None of the members of my family is a cheerleader for the values so stridently celebrated at this past summer's convention in Houston. But I want to describe how the rescue team they organized on Christmas Day of 1985 helped ensure my survival and, perhaps paradoxically, confirmed a lovely statement by Barbara Bush at the same event.*
For weeks I had been confined to a room in a mental hospital, suffering from one of the darkest pains known to humankind—clinical depression. They burst into that grim green cell at noon, all twelve of them, my wife and son, three daughters and their extended families. They had brought with them an enormous turkey dinner complete with napkins and silver which they laid out on my bed. Cajolery or bribery had created this miracle, along with the very presence of such a mob—regulations stipulated no visitors in excess of two.
Even more impressive was their feat of muscling past the custodians a television set and VCR. My oldest daughter, a movie director, had pieced together—out of 8 mm film I had shot—a ribbon of scenes from the distant past, much childish mugging and antic tomfoolery set to Mozart. How delicious it was, in that chill and laughterless place, to hear the sound of pure hilarity and feel appetite stir again, and perceive the first glimmer of light in the dungeon of madness. I had a long way to go, yet months afterwards it was possible for me to situate recollections of this noisy explosion of love at the very start of my recovery.
That Christmas Day my family presented, by most common American standards, an unorthodox profile. One of my daughters was living in sin with her lover, who was present. Another daughter's stepson—he was also on hand—was born out of wedlock and had been reared with great proficiency and tenderness by a single mother who happens to be a lesbian. A favorite godson was likewise illegitimate. Had I been able to take a poll among them I would have found that then, as now, none of the members of my family believed in the power of prayer, or the need for it in or out of school (or hospital). All of them at one time or another have smoked pot, and inhaled it. None considers homosexuality to be either wrong or unnatural, and they all support a woman's right to abortion. They can take pornography or leave it but in any case do not judge it to be evil. Family values? The phrase would make them hoot. Family, as Barbara Bush said, “means putting your arms around each other, and being there.” This was the only consideration which had value on that day of the beginning of my own rebirth.
[Previously unpublished. Styron wrote this reminiscence in 1992 at the invitation of Time magazine for a projected series on “The Family.” The series was canceled; Styron's statement is preserved among his papers at Duke University.]
* Styron refers to Barbara Bush's speech on “family values,” delivered on August 19, 1992, at the Republican National Convention, held in the Astrodome in Houston, Texas.—J.W.