Random Review #7: Stoner (1965) by John Williams. Also Willa Cather, the school of resentment, Harold Bloom, Ernest Hemingway, and A Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
“Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr Stoner; do you hear him?”
Elsewhere in these ink-stained and aged pages of Better Days Are A Toenail Away™️, I have mentioned my lifelong habit, not done purposefully to be fashionable, of “being late to the party,” and it happened YET AGAIN when earlier today I came across an article announcing that creepy Casey Affleck has been tapped to play the titular character in an adaptation of John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner.
An international production headed up by Blumhouse Productions, Cohen Media Group, and Film4, Joe Wright has been hired to direct. Wright has helmed Pride & Prejudice (2005), Hanna (2011), which I liked when I saw it, Anna Karenina (2012), and Darkest Hour (2017) which I enjoyed more because it was a fun date with my ex-partner. We’d snuck into the Churchill biopic after paying to see The Shape of Water (2017) in late December 2017, and I think our money (her money, tbh) went to right movie.
Significantly, Joe Wright has also directed Atonment (2007), an adaptation I tolerated only because the 2001 novel was so fucking good…Ian McEwan’s best since The Child in Time (1987). I don’t know how Wright’s other adaptations of hugely famous and influential novels turned out, but the Jane Austen one is 86% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, while the Tolstoy one is 63% fresh. Atonement is 83%.
So none of Wright’s novelistic adaptations have come out rotten, but that doesn’t mean much when it comes to John William’s 1965 campus novel Stoner, which is a novel with very little action. Much of the heavy lifting is done internally in the thought processes of the characters, so unless Wright resorts to multiple POV with multiple voice overs, I’m not sure how he plans on getting this one to take flight. Or to even be basically watchable.
The John Williams novel Stoner has been enjoying a renaissance in the last two decades; a “renaissance” in the literary landscape of today meaning the book has sold probably thirty-five thousand copies of its new printing because a group of well-known authors, including Bret Easton Ellis and Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, championed the book and penned articles asked why it was so obscure.
Irish author John McGahern wrote the introduction to the new edition. I haven’t read any McGahern, but apparently he was a writer who liked to focus on that which is subtle and simple in our lives. Doing press for his final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, he claimed “the ordinary is the most precious thing in life.”
John Williams himself has called his brand of realism “an escape into reality.”
Writing in The New Yorker, Tim Kreider makes an excellent case for Stoner being an
an anti-“Gatsby.” I suspect one reason “Gatsby” is a classic is that, despite his delusions and his bad end, we all secretly think Gatsby’s pretty cool. Americans don’t really see him as an anti-hero or a tragic figure—not any more than they see the current breed of charismatic criminals on cable as villains. Gatsby’s a success story: he makes a ton of money, looks like a million bucks, owns a mansion, throws great parties, and even gets his dream girl, for a little while, at least. “Stoner” ’s protagonist is an unglamorous, hardworking academic who marries badly, is estranged from his child, drudges away in a dead-end career, dies, and is forgotten: a failure.
John Williams’ approach to the story of William Stoner is a kind of glacial accumulation of humiliation and regret, occasionally punctuated by minor triumphs. Apparently Williams had been influenced by the European author Yvor Winters main complaint with postmodernism, that
“the tendency to express disintegration or uncertainty through language that itself exhibits those qualities. The ‘sound’ alternative, Winters wrote, was to make a lucid statement ‘regarding the condition of uncertainty.’
The prose in Stoner is so plain and unadorned that you often forget you are reading (which should be the goal of all writers, IMHO. You want the reader to see the pictures you are describing. The Po-Mo demigods wrote stuff that called attention to the artifice of writing itself, and it was meta and cute, but it can’t tell a story. For all his talent, Thomas Pynchon is a sketcher of fragmented scenes. He couldn’t write a novel like Stoner if you paid him a billion dollars.)
Pynchon’s V, released in 1963, and based on the author’s two years in the peacetime Navy, was rapturously reviewed and he was hailed the new king of the Postmodern American Novel.
John Williams, a veteran of WWII, had released two unpopular novels before 1965’s Stoner. 1948’s Nothing But the Night and 1960’s Butcher’s Crossing. Stoner received a similar fate, a few good notices, but nothing like the international praise that followed Pynchon’s juvenalia. (I have read everything Pynchon has written, and feel qualified to state that only Mason & Dixon counts as a novel with a beginning, middle, end, and something like actual characters. The rest is jerking off by an artist too talented to sit still.)
