Stoner

Review

1/2026 Review

John William’s Stoner is the January 2026 selection for my Small Press Fiction Book Club. My history with the book is intertwined with that club; initially a fellow member recommended it to me back in probably early 2024, and then the my friend and the club’s first facilitator let me borrow her copy of the book. I found a lot of kinship in Stoner (in my first review I use the words ambivalent and aloof, two words that a therapist once used to describe a younger version of myself).

Like my first reading, Stoner’s inaction and passivity frustrated me deeply. The reader watches every opportunity of life slip through his fingers, all the while Stoner thinks to himself that things are “not unpleasant” and that he is “without ready means for dealing” with his life’s challenges. Edith, his wife, appears on the page as a terror almost out of the Greek and Latin texts that Stoner studies, so complete is her dominion over the house, so resistant to any form of boundary. We watch his daughter be almost physically torn from him and shoved into frilly dresses and eventually into a bottle of whiskey. And we see a fleeting glance of love crushed.

My copy of the book is the 50th Anniversary Edition from the New York Review of Books, which includes a good introduction from John McGahern and correspondence between Williams and his literary agent, Marie Rodell. A few tidbits stood out to me from these letters, including that Williams’ working title was A Fault of Light (it is difficult not to imagine the Sun’s reflection on the page in Stoner’s dying hand, reading this title), and then The Matter of Love. “The matter of love” as a phrase appears on page 259, and I flagged it on both reads of the book before knowing of its importance to the author:

But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth he had given it freely, without thought; he had given it to the knowledge that had been revealed to him—how many years ago?—by Archer Sloane; he had given it to Edith, in those first blind foolish days of his courtship and marriage; and he had given it to Katherine, as if it had never been given before. He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.

(page 259, emphasis mine. Williams is difficult to excerpt in small bits.)

I’m looking forward to the book club discussion for a number of things, but especially so on the questions of Edith, and of this passage and the phrase ‘the matter of love.’

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On Edith. My first read of the book, I found her to be utterly detestable, a completely and unremitting villain. When she barges into the study and removes Grace, when she dismantles Stoner’s study, which is so clearly the primary manifestation of his identity, and finally when she tells him, “don’t you realize how unhappy she has been?” I feel an urge to shout through the page. That line is perhaps one of the most cruel lines of dialogue I’ve read in a long, long time. At no point does Stoner ever attempt to enforce any boundary.

On my second read, I entered cautiously, aware of my contempt for Edith, and looking to interrogate it. I’m not the only one. Marie Rodell writes to Williams, “We have discussed before two points which still impress me as needing amplification: Edith’s motivations, and why Archer sees a teacher in this inarticulate farm boy” (p296). Williams will reply after some revisions, “. . .I have (I think) “explained” Edith a good deal more satisfactorily and made her more believable. . .” (p301). He is citing work on the first 80-90 pages, but more specifically re: Edith, I would guess, pages 50 to about 90. It is in these 40 pages thereabout that Stoner meets and falls for Edith, and we hear exposition on her childhood:

[Edith’s] childhood was an exceedingly formal one, even in the most ordinary moments of family life. Her parents behaved toward each other with a distant courtesy; Edith never saw pass between them the spontaneous warmth of either anger or love. Anger was days of courteous silence, and love was a word of courteous endearment. She was an only child, and loneliness was one of the earliest conditions of her life.

(page 54)

Throughout these pages we see the brief courtship, and a laughing Stoner promise to someday take her to Europe (a promise he’ll break). In those pages, we also see Edith’s marriage night, at which these two virginal people have some of the most uncomfortable sex I’ve read in a novel recently. Edith cannot meet his eyes, and afterwards she goes to vomit. Today, we would probably describe this as quite nearly a sexual assault. Perhaps 20 pages later and Edith has transformed, described as almost stalking the house in the nearly-nude, ready to leap upon him as he enters, for the explicit purpose of conceiving a child. Nearly all human touch ends once the child is conceived.

There is also a line around this time that illustrates how manipulative Williams writes Edith to be. As she is dropping this news upon him on his way out the door, Stoner asks twice if she is sure: “A small frown came between her eyes. ‘I told you I was sure. Don’t you want one? Why do you keep asking me? I don’t want to talk about it anymore.’” (page 84.) This is not the last time we will see Edith be cruelly manipulative in ways that have extreme impacts. Later she will seek a loan without his knowledge and guilt him into signing it, and the same tactic is used repeatedly in the removal of their daughter from his company, the dismantling of his study, and his eviction to the sun room, where he will later die.

