chapter VIII: "you really do hate me, don't you, Edith?"

By the time his parents died, Stoner had already begun the process of forming an intentional, deliberate self. In reflections on previous chapters I'd pointed out Stoner's apparent lack of intention or real integrity; in his youth, self knowledge came as a surprise and direction came from external forces. 

Edith was much less well prepared than her husband was in the face of death. Edith's father's suicide awakens Edith. She looks at her own life and tries to grasp its meaning and direction. She destroys in secret all the things her father ever gave her. In the two months she stayed with her mother, away from Stoner and their daughter, Gracie, Edith cultivated a new style for herself. She had her hair cut short in a fashionable (if not altogether flattering) bob; she learned to smoke and how to apply makeup. She burned her old clothes and took out a loan from her mother to buy an entirely new wardrobe so she could be a new woman. 

Who hasn't hoped at some point that a new look could transform you into a new, more powerful, more resilient, more attractive version of yourself?

Armed with a bold new look, Edith began to be more aggressive in her relationships with her husband and daughter. When Stoner's students came round, she insisted on serving them tea and snacks--and then turning the conversation to herself so that they became confused and embarrassed and stopped their visits. When Gracie and her father shared a moment of loving, joyous laughter between them, Edith began to monopolize all of Gracie's time so as to eliminate the possibility of a flourishing father-daughter relationship. 

Edith's self-creation could not be more different than Stoner's version. Stoner, growing into himself, begins to teach with a passion and excitement that had previously eluded him. He plans a new book project and begins his research with pleasure. He loves caring for his daughter, building the relationship between them. In short, as Stoner develops himself, he becomes creative and interested and as a result, he becomes increasingly interesting. When she returns to Columbia in her "improved" guise, Edith dabbles in the arts--painting, piano-playing, sculpture, community theater. But Edith does not create; Edith cultivates a destructive orientation and she carefully aims her sabotage wherever her husband has begun to create. 

Does Edith see this in herself? This is what I want to know. She wants something different, something more powerful and purposive. She gets that, certainly. But is it destruction and sabotage that she wanted? Does she use them to strike at what terrifies her? Does she just want control instead of any real power? Watching Edith is heartbreaking. Edith--you never had to do this. You never had to choose this. 

Chapter VI: "So it was himself that he was attempting to define as he worked on his study."

I confess that I find this novel uncomfortable to read. It is so bare, so honest and forthright. It is not that it lacks polish, because the language is pristine, perfect. It is rather that this limpid language presents such a direct and unromantic picture of a life and the relationships in it. "It's too much," I keep thinking to myself, "I shouldn't be seeing this, shouldn't be a witness to this."

Since the wedding of William Stoner to Edith, every time the narration turns to Edith, I feel such heartbreak: I want to sit her down and preach at her, "You don't have to do this, Edith. You don't have to choose this." She refuses, down to the core of her, to let herself be loved by her husband. Her marriage is a deal she has struck with ...Stoner? her parents? the universe? And because she has made a deal, she puts in the work, scrubbing the floors clean of invisible dirt until her fingers crack and bleed, laboriously and ineptly sewing and hanging childish curtains, pushing herself to anxiety attacks to entertain guests she despises. When her husband, noting her excessive work, her loneliness, her sadness and disappointment, tries to help, she grows colder and more distant. Maybe she would respect or admire him more if he held himself cold, aloof, and demanding. But he tries. Earnestly, clumsily, haltingly, but he tries. And every time he tries, I wonder at the risk and the hope in him. The narrator tells us that after a year he stopped hoping his marriage would improve, but the narration shows this for a lie: when Edith wants a child, he hopes; when the child loves him, he hopes; when he makes assistant professor, he hopes.

Maybe that's really what disturbs me in this novel--all this groundless, naked hope. It is so hard to hope. Hope, I think, in our current collective imagination, is just a high-sounding word for fantasy, for weakness, and for wishing. You hope things will work out, but what, we sneer, are you doing about it? But hope is already doing. The hoping is itself the doing. Hope is not the relinquishment of achievement, but rather its ground. Hope is already an achievement. This is why Kierkegaard can write, earnestly, that "Love hopes all things and--yet is never put to shame."

post on chapter IV coming soon!