The fact that Williams had joined the war effort “reluctantly,” may have ingratiated him with the hippie if he gave a damn about making friends with the Postmodernists and the Abbie Hoffman types.
But Williams was pretty behind the times already once the 60s got rolling. He wasn’t a chronicler of the now. Just as he’d set his second book “Butcher’s Crossing” in American frontier times, he set Stoner one World War previous to his own.
Williams’ stubborn refusal to indulge the postmodern experiments of his cohorts like Joseph McElroy, William Gaddis, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon, reminds me of Willa Cather writing “straight” stories throughout the 1920s, cheerfully oblivious to the allegedly revolutionary techniques of the Modernists who liked to hang out at Gertrude Stein’s apartment and talk shop: Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and a young John Dos Passos.
If she heard or read about their theories at all, the Iceberg Theory must have sounded like utter nonsense to Cather. To write about something by not writing about it? Right. Like Williams thirty years later, Cather preferred the slow accumulation of time and progress, especially in her pioneer tales like O Pioneers! and My Antonia. In both novels immigrants fresh from Europe can hardly believe their eyes at the vast expanses of the American prairies, just as they can hardly endure the hardships of the winters. Slowly, over years and decades, these people build lives for themselves, homesteads where once mud huts stood, vast apple orchards where once vast blank expanse covered all. Cather’s writing style mimics the hardscrabble lives of her characters, farmers all.
My favourite Cather novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, is most similar to John Williams’ Stoner in that it slowly, some would say agonizingly, depicts a man of no special talents other than iron will and strong work ethic, who must slowly build a community out of a landscape of ignorance, or what Archer Sloane, Stoner’s mentor,
calls “the slime" (36). Cather was aware of the changing literary environment on the 1920s, and Modernism began to usurp realism as the default mode of the times, but she did not waver in her devotion to the slow accumulation of plot and character-based humour, not even when Hemingway aimed one of his barbs her way. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1923 novel One of Ours. Of the novel, Hemingway wrote:
“Wasn’t [the novel’s] last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman, she had to get her war experience somewhere.”
Of course Hemingway, always anxious about his manhood, would chide a woman writer for not writing “realistic” battle scenes, despite the thousands of women who served as medics on the frontlines of battle in both World Wars, and saw just as much torn flesh and ragged bone as Hemingway did the day he was assigned to pick up the human remains strewn across the streets, the result of a munitions factory exploding.
Despite her success, by the 1930s Willa Cather was viewed as a “romantic, nostalgic writer who could not cope with the present” (Davidson 121). According to Wikipedia, “The critic Granville Hicks charged Cather with failing to confront “contemporary life as it is” and escaping into an idealized past. That latter barb is one that could easily be lobbed at John Williams, who set his first novel Nothing But the Night in the present, and later distanced himself from the book, dissatisfied with the conventional result.
Quinn Meyers, writing in the Chicago Review of Books claims that Nothing But the Night was an “early glimpse of genius” that would come to full fruition in Williams last three novels. But Meyers also admits that the book has its failings, not least of which are its strict setting, the entire book takes place over the course of one day. And so reading Williams first novel “is the same as reading any great writer’s early work: there’s a pleasure in noticing bits and pieces of the nascent style and ideas they’d eventually hone.” Think Malcom Lowry’s Ultramarine or Thomas Pynchon’s V. (I feel I have the authority to make this latter claim. Having spent the summer of 2008 reading all of Pynchon’s novels, I found his debut to be tied for worst with 1990’s Vineland.
John Williams must have similarly been aware of the changing values of the 60s, but rather than take a public stance or align himself with a cause, he donned an ascot and “escape[d] into an idealized past,” just as Cather had done three decades earlier. There is nothing wrong with finding the present moment too real for fictionalization. Almost all authors make this complaint at some point in their lives. And Cather’s last “hit” novel, 1940’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl, was set entirely in 1856, showing that she didn’t need to take pointers from her critics to produce work that the public would embrace.
