Stoner by John Williams: The Most Famous Unknown Novel in the World

NYRBooks Classics.                University of Texas Press.     

“But first, are you experienced? Or have you ever been experienced?”

--Jimi Hendrix

Like most folks who read books and watch films as a professional activity, it can sometimes feel as if we’re expected to pass cogent judgment on all books or films (or in my case also on music, visual art and buildings) to discern and share whether something is worth reading or watching. To me, however, life is too short to advise people on what to avoid, what didn’t work, succeed or achieve its creative aims, and what the artistic flaws were that made it a failure. There are plenty of good critics who do that to some degree, and I too enjoy reading their opinions, but I’d much rather talk about films, music or in this case books, that are so marvelous that they can or might actually alter the course of your life in some significant way if you read them. Stoner, released by John Williams in 1965, is just such a book. So is the book about his book, written by Charles Shields in 2018. In fact, The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel might even be that rare case of a work that will really help readers to appreciate the whereof and what-for of the book it examines, in such micro-detail and macro-fondness, that it could even benefit from being consumed prior to Stoner itself.

While I am known to be capable of waxing rhapsodic about this or that, this observation is not only not hyperbole; it also has the advantage of being borne out in longtime personal experience. There are those people who admit to diligently trying to read classics such as Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Moby Dick or Ulysses four or five times to no avail. While I used to be surprised by their candid struggle, perhaps because I so love Cervantes, Sterne, Melville and Joyce, I’ve since learned a valuable lesson, one having to do specifically with Stoner. The sixth time is often the charm. And my own saga with this quietly magnificent novel occurred almost in slow motion after I first attempted it when a rather unusual high school teacher I had, a certain Mr. Stewart, assigned it in our literature class in 1970, five years after it was published (to almost no public or critical response and selling only about two thousand copies) and forty-eight years before I encountered The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel. Most of my class, including myself, was perplexed by the relentless sadness and almost poetic inertia of the narrative, a reaction I now know, or at least suspect, was due to our extreme youth and inexperience.

The sixth time was indeed the charm, at least after I had plunged into this appreciative study of Stoner, Williams, and the writing life in general by Charles Shields. I had, I must confess, initially been distracted by my mistaken assumption that nothing actually ever happens in the slow and occasionally morose narrative. But Shields revealed to me that the important thing is how and why this nothing happens, and the stately crystalline prose which delivers that nothing to us, a style not unlike that of another favourite novel of mine in which literally nothing happens, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. I suppose my only defense for missing the magic of Stoner in my original readings was my admittedly blatant fondness for more radical narrative pyrotechnics such as those of John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and eventually David Foster Wallace. But better late than never, I guess, and also better late only because my youth was missing the necessary ingredients for fully grasping the lonely and estranged academic William Stoner’s essential quotidian grandeur. That supple sorrow is often hidden in between the charmed lines, possibly because everything that happens is actually inside the Stoner character, not unlike other favourite characters of mine by Samuel Beckett, namely Watt, Murphy, Molly, Malone et al.

The bare bones of the Stoner saga, as understated and nearly solipsistic as it is, has strong parallels to Williams’ own academic university career, despite the author’s frequent protestations that his novel is far from autobiographical. Often referred to as austere and unflashy, its style stems from a motive that Williams himself identified as the dialectical opposite of escapist fiction, frequently calling it “an escape into reality,” and it was certainly a reality that the author himself had experienced deeply. Born in 1922 to a Texas family of farmers, he enlisted for the war effort in 1942, spending nearly three years as a sergeant in India, China and Burma and during his stationing began writing what became his first novel, Nothing But the Night, completed after the war while working on his Masters degree at the University of Denver and released in 1948. After completing his Ph.D. in English literature he returned to the University of Denver as an assistant professor and director of their creative writing program, releasing his second novel, Butcher’s Crossing, which focused on frontier life in Kansas in 1960. But it was his third novel from Viking Press, Stoner, which chronicled the somewhat insular and tragic life of a University of Missouri assistant English professor, which has achieved an almost cult-like legendary status as a lost masterpiece, after it went out of print the year following its publication. Williams eventually retired from the University of Denver in 1985 and passed away, all but forgotten, in 1994.

