Stoner by John Williams is one of those novels I've meant to read for years but only just got round to. It's a quiet, elegantly written and tender portrait of a professor at a mid-western university in the first half of the 20th century. His colleagues "held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, [and] speak rarely of him now."
William Stoner's life might be construed as a failure. But it's in his acceptance of failure that Stoner is successful. When he is dying, he asks himself several times what did you expect. Then he takes an inventory of the high points in his life: his marriage, teaching career, few friendships and brief love affair - the episodes comprising the arc of his story.
Early in the novel, his colleague David Masters describes university life as a "rest home for the infirm... and otherwise incompetent." He assesses Stoner's character like this: "You... are cut out for failure; not that you'd fight the world. You'd let it chew you up and spit you out, and you'd lie there wondering what was wrong. Because you'd always expect the world to be something it wasn't, something it had no wish to be. The weevil in the cotton, the worm in the beanstalk, the borer in the corn. You couldn't face them, and you couldn't fight them; because you're too weak, and you're too strong. And you have no place to go in the world."
Stoner remains at the same university throughout his career, with only brief success. He has a long marriage, which except for a short (and rather odd) period of passion, is devoid of tenderness, understanding or connection. Then, he allows his wife Edith, a disturbed personality, to freeze him out of their home as well as out of a relationship with their daughter.
Stoner takes refuge from home at the university, but he's frozen out there too, by the department head, Hollis Lomax. In both situations, Stoner has the moral high ground, but he buckles in to flawed and willful personalities. He survives these blows, in that he keeps on going, living an ever diminishing role at home, and accepting a humiliating and constrained academic schedule at work. There is one brief triumph in his career - but ultimately that success passes into legend, and in the minds of his colleagues and students he becomes "a campus character".
Then there's his love affair with graduate student Katherine Driscoll. The ardor between them is tenderly described, and the meeting of their minds over her doctoral thesis indicates that the relationship is fully satisfying to them both. But he relinquishes Katherine for his marriage to Edith, a relationship that began and ultimately endures on superficial footing.
There's a lot of freezing out - a lot of winter in this spare and elegant novel. But winter is connected to Stoner's most deeply felt moments. Over the days he shares with Katherine, they walk nearly every day in the woods, despite the bitter cold. Then, at the heart of the novel, there's an important turning point in a moment of crisis when "he found himself wondering if his life were worth living; if it had ever been."
He opens the window beside his desk and breathes in the winter air. "He felt himself pulled outward toward the whiteness, which spread as far as he could see, and which was a part of the darkness from which it glowed, of the clear and cloudless sky without height of depth. For an instant he felt himself go out of the body that sat motionless before the window; and as he felt himself slip away; everything - the flat whiteness, the trees, the tall columns, the night, the far stars -- seemed incredibly tiny and far away, as if they were dwindling to a nothingness."
There's a similarly beautiful moment at the end of the novel when "dispassionately, reasonable, he 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; he had had two friends... 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."
What an extraordinary turn of phrase: the chaos of potentiality.
John McGahern in his introduction to the NYRB edition of this book, calls William Stoner a "real hero" the importance, in his view, being Stoner's sense of a job. "You've got to keep the faith. The important thing is to keep the tradition going, because the tradition is civilization."
But think of what he gives up. Stoner lets his influence over and love for his daughter slip away at the hands of his troubled wife. He lets go of Katherine Driscoll so that she can live by herself and he can remain with Edith. He continues to work at the university, flattened and demoralized by the department chair.
Yet it's in his passivity and insignificance, in Stoner's lack of consequence, that he is most at peace with himself. Throughout the novel he remarks that his travails mean nothing. That they don't really matter. But he has a life of the mind and, with that, he has his own quiet dignity.
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