Williams would take a similar approach for the rest of his literary life. His second novel Butcher’s Crossing was a Western (or an anti-Western in the vein of Blood Meridian) set in the 1870s. Stoner is set between 1910 and sometime shortly after WWII. Williams final completed novel, Augustus, is set 26 years before B.C. switched to A.D. (Or as the modern University would have it, B.C.E. (before common era) to C.E. (common era) just so we don’t have to repaginate oh, say, eight hundred thousand books.
From Wikipedia:
The critic Morris Dickstein has noted that while Butcher's Crossing, Stoner, and Augustus are each "strikingly different in subject," they all "show a similar narrative arc: a young man's initiation, vicious male rivalries, subtler tensions between men and women, fathers and daughters, and finally a bleak sense of disappointment, even futility."
Elsewhere in his New Yorker article, Kreider nails it when he remarks that Stoner, both the man and his book, hold up “conscientious slogging as life’s greatest virtue and reward.”
Stoner starts the novel like a Cather pioneer. He has never read a book. He tills the land. He plants crops. And so later on his conversion is that of a religious experience, so that ever after he approaches literature with the fervent devotion of the convert. He had never read a book until his required English survey course. But he takes to books with the same dogged determination he once tilled the fields with. If have has a favourite book, Williams doesn’t tell us what it is. Stoner, in line with his heritage, with inheriting the centuries of tilling and work done before him, minor improvements leading to great discoveries, new ways of doing things.
Stoner is a very old-fashioned novel, a rags-to-plaid novel set in Missouri in the early 1900s. A young teenager is sent to school by his farmer parents to learn newer agricultural methods that might led to greater crop yields.
Here’s a scene early in the novel where William Stoner’s father explains to him why he is sending him to school:
“County agent came by last week. Says they have a new school at the University if Columbia. They call it a College of Agriculture. Says he thinks you oughta go. It takes four years.”
“Four years,” William said. “Does it cost money?”
“You could work your room and board.” He swallowed to steady his voice. “I never had no schooling to speak of. I started working a farm when I finished sixth grade. Never held with schooling when I was a young’un. But now I don’t know. Seems like the land gets drier and harder to work every year; it ain’t rich like it was when I was a boy. County agent says they got new ideas, ways of doing things they teach you at the University. Maybe he’s right. Sometimes I’m working the field I get to thinking-” He scowled at his hands and shook his head. “You go on to the University come fall. Your ma and me will manage.”
It was the longest speech he had ever heard his father make.
Later on in the novel, when young William is about halfway into the most awkward date in all of American literature with his future wife (though neither William nor Edith have an inking of their future nuptials at the time, of course), William rises to leave because Edith is both deeply uncomfortable and non-responsive, when she suddenly launches into a ninety minute barrage of uninterrupted monologue, telling William about all her fears, hopes and dreams (but mainly her fears). It is not long before she kisses him and says
Of this outburst, Williams writes dispassionately, in precisely the same manner he mentioned that William’s father’s speech was the most she’d ever said at a single time:
She continued to talk, and after a while he began to hear what she was saying. Years later it was to occur to him that in that hour and a half on that December evening of their first extended time together, she told him more about herself than she ever told him again. And when it was over, he felt that they were strangers in a way that he had not thought they would be, and he knew that he was in love.
Strange that in a novel ostensibly about literature, or at least literary figures whose vocation is literature, the two most transformative events in Stoner’s life are set into action by two different individuals who rarely speak, and speak more than they ever have before or will again in the service of sending Stoner down a particular road. I’m not sure what this means, other than perhaps Williams believes that the devotion itself, whether to reading or plowing, the hard work ethic in and of itself , means more and conveys a richer slice of reality than any individual book or sentence can do.
A few weeks later when Stoner meets Edith’s disapproving parents, it is not until about two hours into the evening when Edith gets him alone for a moment and says “I’ll try to be a good wife to you William…I’ll try.”
Stoner only has the vaguest sense that something might be wrong with Edith, that there is a great expanse of inner privacy that Edith either values too much or is too modest about to share with anyone. “Upon that inner privacy William Stoner now intruded.” If Edith were merely socially awkward, she and Stoner would have been able to bond over their mutual affliction. (The strongest couples I have ever known have both suffered from shyness.) Whatever haunts Edith, she lashes out at Stoner at random points throughout the novel with a kind of recreational cruelty.
