Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by John Williams
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Extract from The Door
Copyright
About the Book
William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father’s farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely.
Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value. Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history, and reclaims the significance of an individual life. A reading experience like no other, itself a paean to the power of literature, it is a novel to be savoured.
About the Author
John Williams was born on August 29, 1922 in Clarksville, Texas. He served in the United States Army Air Force from 1942 to 1945 in China, Burma and India. The Swallow Press published his first novel, Nothing But the Night, in 1948, as well as his first book of poems, The Broken Landscape, in 1949. Macmillan published Williams’ second novel, Butcher’s Crossing, in 1960. After receiving his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Denver, and his Ph.D from the University of Missouri, Williams returned in 1954 to the University of Denver where he taught literature and the craft of writing for thirty years. In 1963 Williams received a fellowship to study at Oxford University where he received a Rockefeller grant that enabled him to travel and research in Italy for his last novel, Augustus, published in 1972. John Williams died in Fayetteville, Arkansas on March 4, 1994.
I seldom dream. When I do, I wake with a start, bathed in sweat. Then I lie back, waiting for my frantic heart to slow, and reflect on the overwhelming power of night’s spell. As a child and young woman, I had no dreams, either good or bad, but in old age I am confronted repeatedly with horrors from my past, all the more dismaying because compressed and compacted, and more terrible than anything I have lived through. In fact nothing has ever happened to me of the kind that now drags me screaming from my sleep.
My dreams are always the same, down to the finest detail, a vision that returns again and again. In this never-changing dream I am standing in our entrance hall at the foot of the stairs, facing the steel frame and reinforced shatterproof window of the outer door, and I am struggling to turn the lock. Outside in the street is an ambulance. Through the glass I can make out the shimmering silhouettes of the paramedics, distorted to unnatural size, their swollen faces haloed like moons. The key turns, but my efforts are in vain: I cannot open the door. But I must let the rescuers in, or they’ll be too late to save my patient. The lock refuses to budge, the door stands solid, as if welded to its steel frame. I shout for help, but none of the residents of our three-storey building responds; and they cannot because – I am suddenly aware – I’m mouthing vacantly, like a fish, and the horror of the dream reaches new depths as I realise that not only am I unable to open the door to the rescuers but I have also lost the power of speech.
It is at this point that I am woken by my own screaming. I switch on the light and try to control the desperate gasping for air which always seizes me after the dream. Around me stands the familiar furniture of our bedroom, and, over the bed itself, the family portraits, ikons in their high starched collars and braided coats, Hungarian Baroque and Beidermeier, my allseeing, all-knowing ancestors. They alone are witness to the number of times I have raced down during the night to open the door to the rescuers and the ambulance; and they alone know how often I have stood there while the silence of the earlymorning streets slowly gives way to the sounds of restlessly tossing trees and the cries of prowling cats that flood in through the open door, imagining what would happen if my struggle with the key proved in vain, and the lock failed to turn.
The portraits know everything, above all the thing I try hardest to forget. It is no dream. Once, just once in my life, not in the cerebral anaemia of sleep but in reality, a door did stand before me. That door opened. It was opened by someone who defended her solitude and impotent misery so fiercely that she would have kept that door shut though a flaming roof crackled over her head. I alone had the power to make her open that lock. In turning the key she put more trust in me than she ever did in God, and in that fateful moment I believed I was godlike – all-wise, judicious, benevolent and rational. We were both wrong: she who put her faith in me, and I who thought too well of myself.
Now, of course, none of that matters, because what happened is beyond remedy. So let them enter my dreams, the Kindly Ones, whenever they choose, with their high-heeled emergencyservice buskins and tragic-mask faces beneath their safety helmets, to stand like a chorus with double-edged swords round my bed. Every night I turn out the light to wait for them, for the bell of this nameless horror to clang in my sleeping ear, for its ringing tones to lead me towards that dream-door that never opens.
My religion has no place for the sort of personal confession where we acknowledge through the mouth of a priest that we are sinners, that we deserve damnation for breaking the Commandments in every possible way, and are then granted absolution without need for explanation or details.
I shall provide that explanation, those details.
This book is written not for God, who knows the secrets of my heart, nor for the shades of the all-seeing dead who witness both my waking life and my dreams. I write for other people. Thus far I have lived my life with courage, and I hope to die that way, bravely and without lies. But for that to be, I must speak out. I killed Emerence. The fact that I was trying to save her rather than destroy her changes nothing.
