Page Fright

By R.Z. Sheppard

, DARKNESS VISIBLE: A MEMOIR OF MADNESS by William Styron

Random House; 84 pages; $15.95

The characters in William Styron's fiction struggle with guilt, fear, self- loathing, performance anxiety and alcohol. The main character of Darkness Visible also battles these demons. He is the author himself, who now answers the question, What ever happened to William Styron? Since publication of Sophie's Choice nearly a dozen years ago, he has been among the estimated 1 out of 10 people who suffer through episodes of debilitating depression.

By Styronian standards, this is a mote of a book. It began as a speech at Johns Hopkins University and was expanded to an article published last year in Vanity Fair. Adding 5,000 words to the magazine piece, the author manages to fill 84 pages of generously spaced type. There is little literary justification for this. The loose narrative suggests the dangers of stretching one form to do the work of another. There is an excess of the billowy and not always apt prose that marks Styron's fiction: "Doubtless depression had hovered near me for years, waiting to swoop down. Now I was in the first stage -- premonitory, like a flicker of sheet lightning barely perceived -- of depression's black tempest."

But why be too churlish. Even at $15.95 this dilated article is a bargain if it offers insight and encouragement to the depressed. Considering the natural defense mechanism that blunts our memories of pain, it is easy to sympathize with the page fright that appears to have struck Styron as he attempted to dredge up his mental agonies. Among the worst were a paralyzing sense of worthlessness and the inability to find temporary relief in sleep. That feeling of worthlessness accompanied him even on a trip to Paris to accept a literary award that, he says, "should have sparklingly restored my ego."

Since serious mood disorders have proved difficult to treat with psychotherapy and antidepressants, Styron has impatient and unkind words for some of his doctors. Only when he seriously considered self-destruction did he check himself into a hospital and begin healing. One of the things that seems to have put him on recovery road was the realization that his suicide note was pompous. For a writer of Styron's stature, that's shock treatment.