The usual disappointments follow. They do not make love on their wedding night, nor on any other night until one day when Edith decided she wants a child and attacks Stoner with a ferocity only hinted at that first night when she told him about herself in such a strange, focused, and inward way, that if Stoner had had any experience with any other women, even momentary experience, he would have run from Edith’s house as fast as he could and been happier for it.
But no, this is William Stoner in John Williams Stoner, and he has no control over any aspect of his life. The PhD thesis on Chaucer he lengthens into his debut monograph is well received, and he is making preparations for another, better book, when he discovers Edith is pregnant. His professional life is constantly stymied by his personal life, and vice versa. And despite the novel being one of its titular “hero” (John Williams actually calls Stoner a “real hero” in a rare interview from the 1980s) constantly thwarted in every single place he occupies save for the classroom, he throws himself into teaching with an energy not seen since he was a young man working his father fields.
And it is teaching that both further thwarts but ultimately saves our protagonist.
He becomes 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". Towards the end of his life, when he has endured many disappointments, he thinks of academe as “the only life that had not betrayed him”. And he understands also that there is a continual battle between the academy and the world: the academy must keep the world, and its values, out for as long as possible.
This last point of Barnes’ is most crucial, for its forms the crux of the book-length argument Williams seems to be making a case for, that of the University being separate from the “real world.”
I know this is why the STEM people hate us, but to them I say…take a look around. Why wouldn’t be disappear into the pages of fictional books, with such savage vulgarity all around is?
There is a crucial scene in the first third of the novel, just as a young William Stoner is preparing to teach his first class ever as a young PhD candidate. He is as excited as he will get at any other time in the novel. If ever an entire novel were to be written without a single exclamation point, Stoner is that novel. It plods along at a glacial pace, stopping not to smell or describe roses, but stopping because of some administrative error by a department secretary. If Stoner is a novel about work, as John Williams has claimed, its sub-title could be Work, Interrupted. Nevertheless, despite being assigned a paltry single class where he will “teach only the fundamentals of grammar and composition to a group of unselected freshmen, he look[s] forward to his task with enthusiasm and with a strong sense of its significance” (27).
John Williams, who himself taught classes at the University of Denver, expertly describes the awkwardness of teaching those first few classes. Poor Stoner, who has by now acquired passable social skills, finds himself wholly unable to relate his enthusiasm for Chaucer and the other mighty titans of Middle English:
But in the first classes he met…when he began to address himself to his subject and his students, he found that his sense of wonder remained hidden within him…he heard his own flat voice reciting the materials he had prepared, and nothing of his own excitement came through in that recitation.
Like Hagar Shipley in Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel turning into…well, stone, during events of great significance in her life, events during which the expression of emotion would not be merely appropriate but welcomed by her family…so does William Stoner turn to stone when he should be gesticulating wildly and frothing at the mouth, teaching his subject with all the vim and vigour of a dog finally let off a leash.
Dejected, Stoner retreats to the tavern with two other graduate students, David Masters and Gordon Finch. These three young men begin to meet weekly at the same bar, and Stoner actually finds himself among friends and peers for the first time in his life. It is during one of these weekly, sudsy meetings, that John Williams advances the central argument of his novel, which is the central argument of the campus novel as a genre, and the central argument for the existence of the University as an institution in the first and last place.
First, some character introductions are in order.
We already know who William Stoner is and what he’s like, so I’ll skip him and move on to Gordon Finch.
Gordon Finch is a born administrator. He barely passes his classes, he goes along with the general feelings and opinions of those around him, often even espousing these feelings loudly despite holding no strong opinions of his own.
But it would be going too far to say that Finch is mercenary. He is just a creature of comfort, and he is aware that going along with the majority opinion is the path of least resistance. He is by far the worst student of the three.
Dave Masters is the true intellectual. He is curious about the world and everything in it. Stoner often finds him in a library carrel, smoking his pipe, reading late into the night. Stoner is often puzzled to see Masters reading material that has nothing to do with the humanities, such as anthropological studies of remote regions, or 9th century cathedral building techniques in the high Carpathian mountains, or the disputed origins of Japanese N’oh theatre. The problem with Masters is that he is too brilliant, and therefore too restless. He cannot stay on one subject long enough to become so well-versed in its theories and main proponents to get his PhD. He seems idle next to the industrious Finch, though Finch is industrious only in the sense that he diligently attends the little cocktail parties and ceremonies of congratulation for long-tenured faculty members finally retiring. Finch is ingratiating himself with the higher echelons of faculty at the University, the deans and department heads and so on, thus guaranteeing himself a future at the University for the next half-century.
