The
book had been rediscovered abroad, and brought back into print by the New York
Review of Books. One of my favorite UK novelists,
Ian McEwan, has championed the book across the pond when interviewed for an article;
Literature needs more Lazarus miracles like Stoner
It
was republished with an insightful essay by John McGahern who, sadly, died at
about the time of this paperback edition was published (2006). The author of Stoner, John Williams, died in 1994, never to see his greatest work
become critically acclaimed.
When
Mary sent me the New Yorker link, I
immediately ordered the book, although I was continuing to read William Trevor’s short stories, so many of them and so delightful, that it will be on my reading plate
for some time to come. So the intention
was to put Stoner in my reading queue
which is building, and building. But
when the novel arrived, the New Yorker
article kept reverberating, and I was fascinated by the cover of the paperback
(apparently you CAN tell a good book by its cover!) and I found myself putting
it at the top of the queue and, ultimately, interrupting reading the Trevor
collection.
One
of the points made in the New Yorker
article is somewhat inexplicable to me: Despite
its pellucid prose, “Stoner” isn’t an easy book to read—not because it’s dense
or abstruse but because it’s so painful. I had to stop reading it for a year or
two, near the middle of the book….
Yes, it is painful at times, but much of Dickens and Hardy can be painful
too but still compulsively readable.
How anyone could put this compelling novel aside is bewildering. The author of Stoner articulated the very reasons I “fell in love” with the
protagonist. John Williams was once
interviewed and said:
I think he's a
real hero. A lot of people who have read the novel think that Stoner had such a
sad and bad life. I think he had a very good life. He had a better life than
most people do, certainly. He was doing what he wanted to do, he had some
feeling for what he was doing, he had some sense of the importance of the job
he was doing. He was a witness to values that are important ... The important
thing in the novel to me is Stoner's sense of a job. Teaching to him is a job-a job in the good
and honorable sense of the word. His job gave him a particular kind of identity
and made him what he was ... It's the love of the thing that's essential. And
if you love something, you're going to understand it. And if you understand it,
you're going to learn a lot. The lack of that love defines a bad teacher ...
You never know all the results of what you do. I think it all boils down to
what I was trying to get at in Stoner. You've got to keep the faith. The
important thing is to keep the tradition going, because the tradition is
civilization.
The
essence of the story is about a man who grew up working with his parents on
their farm. The time is before the onset
of WW I. He knew nothing else but
scratching out life from the fields, his worn hands those of a laborer. It was hard work and there were diminishing
returns from the land so when his father heard about the state college having a
program to study Agriculture, so he sent his only son there, with the hope he
would emerge with new techniques which would lessen their burdened lives. But William
Stoner would never return to his former life, becoming instead a teacher of
English.
Here
the exterior story and the inner story run parallel but at odds with one
another. His life is besieged by an
unhappy marriage, isolation from his wife Edith and daughter Grace, and plagued
by an enemy in his English Dept, its Chairman, Lomax (as evil a character
towards Stoner as Claggart was to Melville’s Billy Budd), and by Lomax’s favorite student, Walker, who Stoner
thinks unworthy of becoming a teacher. He
argues this with his one friend, the Dean, Gordon Finch, “it would be a disaster to let him [Walker] in a classroom…..if we do,
we become like the world, just as unreal, just as….the only hope is to keep him
out.” But Finch is also now part of
the real world and he has become increasingly removed from Stoner. Then finally the real love of his life materializes,
Katherine, a student, but ultimately it is to be a love denied. Meanwhile his inner life is blossoming,
finding in literature a certain kind of perfect harmony and tranquility.
Both
the New Yorker article and the
Introduction to the NYRB edition quote the same nearly opening lines as I
bracketed in pencil in the book. It sets
the tone and the themes like a piece of sculpture captures the essence of its
subject. It foreshadows the very end at
the beginning, unusual for opening lines: An
occasional student who comes across the name may wonder idly who William Stoner
was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s
colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of
him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that
awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no
sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or
their careers.
