Book Notes: Stoner (1965)

NEITHER THE MALE AUTHORS NOR THE MALE READERS most preoccupied with middle age are inclined to face it cleanly. The male author depicts the mid-life crisis to escape his own. His novels and screenplays are an adolescent retort to the anxieties of ease. Thus the implausible sexscapades, couture bloodletting, and whiny retreats into solipsism that have defined so much of American literature over the last seven decades. In this tradition, there is little difference between a literary depiction of the middle class man and a demeaning one. 

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John Edward Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner is different. Williams sees a soul where others see a stand-in. His novel finds dignity in the travail of this middle class and middle aged soul. This might be the only novel I have read that bestows any real moral dignity on such a soul—a feat more remarkable for that fact that Williams does not seem to believe in souls. There is something Christian in Williams’ magnanimity, in his conviction that there is moral worth in the most humdrum of human lives, in his belief in what C.S. Lewis calls “the burden of my neighbour’s glory.” But there is no redemptive grace in Stoner. His characters have no eternity to look towards or resurrection to hope for. They find no consolation in the promise that the meek will one day inherit the earth. This promise is not rejected so much as omitted. There is a conspicuous lack of clergymen, sermons, and Bibles in a novel set in early 20th century Missouri. 

In their place we find vice-deans and department heads. The protagonist of Stoner is William Stoner, professor of English literature at the University of Missouri. The novel begins with his birth in the 1890s and ends with his death in the 1950s. His life is utterly unremarkable. He lives through both world wars, but fights in neither; he witnesses the Great Depression but never feels its sting. In time of holocaust his greatest trial is a troubled marriage. A tenured professor is all he ever aims to be. He achieves this, but little more: his crowning professional accomplishment is the publication of his dissertation monograph. The drama that propels the story forward is pedestrian. In one chapter it is Stoner’s decision to build a study; in another, his decision to change a syllabus.

The magic of Stoner is its ability to invest these choices with spiritual significance. Williams takes the moral arc of a mundane life extremely seriously. If the deeds of the meek go unhonored and unnoticed in our world, Stoner whispers, it is not because they lack real moral weight. The meek man is still a man. Soul to soul, his inner tragedies and triumphs deserve portion with the great and the strong.

The Nietzchean vitalists will thus find much to despise in Stoner. I recommend it to them anyway: it is one of the few defenses of the ‘bugmen’ capable of mounting a challenge to their philosophy. (On a similar note: if you are an academic teaching one of those “purpose of life” of philosophy courses, Stoner would be a very good case study through which to examine numerous theories of the good life). However, I suspect the novel is less popular for its philosophy than for its writing. One review named it a “perfect novel,” and in many ways it is. Williams offers perfection without theatrics. Stoner has no flashbacks, no unreliable narrators, no hidden disquisitions on the subjectivity of human knowledge. Like its protagonist, the prose of Stoner is subdued. Occasionally Stoner crescendos into passages of quiet beauty, but these passages never call attention to themselves. Williams does not resort to literary fireworks. He never needs to. Each of his paragraphs is perfectly placed. Each of his chapters is flawlessly paced. Without Williams’ mastery of form this novel would not work.

I can lodge only two complaints against Stoner. The first is that it leaves too much unsaid. At times the actions and motivations of its characters are inexplicable. The reader is left to piece together why Stoner’s wife or academic rivals act as they do. We are sometimes left to piece together why Stoner himself acts as he does. Consider the subject William Stoner devotes his life to teaching. What exactly does medieval and renaissance poetry mean to Stoner? What value does he believe it has for mankind? On these questions the novel is strangely mute. Perhaps Williams did not want to be accused of peacocking or pedantry. Though a specialist in English poetry himself, he seems determined that his readers should not realize this. The book has few allusions to the poetic corpus that Stoner studies. It has no discussions of this canon’s merit or meaning. We are told that Stoner passionately lectures students on these topics, but Williams does not give us the content of the lectures themselves. Neither Stoner nor any other character in his story offers an explanation for why antique poems in Middle English and Latin deserve the reverence and attention that he gives them.

The overall effect of this choice is to make Stoner something of an everyman academic. If Stoner was written as a professor of biology or history very little in the novel would change. The object of Stoner’s lifelong passion is incidental to the action.  

