She opened her door and mind to others
VINEYARD HAVEN, Mass. >> Rose Styron used to start her daily swim of the season in May, when the waters off the long dock at her house in Vineyard Haven, Mass., on Martha’s Vineyard, still barely reach 50 degrees. “Now that I’m 95, though,” she said one day in April, “I may wait until June.”
The first of Styron’s four books of poetry, “From Summer to Summer,” a collection for children, was published in 1965. Her most recent, “Fierce Day,” a coming to terms with the death of her husband, author William Styron, in 2006, was published in 2015. In the decades in between, her activism and journalism in the service of human rights, and her dedication as a celebrated host, have otherwise occupied her, as have her four children.
Now, Styron has written a memoir, “Beyond This Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart.” It includes lots of sightings from that same dock, and from the deep porch of her low- slung white house on Vineyard Sound. Presidents and human- rights crusaders, playwrights and movie stars, Nobel laureates and refugees, Sinn Fein members and Ulster Unionists, Hyannis Port Kennedys, newspaper publisher Katharine Graham, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis from her Red Gate Farm tromped across the Styrons’ lawn to their famous dinner parties. As long as guests are interesting, they are summoned there still.
Scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. will arrive on the island in July; Styron plans to host a dinner for him the next day. “Rose’s dinners are like the great belletristic salons of Paris,” he said. Styron said that the only person ever denied an invitation was former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and that she would never backtrack on that.
At a dinner just before the COVID- 19 pandemic, Victoria Wilson, a senior editor at Knopf, approached Styron about writing a memoir. Styron resisted. “I don’t like looking backward,” she said.
That changed during the long months of lockdown. She filled yellow legal pads with memories, opinions and stories: the protest marches, the White House dinners, the pro- democracy intelligence missions, the remote wildlife trips, the rock concerts for human rights.
“It’s a very large life,” Wilson said. “She was obviously a golden girl.”
Also recorded were the dark years of William Styron’s two mental breakdowns and his “Darkness Visible,” a bestselling book about the first that helped countless readers but, ultimately, couldn’t stave off the depression that returned at his life’s end.
“Beyond This Harbor” dips in and out of Rose Styron’s regrets for not better understanding the illness afflicting her husband, the world- renowned author of “Lie Down in Darkness,” “Sophie’s Choice” and “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” and for not having acted sooner when signs pointed to its magnitude.
Because Styron grew up mostly alone and in the care of a nanny, her eldest daughter, filmmaker Susanna Styron, has wondered about her need for company. “I don’t think she got much affection,” she said.
The Styrons bought the Vineyard house with a loan from her family. The beautiful Rose Burgunder had confessed her wealthy background to William Styron only after they had taken up together, two young postwar expats in Rome encouraged in their romance by Truman Capote.
The lifestyle she chose for herself and her family once back in the States was picturesquely free- spirited. “My mother thrives on chaos,” said her daughter Polly, a choreographer. Styron preferred going out more than her husband did. In 1966, without him, she attended Capote’s Black and White Ball.
If William Styron had f lagrant and very public affairs, Rose stuck to “one- or two- night stands,” she writes in the memoir, but she has never named names. She does write frankly about the abortion she had after her third child, Tom, now an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale University, was born. Seven years later came Alexandra, who in 2011 published “Reading My Father: A Memoir,” a bestselling chronicle of her troubled relationship with both her parents.
Styron said she was “happy just being with my husband and children” until a trip to the Soviet Union with her husband in 1968 opened her eyes to the plight of the country’s dissident writers and intellectuals, many banished to the gulag.
“Once you see people of conscience and bravery being imprisoned or killed, once you see what’s going on in the world, it changes you,” she said.
She became a founding member of Amnesty International USA and “stopped writing poetry for 20 years,” she said. Instead, she circled the globe, and a gilded social circuit, speaking and writing and lending the Styron name in support of human rights.
Now, Styron said, “I’m in distress about everything from Afghanistan, Syria and Sudan to Russia and the Ukraine, but mostly about how polarized and divided this country is. I fear for our democracy. I’m hoping young voters will save us next year.”
Styron has never lost her sense of wonder about the Vineyard’s natural world. In her poetry of mourning in “Fierce Day,” nature is a tonic. Her children just finished building her a ground- floor wing at the house, carefully angled for a view of the lawn, the dock and the water.
It also affords a view of the path leading to her front door. “Each summer, the world comes to Martha’s Vineyard,” she writes in “Beyond This Harbor,” and this spring she ebombed her Vineyard mailing list with the message: “Dear friends, Do you know what dates you’ll be coming to MV this spring and summer? Planning ahead and looking forward to seeing you often.”
“Cheers! Rose.”