It is pretty clear then that Edith is written as a villain, and I don’t think Williams goes to much trouble to make her as ‘believable’ as he may believe. Perhaps this is not surprising for a Southern male author writing in the 60s, I don’t know.

Critic Elaine Showalter bumped pretty hard on Edith’s character in her review for The Washington Post in 2015. “[Williams] makes no effort to explain her feelings; she remains shrewishly and selfishly independent to Stoner’s professional travails and personal disappointments. She exists only to torment her husband.” (link to full review)¹ I am not sure how I feel about this criticism. Certainly, Edith is not a well rounded character and Williams does not devote much if any time to understanding her. Though, that can be said of all other characters in the book not called “William Stoner.” The book is interior by nature. It is clear to me by about page 89 that Edith seems likely to be suffering post-partum depression, but I also think that the little we get of her childhood suggests that she has no secure attachments and does not have a strong sense of identity.

Stoner is given his identity, quite literally assigned it by Archer Sloane in the first pages of the book. We are not aware that Edith is ever given even a chance to determine her own identity. Her parents are uninvolved in her life, she goes through the motions of living, but clearly casts about for a sense of self. At one point she flees the Stoner house for some time, returning completely reinvented:

She asked to borrow a sum of money from her mother, who made her an impetuous gift of it. She bought a new wardrobe, burning all the clothes she had brought with her from Columbia; she had her hair cut short and fashioned in the mode of the day; she bought cosmetics and perfumes, the use of which she practiced daily in her room. She learned to smoke, and she cultivated a new ay of speaking which was brittle, vaguely English, and a little shrill. She returned to Columbia with this outward change well under control, and with another change secret and potential within her.

(page 120)

Edith returns with a prepackaged identity, that suggestive of the flapper or whatever came just after. We see her take up piano, we see her try to fit in with the theatre troupe, and we see her try to become involved with the mothers. All of these are attempts to find an identity, to define herself as something solid and secure. But none of them stick, for whatever reason. We can be more assured of her struggles around identity by her clear attacks on her husband’s and her attempt to foist an identity upon her daughter. Only a few pages after her return from St. Louis does she radically change Grace’s life, wardrobe, habits, hobbies, and all else. Pages later she has ransacked Stoner’s home study, which earlier we read as, “an image of a place but which was actually of himself. . . . it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible.” Edith replaces it with a pottery studio, which is not touched much upon again, like many of her attempts to find identity.

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Showalter also talks a lot about Charles Walker, the poor student whose flunking by Stoner ignites a feud between he and Lomax that lasts decades. Showalter has a few things to say about Stoner’s behavior as a teacher, however all of them I think misunderstand the text and are not so much off-base as plainly wrong. What she does criticize in Williams’ writing is that two of the three major ‘antagonists’ (if we consider Edith, Walker, and Lomax the antagonists) suffer ‘grotesque’ physical deformities, and both are given intros that suggest Vader or some other cartoonish villain:

[Lomax] was not seen until the departmental meeting late Tuesday afternoon, after registration had been completed. . . . It quieted enough for everyone in the room to hear the door at the rear of the hall creak open and to hear a distinctive, slow shuffle of feet on the bare wood floor. They turned; and the hum of their conversation died. Someone whispered, “It’s Lomax,” and the sound was sharp and audible through the room.

He had come through the door, closed it, and had advanced a few steps beyond the threashold, where he now stood. He was a man barely over five feet in height, and his body was grotesquely misshapen. A small hump raised his left shoulder to his neck, and his left arm hung laxly at his side. His upper body was heavy and curved, so that he appeared to be always struggling for balance; his legs were thin, and he walked with a hitch in his stiff right leg. For several moments he stood with his blond head bent downward, as if he were inspecting his highly polished black shoes and the sharp crease of his black trousers. Then he lifted his head and shot his right arm out, exposing a stiff white length of cuff with gold links; there was a cigarette in his long pale fingers. He took a deep drag, inhaled, and expelled the smoke in a thin stream. And then they could see his face.

It was the face of a matinee idol². Long and thin and mobile, it was nevertheless strongly featured; his forehead was high and narrow, with heavy veins, and his thick waving hair, the color of ripe wheat, swept back from it in a somewhat theatrical pompadour. He dropped his cigarette on the floor, ground it beneath his sole, and spoke.

“I am Lomax.”

(pages 93-94)

And Walker, who gets a little less drama but no less deformity:

A knock came; he turned to his opened doorway and said, “Come in.”

