John Williams is my choice as the most under-recognized U.S. Author — this review is an excellent look at why he is so good. I hadn’t realized until I saw the cover in the review that John McGahern (an author you and kimbofo introduced me to earlier this year) had written the introduction to this edition of Stoner — can’t say I am surprised. William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956. Driven ever deeper within himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. John Edward Williams (August 29, 1922 – March 3, 1994) was an American author, editor and professor. He was best known for his novels Butcher's Crossing (1960), Stoner (1965), and Augustus (1972), which won a U.S. National Book Award. Of Stoner by John Williams, which tells the life story of a man named William Stoner from the cradle to the grave. Stoner’s life resembles the author’s in many respects: he finds his vocation as a writer and teacher fairly early in life, and devotes the rest of his life to literature.
- John Williams Stoner Wiki
- John Williams Stoner Deutsch
- John Williams Stoner Wikipedia
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It is very difficult to come by a negative review of John Williams’ Stoner. Originally published in 1965 in the U.S., the novel apparently went out of print after 2,000 copies had been sold. It was re-issued in 2003 again to little attention. Reader interest mushroomed in 2011 when a very successful French novelist read it in English and had her publisher buy the rights to the translation. On the cover under the title appears “Read, loved, and freely translated by Anna Gavalda”. This past Fall, Stoner was on the bestseller lists in several European countries and Israel and was selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Many reviews by literary figures of note (Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Bret Easton Ellis, Nick Hornby, C.P. Snow, among others) have hailed the merits of this soon-to-be 50 year old novel, and lesser known writers at publications from the Texas Observer to the New Yorker to Der Spiegel have found Williams’ novel compelling in theme, language, and feeling.
The first thing that reviewers often note is how utterly depressing the events in William Stoner’s life are and the second thing they note is how he experiences deep feelings and sometimes even joy in spite of those events: (major spoiler alert for the duration of this review) his childhood days spent with reticent and joyless parents, his backbreaking labor on a Missouri farm until the age of 18, his penniless days as a university undergraduate and graduate student, his passionless marriage with a wealthy but vindictive woman, his alienation from his only daughter ostensibly largely because of the wife’s machinations, the deaths of his father and mother, his marginalization by the administrative powers that be at the university where he is a professor of English literature, his stunted publishing record, his being forced to leave his mistress because of the plotting of an ideological enemy in his department, and finally his illness and death at precisely the moment when it is most convenient for the departmental plans of that enemy. Then reviewers note how this contrast helps us, the reader, toward a deeper understanding of love, death, disappointment, compassion, and other important concepts and experiences.
I, too, find much to commend in Stoner. Williams presents a beautifully clear language with no pretention or arabesque to it, shows an unwavering commitment to representing William Stoner’s inner experience honestly, and imposes an acute sense of passing time that reminds one of the human need to iteratively reflect forward and back in an attempt to find meaning in the episodes of our lives. I would highly recommend reading this novel, because Williams has a strong sense of the importance of actually telling us the subtleties of what Stoner is feeling; he is not embarrassed to call emotions by their names and to linger over them, and there is a convincing authenticity to this unfolding in language that is very appealing.
But there are two problems here. The first one is noted by one of the few negative reviewers of this work, the British novelist Alex Preston, who finds the prose “dead” and the novel “dreary.” Preston notes, “Stoner’s academic pursuits are kept entirely separate from the blank misery of his life.” This is not entirely true: Stoner experiences strong emotions when planning the writing of his second book: “he was in the stage of 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” (121), and at the moment of his death, he is not holding the hand of a loved one, but is riffling through his copy of the one book he published: “The tingling came through his fingers and coursed through his flesh and bone; he was minutely aware of it, and he waited until it contained him, until the old excitement that was like terror fixed him where he lay” (278). Stoner also experiences a pervasive and authentic joy while teaching at certain moments: “The love of literature… the loves which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly” (113).
I think the implication of what Preston is saying, though, is right: Stoner may experience positive feelings about working with literature, but any insights he may experience from reading and writing about the finest literature the English, Latin, and Greek traditions have produced do not incite, encourage, mandate, or even gently suggest to him that he make adjustments, small or large, to his own personal life. Remember that long list of awful things that happened to him? With one exception discussed below, not one of them does he do a damn thing about. Indeed, it wasn't even his initiative to go to university in the first place, but the proposition of a county agent looking for good candidates for the agricultural program. It is true that Stoner finds love with a visiting junior instructor (specifically, a woman interested in just his area of research), but the affair occurs more as a result of her initiative than his. If reading literature does not allow us to more clearly, or more economically, or more thoroughly, or more compassionately think through and take action in our own life, what good is it?
