Stoner (1965)

John McGahern, introducing John Williams’ Stoner (1965), quotes an interview the he gave late in his life:

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.

I don’t remember how I came to this book, perhaps I was looking for books set in academia. It seemed to me, however, in what are almost certainly the final days of my teaching career, that this book is the perfect one to read now. I have just finished reading Williams’ Stoner and I am somewhat conflicted about it.

It seems to me that Stoner can be read in at least one of two ways. The first is to take its narrator perfectly seriously, and accord to his impassive, stoic, passionate scholar protagonist the credit and respect he is due for living a rather difficult, unhappy life. Stoner comes from poverty, acquires an education in literature and spends his entire life teaching at a university. The first couple of paragraphs of the book capture the extent of his professional success:

He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses… 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.

Over the course of the book, he feuds with colleagues who are vindictive and petty, and shoulders punishing teaching schedules without complaining. His students are uninspiring and assemble at his classes unwillingly, but he nevertheless unfailingly does his duty by generations of them. On the personal front, things are not much better. He carries himself with dignity through a loveless marriage to an erratic and cruel woman, who uses every opportunity to keep him from developing a strong relationship with his daughter. He doesn’t drink, he is never snide, or hurtful, or violent, despite decades of abuse at the hands of his wife. The one unambiguous joy life seemed to bring him (apart from literature) took the form of an affair with a graduate student he pursues in his forties, which also doesn’t last — because of his vindictive colleagues.

Are we to believe that flawless, quiet, strong, good William Stoner is even a possibility? This leads me to what I think is the second way to read Stoner: as a parody of the inflated self-image that academics have. Perhaps if I were a more successful academic I’d read this book in a different light — I can’t rule it out. I will say, although perhaps it is a cruel thought, too cruel for a book so delicately written: it is amusing to imagine a collection of postscripts written by Finch, Lomax, Edith, Grace, and Driscoll, disabusing us of the notion that the protagonist is as virtuous as he is made out to seem, a bit like in Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince.

I should say that all the female characters were thoroughly (even disappointingly) underdeveloped. Stoner’s wife Edith, for example, is fitful and capricious but we are not made privy to anything in her background or upbringing that might explain why she’s acting out. Both readings are consistent with this: she may of course just be an evil woman, but a self-righteous type (like our narrator) would similarly be unable to offer any clarity. Even Katharine Driscoll, the graduate student Stoner has an affair with, seemingly exists only in relation to Stoner, and not independently of him.

It would be difficult for me to argue that for this reason, and this reason alone, I found the book unsatisfactory, though; Williams’ prose throughout this book is crystalline. One often comes upon passages that are crafted masterfully — I’ve highlighted many of them, excerpted below. Here’s a couple of examples. In introducing Stoner’s to-be-wife Edith:

She was educated upon the premise that she would be protected from the gross events that life might thrust in her way, and upon the premise that she had no other duty than to be a graceful and accomplished accessory to that protection, since she belonged to a social and economic class to which protection was an almost sacred obligation.

I imagine Scott Fitzgerald could have written that. And, after the death of Stoner’s parents:

He thought of the cost exacted, year after year, by the soil; and it remained as it had been—a little more barren, perhaps, a little more frugal of increase. Nothing had changed. 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.

Couldn’t that have been written by Steinbeck?

Much of it — especially the bits about learning and teaching — was very relatable to me as well. I suppose that is why I will happily recommend it.

Excerpts

Stoner’s passion for literature grows during his university days.

The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in a way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class, who found a local habitation in a large university in Columbia, Missouri, and who walked unheeding in a midwestern air.

Having come to his studies late, he felt the urgency of study. Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.

On the feeling of being not quite able to communicate a private sense of wonder.

… when he began to address himself to his subject and his students, he found that his sense of wonder remained hidden within him. Sometimes, as he spoke to his students, it was as if he stood outside himself and observed a stranger speaking to a group assembled unwillingly; he heard his own flat voice reciting the materials he had prepared, and nothing of his own excitement came through that recitation.

Excerpts from a boozy conversation about the true nature of the university, with Masters holding court, talking to Finch and Stoner. About Stoner:

Stoner, here, I imagine, sees it as a great repository, like a library or a whorehouse, 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.

About Finch:

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.

Masters’ verdict:

It is an asylum or—what do they call them now?—a rest home, for the infirm, the aged, the discontent, and the otherwise incompetent.