A figure shuffled out of the darkness of the hall into the light of the room. Stoner blinked sleepily against the dimness, recogizing a student whom he had noticed in the halls but did not know. The young man’s left arm hung stiffly at his side, and his left foot dragged as he walked. HIs face was pale and round, his horn-rimmed eyeglasses were round, and his black thin hair was parted precisely on the side and lay close to the round skull. . . .

The young man lowered himself into the straight wooden chair beside Stoner’s desk; his leg was extended in a straight line, and his left hand, which was permanently twisted into a half-closed fist, rested upon it. He smiled, bobbed his head, and said with a curious air of self-depreciation, “You may not know me, sir; I’m Charles Walker. I’m a second-year Ph.D. candidate; I assist Dr. Lomax.”

(p133-134)

Walker’s introduction is a little less dramatic, though it does still feature him emerging from darkness as if he’s a phantom.

This is probably Showalter’s strongest criticism, and she’s probably right when she writes, “This repeated portrayal of Stoner’s antagonists as physically deformed is, perhaps, one of the novel’s nastiest, most outdated strategies.” I noticed the first read, but did not bump on it quite so hard (which is surprising; I’m usually sensitive to this as someone born with a cleft lip, and usually I make note of this sort of portrayal in reviews). It stands out, this time. It also, perhaps, creates an odd connection between Lomax and Walker, that a reader might assume exists only because of their shared ‘deformities.’ It is difficult to find another reason for Lomax to be so undyingly furious at Stoner for one student.

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Those critiques aside, this remains a five-star book for me. I feel too much a connection for it to be anything else. I am not sure that I find Stoner as a “saint” as Williams describes him in a letter, but I see in him someone that loves his work, his child, and yet still struggles to share an ultimate love with someone. As his affair with Katherine is ending, against their will, he says, “You know if there were anything—anything I could do, I’d—” and we wish that were true. We wish it were true for ourselves. We wish it dearly.

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7/2024 Review

In the opening chapters of Stoner, Archer Sloane asks a young William, “Don’t you know about yourself yet?” Stoner seems always to be pulled between the idea of what he wants and what he is willing to do. He thinks constantly about what would be burdensome to others. Throughout the book, his placidity verges on ambivalence — as if he is aloof to the living of his own life. Sloane tells him later that he must remember what he is, and what he has chosen to become. We follow Stoner’s becoming for the rest of his life.

I thought a lot about The Sun Also Rises as I read. There were many times where I wanted to reach through the page, grab Stoner by his shoulders, and shake him. He is often times a passenger when his life cries out for a pilot. In Hemingway’s book, Jake is often a passenger (or, maybe, valet), especially as it relates to Brett. But we don’t spend a lifetime with Jake. We watch Stoner watch his life pass by.

So many passages stood out to me that I transferred about 18 pages worth of A5 to my little borrowed-books notebook. What is a teacher? Where are the bounds between complacency, apathy, and acceptance? What makes a life worth living – is it success? What is success? How much are you willing to give up for your principles? How much of what you do not yet possess are you willing to stake, blind?

Some of the most painful moments in the book are between Stoner and his child. They’re a collection of deaths so complete that in the end nothing is there really to die. They barely know one another, and in fact Stoner barely knows anyone at all. You might call that a failure, and Stoner thinks of it in this way until he considers kindness. He’s always thinking about how not to offend, to the extent that even his very few triumphs he thinks considers “amusingly contemptuous.”

Another disconnected thought: there’s a bit here about rural boy moves to ‘urban’ center and is irrevocably changed, so that when he visits home, he is an ‘alien.’ I know the feeling. There’s a lot here about inheritance and legacy, to an extent. Nothing that I have words for.

The writing… I loved the prose. I notice that Williams, in writing Stoner’s thinking, almost never phrases anything as positive, but as not negative. The phrase, “not unpleasant” appears repeatedly throughout. We get a crystal-clear sense of Stoner’s quasi-nihilistic view on life.

Not sure what else to say. I finished reading this about 30 minutes ago and need to let it cook for a bit. This is definitely the sort of story that appeals to me, though. Down to the occasional odd turn of phrase that I had to sit back and admire (the best in the closing chapters may be, “chaos of potentialities” – wowza).

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Notes

Notes from second read marked (2).

• (2) - Working title was “A Flaw of Light,” and for a while Williams thought of the book as, “The Matter of Love.” The publisher, Viking, titled it “Stoner.”