One chapter sets up a whole failed marriage. We've only seen the beginning but what a breathtakingly difficult beginning it is. More in a day or so--

Chapter III: "Her moral training, both at the schools she attended and at home, was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent..."

My mother must be one of the least selfish persons I know. I am humbled to recall how hard she worked to keep our family solvent on my father's not-quite-large-enough paycheck. She grew berries and vegetables in the back yard so she could can the vegetables and put up jars upon jars of jam and jelly. With the next door neighbor, a comfortable Latvian grandmother, she put up quarts of garlicky dill pickles, apple sauce, apple butter, pears and plums. She scoured all the thrift stores in the Milwaukee area to find clothes for us that were as fashionable as possible. She bought antique tables, desks, dressers, and chairs for pennies at estate and rummage sales and refinished them so they would be beautiful and functional. She (and I) spent hours pouring insulation into the walls of our house by hand to reduce heating costs and save on the labor costs of hiring a professional. For all this she reserved very few luxuries for herself: She always had cigarettes. She always had a reserve of peanut M&Ms that we were never to touch. And she drank little else but Tab, a diet cola most people have long forgotten.

I am not sure my mother sees her hard work as sacrifice. If I were to thank her for all she did, she's make some joke and laugh it off. If I insisted, she'd become uncomfortable. If pressed, I think the most she could say would be something along the lines of "What else was I going to do? Anyone would have done that." It is not true that anyone would have done it. My father, for example, was only pushed into it by my mother's firm lead. And many who might have worked so hard and enjoyed so few treats might still have complained or made a martyr of him- or herself or made those for whom he or she worked to feel guilty for benefiting from that work.

Nevertheless, when I look back at my upbringing and when I think of my moral training (such as it was), I see very little that was positive in nature. What positive rules or values was I taught? My mother was absolutely amazing at personal finance. (Before she married, she drove a Mustang. She had two, one after the other. She paid for both in full in cash. On factory wages. Badass.) But I can't recall a single conversation either of my parents had with me or my siblings about how to create a budget or how to follow one. Maybe they thought we'd just pick it up naturally, without having to be taught, much like the way I learned how to read.

Being good was a matter of not doing: don't hit your brother or sister; don't talk back; don't get bad grades; don't touch things that aren't yours; don't say naughty words. Etc. I have no recollection of positive moral training. Be this kind of person. These kinds of attitudes are good ones. Pay attention to these sorts of things. Instead of "Do this, for these reasons," I remember learning "Don't do this"--and not many reasons.

What are we to make of Edith, then, except that she is beautiful and without much personality? At the end of the chapter, after it has been determined that Edith and Stoner will marry, Edith runs after him and, her face pale with emotion, calls Stoner by his given name for the first time: "I'll try to be a good wife to you, William. I'll try." Were you touched when you read that? Did you feel for Edith a little? She's not a wicked person. Not a bad or malicious person. She can articulate a desire and intention to be a good wife. Remember this.

Chapter II: "The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has aimed his life to build."

William Stoner was not one of those persons who came to college to hone the passions he already felt. Stoner had no real passions before the middle of his sophomore year. Even after his mentor, Archer Sloane, gently but firmly told him that his passion was literature and that his purpose was to become a teacher, we the readers still don't get to see a whole lot of passion in Stoner's life. Stoner has to grow into passion. He does it in fits and starts, clumsily, without any real finesse. If we could see more, we'd see the vulnerability of it; the rawness.

Like many doctoral students, Stoner got to teach freshman the basics of his field--in his case, he got to teach composition and grammar classes. Like many doctoral students, Stoner felt the glorious possibilities before him: he would be the instructor that shows his students (as no one ever before had shown them!) the life-altering principles underlying composition. He would connect (as no one ever before had connected!) grammar and the structure of a sentence, of a paragraph, to the coherence and intelligibility of life itself. He would impress upon them (as they never before had been so impressed!) the utterly basic, life-splitting, life-giving qualities of solid prose. He would revolutionize their lives.