When asked in an interview in 1986 about the source of his love of literature and whether literary works were meant to be entertaining, he succinctly responded, “Absolutely. To read without joy is stupid.” The question hovering in the air, of course, was just what is entertaining and how literary works can elicit that joy. When Stoner was finally reprinted by New York Review Books Classics in 2005, the reception and critical acclaim was so stunning it must have been indicative of an invisible sea change in American letters happening over forty years in some subterranean location in the hearts and minds of readers and critics alike. In fact, John McGahern’s introduction touting it as not only a classic novel of university life but also about the life of the heart and the mind, he extolled the virtues of the style Williams used to so vividly subvert worldly judgments about success and failure, a style where the passion of the writing is masked by the coolness and clarity of intelligence possessed by the author. His own assessment of that style is as accurate as it is succinct, in keeping with the intimate yet somehow lofty scale of its subject. And Williams’s own insistence that suffering in silence can often still be entertaining was also not lost on McGahern’s keen sensibility for his quiet and modest greatness:

There is entertainment of a very high order to be found in Stoner, as well as pain and joy. The clarity of the prose is in itself an unadulterated joy. The novel is distanced not only by its clarity and intelligence but by the way the unpromising material is so coolly dramatized. The small world of the university opens out to war and politics, to the years of the Depression and the millions who once walked erect in their own identities, and then to the whole of life. If the novel can be said to have one central idea it is surely that of love, and the many forms that love takes and all the forces that oppose it.

Indeed, the fact that the life of the character the author depicts did not turn out to be a conventionally happy or exciting or even satisfying one does not preclude Williams’s nobility and his nature as a heroic figure. As he expressed it with his usual candor during the same interview:

I think he’s a real hero. A lot of people who have read the novel think that Stoner had such a sad and bad life. I think he had a very good life. He was doing what he wanted to do, he had feeling for it and some sense of the importance of the job he was doing. If you love something you’re going to understand it and if you understand it you’re going to learn a lot. You never know the results of all you do. You’ve got to keep the faith. The important thing is to keep the tradition going, because the tradition is civilization. Love was a passion neither of the mind nor the heart, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were both but the matter of love, and its specific substance.

Author John Williams. (University of Denver archives.)

Looking every bit the alcohol-soaked and tobacco-stained academic that he was (he would pass from respiratory failure), his portrait also captures the poignant patience of an author whose work would require almost half a century to achieve the acclaim it richly deserved, and even almost a decade after his own mortal coil was shuffled off. To some extent the solidity of his fragile but resilient character is what most aligns his creation of his nearly alter-ego figure of Stoner with many of Kafka’s portrayals of resigned existential personas. To me, the book that Stoner most clearly resonates with, or even evokes in some odd way, is Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis from ten years earlier, despite the British-American clash of sensibilities. Showcasing both the academic environment in general and academic behaviour patterns in particular, the big distinction is naturally that caustic Amis comic take on those foibles. There is nary a whiff of comedy, satire, parody, jest, or even a passing grin or fleeting smile of the sort that distinguished Lucky Jim’s luck in Stoner. Thus an appropriate alternative title could have been Sad Stoner. Even a novel such as Malone Dies by Beckett has a strange resonance with it, since an additional afterthought title might have been Stoner Dies.

But it’s the concise beauty and economical craftsmanship of Williams’s prose, which shares the slightly elegiac aroma of Hemingway’s own minimalist music, that allows this novel to rise to the level of a life-altering event for those readers with the patience to accept its subtle challenges. And that is where the study, both biographical and literary, conducted by Charles Shields comes into homeopathic play as a companion volume. Shields, a resident of Virginia whose previous literary biographies include one on Harper Lee and one on Kurt Vonnegut, takes us on a guided tour of the entire arc of the Williams saga, starting from when he was first told by his rustic farmer grandfather, “Don’t read so much, you’ll tire out your brain.” Then he himself observed at age seventeen, “We linger for a moment in a morass of stupidity and conceit, and then we graduate from high school.” And finally he countermanded his gramps’ advice by totally immersing himself in books as an alternate reality, ending up editing the anthology English Renaissance Poetry from Skelton to Jonson. Eventually he even won a National Book Award (sharing it with his polar opposite John Barth), which likely amazed his farming family, although he once tried to explain to them the unexpected similarities between agriculture and literature (both are hard but noble work).