If you enjoyed Stoner, try another masterpiece by John Williams
JOHN WILLIAMS
BUTCHER’S CROSSING
BY THE AUTHOR OF STONER
Will Andrews is no academic. He longs for wildness, freedom, hope and vigour. He leaves Harvard and sets out for the West to discover a new way of living.
In a small town called Butcher’s Crossing he meets a hunter with a story of a lost herd of buffalo in a remote Colorado valley, just waiting to be taken by a team of men brave and crazy enough to find them. Will makes up his mind to be one of those men, but the journey, the killing, harsh conditions and sheer hard luck will test his mind and body to their limits.
Praise for Butcher’s Crossing
‘One of the finest books about the elusive nature of the West ever written’ Time Out
‘Harsh and relentless yet muted in tone, Butcher’s Crossing paved the way for Cormac McCarthy’ New York Times Book Review
‘Butcher’s Crossing is like a western by Joseph Conrad . . . wonderful . . . beautifully written’ David Nicholls
‘It is the novel’s immense visual power and tangibility of material detail, its fully realized sense of time and place, its telling incidents, its nimble and subtle resonance with the Bible, and its fleshed-out characters, that make it a very great work’ Boston Globe
BUY NOW IN VINTAGE CLASSICS PAPERBACK
Nothing But the Night
Butcher’s Crossing
Augustus
This book is dedicated to my friends and former colleagues in the Department of English at the University of Missouri. They will recognize at once that it is a work of fiction – that no character portrayed in it is based upon any person, living or dead, and that no event has its counterpart in the reality we knew at the University of Missouri. They will also realize that I have taken certain liberties, both physical and historical, with the University of Missouri, so that in effect it, too, is a fictional place.
Stoner
Introduction
On the opening page of this classic novel of university life, and the life of the heart and the mind, John Williams states bluntly the mark Stoner left behind: ‘Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound that evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.’ In plain prose, which seems able to reflect effortlessly every shade of thought and feeling, Williams proceeds to subvert that familiar worldly judgement by bringing Stoner, and everything linked to him – the time, the place, the people – vividly to life, the passion of the writing masked by a coolness and clarity of intelligence.
Stoner’s origins were as humble as the earth his parents worked. In the beginning they are shown as hardly more animate than their own clay, but in vivid scenes, such as their attendance at Stoner’s wedding to a banker’s daughter, their innate dignity and gentleness contradict that easy judgement, and towards the novel’s end Stoner himself seems to acquire their mute, patient strength.
Stoner was an only child, and though good at school had no other expectation than to one day take over the fields he was already helping to work. One evening after the day’s toil his father said, ‘Country agent came by last week...Says they have a new school at the University of Columbia. They call it a college of agriculture. Says he thinks you ought to go.’
At the university he earns his bed and board by working on a nearby farm owned by a first cousin of his mother. This is bare board and hard, brutal work, but he gets through it stoically, in much the same way as he gets through the science courses at the university. ‘The course in soil chemistry caught his interest in a general way...But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before.’
The instructor Archer Sloane changes his life. He abandons science to study literature. At the prompting of his mentor, he stays on at the university, labouring on the cousin’s farm while obtaining his Master of Arts. At his graduation he tries to tell his parents that he will not be returning to their farm when they come to attend the degree ceremony. ‘If you think you ought to stay here and study your books, then that’s what you ought to do,’ his father concludes towards the end of that moving scene.
The novel then details the outwardly undistinguished career of an assistant professor of English within the walls of the university: his teaching, his reading and his writing, his friendships, his falling in love with an idealised woman, his slow and bitter discovery of that person once they marry, and how their gentle, pliable daughter becomes the wife’s chosen battleground. Outside the marriage, Stoner’s affair with a young teacher becomes entwined in bitter, vindictive university politics.
This love affair between two intelligent people is brought to life with a rare delicacy. A healthy sensuality is set against their vulnerability as they discover the glory of the first day of the world. ‘The life they had together was one that neither of them had really imagined. They grew from passion to lust to a deep sensuality that renewed itself from moment to moment.’ They study, they converse, they play. ‘They learned to be together without speaking and they got the habit of repose.’ Not only did they find pleasure in one another but meaning, which is drawn with playful, affectionate irony. ‘Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.’
Integral as it is to the plot, the love affair serves more importantly in the overall vision as a source of light in the darkness of Stoner’s marriage, a powerful suggestion of the happiness that might have been.
