The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of novelist William Styron (books by this author), born in Newport News, Virginia (1925). He got a job with a publisher, McGraw Hill, but he hated every minute of it, and decided he needed to leave. So he threw balloons out the office window until he was fired. After that, he committed himself to writing. In a letter to his father, he said, "Writing for me is the hardest thing in the world, but also a thing which, once completed, is the most satisfying...I am not a prodigy but, fate willing, I can produce art." In 1951, when he was 26 years old, he published his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness. It's the story of a beautiful young woman named Peyton Loftis who commits suicide. It got great reviews, and critics compared Styron to William Faulkner.

Styron was awarded the Rome Prize, and before his time in Italy he decided to spend a summer in Paris. There he met a group of ex-pat writers that included Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and James Baldwin. He said, "I had just published a first novel and was a celebrity, though one of very low rank since few of the Americans in Paris had heard of my book, let alone read it." He was only in Paris for about six weeks, but he helped found The Paris Review, which debuted in 1953. Styron was one of the first writers interviewed for the "Art of Fiction" section. Matthiessen and Plimpton conducted the interview, and they wrote: "Styron, shading his eyes, peers down into his coffee. He is a young man of good appearance, though not this afternoon; he is a little paler than is healthy in this quiet hour when the denizens of the quarter lie hiding, their weak eyes insulted by the light." In that interview, they asked him: "Do you enjoy writing?" and Styron replied: "I certainly don't. I get a fine, warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell." At the end of the interview, Matthiessen and Plimpton asked Styron about the purpose of young writers. He replied: "The purpose of a young writer is to write, and he shouldn't drink too much. He shouldn't think that after he's written one book he's God Almighty and air all his immature opinions in pompous interviews. Let's have another cognac and go up to Le Chapelain."

Styron went on to write The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), Sophie's Choice (1979), Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990), and The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps (2009).

He said, "The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads."

And, "I think whatever reputation I have is obscured by the simple fact that very few writers who are not perpetually in the public eye really have much of a reputation at all in this vast country. On the totem pole of reputation and of cultural acceptance, we're not very high, any of us. [...] I don't want to sound like I'm singing the blues that writers are doomed to obscurity, because they're not. But on the totem pole, we're somewhere in the area of your local psychiatrist."

It's the birthday of the playwright Ben Jonson (books by this author), born on this day in London, probably in 1572. His plays include Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone (1606), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1614). A contemporary, friend, and rival of Shakespeare's, Jonson was a heavy drinker and a fighter, no "Gentle Will."

Jonson's father died before he was born, and his stepfather was a bricklayer, so after a good education, young Ben spent some time laying bricks and then went off and joined the army. The story goes that he ran to the front of the lines and challenged a random soldier to single combat, then killed him. He went back to London, where he got work as an actor. Apparently he wasn't a very good actor, but he was a good playwright. In 1597, he co-wrote a play called The Isle of Dogs, which got him in trouble with the government—it was too subversive, and he was thrown in jail for "leude and mutynous behavior." He was let out after a few months, but a year later, he killed a fellow actor named Gabriel Spenscer in a duel. He was arrested and he should have been hanged, but he pulled out a legal defense called "benefit of clergy"—since he could read the Bible in Latin, he got to go in front of a more lenient court, which rarely sentenced well-educated men. Instead, he got another stint in jail, and was branded on his thumb to remind him that he had almost been executed. In 1604, he co-wrote a play called Eastward Ho! that mocked Scotland—since James VI of Scotland had taken over the throne from Elizabeth, making fun of Scotland was not tolerated, and Jonson was once more thrown in jail and informed that his ears and nose would be cut off. This threat never materialized, and when he was released, he hosted a banquet with friends to celebrate yet another narrow escape.

Jonson's plays were more classically inspired than Shakespeare's, less dependent on bawdy jokes and flashy duels. Jonson made plenty of disparaging comments about Shakespeare. He complained that his fellow playwright had "small Latine, and less Greeke." And Jonson was probably alluding to Shakespeare, who did have a tendency to rip off plots from other people, when he wrote:

"Poor Poet-Ape, that would be thought our chief,
Whose works are e'en the frippery of wit,
From brokage is become so bold a thief,
As we, the robb'd, leave rage, and pity it.
At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
Buy the reversion of old plays; now grown
To a little wealth, and credit in the scene,
He takes up all, makes each man's wit his own :
And, told of this, he slights it. Tut, such crimes
The sluggish gaping auditor devours ;
He marks not whose 'twas first : and after-times
May judge it to be his, as well as ours.
Fool! as if half eyes will not know a fleece
From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole piece?"

Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson was known as a slow, meticulous writer. After Shakespeare's death, Jonson wrote: "I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand. [...] I loved the man and do honor his memory on this side of idolatry, as much as any: he was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions; wherein he flowed with that facility, that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped."

Ben Jonson was famous for his ability to drink—it is said that when he converted from the Catholic Church to the Anglican Church in 1610, he downed the entire chalice of wine during his first communion. His bar of choice was the Mermaid Tavern in Cheapside, where he was the ringleader of a group of literary men. There are stories about the great debates and battles of wit that Jonson and Shakespeare had over their pints at the Mermaid, surrounded by the likes John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Fletcher, Sir Francis Bacon, and Francis Beaumont—but this is probably not true. More likely it was Jonson and some younger literary disciples who were regular patrons. After Jonson's death, the playwright Jasper Mayne wrote an ode, "To the Memory of Ben Jonson," and he wrote: "Such thy drought was, and so great thy thirst, / That all thy Playes were drawne at th' Mermaid first."

From the archives:

It's the birthday of Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata (books by this author), born in Osaka, Japan (1899).Both of his parents died by the time he was three years old, his grandmother died when he was seven, and his only sister died when he was nine. After being raised by his grandfather, he won fame and admiration in Japan for the novella The Izu Dancer (1925), about a man's obsession with a long-legged 14-year-old dancer. He spent 12 years writing his masterpiece, Snow Country (1937), about a man's frustrating relationships with two geisha he meets while on vacation. In 1968, he became the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize.