Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

The Plight of an Artist Turns Tragic

Darkness Visible is a radical narration about a dark dreaded disease written by someone who had the skills to spin an emotional yarn about it. In October of 1985, William Styron took a trip to Paris to accept the Prix Mondial Cino del Duca award for humanism. Styron¿s First novel, Lie Down in Darkness, was one of del Duca¿s offerings. Styron¿s state of mind on the 4-day turn-a-round was not good and he would not have accepted the honor at all had he known just how sick he was. The point of revelation came in December the same year. During the time he was in Paris, Styron was taking a minor tranquilizer, Halcion. His pain closely resembled the feeling of drowning or suffocation or being in a trance. One in ten suffer from the illness and artistic types, especially poets, are particularly vulnerable to the disease which takes twenty percent by way of suicide, some of the more well-known are: Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. Styron thinks seeds of the illness take root in childhood. Styron was sixty when the disease struck in unipolar form ¾ straight down. Styron abused alcohol for forty years. He said many writers use alcohol as a magic conduit to fantasy and euphoria and enhancement of the imagination. He used it in conjunction with music as a means to let his mind conceive visions that the unaltered, sober brain has no access to. Alcohol was an invaluable senior partner of his intellect. In June before Styron entered the hospital in December, his body rejected alcohol ¾the daily mood bath. The checklist of function failures Styron listed are: disappearance of voice, which becomes wheezy and spasmodic, libido makes an early exit, appetite is lost, sleep disrupted and there is a complete absence of dreams. Exhaustion overtook him, and he got only two or three hours of sleep with the aid of Halcion. Experts in psychopharmacology have warned that the benzodiazephone family of tranqilizers of which Halcion is one (also Valium and Ativan) is capable of depressing one¿s mood and even precipitating a major depression. One night after contemplating suicide, he woke up his wife and was admitted to the hospital the next day. By February, Styron emerged into light, still shaky but, as he described it, the body¿s sweet juices were flowing again. Styron ponders the reason for his illness whether the abrupt withdrawal from alcohol, turning 60, being disconcerted with the way his work was going or the onset of inertia in his writing life. Suicide had been a theme in his books and three major characters killed themselves. Depression had been tapping at his door for decades. Styron¿s father had battled depression and his mother died when he was thirteen. Unable to achieve the catharsis of grief, he carried within himself a burden of rage and guilt. He says many famous writers and artists gave us hints of the vast metaphor of depression in their work: Job, Sophocles and Aeschylus were chroniclers of the human spirit, wrestling with vocabulary to give proper expression to the desolation from Hamlet to Emily Dickinson Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Donne to Hawthorne, and Dostoevski and Poe, Camus and Conrad and Virginia Woolf and even Albrecht Durer¿s engraving. The most faithfully represented is that of Dante, ¿In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, For I had lost the right path.¿ For those who have dwelt in depression¿s dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell¿s black depths. And at last emerging into what he saw as ¿the shining world.¿ There, whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy. ¿And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.¿ Trish New, author of The Thrill of Hope, South State Street Journal, and Memory Flatlined.

I'm right here, MRS. BROWN ! ! ! ! !

Darkness Visible is a fascinating modern memoir of a man and his ability to survive his debilitating depression by the end of a thread. The plot slowly unfolds from Styron's mild discontent, and soon spirals into a series of brutal and suicidal tendencies. Styron, very humbly, shows his pure strength as a man struggling for survival from his mental disease. His story offers a very unique look at the dangerous conflicts of mental illness and the affect it has on the person and on the world. At times the reader is almost cetain that Styron cannot possibly make it through the torture he is enduring, but his burden is soon subdued by the thriving will power that Styron ever displays throughout the memoir. Darkness Visible offers a riveting account of a man's personal struggle with mental illness, yet also serves as a message of hope to those who have succumbed to this crippling disease. I thought Styron's briliiant use of convoluted vocabulary sufficiently regulated the tone of the story and kept the reader wanting to find out more. However, the book (although short) seemed to drag at times because of its habit of repeating facts and feelings already read earlier in the book. Despite its habit for repetition, the book suffciently keeps the reader interested and manages to convey a very specific point in time accurately, and with very little words. The book is ridiculously short, but it has to be, considering that if Styron would have made it any longer, the reader probably would have lost interest in the subject all together. Having had the 'joys' of depression all of my life, this memoir was moving and inspired me never to give up hope, even in my darkest hours. Not bad, Bill!

The black dog whimpers

Full marks for Styron coming out at a time when depression needed a smart poster boy -- because mental illness does a great job dividing our world. However, it simply isn't true (as per the publisher's claim) that Styron is the first to convey the full terror of depression -- Hemingway and Chekhov immediately come to mind with their short stories, for instance, that don't actually name depression or madness, but evoke it's cruelties beautifully. Styron certainly has done a magnificent job with this memoir, in large part because he keeps everything understated (certainly restrained). His book invites serious reflection, and it's worth considering his bursts of anger as symptomatic more than didactic. I also recommend IN THE GHOST COUNTRY as another interesting book that intimately follows a man's descent into a haunted madness as he walks to the South Pole. A stunning fall to the bottom of the world indeed.

Big words don't make a good memoir

As a major in Human Development and a survivor of depression, I found that Styron's memoir was nothing more than big words. He calls Art Therapy infantile! A well establish writer should becareful how he uses words... especially on a technique that is internationally used to treat clients with depression. Although, he makes note that every recovery is different, he disclaimed a well respect treatment technique. Also, he focused too much on that fact that suicidal ideation, is experienced by 'famous' people too. Any educated person knows, that depression is not a racist disease... I don't think he needed to used more than 2 chapters explaining this.

dont think it

I've read alot of great children's books such as Ella Enchanted, Destiny, Defender of the small, and The Time Warp Trio books, but I've never read a 'sophisticated and grown up' book before. I'm twelve, how else should I describe it? I do think this book is good. I had a hard time understanding what it meant at first, but later on I understood that no one who has not been afflicted with isnomnia will truly know the full depth of madness and emptiness that they feel. Styron, with intimate details, creates an illistration for us.

A little disappointing

After all the hype I'd heard about 'Darkness Visible', I found it a bit disappointing. Styron is clearly a great writer- few would dispute that. Nonetheless, I found his description of the subjective feeling and experience of depression to be somewhat lacking. Of course, it's very difficult to describe any subjective mental state, but nonetheless I didn't find his attempt too compelling. On the other hand, the book is very well-written and stylistically pleasing.

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