For quite awhile I've been aware of this novel, Stoner, by John Williams, which is often said to have a "cult following." I think it was the title and the associations of "cult following" that led me to believe the book had to do with drug culture, but then I learned by chance that the title is the last name of the main character, William Stoner, who is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri. And not long after that I saw at a brick-and-mortar bookstore--plug: Magers & Quinn, in south Minneapolis, Hennepin Avenue a block south of Lake Street--a NYRB hardback, 50th anniversary edition (2015), for $8. So it's mine now, and I started reading Stoner a few days ago. I should be done by now, because it's only 288 pages and I've been enjoying it about as much as any book I've ever read, but because of my enjoyment I've been limiting myself to a chapter or two a day--there's 17 chapters to the 288 pages--so that there'll be more to savor tomorrow.
The cultists like to discuss whether the book is a statement of despair or an uplifting tale of a good man. I think I comprehend the opposing views. Stoner qualifies as a loser, both at home, where he pays exorbitant fees for the ordinary crime of having foolishly married a psychological wreck, and at work, where the devious head of the English department out maneuvers him in a feud arising from Stoner's principled stand against a flashy but incompetent PhD candidate. Thus Stoner, hated by his boss, remains forever at the assistant professor level, teaching not graduate seminars but endless sections of freshman composition, on different days, often one in the early morning and another late in the afternoon. His reaction to the adversity is like that of his parents who, without complaint or possibility of success, farmed dusty Missouri land day after long day till one day first his dad and then his mom died. Most of Stoner's students would have been too indifferent to know what a dedicated teacher he was, day after day, year after year, until it happened to him, too. The family epitaph could be by Bob Dylan:
Life is sad
Life is a bust
All you can do is do what you must
You do what you must do, and you do it well.
The story of how Stoner got from the family farm to the University is told in chapter 1. A county agent has mentioned to his father that the public university at Columbia has a new school, the school of agriculture, and that his son should consider attending. It's discussed at the supper table one evening. In his innocence, William asks whether it costs money. The answer is that his mother has a cousin who lives on a farm just outside of the university town, and he could live there and "work his room and board." His next question, about whether his parents would be able to manage the farm without him, elicits perhaps the first of the book's many memorable passages:
"Your ma and me could manage. I'd plant the upper twenty in wheat; that would cut down the hand work."
William looked at his mother. "Ma?" he asked.
She said tonelessly, "You do what your pa says."
"You really want me to go?" he asked, as if he half hoped for a denial. "You really want me to?"
His father shifted his weight on the chair. He looked at his thick, callused fingers, into the cracks of which soil had penetrated so deeply that it could not be washed away. He laced his fingers together and held them up, almost in an attitude of prayer.
"I never had no schooling to speak of," he said, looking at his hands. "I started working a farm when I finished sixth grade. Never held with schooling when I was a young 'un. But now I don't know. Seems like the land gets drier and harder to work every year; it ain't rich like it was when I was a boy. County agent says they got new ideas, ways of doing things they teach you at the University. Maybe he's right. Sometimes when I'm working the field I get to thinking." He paused. His fingers tightened upon themselves, and his clasped hands dropped to the table. "I get to thinking--" He scowled at his hands and shook his head. "You go on to the University come fall. Your ma and me will manage."
It was the longest speech he had ever heard his father make. That fall he went to Columbia and enrolled in the University as a freshman in the College of Agriculture.
A few pages later:
The summer after his first year of college he returned to his father's farm and helped with the crops. Once his father asked him how he liked school, and he replied that he liked it fine. His father nodded and did not mention the matter again.
In his second year, Stoner took a class, "rather perfunctorily required of all University students," in English literature. It was taught by a man like the one Stoner would become. One day the topic was Shakespeare's 73rd sonnet, which Williams sets out in the text of the novel:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourisht by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
The instructor, employing the Socratic method, asks Stoner what the poem means--"what, across three centuries, Shakespeare is saying to you." He is unable to answer, but, feeling some dread, because his loving parents were expecting a return on their investment back on the farm, he left off taking courses in the agriculture school and beginning with the next semester registered instead for courses in philosophy, literature, and classical languages. The answer to the question about the poem is supplied by the novel itself, especially an episode concerning an affair Stoner has with a graduate student who is an exemplar of the heartbreaking ideal expressed by Shakespeare.
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