Stoner’s wife is a type that can be glimpsed in much American writing, through such different sensibilities as O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald – beautiful, unstable, educated to observe the surfaces of a privileged and protected society – but never can that type of wife have been revealed as remorselessly as here:
She was educated upon the premise that she would be protected from the gross events that life might thrust in her way, and upon the premise that she had no other duty than to be a graceful and accomplished accessory to that protection, since she belonged to a social and economic class to which protection was an almost sacred obligation...Her moral training, both at the schools she attended and at home, was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual. The sexuality, however, was indirect and unacknowledged; therefore it suffused every other part of her education, which received most of its energy from that recessive and unspoken moral force. She learned that she would have duties towards her husband and family and that she must fulfill them...Her needlepoint was delicate and useless, she painted misty landscapes of thin water-color washes, and she played the piano with a forceless but precise hand; yet she was ignorant of her own bodily functions, she had never been alone to care for her own self one day of her life, nor could it ever have occurred to her that she might become responsible for the well-being of another...Upon that inner privacy William Stoner now intruded.
They marry without knowledge of one another and with nothing in common but desire. Their sexual incompatibility is described with the same chasteness as the deep sensuality of the lovers:
When he returned, Edith was in bed with the covers pulled to her chin, her face turned upward, her eyes closed, a thin frown creasing her forehead. Silently, as if she were asleep, Stoner undressed and got into bed beside her. For several moments he lay with his desire, which had become an impersonal thing, belonging to himself alone. He spoke to Edith, as if to find a haven for what he felt; she did not answer. He put his hand upon her and felt beneath the thin cloth of her nightgown the flesh he had longed for. He moved his hand upon her; she did not stir; her frown deepened. Again he spoke, saying her name to silence; then he moved his body upon her, gentle in his clumsiness. When he touched the softness of her thighs she turned her head sharply away and lifted her arm to cover her eyes. She made no sound.
Her sexuality then changes violently when she decides she wants a child and ceases completely as soon as she is pregnant. Soon after their daughter is born, the child becomes the focus of the mother’s inner turmoil, her unresolved hatred of Stoner. If the portrait has a flaw, it is in its remorselessness, yet such is the clarity of the understanding that we come to accept it simply as the way things are, in the same way as the love affair becomes the way things ought to have been.
In the many minor portraits the touch is equally sure and psychologically astute: ‘Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance. Every ten or fifteen minutes he removed a large gold watch from his vest pocket, looked at it, and nodded to himself.’ There are Stoner’s friends, the brilliant David Masters, who gives voice to some of John Williams’s own views on the nature of a university, goes to the war and is killed in France; the worldly Gordon Finch who returns from the war with military honours to the university, where he rises to be dean of the faculty. Finch remains Stoner’s loyal if sometimes exasperated ally and protector within the university, and his uncomplicated friendship is there for the whole of Stoner’s life. We witness, too, the slow decline of Stoner’s mentor, Archer Sloane, and the rise of his replacement, Hollis Lomax, who becomes Stoner’s implacable enemy. In a novel of brilliant portraits, that of Hollis Lomax is the most complex. Some of the scenes of conflict are almost unbearable in their intensity.
Stoner is also a novel about work, the hard unyielding work of the farms; the work of living within a destructive marriage and bringing up a daughter with patient mutability in a poisoned household; the work of teaching literature to mostly unresponsive students. How Williams manages to dramatise this almost impossible material is itself a small miracle.
In a rare interview given late in life, John Williams says of Stoner:
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. He was a witness to values that are important...The important thing in the novel to me is Stoner’s sense of a job. Teaching to him is a job – a job in the good and honourable sense of the word. 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. And if you love something, you’re going to understand it. And if you understand it, you’re going to learn a lot. The lack of that love defines a bad teacher...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.
John Williams is best known for his novels, Nothing But the Night, Stoner, Butcher’s Crossing, and Augustus, for which he won the National Book Award in 1973. He also published two volumes of verse and edited a classic anthology of English Renaissance poetry. The novels are not only remarkable for their style but also for the diversity of their settings. No two novels are alike except for the clarity of the prose; they could easily pass for the work of four different writers. In the course of the long and fascinating interview that Williams gave to Brian Wooley from which I have quoted his remarks about Stoner, it grows clear that of the four novels Stoner is the most personal, in that it is closely linked to John Williams’s own life and career, without in any way being autobiographical. The interview was given in 1985, the year Williams retired as Professor of English from the University of Denver where he had taught for thirty years. Pressed towards the end of the interview he 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, all of which can be predicated and measured. Then, more specifically, Williams complains about the changes in the teaching of literature and the attitude to the text ‘as if a novel or poem is something to be studied and understood rather than experienced.’ Wooley then suggests playfully, ‘It’s to be exegeted, in other words.’ ‘Yes. As if it were a kind of puzzle.’ ‘And literature is written to be entertaining?’ Wooley suggests again, ‘Absolutely. My God, to read without joy is stupid.’
