Discovering ‘Stoner,’ the novel I almost missed
In a review written in 2013 of John Williamson’s “Stoner,” Tim Kreider snagged the attention of The New Yorker readers with this title: “The Greatest American Novel You’ve Never Heard of.”
This year, when my friend Anne introduced me to “Stoner,” I still belonged to the ignorant crowd. I’d never heard of the man or his book. Given the title and its publication in 1965, I immediately assumed “Stoner” featured hippies and potheads.
But when Anne explained that it was the story of a Midwestern professor of literature and his lifetime of suffering and failure, I realized I was way off base.
The plot of Williamson’s novel is simple enough. Raised on a hard-scrabble Missouri farm in the late 19th century, William Stoner takes the advice of his father and heads off to college to study new methods in farming. There the young man takes a literature class that leaves him drunk on words and ideas, so much so that he changes his major to English. He doesn’t explain this change to his parents until his graduation, when he also tells them he won’t be returning to work the farm.
In graduate school — Stoner aims to become a professor — he makes two good friends, both of whom enlist to fight in the first world war. Dave Masters dies in battle, while Gordon Finch returns home an officer and a hero of sorts. Meanwhile, Stoner meets and eventually weds Edith, who is of a higher social class.
In their horrible, failed marriage — Edith fears and despises the sex act, and Stoner is too inept and uncommunicative as a lover and husband to shift her opinion — the sadness and stoicism which haunts Stoner becomes more and more apparent. Once Edith decides she wants a child, she becomes affectionate for a time, but with her pregnancy and the birth of their daughter Grace, she falls back into frigidity and neuroticism. Grace becomes a battlefield between her mother and father, and eventually resembles her mother, with alcoholism as an additional handicap.
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When Stoner flunks an arrogant and lazy graduate student, the student’s mentor, Professor Hollis Lomax, becomes Stoner’s implacable enemy, throwing barriers into his path whenever the opportunity occurs. Meanwhile, Stoner meets another lover of literature, Katherine Driscoll, and these two wounded souls enter into an affair which eventually leads to scandal.
To say more of the plot will spoil the rest of the story. Instead, let’s look at some other features of “Stoner,” including its publishing history.
One mark of the book’s genius is the voice. Using third-person narration, Williams controls the style and syntax so that the plain, straight-up prose matches Stoner’s interior landscape of thought and emotion. There are no missteps here, no jarring intrusions. Descriptions of what happens, however bleak, seem as natural and unpretentious as the farm of Stoner’s youth. Here, for instance, is an example of both the prose and Stoner’s revelations about life:
“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.”
Moreover, though he gives us a man in full, Williams never explicitly imposes on the reader some moral lesson to be drawn from that life. Consequently, Stoner becomes more fully human, which means that the more we know of him, just as with our family and our friends, the more a mystery he becomes.
Is Stoner a hero? In his perseverance in his marriage, his devotion to literature, and his refusal to buckle to Professor Lomax, we can reply in the affirmative. Is he a coward? Regarding his marital floundering and his broken relationship with his daughter, the conclusion to his affair with Katherine, and even perhaps his failure to join his two friends and march off to war, we can again reply in the affirmative. In short, Williams has created in Stoner that amalgamation of virtues and vices that define most of us.
The novel’s publication history reflects its quirks and dichotomies. Published in 1965, “Stoner” sold only 2,000 copies before going out of print. The novel was republished in the 1970s, gaining new fans, but it wasn’t until the 21st century, and in Europe rather than America, that the novel finally grew wings and flew from the shelves to become an international bestseller. By that time Williamson had died, in a sense a Stoneresque fate for the author and his own hopes and ambitions.
Near the novel’s end, Stoner “contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be. He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of mankind,” yet he had failed to attain that desire. He had wanted “the connective passion of marriage,” but that again never materialized. He had wanted love, “but had relinquished it, had let it go into the chaos of potentiality.” Finally, he had wanted to inspire his students, to find purity and integrity in his teaching and in the institution where he taught, yet he had instead “found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality.”
Stoner ticks through this list, then asks himself, “What did you expect?”
For me, this question lies at the heart of the book. Our expectations of life may be dashed to pieces or, possibly worse, fulfilled but leaving us empty and disappointed. When my mother was still alive, and I would express some ambition, large or small, she often said, “Be careful what you wish for.”
Perhaps that is one lesson we can take from “Stoner.”
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
