William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life by Steve Almond

"Literature exists to help people know themselves," Steve Almond tells us early in his new book William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life. Almond delves into John William's novel Stoner and explores how he connected to the character of William Stoner and how the novel impacted his life.  

Steve Almond read Stoner a dozen times, grappling with its messages and why it brings him back time after time. He offers us a Stoner who shows the "devotion to the inner life," a lost art in a culture fixated on wealth and consumerism and entertainment.

I have read Stoner twice. I picked up an ebook on sale because I liked the cover art, a painting by John Singer Sargent. I got the 'Stoner' bug and was soon touting it, part of its rediscovery by readers.

Stoner is the story of a man whose hardscrabble farmer father sends him to university to study agriculture. Stoner is baffled by literature and is moved to understand. His professor understands that Stoner has fallen in love with literature and is destined to become a teacher. The story follows his career, his unhappy marriage, alienation from his daughter, his love affair, and departmental battles. And then--he dies of cancer. In the end, Stoner forgives his wife and himself and accepts that his choices were the only ones he could have made.

The novel breaks the rules for a best-seller, and Williams knew it when he wrote it. From the old-fashioned narration and the lack of page-turning action to the focus on a sad character whose choices bring him pain. And yet...we are carried away by the story. It is about the choices we make and don't make, how we marry for lust and are ruined by lovelessness, how sticking to our values can destroy our careers.

Almond becomes deeply personal, sharing his own decisions and failures and history and how William Stoner reflected his life back to him, helping him to understand himself and better himself.

Almond probes Stoner's wife, making her a more fully realized character for readers. Almond's wife would like to hear Edith's side of the story, how sexual abuse and the lack of choice for women in 1928 caged her into a life she did not want. Edith gives up their newborn daughter to Stoner's care; later, jealous, she reclaims the child and alienates her from her father. The child suffers but Stoner cannot see any choice but to allow it. The girl is broken by this and it destroys her.

Stoner's squabbles with the English department head, Lomax, shows "the difficulty of standing up for yourself in the world, the price you pay when you fail to do so, and the price you pay when you succeed." Stoner wants to uphold the "intellectual purity of the academy" but feuding with the powerful can't result in victory.

Was Stoner a masochist? Growing up on a farm, was he so used to being the victim of uncontrollable forces that he sought out failure? On his death bed, Stoner's daughter remarks, "things haven't been easy for you, have they?" to which he replies, "I suppose I didn't want them to be."

Almond looks at the theme of class in Stoner. Marrying Edith, a pampered girl from the upper classes and embracing a career as a teacher brings Stoner far up the ladder from the manual labor and subsistence life on his family farm. Almond writes that Stoner "show us what happens when the poor farm boy actually gets the rich girl, which is that he winds up in hell."

During WWI, Stoner's two best friends at university go to war while he is talked out of it by his professor. Stoner is perfectly happy in his cell, searching literature for truth and beauty.

There are moments of joy in Stoner's life, particularly when he falls in love with Katherine, a young instructor. Sharing the intellectual life leads to carnal love until Lomax holds the affair over Stoner's head to threaten his career. The interlude allows reflections on love. Stoner must choose between human love and the love of teaching.

It is teaching that Stoner loves the most, the idealized vision of preserving and passing on the heritage of literature. Over and over he chooses teaching--instead of enlisting, instead of divorce, instead of a good relationship with his boss. Literature is his first love and Stoner never abandons her.

On his death bed, Stoner asks if his life had value or if he was a failure. Williams wrote that Stoner "had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality." In a flash of insight, Stoner realizes that failure didn't matter. "He was himself, and he knew what he had been." And that is the beauty of the novel. It is enough to be oneself. To stay true to who one is. Nothing else matters in the end. In the battle for the inner life, Stoner had won.

Throughout the book, Almond connects his subject to contemporary American politics, concluding that "Americans are conflict junkies" and when politicians don't fight back we lose interest. "Going high" as Stoner did may win the battle but it loses the fight.