His
discovery of the love of learning and literature comes at the end of his
college years (he thought of the years
before, the distant years with his parents on the farm, and of the deadness
from which he had been miraculously revived). And he comes to his
profession almost by accident, his mentor, Professor Sloane saying “but don’t you know, Mr. Stoner?...Don’t you
understand about yourself yet? You’re
going to be a teacher.” Suddenly Sloan seemed very distant, and the walls of
the office receded. Stoner felt himself
suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,”
Sloane said softly.
“How can you
tell? How can you be sure?”
“It’s love, Mr.
Stoner,” Sloane said cheerfully. “You are in love. It’s as simple as that.”
The
joys of learning, teaching, moving forward in intellectual endeavors, counter
balance worldly affairs. The University
is a refuge from life itself. And then
he finally discovers he is indeed a teacher: The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and
heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of
letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print - the love which he had
hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at
first, and then boldly, and then proudly…..He felt himself at last beginning to
be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given
a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or
inadequacy as a man. It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one
which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence.
However, his personal life is not what he imagined it would be. Edith, his wife, is reminiscent of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s Zelda (and as the New Yorker
article astutely observes, you could almost describe [Stoner] as an
anti-“Gatsby”). Edith is unstable,
almost child-like, and like Zelda ultimately tries to find some self identity
in the arts. They are totally estranged
from each other, although living under the same roof. As one would imagine,
their daughter, Grace, is impacted by this, ultimately getting pregnant to
escape their home, moving to St. Louis, her husband (who she marries after she
finds she’s pregnant) dying in WW II (in
fact, the novel bridges WW I and WW II).
She remains more or less in a trance, answering most questions Stoner
asks with “it doesn’t matter,” over and over again, perhaps homage to
Melville’s Bartelby similarly saying “I prefer not to.” She becomes an alcoholic.
The
absolutely exquisite, compact writing is what makes this novel great. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, where we come
from and where we go during this brief encounter with life resonates in the
pages. Shadows, light, darkness, death,
and nature figure prominently in the narrative, particularly the farmers’
fields Stoner comes from. Here he is burying his father: They
buried his father in a small plot on the outskirts of Booneville, and William
returned to the farm with his mother.
That night he could not sleep. He dressed and walked into the field that
his father had worked year after year, to the end that he now had found. He
tried to remember his father, but the face that he had known in his youth would
not come to him. He knelt in the field and took a dry clod of earth in his
hand. He broke it and watched the grains, dark in the moonlight, crumble and flow
through his fingers. He brushed his hand on his trouser leg and got up and went
back to the house. He did not sleep; he lay on the bed and looked out the
single window until the dawn came, until there were no shadows upon the land,
until it stretched gray and barren and infinite before him.
After
his mother dies, he lays her beside his father, and probably this is where the
novel’s prose is bleakest, but rings so true. Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken,
their intelligences numbed. Now they
were in the earth to which they had given their lives, and slowly, year by
year, the earth would take them. Slowly
the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and
slowly it would touch their flesh, and finally it would consume the last
vestiges of their substances. And they
would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long
ago given themselves.
But
counterbalancing the dark aspects of life pushing Stoner along (sometimes the
reader wondering whether he is a participant in his choices), is Stoner’s
euphoric discovery that his choices are one of the mind, not in day to day
living: But choices is what excited him in his work, such as when he was
planning his own book, an esoteric study of the English Renaissance. He was in the stage of his planning his
study, and it was that stage which gave him the most pleasure – the selection
among alternative approaches, the rejection of certain strategies, the
mysteries and uncertainties that lay in unexplored possibilities, the
consequences of choice….The possibilities he could see so exhilarated him that
he could not keep still.
And
it is his love of his work, in spite of the slings and arrows dealt by his
exterior life, which grows and grows in the novel. He stands up for academic integrity, at a
great cost to himself, but on his death bed has his doubts about the meaning of
it all: He had dreamed of a kind of
integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he found compromise and the
assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of
the long years he had found ignorance.
And what else? he thought. What else?
It
is a remarkable novel, doubly remarkable that it went unnoticed for so
long. As the New Yorker article points out, so was Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. The latter I discovered for myself (and
reprinted when it was long out of print).
John
Williams' Stoner can easily stand
besides Yates’ work as one of the more important American novels of the 20th
century.
