William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life: Bookmarked

(A Short History of My Many Feuds)

Early in Stoner, we track our hero to a local tavern, where he meets each week to drink with two fellow PhD candidates, an affable ass-kisser named Gordon Finch, and Dave Masters, a sly cynic who specializes in the art of brutal assessment. “You, too, are cut out for failure,” Master tells Stoner, after a few pints, “not that you’d fight the world. You’d let it chew you up and spit you out, and you’d lie there wondering what was wrong.” The comment scans as a bit of drunken banter. But as the novel unfolds, this observation emerges as a central theme: the difficulty of standing up for yourself in the world, the price you pay when you fail to do so, and the price you pay when you succeed.

I can’t speak for the rest of you, but I have spent much of my life trying to figure out how to defend my interests in a way that doesn’t undo my sanity. Like William Stoner, I have been party to disputes that take shape and escalate without my consent or understanding, that exasperate and exhaust me, so that I often feel as if I, too, am staring up from the ground, wondering what went wrong.

The prophecy of Dave Masters applies most obviously to the Stoner marriage. But no sooner has our hero capitulated to Edith then the novel plunges him into a professional feud, which dominates the second half of the novel. This one is with his cunning colleague, Hollis Lomax, who arrives at the university wreathed in mystery.

His first appearance is at a departmental meeting, to which he arrives conspicuously late. A slow shuffle sounds at the back of the room. Someone whispers, It’s Lomax. The figure in question is barely five feet and “grotesquely misshapen” with a small hump in his back. His disability makes him appear to be struggling for balance. And yet he is impeccably dressed, right down to the gold cuff links that appear when his right arm shoots out to reveal a lit cigarette, which he puffs dramatically. Only then does he look up, revealing his face, which is that “of a matinee idol. Long and thin and mobile, it was nevertheless strongly featured; his forehead was high and narrow, with heavy veins, and his thick waving hair, the color of ripe wheat, swept back from it in a somewhat theatrical pompadour.” Lomax drops his cigarette and grinds it beneath his gleaming wingtips before speaking to his assembled colleagues. “I am Lomax,” he tells them, in a booming voice. “I hope I have not disrupted your meeting.”

It’s one of the most delicious entrances in all of literature: the tension between the deformed body and the dazzling face, the precarious gait and the gestural elegance! Lomax is half Quasimodo, half Cary Grant, with an advanced degree in malicious drama. In other words, he’s perfectly cast as a foil to William Stoner, a man stolid down to his inanimate surname.

But the pair don’t start out as enemies. On the contrary, Stoner is drawn to Lomax, whose eloquence reminds him of Dave Masters. A friendship seems imminent, especially after the Stoners throw a party where a drunken Lomax, before applying that chaste kiss to Edith, speaks of his solitude and how literature rescued him. Stoner sees that Lomax has gone through the same kind of conversion he experienced in class with Archer Sloane. At school, he greets Lomax warmly, expecting kinship, but he is met with “an irony that was like cold anger.” Unwittingly, Stoner has again intruded upon the privacy of a damaged person. Lomax is ashamed of having exposed himself and converts this shame into enmity.

Their grudge begins when Lomax’s protégé, a disabled graduate student named Charles Walker, wheedles his way into one of Stoner’s graduate seminars. Walker shows up late for the next class, in a clumsy imitation of his mentor. He then interrupts the lecture incessantly.

Stoner is concerned enough to consult Lomax, who looks directly at Stoner and says, “with cheerful malevolence, ‘As you may have noticed, he is a cripple.’” By the end of their chat, Lomax’s voice is trembling with anger. Stoner can see that his colleague has personalized the situation. But he does not see—and the reader must therefore see on his behalf—that Lomax has begun laying a trap for him, one in which Walker is merely the bait.

Walker continues to act out. When the other students ignore him, he retreats into a mood of “outraged integrity.” He delays his presentation and a young instructor named Katherine Driscoll delivers a dazzling paper in his stead. Stoner arrives at the next class to find Walker seated at his desk, clearly fantasizing about replacing him as professor. Walker’s paper is actually an improvised performance, a garish imitation of Lomax unrelated to his proposed subject. It is devoted, instead, to denigrating Katherine Driscoll’s work.

After class, Stoner apologizes to Katherine. She can barely restrain her laughter, for she can see the obvious truth—that Walker was attacking Stoner, not her. Stoner orders Walker to turn over the text of his presentation, though it’s clear no such text exists. When Walker refuses, Stoner informs him he will fail the class. “One must be prepared to suffer for one’s beliefs,” Walker declares.

“‘And for one’s laziness and dishonesty and ignorance,’” Stoner snaps. He goes on to suggest that Walker re-examine his position at the university, and whether he has any place in a graduate program.

It’s one of those moments where you want pat old Stoner on the back; he’s finally brought the hammer down on this arrogant provocateur. At the same time, one senses, queasily, that he’s been played by Lomax. This feeling of exhilarated dread, of knowing we’re headed for a nasty showdown (a feeling that deserves its own complicated German word) is part of what makes Stoner so irresistible.

Word soon arrives that Stoner will have to serve on the committee overseeing Walker’s oral exams, alongside his advisor … Lomax. What follows is a ten-page set piece in which a discussion of medieval literature goes medieval. Walker, though dazzling when discussing his dissertation, knows nothing of the required texts. Stoner watches, with a grim and growing sense of duty, as Lomax deftly manipulates the conversation to obscure his protégé’s glaring deficits.

When it’s finally his turn, Stoner asks Walker a series of remedial questions about the literary tradition. The candidate flusters and filibusters. Lomax tries to interrupt but Stoner calmly shuts down these efforts. “I am asking simple questions,” he says. “I must insist upon simple answers.”

There is a giddy pleasure to all this—the pleasure of watching a slick fraud exposed in real time. And I might as well confess that chewing over this scene in the age of Donald Trump yields an especially piquant vision of vindication. If only the moderators at one of the 2016 presidential debates had exhibited the courage to follow Stoner’s example! Had asked Trump to recite the duties of the presidency as outlined in the Constitution. Or the contents of the Thirteenth Amendment. Or the Nineteenth Amendment. Or to summarize the outcome of the Dred Scot case. Or the tenets of the Monroe Doctrine. Or to identify the components of the nuclear triad. Or to identify the tax rate for the wealthiest Americans under President Eisenhower. If only they had refused to allow the candidate to hide behind the bombastic talking points cribbed from talk radio. I am asking simple questions, Mr. Trump. I must insist upon simple answers.

Anyway.

The questioning goes on until Stoner’s disgust gives way to “a kind of pity and sick regret.” Walker doesn’t even know the poems of the Romantic period, his alleged specialty. Stoner votes to fail him, naturally. Lomax is apoplectic. “Do you realize what you’re doing to the boy?” he shouts.

“I’m preventing him from teaching in a college or university,” Stoner replies. “Which is precisely what I want to do.” For him, this dispute is about nothing less than the intellectual purity of the academy.

The problem, as Masters warned him years ago, is that the purity of the academy is a mirage. Lomax wastes no time proving the case. He threatens to bring formal charges against Stoner. When this plan fails, he flexes his power as chair of the English Department. Lomax saddles his rival with a nightmare schedule, blocks his academic progress, and prevents him from teaching courses in his specialty. Walker returns to campus, strutting about like a conquering hero and openly mocking Stoner. Lomax makes no secret of the feud and it soon pollutes the entire department.

When Stoner implores Lomax to relent, he receives as his response an aria of projective rage. Lomax believes, with utter sincerity, that Stoner has tried to ruin Walker’s career. And not just because of Walker’s “enthusiasm and integrity” but because of “an unfortunate physical affliction that would have called forth sympathy in a normal human being.”

Williams captures something here that lies at the heart of all conflict: our unconscious compulsion to project onto our enemies the most intractable aspects of our self-hatred. For all his powers of intellect, Lomax feels monstrous. Thus, he tells himself a story in which Stoner is the monster, the man who falls short of normalcy. Some part of Lomax knows that his defense of Walker has desecrated his professional integrity. And this too, winds up projected onto Stoner. “I don’t think you’re fit to be a teacher,” he seethes. “No man is, whose prejudices override his talent and his learning.”

This encounter is the last time the two men will speak for twenty years. Before Stoner departs, he takes a last look at the man he once hoped to befriend. Lomax stares at the papers on his desk. His face is red, and he appears to be struggling with himself. Stoner suddenly realizes what he’s witnessing: not anger but shame.