Introduction from John McGahern

• (all intro notes from reading 2, which was of the NYRB 50th anniversary hardback)
• xii, quoting Williams - I think he’s a real hero. A lot of people who have read the novel think that Stoner had such a sad and bad life. I think he had a very good life. He had a better life than most people do, certainly. He was doing what he wanted to do, he had some feeling for what he was doing, he had some sense of the importance of the job he was doing. . . . His job gave him a particular kind of identity and made him what he was . . . It’s the love of the thing that’s essential. . . . You never know all the results of what you do. I think it all boils down to what I was trying to get at in Stoner. You’ve got to keep the faith. The important thing is to keep the tradition going, because the tradition is civilisation.
  • Q: What kind of life do you think Stoner had?
• xiii - . . . [Williams] complains about the change away from pure study within the universities, the results of which cannot be predicted, towards a purely utilitarian, problem-solving way of doing things more efficiently, both in the arts and sciences . . . Williams complains about the changes in the teaching of literature and the attitude to the text “as if a novel of poem is something to be studied and understood rather than experienced.”
• xiii, quoting Williams - “Absolutely. My god, to read without joy is stupid.”
• xiii - If the novel can be said to have one central idea, it is surely that of love, the many forms love takes and all the forces that oppose it.

Stoner

• p11 - Sloane’s eyes came back to William Stoner, and he said dryly, “Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr. Stoner; do you hear him?”
• p19 - “But don’t you know, Mr. Stoner?” Sloane asked. “Don’t you understand about yourself yet? You’re going to be a teacher.”
• p25 - His parents were happy to see him, and they seemed not to resent his decision. But he found that he had nothing to say to them; already, he realized, he and his parents were becoming strangers; and he felt his love increased by its loss. He returned to Columbia a week earlier than he had intended.
• p30 (2), Dave Masters speaking re: Stoner - Still smiling and ironically malevolent, he turned to Stoner. “Nor do you escape, my friend. No indeed. Who are you? A simple son of the soil,, as you pretend to yourself? Oh, no. You, too, are among the infirm—you are the dreamer, the madman in a madder world, our own midwestern Don Quixote without his Sancho, gamboling under the blue sky. You’re bright enough—brighter anyhow than our mutual friend. But you have the taint, the old infirmity. You think there’s something here, something to find. Well, in the world you’d learn soon enough. You, too, are cut out for failure; not that you’d fight the world. You’d let it chew you up and spit you out, and you’d lie there wondering what was wrong. Because you’d always expect the world to be something it wasn’t, something it had no wish to be. The weevil in the cotton, the worm in the beanstalk, the borer in the corn. You couldn’t face them, and you couldn’t fight them; because you’re too weak, and you’re too strong. And you have no place to go in the world.”
  • Q: What are your thoughts on Dave Master’s assessment of Stoner in Chapter 2? Was he right?
• p31 - . . .Stoner remembered what Masters had said; and though it brought him no vision of the University to which he had committed himself, it did reveal to him something about his relationship to the two men, and it gave him a glimpse of the corrosive and unspoiled bitterness of youth.
• p35, Sloane talking about war - “I was born in 1860, just before the War of the Rebellion. I don’t remember it, of course; I was too young. I don’t remember my father either; he was killed in the first year of the war, at the Battle of Shiloh.” He looked quickly at Stoner. “But I can see what has ensued. A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.” He paused for a long moment; then he smiled slightly. “The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has aimed his life to build.”
• p36 - He spoke slowly, “You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you’re trying to decide what to do.”
• p43 - He sat in the dimness of his room and heard outside the shouts of joy and release, and thought of Archer Sloane who wept at a defeat that only he saw, or thought he saw; and he knew that Sloane was a broken man and would never again be what he had been.
  • Q: At what defeat was Sloane crying?
• p54 (2) - [Edith’s] childhood was an exceedingly formal one, even in the most ordinary moments of family life. Her parents behaved toward each other with a distant courtesy; Edith never saw pass between them the spontaneous warmth of either anger or love. Anger was days of courteous silence, and love was a word of courteous endearment. She was an only child, and loneliness was one of the earliest conditions of her life.
  • TB: On my first read of this book, I came to hate Edith and see her as a major villain. Reading this, I just feel sorry for her.
  • TB: Post-correspondence, I suspect these are the ¶s that Williams discusses having added to clarify Edith’s “motivations.” I am not sure they really do that. These are about six ¶s in the midst of 300 pages.
• p56 (2) - “You must have known I loved you,” [Stoner] said. “I don’t see how I could have hidden it.” ¶ She said with some hint of animation, “I didn’t. I don’t know anything about that.” ¶ “Then I must tell you again,” he said gently. “And you must get used to it. I love you, and I cannot imagine living without you.”
  • TB: You would be surprised at how unaware one can be that your heart and soul feels completely saturated by them.
