The Unbeautiful & Damned

LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS (400 pp.)--William Styron--Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50).

William Styron is a 26-year-old Virginian who has just written his first novel. To his publishers, Lie Down in Darkness "is a major novel by a major novelist . . . an event comparable to the publication in 1929 of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel." While Novelist Styron does not live up to that billing, he shows enough talent to prove that the South has raised another good writing man.

The rest of the news about Styron is that he is one more recruit for the dread-despair-and-decay camp of U.S. letters. This time, decay hits a country-clubbing clan from the Virginia Tidewater.

The Loftises are spiritual leeches. They batten on each other--and on any aid to narcosis they find handy. For fiftyish Milton Loftis, the daily drug is whisky. Drunk, he can just bear the rich, domineering wife to whose purse strings he is tied. In would-be revolt, he conducts a joyless affair with a dumb, social-climbing brunette; he gets a glimmer of happiness only from spoiling his beautiful, flighty daughter Peyton.

A martyr in her own eyes, his wife Helen flails the pettiest flaws of father and daughter with a tongue like a cat-o'-nine-tails. Daughter Peyton completes the fall of the house of Loftis when she runs away to New York and her own narcotic, sex. She marries a highbrow Jewish painter, betrays him with half a dozen men. Toward the end, her mind cracks.

In her delirium, Peyton tries to sum up what her "lost generation" has been searching for: "Not out of vengeance have I accomplished all my sins, but because something has always been close to dying in my soul, and I've sinned only to lie down in darkness and find, somewhere in the net of dreams, a new father, a new home." At 22, she makes her separate peace with the world in a suicide jump.

Author Styron laves his unbeautiful people in the rhetoric of tragedy, but essentially they remain moral pygmies. The Loftises are lost, all right, but not in the universal darkness of the age as their author implies, just in the murky crevices of their own pampered egos.

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