Like most teachers, particularly young, inexperienced teachers, Stoner does none of these things. In the classroom, the nearly desperate passion he feels never makes itself felt outside his own heart (or outside his own head). His students remain unaware (or unconvinced) of the aliveness in their gangly young instructor. In his own head, the material was exciting, dramatic, dynamic. But his out-loud voice betrayed him: he was dull, flat, halting. Not actually bad. But certainly not very good.

Like many doctoral students, Stoner meets his best friends in graduate school. We readers have not yet heard whether Stoner had any friends. In his doctoral studies he makes a few friends. And when those friends--the first friends of Stoner's "new" life as an academic--join the war efforts, they encourage him to join as well.

Stoner is conflicted. He doesn't want to be left behind. He doesn't want to come off a coward. But he isn't sure. So he mentions it to Sloane. We don't know what he said to Sloane--we don't know whether he asked for advice or whether he tried to "casually" bring up the subject of war. We do know Sloane's reaction. Sloane comes off a twentieth-century Socrates when he says "if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that's left is the brute, the creature that we--you and I and others like us--have brought up from the slime." In the Crito, at 47e, Socrates asks his long-time friend "is life worth living for us with that part of us corrupted that unjust action harms and just action benefits? Or do we think that part of us, whatever it is, that is concerned with justice and injustice, is inferior to the body?"

Both Sloane and Socrates are concerned with the part of both the individual human soul and human nature as a whole that is harmed by injustice, violence, ignorance, and careless reasoning. Plato links Socrates to Achilles at the beginning of Crito. Socrates, like Achilles, chooses the shorter but more honorable life. Sloane reminds Stoner that "there are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and are not recorded in the annals of history." What kind of life will Stoner want to build? If we would have integrity, then it is a requirement that we have some goal, some vision for the life we want to have. Will Stoner's life turn out to be a life of integrity?

Chapter I: Did you cry with Stoner's mother?

In the first chapter, William Stoner doesn't come off as a very strong person, as one in charge of his own life. He went off to college on his parents' command. It wouldn't have occurred to Stoner to go to college, any more than it occurred to him later to stay for a master's degree or a doctoral degree; or any more than it occurred to him that he might stay as faculty at the University of Missouri. It certainly didn't seem to occur to Stoner to stand up for himself to his aunt and uncle Foote while they watched him work their farm for room and board.

Stoner's passivity (or apparent passivity) extends to his capacity for attention. He takes the sophomore literature survey because he must, and it bothers him. He doesn't even realize it bothers him until his professor singles him out one day in the classroom and tells him what he doesn't know: "Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you across three hundred years, Mr. Stoner; do you hear him?" Even then, the long hours puzzling over the poetry and prose that resisted his understanding, the failed exams, the apparently sudden and surprising switch from the agricultural science sequence to a course of study in the liberal arts appear to be absent from Stoner's attention, from his conscious awareness. They aren't part of any deliberate plan on Stoner's part. They are just things that are happening to him, episodes in his life, barely related, until his professor tells him, gently, "Don't you understand about yourself yet? You're going to be a teacher."

It would be saying too much to say that Stoner's life clicks into place and becomes complete and completely suffused with meaning when Professor Sloane gives him his life project. But once Sloane tells Stoner he is to be a teacher, Stoner has, at last, a frame for the story of his life. Then he can start filling in details and training his attention.

Did you cry with Stoner's mother at the end of the chapter? Did you put your fists to your face, feel your knuckles press deeply and painfully into the soft flesh of your cheeks? Did you notice the posture she must have held when you found yourself hunched over, eyes downcast, forehead furrowed? Did you feel for her when you imagined your mother thus? Did you feel for yourself when you pictured your own child, years from now, leaving you for a life you can't imagine?

What else did you notice?

welcome!

The book we'll read and discuss together is John Williams's novel Stoner. I read a few blog posts over at Better Living Through Beowulf that piqued my interest and made me think this might be a novel that could inspire reflections and discussions on the main themes in all my classes: failure, disappointment, disenchantment, integrity, personhood, and how to live well.

Check out what Professor Bates has over on his blog about the novel here and here.

My plan is to post my reflections on Sundays, beginning with this Sunday. Most weeks I'll cover one chapter; if the chapter is quite short, then I'll post on two chapters.

I'm looking forward to lively discussions!