When I put it out there that I was about
to read Stoner, John Williams’ quiet masterpiece, I was issued with two
provisos. The first was to prepare myself to be left broken by the sadness of
the story. Indeed, I have no quibble with that; it’s a heartbreaking tale,
beautifully told and, despite the occasional hopeful interlude, desperately
bleak. The second warning, though, felt more complicated. I was to ready myself for one
of the most loathsome women in literature. And it wasn’t hard, at first, to
agree.
The treatment that Edith Stoner doles out
to her husband William for almost the entirety of his adult life left me angrily shaking my head. On one occasion - when Edith forbids their young daughter
Grace from sharing quality time with her father in his study - I found myself uttering an expletive out loud on
the top deck of the Number 73 bus.
However, this charge of loathsomeness is far
from an open and shut case. In a novel that urges us to look closer at the
seemingly inconsequential life, quietly lived, we are given short but powerful glimpses into
the characters of those that surround the eponymous hero.
On the surface, Edith is a monster. Yet
stumbling on the following passage which details Edith’s reaction to the death
of her father, we find the author leaving the door to her character ajar.
*
Finally she arranged all of her childhood
belongings neatly in two piles. One of these consisted of toys and trinkets she
had acquired for herself, of secret photographs and letters from school
friends, of gifts she had at one time received from distant relatives; the
other pile consisted of those things that her father had given her and of
things with which he had been directly or indirectly connected. It was to this
pile that she gave her attention. Methodically, expressionlessly, with neither
anger nor joy, she took the objects there, one by one, and destroyed them. The
letters and clothes, the stuffing from the dolls, the pincushions and pictures,
she burned in the fireplace; the clay and porcelain heads, the hands and arms
and feet of the dolls she pounded to a fine powder on the hearth; and what
remained after the burning and pounding she swept into a small pile and flushed
down the toilet in the bathroom that adjoined her room.
*
There is nothing explicit here. And yet,
how can we not but surmise that Edith has experienced some ghastly kind of
child abuse at the hands of her deceased father. Indeed, if we made Edith Stoner
the lodestone of this novel, I vouch that we’d almost certainly have an
entirely different reaction to her. Likewise, Archer Sloane, Stoner’s difficult
mentor who dies with his eyes wide open at his desk. Or Horris Lomax, the
hunchback with the matinee idol face, and along with Edith, the bane of our
hero’s professional and, eventually, private life.
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Edvard Munch, The Artist and His Model (1919-21) |
It’s not the quiet horrors and
frustrations that make this such a powerful work though. The short-lived,
fiercely burning love affair that stands at the centre of the book, and the centre
of Stoner’s life is beautifully rendered. In simple and elegant prose, Williams sets the romance in motion.
*
It was dark outside, and a spring chill
was in the evening air. He breathed deeply and felt his body tingle in the
coolness. Beyond the jagged outline of the apartment houses the town lights
glowed upon a thin mist that hung in the air. At the corner a street light
pushed feebly against the darkness that closed around it; from the darkness
beyond it the sound of laughter broke abruptly into the silence, lingered and
died. The smell of smoke from trash burning in back yards was held by the mist;
and as he walked slowly through the evening, breathing the fragrance and
tasting upon his tongue the sharp night-time air, it seemed to him that the
moment he walked in was enough and that he might not need a great deal more.
*
The pivot at the centre of this paragraph
could serve as an encapsulation of the entirety of the novel: ‘from the
darkness beyond it the sound of laughter broke abruptly into the silence,
lingered and died.’ The whole affair that Stoner conducts with the research student Katherine is just over a chapter in length. And then the picking up for the
second half of the novel of a heartbreaking and elegiac mood, rendered, at
times, in a wonderfully profane biblical parataxis.
*
'Lust and learning, Katherine once said.
'That's really all there is, isn't it?' And it seemed to Stoner that that was
exactly true, that that was one of the things he had learned.
*
Lust and learning. Not much else. Yet in that moment, that is so much. Lomax brings the affair down, Katherine disappears.
 |
Edvard Munch, The Kiss (1897) |
There is also a Zolaesque futility to the
novel that inevitably leaves you saddened. The environment that Grace
grows up in will have a significant impact. Pregnancy as an escape, alcoholism as a crutch, are the
ways that her life will play out.
*
'I
suppose', she said, 'I suppose I got pregnant deliberately, though I didn't know
it at the time; I suppose I didn't even know how badly I wanted, how badly I
had to get away from here. I knew enough not to get pregnant unless I
wanted to, Lord knows. All those boys in high school, and — she smiled
crookedly at her father - 'you and mamma, you didn't know, did you?'
'I
suppose not’, he said.
‘Mamma
wanted me to be popular, and — well, I was popular, all right. It didn't mean
anything, not anything at all'.
‘I
knew you were unhappy’, Stoner said with difficulty. 'But I never realized —
never knew —'
'I
suppose I didn't either’, she said. 'I couldn't have. Poor Ed. He's the one
that got the rotten deal. I used him, you know, oh, he was the father all
right—but I used him. He was a nice boy, and always so ashamed—he couldn't
stand it. He joined up six months before he had to, just to get away from it. I
killed him, I suppose; he was such a nice boy, and we couldn't even like each
other very much?’
They
talked late into the night, as if they were old friends. And Stoner came to
realize that she was, as she had said, almost happy with her despair; she would
live her days out quietly, drinking a little more, year by year, numbing
herself against the nothingness her life had become. He was glad she had that,
at least; he was grateful that she could drink.
*
Just heartbreaking. And, again, in one
short scene, consisting of only a few paragraphs, we get a whole life hinted at (yet
this time the delineation is more explicit).
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Edvard Munch, Melancholy (1897) |
All that remains is the foreshadowed and
inevitable deathbed scene. Stoner searching for a book, his own book, clutching
at it and then dropping it as he dies.
That final passage was arrived at at the start
of summer, and I wanted to ruminate on the novel and see if - as I anticipated - the story would linger and remain under my skin. Obviously it has.
But what has surprised me most is a growing bafflement with William Stoner. I
almost wanted to shake him out of his
meek acquiescence and tell him to stand up to Edith, if only for the sake of
his daughter Grace. His retreat into his work, ultimately a retreat between the
pages of his books, almost argues against how many of us - certainly me - regard the consolations of art. Edith makes you fume, and Grace and her
situation leave you sad, but William himself, ultimately, puzzles you. Perhaps
it’s this that is the true key to the novel’s unquestionable greatness.
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