Almond's book was enjoyable for the insights into John William's "perfect novel" and also for a deep understanding of how a novel can impact a reader.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life
Steve Almond
IG Bookmarked Series
ISBN: 978-1632460875
Publication: June 18, 2019
14.95 paperback

Click on these links to learn more about John Williams and Stoner
The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel
 Stoner and rereading Stoner
Augustus
Nothing But the Night

The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel--John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life

I was fascinated by the life of author John Williams as told by Charles J. Shields in The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel. Learning about William's life and influences helps me to better understand and appreciate his work. 

I discovered William's book Stoner after purchasing a Kindle when I received an email of ebooks on sale. I was drawn to the novel by the cover, a detail of Thomas Eakins's painting The Thinker, Portrait of Louis H. Kenton. And I was drawn by the description of the novel.

I loved Stoner and it became one of my all-time favorite novels. It was about this time in 2013 that Stoner was labeled "The Greatest American Novel You've Never Heard Of" by Tim Krieder in the New York Times.

On December 23, 2013, I reviewed Stoner on my blog and this past winter I reread the book with my local library book club. I raved about Stoner so much that my son bought me Augustus as a Christmas gift, the book for which Williams won the National Book Award in conjunction with John Barth's Chimera.

Who was this man, this John-Williams-not-the-composer, this writer who I never heard about? I read Barth in an undergraduate college class, including his Chimera. Why had I not heard of Williams before?

I was very pleased to read the e-galley of The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel by Charles J. Shields, which answered my questions, how Williams was overlooked and later rediscovered, and how readers and book clubs have brought Stoner to its proper place in the canon.

Williams shared attributes with his protagonist Stoner; they both came from humble roots and grew up poor and worked in academia. Both were smitten with language and poetry. Both had unhappy marriages and an affair (or more, for Williams). Both stayed true to their ideals. Both died without the recognition they deserved.

But in other ways, Williams was very different from his character. Stoner stuck with his one, failed, unhappy marriage; Williams married multiple times. Williams thrived in an academic network based on alcohol and drinking. Williams's father abandoned his family and his stepfather was a drinker who was lucky to snag a New Deal job. And whereas Stoner never completed his thesis, Williams published three novels after several failed attempts.

The literary influences on Williams were diverse, from pulp magazines filled with adventure and romance to Thomas Wolfe. Williams was inspired by Eugene Gant in Look Homeward, Angel. (Wolfe was my favorite as well when I first read him at age 16.)

Seeing the movie A Tale of Two Cities starring Ronald Coleman impacted Williams also, and he tried to channel Coleman's style and panache, down to the thin mustache.

Williams became involved with theater (as did Wolfe before he turned to novels). He then discovered Conrad Aiken and psychological fiction, and then Proust, altering his writing style.

Dropping out of college, Williams became a radio announcer and jack of all trades in radio broadcasting. A whirlwind romance sped into marriage. Then, in 1942, faced with the draft, Williams enlisted in the air corps and became a radio technician. He ended up on planes flying over the Himalayas to bring supplies to General Chaing Kai-shek. He received a 'Dear John' letter.

In 1945 Wiliams returned to the States and found work at a radio station in Key West, Florida. Here he wrote his first novel, Nothing But the Night, "steeped in psychological realism" and filled with pathologies. He sent the manuscript to Wolfe's last editor Edward Aswell of Harper and Brothers, who rejected it.

Alan Swallow of Swallow Press in Denver, CO also found much to critique in the novel but also saw in Williams a spark of genius. Swallow was part of the New Criticism movement. He suggested that Williams come to the University of Denver. Williams was admitted and then was married a second time. His writing still suffered from "a lag between thought and emotion." Marriage No. 2 also ended and soon after Williams married a third time.

The work and philosophy of Yvor Winters, who held to a classical style of writing over the modern tendency of self-expression and obscurity, influenced Williams and he declared himself a 'Winterarian." Williams realized his writing was "overwrought" and embellished.

Williams turned his attention to the myth of the West and began researching for a novel about a young Romantic who experiences the real West. The book was promoted as a Western, a dismal and fatal choice that upset Williams. It never found its proper audience.

