‘Masters’ Offers Writerly Profile of Styron

William Styron is one of the country’s most distinguished literary figures. His novels “Lie Down in Darkness,� “The Confessions of Nat Turner� and “Sophie’s Choice� have classic status and permanent places in the academic curriculum. He is rightly honored on the distinguished “American Masters� series tonight.

The trouble is that writers are hard to get on film. The moving finger writes, but not very telegenically. Performers are another matter. Like the recently profiled Danny Kaye, they bring a visual scrapbook of tapes, clips and interviews through which a producer can romp barefoot. Save for the occasional extrovert like Norman Mailer, writers work in unseen solitude.

In “William Styron: The Way of the Writer,� we see Styron at his yellow pad (no crossings out, no caretted insertions), speaking or reading voice-over from his work as he strolls in a garden, pauses on a riverside dock, drives, walks a childhood street. Stock footage, including the launching of a wartime ship in his native Newport News, Va., carries a slight air of desperate reaching.

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There are lively interviews with his author friends Carlos Fuentes, Peter Matthiessen and Arthur Miller, with Meryl Streep from “Sophie’s Choice� and with Styron’s charming wife and daughters (also glimpsed as children in funny but un-captioned family films). Would there were more.

A touch of controversy is provided by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who, like many black intellectuals, was less than enchanted by Styron’s appropriation of the rebellious slave Nat Turner.

The central fact of Styron’s later life was a sudden, severe and almost suicidal depression that fell upon him like a curse and stayed in place for several years. It is dealt with in the program (as it could hardly not be) but at a literary level, including a quote from Baudelaire, rather than in a more visceral account of what the ordeal was like and how at last it ended. (He published a book about it, “Darkness Visible,� in 1990.) The less abstract telling might have carried a measure of encouragement for others who grapple with depression. The choice may well have been Styron’s. Even as writers go, he is a private, guarded man.

Mary McDonnell is the unseen and almost too-quiet narrator and occasional reader from Styron’s books. Variety Moszynski was the writer-director, Claire Patry the producer, with Susan Lacy, Lawrence Pitkethly and Frederic Bourboulon as executive producers.

* “William Styron: The Way of the Writer� airs on “American Masters� at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.