I’d like to open the evening with a question to Susan Sontag. A poet she admires wrote: ‘The real enemy of man is History’. 

Susan Sontag: It is certainly true that I greatly admire Czesław Miłosz, but I don’t understand that sentence, at all. We live in a world that is thick with institutions, prejudices, connections, ideas, memories. This is a very weighty part of our existence, for most people the way in which they are grounded in history is not apparent to them, it’s like the air that they breathe. But I have to admit, to make such a generalization that the enemy of human beings, excuse me for correcting the word man and substituting human beings, the enemy of human beings is history is really, I don’t know what it means, because there is no way in which we can not live in history. We do not have just a biological existence, we also have a cultural existence and a moral existence, and our cultural and moral existence has a geniality, and that geniality is history. There are bad histories, there are poisonous histories, but I cannot see any sense in talking about history as such, as something that we could imagine being free of or desire being free of.

Robert Stone: Well I can imagine trying to be free of it. There it lies behind us and we have really no way immediately of cleaning it up. We can imagine ourselves, our own life, our own lives, we can impose a narrative on our existence in the present, and yet we’ve left behind us things that are extremely difficult to resolve that define us. So we set about imposing narratives on that, and I think of William Maxwell’s statement on the subject of writing about the past: ‘Anyone who sits down to render the past lies with every breath he draws’. Most of what we conceive of as history is some kind of narrative, a way of apologizing, of making sense, of inspiring and controlling the future. Far from it being an enemy, it’s an irreplaceable aspect of existence, but no more available than the present or the future, it’s just as allusive as the present and even as allusive as the future. 

William Styron: I would more or less agree with Susan with the opaqueness of that statement. It leads me to another famous quotation by Joyce: ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’. To that degree there’s an enigma certainly in history, that we’re immersed in it, we can’t make sense of it, and as I think Bob was implying, we try to make sense of the madness of history through our attempts to create narratives to create fictions, to try to define this often nightmarish condition in which we find ourselves. 

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In The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice history provides an escape. 

William Styron: I suppose I’ve seized these momentous events in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in an attempt to cast light not on our past, but on the present. Certainly in writing The Confessions of Nat Turner, although I wasn’t overly self- conscious about it, there was a deliberate connection in my mind between the slave unrest and this unprecedented rebellion of a single slave in the early nineteenth century. I saw that as a paradigm and as an analogy with the incredible neo-slavery that has existed in the United States ever since Reconstruction. The events surrounding the publication of the books certainly indicated that I was on the right track because they received an extraordinary amount of antagonism from the black community, who conceived that my vision was not consummate with theirs. The basic thing is that I wanted to create an analogy between the terrible oppression of slavery and the equivalent oppression in the twentieth century of blacks in America. So this was a deliberate attempt on my part. 

Susan Sontag:  Well once again I don’t know what it means to speak of history, as such. I think there are histories. The famous line of Joyce that comes from Ulysses of something that Steven Dedalus says early on: ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’. He’s not just talking about history in general, no one talks about history in general except for philosophers of history, a very small band. People are talking about their particular histories. If you are Irish, or Serb, you might very well say ‘History, that is the history of my people with its struggle, with its prejudice, with its violence, is something I wish I could escape from’. But this is not history in general. There are particular national histories, or community histories, that become very poisoned or very enslaving to individuals. I know African Americans who wish they could escape from the burden of African American history. America is famous for being a land of forgetting, a place where immigrants came to forget their own histories, start their own life. I agree entirely with William, if I understand the implication of what he says: when you write about the past you are writing about the present.

Robert Stone: I don’t think we should let the evocation of that particular scene in Ulysses escape us, if we’re considering this question. Steven Dedalus is talking to a man named Darcy, who’s a school master, and Darcy believes that history has a pattern, and that that pattern is the ascent to sublime consciousness of human kind, he believes in the spirit of history, he believes in an ordained destiny for human kind, he is a historical idealist of the most irrepressible kind, and he’s subjecting Dedalus to his vision of the history, and the present and the inspiring future of man. And Dedalus is half listening to him, and he hears the sound of kids playing outside, and he hears one of the kids playing and one of the children playing says ‘Goal’, they’re playing football, and Dedalus thinks ‘History, a cry in the street’, and then he thinks ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’. The whole pattern in that little scene compresses everything I think that Joyce, who thought a lot about history, considered in that question. 

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What about the history of Dog Soldiers?