• p56 (2) - He felt a laugh come up in his throat, and he said in happy confidence, “Ah, Europe. I’ll take you to Europe. We’ll see it together someday.”
• p84, as Edith decides they should have a child, William asks if she is sure, and she says - A small frown came between her eyes. “I told you I was sure. Don’t you want one? Why do you keep asking me? I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
  • TB: emphasis in original. This is when I began to see Edith as a villain.
• p89 - TB: Edith’s behavior after the birth seems a lot like post-partum depression.
• p91, on the burial of Sloane - Whether he wept for himself, for the part of his history and youth that went down to the earth, or whether for the poor thin figure that once kept the man he had loved, he did not know.
• p95 - He wished to talk to [Lomax] as he had talked to Dave; but he could not, even after he admitted his wish to himself. The awkwardness of his youth had not left him, but the eagerness and straightforwardness that might have made the friendship possible had. He knew what he wished was impossible, and the knowledge saddened him.
• p103 - As he worked on the room, and as it began slowly to take shape, he realized that for many years, unknown to himself, he had had an image locked somewhere within him like a shamed secret, an image that was ostensibly of a place but which was actually of himself. So it was himself that he was attempting to define as he worked on his study. As he sanded the old boards for his bookcases, and saw the surface roughness disappear, the gray weathering flake away to the essential wood and finally to a rich purity of grain and texture—as he repaired his furniture and arranged it in the room, it was himself that he was slowly shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible.
• p109 - Stoner argued with [his mother], but she would not be moved. At last he realized that she wished only to die, and wished to do so where she had lived; and he knew that she deserved the little dignity she could find in doing as she wanted to do.
• p110 - He turned on the bare, treeless little plot that held others like his mother and father and looked across the flat land in the direction of the farm where he had been born, where his mother and father had spent their years. He thought of the cost extracted, year after year, by the soil; and it remained as it had been—a little more than barren, perhaps, a little more frugal of increase. Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh, and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.
• p115 - He suspected that he was beginning, ten years late, to discover who he was; and the figure he saw was both more and less than he had once imagined it to be.
• p120 (2) - She asked to borrow a sum of money from her mother, who made her an impetuous gift of it. She bought a new wardrobe, burning all the clothes she had brought with her from Columbia; she had her hair cut short and fashioned in the mode of the day; she bought cosmetics and perfumes, the use of which she practiced daily in her room. She learned to smoke, and she cultivated a new ay of speaking which was brittle, vaguely English, and a little shrill. She returned to Columbia with this outward change well under control, and with another change secret and potential within her.
  • TB: Edith clearly has little sense of identity and casts about trying to find it. I think that is partly why she so often lashes out on William’s displays and manifestations of himself, and why she tries to find vicariously find one for Grace.
• p124 - TB: This is the scene in which Grace and William are laughing together in his study, and Edith charges in and wrecks it. This was one of the moments of my most clear hatred for Edith, but also my most frustration with William. These two never have an adult conversation, and William never asserts any boundaries. All three suffer for it.
• p125 - “Don’t you realize how unhappy she has been?”
  • TB: HORRIBLE. A horrible, horrible, thing to say. Unforgivable.
• p129 - When he got home that evening he found that during the day Edith had, with the help of a local handyman, moved all of his belongings out of his study. Jammed together in one corner of the living room were his desk and couch, and surrounding them in a careless jumble were his clothes, his papers, and all of his books.
• p135-136 (2) - The seminar was held in a small basement room in the south wing of Jesse Hall. A dank but not unpleasant odor seeped from the cement walls, and feet shuffled in hollow whispers upon the bare cement floor.
  • TB: Noting this not for the sentence but for the words “not unpleasant” which appear repeatedly throughout the text. Almost as if Stoner has an unusually high tolerance for what is “not unpleasant” or perhaps struggles to identify something as “not pleasant.”
  • Q: Why do you think Williams uses the words “not unpleasant” to describe things so frequently throughout the text?
• p144-147 is the scene with Walker delivering his clearly manufactured diatribe.
  • p145 (2) - Covertly, Stoner looked at her for several moments; he found himself wondering what she was feeling and what she wished him to do. When he finally shifted his gaze away from her he had to realize that his decision was made. He had waited too long to interrupt, and walker was rushing impetuously through what he had to say.
  • p146 (2) - After he became used to his anger Stoner found a reluctant and perverse admiration stealing over him. However florid and imprecise, the man’s powers of rhetoric and invention were dismayingly impressive; and however grotesque, his presence was real. There was something cold and calculating and watchful in his eyes, something needlessly reckless and yet desperately cautious. Stoner became aware that he was in the presence of a bluff so colossal and bold that he had no ready means of dealing with it.
