Until randomly picking it up from the shelf of a stranger’s flat, I had never heard of the novel Stoner or its author, John Williams. ‘The greatest novel you’ve never read’ was a fitting cover quote, irritating and provocative in equal measure. A novel that, despite its greatness, is not only from an unheard of author, but was published in the mid-sixties. Why should it be worth reading now?
For whatever reason, Stoner is one of those novels that, seemingly forgotten, has risen from the literary mass grave and into the light of day. Though it can count itself lucky to have finally found a receptive audience (at least in Europe), the fact that it was largely sidelined during the author’s lifetime is bittersweet.
You could say that Stoner doesn’t do itself any favours on this front. Its title is bland and borderline misleading, while both the style and the subject matter promises to be heavy. And for better and worse, it’s a campus novel that has a religious reverence for literature and education.
Some readers might be put off by this dogmatism, and the apparent dourness of the novel. Yet William’s writing strikes directly at its target: it has that timeless quality many writers strive for. In the 60s numerous loud, distinct American writers emerged: Updike, Vonnegut, Didion, Pynchon — John Williams is not one of them. Stoner is a quiet novel, with no intention of shaking up the establishment.
This quietness reflects its protagonist: an unassuming, midwestern academic who ultimately fails to be remembered, like a modest, everyman Ozymandias. Williams describes this life in a way that is almost biographical, to sometimes brutal effect. We immediately learn that Stoner studied at the University of Missouri, and taught there until his death. There is little room for surprise or mystery — Williams emphatically tells us that
He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after taking his courses.
Although there is a clear parallel to the author’s career — Williams taught literature at the University of Denver for three decades — the strength of Stoner is in its universality. William Stoner is not an exceptionally tragic figure, like those of Shakespeare which so captivate the character as a young student from a farm. His tragedy is entirely ordinary. He begins life with no aspirations, then gets a taste of a more meaningful life; marries young to the wrong woman; finds joy in his teaching but struggles to excel at it. Both his marriage and the department politics become cruel and cumbersome, and his moments of happiness are always cut short.
In many ways, these pitfalls are not so much a wretched affliction of fate, as the inherent conditions of the world, which William’s establishes in a description of Stoner’s parents:
At thirty his Father looked fifty, shoulders stooped with labour, he gazed at the arid patch of land that sustained the family from one year to the next. His mother regarded her life patiently, as if it were a long moment she had to endure.
It’s so sad it’s almost funny, but it doesn’t end there. Note the description of the (abrupt) honeymoon of William and his bride Edith: ‘…restless and strained by their isolation, it was as if they walked together in a prison.’ For Stoner, at least, the university represents the freeing power of knowledge. The character of Dave Masters, one of Stoner’s few friends during his early days as an instructor at the university, hangs over the novel, despite being killed in France as part of the American Expeditionary Forces of World War 1. In an early scene Masters describes the institution of the university as a refuge ‘for the dispossessed of the world.’ It’s clear that both Stoner’s saviour and downfall is his willingness to be completely subsumed by the university. While it is in Master’s words, an ‘asylum’, it is also a bastion of meaning and purpose.
Academia indeed breeds a special kind of insanity. Some of William’s best scenes play off the high-wire ego-tennis that plays out in this environment. Stoner may seem like a pushover, but he sticks to his guns when it comes to flunking a lazy student, Walker, which leads him to lock horns with Hollis Lomax, his sardonic colleague. His modesty stops him from vying for the department head position, so when it goes to Lomax, trouble naturally lies ahead.
The conflicts work well because they are so recognisable — the way in which integrity and cruelty, justice and hubris violently clash. Lomax is no simple adversary: our first impression of him is a ‘grotesquely misshapen’ body with the face of a ‘matinee idol’, one whose isolation is deeply internalised:
During the next few weeks it became evident that Lomax did not intend to fit himself into the social, cultural, and academic routine of Columbia, Missouri.
Despite this intriguing set up, there is something questionable about the way Williams turns this character so purely vindictive, suggesting, whether intended or not, a parallel between physical and moral deformity.
Nor is his treatment of Edith fair by any stretch of the imagination. Her long vendetta against her husband, and control of their daughter, sets the reader against her, even if there are flashes of sympathy afforded here and there. Had the novel been written from her perspective, Stoner might appear to be the inconsiderate one. Although we never fully understand her motivations, it’s clear that the marriage is not, and never was, for her own benefit. Stoner’s understanding of love only comes much later in life, at which point it can only do damage to him. As with Lomax, Edith’s portrayal is quite true to the era — what jars is Williams’ unwillingness to let these characters explain themselves.
This may seem like an odd line of attack but it fits into a more general criticism of the book falsely martyring its hero, which has been levelled by feminist critic Elaine Showalter. Some see Stoner as stoical; others might interpret him as passive to the point of negligence. Williams has at least taken care to contextualise his protagonist’s actions in a certain era. Stoner comes of age in the early 20th century and key moments of his life coincide with the World Wars and the Great Depression. Williams was born a few decades later, so he can observe Stoner’s life with a sense of distance, but not too much. So we get passages like this, late in the book, capturing the 1930s:
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 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 the tenured employee of an institution that somehow could not fail.
The university, of course, is not impermeable to the despair of the outside world, nor is literature the salvation of humanity. The conclusion was foretold. Stoner
…had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years… found ignorance.
Is this sobering, or just bitter? Williams’ thinking seems to be coloured by the same Renaissance ideals as his protagonist, and it’s hard not to see his personal voice emerge in passages like these. In reality, John Williams was not so magnanimous as Stoner. He was an alcoholic, plagiarist and womaniser, and apparently felt threatened by women in academia, which for his time, it may be said, was not a distinct deficiency.
Though Stoner certainly rings true, I wonder how much of its resonance is a product of its immaculate craft. Just as its strength is in its classical virtues, there are elements that, for some, will feel too classical — stuck, ironically, in its own stiff conceptions of the world. But, whether rightfully earned or not, the gravity of Stoner is undeniable — without weeping at its conclusion, I could connect with it. A reminder that good writing can hold prejudices just as it can expose them.
