Overlooked Novel Teaches Us How to Live

stoner

After two friends separately recommended John Williams’ 1965 campus novel Stoner as an overlooked masterpiece, I sat down and read it. I can report that they were right.

Stoner is a campus novel but, unlike most campus novels, it is not comic. I theorize that most writers of such novels, especially those employed by universities, fear looking silly by complaining too much about academe. After all, it affords them an easier life than writers of previous generations have endured. They don’t need to please finicky patrons or a brutal marketplace, and they risk looking trivial when they complain about working conditions.  By engaging in comic satire, the authors of comic campus novels are able to vent their frustrations about small things without seeming small themselves.

Unfortunately, in the process they generally fail to do justice to the very big intellectual and creative passions that light up many of those who work at colleges and universities. Sure, it may seem strange to outsiders to see grown men and women arguing passionately about, say, 17th century metaphysical poetry. Even a non-comic work like Margaret Edson’s W;t seems perplexed that someone could be as combative about the work of John Donne as Vivian Bearing is. In Edson’s mind, it takes a terminal illness to awaken Vivian to anything approaching a sane perspective. Campus novels like Mary McCarthy’s Groves of Academe, David Lodge’s Trading Places, Small World, and Nice Work, Jane Smiley’s Moo, Richard Russo’s Straight Man and others dismiss the efforts of intellectuals in their own ways.

Stoner is different because it talks about intellectual passion as a love affair. At the same time, the author acknowledges the world’s skepticism. In fact, the novel seems to go out of its way to make Stoner and his academic career seem small. Its genius is to uncover more substance than meets the eye.

Protagonist William Stoner is the son of subsistence farmers who attends the University of Missouri to major in agriculture. While there, he falls in love with poetry, although it takes a professor to point this out to him. After all, the world he comes from sees literature as extraneous, a needless extravagance.

The ground begins to shift beneath Stoner’s feed when he encounters Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, which is the one that begins, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold.” Here’s his response when his professor asks him to explain it:

Sloane’s eyes came back to William Stoner, and he said dryly, “Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr. Stoner; do you hear him?”

William Stoner realized that for several moments he had been holding his breath. He expelled it gently, minutely aware of his clothing moving upon his body as his breath went out of his lungs. He looked away from Sloane about the room. Light slanted from the windows and settled upon the faces of his fellow students, so that the illumination seemed to come from within them and go out against a dimness; a student blinked, and a thin shadow fell upon a cheek whose down had caught the sunlight. Stoner became aware that his fingers were unclenching their hard grip on his desktop. He turned his hands about under his gaze, marveling at their brownness, at the intricate way the nails fit into his blunt finger-ends; he thought he could feel the blood flowing invisibly through the tiny veins and arteries, throbbing delicately and precariously from his fingertips through his body.”

Shakespeare’s sonnet expresses the war between mortality and love, with the speaker feeling his love vividly because he is getting older. Stoner picks up the themes in an inchoate way. His fellow students, younger than he is, are filled with an inner light, even as a shadow hangs over them. In the very moment when Stoner senses his mortality, he awakens to the blood flowing through him. Nothing in his world has prepared him for such an insight.

He cannot answer his professor’s question, but he keeps taking English courses. Finally the professor calls him in and points out to him that his life is about to take a different turn:

“But don’t you know, Mr. Stoner,” Sloane asked. “Don’t you understand about yourself yet? You’re going to be a teacher.”

Suddenly Sloane seemed very distant, and the walls of the office receded. Stoner felt himself suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Sloane said softly.

“How can you tell? How can you be sure?”

“It’s love, Mr. Stoner,” Sloane said cheerfully. “You are in love. It’s as simple as that.”

It was as simple as that. He was aware that he nodded to Sloane and said something inconsequential. Then he was walking out of his office. His lips were tingling and his fingertips were numb; he walked as if he were asleep, yet he was intensely aware of his surroundings. He brushed against the polished wooden walls in the corridor, and he thought he could feel the warmth and age of the wood; he went slowly down the stairs and wondered at the veined cold marble that seemed to slip a little beneath his feet. In the halls the voices of the students became distinct and individual out of the hushed murmur, and their faces were close and strange and familiar. He went out of Jesse Hall into the morning, and the grayness no longer seemed to oppress the campus; it led his eyes outward and upward into the sky, where he looked as if towards a possibility for which he had no name.

And later on:

As his mind engaged itself with its subject, as it grappled with the power of the literature he studied and tried to understand its nature, he was aware of a constant change within himself; and as he was aware of that, he moved outward from himself into the world which contained him, so that he knew that the poem of Milton’s that he read or the essay of Bacon’s or the drama of Ben Jonson’s changed the world which was its subject, and changed it because of its dependence upon it.

Even simple grammar grips him and he is excited to teach a course in freshman composition:

Though he was to teach only the fundamentals of grammar and composition to a group of unselected freshmen, he looked forward to his task with enthusiasm and with a strong sense of its significance. He planned the course during the week before the opening of the autumn semester, and saw the kinds of possibility that one sees as one struggles with the materials and subjects of an endeavor; he felt the logic of grammar, and he thought he perceived how it spread out from itself, permeating the language and supporting human thought. In the simple compositional exercises he made for his students he saw the potentialities of prose and its beauties, and he looked forward to animating his students with the sense of what he perceived.

Of course, just as there is  a gap between the poetry of early love and the prose of marriage, so there is a gap between his love of language and literature and how they show up in his job:

But in the first classes he met, after the opening routines of rolls and study plans, 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.

He experiences a version of that gap also in the graduate student essays that he writes and in the book that he eventually publishes. Although he works hard at his teaching and becomes better in the classroom, he is never a brilliant teacher.

Then a horrible wife and a horrible chairman combine to make his life miserable, with the first dividing him from the daughter he loves and the latter taking away from him the medieval courses that light him up. They also bring to an end his beautiful relationship with a dissertation student. Stoner never complains, just as his parents never complained, and simply forges on. Comic campus novels put most of their emphasis on these petty humiliations.

But not this one. Stoner realizes, long after the affair has ended and he is getting old, that his love, whether for this woman or for poetry, outweigh everything else. His love is as strong in his late fifties as it was when he first encountered Shakespeare in college:

Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth he had given it freely, without thought; he had given it to the knowledge that had been revealed to him—how many years ago?—by Archer Sloane; he had given it to Edith, in those first blind foolish days of his courtship and marriage; and he had given it to Katherine [his mistress], as if it had never been given before. He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it more fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.

At the end of his life, lying on his deathbed, he acknowledges how his life would not appear much to others:

Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be…He had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion of marriage; he had had that, too, and he had not known what to do with it, and it had died. He had wanted love; and he had had love, and had relinquished it, had let it go into the chaos of potentiality. Katherine, he thought. “Katherine.”

And he had wanted to be a teacher, and had become one; yet he knew, he had always known, that for most of his life he had been an indifferent one. He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance. And what else? He thought. What else?

What did you expect? he asked himself.

The book does not end there, however. In the final pages he has an epiphany that validates his life:

A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure—as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been.

In his last moments, he fingers the book that 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 opened the book; and as he did so it became not his own. He let his fingers riffle through the pages and felt a tingling, as if those pages were alive. 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.

Comic campus novels satirize the intellectual life because it seems small. Stoner acknowledges that it may seem small but points out it doesn’t have to be. Stoner is ultimately a big man because he honors the call within himself and follows it. We all have it within us to follow that call.

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