Unexpected reading: "Stoner" by John Williams

It's not often these days that I read a novel cover to cover in one day. And yet this is what happened yesterday, entirely unexpectedly, with this book, Stoner, by John Williams. 

Stoner... who? you might say, as indeed I did. It seems to be a common reaction. I was given the book, in a nice hardback edition, by a very good old friend, but when I picked it up I couldn't remember what, if anything, she had told me about it or why she had decided to give it to me. Only after I had finished did I check online, to find that this was a widely-reviewed 2013 must-read, awarded the Waterstones Prize, no less. Strange though that, for all its eminence, every review of the book starts by remarking on the obscurity of the author and the slow-burning nature of this novel's success. It was first published in America in 1965, and in the UK in 1973. It seems to have been picked up by some critics, particularly in continental Europe, last year and to have enjoyed huge sales. Perhaps fittingly (as we shall see), this is all considerably too late for the author, who died in 1985.

However, I didn't need all those reviews and accounts of revival to register the quality of this book. For one thing, I read it in a day. For another, though I was at a concert in Bozar last night, I heard little of the music, as my mind was stuck on trying to work out how and why this book worked its peculiar power.


But back to basics for a second, what is it about. Simply, it is the story of a life, a relatively ordinary and unassuming one, taking us from the birth in 1891 of William Stoner into a family of hard-graft, dirt-poor Missouri farmers, his entry at nineteen into Missouri State University to study agricultural science, his conversion to English literature, his subsequent career as a teacher of English literature at the same university, up until his death. Along the way, a life lived unexceptionally, marriage, a daughter, professional rivalries and conflict, a brief affair, family troubles and an illness. 

The very first page of the book says it all, really: 

William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his course. When he died his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University library. This manuscript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: 'Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues.'

An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner's colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.

One might be forgiven for wondering why one should read on at all really. It is a typical, dismissive summary of an undistinguished life. And yet, this is a book which had me - and by all accounts, many others - eagerly turning the pages. Why?

The blurb, and many reviews, make much of the "sadness" of this novel. Stoner's life is, by most measures, a sad one. It is constricted and circumscribed in many ways, by poverty, by habit, by social convention, by the ill-will of others, by the times in which it was lived. Stoner's horizons are limited. In the novel, he barely moves, with only rare departures from the haven of the university, usually to attend to family business, and no travel outside the State of Missouri is mentioned at any point in his life. The wider world only encroaches rarely, most notably in the form of two world wars, which bring disruption - for good and ill - to the enclosed university world. 

The events of Stoner's life objectively do little to compensate for this circumscription. His marriage, to a rather ethereal, out-of-his-league society girl, Edith, is a disaster, but one prolonged for his whole life, because his young wife, unable to return his initially genuine and tender love, especially not physically, and mentally hemmed in by a life-sapping education and devotion to appearances, becomes depressed and embittered and makes her life a constant low-intensity campaign to undermine and thwart her husband. The worst of it, after the low-key but poignant tragedy of their honeymoon, is his wife's later systematic destruction of the close and loving relationship Stoner builds with his daughter, Grace, thereby cutting him off from one of the two great loves of his life and  setting Grace on a path of self-destruction.

As for the other real love of Stoner's life, Katherine, the graduate student and intellectual equal with whom he lives a brief but beautifully-evoked affair, this episode too is closed down by Stoner's adversaries, not this time by his wife, but in this case his professional rival (and departmental head), Hollis Lomax, whose rancour against Stoner goes back to the latter's principled objection to giving a pass grade to a protégé of Lomax on the basis of a clearly fraudulent dissertation. Lomax, who has heard about Stoner's affair, threatens scandal and, more effectively, to destroy Katherine's promising academic career. Interestingly, Edith, is also aware of the affair, but is largely indifferent to - even condescendingly indulgent of - his typically forty-something fling with his "little co-ed". More convention from her.

In his professional life, Stoner neither fails nor shines. Mostly, he is a good teacher, though never quite able to transmit fully his real passion for literature, but his one published work fails to set the world alight (one reviewer calls it "competent", another "pedestrian") and departmental advancement never comes his way, with, as we have seen, a rival promoted over his head.

So here is the "sadness". A life bound by convention, frustrated ability, low horizons, lost love and a distinctly middling career.

Again, one might ask, so why is this book so good, so readable? 

For one thing, the book is beautifully written. Simple and straightforward - no tricksy narrative techniques here - but poignant, closely observed and wonderfully evocative. It carries you forward. 

And then, there is the real message of the book, which for me is far from a sad one. For all its pains, Stoner's life is not miserable, not when seen from the inside. This is not to say that he is delusional; indeed he understands his condition well, and relates it with great candour. It is rather that the value of his life transcends its outward events.

Even at the steady narrative level, this is no unrelenting misery-fest. Stoner has his ups and downs, his minor personal triumphs and victories as well as his trials and defeats. There are points of light, too. An early friendship with two other students, one of whom dies in the Great War, while the other goes on to be Dean of the University (and a reliable - if occasionally exasperated - ally to the end), seems a minor matter when told at the beginning of the book, but gradually emerges as critically supportive to Stoner throughout his life. Also those two frustrated loves, of his daughter, Grace, and of his student, Katherine, for all that they are curtailed, stand as visions of paradise, evidence of a capacity to love and be loved, and the ability to be happy. Katherine recognises this, albeit while acknowledging the banality of the sentiment:

One evening, near the end of the time they had together, Katherine said quietly, almost absently, 'Bill, if we never have anything else, we will have had this week. Does that sound like a girlish thing to say?'
'It doesn't matter what it sounds like, ' Stoner said. He nodded. 'It's true.'
'Then I'll say it,' Katherine said. 'We will have had this week.'

Love is one of the big questions running though the book, what it is, what it means. At the beginning of Stoner's affair with Katherine, this is how he sees it:

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.

The first time the word is used is in quite a different context, but a key one for realising why this book is not a sad one. Of all people, it is used by Stoner's rather crusty English professor and sort-of mentor, Archer Sloane, who persuades him as a student to switch courses and pursue English literature. Stoner doesn't understand why Sloane thinks he should switch, especially after a recent class when Stoner was left bereft of words when asked to say what a Shakespeare sonnet meant:

'But don't you know, Mr Stoner?' Sloane asked. 'Don't you 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.'

This love - and this capacity for love - is arguably the key which explains why this is not a sad novel. Stoner's love of literature is profound and sustaining, and it matters little that he is never fully able to express it either as a teacher or as an academic. Similarly, his love for others, for all the adversities and defeats it faces, is real - it has been. And this is what we see in an extraordinary death bed scene, with Stoner alone, knowing he is at the point of death, that a man able to love can also love himself and his life, however sad and 'failed' that life might outwardly be. 

There is more to say, but I suspect this is already my longest review ever. So do I recommend this book? It is possible that somebody could read this book and consider it a complete waste of time. But not people who've read as far as this last paragraph here. So yes, very much so.