Full Title: “Memoir of a ‘Very Large Life,’ With Poetry, Crusades and Glittering Names (via NY Times)”
Rose Styron used to start her daily swim of the season in May, when the waters off the long dock at her house in Vineyard Haven, on Martha’s Vineyard, still barely reach 50 degrees. “Now that I’m 95, though,” she said one day in April, “I may wait until June.”
The first of Styron’s four books of poetry, “From Summer to Summer,” a collection for children, was published in 1965. Her most recent, “Fierce Day,” a coming to terms with the death of her husband, the author William Styron, in 2006, was published in 2015. In the decades in between, her activism and journalism in the service of human rights, and her dedication as a celebrated hostess, have otherwise occupied her, as have her four children.
Now, Styron has written a memoir, “Beyond This Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart.” It includes lots of sightings from that same dock, and from the deep porch of her low-slung white house on Vineyard Sound. Presidents and human-rights crusaders, playwrights and movie stars, Nobel laureates and refugees, Sinn Fein members and Ulster Unionists, Hyannis Port Kennedys, the newspaper publisher Katharine Graham, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis from her Red Gate Farm tromped across the Styrons’ lawn to their famous dinner parties. As long as guests are interesting, they are summoned there still.
The Styrons were the first people the singer-songwriter Carly Simon wanted to meet when she arrived on the Vineyard in 1970. “They were legends,” Simon said recently.
They came up from Litchfield County, Conn., where artists and writers had started to settle when the Styrons bought their first home, a rambling property in Roxbury, in 1954. There, Rose embarked on motherhood and entertaining, and typed her husband’s manuscripts. In the guest cottage, the author James Baldwin wrote “The Fire Next Time.” In 1963, they found the summer house on the Vineyard, and Connecticut neighbors like the director Mike Nichols and, eventually, the journalist Diane Sawyer, the writer Philip Roth, the playwright Arthur Miller and the photographer Inge Morath, the composer Leonard Bernstein and his family were soon on hand. Styron always rose early to write her poetry. In 1973, she published “Thieves’ Afternoon,” and in 1995, “By Vineyard Light.”
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