Rose Styron’s Gentle, Riveting ‘Beyond this Harbor’

A review of the poet’s new memoir, which touches on her life, activism, and relationship with husband and novelist William Styron.

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It’s pretty much impossible to imagine a richer, more fulfilling life than the one recounted by Rose Styron in her brilliant, beautiful new book, Beyond this Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart.

Beyond this Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart

By Rose Styron

Penguin Random House, 352 pages.

Publication date: June 13, 2023

A legendary poet, activist and doyenne of the literate left, Rose at ninety-five remains a uniquely cherished beacon for a treasured but fast-disappearing generation of Earth-shaping authors, artists, and activists.

A truly blessed, uniquely gifted, and amazingly generous spirit, Rose used the isolation of COVID-19, and her Martha’s Vineyard sanctuary, to craft a memoir that is profoundly shocking and heartbreaking. 

I’ll put it this way: if you wrote a novel as graceful and poetic as this true life memoir, it might be dismissed as both mostly too good to be true and almost too stark to bear.

Rose was born into a comfortable, secular Jewish Baltimore family. Her stately, genteel mother lived to be 102-years-old. Blessed with an athletic attitude, loads of spunk, and a generous allowance, Rose Burgunder spent her younger days roaming an unspoiled play world of Huck-Finnish adventure.

Sailing through Quaker schools with an artiste’s inclination, her path led eventually to Wellesley, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard—not to mention Rome and Paris, where the aspiring young poet met the tall, dashing novelist William Styron.

A son of the South and a graduate of the Marine Corps, the twenty-something Bill had just improbably won the Prix de Rome for his novel Lie Down in Darkness. A storybook romance ensued, punctuated by orders from Truman Capote to get married, which the couple did in 1953 in a bohemian concert with some of the era’s greatest literati, including some who go on to found The Paris Review.

Rose, throughout her narrative, comes across as being a bit astonished with how (mostly) charmed her life has been.

But she pays her dues with daring, tangible commitments to human rights and her work helping Amnesty International free worldwide prisoners of conscience.

Accompanied by her daughter Susanna (with whom I shared a memorable 1980 Pentagon arrest in the company of Dr. Benjamin Spock, Mary Morgan, Daniel Berrigan, and the just-passed, deeply missed Daniel Ellsberg), Rose smuggled critical documents out of Pinochet’s Chile. There are other hair-raising adventures, along with state dinners, Congressional arm twisting, conferences, and the conspiratorial hustling of a ceaseless advocate. The memoir, in part, becomes a harrowing travelogue through eastern Europe and southeast Asia to the unspeakable travesties of our own horrific prisons and the infuriating hypocrisies of our worst politicians. 

Sustaining long-term friendships with the Kennedys, the Clintons, and too many musical and literary giants to recount, the Styrons, with homes in Connecticut and on the Vineyard, hosted as many fundraising events as one could imagine, for causes ranging from gun control and the death penalty to ending nuclear war and nuclear power, to human rights, press freedom, and a nascent feminist movement.  

Throughout it all, Bill is her loyal side man. She types his longhand writings and hears out his formative musings through a half-century collaboration that brought readers The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie’s Choice, and many more.    

I once drove with Bill from their rural Connecticut home to the Vineyard Ferry, and it was abundantly clear that there was no fluff to this guy. Small talk quickly gave way to a towering, impatient intellect capable of producing some of history’s greatest novels. Lucky for me, I’d read most of them before getting into that car.

But Darkness Visible, Bill’s memoir about the depths of his depression, was on another level entirely. This brief but devastating account plumbed the deepest crevasses of  depression long before the pharmaceutical industry turned it into a billion-dollar profit center.

In Rose’s frank telling, their dream life suddenly and repeatedly flies off into the bottomless Hell of a terribly tortured soul and the devoted lover who shares his pain. 

With strains of depression running through my own family, I raced through a reading of Darkness Visible while stuck on an airport tarmac. It was an incredibly painful but indelibly life-changing, liberating experience for me—as it remains, I’m sure, for countless others.

This lovely volume becomes an epic symphony—calm seas and a prosperous voyage, shaken by horrific storms and unfathomable crashes into the darkest shoals of our fragile souls.

Rose’s descriptions paint a soulmate’s perspective into the tangible experiences that shaped this breakthrough volume. Like Bill’s illuminating howl, Rose spares no detail in her own memoir of the terrible ordeals (there were many) that shaped their shared hell and his tortured passing.  

Thus this lovely volume becomes an epic symphony—calm seas and a prosperous voyage, shaken by horrific storms and unfathomable crashes into the darkest shoals of our fragile souls.

Rose Styron is a matchless poet and a wonderful human being. Her memoir is truly a gift. Don’t miss it.