John had several affairs, including a woman who became his next, and last, wife. Meanwhile, he was working on the novel that became Stoner. The literary world was going in other directions, but Williams stuck to his ideals. Bestsellers included The Moon-Spinners by Mary Stewart and Daphne du Maurier's The Glass Blowers. Up and comers included Saul Bellow, Ken Kesey, and Thomas Pynchon. Stoner was "unfashionable." It lacked emotion, was too understated.  Williams's agent warned his book would never sell well. That wasn't his goal. The novel was quite overlooked for a year when a review finally hailed it.

Williams began thinking about "the paradoxes of power" and about Cesar Augustus. By this time, in the late 60s, the counterculture was making its mark on academia. In 1971 Stoner was republished. In 1972 Augustus was finally published and won the National Book Award in 1973. Williams' drinking was becoming a problem but he started on a new novel set during the Nixon years. A lifelong smoker, he was on oxygen. He won awards and his books were brought back into print. In 1986 at a farewell dinner Williams read from his manuscript, a book he couldn't finish. In 1994 Williams died of respiratory failure.

But his novels kept popping up as new readers discovered them. In 2006 the New York Review of Books Classics reprinted Stoner and "Stonermania" took the literary world. The novel was first popular in Europe, Waterson named it Book of the Year in 2013. In America, readers began sharing the book with each other.

Williams was a complicated man with a complicated personal life. Like his protagonist, he stuck to his ideals. He learned to write the hard way, by writing unsellable novels before writing the novel that would sell a million copies worldwide.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

*****

from the publisher:

Charles J. Shields is the author of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, a New York Times bestseller, a Literary Guild Selection, and a Book-of-the-Month Club Alternate. His young adult biography of Harper Lee, I Am Scout, was chosen an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, a Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year, and a Junior Literary Guild Selection. In 2011, Shields published And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life, a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of the Year.

The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel is an expert uncovering of an American master who deserves the larger audience this biography will help give him. With his characteristic insight into the ligatures between life and art, and in his own enviable prose, Shields brings Williams into full-color relief. This is a major accomplishment by a major biographer, a gift for which Williams’s admirers will be most grateful." -William Giraldi, author of Hold the Dark and The Hero’s Body

"Charles Shields’s biography of John Williams is every bit as impressive as his subject’s book, the not-so-underground classic (and international bestseller) Stoner, a gripping and compulsively readable tale of an ‘unremarkable man.’ Shields brilliantly recreates Williams’s outwardly ordinary life as an English professor eager to balance his scholarship with a creative writing career, revealing fascinating psychological depths in a man who on the surface doesn’t seem to have any. The reader is carried along by this masterful, finely honed biography."-Mary V. Dearborn, author of#xA0;Hemingway: A Biography

"A masterful depiction of the generation of burnt-out alcoholic American writers who survived WWII. Shields comes about as close as humanly possible to recreating the crucible of chance, devotion, genius, and circumstance that produced ‘the greatest novel you have never read.’ His brisk, fluent biography will change this." -J. Michael Lennon, author of Norman Mailer: A Double Life

The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel
by Charles J. Shields
University of Texas Press
Publication Date: October 15, 2018
ISBN: 9781477317365, 1477317368
Hardcover $29.95 USD

Favorite New Classics: Stoner by John Williams and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

I was thrilled to find John Williams' novel Stoner on my library book club list. Soon after I had bought a Kindle I purchased the ebook and it became one of my favorite discoveries.

Stoner is one of literature's great characters, an Everyman/Job/Willie Loman who endures life's bitter realities, often dejected but with bursts of resistance and empowerment.

Stoner was the child of uncommunicative, distant, Midwestern parents, observing their joyless life fighting the barren land to survive. His father was convinced to send him to agricultural school to learn modern methods that would perhaps make their farm successful.

Stoner is disconnected and passive until he faces the big unknowns and questions posed by literature. He struggles to understand, switching his major to English. His mentor realizes Stoner had  found something he loved.

When he learns his son will not return to the farm, Stoner's father merely replaces his son with a hired hand.

During WWI, Stoner's mentor convinces him not to enlist and abandon his studies; his duty is to keep the world from snuffing out the flame.

Stoner falls in love with a woman who 'doesn't mind' and seems to be more interested in escaping her father than desiring a marriage. Their relationship is a disaster and a disappointment to Stoner.  His wife punishes him every way imaginable, even interfering with his writing and career. He carries on, accepting rejection and isolation.