There is entertainment of a very high order to be found in Stoner, what Williams himself describes as ‘an escape into reality’ as well as pain and joy. The clarity of the prose is in itself an unadulterated joy. Set a generation back from Williams’s own, the novel is distanced not only by this clarity and intelligence but by the way the often unpromising material is so coolly dramatised. The small world of the university opens out to war and politics, to the years of the Depression and the millions who ‘once walked erect in their own identities’, and then to the whole of life.
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. ‘It [love] was a passion neither of the mind nor of the heart, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance.’
JOHN MCGAHERN
2002
1
WILLIAM STONER ENTERED the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses. When he died his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University library. This manuscript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: “Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues.”
An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.
He was born in 1891 on a small farm in central Missouri near the village of Booneville, some forty miles from Columbia, the home of the University. Though his parents were young at the time of his birth—his father twenty-five, his mother barely twenty—Stoner thought of them, even when he was a boy, as old. At thirty his father looked fifty; stooped by labor, he gazed without hope at the arid patch of land that sustained the family from one year to the next. His mother regarded her life patiently, as if it were a long moment that she had to endure. Her eyes were pale and blurred, and the tiny wrinkles around them were enhanced by thin graying hair worn straight over her head and caught in a bun at the back.
From the earliest time he could remember, William Stoner had his duties. At the age of six he milked the bony cows, slopped the pigs in the sty a few yards from the house, and gathered small eggs from a flock of spindly chickens. And even when he started attending the rural school eight miles from the farm, his day, from before dawn until after dark, was filled with work of one sort or another. At seventeen his shoulders were already beginning to stoop beneath the weight of his occupation.
It was a lonely household, of which he was an only child, and it was bound together by the necessity of its toil. In the evenings the three of them sat in the small kitchen lighted by a single kerosene lamp, staring into the yellow flame; often during the hour or so between supper and bed, the only sound that could be heard was the weary movement of a body in a straight chair and the soft creak of a timber giving a little beneath the age of the house.
The house was built in a crude square, and the unpainted timbers sagged around the porch and doors. It had with the years taken on the colors of the dry land—gray and brown, streaked with white. On one side of the house was a long parlor, sparsely furnished with straight chairs and a few hewn tables, and a kitchen, where the family spent most of its little time together. On the other side were two bedrooms, each furnished with an iron bedstead enameled white, a single straight chair, and a table, with a lamp and a wash basin on it. The floors were of unpainted plank, unevenly spaced and cracking with age, up through which dust steadily seeped and was swept back each day by Stoner’s mother.
At school he did his lessons as if they were chores only somewhat less exhausting than those around the farm. When he finished high school in the spring of 1910, he expected to take over more of the work in the fields; it seemed to him that his father grew slower and more weary with the passing months.
But one evening in late spring, after the two men had spent a full day hoeing corn, his father spoke to him in the kitchen, after the supper dishes had been cleared away.
“County agent come by last week.”
William looked up from the red-and-white-checked oilcloth spread smoothly over the round kitchen table. He did not speak.
“Says they have a new school at the University in Columbia. They call it a College of Agriculture. Says he thinks you ought to go. It takes four years”
“Four years,” William said. “Does it cost money?”
“You could work your room and board,” his father said. “Your ma has a first cousin owns a place just outside Columbia. There would be books and things. I could send you two or three dollars a month.”
William spread his hands on the tablecloth, which gleamed dully under the lamplight. He had never been farther from home than Booneville, fifteen miles away. He swallowed to steady his voice.
“Think you could manage the place all by yourself?” he asked.
“Your ma and me could manage. I’d plant the upper twenty in wheat; that would cut down the hand work.”
William looked at his mother. “Ma?” he asked.
She said tonelessly, “You do what your pa says.”
“You really want me to go?” he asked, as if he half hoped for a denial. “You really want me to?”
