The Oakland Review Blog

Introducing a new literary blog from the editorial staff of The Oakland Review, specializing in book/poetry reviews, personal essays, and cultural commentary.

October 20, 2024

On Pointless Passions, Dead-End Deaths, and ‘Stoner’ by John Williams

By Stephen Makin

On Thursday, September 9th, I completed my read of Stoner, a biographical novel by John Williams published in the 1960s. The novel was a present from my father—a regifting, I should note, as he was gifted the book by his brother about a year prior. My uncle, a general cynic, attended graduate school for the humanities, and I had rashly assumed that it was this begrudged pursuit of academia which had inspired him to pass along the story to my father—who once upon a time also considered academia but instead went into law. Like my uncle, the novel’s protagonist, William Stoner, chooses to pursue academia, finding himself entrenched and at home in the spirit of education, yet altogether humiliated by the way in which his life continues to disappoint him the longer he spends on a college campus.

Stoner, like many a “natural-born” English student, is initially drawn into education by a particularly passionate educator, Archer Sloane. I remember my own: Mr. Cusick, probably, among others. I digress. Trying to recapture the particular high of Sloane’s lectures, Stoner attends graduate school at his undergraduate alma mater and is first promoted to assistant professor by Sloane. He wonders if he is, for the very first time in his life, happy or fulfilled. But having married himself to the field of English, difficult choices ensue, and a conflict of morals erupts with the new Department Chair over the fate of a student who is totally underqualified for graduate level education. Stoner wants the student expelled. His boss does not. Stoner finds himself in a bind, and having permanently angered higher-ups, he is never again given any serious chance to rise up in the ranks. The road to fulfillment morphs into a rigid stalemate.

The aforementioned Department Chair is so very fond of the underqualified student, I should note, because both suffer from a similar physically debilitating ailment. The former harbors pity for the latter, as well as a hidden desire to advance physically disabled students in academia. And I may be reading into this a little, but I fear there may be a nonzero chance of the two men sharing in a covert sexual relationship throughout. But whatever the case, William Stoner becomes an inadvertent obstacle to this secret will, and very quickly, he finds that his tenured position is the only thing keeping him from the proverbial chopping block. To this end, even though Stoner remains only an assistant professor, all his enemy can do is assign him a miserable teaching schedule year after year after year, beholden to freshman seminars and introductory courses. Stoner is employed, but miserable.

My uncle has often expressed similar sentiments about the politics of academia, especially as it may pertain to the humanities. With a limited number of employment opportunities available in such a field, even something so simple as spite/politics-of-opinion can stifle one’s progress to the top. It is likely for one to have to endure the same boss for extremely long periods of time, and equally likely for one to lack better prospects at some other, similar-tier university.

This is certainly one take to be had from John Williams’s masterpiece. But I do suspect that the real reason for my uncle’s gifting of the novel lies later on in its contents, at the story’s end, when Stoner is dying from a long-hidden cancer centered somewhere in his lower body. Last year, my father and his brother watched their cousin die of cancer, far too young, in New York City. They were all very close as children, and I couldn’t help but think that my father probably had some difficulty coping. Even I dealt poorly with the whole matter, albeit secretly. But reading this novel alleviated some pain. Williams’s description of a slow ease into death—“There was a softness around him, and a languor crept upon his limbs. 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.”—is so astutely wrought with critical emotion that a reader almost wishes it into existence, prays for its roots to remain somewhere within the scattered realm of realism. The novel’s end becomes a show of wishful thinking for the dying.

As William Stoner lies on his deathbed, his only friend is in the next room over, talking with Stoner’s wife. The dying professor can only make out brief phrases of their conversation. He surmises that the two of them must be talking about his impending doom. He imagines also, at first, that they are not saying anything good—and how could they be? His life, he decides, simply must appear quite shameful, at least to the untrained eye. John Williams employs the adverb “mercilessly” to qualify Stoner’s initial thinking. But more immediately before his passing, he chooses to reverse course—the words exchanged in the next room (between his best friend and his wife of all people) are more than likely positive, and even in the case that they aren’t, why should he, a dying man, give them any kind of creedence? Taking its time to get there, admittedly, Stoner becomes something of a comforting read in its last few paragraphs. It is difficult to spin death into a hopeful ending, but Williams accomplishes it with genius poise. Of course, a long time has passed since the 1960s, but cancer persists even now. Death persists. It always will. So too, however, does the comfort that accompanies assumptions of dying men leaving little shame behind to linger. 

So those are the opinions of the working adults in my family, at least as far as I can tell or am willing to assume. But what did I—decidedly green with regards to professional writing, and still a college underclassman—think about the novel?

The very first thought to occur here is that I think it’s a shame how so many people allow their very lives to outrun them. In the novel, Stoner does not want to retire from his teaching position when he hits the ripe, old age of 65. In an effort to convince the man to do so (it is the only way left to get rid of him), the insidious Department Head exclaims that Stoner should steal back all the time that he can manage to get his hands on, if for no other reason than the sake of writing more books and allowing his expertise to flow freely back into academia. Stoner refuses. He no longer wants to write. His life—that is, his creative existence—has outrun him. He feels that he has nothing left to offer the young—having spent so long teaching the works of famous writers and providing commentary from the same old textbooks again and again and again. He sees that creation is a gift that is given to the youthful, often wasted. 

College students are a fortunate bunch, and not just in the way that pompous, self-hating graduates spew about on the internet. Many are endowed with time and housing. Those who are gifted neither, and who have to work multiple jobs throughout so as simply to support themselves financially, are still utterly surrounded by ingenious mentors from their given fields. Help abounds, as does critical mentorship. The student wants to grow up fast to reach these mentors’ levels. The student wants to impress them with their own quick wit, with their own fast and silver tongue. And finally, above all, the student wants to surpass them. If one cannot do, as they say, one teaches, and one rarely wants to teach from the outset. There is a brief consensus among undergraduates of a certain age that education is a whole lot more than just the sum of its parts, which at face value would be nothing more than job training. It is this consensus that, however true or untrue, justifies briefly the exorbitant price tag. Go on and tell a man in his fifties to go off to college and make himself learned in the arts and languages simply for the sake of doing so. He will not. Even Stoner himself, at the very beginning of the novel, does not choose to pursue higher education for this purpose. Instead, his impoverished parents send him off to go and learn about agriculture, and when he leaves this degree path, he does so in secret.

I should note here that readers should take care not to reduce these sentiments to anything even remotely along the lines of “old people can’t write.” That would be an unfortunate and untrue reading of this blog post. On the contrary, I myself rely almost exclusively upon the writing critiques of people older than thirty before I send my pieces anywhere. These people have experience. But there is a time and a place to go out and gather that experience. It is difficult to begin the writing journey in the midst of a professional career or between the hours spent with spouse and children. William Stoner feels all of these emotions. He faces down the challenges. At the end of the day, I wouldn’t even say that he loses outright—he succumbs to the world, surrenders to it. Again, I am not writing to discourage older writers. I am attempting to inspire young writers to finally get going. If you’ve been thinking about maybe, just maybe scratching that quiet, subcutaneous itch that you’ve recognized as something real and often crippling, the one that nags you over and over to bring forth new wisdom to the human table, just remember that the clock is ticking and—at sometime or another—the bell will finally toll.

As another note, do read Stoner by John Williams. The book is really something.