Meanwhile Stoner takes three hours to prepare for a one hour tutorial he will be teaching, and Masters reads whatever the hell interests him.
One day, during their weekly chat at the tavern, Masters idly lights his pipe and asks his friends the central question of the book:
Masters, holding aloft a hard-boiled egg from the free lunch as if it were a crystal ball, said, “Have you gentlemen ever considered the question of the true nature of the University? Mr. Stoner? Mr. Finch?”
Both Stoner and Finch shake their heads. They don’t know where Dave is going with this. And neither does the reader.
“I’ll be you haven’t. Stoner, here, I imagine, sees it as a great repository, like a library…where men come of their free will and select that which will complete them, where all work together like little bees in a common hive. The True, the Good, the Beautiful. They’re just around the corner, in the next corridor; they’re in the next book, the one you haven’t read, or in the next stack, the one you haven’t got to. But you’ll get to it someday. And when you do – when you do –“ He looked at the egg for a moment more, then took a large bite of it and turned to Stoner, his jaws working and his dark eyes bright.
Now, Master is forwarding the time-dishonoured American notion that just around the corner, perhaps even around the very next bend, waits the thing that will finally bring one happiness. Hell, it is probably the foundational theme on top of which all American literature is built. Recall those final beautiful words of The Great Gatsby. Gatsby, who has come so far in his life…that he just needs to round one more corner to grasp Daisy, or whatever else represents the happiness and contentment that eludes him:
He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning-
The bold font emphasis is mine, but the section break is Fitzgerald’s, and it is beautiful and heartwrenching because it is the only place such hope in the future can go…into the broken terminuses that bookend chapters of our lives that were supposed to end in something better, if not delight than at least contentment.
It is waiting for Stoner in the next book…and surely Dave Masters’ telling him “you’ll get to it someday. And when you do – when you do…” is a deliberate echo of Fitzgerald voicing the exact same idea, ending with the exact same inability to put into words what the actual end of the American pursuit of happiness will feel like, only that we must have faith in its coming. And one fine morning-
Masters is telling Stoner, in no uncertain terms, that he will never be happy, but the University is the only place for him because it will both give meaning to his life and make the pursuit more interesting. Stoner’s life will be an endless quest for the perfect sentence, the one that will tell him exactly where to go and exactly what to do when he gets there. For Stoner, clinging to the dictates of literature is his entire identity. That’s why grammar matters to him so much. The rules. The process. Because he will only ever have the process, not its culmination, therefore the process must be sacred.
Finch, who is always missing both the main point and the hidden (and more deadly) point, the poisoned tip of the spear, “laugh[s] aloud and slap[s] the table. ‘He’s got you, Bill. He’s got you good.’”
But Masters isn’t done.
“[He] turn[s] his gaze to Finch. ‘And you, Finch. What’s your idea? You’ll protest you haven’t thought of it. But you have. To you, the institution is an instrument of good – to the world at large of course, and just incidentally to yourself. You see it as a kind of spiritual sulphur-and-molasses that you administer every fall to get the little bastards through another winter; and you’re the kindly old doctor who benignly pats their heads and pockets their fees.’
Finch laughed again and shook his head. ‘I swear it, Dave, when you get going.’
‘You’re bright enough – and just bright enough – to realize what would happen to you in the world. You’re cut out for failure and you know it. One the one hand, you’re capable of work, but you’re just lazy enough that you can’t work as hard as the world would want you to. In the world you would always be on the fringe of success, and you would be destroyed by your failure. So you are chosen, elected; providence, whose sense of humor has always amused me, has snatched you from the jaws of the world and placed you safely here, among your brothers.’
Then Masters turns to Stoner.
“‘You’re bright enough – brighter anyhow than our mutual friend. But you have the taint, the old infirmity. You think there’s something here, something to find. Well, in the world you’d learn soon enough…[b]ecause you’d always expect the world to be something it wasn’t. You couldn’t face [the world], and you couldn’t fight [it], because you’re too weak, and you’re too strong. And you have no place to go in the world.’”