Masters continues, describing Finch:

You’re cut out for failure, and you know it. Though you’re capable of being a son-of-a-bitch, you’re not quite ruthless enough to be so consistently. Though you’re not precisely the most honest man I’ve ever known, neither are you heroically dishonest. On the one hand, you’re capable of work, but you’re just lazy enough so that you can’t work as hard as the world would want you to. On the other hand, you’re not quite so lazy that you can impress upon the world a sense of your importance. And you’re not lucky—not really. No aura rises from you, and you wear a puzzled expression. In the world you would always be on the fringe of success, and you would be destroyed by your failure.

Masters on Stoner:

You, too, are among the infirm—you are the dreamer, the madman in a madder world, our own midwestern Don Quixote without his Sancho, gamboling under the blue sky. 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. You, too, are cut out for failure; not that you’d fight the world. You’d let it chew you up and spit you out, and you’d lie there wondering what was wrong. Because you’d always expect the world to be something it wasn’t, something it had no wish to be. The weevil in the cotton, the worm in the beanstalk, the borer in the corn. You couldn’t face them, and you couldn’t fight them; because you’re too weak, and you’re too strong. And you have no place to go in the world.

Masters enlists to fight in the First World War:

I suppose I’m doing it because it doesn’t matter whether I do it or not. And it might be amusing to pass through the world once more before I return to the cloistered and slow extinction that awaits us all.

Stoner, recalling Masters after his death.

When he thought of Masters, he thought of him as a Catullus or a more gentle and lyrical Juvenal, an exile in his own country, and thought of his death as another exile, more strange and lasting than he had known before.

About Edith’s father:

Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance. Every ten or fifteen minutes he removed a large gold watch from his vest pocket, looked at it, and nodded to himself.

Stoner, after his marriage to Edith.

In the quietness, in the warmth, in the air that took on a timelessness from the old paintings and statuary, William Stoner felt an outrush of affection for the tall, delicate girl who walked beside him, and he felt a quiet passion rise within him, warm and formally sensuous, like the colors that came out from the walls around him.

They became a little drunk; they laughed vaguely and sentimentally; they saw each other anew.

Sloane’s death.

The coroner announced heart failure as the cause of death, but William Stoner always felt that in a moment of anger and despair Sloane had willed his heart to cease, as if in a last mute gesture of love and contempt for a world that had betrayed him so profoundly that he could not endure in it.

On becoming a better teacher.

He was ready to admit to himself that he had not been a good teacher. Always, from the time he had fumbled through his first classes of freshman English, he had been aware of the gulf that lay between what he felt for his subject and what he delivered in the classroom. He had hoped that time and experience would repair the gulf; but they had not done so. Those things that he held most deeply were most profoundly betrayed when he spoke of them to his classes; what was most alive withered in his words; and what moved him most became cold in its utterance. And the consciousness of his inadequacy distressed him so greatly that the sense of it grew habitual, as much a part of him as the stoop of his shoulders. But during the weeks that Edith was in St. Louis, when he lectured, he now and then found himself so lost in his subject that he became forgetful of his inadequacy, of himself, and even of the students before him. Now and then he became so caught by his enthusiasm that he stuttered, gesticulated, and ignored the lecture notes that usually guided his talks. At first he was disturbed by his outbursts, as if he presumed too familiarly upon his subject, and he apologized to his students; but when they began coming up to him after class, and when in their papers they began to show hints of imagination and the revelation of a tentative love, he was encouraged to do what he had never been taught to do. 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 was both saddened and heartened by his discovery of what he might do; beyond his intention, he felt he had cheated both his students and himself. The students who had been able theretofore to plod through his courses by the repetition of mechanical steps began to look at him with puzzlement and resentment; those who had not taken courses from him began to sit in on his lectures and nod to him in the halls. He spoke more confidently and felt a warm hard severity gather within him. He suspected that he was beginning, ten years late, to discover who he was; and the figure he saw was both more and less than he had once imagined it to be. 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.

The planning stages of a project.

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.

Reading for fun.

He read and studied, and at last came to find some comfort, some pleasure, and even a ghost of the old joy in that which he did, a learning toward no particular end.

During a particularly depressing period in Stoner’s life.

He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.

Some excerpts from the parts where Stoner and Driscoll have an affair.

… the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.

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 state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human 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.

Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.

I underlined this because it reminded me of myself.

… with his young students he was gentle and patient, though he demanded of them more work than they were willing to give, with an impersonal firmness that was hard for many of them to understand.

Just some sound advice.

He seldom thought of the past or the future, or of the disappointments and joys of either; he concentrated all the energies of which he was capable upon the moment of his work and hoped that he was at last defined by what he did.

On his deathbed, Stoner picks up the book he wrote.

It hardly mattered to him that the book was forgotten and that it served no use; and the question of its worth at any time seemed almost trivial. He did not have the illusion that he would find himself there, in that fading print; and yet, he knew, a small part of him that he could not deny was there, and would be there.