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"View Slideshow\n\nNovelists generally have a special feeling for house and home, since that's where they spend most of their working days. William Styron was a classic example of this. To me, and I think to most people who knew him, he was either writing in Connecticut or else sitting in a rocking chair on his Vineyard porch reading a book. He was sometimes a traveler, but he was most of all a man who loved being home.\n\nIn this piece, first published in Architectural Digest in March 1984, Styron speaks of \"the humanity and wit\" of the design of a southern mansion. This, and his easy grace in his sentences, some of them orotund, are characteristic of an unusual man and a great American writer, whose death just a few months ago was accompanied by many tributes. He was also mentioned as having been a hell-raiser in his youth, a participant in literary feuds, criticized by some for daring to write the memoir of a slave, howled at by others for daring to write about the holocaust, seemingly living in a vortex of vilification.\n\nYet the books that emerged from his meditations\u2014Lie Down in Darkness (1951),The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), Sophie's Choice (1979) andDarkness Visible (1990) among them\u2014gave him moral authority. Though he experienced, and wrote about, infernalities, he could be a thoughtful and reassuring presence, someone who liked a joke and could do funny accents. If he showed up at a party, he tended to leave early. He loved dogs, and what he liked best was to take them for walks on his favorite routes. His Vineyard house was simple, even stark, dwarfed by enormous trees, set on a beautiful lawn that reached to the water.\n\nHe was one of the last of a generation of writers who were mighty and romantic, because they were mostly hidden. (And because of this they bewitched the imaginations of those of us who wished to be writers ourselves.) If Styron seemed reclusive, it was because he needed peace of mind to work. He was one of the many writers I have known who epitomized the need to live in a serene, even bourgeois household. Rose Styron, whose care for his well-being exceeded almost anything I have ever witnessed in wifely devotion, assured him of this serenity.\n\nA mythology grows around people who keep themselves out of the public eye. Styron was celebrated for being combative and prickly, but really he was a man who set out to make sense of his life and his experiences of the most traumatic episodes in the world\u2014the war, slavery, the holocaust, his own suicidal depression and, as this piece shows, the complex glories of the American South.\n\nIf the accident of birth caused you to spend most of your early life, as I did, on what is known as the Virginia historic peninsula, you were apt to grow up with a ponderous sense of the American past. As a boy I was made constantly aware of the trinity of national shrines\u2014Jamestown, Yorktown and Williamsburg\u2014which even then, in the 1930s, brought tourists flocking to that 70-mile oblong of somnolent Tidewater lowland that juts southeastward from Richmond between two of the country's most venerable rivers, the York and the James. But at that age, proximity and familiarity breed, if not contempt, then a certain callow indifference, and I don't recall being at all thrilled by the greater part of my admittedly august surroundings.\n\nJamestown was merely a boring landing on the river, heavy with melancholy and ancient, illegible tombstones. Yorktown, for me, possessed no glamour, none of the allure of a world-class battleground on the order of Waterloo or Hastings, but was simply a river beach where we went to gorge ourselves on hot dogs and to swim in the soupy tidal water thick with jellyfish. For some reason verging on the heretical, Colonial Williamsburg never captured my fancy; it seemed even then a place largely contrived and artificial, and it left me cold. But part of my spirit was always mysteriously drawn to the James River mansions. They spoke to me in a secret, exciting way that the other landmarks could never speak, and I still consider them among the state's truly captivating attractions.\n\nWestover and Brandon. Shirley and Carter's Grove. There are other fine Colonial structures in the Tidewater, but these four remain the exemplars of the noble species of dwelling that the early planters built on the banks of the James, creating, from native brick and timber, likenesses of the country houses of England they had left behind, but in each case, out of some quirky genius, imparting to the whole an individuality that remains arrestingly American. The mansions have of course undergone much restoration since the mid-18th century, when they were built. (William Byrd's Westover, perhaps the most splendid of the group, was badly mutilated by fire during the Civil War.) But one of the remarkable things about these houses is the way they have escaped the look of having been prettified by the embalmer's hand. Although they are linked in spirit by their obviously Georgian origins, part of the charm of each lies in its almost defiant distinctiveness\u2014Shirley, with its absence of wings, having a lofty solidity, in contrast, say, to the dignified horizontal expansiveness of Brandon and its rectangular wings attached to the center by connecting passageways. Each is unique, and a surprise.