One could argue that Stoner’s sense of virtue is his happiness, that he is a Stoic at heart and he doesn’t need literature to help him fix problems that he does not perceive as such. But, really, he is often miserable, and even if he were a Stoic in self-consideration, he is not such in consistency and tenor of response. One could also argue that he does reflect and make changes from time to time. For example, Stoner takes a stand when he discovers that an extremely weak and pretentious graduate student has found a mentor and protector among Stoner's colleagues, and Stoner attempts to block the student from continuing in the doctoral program. But that act stands in bleak isolation in this story, and as soon as the student's faculty supervisor retaliates, Stoner acquiesces. Stoner does not take a stand when the great care he has taken to be a good father to his daughter in her youngest years is completely undermined by his wife’s subsequent directives that leave their teenaged and then adult daughter unable to relate intimately with others and unable to survive without drinking heavily on a daily basis. Shouldn’t a lifelong engagement in reading and commenting on excellent literature allow him to see the merits of choosing the second battle over the first?
The second problem with Stoner, is, I admit, not really the novel’s problem, but more my own wish for this beautifully reflective novel to be something it is not. When I read Lydia Millett, Elizabeth Strout, and Marilynne Robinson, for a few examples, it seems to me that the author loves each character: the characters crucial to the plot, the characters not so crucial, those who appear mainly for comic relief, the characters who care and are long-suffering, the characters who are immoral, the characters who are amoral – these authors, somehow, seem to love them all. In Williams’ novel, it seems to me that the author loves Stoner very much, really likes Gordon Finch and Dave Masters (Stoner’s two best friends), and uses the other characters’ lives to show his love for those who seem to be his favorites. The injustices suffered by Stoner at the hands of his intimates and colleagues seem disappointingly balanced by the lack of depth of characterization and the specter of reduced authorial empathy suffered by all the other characters at the hands of their creator. In spite of these problems, do read the book. The narrative will force you into a vast array of uncomfortable spots, because Stoner finds himself in so many such spots and lets us know how each feels. Despite his great learning, he hasn't a clue as to how to productively approach any of them, and sometimes that's exactly what reality feels like.
Williams, John. (1965). Stoner. New York: New York Review Books.
Whatever my reservations about the New York Review of Books, if it subsidizes reissues of things like this, I pardon its sins. Extra points for choosing such an apt cover painting to implicitly portray its hapless professor hero:
And here is Stoner speaking:
Stoner looked across the room, out of the window, trying to remember. “The three of us were together, and he said–something about the University being an asylum, a refuge from the world, for the dispossessed, the crippled. But he didn’t mean Walker. Dave would have thought of Walker as–as the world. And we can’t let him in. For if we do, we become like the world, just as unreal, just as…The only hope we have is to keep him out.”
Walker is an ignorant, smooth-talking, careerist academic, and there’s little separating his portrayal in this book (from 1965, but taking place mostly in the first half of the century) from these sorts of people today. Stoner is an impractical dreamer, a farmboy who goes to a local college and discovers he loves literature, and so does his graduate work at the same school and then gets a professorship there. He makes two mistakes: he marries the wrong woman, and he makes the wrong enemy in his department. These are big mistakes, and he pays big for them.
I cannot recall any other academic novel that treats its subject material with such unremitting gravity. The standard model of an academic novel is to either indulge in high melodrama (Mary McCarthy, Iris Murdoch) or to make light of the intellectual pretenses of its characters (Kinsley Amis’s overrated Lucky Jim, Malcolm Bradbury’s far funnier Stepping Westward). Williams’s approach seems to have been to adopt the social realist approach of George Gissingand Sinclair Lewis’s more sober moments and apply it to the incongruous and hermetic world of a university. Consequently, he treats the small events of Stoner’s life with a sense of real consequence, as though they were matters of life and death. And so they become.
John Williams Stoner Wiki
After his mistakes, Stoner is a defeated man, and it takes him years to recover. But what saves the novel from being just an exercise in misery is that Stoner does get his triumph. He fights against the inertial decline of his life, and he wins. It is, objectively speaking, a small triumph, but on the terms that Williams has set, it validates his existence without qualification. The novel is a passage from ideals that cannot be fulfilled to a non-tragic view of life, and it’s summarized best in this passage:
John Williams Stoner Deutsch
In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age, he began to know that it was neither a stae of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as an act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.
John Williams Stoner Wikipedia
I don’t mean to downplay the brutally accurate portrayals of academic politics and fleeting trends, which feel absolutely au courant, but the novel would not stand out as it does if it did not treat its subject matter with the same respect and humility with which Stoner himself treats literature and teaching.