I’ve always loved this scene for its unflinching portrayal of Lomax, in particular this moment when his shame comes into view. But to revisit this exchange in the America of this moment is to recognize the enormity of shame as a driving force in our political discourse. It’s always been there, of course, simmering beneath the moral atrocities of our history. “There is no greater injustice than to wring your profits from the sweat of another man’s brow,” Lincoln insisted. You slave owners should be ashamed of yourselves. That’s what he was saying.

A century and a half later, Donald Trump brought the Party of Lincoln to the opposite conclusion: that being a white man in America means never having to say you’re sorry. No public figure in our history has exploited shame so relentlessly. The beating heart of his candidacy was not his command of policy or his oratory or even the moneyed gloss of his celebrity. It was his instinctive ability to weaponize the inner life of his partisans, to transmute the shame of their bigotry and declining utility and angry dependence into a cleansing rage.

The pundits and pollsters missed this altogether. Every time he said or did something despicable, a chorus of condemnation rang out, which allowed Trump to cast himself as the injured party, forever smeared by a cabal of condescending elites. Like Lomax, Trump feuds not as a strategy but as a compulsion, a way of recasting his sadistic urges as a necessary, even noble, defense against the judgment of others.

William Monahan captures the mindset precisely in his novel The Lighthouse: “Like most evil, self-interested people, Mr. Glowery thought (it may actually be a form innocence) that everyone else was as evil and self-interested as he was, and that no matter what he did to harm other people, he was merely protecting himself intelligently against enemies as obsessive as himself. Mr. Glowery really believed that everyone did this sort of thing constantly.”

The revelation of 2016 was that Americans became completely mesmerized by this sort of thing. The media covered Trump obsessively because Trump obsessively feuded. In a mature democracy, each election is a contest of ideas. Ours are about feuds, locking a woman up, punching someone out. People tune into politics today for the same reason they tune into reality TV or social media or mixed martial arts: for the blood and the shame.

I’ve thought a good deal about this peculiar national lust and concluded that Americans are conflict junkies precisely because we spend so much of our psychic energy avoiding conflict. This is what makes us vulnerable to trolls, whether they dwell in a basement or the Oval Office: they enact our stifled impulses.

Edith and Lomax dominate Stoner in the same way demagogues dominate their political opponents; not through superior ideas or logic, but the seductive force of uninhibited aggression. This is the secret sauce modern conservatives use to advance a plutocratic and bigoted agenda. At a primal level, they project a willingness to fight.

If John Kerry had turned to George W. Bush during any of their presidential debates and said, “In 1969, I was on the Duong Keo River killing Vietcong and watching my friends bleed out. Where were you in 1969?” he would have been elected president. Just as Hillary Clinton would be president today if, during her second debate with Trump, she had turned to him and said: “Stop stalking me around the stage. It doesn’t make you look tough, Donald. It makes you look like a creep who harrasses women.”

But look: that’s not who liberals are. They don’t punch bullies. They go high, like Stoner, and wind up on the ground wondering what went wrong.

It is worth noting here that Williams was inspired to write Stoner by a legendary row between two senior professors in his department. And that he composed much of the book while embroiled in a feud with his hero, the combative poet and critic Yvor Winters, who accused Williams of plagiarism and threatened to destroy his reputation. Williams must have felt what his protagonist does: that a potential friend had become a dogged adversary, one who, based on the archival record, gleefully leveraged his aggression into dominance.

For the past four years, I’ve been the co-host of a strange and rather beautiful podcast called “Dear Sugars,” which consists of me and my friend, the writer Cheryl Strayed, answering letters from people in crisis. Our in-box contains thousands of stories. It’s more or less a transcription of the culture’s inner life. Regardless of what the letters detail—death, abuse, infidelity, motherhood, friendship—nearly all include an element of conflict avoidance. Our correspondents know they need to confront someone in their lives but they haven’t worked up the courage, so they write to us instead. They’re in conflict about conflict.

I’ve spent my entire life in this state. I was bullied in school and at home and spent much of my waking life fantasizing about fighting back. My brothers and I brawled, rather ineptly, but never resolved the resentments that led to the punches. To this day, more than forty years on, I can remember those scuffles: the indignation I felt at my older brother yanking me into a headlock by my hair, me socking him in the jaw the moment he freed me, my father sitting on a piano bench watching all this, urging me stand up to my brother. That was the fight, I believe, in which Dave broke his hand punching my skull.

I remember tussling with my twin brother, too, both of us standing at the foot of a bed huffing with adrenaline, not knowing what was going to happen next. Then I heard a loud slap and saw Mike was holding his cheek and for a long moment I had no idea that my hand had flown up and struck him.

The emotional violence was worse. My brothers forged a closer bond with each other than with me, and I never forgave them for that. They broke me once, hurling down insults from the second floor of some vacation condo until I wept right in front of them. I spent the next two decades unconsciously chasing the same degradation.

I didn’t want to fight at all. On the other hand, all I wanted to do was fight. I felt like a bloodhound circling my own aggression. I can remember being at a heavy metal show shortly after college when a brawl broke out. I leapt into the middle of the scrum to play peacemaker. But the moment I saw the horror on my date’s face I realized I’d been drawn by the promise of violence. Like a lot of men, I told the world I was the sensitive kind, a lover not a fighter, then snuck off to watch football games and boxing matches where I could feed on the brutality of other men, asking myself all the while: was I going to stand up for myself?

Stoner was a part of this. It was asking the same question: whether the hero would ever punch back. The novel found me, as I’ve mentioned, in my first year of graduate school, thanks to a friend. But the original source was actually one of our teachers, whom I’ll call Professor X. He was in every respect a rising star: young, handsome, charming. A glowing New York Times review of his debut story collection had been taped to the door of the director’s office and I read this notice in awe. I hoped he would like my work and become my mentor, perhaps even my friend.

I worked hard to win his favor in workshop, writing detailed critiques of the stories submitted by my colleagues and eagerly participating in class discussions. And then, one day, Professor X asked me to stop by his office after class. I was certain—in the way aspiring disciples are always certain—that our special bond was about to be consecrated.

Instead, Professor X sat me down and chided me for speaking too harshly in class about another student’s work. I apologized, instantly and earnestly. I felt it was still possible that this reprimand was a kind of formality, and that the true purpose of the visit was to recognize my efforts in class. But Professor X continued to glare at me. After a few long and embarrassing seconds, I laughed softly. “I get it,” I said. “I screwed up.” I can now see that this was just the wrong thing to do, that my effort to defuse tension had registered as disrespect.

I don’t mean to portray myself as an angel. I was ambitious and insecure, always a volatile mix, and because I had come from the world of journalism—and before that, Judaism—my manner registered as brash. I was also sad and lonesome at that time in my life, and often drove people away from me without realizing why. But mostly, looking back, I can see that I was naïve. Like William Stoner, I viewed the academy as a refuge from the competitive clashes of the newsroom.

My unconscious expectations were even more outlandish. I wanted my professors to enforce empathy in a way my parents never managed, to keep us creative siblings from turning on each other. Professor X wasn’t like that. Despite his scolding, he allowed students to argue with each other and sometimes criticized other writers in front of us. Before one class, he abruptly announced that we wouldn’t be discussing a particular manuscript because it was unworthy of our consideration. The woman who had written the story sat there, absorbing this humiliation. She called me in tears that night, and left the program altogether within a few months.

A few days after the term ended, Professor X called me at home. This was before the age of cell phones, so I didn’t know it was him until his voice filled my ear. I was excited, because I still believed that he recognized my dedication and wanted to be my mentor. That was why he was calling me at home!

That was not why he was calling me at home. He was calling to berate me, which he did for several minutes. He told me that I was a loose cannon and that I didn’t respect him and that he wouldn’t read my thesis work if I didn’t shape up.

All through that broiling summer I perseverated on this conversation, trying to figure out how I had provoked such wrath. I shaved my head, too, in some kind of penitential fit. My nose was suddenly huge and my skull was a pale bulb nicked and seamed with scars from those ancient fights with my brothers.

When I returned to campus in the fall, I found a homemade cassette tape in my mailbox—made by Professor X—with a note saying he looked forward to reading my thesis. It was a peace offering, and I was glad to have it. Also in my mailbox was a note from the Chair of the English Department announcing that Professor X was up for tenure, and soliciting students to write letters for his file. It never occurred to me, until just now, that these two items might be related. I thought Professor X just felt bad for hollering at me.