His father shifted his weight on the chair. He looked at his thick, callused fingers, into the cracks of which soil had penetrated so deeply that it could not be washed away. He laced his fingers together and held them up from the table, almost in an attitude of prayer.
“I never had no schooling to speak of,” he said, looking at his hands. “I started working a farm when I finished sixth grade. Never held with schooling when I was a young ’un. But now I don’t know. Seems like the land gets drier and harder to work every year; it ain’t rich like it was when I was a boy. County agent says they got new ideas, ways of doing things they teach you at the University. Maybe he’s right. Sometimes when I’m working the field I get to thinking.” He paused. His fingers tightened upon themselves, and his clasped hands dropped to the table. “I get to thinking—” He scowled at his hands and shook his head. “You go on to the University come fall. Your ma and me will manage.”
It was the longest speech he had ever heard his father make. That fall he went to Columbia and enrolled in the University as a freshman in the College of Agriculture.
He came to Columbia with a new black broadcloth suit ordered from the catalogue of Sears & Roebuck and paid for with his mother’s egg money, a worn greatcoat that had belonged to his father, a pair of blue serge trousers that once a month he had worn to the Methodist church in Booneville, two white shirts, two changes of work clothing, and twenty-five dollars in cash, which his father had borrowed from a neighbor against the fall wheat. He started walking from Booneville, where in the early morning his father and mother brought him on the farm’s flat-bed, mule-drawn wagon.
It was a hot fall day, and the road from Booneville to Columbia was dusty; he had been walking for nearly an hour before a goods wagon came up beside him and the driver asked him if he wanted a ride. He nodded and got up on the wagon seat. His serge trousers were red with dust to his knees, and his sun- and wind-browned face was caked with dirt, where the road dust had mingled with his sweat. During the long ride he kept brushing at his trousers with awkward hands and running his fingers through his straight sandy hair, which would not lie flat on his head.
They got to Columbia in the late afternoon. The driver let Stoner off at the outskirts of town and pointed to a group of buildings shaded by tall elms. “That’s your University,” he said. “That’s where you’ll be going to school.”
For several minutes after the man had driven off, Stoner stood unmoving, staring at the complex of buildings. He had never before seen anything so imposing. The red brick buildings stretched upward from a broad field of green that was broken by stone walks and small patches of garden. Beneath his awe, he had a sudden sense of security and serenity he had never felt before. Though it was late, he walked for many minutes about the edges of the campus, only looking, as if he had no right to enter.
It was nearly dark when he asked a passer-by directions to Ashland Gravel, the road that would lead him to the farm owned by Jim Foote, the first cousin of his mother for whom he was to work; and it was after dark when he got to the white two-storied frame house where he was to live. He had not seen the Footes before, and he felt strange going to them so late.
They greeted him with a nod, inspecting him closely. After a moment, during which Stoner stood awkwardly in the doorway, Jim Foote motioned him into a small dim parlor crowded with overstuffed furniture and bric-a-brac on dully gleaming tables. He did not sit.
“Et supper?” Foote asked.
“No, sir,” Stoner answered.
Mrs. Foote crooked an index finger at him and padded away. Stoner followed her through several rooms into a kitchen, where she motioned him to sit at a table. She put a pitcher of milk and several squares of cold cornbread before him. He sipped the milk, but his mouth, dry from excitement, would not take the bread.
Foote came into the room and stood beside his wife. He was a small man, not more than five feet three inches, with a lean face and a sharp nose. His wife was four inches taller, and heavy; rimless spectacles hid her eyes, and her thin lips were tight. The two of them watched hungrily as he sipped his milk.
“Feed and water the livestock, slop the pigs in the morning,” Foote said rapidly.
Stoner looked at him blankly. “What?”
“That’s what you do in the morning,” Foote said, “before you leave for your school. Then in the evening you feed and slop again, gather the eggs, milk the cows. Chop firewood when you find time. Weekends, you help me with whatever I’m doing.”
“Yes, sir,” Stoner said.
Foote studied him for a moment. “College,” he said and shook his head.
So for nine months’ room and board he fed and watered the livestock, slopped pigs, gathered eggs, milked cows, and chopped firewood. He also plowed and harrowed fields, dug stumps (in the winter breaking through three inches of frozen soil), and churned butter for Mrs. Foote, who watched him with her head bobbing in grim approval as the wooden churner splashed up and down through the milk.