Robert Stone: Of course that was quite contemporary. It was a couple of years since my first book, and my writing of Dog Soldiers was really a response to coming from Vietnam to coming home, and I’d been living in London, I went to Vietnam from Europe, and then went back to America, and perhaps because I had been in Europe for a while, there seemed to be a dark complementary nature to life in America then to what I remembered from Vietnam. So it was all quite contemporary and immediate, it was going on around me. I mean it’s historical now, it looks historical to me because I can remember the writer who is becoming history, that is me, but it was quite contemporary when I wrote it, literally. 

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In America you quote Langston Hughes: ‘America will be’.

Susan Sontag: It’s ‘America will be!’ and it’s a famous poem of Langston Hughes in which he expresses his disappointment with America because of racism, because of social injustice of all kinds, but the refrain is always ‘America will be, America will be’. America sera, you know that’s the idea. So I supposed I wanted to evoke the idea that America is a project, that we, if I can say ‘we’, we’re forever involved in a kind of project. The deepest thing in me is the idea that I’m becoming, I’m in the process of becoming, I’m not finished, it’s a very American idea.

William Styron: It’s called self-improvement. 

Robert Stone: Simple English phrase, a ‘making it’, just ‘making it’, everything that conveys. To make it, to be ‘making it’ has a kind of constructive quality. I once lost a lot of money on a horse called ‘Willy Make it’, a haunting little phrase. 

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The ancient Greeks said that change is healthy.

Susan Sontag: Well the Greeks said everything, that’s why we love them. 

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At the press conference yesterday, you said: ‘the defining moment of this last
century was the dropping of the bomb’.

William Styron: Well I don’t know, I have to speak once again from the point of view of history. I remember Tolstoy very arbitrarily spoke of history in the novel as being fifty years in the past. And perhaps now that the dropping of the bomb is fifty years in the past, we can speak of it as history. I’m fascinated by the dropping of the bomb because of the moral dilemma, the moral issues that are raised by it. If you were as I was, a young Marine ready to lose your life almost assuredly in the invasion of Japan, you would have a different view of the bomb and it’s effect, then people who moralize about it and the horror of Hiroshima. I don’t think this is an issue that has ever really been resolved. Perhaps if I had not been a kid whose life was saved, literally, I would be able to be more circumspect about the bomb. But it’s troubled me over the years, because the bomb was my salvation, my personal salvation, and was unquestionably the engine of death of thousands and thousands of Japanese. It remains to my mind the single most important question left to people who wonder about history, whether the bomb should have been dropped or not. And the issue is still to be resolved. 

Susan Sontag: Well, as someone who very much deplores the use, the American use, of the bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, let me just say my point of view is that there were alternatives. First of all the Japanese were involved with negotiations for surrender at the time that the bomb was dropped, secondly I believe that those negotiations were aborted in order to test the bomb. I believe they would have surrendered without the use of the bomb, or with, as proposed by some scientists and American officials, a demonstration of the bomb on a desert atoll. Ok we’re going to drop this on you, come and watch. Thirdly, that the notion that the bomb was then dropped on Nagasaki, is even more deplorable if it’s possible to measure these things, because the Japanese were certainly about to surrender. 

William Styron: That’s where I take issue with you, because I think it has yet to be demonstrated conclusively that the Japanese were going to surrender. Steven Ambrose, one of our better historians, wrote a recent essay in which he pondered this very same issue. And has to my mind, made it clear that there is no evidence whatsoever that the Japanese were ready to surrender, that in fact the war party in the cabinet was far more determined to pursue the war after the bombing than before. Now this is why I find this whole subject so fascinating, that there’s a polarity that Susan in all good judgment, and with considerable passion, argues her point and I feel that she’s wrong and I’m right. It’s an irresolvable issue. 

Susan Sontag: But the question is not that I have passion or if you have passion, the question is that I have different sources. You cite Ambrose, and I can cite other books and articles which say the opposite. 

William Styron: That’s why I find it so interesting. 

Robert Stone: You have two histories here. You believe in them absolutely. 

Susan Sontag: Yes, but all I want for the audience to know is that if you cite Ambrose, this is not the sole account,and if he says there is no evidence whatsoever, many authorities, say otherwise. 

William Styron: That’s precisely what my point is. 

Robert Stone: Which is history? Which of your opinions should we count as history?

Susan Sontag: But it again, it’s not, here I think Will and I will agree, it’s not about opinions, there is a historical record. 

Robert Stone: Of course it is about opinions.

Susan Sontag: No because in the end, one of us is right on this issue. 

William Styron: I’m not so sure. 

Robert Stone: It doesn’t matter whether one of us is right. 

Susan Sontag: Well, listen, that’s like saying it’s raining and it’s not raining. In either the evidence were or they weren’t. 