    • TB: I believe this is another phrase we see often, “no ready means of dealing with it” or words to the same effect.
    • TB: In this section, and in the original section introducing Walker (as in the one introducing Lomax), we get these grotesque physical descriptions which are clearly written to other these two and to precondition them towards villainy. This is a point of criticism from Elaine Showalter that I think is accurate and worth reflecting on. Though, in the same piece twice confuses itself about the events and descriptions therein. Showalter thinks that Stoner finds Walker intelligent, but this is not so. And she suggests that Stoner has some special fondness for Driscoll, but this is also not so, and not to be for a little while yet.
• p174-175 (2), in which Lomax is dictating charges against Stoner to Finch. - “. . . that certain conflicts of temperment and feeling came out during the course of this seminar, that the conflict was aided and intensified by Mr. Stoner himself, who allowed, and indeed at times encouraged, other members of the class to ridicule and laugh at Mr. Walker. I am prepared to demonstrate that on more than one occasion this prejudice was manifested by statements by Professor Stoner, to students and others; that he accused Mr. Walker of ‘attacking’ a member of the class, when Mr. Walker was merely expressing a contrary opinion,. . .”
  • Q: Why does Lomax so strongly defend Walker? Is it companionship of similar disability? Is it that he is taken by the bluff? Maybe multiple things? Could it be that Walker truly is a good student, and Lomax truly does see something in him that Stoner cannot or will not?
• p184 - He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him.
• p195 (2) - During the afternoons they spent together Katherine Driscoll was courteous, friendly, and reserved; she was quietly grateful for the time and interest he expended upon her work, and she hoped she was not keeping him from more important things. It did not occur to him that she might think of him other than as an interested professor whom she admired and whose aid, though friendly, was little beyond the call of his duty. He thought of himself as a faintly ludicrous figure, one in whom no one could take an interest other than impersonal; and after he admitted to himself his feeling for Katherine Driscoll, he was desperately careful that he not show this feeling in any way that could be easily discerned.
• p199 - In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.
• p201 - In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.
• p202 - Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.
• p208 (2) - It had not occured to him how he must appear to an outsider, to the world. For a moment he saw himself as he must thus appear; and what Edith said was part of what he saw. He had a glimpse of a figure that flitted through smoking-room anecdotes, and through the pages of cheap fiction—a pitiable fellow going into his middle age, misunderstood by his wife, seeking to renew his youth, taking up with a girl years younger than himself, awkwardly and apishly reaching for the youth he could not have, a fatuous, garishly got-up clown at whom the world laughed out of discomfort, pity, and contempt. He looked at this figure as closely as he could; but the longer he looked, the less familiar it became. It was not himself that he saw, and he knew suddenly that it was no one.
• p214 (2) - With sudden violence Finch crumpled the paper that he had so carefully folded and threw it at a wastebasket. He said, “In theory, your life is your own to lead. In theory, you ought to be able to screw anybody you want to, do anything you want to, and it shouldn’t matter so long as it doesn’t interfere with your teaching. But damn it, your life isn’t your own to lead. It’s—oh, hell. You know what I mean.” ¶ Stoner smiled. “I’m afraid I do.”
• p220 (2) - But from the moment he walked out of Gordon Finch’s office, he knew, somewhere within the numbness that grew from a small center of his being, that a part of his life was over, that a part of him was so near death that he could watch the approach almost with calm.
• p221 (2) - Katherine nodded. “I used to think I wouldn’t be able to endure it. But I’m just numb. I don’t feel anything.” ¶ “I know,” Stoner said. They were silent for a moment. “You know if there were anything—anything I could do, I’d—” ¶ “Don’t,” she said. “Of course I know.”
  • TB: If there were something to be done, would Stoner do it? Wasn’t there something to be done?
• p223 (2) - She must have been planning her departure for some time, Stoner realized; and he was grateful that he had not known and that she left him no final note to say what could not be said.
• p225 - “Oh, yes,” Edith said. “Katherine Driscoll. Well, you see? I told you, didn’t I? I told you those things weren’t important.” ¶ He nodded absently. Outside, in the old elm that crowded the back-yard fence, a large black-and-white bird—a magpie—had started to chatter. He listened to the sound of its calling and watched with remote fascination the open beak as it strained out its lonely cry.
• p226, several paragraphs, some (2) - But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand. Deep in him, beneath his memory, was the knowledge of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain. Though he seldom thought of his early years on the Booneville farm, there was always near his consciousness the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak. ¶ . . . He saw good men go down into a slow decline of hopelessness, broken as their vision of a decent life was broken; he saw them walking aimlessly upon the streets, their eyes empty like shards of broken glass; he saw them walk up to back doors, with the bitter pride of men who go to their executions, and beg for the bread that would allow them to beg again; and he saw men, who had once walked erect in their own identities, look at him with envy and hatred for the poor security he enjoyed as a tenured employee of an institution that somehow could not fail.
