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 T
he 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