Robert Stone: History is really not what happens, history is what we say happened. History is what we believe happened. It’s not actually what happened. So we have two distinct histories. History is what we have decided the past is. And if in my historical view, the United States was compelled to drop the bomb, that is one kind of history in which I will act and if my view is that the United States simply dropped the bomb to demonstrate it’s power in the post-war world, that is another history altogether and I will operate on that belief. And I think it illustrates a great deal about what we’re talking about when we talk about history. 

William Styron: Well that’s what I intended to say at the beginning: here it is over fifty years after this catastrophic event, and there is not a clear-cut understanding of who was right and who was wrong. Whether Truman was right or wrong. The fact that in Prague, in the year 2000, we can still be pondering the rightness or the wrongness, and with passion, two of us be divided in our opinion, is almost a demonstration of the nightmare of history. We cannot grapple with it because we don’t know what is true and what is not true, and that’s the mystery and the nightmare of history. 

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In Sophie’s Choice you refer to Simone Weil with the idea that man is devoid of free will, that man has no choice, all things are predetermined.

William Styron: Well, I’m not a metaphysician. Simone Weil was a philosopher and I’m not. So I find it hard to grapple with determinism and such matters as it applies to history. I plainly believe that one of the constants in history is evil. And that we’re at various times in history confronted with it, and since Susan used an epigraph, I’d like to use one too, the one I used for Sophie’s Choice, from AndréMalraux: ‘I seek that essential region of the soul, where absolute evil confronts brotherhood.’ That’s a very noble statement. If we defeat evil, or if we beat it down, it’s through some sort of mystical, transcendental idea of love, that sounds almost like a piece of sentimental Christianity. But I believe it. And for me, I have this rather limited view of the workings of history, I remember how vividly joyous I was, ironically, when I heard that the bomb had dropped and my ass was saved. I’ll never forget it, this was in 1945. And I remember saying to myself, to all my pals in the marines, ‘There are going to be no more wars, wars are finished’. Well within six years I was in the Korean War, and I was once again faced with the idea of having my ass shot off. And I’m only bringing that up to stress the fact that events in the Balkans, have in the past decade, demonstrated once again that this evil that we thought was evaporating mid-century is still with us. 

Susan Sontag: I have never been a combatant, but I have been in three wars as a civilian. And most recently I spent a better part of three years in Sarajevo during the siege. And I saw a lot of evil, I couldn’t agree more with Bill about evil being a constant in human affairs, I would not just say in history, I would say in human affairs. There’s a lot of evil in people. And it’s not just expressed in large historical events, it’s expressed in small acts of cruelty and sadism that people inflict on each other in domestic situations. I never thought that war is over. How about war as a way of combating evil? If we think of Nazi Germany as a kind of benchmark of evil, do we not think that the Second World War was justified?

William Styron: I have no quarrel with that. 

Susan Sontag: Well, then someone has to fight evil. It’s not just love, one has to fight. I have to say, if I ever thought I was a pacifist, and I’ve toyed with that fantasy, my three years in Sarajevo robbed me of any thought of being a pacifist but gave me quite a lot of sympathy for the military, and admiration for some soldiers and officers and what they did there. 

William Styron: Well I’ve never had the slightest resistance over the idea that I was proud to be a marine until this day, I’m proud to be a marine. 

Susan Sontag: But you’re saying the only way to combat evil is through love. 

William Styron: I didn’t imply that as a categorical matter. I was trying to say that maybe one of the resorts, one of the emotions we resort toin combating evil is acts of love, even though that does sound like Christian sentimentality, I none the less believe it. 

Robert Stone: It’s the old question of ‘What must we do to be saved?’ that never got answered. Or rather it got answered again and again and the answers were never sufficiently useful. It seems to me, I always felt that I was waiting, being of the generation that I am, the kind of post civil rights movement, California is wonderful, everything I had to do with that generation has always inclined me, my post Christianity, always inclined me to wait for some kind of overwhelming act of love, or some kind of transcendent inflammation within myself or some bright vision in the world that would sweep everything away and that would obviate the prospect of evil. But that never seems to happen, and I have to conclude that it isn’t going to happen. It seems then that all we can do is not to confront evil, because I think that’s too scary, it’s too weird, all we can do being who we are, which is not so much, and the world being what it is, which is not great, we can simply put Tuesday on top of Monday in a half-way decent way. And I really don’t think there’s much more we can do in that. I believe in Original Sin, I believe in it as a metaphor, but I believe in it. There is a way in which we cannot possibly transcend who and what we are and we cannot seem to transcend what the world is, and the best we can do is to persuade ourselves that we are half-way decent people at least enough of the time, and behave halfway decently and then extend that to at least a small degree of projection, that we can extend it. I would love to be able to take part in something more overwhelming but I don’t think there is such a thing. 