• p234 (2), discussing with Lomax’s #2 a ‘partial return to the syllabus’ - Stoner pursed his lips and looked at the ceiling, resting his elbows on the arms of the chair, he placed the tips of his fingers together and let his chin rest on his thumb-tips. Finally, but decisively, he said, “No, I don’t believe the—experiment—has had a fair chance. Tell Lomax I intend to carry it through to the end of the Semester. Would you do that for me?” ¶ . . . ¶ Stoner said, “Oh, at first he my be [disappointed]. But he’ll get over it. I’m sure Professor Lomax wouldn’t want to interfere with the way a senior professor sees fit to teach one of his classes. He may disagree with the judgement of that professor, but it would be most unethical for him to attempt to impose his own judgement—and, incidentally, a little dangerous. Don’t you agree?” ¶ . . . ¶ “Oh, another thing. I’ve been doing a little thinking about next semester. If my experiment works out, next semester I might try something else. I’ve been considering the possibility of getting at some of the problems of composition by examining the survival of the classical and medieval Latin tradition in some of Shakespeare’s plays. It may sound a little specialized, but I think I can bring it down to a workable level. You might pass my little idea along to Lomax—ask him to turn it over in his mind. . .”
  • TB: I love catty Stoner.
• p236 (2) - It was a triumph in a way, but one of which he always remained amusedly contemptuous, as if it were a victory won by boredom and indifference.
  • TB: Stoner cannot even hold his victories with any value.
• p249, Grace discussing what to do about her pregnancy - “I don’t know,” she said. “It really doesn’t matter. I don’t want to be a bother.”
  • TB: Attachment problems, depression. Poor girl.
• p252 - Like many others who went through that time, he was gripped by what he could think of only as a numbness, though he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because they could not be lived with. It was the force of a public tragedy he felt, a horror and a woe so all-pervasive that private tragedies and personal misfortunes were removed to another state of being, yet were intensified by the very vastness in which they took place, as the poignancy of a lone grave might be intensified by a great desert surrounding it.
• p252, Grace’s wedding (2) - After the ceremony the two young people climbed joylessly into Frye’s little roadster and left for St. Louis, where they still had to face another set of parents and where they were to live. Stoner watched them drive away from the house, and he could think of his daughter only as a very small girl who had once sat beside him in a distant room and looked at him with solemn delight, as a lovely child who long ago had died.
• p254 (2) - One part of him recoiled in instinctive horror at the daily waste, the inundation of destruction and death that inexorably assaulted the mind and heart; once again he saw the faculty depleted, he saw the classrooms emptied of their young men, he saw the haunted looks upon those who remained behind, and saw in those looks the slow death of the heart, the bitter attrition of feeling and care.
• p256 - “I drink a little more than I ought to,” she said. “Poor Father. You didn’t know that, did you?” ¶ “No,” he said. ¶ “Every week I tell myself, next week I won’t drink quite so much; but I always drink a little more. I don’t know why.” ¶ “Are you unhappy?” Stoner asked. ¶ “No,” she said. “I believe I’m happy. Or almost happy anyway. It isn’t that. It’s—” She did not finish.
• p259 - But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth he had given it freely, without thought; he had given it to the knowledge that had been revealed to him—how many years ago?—by Archer Sloane; he had given it to Edith, in those first blind foolish days of his courtship and marriage; and he had given it to Katherine, as if it had never been given before. He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.
  • TB: “The Matter of Love” was Williams’ title for the book.
• p280 - “Poor Daddy,” he heard Grace say, and he brought his attention back to where he was. “Poor Daddy, things haven’t been easy for you, have they?” ¶ He thought for a moment and then he said, “No. But I suppose I didn’t want them to be.”
• p282 - A new tranquility had come between them [Stoner & Edith]. It was a quietness that was like the beginning of love; and almost without thinking, Stoner knew why it had come. They had forgiven themselves for the harm they had done each other, and they were rapt in a regard for what their life together might have been.
• p284 - Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be. He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of mankind; he had had two friends, one of whom had died senselessly before he was known, the other of whom had now withdrawn so distantly into the ranks of the living that . . . He had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion of marriage; he had had that, too, and he had not known what to do with it, and it had died. He had wanted love; and he had had love, and had relinquished it, had let it go into the chaos of potentiality. Katherine, he thought. “Katherine.”
  • TB: Emphasis mine, ellipsis in original.
  • Q: What does a failed life look like?
• p287 - A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure—as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been.

