Academics as a Blood Sport

Stoner a novel by John Williams.  From John Williams: Collected Novels.  Daniel Mendelsohn, editor.  Library of America.  pp. 257-486 ****

William Stoner, after growing up on a hardscrabble farm in rural Missouri, has two major epiphanies in his early adulthood.  The first occurs when he attends the University of Missouri as an agricultural student, and takes a required English class with a difficult and demanding professor named Archer Sloane.  The professor asks a simple question about something he’d read, and he finds he can’t answer, not because he hasn’t done the assignment, but because there was something so vast about the subject that he couldn’t speak to it.  It wasn’t like his courses in agriculture.  He seemed to realize that literature was another kind of endeavor altogether, one that he wanted to pursue.  Unbeknownst to his parents, he changes his major.  He’s realized that he cannot, as they had hoped, return to the farm and work with them.

His other major revelation comes when he’s an instructor and sees a young woman at a reception who strikes his fancy.  “Her long, delicately featured face smiled at those around her, and her slender, almost fragile fingers deftly manipulated urn and cup.”  He hadn’t run into anybody like that back on the farm.  It is one of those I-just-met-the-woman-I’m-going-to-marry moments, and marry her he eventually does, though she hadn’t had the same reaction to him.  If we detect any reason for her marrying him, it would seem to be to get away from her parents and her stultifying home life.  I hate to make a bold statement, but I think it’s the worst marriage that I’ve ever read about in a work of literature.[1]

By some odd coincidence, I recently watched “A Woman Under the Influence,” Gina Rowlands brilliant portrayal of a woman with a serious mental illness.  That character definitely has problems with anxiety, but she is also an extremely loving wife and mother, a free spirit, and a lover of life and humanity.  Stoner’s wife Edith is much nuttier than the woman Rowlands portrays.  I would say, in fact, that she is strange to the point of being unbelievable.

She at first seems like a porcelain doll, with no affect and nothing to say, until she suddenly blurts out her whole life story, at least her version of it.  Despite her utter affectless, she decides to marry this man, and to as soon as possible.  But she isn’t interested in sleeping with him on her wedding night, and when she finally does consent shows no enjoyment of the act.  She doesn’t seem to care for him at all.

Stoner continues with his life as an instructor and young professor, and at some point she decides she wants to have a child.  Suddenly she is wantonly, sexually aggressive, like a heroine in pulp fiction.  She’s slavering for her man and can’t get enough.  But as soon as she gets pregnant, all that goes out the window, and when her daughter is born—this child she wanted so much—she ignores her for years, and lets Stoner raise her on top of all his other duties.  After a few years, when she notices Stoner and his daughter getting close, she steps in and wants to be the mother, and remove him from her life altogether.  The whole thing makes no sense; she doesn’t hold together as even a mentally deranged person.  There is a whore-with-a-heart-of-gold in Butcher’s Crossing who is a much more believable female.

Stoner’s travails in life are not confined to home.  Established as a professor at the university where he was an undergrad, and engaged with his work, he butts heads with another professor in his department.  The man in question, Hollis Lomax, has a physical deformity, a hunchback, about which he is obviously self-conscious and somewhat sensitive; apparently in reaction to that, he’s arrogant and withdrawn, not a favorite in the department.  When a student named Charles Walker comes along with the same disability, he immediately mentors the young man and champions his cause.  Walker is actually quite intelligent, but he tries to get by on brilliance alone.  He takes a seminar that Stoner offers and doesn’t do the work, and Stoner—a hardworking man of conscience—flunks him.  Then, by a technicality, Stoner winds up on the committee, along with Professor Lomax, that is examining the young man to see if he’s a PhD candidate.  Walker doesn’t know even the most basic stuff; he’s obviously not ready to go on.  But Lomax won’t hear of it—he apparently thinks the young man’s handicap excuses everything—and becomes Stoner’s lifelong enemy.

Then he becomes the department chairman.

I guess I’ve heard of, and maybe even observed, a few feuds among professors, but nothing as terrible as this.  Lomax forces Stoner to teach only the most basic courses, and a huge load of them, neglecting his field of interest.  Because of his situation at home, he can’t seek other employment—his wife won’t think of leaving, and he doesn’t want to abandon his daughter—so he’s stuck in a dilemma where no one can help him.  He does eventually find love, with a beautiful undergrad, of all people, and they have a wonderful affair for a period of time.  But Lomax finds a way to put an end even to that.  He’s vindictive to the end.

Stoner is one of those rare novels that begins with a character’s birth and ends with his death; we see the entirety of his sad and in many ways difficult life.  What stands out is that he lived a life of integrity.  He could have avoided any number of difficulties if he had capitulated on that one student, but he wouldn’t.  The book is beautifully written and, like Butcher’s Crossing, carefully observed.  But it is marred by that one off-the-wall character.  He should have called it I Married a Martian.  It’s the one flaw—but a major one—in an otherwise excellent novel.

[1] “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” looks like marital bliss compared to this.  At least those two engaged with each other.