Stoner

In a very fine New Yorker review of John William’s Stoner, Tim Kreider laments that despite the novel becoming an unexpected bestseller in Europe, it remains ‘chronically underappreciated in America’. Kreider senses the presence of not just a great writer, but a wise one – ‘And wisdom is, of course, perennially out of style’ (October 20, 2003). Stoner sold fewer than 2000 copies in 1965 but its modest presence refuses to go away. My “Vintage” copy was given to me by a graduating student – a very fitting gift once you know the story. As a teacher of literature, I take encouragement; this is a novel about a man who teaches novels and plays and poetry diligently, honestly, and as passionately as he can. Not all English teachers are Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society – yet literature can speak through even a dry manner, if we only let the ‘words’ do the talking.

William Stoner comes from an unlikely background, as a son of the earth, enrolled initially in Agriculture, until he experiences a kind of conversion in the class of a rather intimidating old professor, Arthur Sloane. Asked directly by Sloane to explain the meaning he finds in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 (‘That time of year when thou mayst in me behold’) Stoner can only reply ‘It means … It means…’. And yet this moment resonates with him and he moves on to the study of literature. In a passage I think I will from here on quote to teachers at the start of a school year, Sloane later tells Stoner the nature of his destiny.

 

‘But don’t you know, Mr Stoner? Sloane asked. ‘Don’t you understand about yourself yet? You’re going to be a teacher.’

Suddenly Sloane seemed very distant, and the walls of the office receded. Stoner felt himself suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, ‘Are you sure?’

               ‘I’m sure,’ Sloane said softly.

               ‘How can you tell? How can you be sure?’

               ‘It’s love, Mr Stoner,’ Sloane said cheerfully. ‘You are in love. It’s as simple as that’ (p.19).

 

Sloane is such a servant of his job that Williams gives him the ambiguous fate of dying at his desk, discovered on a Monday morning by one of his postgraduates. Let that be a warning to Stoner. Stoner, too, will live out his life in a provincial university, not seeking his own advancement but nonetheless becoming the victim of more ambitious, less worthy types. Stoner’s marriage, too, is a tragedy – brief love deflowering into coldness and hostility; an inspiring affair has all the temporary freedom on Winston and Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s not an easy life that this professor lives, and yet Stoner has the integrity and humility to realise that there are worse lives to have lived. His dream as a teacher – ‘a kind of integrity … a kind of purity that was entire’ -- is beyond his reach; like the philosopher, he understands the limits of his knowledge and power (‘he had conceived wisdom … he had found ignorance’ p.285).

Despite all of this, I found the novel to be not only compelling but inspiring. The question of failure and success which dominates so much of our thinking is – in this novel – put into a wider, more humane perspective. And that, it seems to me, is the domain of not only good literature, but the good literature teacher.