Human rights activist and poet Rose Styron has lived a life, as they say. A founding member of Amnesty International USA, Rose was also one of the first women to become a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Married for more than fifty years, until his death in 2006, to Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning novelist William Styron, she is the mother of Susanna, Paola (Polly), Tommy, and Alexandra (Al); grandmother to Tavish, Emma, Lilah, Lulu, Tommy, Gus, Huck, and Martha; and the friend of — well, here’s where I run into a space crunch. Rose’s friends include novelists, playwrights, poets, journalists, actors, crooners, and a bevy of other creators. They include U.S. presidents and politicians from abroad. They include human rights activists and jailed dissidents. They included my parents, Jules and Judy Feiffer, and I’m delighted to say they also include me.
At the age of 95, Rose Styron published a memoir. In “Beyond This Harbor: Adventurous Tales of The Heart” (Alfred A. Knopf), Rose tells the story of a remarkable life built around activism, literary happenings, and family, and the convergence of the three — which often happened on the front lawn of Styron’s Vineyard Haven home.
But how did the Styrons end up on the Vineyard, in their house overlooking Vineyard Haven Harbor? Read on to find out. MV Arts & Ideas is grateful to Rose for allowing us to publish this excerpt from her memoir. —Kate Feiffer
An excerpt from “Beyond This Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart.”
A few years after our wedding, Bill and I and little Susanna visited Michael Carlisle and his Coffin grandmother on Nantucket. Bill’s editor Hiram Haydn called to say we should take the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard and visit him and his wife, Mary. We agreed to meet at the Vineyard Haven dock. When we arrived on the agreed-on afternoon, there was no Hiram. He’d forgotten our plan. As we stood puzzling, a blonde angry woman swooped past us, chasing the biggest black poodle I’d ever seen. “Gregory Zilborg!” she kept shouting. “Come back here!” In vain. She then spotted an older man (Harry Levin, head of Russian studies at Harvard) on a wobbly bicycle heading down the street. “Harry! Go get Gregory!” the woman shouted, and he dutifully turned in chase.
The woman suddenly turned and spotted us, and we recognized each other. “What are you doing here?” she asked. It was Lillian Hellman, whom we had met at our wedding reception in Parioli. Hearing our plight, she insisted we come to her house, a short walk up the beach, and call Hiram from there.
Through the garden and onto a porch we trooped with Lil, followed by the large, breathless Gregory Zilborg (named for her psychiatrist). Dashiell Hammett was sitting in a rocker and he lifted Susanna onto his lap. By the time the Haydns arrived, we’d had tea and cookies and Lil had persuaded us “not to go to that vile island Nantucket ever again.” She instructed us to book two weeks the next summer at an old white-shingled house near hers, and we did. From 1960 until 1963, we Styrons rented for a summer month on Martha’s Vineyard—on the way to West Chop, in Katama (next to Walter Cronkite, whom we did not know then), and in Vineyard Haven. Vineyard Haven was our favorite spot, even though we were teased about being centered on Murderers’ Row, as the strip of Vineyard Sound land was known, where Lillian Hellman, Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, John Hersey, and Diana and Lionel Trilling spent social but often spiteful summers.
Around Labor Day 1963, after sending our three kids home to Connecticut with Bill while I closed down the house we had rented from the Philip Rahvs, I walked to town. My mission was to go to Carly Cronig’s real estate office to rent for the next summer. I arrived five or ten minutes before six o’clock closing time. The phone rang as I stood before Carly’s desk. He answered it, saying, “Oh, Mrs. Eels, I’m so sorry. Your husband died this morning? Of course you want to go back to Cleveland right away. Yes, I’ll be glad to see to it for you, yes, completely furnished,” or words to that effect.