The request for letters urged us to be “absolutely candid” and I took this to mean that our letters would not be shared with Professor X. I wrote an absolutely candid letter. I acknowledged that Professor X was an outstanding teacher to most of his students, but that I could only speak to my own experiences, which I then detailed.

It would be lovely to suppose that I wrote this letter solely at the bidding of my conscience, that, like Stoner, I had the sanctity of the academy in mind. But I want to be honest about my motives here: I was ravenous for revenge. Professor X had abused his power. That was how I saw it.

Within the week, Professor X left a second note in my mailbox stating that he would not be reading my thesis. No explanation was necessary; clearly, my letter had not been confidential. In fact, we never spoke another word to one another. Our feud infected the entire program. A palpable tension swirled when we were in the same room. He was awarded tenure. But the general perception—one I was only dimly aware of amid my blinding sense of persecution—was that I’d tried to torpedo his career.

The other fiction writer on the faculty eventually announced that she, too, wouldn’t read my thesis. I can remember walking across campus in a torrential rain and seeing this woman, a former teacher of mine, walking towards me. We were the only two people in sight. Rather than pass by me, she veered off the path and into a bog of muddy lawn. I watched all this in a kind of wonder, her dress shoes tugged at by the mud, her face red with what I can now see was shame.

I grew isolated and depressed and read Stoner a third time, then a fourth. The book had found me only because of Professor X, though I’m not sure the irony of the situation would have impressed me.

It’s been more than two decades since I left my graduate program and I still have no idea why Professor X personalized our relationship. I do know that he was struggling during those years in ways that were mostly hidden from view, drinking too much, splitting up with his wife. He was a young guy under a lot of pressure, having to teach a bunch of students who essentially wanted his job. He probably saw me as a threat to his legitimacy. But that’s just a guess.

I do know that we looked strikingly similar, so much so that people would sometimes get us mixed up, and that Professor X had the same name as my twin brother. My own desperation for his approval no doubt dated back to my childhood, and invoked an ancient sense of victimhood, of powerlessness, that I must have provoked in ways I still can’t see. The whole reason we stage feuds—whether personal or political—is to blind ourselves with rage.

In the end, I had to ask professors outside the program to read my thesis. One of those poor souls, a poet, wrote to express his confusion about the epigraph, a quote from a Steve Earle song that had nothing to do with the stories themselves, and would have made no sense to anyone but me and Professor X:

I got a razor in my pocket

And a pistol hid down by the school

I wish I could report that my feuding days ended there. But over the past two decades I’ve racked up a stunning roster of rivals: literary agents and fellow writers, publishers, bloggers, and professional demagogues. A complete archive of my feuds would extend from the folder in my inbox labeled “Crazy Shit” to the archives of Fox News.

I’m pretty sure I enjoy the distinction of being the only author ever to have to be physically separated from his own publisher at Book Expo. This would have been in 2006. The publisher had cornered me backstage after a book signing and demanded that I interact with her, something I did not wish to do because she was, in my estimation, an inept lunatic.

After the Expo, this publisher called me repeatedly, insisting that we needed to resolve our issues. Her conscious motive was to work things out—I give her that credit. But it was also clear that her pride had been injured and so she wanted, also, to reaffirm her own power, to get back into it with me, to do the dance. This is the term of art I use when I can sense that someone is itching to feud with me.

I knew I’d have to do the dance with her eventually, and that when I did she would try to reignite our rancor. So I wrote a script for myself. The script said this: “I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but I’m confident we’ll be able to work together moving forward.” When at last we talked on the phone, this was literally the only thing I said.

Publisher: “We need to be able to talk about what happened at the Expo, Steve.”

Me: “I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but I’m confident we’ll be able to work together moving forward.”

Publisher: “I’ve never been treated that way by another writer.”

Me: “I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but I’m confident we’ll be able to work together moving forward.”

Publisher: “I don’t understand why you’re so angry.”

Me: “I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but I’m confident we’ll be able to work together moving forward.”

On and on it went, until my publisher, having passed through provocation and antic rage into a kind of exhausted futility, hung up.

I thought I’d won. I bounced around my apartment. I called my best friend to recount the triumph. But no one wins in a feud, especially when you beef with someone more powerful than you. That’s the whole point of Stoner. In this case, the publisher decided not to put out a paperback edition of my next book, damning it to an even more certain obscurity.