He was quartered on an upper floor that had once been a storeroom; his only furniture was a black iron bedstead with sagging frames that supported a thin feather mattress, a broken table that held a kerosene lamp, a straight chair that sat unevenly on the floor, and a large box that he used as a desk. In the winter the only heat he got seeped up through the floor from the rooms below; he wrapped himself in the tattered quilts and blankets allowed him and blew on his hands so that they could turn the pages of his books without tearing them.
He did his work at the University as he did his work on the farm—thoroughly, conscientiously, with neither pleasure nor distress. At the end of his first year his grade average was slightly below a B; he was pleased that it was no lower and not concerned that it was no higher. He was aware that he had learned things that he had not known before, but this meant to him only that he might do as well in his second year as he had done in his first.
The summer after his first year of college he returned to his father’s farm and helped with the crops. Once his father asked him how he liked school, and he replied that he liked it fine. His father nodded and did not mention the matter again.
It was not until he returned for his second year that William Stoner learned why he had come to college.
By his second year he was a familiar figure on the campus. In every season he wore the same black broadcloth suit, white shirt, and string tie; his wrists protruded from the sleeves of the jacket, and the trousers rode awkwardly about his legs, as if it were a uniform that had once belonged to someone else.
His hours of work increased with his employers’ growing indolence, and he spent the long evenings in his room methodically doing his class assignments; he had begun the sequence that would lead him to a Bachelor of Science degree in the College of Agriculture, and during this first semester of his second year he had two basic sciences, a course from the school of Agriculture in soil chemistry, and a course that was rather perfunctorily required of all University students—a semester survey of English literature.
After the first few weeks he had little difficulty with the science courses; there was so much work to be done, so many things to be remembered. The course in soil chemistry caught his interest in a general way; it had not occurred to him that the brownish clods with which he had worked for most of his life were anything other than what they appeared to be, and he began vaguely to see that his growing knowledge of them might be useful when he returned to his father’s farm. But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before.
The instructor was a man of middle age, in his early fifties; his name was Archer Sloane, and he came to his task of teaching with a seeming disdain and contempt, as if he perceived between his knowledge and what he could say a gulf so profound that he would make no effort to close it. He was feared and disliked by most of his students, and he responded with a detached, ironic amusement. He was a man of middle height, with a long, deeply lined face, cleanly shaven; he had an impatient gesture of running his fingers through the shock of his gray curling hair. His voice was flat and dry, and it came through barely moving lips without expression or intonation; but his long thin fingers moved with grace and persuasion, as if giving to the words a shape that his voice could not.
Away from the classroom, doing his chores about the farm or blinking against the dim lamplight as he studied in his windowless attic room, Stoner was often aware that the image of this man had risen up before the eye of his mind. He had difficulty summoning up the face of any other of his instructors or remembering anything very specific about any other of his classes; but always on the threshold of his awareness waited the figure of Archer Sloane, and his dry voice, and his contemptuously offhand words about some passage from Beowulf, or some couplet of Chaucer’s.
He found that he could not handle the survey as he did his other courses. Though he remembered the authors and their works and their dates and their influences, he nearly failed his first examination; and he did little better on his second. He read and reread his literature assignments so frequently that his work in other courses began to suffer; and still the words he read were words on pages, and he could not see the use of what he did.
And he pondered the words that Archer Sloane spoke in class, as if beneath their flat, dry meaning he might discover a clue that would lead him where he was intended to go; he hunched forward over the desk-top of a chair too small to hold him comfortably, grasping the edges of the desk-top so tightly that his knuckles showed white against his brown hard skin; he frowned intently and gnawed at his underlip. But as Stoner’s and his classmates’ attention grew more desperate, Archer Sloane’s contempt grew more compelling. And once that contempt erupted into anger and was directed at William Stoner alone.
The class had read two plays by Shakespeare and was ending the week with a study of the sonnets. The students were edgy and puzzled, half frightened at the tension growing between themselves and the slouching figure that regarded them from behind the lectern. Sloane had read aloud to them the seventy-third sonnet; his eyes roved about the room and his lips tightened in a humorless smile.
“What does the sonnet mean?” he asked abruptly, and paused, his eyes searching the room with a grim and almost pleased hopelessness. “Mr. Wilbur?” There was no answer. “Mr. Schmidt?” Someone coughed. Sloane turned his dark bright eyes upon Stoner. “Mr. Stoner, what does the sonnet mean?”
