the literary life MANUALS FOR LIVINGIn a required literature course, one
of Stoner’s professors reads a Shake-
spearean sonnet, which sends Stoner
spiraling into a reverie. Williams
writes: “Light slanted from the win-
dows and settled upon the faces of his
fellow students, so that this illumina-
tion 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 can suddenly feel
the blood flowing invisibly through his
own arteries. He regards his fellow stu-
dents “curiously, as if he had not seen
them before, and felt very distant from
them and very close to them.”
A shiver was sent through my body as
I read this passage, for I too had experi-
enced an ecstatic awakening. It was the
reason I’d fled a career in journalism to
return to graduate school, a decision
my editor regarded as foolish at best.
(“You want to write books?” he sneered.)
As an apprentice writer and adjunct
professor, I spent most of my time
writing and teaching quite badly. I
received a lot of rejection, all of it de-
served. One particularly candid stu-
dent noted on her teacher evaluation
form that I was the worst teacher she
had ever encountered. “If writing were
a pa r t of my body,” she added, “ I wou ld
cut it off with a razor blade.”
Wel l t hen.
William Stoner also struggles as a
teacher. He is often crippled by doubt,
certain he’ll never be able to transmit
his passion to a class full of uninterested
students. But he also enjoys euphoric
moments, when his love for particular
works overruns his sense of inadequacy,
and his students respond by showing
“hints of imagination and the revela-
tion of a tentative love” in their work.
Those were the moments for which
I yearned in the classroom. And thus
Stoner became a kind of homeland to
which I could return amid my doubt,
a world where the mission of writing
a nd teach i ng l iter at u re felt u nequ ivo -
cally heroic. This is no doubt why so
many writers and critics and profes-
sors champion the novel with suchpassion and persistence.
Stoner also affirmed my faith in the
not ion t hat a ny l itera r y endeavor is u l-
timately a meritocracy. After all, the
novel almost immediately went out of
print following its initial publication in- It was reissued, and went out of
print, twice more, in 1972 and again in - Each time, the evangelical fervor
of readers persuaded publishers to give
it another shot. The book finally went
on to become a massive best-seller
across Europe and was reissued a third
time, in 2006, by New York Review of
Books Classics.
Reading Stoner had an even more
striking effect on my work at the
keyboard. Like most MFA students I
had been bludgeoned by the mantra
“show, don’t tell” during my program,
encouraged to write in scene as much
as possible and to avoid sustained ex-
pository passages.
I had also come to believe that the
key to writing exciting literature was
to focus on memorable characters, the
lawless and lust-driven, the drunken
and depraved.
But from its opening words, Stoner
put the lie to these dogmas. In fact,
Williams begins the book with what
amounts to a brief obituary, in which
we learn that William Stoner taught at
the same university his entire life, that
he never rose above t he r a n k of a s sist a nt
professor and that “few students re-
membered him with any sharpness after
they had taken his course.”
This passage both riveted and con-
founded me. And it took me many years
to figure out why. By upending our
traditional sense of the heroic—that
of external action and ambition—he
was redirecting the reader’s attention
to t he t r ue sou rce of hu m a n d r a m a, t he
inner life, that private set of yearnings
and fears and confusions that are gen-
erally concealed from the world and yet
persistently, unavoidably experienced.
Williams was also, almost invis-
ibly, establishing an omniscient nar-
rator who was capable of covering vast
swaths of time and experience. It was
this narrative latitude that allowed him
to zero in on those precise moments
when Stoner’s inner life is thrown into
disequilibrium.
The novel was proof that leaping
from one frantic scene to the next—
show, don’t tell— d id not render my work
enthralling so much as unintelligible.
The more I studied Stoner as a
writer, the more I recognized that its
mechanisms of enthrallment were not
obscure or mystical but straightfor-
ward and mechanical. The narrator
builds psychologically and emotionally
reliable ramps to harrowing moments
and then slows down.
Because the action cannot move for-
ward, the writer’s attention must turn
inward, toward the chaos of unbearable
feeling.A
LT HOUG H I’ve learned
more about writing from
reading Stoner than any
workshop I ever took, the
central reason I keep circling back to
it isn’t aesthetic. What I’m after is per-
sonal reckoning. This is how it works
with our favorite books. We turn to
them precisely because they wield the
power of intimate revelation.
Each time I’ve read Stoner it has il-
luminated some new aspect of my own
inner life. This is what Nabokov means
when he notes that “one cannot read a27 POETS & WRITERS^A first edition of Stoner, published by
Viking Press in 1965.pb
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