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BYLEOROBSON

T

HE LIFE OF Robert
Stone contained virtually
all the things one might
consider essential to
qualifying as a major
postwar American novelist: a National
Book Award (for “Dog Soldiers,” in
1975), movie adaptations, A-list friend-
ships (Paul Newman, Nick Nolte), a
succession of lucrative grants and resi-
dencies, depression exacerbated by
drink and drugs, escalating advances,
extensive dealings with Condé Nast,
contrarian reviews in the late 1990s
from Michiko Kakutani and James
Wood. But whatever his credentials,
however wide the recognition, Stone’s
friend, the novelist Madison Smartt
Bell, was still duty-bound, like virtually
all first biographers, to make a full-
throated case for his continuing rel-
evance and appeal. “Child of Light”
forms part of a three-pronged on-
slaught, along with a Library of
America edition of Stone’s best-known
novels and a selection of essays, “The
Eye You See With,” both edited by
Mr. Bell, but the reader who battles
through these 2,000 pages might be
forgiven for wondering at the scale of
the tribute. Mr. Bell, in his role of biog-
rapher, proves as liable to presuppose
his subject’s importance (“a complete
maverick,” “one of the world’s most
brilliant, difficult, extraordinary men”)
as the writer himself was in pontifical
exercises called things like “What Fic-
tion Is For,” while the freshly canon-
ized novels, never at the cutting edge,
too often seem slickly platitudinous
and baldly conventional.
Stone was born in 1937, in New
York. He never knew his father. His
mother, the daughter of a tugboat cap-
tain, was a sometime teacher and a
schizophrenic. His childhood was a
mess—“in all the obvious ways it could
be bad,” Stone recalled, “it was.” He
was raised by the Marist Brothers, who
beat him but also gave him books, and
he became an avid teenage drinker and
dope-smoker. At 17 he joined the Navy,
and was able to visit or glimpse South
Africa, Cuba and Greece. While at sea,
he began writing stories and read
Melville along with various modernists
(Wallace Stevens, Joyce). After his
return to New York in 1960, he met his

future wife, Janice—a union that

lasted, against some staggering odds

(notably, Stone’s alcoholism), until his

death in 2015.

In 1962 Stone was accepted as a

Stegner Fellow in creative writing at

Stanford. While living in San Fran-

cisco, the Stones got to know Ken

Kesey, the acid-dropping author of

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”

and leader of the so-called Merry

Pranksters. Stone became a key wit-

ness for Tom Wolfe’s plunge into this

scene, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid

Test” (1968), but by then Stone was

already pursuing his own fate as a kind

of reportorial novelist. Over the next

45 years, despite what Mr. Bell calls

his “penchant for procrastination,”

he published eight novels principally

concerned with the contradictions in

America’s self-image, often based on

firsthand observation, and set in a

series of locales heaving with corrup-

tion, conflict and tension: New Or-

leans, Vietnam (from where heroin is

trafficked back to a California sour

with dashed hopes, in “Dog Soldiers”),

Nicaragua (renamed), Hollywood (with

visits to Mexico), New York Harbor,

Jerusalem and the Caribbean.

Mr. Bell starts with the contention

that Stone’s work “chronicled both the

peak and the decline of a great many

aspects of U.S. world dominance.” Stone

wrote about the ways in which Ameri-

can conviction in its own benevolence

brought ill effects abroad that, in many

instances, poisoned affairs at home

as well. (His influence can be seen to-

day in the writing of Rachel Kushner

and Jennifer Egan.) But Mr. Bell also

wants to present Stone as an “artist”—

the word and its cognates occur fre-

quently in his account. Stone himself

made lofty reference in his fiction to

things that are difficult to “verbalize”

and that “cannot be fully described.”

And yet his prose never shows the

slightest hint of strain or striving. We

are confined to the realm of purely

theoretical complexity, a land charac-

terized by bland adjectives and banal

syntax. Stone writes about the crazy

and zany, the freakish and freaked-out,

the extreme and extremist, with anes-

thetic poise, as in this description from

his breakthrough novel, “Dog Soldiers,”

of the aftermath of a bombing:

Converse went across the street

and watched the ambulance people

lug body bags over the rubble. Dead

people and people who appeared to

be dead had been laid out on the

exposed earth where the cement

had been blown away, and the

blood and tissue were draining into

the black soil.

Even as he claimed personal alle-

giance with the ’60s counterculture, he

was also representative of what he saw

as the politically motivated “resur-

gence of realism” that arrived at

around the same time to sweep away

postmodernism. (His exact contem-

porary Thomas Pynchon showed that

you can in fact be politicized and post-

modern, antiwar and antirealist.)