‘I’m one of you. Worse, in fact. I’m too bright for the world, and I won’t keep my mouth shut about it; it’s a disease for which there is no cure. So I must be locked up…where I can do no harm. It’s for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. Like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn’t give a damn about laity or even about God, we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive – because we have to.”
[once again, bold font emphasis emphasis mine]
John Williams argument is that academia exists solely for academics, is one that has gained increasing currency in the last twenty years as the Humanities become devalued and its sub-disciplines pop up, each with their own nomenclature and vernacular and code-words one must decode and memorize if one is to understand even the simplest argument of a first year essay in said sub-discipline.
No wonder Stoner is so hostile towards Hollis Lomax. Lomax represents the teachers who wants to shrink the distance between the student and the instructor. Lomax craves a more intimate, reciprocal relationship with his students. Stoner thinks it only proper that his students remain at arms length. For Stoner, the University must remain just hostile enough toward non-traditional students so that people like him can remain tenured and undisturbed. No wonder he hates any pretence toward the democratic. Yes, Hollis Lomax protege Charles Walker is a lazy student, only reading that which interests him. But he clearly loves literature. So what if what he likes and knows happens to be a narrow subsection of literature? The same could be said for Stoner. That’s what academia is. If the kid loves Keats and Shelley, let him speak and write brilliantly on Keats and Shelley. But no, Stoner resents both Lomax and Walker, both characters who are physically disabled, which is Williams way of showing how people who shouldn’t be in University are allowed in, and then allowed to remain despite ostensible incompetence. The physical deformities of Lomax and Walker would not get past an editor now, for there would be other ways of demonstrating the ways in which people can manipulate a so-called weakness for their own gain in this supposedly “understanding” times. Stoner is right that merit matters, but he dismisses outright the notion that perhaps Walker disadvantages are what make him so arrogant and, at time, ignorant. These two men, despite the difference in age, represent what Williams took to be the slouchy and the slovenly taking over Universities in America. Not wishing to spend much time inside his characters’ heads, something Williams finds “distasteful,” he has to externalize their deformities, which is unfortunate.
Moving his novel one whole World War back from the time period in which it was published isn’t fooling anyone. It is obvious that Williams felt no sympathy for the marginalized, that he thought they needed to read the same books he’d read, study the same things he’d studied, and come out the other end with the same view of the world he had. Or perhaps he was guilty of what Granville Hicks charged Willa Cather with: an inability to depict “contemporary life as it is” (or perhaps Williams simply did not wish to do battle with these lazier scholars using their specialized nomenclature and terms, hence his “escaping into an idealized past” of the interwar years, and going even further back for his 1973, Augustus.
It must have driven Williams nuts that he had to share his National Book Award money with John Barth, a bard of the postmodern, who’d won for Chimera. He was a proponent of staunch realism in a time when Gaddis J.R. and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow were regularly winning National Book Awards (though it should be said, the Pulitzer board overturned Pynchon’s win for GR, calling the book, among other things, “overwritten, turgid, and obscene.”
What Harold Bloom calls the school of resentment is played out every day on Twitter, both literary Twitter and the rest of Twitter, itself divided into subsections like Sports Twitter, Political Twitter, and so on. One thing you see a lot on Twitter these days is some poor sod asking for clarification on an issue and somebody screaming at her/him/them, in caps: IT’S NOT MY JOB TO EDUCATE YOU ON THIS TOPIC. DO SOME READING AND FIGURE IT OUT YOURSELF.
Well sure. But should the curious offender do the required reading and come out the other side and happen to have a view that does not align perfectly with the original yeller’s sympathies and perceptions…even if they’ve done the work, they are a bigot and not to be engaged with.
How could Williams not see that Stoner was enacting his own version of grievance politics with his smug prescriptivism and his narrow view of a field as rich and lush as literature? Literature isn’t just some boring cultural inheritance, it is primarily a way for human beings to talk to each other across centuries (“Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr Stoner; do you hear him?”) about their loves and fears and worries, not a vehicle with which we should smuggle ideology. James Baldwin knew that, even if it cost him his reputation as a novelist (although his novels are going through critical reassessment, long overdue). It cost him his friendship with Richard Wright when he complained of the “Marxist fantasy” at the end of Native Son.
Stoner costs himself a lot in his life. And so too did Williams, it seems.
