This is by American academic and novelist John Williams (1922-94), and it was published in 1965. My audio-version was beautifully read by Alfred Molina.

It was a thin chain of happenstance that led me here. A while ago, I came across an article by Julian Barnes (probably while looking for material about The Sense of an Ending or Arthur & George). Writing in 2013, he describes Stoner as "the must-read novel" of the year. You take notice of the recommendations of authors as good as Barnes.

And then, in an article about books we like so much that we give copies to others, I found Claudia Lorenzo Rubiera pondering: "You never know who's going to make you discover something you'll later adore." Stoner is one of the first titles she mentions.

So, Stoner went on The List (the ever-expanding, endlessly bifurcating, hydra-headed LIST), filed in the "books, bookshops, and academia" category.


John Williams

It is a beautiful book... It's the record of one man's life, and not even a prominent or successful man at that.

Our protagonist, William Stoner (1891-1956), grew up poor. He made his career, against all odds, in academia, but never managed to rise through the ranks, ending his life as assistant professor. He married unwisely; lost touch with his daughter (largely thanks to his wife); had one blazing comet of a love affair that ended like a damp squib; travelled hardly anywhere; published one book; and died of cancer.

How can such a story be interesting? But it is, it is... It draws us in.


Some of my own memories of academia, 2011

Stoner comes from a farming family, and at the age of 19, he is sent to the University of Missouri to study agriculture. But he falls in love with the study of English literature... We admire the courage he shows in shifting his focus and following his passion; we admire his herculean efforts to fund his university classes (which he does by working long hours for board on a relative's farm). We also salute the fortitude of his parents, left alone to continue their work on the land. They probably never understood their son's choice.

We groan as he picks a wife we're sure will prove to be wrong for him... Edith is painted in lurid colours that contrast sharply with the plainness of Stoner's story. And we end up fairly confident that she has a mental illness, which of course would have gone wholly unrecognized and untreated in those days.

It's hard to like Edith, who rapidly masters the art of vindictiveness, and yet you also feel desperately sorry for her. She missed out on her trip to Europe because she was getting married; she has not learnt to be curious, and has next to no intellectual stimulation or outlet for her interests; and she doesn't thrive on motherhood. The mystery, of course, is how more of the women of that class and era didn't end up mentally ill... You kind of want someone to do what Jean Rhys did with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, or what Zelda Fitzgerald did with her husband's work. For sure, Edith has a haunting story of her own.



Stoner, meanwhile, plugs on with his academic career. And he runs across many of the characters and conflicts that anyone with university connections will all too easily recognize. There's the guy with the favourite student, whom he will protect at all costs; the guy who opens up one day, only to shut down coldly and irrevocably the next; the nice guy who tries to play protector and middleman, ends up getting pushed around anyway, and yet comes out of it all very comfortably... Stoner, to his detriment, has integrity. He won't pass a student who doesn't merit that pass, even at the expense of incurring the lifelong enmity of the student's supervisor.

Stoner's sworn enemy is also the one who torpedoes his affair with Katherine Driscoll, a young lecturer. Not that we ever saw a way out there. Stoner won't leave his wife and daughter. So there is this sunlit period of his life, that shows him clearly what he has missed out on in life. And then he's back to the grind.

His nemesis also hamstrings his research ambitions by giving him a horrible timetable, and a heavy workload with mostly junior classes. Stoner doesn't rebel -- except that one time when he wrests back his senior classes by the sheer weight of fait accompli. We cheer.

The novel certainly gives pause to those of us who have been known to regret that we came to academia too late. Toilers who have experienced not so much a hallowed sphere of scholarship as a commodified, commercialized, and mediatized arena of competition are dismayed to find that the business overtones may have been lacking in Stoner's day, but all the other ugly attributes of academia -- spitefulness, pettiness, jealousy, favouritism -- were just as much present in that era as they are in our own.

The final push comes when Stoner's arch-enemy tries to eject him at the age of 65, whereas he wants to stay on until 67. But, in fact, his taunter gets his wish, because cancer forces Stoner to quit prematurely.



We're told of his death right at the beginning of the book. So there's no surprise. But these final pages are supremely revelatory.

Several times in the closing section, when Stoner is dying, and contemplating "the failure that his life must appear to be", the question recurs: "What did you expect...?"

Good point. What did you -- we -- think life was going to hold? I guess many of us, as our years grow full, have to admit we perhaps expected more. More lucky breaks, perhaps, more opportunities, less grind. Access to more energy, or more confidence... We look back, and everything seems so trivial. Most of us have blazed no trail, and will leave behind very little that's of any consequence.

Of course, in comparison with the tragedies that beset some people's lives, we might also be grateful for that very triviality. But we're conscious that we won't be remembered for long.

Yet Stoner has an acute revelation of identity in his last moments: "A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure -- as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been... A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been."

This hits you like a gut-punch: "He was himself, and he knew what he had been..." That's it, really, for all of us, however famous we have been (or not), and however storied we may (or may not) become. Each of us has had this chance to be a unique human being, for this brief flicker of time between two eternities. To be ourselves, and to know what we have been -- that's not the worst end, by any means.

In his final moments, Stoner picks up his own book, and touching its pages, feels "the old excitement that was like terror". His path is strewn with what look very much like failures, and yet he blazes up, this man. It's as though he says -- to himself, not to us, because that would be immodest, and very quietly: Look what my life has been.

As the book ends, it suddenly seems far from insignificant that Stoner's awakening to literature came with Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, which ends:

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.



