John Williams’ Stoner: Absorbed by the Delicately and Intricately Cellular Being of the Snow

I’ve just finished one of the greatest novels written in the English language. It is difficult to do more that put down a few quotes, first by the Author, John Williams, and then from the novel, Stoner. Few people have read Stoner; nearly all who do say what I just did. Williams was born in Texas in 1922. He died in 1994. After fighting in World War 2 he became an English professor and Creative Writing instructor at the University of Denver, where he spent his entire career. He wrote 3 acclaimed novels, all intermittently in print, and none like the other. Stoner is a Devastationalist masterpiece. It is a plain narrative, quietly and unobtrusively poetic. Somehow he fits a man’s entire life into less than 300 pages. And that life is tragic to the point of being unbearable, as Lear is in the end. Yet still, somehow, Williams suffuses it with wisdom, pity, mercy, kindness and forgiveness, without narrative gimmicks, never averting his eyes from pain. Here are two quotes from an interview, with a link to the entire thing:

“The novel is a terribly old form-The Iliad and The Odyssey are novels in verse-despite what critics say. I’ve said some of that bullshit in my classes, like `the modern novel begins with Flaubert,’ or some crazy thing like that, which is true in a sense but it’s not altogether true, it’s only a point of departure. I love the novel because it’s a form that’s imprecise, in flux, and it takes advantage of every known literary form that’s gone before-poetry, the essay, drama. I think the novel is in a sense `A Life.’ The birth, living and death doesn’t have to be explicit in the novel, but I think it has to be about birth, living, and death. I think any good novel ends with a kind of death. It doesn’t mean that the hero has to die at the end, but it should be `A Life.'”

“World War II happened to us. It’s like cancer, you don’t ask for cancer, but you have no choice. Despite all the revisionist history we had no choice about World War II, we had to get into the goddam war. But finally I think World War II brutalized this country. People almost got used to people being killed.”

http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmarticleID=1190

This a NYT review article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/books/review/Dickstein-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

This is his description of Stoner’s wife, at a moment when his marriage has been long over:

“Edith’s clothes were flung in disarray on the floor beside the bed, the covers of which had been thrown back carelessly; she lay naked and glistening under the light on the white unwrinkled sheets. Her body was lax and wanton in its naked sprawl, and it shone like pale gold. William came nearer the bed. She was fast asleep, but in a trick of the light her slightly opened mouth seemed to shape the soundless words of passion and love. He stood looking at her a long time. He felt a distant pity and reluctant friendship and familiar respect; and he felt also a weary sadness, for he knew that no longer could the sight of her bring upon him the agony of desire that he had once known, and knew that he would never again be moved as he had once been moved by her presence. The sadness lessened, and he covered her gently, turned out the light and got into bed beside her.”

I have never read a finer description than the following three paragraphs of midlife despair, which becomes metaphysical:

“He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.

“Once, late after his evening class, he returned to his office and sat at his desk, trying to read. It was winter, and a snow had fallen during the day, so that the out-of-doors was covered with a white softness. The office was overheated; he opened a window beside the desk so that the cool air might come into the close room. He breathed deeply, and let his eyes wander over the white floor of the campus. On an impulse he switched out the light on his desk and sat in the hot darkness of his office; the cold air filled his lungs, and he leaned toward the open window. He heard the silence of the winter night, and it seemed to him that he somehow felt the sounds that were absorbed by the delicately and intricately cellular being of the snow. Nothing moved upon the whiteness; it was a dead scene, which seemed to pull at him, to suck at his consciousness just as it pulled the sound from the air and buried it within a cold white softness. 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 or 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. Then, behind him, a radiator clanked. He moved, and the scene became itself. With a curiously reluctant relief he again snapped on his desk lamp. He gathered a book and a few papers, went out of the office, walked through the darkened corridors and let himself out of the wide double doors at the back of Jesse Hall. He walked slowly home, aware of each footstep crunching with muffled loudness in the dry snow.

“During that year, and especially in the winter months, he found himself returning more and more frequently to such a state of unreality; at will he seemed to be able to remove his consciousness from the body that contained it, and he observed himself as if he were an oddly familiar stranger doing the oddly familiar things that he had to do. It was a dissociation that he had never felt before; he knew that he ought to be troubled by it, but he was numb, and he could not convince himself that it mattered. He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him he cared to remember.”

The following quote is central to the whole book, and establishes Stoner as a hero but then, in the second paragraph, moves on from his own history to the history of others, as he considers the Great Depression:

“But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand. Deep in him, beneath his memory, was the knowledge of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain. Though he seldom thought of his early years on the Booneville farm, there was always near his consciousness the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forebears whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak.

“And though he looked upon them [his younger colleagues] with apparent impassivity, he was aware of the times in which he lived. During that decade [the 1930’s] when many men’s faces found a permanent hardness and bleakness, as if they looked upon an abyss, William Stoner, to whom that expression was as familiar as the air he walked in, saw the signs of a general despair he had known since he was a boy. he saw good men go down into a slow decline of hopelessness, broken as their vision of a decent life was broken; he saw them walking aimlessly upon the streets, their eyes empty like shards of broken glass; he saw them walk up to back doors, with the bitter pride of men who go to their executions, and beg for the bread that would allow them to beg again; and he saw men, who had once walked erect in their own identities, look at him with envy and hatred for the poor security he enjoyed as a tenured employee of an institution that somehow could not fail. He did not give voice to this awareness; but the knowledge of common misery touched him and changed him in ways that were hidden deep from the public view, and a quiet sadness for the common plight was never far beneath any moment of his living.”

I know this feeling, especially from the early eighties, when Reagan demolished the safety net and sent millions of people onto the streets to live.

Here is the coming of World War 2:

“Five days before the marriage [of his pregnant, 18-year-old daughter to a boy she has no feelings for] took place the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor; and William Stoner watched the ceremony with a mixture of feeling that he had not had before. Like many others who went through that time, he was gripped with what he could think of  only as a numbness, though he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because because they could not be lived with. It was the force of a public tragedy he felt, a horror and woe so all-pervasive that private tragedies and personal misfortunes were removed to another state of being, yet were intensified by the very vastness in which they took place, as the poignancy of a lone grave might be intensified by the great desert surrounding it. With a pity that was almost impersonal he watched the sad little ritual of the marriage and was oddly moved by the passive, indifferent beauty of his daughter’s face and by the sullen desperation on the face of the young man.”

Was not 9-11 like this? And given his quote about the war, I believe he nails in this book the impact war has on a nation’s morality. I wish I could say something more, subject the narrative to some kind of analysis, but it is too soon for that and really I only want to urge everyone to read the book, and show in these few paragraphs some of its power.