Reading the Library of America

omnibus alongside “The Eye You See

With” reveals the narrow empiri-

cism of Stone’s project as a writer. In

1971 he published an account in the

Guardian of a visit to Vietnam entitled

“There It Is” (a shoulder-shrugging

catchphrase along the lines of Kurt

Vonnegut’s “So it goes”). Stone re-

cycled many of his thoughts in “Dog

Soldiers”: “There it is, he said to him-

self. That was what everyone said—GIs,

reporters, even Arvins and bar girls.

THERE HE ISStone on book tour in Hartford, Conn., in 1981.

THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES

Frank Ramsey:

A Sheer Excess of Powers

By Cheryl Misak

Oxford, 500 pages, $32.95

BYRICHARDDAVENPORT-HINES

F

RANK RAMSEYwas only
26 when he died in 1930.
Yet he had already made
indelible marks in philos-
ophy, pure mathematics,
mathematical logic, economics, prob-
ability theory and decision theory.
Among the English intelligentsia of
the 1920s, his opinion had peculiar
and decisive authority. If a recondite
point arose in philosophy, psychology,
logic or economics, the question al-
ways asked was: “What does Frank
Ramsey think?” His childhood and
most of his working life were spent at
the University of Cambridge. Though
his name is remembered only by spe-
cialists, Cheryl Misak persuades us,
in “Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of
Powers,” that it should be coupled
with those of other Cambridge men,
such as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin
and John Maynard Keynes.
Why, then, is he so little known?
The subjects that he investigated
were abstruse. Few people felt confi-

dent of understanding them. Fewer

still could keep pace with the

originality of his ideas and the un-

orthodoxy of his conclusions. For

generations accustomed to polysyl-

labic obfuscation in his subjects, his

prose seems too simple, direct and

unpretending to be taken seriously.

The usually spiteful Lytton Strachey

had nothing but good to say of

Ramsey—“one of the few faultless

people, with a heavenly simplicity

and modesty.” Ramsey’s heavenliness

has proved a hindrance to perpetuat-

ing his name. He was too merry and

gentle a man to thump his critics in

verbal combat. He was too joyous

in life to hammer his points into

obstinate nay-sayers. He had none of

the jealous rivalry that builds some

academic reputations. He died too

young to win the Nobel or life’s other

prizes.

Ramsey’s daring and enduring

influence are undeniable. At the age

of 18, in the winter of 1921-22, while

still an undergraduate, he translated

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s tortuously

mysterious study of the relation-

ship between language and reality,

“Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,”

from German into English. Sitting

with a copy of the book in a secre-

tarial agency in Cambridge, he gave

an instantaneous rendering aloud,

without preparation, into English.

A shorthand typist, who must herself

have been remarkable, noted his

utterances on her pad and typed

them afterward. Wittgenstein said

Ramsey’s translation had “equal

authority with the original.”

The Most

Genial

Genius

Later in 1922, at a time when

Keynes’s prestige stood so high that

his university was nicknamed

“Keynesbridge,” Ramsey proposed

counterarguments to the economist’s

“A Treatise on Probability.” The 19-

year-old spoke in terms so

trenchant that he shook the

older man’s trust in his own

arguments.

Ramsey’s paper “Truth and

Probability,” written in 1926

but published posthumously,

was matchless in its time.

He was the first to define

probability in terms of sub-

jective degrees of belief.

Belief was analogous to an

individual’s memories or per-

ception, he proposed; it was

not the product of the ob-

jective relations between

propositions and formal logic.

The ideas that he expounded

in this paper laid the basis

for rational-choice theory as

well as game theory, which

studies mathematical models

of conflict and cooperation

between decision makers

in an effort to understand

outcomes. “Truth and Proba-

bility” also spurred the de-

velopment of Bayesian statistics

(based in the interpretation of proba-

bility) and contributed to research in

psychology and artificial intelligence.

In 1927-28, Ramsey published

two papers in Keynes’s Economic

Journal. One discussed optimal taxa-

tion, the other optimal savings, and

each, as Ms. Misak notes, launched

a branch of economics. He was

always concerned for the social-

welfare implications of economic

policies and for their consequences

for posterity. The imbalances in

benefits to individuals and to society

were a keen ethical preoccupation.

Ramsey was the greatest 20th-

century eponym. His paper “On a

Problem of Formal Logic” (1928)

started the branch of mathematics

now known as Ramsey theory. In

economics, his name endures in the

Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans model and in

the Keynes-Ramsey Rule. In philoso-

phy, there are Ramsey Sentences, the

Ramsey Test for Conditionals and

Ramseyan Humility.