Tim Kreider comments: "Stoner realizes at the last that he found what he sought at the university not in books but in his love and study of them, not in some obscure scholarly Grail but in its pursuit. His life has not been squandered in mediocrity and obscurity; his undistinguished career has not been mulish labor but an act of devotion. He has been a priest of literature, and given himself as fully as he could to the thing he loved. The book's conclusion, such as it is -- I don't know whether to call it a consolation or a warning -- is that there is nothing better in this life."

Part of this package involves teaching, of course. After a few years of giving classes, he feels he is finally beginning to really figure out what a teacher is: "Simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man." When he retires, and they give a rather silly little dinner for him, his speech is brief: "I have taught at this University for nearly forty years. I do not know what I would have done if I had not been a teacher... I want to thank you all for letting me teach."

Not that we are allowed the warm fuzzies of feeling that all his students will remember him for the rest of their lives. We're told, right at the beginning, that they won't. But Stoner's educational activity carries its own value. A pity so many universities don't recognize that...


It's true that it's the students who make it worthwhile...

The Internet Archive version of the book has an introduction by John McGahern, who quotes one of the few interviews Williams ever gave (in 1985). Of his lead character he says:

"I think he's a REAL hero... I think he had a very good life. He had a better life than most people do, certainly... The important thing in the novel to me is Stoner's sense of a JOB. Teaching to him is a job -- a job in the good and honourable sense of the word. His job gave him a particular kind of identity and made him what he was... You never know all the results of what you do... You've got to keep the faith. The important thing is to keep the tradition going, because the tradition is civilisation."

This edition also includes some of the correspondence between Williams and his agent, Marie Rodell. He pitches his character to her like this: "To all outward appearances, he is a failure... But the point of the novel will be that he is a kind of saint; or, stated otherwise, it is a novel about a man who finds no meaning in the world or in himself, but who does find meaning and a kind of victory in the honest and dogged pursuit of his profession."

Rodell replies: "I don't see this as a novel with a high potential sale... Its theme to the average reader could well be depressing..." And indeed, it was rejected by several publishers before finding a home.

Barnes, in 2013, charts its publication history like this: "It was respectably reviewed; it had a reasonable sale; it did not become a bestseller; it went out of print... Fifty years after Williams wrote to his agent, Stoner became a bestseller. A quite unexpected bestseller. A bestseller across Europe. A bestseller publishers themselves could not quite understand. A bestseller of the purest kind -- one caused almost entirely by word-of-mouth among readers... Stoner first went into Vintage in 2003... In the decade up to 2012, it sold 4,863 copies, and by the end of last year was trundling along in print-on-demand. This year, up to the end of November, it has sold 164,000 copies, with the vast majority -- 144,000 of them -- coming since June. It was the novel's sudden success in France in 2011 that alerted other publishers to its possibilities; since then it has sold 200,000 copies in Holland and 80,000 in Italy. It has been a bestseller in Israel, and is just beginning to take off in Germany."

Curious...

Kreider describes it as "the greatest American novel you've never heard of". While recognizing that it's a somewhat harrowing read, he pinpoints Williams's amazing trick with language, which he "pulls off again and again, in quiet, transcendent moments..., giving you glimpses of eternity through the darkening view out an office window on a winter night".



Kreider also discusses something that bothered me as I listened. Both Hollis Lomax, Stoner's nemesis, and Charles Walker, the bombastic and incompetent student whom Lomax protects, have a disability (Lomax has a body that is "grotesquely misshapen"; Walker is even described, in the jarring terminology of the day, as a "cripple"). "This marking of evil with deformity," says Kreider, "strikes a twenty-first century reader as heavy-handed, not to mention un-p.c."

And indeed, I'm pretty confident present-day novelists would hesitate to frame a conflict in a way that foregrounds such characteristics.

But it's very revelatory. On one level, Lomax and Walker have experienced a degree of disadvantage that may well have embittered them. Williams doesn't go into this, any more than he goes into what might be wrong with poor Edith. This is Stoner's book, after all. But he leaves it as a thought in our heads. We know, for example, that Lomax experienced a childhood isolation that eventually led him to literature, to "a kind of conversion, an epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put in words" (akin to what Stoner himself experienced in his early days at university). Lomax also tells Stoner that Walker is "rather awkwardly shy and therefore at times defensive and rather too assertive".

On another level, however, Williams draws a clean line between Lomax and Walker. The origins of this are found very early in the text, when Stoner is conversing with two fellow-postgraduates, David Masters (later killed in World War I) and Gordon Finch (later the benign but somewhat ineffectual dean of Stoner's faculty). Masters contends that the university is essentially "an asylum... a rest home, for the infirm, the aged, the discontent, and the otherwise incompetent". In another environment, Masters continues, Finch "would always be on the fringe of success", but never quite there; Stoner, meanwhile, is "the dreamer, the madman in a madder world". So, he explains: "It's for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world."

Later, in the midst of the beef with Lomax over Walker, Stoner reminds Finch of Masters' words: "Something about the University being an asylum, a refuge from the world, for the dispossessed, the crippled. But he didn't mean [people like] Walker. Dave would have thought of Walker as -- as the world. And we can't let him in. For if we do, we become like the world, just as unreal."

Lomax, for all his malevolence, is the real deal. Walker isn't.
Walker, either with or without his disability, is too thrusting and superficial and opinionated to belong in this refuge. He is simply not a believer. He just goes through the motions.

Kreider glosses it like this: "Walker is the world embodied, covering for his lack of even a basic factual command of his chosen field with florid rhetoric... He's a more instructive foil to Stoner than Lomax, not a rival but a kind of apostate."

As I said, I think any contemporary author would hesitate, for better or worse, to set up a conflictual situation in quite this way. And the university has now, for better or worse, irrevocably embraced "the world". Things change.



In sum, a beautiful, thought-provoking book, which is likely to linger long in my mind.