Susan Sontag: Bob has said he’s post-Christian, and Bill has expressed some wonderful ideas and then a little shyly, of course maybe this is Christian sentimentality, so of course I have to come forward and say ‘I’m a Christian’, period. I don’t think it’s sentimental, I think it’s Christian. And I believe you can do a lot more than put Tuesday on top of Monday in a decent way, I mean not everybody is called to be a hero or a saint or whatever. But I’ve seen unbelievable heroic and altruistic actions on the part of a few people, and I want to live in a world in which such a thing is possible. It isn’t everybody’s role and it isn’t everybody’s temperament but I’ve seen it. It’s part of the Christian idea, the idea of extending your life for other people even at the expense of your own life or own comfort. 

William Styron: That’s such a wonderfully heretical thought, Susan, I’m proud of you for saying it. Right now, there’s about a million people on Wall Street for whom these words would be absolute poison. 

Robert Stone: We would all subscribe to it!

Susan Sontag: No, no, I don’t agree, I think Bill is absolutely right, in fact I don’t think it’s just the million people on Wall Street, I think the vast majority of people in the country that we’re all citizens of would find this deeply weird. 

Robert Stone: I don’t understand why, I mean it seems like fighting the good fight and who’s going to come out against that?

Susan Sontag: Cause they do! Because the notion of altruism, and sacrificing possibly material advantage and comfort is almost unintelligible to most people now. 

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What happened?

Susan Sontag: Call it the total victory of capitalism. 

William Styron: It’s not only capitalism, it’s greedy capitalism.

Susan Sontag: That’s what I mean, the total victory of capitalism. 

Robert Stone: I want to interpose this very quickly. I don’t believe there is such a thing as capitalism. I’ve thought about this for maybe an hour or so. I really don’t think the means of production and distribution control the form of society to the extent that we can say there is such a thing as capitalism.  I really don’t believe in capitalism as such, I believe in greed. I don’t need any persuasion about things like that. But it’s really a separate matter from people indulging in the vices of which they’re so fond. I really don’t think anyone would disagree with the principles you’ve stated, the question is really not whether we agree with them or disagree with them, the question is whether someone actually goes out and lives in this fashion. 

Susan Sontag: I can tell you that people do disagree with them, and I don’t think that capitalism is just a word invented by Marx, I think it’s a word used by everybody and they know what they’re talking about. The moral climate has shifted, it has shifted enormously, and if you talk to younger people, you really feel it. 

William Styron: I know a young man who is a very nice young man, he’s in his thirties, and I like him. He’s well-read, well-educated and he’s in Wall Street. And his only aim in life is to make a hundred million dollars before he’s forty. I find this so bizarre. And yet he’s not unusual, he’s characteristic of his age group in a certain stratum of American society. I find this bizarre beyond belief, I don’t even think greed covers such a goal in life. 

Robert Stone: Sure it does.

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So where are we now? 

Robert Stone: If we knew where we were going, to paraphrase Lincoln, we would have more of an idea where we are. We may be at the brink of extinction, collectively. We don’t know, we really don’t know where we are, and it’s extremely difficult to determine. We are still inventing the past, we do seem to have dropped in large measure the idea of progress, which was particularly continuous in American history. People do not go around talking about the world of tomorrow, tomorrow was the current word in the 1930’s right up to about 1964, the World’s Fair, the extremely corporate and capitalistic World’s Fair. And right about that time when things started going wrong, the idea of progress seems to have been eclipsed. The reason I bother to try and qualify definitions of capitalism as opposed to greed is I worry about anti-nomanism. I wonder about the idea if you embrace the right faith, a kind of anti-capitalism, then you no longer have to worry about things like greed. That’s the reason I make that distinction. I don’t know where the hell we are, I don’t know where the hell I am. 

Susan Sontag: There’s no faith. That’s what I mean by the total victory of capitalism. 

Robert Stone: We’re not talking about the same thing. 

William Styron: History, to use the simplest cliché, has always been two steps forward, one step backward. Terrible retrograde things happening. Moments of extraordinary growth and development, spiritually and otherwise, and then these catastrophic events which represent the one step back, the most obvious example would be what happened in Germany in the 1920’s. This extraordinary paragon of a cultured nation dissolving into barbarism and horror. But I don’t know whether I’m a pessimistic optimist or an optimistic pessimist, because as radiant as certain aspects of our society seem to be at the moment, I’m just ready for the next disaster. 

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Prague Writers' Festival, April 2000

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