John Williams and Marie Rodell, Correspondence about ‘Stoner’

(All notes from second reading, which was the first of the 50th anniv. ed. which contained these.)

• p294, JW - I shudder to describe any novel in a sentence or so. But shudder or no, the next novel will be about a college preofessor; as a student he attends a midwestern university, gets his degrees there, and a job as a teacher, and spends the rest of his life at the same university, teaching. To all outward appearances, he is a failure; he is not a popular teacher; he is one of the less distinguished members of his department; his perosnal life is a shambles; his death by cancer at the end of an undistinguished career is meaningless. But the point of the novel will be that he is a kind of saint; or, stated otherwise, it is a novel about a man who finds no meaning in the world or in himself, but who does find meaning and a kind of victory in the honest and dogged pursuit of his profession.
  • TB: later, referring to a different novel, likely Augustus, he says that protag is involved in the same drama as Stoner: inner versus outer values.
• p296-297, MR - We have discussed before two points which still impress me as needing amplification: Edith’s motivations, and why Archer sees a teacher in this inarticulate farm boy. . . . I may be totally wrong, but I don’t see this as a novel with a high potential sale. its technique of almost unrelieved narrative is out of fashion, and its theme to the average reader could well be depressing.
  • TB: Indeed, it sold poorly on publication and was out of print w/in a year. Not until the late 2000s did it have a significant revival.
• p301, JW, responding to some of MW’s notes - . . .Most of the work has been done on the first 80 or 90 pages, and I think it has made a lot of difference; there was a really soggy stretch beginning with when Stoner first met Edith and extending through the honeymoon. I have completely re-written that stretch, putting in some short scenes where previously narrative and exposition had been a good deal too heavy; I have (I think) “explained” Edith a good deal more satisfactorily and made her more believable: I have, moreover, cut some of the first one third of the book: and though it still moves slowly (as it must), it doesn’t any longer give you the feeling that you’re wading through molasses.
  • Q: Is Edith a believable character?
• p304, JW - After reading the novel over and over, I still cannot convince myself that we are going to have an impossible time getting it placed. Whatever its “commercial” possibilities, I believe finally that its quality will, if nothing else, shame someone into wanting to do it. I may be naive; but I cannot help believing that somewhere, someone will feel compelled to publish a good novel, even if it has little chance of being a book-club selection or a spectacular movie. Anyhow, we shall see.
  • TB: Letter dated 11/21/1963. 61 years ago.
• p307, MR - P.S. The manuscript is just back from Simon & Schuster; Henry Simon says: “Several others here have now read the manuscript, and we’re all in agreement that it is a book to be respected highly but that it has such a pale grey character that it would be most unlikely to earn its keep in hard covers and almost impossible to sell to a paperback house.”

Book Club Questions

1. How did you feel reading this book?
2. What kind of life do you feel Stoner ultimately had?
3. What are your thoughts on Dave Master’s assessment of Stoner in Chapter 2? Was he right? (see page 30.)
4. At what defeat was Sloane crying? (see page 43.)
5. Why do you think Williams uses the words “not unpleasant” to describe things so frequently throughout the text? (for an example, see page 135.)
6. Why does Lomax so strongly defend Walker? Is it companionship of similar disability? Is it that he is taken by the bluff? Could it be that Walker is truly a good student, and Lomax does see something in him that Stoner cannot or will not?
7. Is Edith a believable character? What are your feelings towards her?

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