Shields’s tongue was firmly in his cheek when he titled his study The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel, since the literary dimension is so subjective that there is no such thing, or else maybe there are a multitude. And everyone can choose whom to bestow that mantle on: Hemingway (Stoner could be the anti-Jake Barnes) or Fitzgerald (Stoner could be the anti-Jay Gatsby) or the Mann of The Magic Mountain, the Kafka of The Castle, the Musil of his unfinished opus The Man Without Qualities, all of them riveting narratives where nothing much happens. The amorphous character of William Stoner shares many similarities with Musil’s Ulrich, and for my part Shields’s moving exploration of Stoner (and its author) has deftly alerted me to everything I was woefully missing in my first attempts to climb its sorrowful mountain. Shields’ book does everything a fine biography should set out to do and more, by establishing the crucial parallels between Williams and his titular character in a way that reveals foibles and flaws in tandem with flashes of the greatness that young Williams exhibited precociously while pretending to dream of crop rotation. In one unpublished draft for a story from 1944, he indicates the secret of his later legend, if not his worldly success.

Take any man, I said, reaching across the table and lighting your cigarette . . . study him carefully . . . take him, season with a little imagination and sympathy . . . and you’ll have a novel. Natural liars are the best writers. I write of human experience so that I may understand it and thereby force myself into some kind of honesty. Although I may seem to take something away from Stoner in the end at his death, I don’t really; I give him something more than he has had before, and more than any of us ever gain—his own identity.

Take any man, season him with imagination and sympathy and write of human experience, thus forcing himself, the author, into “some kind of honesty.” That is precisely and concisely what he set out to do in Stoner, and exactly what has endeared him to so many increasingly adulatory readers over the decades since his writing and his passing. This book about Stoner/Williams and the perfect novel is not a perfect book, not by a long shot, but it is a splendid one. Any flaws it has are almost solely due to operating in the shadow of Stoner as a kind of monumental failure and yet a monumental success at the same time, even though its eventual acclaim was a delayed reaction of nearly half a century. The biographical profile and study is occasionally sketchy and functions nowhere near the literary level of clarified and subdued intelligence of its subject, however its true cultural purpose, and most important value, is as a gateway to Stoner, giving readers a passport to the melancholy beauty of the Williams world. It’s a road map of sorts to a foreign country hidden in plain sight, which Ian Canon called his favourite novel of all time, and the only book that he’s read more than three times. (I’ve got him beat by three times.)

James McWilliams, in the Texas Observer, called Stoner the greatest novel ever written by a Texas-born writer you’ve never heard of. What so many converts to the cult of Williams’ palpable aura of authenticity, whether recently or originally, feel seeping into their souls from this author, almost as if directly from his unconscious to ours and bypassing the conscious zone completely, may be tricky to put into words ourselves. But my best guess would be his adherence to the idea that making a persistent effort to be true to your art is what matters, even more than fame or fortune, and certainly more than celebrity. Not the sweetness of triumph necessarily, then, but what I would call the tenderness of trying. In general, his fellow writers were usually the first to fully recognize what Stoner meant to him, to them, to us all, because the character that Williams invented, even if almost a mirror image of himself, is someone who, as McWilliams put it so well,

without guile or sentimentality, lives through books. Through literature, he abides. Life’s deepest pleasures can, with a little work, be found between the covers of books. This is a novel that will take you back to that magical moment when you first got lost in a serious piece of literature and realized, as Stoner himself finally does, a kind of purity that is entire.

Yes. That’s it.

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.