He never leaves his Alma Mater, eventually becoming a good teacher. Then a new department head promotes a gifted student who relies on charm and blarney while neglecting true scholarship and mastery of his subject. Stoner and his boss clash over the student's dissertation when he insists the student is unworthy. He will not lower his standards. Stoner is punished for not playing the game with the loss of his specialty course and only given freshman level classes.

There are moments of glory in Stoner's life.

His wife got the idea of having a child but found no joy in motherhood. She became an 'invalid', so Stoner had to care for the infant and child, cook and clean. His daughter bonds with him, and in vengeance's Stoner's wife separates them.

A graduate student falls in love with him and their relationship is carried on behind closed doors for a year. When the department chair learns of  their relatiobship, Stoner is pressed to make a decision; he cannot abandon his wife and their daughter. The love of his life moves on to her own career.

Depressed and feeling his age, Stoner plods on until one day he throws away his freshman texts and instead teaches the upper level material he has been denied. His freshman class finishes with higher scores than their peers.

One book club member used the word miserable for Stoner's life. We discussed his fatalism and acceptance, his inaction to better his life, and the reasons behind his choices and lack of action.

I drew attention to his achievements: he held to his values at any cost. He was, as a college friend pointed out early in his life, a Quixotic dreamer out of joint with the world. At the end of his life he understands and accepts his life with unexpected contentment. In his last moments, there is a clarity to his life. Stoner and his wife forgive each other, and a strange comfort envelopes him.

The book group filled the entire hour with our discussion. And that is the sign of a great book--it made us think and reflect and endeavor to probe the mystery of the human experience.

Read the New Yorker review here.

“A masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man” —The New Yorker

*****

This month I was also thrilled to reread another of my favorite 'new classics', Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize winner Gilead. I read it nearly ten years ago, then reread it for a book club. I believe this is my third reading of the book. It is an affirming book that inspires us to pay more attention to the wonder of human existence.

Yes, being married to an ordained pastor who spent 30 years in the pulpit does impact my love of John Ames, a third generation pastor living in a small Kansas town. His grandfather came to Kansas from Maine during the Bloody Kansas days, a vehement abolitionist who knew John Brown. The image of his sainted grandfather was Biblical in size.

But when he returned to his pulpit with a gun and bloody shirt, preaching abolition and taking up the sword, his son went to worship with the Quakers. His pietism was also strong, and lived on in his son, John Ames.

John lost his wife and newborn baby early in life. In his years of sadness and isolation, he resorted to his books for consolation. His dear childhood friend Broughton is a neighboring pastor, once a vigorous man and remarkable preacher, now crippled with arthritis. Broughton named a son after his friend, a child to 'share.' But John Ames Broughton, known as Jack, was a troubled child prone to pranks and deviltry, culminating in an act that drove a wedge between him and John Ames.

A miracle happened to John in later life. A woman wandered into his church. He noticed her sad and quiet face. She asked to be baptized, and in time proposed that he marry her. They had a son. The joy they brought into his life is profound. But John Ames is now turning seventy-six. He has heart disease and knows his days are numbered.

The novel is John's letter to his son, to be read when he reaches adulthood. In the letter he writes about his love for his son and tells stories of their family history, his personal life, his personal theology, and Jack's story. 

Each entry is gorgeous and moving. John has suffered and struggled. Love comes late. But he is in awe and wonder at the beauty of existence. "I love this life," he writes to his son while watching him blowing bubbles with his mother.

****

Gilead is the story of fathers and sons. John Ames loves the son of his late life, and is concerned for what his life will be like growing up without a father.

John returns again and again to the journey he and his own father took during the Depression to find his grandfather's grave. The journey took many weeks across dusty roads. They were thirsty and people along the way had little food to spare them, even for cash payment.

He talks about his father's troubled relationship to his grandfather. During the days of Bloody Kansas, Grandfather was a supporter of John Brown, and perhaps had even killed a man.

Then there is Broughton's son Jack, named for John Ames to compensate John for his lost child. Broughton's children, Glory and Jack, have returned to help their elderly father. John knows Jack's failings and sins. He is distrustful of Jack. As a pastor, this causes a crisis of conscience and calling and he struggles with his inability to trust and forgive Jack.

