Notes on a classic, or should-be classic, by John Williams, from 1965
It is a book both well-known and unknown, which is a weird thing to say. It is known by its devotees, of course, and by people who care a lot about 20th-century American literature. But it is not known by the general public — as The Great Gatsby, say, is. Even those who have never read The Great Gatsby know the title. That familiar alliteration, lodged in our national consciousness.
But about the book I was talking about: Discussing it in the New York Times, Morris Dickstein made a statement that became a helluva blurb: “Stoner is something rarer than a great novel — it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away.”
Charles J. Shields wrote a biography of the author: The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel.
That man, that author, is John Williams, who was born in Texas in 1922 and died in Arkansas in 1994. Stoner, he published in 1965. It is not about someone who smokes pot. It is about a man named “Stoner,” William Stoner. When Americans think “John Williams,” they naturally think of the film composer. But they, we, should make room in our consciousness for this writer.
What is Stoner about? It’s a novel of university life. Stoner is a professor, an English professor. It is a novel about farming, and marriage, and friendship, and love, and war. Many of the basic ingredients of life are mixed in.
It is not a long novel; it is almost a novella. And to say it is well written . . .
Williams is in total command of the language. He writes clearly, neatly, elegantly, interestingly. Simply. Professor Strunk — as in Strunk & White, and The Elements of Style — would have loved him. There is not a showy sentence in the book. No sentence that is proud of itself — that says, “Look at me!” Williams is an honest writer.
I once knew a great musician and teacher who used the word “honest” — an “honest pianist,” for example. A pianist of integrity, serving the music, not ego.
In Stoner, I think there are about five questionable sentences — not bad ones, but questionable, or semi-questionable, ones. I think Williams uses the wrong word once, but I’m not sure.
Anyway, I would like to jot a few notes. Last year, a friend of mine gave me a copy of Stoner. He is a devotee of the book. I have only now read it and — yes. I get what the fuss is about, the enthusiasm is about. Yes, no question.
• William Stoner was born in 1891 and grew up on a farm. Very hard life — the kind people describe as “hardscrabble.” Now he is in college, studying agriculture. But he takes an English course, a survey — and is gobsmacked. He is enthralled with literature and the life of the mind. Also, the life of the imagination (although this is not a phrase one uses).
Consider:
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.
Blessed are those who are lit up by classical, and classic, literature. (Would that it happened to me more often.)
The above passage made me think of W. E. B. Du Bois, in his Souls of Black Folk (1903). He is talking about race — but he is also talking about . . . well, listen:
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas. . . . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously. . . . So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.
• An English professor, Archer Sloane, discerns something in Stoner. “But don’t you know, Mr. Stoner?” he says to his student. “Don’t you understand about yourself yet? You’re going to be a teacher.” Stoner responds, “Are you sure?” Sloane says, “I’m sure.” Stoner: “How can you tell? How can you be sure?” Sloane: “It’s love, Mr. Stoner. You are in love. It’s as simple as that.”
And as Williams writes, “It was as simple as that.”
I have known a few natural-born teachers — teachers who are destined to do that, who can do no other. What a happy calling.
• The world of Stoner’s parents — the farm — is very different from the world that Stoner has now acquired. This is poignant, and more than poignant, painful.
. . . he found that he had nothing to say to them; already, he realized, he and his parents were becoming strangers; and he felt his love increased by its loss.
• Stoner entered college at 19, and we can assume that his primary and secondary education was less than top-quality:
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.
Many, many people — from whatever background, and whatever circumstances — have felt that way.
• I loved this:
. . . he felt the logic of grammar, and he thought he perceived how it spread out from itself, permeating the language and supporting human thought.
The same sort of thing applies to music: Know how to write a fugue, for example — the rules of a fugue — and, boy, is your “thought” “supported.”
“Just grammar,” people say. Mere grammar. Oh, no. It is a supporter, a foundation, an upholder, of worlds.
• World War I comes. With it comes patriotism, which is great, but also jingoism, a fever that messes with minds:
Once there was a brief-lived demonstration against one of the professors, an old and bearded teacher of Germanic languages, who had been born in Munich and who as a youth had attended the University of Berlin. But when the professor met the angry and flushed little group of students, blinked in bewilderment, and held out his thin, shaking hands to them, they disbanded in sullen confusion.
• Professor Sloane takes the war very hard. He explains to Stoner: “I was born in 1860, just before the War of the Rebellion. I don’t remember it, of course; I was too young. I don’t remember my father either; he was killed in the first year of the war, at the Battle of Shiloh. But I can see what has ensued.”
He continues: “A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute . . .”
Twenty-some years later, Stoner — now Professor Stoner — will feel similarly low about World War II. Because of the “waste” (a word that Williams uses). Not that America’s participation is unnecessary; not that it is not right; not that it is not utterly honorable. Nevertheless, the waste: of lives, of time . . .
Recently, a Ukrainian said to me something like this: “We should be developing our careers, and raising families, and enjoying Netflix, and all those modern things. Instead, Russia has imposed on us years of trench warfare, as in the previous century. They have just halted our lives, when they have not ended them.”
• Here is a typical line from Williams, a typical observation — great, just great:
. . . Mrs. Bostwick’s face was heavy and lethargic, without any strength or delicacy, and it bore the deep marks of what must have been a habitual dissatisfaction.
• Mr. Bostwick, Williams describes as “unsubstantially heavy.” What an interesting observation.