This is a deliberate choice on Williams’ part. One of the running themes of Stoner is the impossibility of articulating those things which matter most. The undergraduate Stoner decides to study English literature when he struggles to explain the meaning of a sonnet. On Stoner’s deathbed he is once again inarticulate: he urgently feels “as if he has something to say” but never manages to say it. Throughout his life Stoner seems constitutionally incapable of stating his intentions, objections, or desires plainly. It is not clear to me if this is a problem of self-knowledge or the consequence of culture. Does he not open up his soul because he does not know his soul? Is it because things of the soul simply cannot be expressed in words? Or perhaps Stoner could express them, but chooses not to? Is his tongue stopped by devotion to duty? In concession to custom? We do not know. We do know that the tongues of other characters in Stoner are similarly afflicted. Of the many miseries in this book, all seem to trace back to some failure in speech. 

 I do not easily relate to such a character. Stoner’s weaknesses are not my own. Quite the opposite: I am probably a bit too reflective, and more than a bit too talkative, for my own good. Had I read this novel a decade ago I probably would have dismissed its protagonist as a baffling bit of artifice. Fortunately, I have met enough quiet Midwesterners in the intervening years to recognize Stoner’s type. I think in particular of one man I once knew well. He shared many of Stoner’s character traits. As with Stoner, he had an inborn nobility obscured by the modesty of middle class living.  As with Stoner, this man was intelligent but not loquacious. He was perceptive but rarely self-reflective. With great barriers of resolve he fenced others away from his inner thoughts and emotions; it was hard to tell whether he did not know his soul or whether he simply could not share it. Like Stoner he sacrificed sleep and sweat for his family’s sake; like Stoner, his efforts did not stop him from estrangement from those same family members in his middle-age. Neither Stoner nor he deserved the injustices each received—but in both cases these were private injustices. Like Stoner, he lived a life most of his contemporaries would call comfortable. The man I knew was not as passive as Stoner (unlike Stoner, he was no stranger to wrath) but his instincts were very similar. His stock response to pain or trial was to buckle down and carry on. As was true for Stoner, these personality traits led him to keep a fatal diagnosis hidden from those around him for as long as possible.

As with Stoner, there were many times where I wished he had chosen to speak.

The type of man portrayed in this novel is a real one. If I am disappointed that Williams does not unveil the motives that propel his novel forward, I understand why he did so. The opacity of Stoner‘s characters might be the most realistic thing about them.

The life of William Stoner is beset by tragedies great and small. Some of these are children of chance. Others are the products of Stoner’s own passivity and poor decision making. Many are quite harrowing. I had to put the book down for a season after I read the chapter where Stoner’s wife ices him out of his daughter’s life. It was just too much.

This has given me much to ponder. I read Stoner not long after finishing Blood Meridian. Nothing in that bloodbath of a book—not even that infamous tree of dead babies—prompted the sort of visceral reaction I felt here. In some ways this is a testament to William’s skill as a writer. Yet all of these sad happenings point to a weakness in Williams’ craft. Tragedy is a crutch that Williams cannot stop using.

Any author can make suffering seem significant. Only the greatest authors can plumb the depths of happiness. Williams does not attempt this. This is to his novel’s detriment. This novel is in part an investigation of heroism and virtue in everyday life. But the tragedies Stoner lives through are not ordinary. His life is a few standard deviations sadder than the norm. Williams uses misery for contrast: against its dark background, Stoner’s fortitude and dignity shine brightly. By these means Williams succeeds at placing this middle class, middle aged man on the same plane as the strong and the great. But see the catch? This man only belongs there when he is suffering.

This is a tough nut to crack. Dignity is not dependent on pain. We know this truth, but it is not easy to translate that knowledge into a compelling story. One wishes Williams had this skill. One wonders whether he could have dignified Stoner without recourse to suffering. This is possible: Leo Tolstoy did it. That was Tolstoy’s special genius: there was a man who could wring meaning out of both laughter and sorrow. Alas, there are so few Tolstoys! Williams is very good, but falls short of that standard. The book that dignifies that joys of the middle class, middle-aged American man has yet to be written.

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For more of my writing on literature, you might also like the posts  “Myths of the Over-Managed,” ” On The Tolkienic Hero,” “Longfellow and the Decline of American Poetry ,” and “How I Taught the Iliad to Chinese Teenagers.” To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar’s Stage, you can join the Scholar’s Stage Substack mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. Your support makes this blog possible.

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