “the embodiment of everything I deemed attractive and even envied in a human being.”

Styron the novelist is enthralled by men like Landau—glittering charmers who cast a rapturous spell—and there is a decadent version of this same sinister enchanter, Mason Flagg, in Set This House on Fire. But Nathan, at one moment generous, loving, high-spirited, erudite, funny (this last we must take on faith; Styron tells us about the comic genius but fails to show it), can without warning turn into a snarling fiend, raging at Sophie for imagined infidelities and at Stingo for his incurable Southern racism. Only toward the end do we learn that Nathan’s bewildering fluctuations of mood are in fact psychotic, that his beguiling façade is a crazy pack of lies—he has never been to Harvard, he is not a research biologist—and that he has been in and out of mental hospitals most of his life. Despite this explanation, however, Nathan never develops into a credible human being, for Styron paints him in such garish shades of genius and bestiality that, mad though he may be, he is deprived of plausibility. No matter, for his role in the story is primarily instrumental. It is not Nathan’s operatic madness but Sophie’s slavish devotion that absorbs us, and she is the passionate heart of the book.

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With a sure instinct, Styron has written Sophie’s story in the grand manner of 19th-century fiction—she is, indeed, one of the very few women in contemporary American fiction to possess something of the tragic stature and self-defeating complexity of such classic heroines as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Hardy’s Sue Bridehead. A victim of absolute evil, she is not simply a pathetic survivor trembling before the lash of fate. She is lover, liar, masochist, drunk—a martyr but not a saint. Despite the cowardice and deception she divulges to Stingo, it is impossible not to be touched by the nobility of this lovable woman devoured by self-loathing. Even when she summons up the courage to tell her young friend, with self-flagellating candor, about her pretense of anti-Semitism when making a futile attempt to seduce Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, while working as his secretary, we cannot bring ourselves to condemn Sophie. The cruel secret hidden in the title is withheld until almost the last, and it is the darkest reason of all for Sophie’s suppurating guilt. In Sophie Zawistowska, Styron has achieved an intensity of feeling and pain that is admirably unsentimental, and he forces us to see that her sins deserve, beyond pity, the generosity of forgiveness.

Sophie’s Choice, however, deals not only with this fragile survivor of Nazi barbarism. It is also an account of William Styron’s young manhood, and clearly one of his motives for placing Sophie’s life in the context of his own, though they are so disparate, is to play on that recurrent theme of American fiction, the contrast of New World innocence and European experience. If in Henry James this encounter brings about alterations of manners and morals, in Sophie’s Choice it acquires the extremity of nightmare. Listening to Sophie, Stingo is shattered by the realization that while millions were being massacred in Europe, the rest of the world, oblivious, went on with its ordinary business. Stingo feels he can never come to terms with the fact that on the very day Sophie arrived in Auschwitz, he was stuffing himself with bananas in North Carolina to meet the weight requirement of the Marine Corps.

But it is a question whether the collision of innocence and experience requires the profuse indulgence of Styron’s portrait of the artist as a young man. There is too much in this novel about Stingo’s frustrated efforts to unburden himself of his pent-up virginity. Except for the lyrical celebration of Prospect Park in high summer and a funny account of his failure to conquer an impregnable fortress named Leslie Lapidus, Stingo’s horny preoccupations are prolix and faintly embarrassing.

At the end of the novel, Stingo vows that “Someday I will write about Sophie’s life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world,” and Styron has tried to honor this vow in Sophie’s Choice. On one level it is an extraordinary act of the novelist’s imagination, which recreates Sophie’s ordeal in Auschwitz and beyond through a wealth of immediate, dramatic detail. We see the “bluish veil of burning human flesh” that darkened the sunlight in the camp; we see and are repelled by Höss taking a break from his murderous duties to gaze lovingly out the window at his Arabian horse. Or, in an appalling episode, Sophie, haggard and defenseless during her first weeks in New York, is crushed in a rush-hour subway train and, when the lights go out, raped by an anonymous marauding finger.

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But Styron does not limit his scrutiny of evil to these devastating obscenities. He has a moral to spell out. He has read widely and conscientiously in the literature of the Holocaust—not only such detailed chronicles as those of David Rousset, Tadeusz Borowski, Eugen Kogon, André Schwarz-Bart, but also the theoretical efforts of Hannah Arendt, George Steiner, and the Jewish theologian Richard Rubenstein—and he means to wrest some lesson from the slaughter. Styron has been particularly impressed by Rubenstein’s thesis, in The Cunning of History, that the concentration camps were not only “places of execution” but a new kind of slave society—“a world of the living dead”—based on ruthless domination and “the absolute expendability of human life.”

Midway through Sophie’s Choice, then, Styron abruptly and for a long moment exchanges the voice of the novelist for that of the moralist. What especially troubles him is the fact that the world is, to this day, largely unmindful of the millions of non-Jewish Russians, Serbs, Gypsies, Slovenes, and Poles like Sophie who died alongside the Jews. It disturbs him that “It is surpassingly difficult for many Jews to see beyond the consecrated nature of the Nazis’ genocidal fury.” Though Styron allows that such parochialism is understandable, in his view it reveals a deficiency of moral responsibility and a dangerous insensitivity to those forces in contemporary life that might spawn new Holocausts. In a recent interview, he has even questioned the validity of the word Holocaust, as Jews have defined it for more than a decade, and argues that the French term I’univers concentrationnaire more accurately describes “the significance of this intolerable crime.”

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In one sense, given his revulsion at the radical evil of the Nazis, Styron may be right. But what he misses is that, precisely as an expression of radical evil, the Holocaust gained its significance because its first purpose was the total eradication of one people, the Jews—not for anything they had done but only for being who they were. It is this that distinguishes the Jewish victims in the death camps from all others.

Styron also neglects the historical fact that the word Holocaust acquired importance for Jews only twenty years after the defeat of Nazi Germany. What happened between 1940 and 1945 became fully manifest to Jewish consciousness not in the decade after World War II but with the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, the third time that the Israelis had to defend their lives, when it became evident that the symbolic and actual history of the people was again being threatened. It was then that the theological meaning of the Holocaust became clear: that, as Emil Fackenheim put it, Hitler should not achieve in death what he failed to do in life.

Styron’s insistence on seeing the Holocaust as an example of slavery—if a particularly horrible one—is perhaps to be expected in a Southerner who has devoted a good deal of his mature life to contemplating that institution. Yet by emphasizing not the end goal of the Nazi plan—mass murder—but rather the means of domination and enslavement which they settled on to effectuate that goal, Styron loses a sense of the full enormity of the Holocaust. He is, in any case, too prone to highly charged but dubious generalization: “And were not all of us, white and Negro, still enslaved? I knew that in the fever of my mind and in the most unquiet regions of my heart I would be shackled by slavery as long as I remained a writer.” Sentiments like these, intended to enlarge the didactic range of his novel, have, rather, the effect of undermining its dramatic power.

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Yet it should be stressed that Styron’s “philosophy” is, in every way that counts, external to Sophie’s Choice. Philosophers analyze, classify, and make distinctions of language, but a novel like this one cuts across distinctions because human beings embody within themselves endlessly various motives. The art of the novel is necessarily dramatic, concrete, and idiosyncratic, and it can reveal complex truths about individuals, and their dissonant impulses, in devious and untidy ways. Styron may not be persuasive as a philosophic mind meditating on history, but that does not diminish his genuine strength. So powerfully does the novelist bring Sophie to life that she seems less imagined than remembered. As we read her story, we bear witness to her fatality, and it is the word made flesh that remains with us in the end.

¹ Random House, 515 pp., $12.95.