Stoner swallowed and tried to open his mouth.
“It is a sonnet, Mr. Stoner,” Sloane said dryly, “a poetical composition of fourteen lines, with a certain pattern I am sure you have memorized. It is written in the English language, which I believe you have been speaking for some years. Its author is William Shakespeare, a poet who is dead, but who nevertheless occupies a position of some importance in the minds of a few.” He looked at Stoner for a moment more, and then his eyes went blank as they fixed unseeingly beyond the class. Without looking at his book he spoke the poem again; and his voice deepened and softened, as if the words and sounds and rhythms had for a moment become himself:
“That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourisht by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
In a moment of silence, someone cleared his throat. Sloane repeated the lines, his voice becoming flat, his own again.
“This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
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?”
William Stoner realized that for several moments he had been holding his breath. He expelled it gently, minutely aware of his clothing moving upon his body as his breath went out of his lungs. He looked away from Sloane about the room. Light slanted from the windows and settled upon the faces of his fellow students, so that the illumination seemed to come from within them and go out against a dimness; a student blinked, and a thin shadow fell upon a cheek whose down had caught the sunlight. Stoner became aware that his fingers were unclenching their hard grip on his desk-top. He turned his hands about under his gaze, marveling at their brownness, at the intricate way the nails fit into his blunt finger-ends; he thought he could feel the blood flowing invisibly through the tiny veins and arteries, throbbing delicately and precariously from his fingertips through his body.
Sloane was speaking again. “What does he say to you, Mr. Stoner? What does his sonnet mean?”
Stoner’s eyes lifted slowly and reluctantly. “It means,” he said, and with a small movement raised his hands up toward the air; he felt his eyes glaze over as they sought the figure of Archer Sloane. “It means,” he said again, and could not finish what he had begun to say.
Sloane looked at him curiously. Then he nodded abruptly and said, “Class is dismissed.” Without looking at anyone he turned and walked out of the room.
William Stoner was hardly aware of the students about him who rose grumbling and muttering from their seats and shuffled out of the room. For several minutes after they left he sat unmoving, staring out before him at the narrow planked flooring that had been worn bare of varnish by the restless feet of students he would never see or know. He slid his own feet across the floor, hearing the dry rasp of wood on his soles, and feeling the roughness through the leather. Then he too got up and went slowly out of the room.
The thin chill of the late fall day cut through his clothing. He looked around him, at the bare gnarled branches of the trees that curled and twisted against the pale sky. Students, hurrying across the campus to their classes, brushed against him; he heard the mutter of their voices and the click of their heels upon the stone paths, and saw their faces, flushed by the cold, bent downward against a slight breeze. He looked at them curiously, as if he had not seen them before, and felt very distant from them and very close to them. He held the feeling to him as he hurried to his next class, and held it through the lecture by his professor in soil chemistry, against the droning voice that recited things to be written in notebooks and remembered by a process of drudgery that even now was becoming unfamiliar to him.
In the second semester of that school year William Stoner dropped his basic science courses and interrupted his Ag School sequence; he took introductory courses in philosophy and ancient history and two courses in English literature. In the summer he returned again to his parents’ farm and helped his father with the crops and did not mention his work at the University.
When he was much older, he was to look back upon his last two undergraduate years as if they were an unreal time that belonged to someone else, a time that passed, not in the regular flow to which he was used, but in fits and starts. One moment was juxtaposed against another, yet isolated from it, and he had the feeling that he was removed from time, watching as it passed before him like a great unevenly turned diorama.
He became conscious of himself in a way that he had not done before. Sometimes he looked at himself in a mirror, at the long face with its thatch of dry brown hair, and touched his sharp cheekbones; he saw the thin wrists that protruded inches out of his coat sleeves; and he wondered if he appeared as ludicrous to others as he did to himself.
He had no plans for the future, and he spoke to no one of his uncertainty. He continued to work at the Footes’ for his room and board, but he no longer worked the long hours of his first two years at the University. For three hours every afternoon and for half a day on the weekends he allowed himself to be used as Jim and Serena Foote desired; the rest of the time he claimed as his own.
Some of this time he spent in his little attic room atop the Foote house; but as often as he could, after his classes were over and his work at the Footes’ done, he returned to the University. Sometimes, in the evenings, he wandered in the long open quadrangle, among couples who strolled together and murmured softly; though he did not know any of them, and though he did not speak to them, he felt a kinship with them. Sometimes he stood in the center of the quad, looking at the five huge columns in front of Jesse Hall that thrust upward into the night out of the cool grass; he had learned that these columns were the remains of the original main building of the University, destroyed many years ago by fire. Grayish silver in the moonlight, bare and pure, they seemed to him to represent the way of life he had embraced, as a temple represents a god.