• Frankly, this made me think of the smartphone:
Every ten or fifteen minutes he removed a large gold watch from his vest pocket, looked at it, and nodded to himself.
• Stoner and Edith have agreed to be married. When? When will the wedding be? “If it’s to be done,” says Edith, “I want it done quickly.” There we get a touch of Macbeth. (And the marriage will be something like murder.)
• I know that people have imaginations — that they have sympathy, creativeness, and genius. But I don’t know how Williams can write about the things he does — for instance, the Stoners’ painful and bizarre marriage — without having experienced them himself.
• He is deft with an oxymoron, Williams is — for example, “He bent to kiss her, and he felt the frail strength of her slender fingers on his arms.” “Frail strength” — good.
• We say “armchairs.” People once said “armed chairs.” We say “ice cream.” People once said “iced cream.” “Candied apple,” “candy apple.” Well, Williams writes of a “two-storied house.”
• I have a friend who knows farm life. And one of the things he hates, with a burning passion, is romanticization of farm life. I thought of him when I read the below passage in Stoner.
Stoner’s mother has just died. Listen:
He buried her beside her husband. After the services were over and the few mourners had gone, he stood alone in a cold November wind and looked at the two graves, one open to its burden and the other mounded and covered by a thin fuzz of grass. He turned on the bare, treeless little plot that held others like his mother and father and looked across the flat land in the direction of the farm where he had been born, where his mother and father had spent their years. 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.
(You want anti-romance — that’s anti-romance, baby.) (This book is so honest, so unsparing, it almost knocks you out. But you are grateful for it, I think.)
• After quoting a sentence, I would like to ask a question:
No one refused to speak to them; no one gave them black looks; they were not made to suffer by the world they had feared.
People used to speak of a “black mood” and so on. Do they still? Is it kosher? Is “dark mood,” “dark look,” better? Life can be a minefield.
• Williams uses the word “unbend” — one of whose definitions is: “to cause to relax; to set at ease for a time” — as in “to unbend the mind from study.” I have never used that word, to my knowledge. I like it.
• At the university, people think that Professor Stoner is indifferent to the Depression. That he is so absorbed in his work — his books, his teaching — he does not even notice it. Uh-uh.
. . . though he looked upon them with apparent impassivity, he was aware of the times in which he lived. During that decade when many men’s faces found a permanent hardness and bleakness, as if they looked upon an abyss, William Stoner, to whom that expression was as familiar as the air he walked in, saw the signs of a general despair he had known since he was a boy. He saw good men go down into a slow decline of hopelessness, broken as their vision of a decent life was broken; he saw them walking aimlessly upon the streets, their eyes empty like shards of broken glass; he saw them walk up to back doors, with the bitter pride of men who go to their executions, and beg for the bread that would allow them to beg again; and he saw men, who had once walked erect in their own identities, look at him with envy and hatred for the poor security he enjoyed as a tenured employee of an institution that somehow could not fail. He did not give voice to this awareness; but the knowledge of common misery touched him and changed him in ways that were hidden deep from the public view, and a quiet sadness for the common plight was never far beneath any moment of his living.
• About a book that Stoner has read, Williams says this: “The prose was graceful, and its passion was masked by a coolness and clarity of intelligence.” Much the same can be said of Stoner.
• Bill Buckley entered college — Yale — when he was about 20. So did many of his peers. They had been drafted. There were so many freshmen at Yale, some had to live in Quonset huts. Bill always said that he and his peers were advantaged by entering college “late.” They valued their professors all the more. They were hungry for education.
I thought of Bill when reading this, about Stoner:
The years immediately following the end of the Second World War were the best years of his teaching; and they were in some ways the happiest years of his life. Veterans of that war descended upon the campus and transformed it, giving to it a quality of life it had not had before, an intensity and turbulence that amounted to a transformation. He worked harder than he had ever worked; the students, strange in their maturity, were intensely serious and contemptuous of triviality. Innocent of fashion or custom, they came to their studies as Stoner had dreamed that a student might — as if those studies were life itself and not specific means to specific ends.
Marvelous. (Wish I could share that passage with Bill.)
• At the end of a wistful, elegiac passage, Williams speaks of the “pity and sadness” that Stoner feels. I thought of a great title: “The Pity of It All.” (The book is Amos Elon’s, from 2002, about Jews in Germany, from the 1740s to the rise of Hitler.)
• Early in these notes, I said, “I think Williams uses the wrong word once, but I’m not sure.” Well, let me quote the sentence in question: “They had forgiven themselves for the harm they had done to each other, and they were rapt in a regard of what their life together might have been.”
Instead of “themselves” — “forgiven themselves” — does the author mean “each other”? I’d like to ask him. (Of course, you would not want “each other” and “each other” in rapid succession. That would mar the sentence. Sillify it. But to forgive oneself is different from forgiving another.)
• Way up above, I quoted and linked to an essay by Morris Dickstein (2007). I will quote from it again:
Ignored on publication in 1965, a clamorous year, [Stoner] has been kept alive by enthusiasts who go into print every decade to rediscover it . . . They invariably wonder why no one has heard of the book. “Why isn’t this book famous?” . . .
Some things are famous and bad, or mediocre; other things are unknown — or known only to enthusiasts — and great. I’m glad I was given Stoner. Read it in two sittings. Read it too fast, because I wanted to know what would happen. Oh, well.