\n\nThere are perhaps few habitations anywhere that ever so successfully fused aesthetic delightfulness with unabashed commerce. The plantation houses were really the headquarters for complex business enterprises. Their situation on the river happened not primarily because of the ingratiating view, but because the James was the means whereby each estate's golden harvest of tobacco was shipped back to the insatiable pipe smokers and snuff dippers of England and the Continent. What strikes one, then, is that the homes\u2014created by gentlemen for whom profit was a paramount concern\u2014are so fastidious yet so sensuous in their elegance, so satisfying in terms of all those components that make up the nearly perfect human abode. And all of this took place on the breast of a raw and primitive continent whose often violent settlement began not many years before.\n\nHow easy the temptation must have been to erect something tacky and utilitarian and to make one's getaway; the banks of the waterways of the earth have been littered by exploiters' shameless eyesores. But Virginia planters like William Byrd and his fellow proprietors, entrepreneurial though they were, made up a rare breed whose sense of environment was subtle and demanding. We know from the records they left that they responded with passion to the music of Purcell and Lully, to the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil; why should they not be determined that their surroundings be imbued with equal serenity and refinement?\n\nAmong other things, these fog-dampened Britons were plainly intoxicated with the flowering of Virginia's lush and sun-drenched countryside. And so what impressed me as a boy, perhaps unconsciously, impresses me now with logic and force; the harmonious connection between the mansions and their natural surroundings, each of them seeming to grow like an essential ornament in a landscape of huge, hovering shade trees, boxwood-and-rose-scented gardens, and a sumptuous lawn undulating to the river's edge. Two hundred and fifty years later this mingling of elements has a flowing integrity and authenticity. Also, humanity and wit.\n\nLook for humanity and wit almost everywhere in one of the James River mansions. In the great downstairs hall, the visitor will see how two doors facing each other allowed guests to arrive from opposite directions: by way of a tree-lined carriage road or, for people coming by barge or boat, across the lawn from the bank of the river. In the solitude of that barely civilized wilderness, guests were welcome and fussed over, and they came incessantly. Isolation made hospitality more than a ritual: It was part of a hungry need for communion, and the splendidly paneled rooms that give off the main hall saw manic activity: dancing and reading aloud; parlor games; music played on spinet and mandolin and harpsichord; gossip, flirtation and seduction; card games; much drinking of local applejack and fine Bordeaux wine around fireplaces that were everywhere and fueled from inexhaustible sources of Tidewater timber. Early on, Virginia developed a serious cuisine. At tables in the big dining room, the food\u2014usually supplied from outside cookhouses\u2014was served to the household and to the endless stream of visitors in orgiastic plenty that stillmakes one marvel.\n\nNo time or place is without its woes and discomforts, and surely the planters often worked hard and were besieged by problems, but a nimbus of hedonism surrounds our vision of the James River mansions in their heyday. Both the inhabitants and the crowd of callers must have had a lot of fun. Set down as they were in a delectable backwater where their only excuse for being was to supply their countrymen with a mildly euphoric weed they extracted from the fat land with absurd ease, the planters were among the favored few in history for whom the circumstances of life had produced a vast amount of enjoyment and relatively little adversity. Although the American Revolution would eventually produce friction and discontent, the proprietors appeared blissfully free of political anxieties. The pestilences that had decimated Jamestown had subsided. War\u2014both European and domestic\u2014was many comfortable miles away. The local Indians had been pacified years before. The low-church Episcopal God whom the planters sometimes worshipped was forgiving and tolerant of their voluptuous pleasures, leaving the burden of sin to be suffered by the Puritans, far north in icy New England. In the long and disorderly chronicle of the West, with its chiaroscuro of serenity and dark agony, they were children of a brief sunshine.\n\nOne discordant presence was usually forgotten, or overlooked, even then. As the present-day visitor looks out across the tidy beds of flowers bordered by boxwood and traversed by brick walls, his gaze may linger on the outbuildings (or the spot where they once stood), and they too will seem to fall symmetrically into place. These smaller buildings\u2014servants' quarters, cookhouse, tannery and smokehouse, carpenter's shop, all decently contrived of honest and workmanlike construction\u2014were, of course, the demesne of the black slaves, whose toil had been essential to the creation and success of the mansions, and continued to assure their perpetuation. The \"people,\" as they were so often called, had been generally treated with care and kindness, so it is understandable that the planters suffered vexation over their common plight and cursed heaven for their predicament. However, not knowing what else to do, they allowed the problem to pass into the hands of later generations, who resolved the matter in one of the most murderous wars ever fought. Meanwhile, the beautiful mansions endured, and still endure."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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