Bill and I had never thought of buying a summer place on the Vineyard, but I heard myself say brightly, “Mr. Cronig, what will the price of the house be?” He replied on the spot: “Seventy-five thousand dollars.” Bill and I didn’t have that much in the bank, but I knew his new novel would be ready soon, and I decided I could call my mother in Baltimore and my brother in Bethesda to see if they would put the amount in the Styron account, to be reimbursed within a year or so. I told Carly we wanted to buy it, immediately! I had not consulted Bill. Carly replied, “If you can have the check ready at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow, it’s yours.”
By 10:30 p.m., I was squared away with Bill and with my family. I reported to Carly, who reported to Agnes Eels, and I prepared a check—thrilled.
But at 8:00 a.m. the next day I received a phone call from the real estate broker, saying, “Oh, Mrs. Styron, I’m so sorry you didn’t get the house. My other client will pay twice as much, and of course, I have to get that for Mrs. Eels.”
Confused and saddened, I hung up. I called Agnes Eels to, again, express my condolences about her husband. And to say how sorry I was not to get the house. Silence for a moment on the other end. Then: “What do you mean you didn’t get it? We agreed last night!” Then, “This isn’t Agnes, it’s her sister-in-law. You better get over here with your check right away. Agnes has gone to the hairdresser to look proper for you at 9:00 a.m. Hurry!”
I went, pronto, check in hand. Both Mrs. Eelses greeted me, put my check on the mantelpiece, gave me two hugs and a glass of tomato juice.
“I’m so glad to have someone with young children buy our house,” Agnes Eels began. “Three generations of us have been happy here. You probably don’t know it, but your daughter Susanna [eight then] tried to ride her bike across our narrow seawall and fell off, down into the sand. We rescued her and she and my granddaughter Marianne are now playmates at the Yacht Club.” I had apparently walked on the little beach past her property to the club almost daily with our three kids. I realized I’d never even seen this house I was buying: A row of trees blocked it from beach sighting, but the lawn before them was wide and inviting, as was the raspberry patch at the seawall’s edge. Those trees soon blew down, in Hurricane Bob, and our view from the slightly sloping old lawn to the Sound is endlessly life-enhancing.
At about 9:15 that morning, as we three women were sitting contentedly, Carly entered behind us and, seeing me, said, “Oh, Mrs. Styron, I’m so sorry you didn’t get the house.”
Agnes stood and said, “What do you mean, Carly? We settled this last night. Of course Mrs. Styron got the house.”
Carly dug in his heels and said, “But, Mrs. Eels, I’m your agent and I’ve got twice as much for you—$150,000.”
Agnes didn’t believe him and asked how he managed to up the price after 11:00 p.m. He explained that when he saw last summer that her husband was ill, and heard he was declining during the winter, he brought his client to look in the windows. And then they managed to get in through the back door.
Agnes was furious, and I watched as Carly continued talking, saying that his client insisted that he wanted to buy the property if it ever came up for sale. Carly had called him when Mr. Eels died.
“Get out, Carly! No commission for you. The house is Mrs. Styron’s,” Agnes shouted. Then we learned that Carly’s client had hired a private jet from Washington and was on his way to the island. Carly was frantic. Agnes instructed him to use the kitchen phone and call the man and tell him the deal was off.
Carly obeyed. We could hear him whining to his client’s wife in D.C. that the sale was off, and yes, he knew how angry her husband would be, and, okay, he’d go to the airport to meet him. Now!
And off he went. His client was so angry that he echoed, “No cut for you, Mr. Cronig,” and added, “I’ll sue her!” In those days Massachusetts was one of the few states where an owner could be sued for “wrongful sale.”
Agnes Eels then said to me, “I know you can’t afford it, but I’ll block him through every court. You’ll probably have to rent our house next summer.” And we did, acquiring it in 1965, after the three state courts he petitioned at $25,000 each (lawyers, paperwork filings, whatever) turned him down. The house was ours! 60th anniversary on the horizon.
From “Beyond This Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart,” © 2023 by Rose Styron. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.