Jack has been friendly with John Ames wife and son. He plays catch with the son while John watches, his heart too frail for activity. Should he warn his wife and son against Jack?

In his journal, John writes about his morning sermon on Abraham and Isaac, Hagar and Ishmael. John notes that Abraham, who is too old to father more sons, must trust the Lord to watch over them both, one sent into the wilderness and the other intended to be a sacrifice. And he continues,

"...any father, particularly an old father, must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to begat another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents' love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness."

At one point, John Ames spends considerable time mystifying the Fifth Commandment, honor your mother and father, as related to our relationship to God more than to community. He contends that we must see the spark of God in every human, and learning to see God in our parents is the beginning.

*****

Can people change? Is Jack a changed man? John's wife is sure that people can change. She has not shared her secret past with anyone, but John has seen the sadness in her face and known she had a hard life. What did she need to do to survive all those years before they met? She had no family, and lived through hard times. She and Jack seem to 'understand' each other; unlike John and Broughton, they have been out in the world beyond Gilead.

In the last pages of the novel Jack finally tells John why he has really returned to Gilead, the sorrow and pain of his inability to believe, and the secret heartache that has worn him down.

*****

It happened that the book club members who most loved the novel had all settled next to each other. Most wish there was a stronger, linear story line, or less theology and religion, but most appreciated the beautiful language describing the simple joys of existence and fatherly love. One woman hated the book, hated Jack, and said she hated the Prodigal Son parable he seemed based on. And another could not read about fatherly love, having been denied the opportunity himself.

It is always interesting in a book club to hear how one work of art affects people is such diverse and personal ways.

Stoner

Stoner by John Edward Williams

"From the earliest time he could remember, William Stoner had his duties..At seventeen his shoulders were already beginning to stoop beneath the weight of his occupation."

William Stoner was the son of Missouri farm folk, quiet, hard-working people. Their only child grew up lonely and isolated in the depressed house.

Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed.

Then one day his father makes the only speech of his life. He tells William that he wants him to attend the University to learn modern farming methods in hopes of reviving the farm, with the expectation of a better life for the family.

"He did his work at the University as he did his work on the farm--thoroughly, conscientiously, with neither pleasure nor distress."

In his first literature class in college, Stoner is confronted by a question he had never considered before. "What does it mean?" Professor Sloane asks after reading a Shakespeare sonnet.

"This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong/To love that well thou must leave ere long."

Stoner has an epiphany. He drops his agricultural science courses and takes up literature. He applies himself with a passion he had never before known. In his senior year Professor Sloane summons Stoner to his office and asks what his plans are.

"But don't you know, Mr. Stoner?" Sloan asked. "Don't you understand about yourself yet? you're going to be a teacher."

Stoner is offered a teaching position while working for his Master of Arts degree. He spends his entire academic and work career at the University.

Stoner struggles to voice the feeling he experiences with literature until he can finally answer Sloane's question of "What does it mean?" He is able to eventually share his passion with his students, and becomes a good teacher. But he struggles to find meaning in his personal life, which is a failure, as is his professional political life in the University hierarchy. At the height of his career, because of his integrity and high regard for education, he crosses the department head and a one way feud ensues. His upper level courses are taken away and he is given an untenable schedule of freshman English classes.

Through it all he continued to teach and study, though he sometimes felt that he hunched his back futilely against the driving storm and cupped his hands uselessly around the dim flicker of his last poor match.


Stoner finds joy in little pockets of his life: the first years of his daughter's life, before his wife separated them in her vengeful hatred of the man whose only fault was that he loved her and wanted her physically. He finds passionate love in middle age with an instructor, but when discovered by the department chair they must separate.

As Stoner faces death, he confronts the meaning of his life.

He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality.

Stoner is a book about work. It is about ideals. It is about love. It is like the movie "Mr. Holland's Opus" without the happy ending of public acclaim. William Stoner, in the end, provides his own happy ending, accepting the reality of his life with joy.

This is a beautifully written book, a moving portrait of Everyman. I only discovered it when it was offered on an Amazon daily kindle deal. I can't believe I had never heard of it before! Stoner is a treasure, and I know I will read it again.