Stoner
Stoner
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John Williams on Stoner
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why he wrote it
Against the symbol-laden novel of his momentWilliams conceived the book’s moral argument seven years before it was published, writing to his agent Marie Rodell in 1958 while the manuscript was still taking shape. The letter names the ambition in a single sentence, and it cuts against every expectation a reader might bring to a novel about a man whose marriage fails, whose career stalls, and who dies in obscurity.
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.
The ambition to write a novel about quiet human dignity put Williams on a collision course with the dominant literary mode of the early 1960s, which favored conspicuous formal invention and dense symbolic architecture. He pushed back in a newspaper interview, naming exactly what he was refusing to do.
I knew I was going somewhat against the fashionable novel of my time. I wanted to write a novel which was honest rather than sensational, which would hold the attention of the reader without resort to gimmicks and inventions, and which would be moving primarily upon that level on which we are moved in life; in short, I wanted to write a novel that was almost wholly devoid of ‘symbols’ and I wanted to do so out of an odd conviction that human beings are important, not because they are ‘symbols of something,’ but because they are human beings.
How he wrote it
Five to seven years, one typist in tearsWhen Rodell warned him in 1963 that Stoner was unlikely to sell, Williams did not argue the commercial case. He conceded the point and then set it aside, grounding his confidence in something he felt could outlast a weak first reception.
The only thing I’m sure of is that it’s a good novel; in time it may even be thought of as a substantially good one.
He was right about the timeline. The book sold modestly in 1965 and went out of print. It took nearly half a century, and a wave of European translations, before readers caught up with his prediction.
Williams rarely discussed his working method, but one moment from the same 1963 letter to Rodell captures what he was aiming for at the level of the sentence and the scene: not critical admiration, but involuntary feeling. He had not set out to test the manuscript on a reader; the encounter was accidental.
One afternoon a few weeks ago, I walked in on my typist (a junior history major, and pretty average, I’m afraid) while she was finishing typing chapter 15, and discovered great huge tears coursing down her cheeks. I shall love her for ever.
What he wants us to sit with
A good life, seen plainThe novel’s most persistent misreading, in Williams’s view, was that William Stoner led a defeated life. In a rare interview, he corrected that reading head-on, shifting the frame from what Stoner failed to achieve to what he actually inhabited day to day. The distinction mattered to Williams more than any other point about the book.
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 had a better life than most people do, certainly. He was doing what he wanted to do, he had some feeling for what he was doing, he had some sense of the importance of the job he was doing … The important thing in the novel to me is Stoner’s sense of 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.
The same interview, quoted at greater length in Critics at Large, extends Stoner’s situation into a claim about what any intellectual life is finally for. Williams is no longer talking about one professor at a Missouri university; he is talking about the relationship between devoted work and civilization itself.
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.
In a 1985 interview with journalist Brian Wooley, Williams was asked whether literature was meant to entertain. The question seemed to annoy him. Earlier in that same conversation he had objected to treating a text as something to be studied rather than experienced, so when the direct question came, his answer was immediate.
Absolutely. My God, to read without joy is stupid.
anodysseyofthoughts.wordpress.com, “‘Stoner’, By: John Williams; A review | An Odyssey Of Thoughts”