In the University library he wandered through the stacks, among the thousands of books, inhaling the musty odor of leather, cloth, and drying page as if it were an exotic incense. Sometimes he would pause, remove a volume from the shelves, and hold it for a moment in his large hands, which tingled at the still unfamiliar feel of spine and board and unresisting page. Then he would leaf through the book, reading a paragraph here and there, his stiff fingers careful as they turned the pages, as if in their clumsiness they might tear and destroy what they took such pains to uncover.
He had no friends, and for the first time in his life he became aware of loneliness. Sometimes, in his attic room at night, he would look up from a book he was reading and gaze in the dark corners of his room, where the lamplight flickered against the shadows. If he stared long and intently, the darkness gathered into a light, which took the insubstantial shape of what he had been reading. And he would feel that he was out of time, as he had felt that day in class when Archer Sloane had spoken to him. The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in a way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class, who found a local habitation in a large university in Columbia, Missouri, and who walked unheeding in a midwestern air.
In a year he learned Greek and Latin well enough to read simple texts; often his eyes were red and burning from strain and lack of sleep. Sometimes he thought of himself as he had been a few years before and was astonished by the memory of that strange figure, brown and passive as the earth from which it had emerged. He thought of his parents, and they were nearly as strange as the child they had borne; he felt a mixed pity for them and a distant love.
Near the middle of his fourth year at the University, Archer Sloane stopped him one day after class and asked him to drop by his office for a chat.
It was winter, and a low damp midwestern mist floated over the campus. Even at midmorning the thin branches of the dogwood trees glistened with hoarfrost, and the black vines that trailed up the great columns before Jesse Hall were rimmed with iridescent crystals that winked against the grayness. Stoner’s greatcoat was so shabby and worn that he had decided not to wear it to see Sloane even though the weather was freezing. He was shivering as he hurried up the walk and up the wide stone steps that led into Jesse Hall.
After the cold, the heat inside the building was intense. The grayness outside trickled through the windows and glassed doors on either side of the hall, so that the yellow tiled floors glowed brighter than the gray light upon them, and the great oaken columns and the rubbed walls gleamed from their dark. Shuffling footsteps hissed upon the floors, and a murmur of voices was muted by the great expanse of the hall; dim figures moved slowly, mingling and parting; and the oppressive air gathered the smell of the oiled walls and the wet odor of woolen clothing. Stoner went up the smooth marble stairs to Archer Sloane’s second-floor office. He knocked on the closed door, heard a voice, and went in.
The office was long and narrow, lighted by a single window at the far end. Shelves crowded with books rose to the high ceiling. Near the window a desk was wedged, and before this desk, half turned and outlined darkly against the light, sat Archer Sloane.
“Mr. Stoner,” Sloane said dryly, half rising and indicating a leather-covered chair facing him. Stoner sat down.
“I have been looking through your records.” Sloane paused and lifted a folder from his desk, regarding it with detached irony. “I hope you do not mind my inquisitiveness.”
Stoner wet his lips and shifted on the chair. He tried to fold his large hands together so that they would be invisible. “No, sir,” he said in a husky voice.
Sloane nodded. “Good. I note that you began your course of studies here as an agriculture student and that sometime during your sophomore year you switched your program to literature. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir,” Stoner said.
Sloane leaned back in his chair and gazed up at the square of light that came in from the high small window. He tapped his fingertips together and turned back to the young man who sat stiffly in front of him.
‘The official purpose of this conference is to inform you that you will have to make a formal change of study program, declaring your intention to abandon your initial course of study and declare your final one. It’s a matter of five minutes or so at the registrar’s office. You will take care of that, won’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Stoner said.
“But as you may have guessed, that is not the reason I asked you to drop by. Do you mind if I inquire a little about your future plans?”
“No, sir,” Stoner said. He looked at his hands, which were twisted tightly together.
Sloane touched the folder of papers that he had dropped on his desk. “I gather that you were a bit older than the ordinary student when you first entered the University. Nearly twenty, I believe?”
“Yes, sir,” Stoner said.
“And at that time your plans were to undertake the sequence offered by the school of Agriculture?”