Once John Williams has Stoner on campus more regularly, as his family life falls apart, we see that the character of William Stoner is John Williams’ surrogate mouthpiece for the decline in quality of education in American Universities from the 1960s onwards. (William Stoner himself doesn’t speak much, and when he is trying to decide whether or not to head overseas to fight “the Huns,” as Gordon Finch has taken to calling them (he signed up as soon as it was possible), Williams writes “he had never gotten in the habit of introspection, and he found the task of searching his motives to be a difficult and slightly distasteful one.” So perhaps Stoner is more of a “thoughtpiece” for Williams’ views on the University…no, that doesn’t work either.
Stoner’s entire life is essentially one long battle against certain ideas and modes of approach that seem to be taking hold in the Humanities Departments. Williams himself seems to be snorting against some of the ideas that took hold in the Civil Rights Era, Postmodernism, what Harold Bloom calls the “School of Resentment.”
Any campus novel worth its paper has some view, however subtle, on this matter, an opinion of some kind. For example, in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, when the five remaining Classics students in the entire College are suddenly abandoned by their professor just a few weeks before the end of the semester, the Dean summons the shocked quintet and informs them that, with the school’s lone classics professor having vanished, their major is being eliminated altogether “so we can get the new Semiotics department off the ground.” Apparently, there is “so little interest in the subject [of Classics]” that they’re shuttering the whole department. The students will have to find new majors. Or find a new school, goes the unsaid implication.
As the years go by, Stoner watches as his nemesis Hollis Lomax becomes a proponent of one school of thought, and he, Stoner, a proponent of the other, To be seen with one or the other comes to mean something, on campus.
"The value and purpose of academe is a key concern of the novel, while one of its main sequences describes a long and savage piece of departmental infighting. So Williams was perhaps a little naive, or at least over-hopeful, in thinking his novel wouldn't, or shouldn't, be labelled "academic".
Okay. So I’ve gone on and on about Stoner’s losses and his being thwarted by life. Now what of his victories? None other than the British novelist Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot, England, England, and Nothing to Be Frightened Of, and Something to Declare)
Good things do happen in Stoner's life, but they all end badly. He relishes teaching students, but his career is stymied by a malevolent head of department; he falls in love and marries, but knows within a month that the relationship is a failure; he adores his daughter, but she is turned against him; he is given sudden new life by an affair, but finds love vulnerable to outside interference, just as the academy is vulnerable to the world. Aged 42, he reflects that "he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember."
For whatever reason, an Irish author named John McGahern wrote the introduction to the new edition. I haven’t read any McGahern, but apparently he was a writer who liked to focus on that which is subtle and simple in our lives. Doing press for his final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, he claimed “the ordinary is the most precious thing in life.” Williams himself has called his brand of realism “an escape into reality.”
In that same interview, Williams said “[t]o read without joy is stupid.” This is from the man who wrote Stoner.
I suppose one can be utterly engaged in a novel, totally subsumed by the plot and the possibilities unfurling with each page, without feeling joy. This student who Williams saw weeping while reading one of his novels. Was she experiencing “joy?”
I doubt it. Sounds more to me like her heart was broken.
Of course, Stoner’s lone lover disappears wordlessly from town one day, but years later when she releases a dedication of her own, it is dedicated to “W.S. With love.”
This was the point of my own reading that I clasped the book shut and closed my eyes. Jesus Christ.
A few years later when I saw the film A Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), which details the brief but intense love affair between an artist and a young woman of French nobility who is about to come out and be forced into marriage with an Italian man she does not know, I was dumbstruck when I saw that Héloïse, decades later, left for Marianne, a secret hand signal in a family portrait with her husband (one of the landed gentry, to the manor born types). Héloïse knows Marianne would eventually see the portrait and therefore know, in her heart, that neither she nor their love had been forgotten. Mariann sees Héloïse just once more, though Héloïse does not know it, and it is one of the more touching moments in the film, as touching as the secret message Héloïse leaves Marianne in her family portrait, or the one Katherine Driscoll leaves William Stoner in the copy of her monograph (let us only hope she is not thwarted and will publish many more).
For Stoner to claim this one victory, his initials in the pages of a book he did not write, but was written by someone who knew and loved, however briefly, is a victory that belongs only to him and his small, sad life, feels richly deserved.