The ordinariness of life-altering passion

The turmoil and pain in Stoner’s life are conveyed in the quietest way possible. This book may leave you sad and contemplative but you also feel richer.

In the early years of the 20th century, in a small farm in rural Missouri, a farmer and his wife send their son off to university in the nearby town of Columbia to learn agricultural sciences. This would, the agent who’d approached the farmer and his wife about the availability of such a university course, help them in the long run to manage their farm. Modernise it. Bring up crop yield. Earn more. Perhaps.

The farmer and his wife — stoic souls who are descendants of those who’d toiled and led hardscrabble lives with little difference in personal fortunes from generation to generation — don’t make much of a drama of the son’s departure. There’s no expression of sentiment, no display of tears at the empty nest. Thus begins Stoner, John Williams’ 1965 novel about the life of an English professor at an American university and his loves (or the lack of them), the historical social upheavals that seem to not touch him, and the disappointments of a life lived in academia.

William Stoner, the eponymous character (critics, when the novel first came out, described him as “grey”), takes the decision mid-way through his university course to abandon agricultural sciences and switches to learning English literature. It’s the first time he experiences a life-altering love, for a discipline of study that eventually becomes a vocation.

A writer’s writer

There are other romances that happen in Stoner’s life — the first with the woman who would eventually become his wife in a disastrous marriage and the second with a colleague that has to end under the threat of scandal. But his great love will remain English literature and teaching it over decades to students who are not always the most receptive or appreciative of the joys of the subject.

John Williams, himself a professor — first at the University of Missouri and then the University of Denver — was not a literary superstar in his lifetime. Stoner was his third novel and barely sold more than two thousand copies of its first print run. But it did find passionate champions among a certain section of writers and critics. Williams, in effect, became that one thing a lot of writers would rather not be: a writer’s writer. That dreaded mantle often means a niche readership that exclusively chatters and recommends works amongst themselves and barely garners any readers among the public.

Every other decade, even after his death in 1994, there was a revival of interest in Williams’ work, especially Stoner. Sometimes this expanded his audience further. Perhaps the marketing of the book — calling it one of the saddest novels in existence (I paraphrase here) — didn’t help its cause. While there is an overwhelming grey-ish sort of sadness in the pages of the book, there’s also much beauty to be relished in the elegance of the prose, in the observations that Williams makes about the passing of time and the true nature of love.

So Stoner is not a joyride. There are no points in the emotional heat map of the story that would glow red. The turmoil and pain and the few joys in William Stoner’s life are conveyed in the quietest way possible. It might leave you sad and contemplative once you’ve finished the last sentence, but you feel richer for having spent time with this character and his story that is remarkable for being how outwardly unremarkable it seems.

The author is a Bengaluru-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

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