Like his mentor Keynes, Ramsey

was the first-born of Cambridge

academic parents. Both men had

anxious, ineffectual fathers:

Neville Keynes was an econo-

mist who fled from his oner-

ous subject into the humdrum

comforts of university admin-

istration; Arthur Ramsey was

a second-rate mathematician

who became deputy head of

a second-rate college. Both

the mothers were social activ-

ists of strong and purposive

character.

Ramsey was a prodigy,

Ms. Misak tells us, who

learned to read by playing

with a bag of alphabet crack-

ers. The head teacher of his

elementary school found him

“a charming and wonderful

pupil,” mastering recurring

decimals at the age of 5. He

was close to his brother Mi-

chael: Both of them in adult-

hood were absent-minded,

shambling, genial giants, with

guffawing laughs, gentle man-

ners and melodious voices.

Michael, too, was “born to be a pro-

fessor,” as Owen Chadwick observed

in his 1990 biography, and he attained

a university chair at the age of 35.

Michael’s career culminated with

his enthronement as Archbishop of

Canterbury—that is, head of the

Church of England—in 1961.

PleaseturntopageC8

PRODIGYThe usually spiteful Lytton Strachey

called Ramsey ‘one of the few faultless people, with

a heavenly simplicity and modesty.’

COURTESY STEPHEN BURCH

READ ONLINE ATWSJ.COM/BOOKSHELF

Child of Light

By Madison Smartt Bell

Doubleday, 588 pages, $35

Robert Stone: A Flag

for Sunrise, Dog Soldiers,
Outerbridge Reach

Library of America, 1,233 pages, $35

The Eye You See With

By Robert Stone

HMH, 588 pages, $35

There it is.” The evocation of the

bombed-out tax office is borrowed al-

most verbatim, right down to the patly

nihilistic payoff, with both Stone and

his creation Converse pausing to re-

flect on the lizards that the previous

occupant of his Saigon hotel room had

smashed against the wall with a fist.

Stone was a thin-skinned, solitary,

depressive type with a gruff, bearded,

gregarious exterior, and his analysis of

male anomie tends to blur the bound-

ary between the would-be existentialist

and the contentedly hard-boiled. In the

1981 geopolitical thriller “A Flag for

Sunrise”—a substantial but portentous

attempt to grapple with U.S. meddling

in Central America—the anthropologist

Holliwell, set to leave New York for a

place called Compostela, is asked by

a friend, Marty Nolan, to report on

the activities of some American expats

on the Caribbean coast of “Tecan.”

Holliwell declines, and Nolan appears

to give in, but as a parting shot he says

that Holliwell “may feel differently”

when he arrives, and that the request

may be repeated through “a third

party.” Somehow it isn’t until Holliwell

is “halfway across the Brooklyn

Bridge” that “the suggestion of a

threat in Nolan’s final words struck

him.” This is his response:

A chill touched his inward loneliness.

He was, he knew at that moment,

really without beliefs, without hope

—either for himself or for the world.

Almost without friends, certainly

without allies. Alone.

It’s a characteristic Stone cadence.

But how is that final adjective sup-

posed to produce its intended clinching

effect? Earlier in the paragraph, No-

lan’s words have already made Holli-

well “think of the man entombed be-

side the Perfume River,” and then we

have, in quick succession, “loneliness,”

“without friends,” “without allies.”

The most recent novel collected in

the Library of America edition, “Outer-

bridge Reach” (1992), though very

much in the Stone mold, poses a differ-

ent set of problems. (All three novels

in the Library of America volume made

the shortlist for the National Book

Award, as did a fourth, 1998’s “Damas-

cus Gate.”) It is another example of

Stone’s favored “convergence struc-

ture,” a narrative approach that, in its

continual need to situate different

characters, shows excessive reliance

on the “Meanwhile.. .” construction.

The book toggles between the cash-

strapped Owen Browne, a Vietnam vet-

eran who writes PR copy for a yacht

company; his wife, Anne, a journalist

and daughter of a rich local business-

man; and Strickland, a documentary

maker devoted to “the human factor.”

After Browne agrees to take part in

a lucrative solo circumnavigation race

in place of his Trump-like boss (“a

PleaseturntopageC8

Globe Jotter

Robert Stone’s novels turned a reportorial eye on the U.S.’s shifting role in the world

BOOKS

T h e Way We We a r

A philosophy of

clothes and fashion

C11

A Study in Starlight

Cecilia Payne-

Gaposchkin, pioneer of

astrophysicsC8