It would be lovely to present Stoner as a novel purely devoted to the inner life. It would also be inaccurate. The book is also very much about the material world, about the collision of poverty and privilege, which is to say about class. It took me half a dozen readings to realize how persistently Williams explores this theme. He takes a far more subtle approach than, say, Dickens. But he’s equally resolute.
This is why the earliest pages of the book are dedicated to an unflinching description of the Stoner family farm. It’s an operation “bound together by the necessity of its toil,” with a crude homestead that has taken on the colors of the parched land around it, and floors “of unpainted plank, unevenly spaced and cracking with age, up through which dust steadily seeped and was swept back each day by Stoner’s mother.” His parents are described as nearly insensate, enslaved to an unforgiving earth that seems forever on the verge of swallowing them up.
John Williams did not grow up on such a farm. But the circumstances into which he was born were indisputably meager. His biological father died under nefarious circumstances—or, just as likely, abandoned his family—when Williams was three, and his mother remarried a heavy drinker who couldn’t keep the rent paid. The family eventually sought refuge with his mother’s people, farmers in Clarksville, Texas.
Williams was an early reader, and went on to become a dedicated academic and author. But his erudition provoked more skepticism than pride in his kin, and the dandy clothes he later donned as a professor, as well as the cigarette holder, should be viewed not as a mark of his breeding, but a desire to compensate for the conditions of his youth.
Stoner, then, isn’t just a story of a literary awakening. It’s also about the fraught journey from a life of subsistence to one of relative abundance, about what it’s like to betray your legacy even as you seek your destiny.
This tension is bound to the novel’s instigating event: the visit from the county agent who suggests that William attend college. In response, Stoner’s father delivers what we are told is the longest speech of his life. He observes that he “never held with schooling” when he was young, but that his land has grown harder to work; he acknowledges what the county agent has told him: that his son might learn new methods of farming at the University. “Maybe he’s right,” the senior Stoner observes. “Sometimes when I’m out in the field I get to thinking.”
It’s a moment where we can see, fleetingly, the stirring of his imagination, which fixes on adaptation as a necessity. He sends his only son off to college not to pursue self-improvement, but as a means of familial survival.
Stoner travels by foot and buggy to Columbia and arrives at the university covered in red dirt. He gazes at the grand brick buildings and fields of green in awe; he can bring himself to do no more than pace the edges of the campus. He boards with an elderly couple who work a farm outside of the city. The Footes are cousins to Stoner but regard the young scholar with suspicion, scoffing at his academic ambitions and happily exploiting his labor. His room has no heat, and in winter he has to wrap himself in ragged blankets and blow on his hands so he can turn the pages of his books without tearing them.
These privations are understood by all parties as the punishment inflicted on those who seek to rise above their station. Indeed, one of the most notable symptoms of Stoner’s decision to study and teach literature is that he feels empowered to reject this treatment. In this sense, his revelation registers as triumphant.
But the novel refuses to dodge the underside of this heroism: the crushing betrayal he visits upon his parents, who have sacrificed so much to send him to college. The whole point of his schooling, so far as they are concerned, is for him to rescue the farm, not to abandon it. Stoner is so plagued by guilt that he hides his decision for years. On the morning of his graduation, he glances at his folks, “the brown faces that rose nakedly out of their new clothing,” and his will fails him yet again.
When he finally confesses, his father assumes he’s has gotten himself into some kind of trouble. Stoner attempts to explain his plan to teach; his father receives the words “as a stone receives the repeated blows of a fist.” His mother’s reaction is to squeeze her eyes shut and breathe heavily and press her fists against her cheeks. “With wonder Stoner realized that she was crying, deeply and silently, with the shame and awkwardness of one who seldom weeps.”
To pursue his future, Stoner must cut ties with his past. He becomes both orphan and traitor and spends the rest of his days haunted by a secret sense of his own wrongdoing. This is why he engineers situations designed to punish himself.
*
The most obvious and vexing example is his decision to court and marry Edith Bostwick. Given that Stoner has, to this point in his life, expressed no romantic inclinations, it is worth pondering why he is transfixed by Edith. Stoner is teaching at a large university where, presumably, they are women he might find intellectually and temperamentally compatible. So why Edith?
Her beauty plays a role. But it is a beauty bound up in Stoner’s particular ideas about grace and refinement, which is to say class. He meets her at a reception held in “the grandest house” he has ever been near, spotting her at the head of a massive walnut table “covered with yellow damask and laden with white dishes and bowls of gleaming silver.” As she delicately pours tea into gold-rimmed cups, Stoner is “assailed by a consciousness of his own heavy clumsiness.”
This initial view is enough to spur an ardor worthy of Gatsby: “There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything.”
Stoner wants the same thing: to possess a woman who personifies wealth and punishes him for repudiating his birthright. The more we learn about the Bostwick family, the more obvious this becomes. Horace is a banker by profession and a pompous charlatan by nature, covetous in spirit and corpulent in form. His wife exhibits a bitterness “so general and pervasive that no specific remedy” can assuage it.
During the pre-marital interview, she peers at Stoner “curiously, as if his face were smudged or his nose were bleeding,” while Horace is dismayed to learn that his daughter’s suitor has no means beyond his profession. He points out that Edith has had “advantages” such as a fine home and servants and private schools, and wonders out loud how she will survive the reduced standard sure to be inflicted by what he calls Stoner’s “condition.”
Stoner is so humiliated he’s ready to rescind his proposal.
The reader expects Bostwick to be relieved. Instead, he turns panicky and deferential. His bluff has been called. He knows that his daughter is ill-prepared for the duties of adulthood; beneath his bluster he’s desperate to marry her off.
Stoner’s own father recognizes the situation instantly. Upon meeting Edith, he stares directly into her eyes and issues a shockingly candid challenge. “A man needs himself a woman, to do for him and give him comfort. Now you be good to William. He ought to have someone who can be good to him.”
“I’ll try Mr. Stoner,” comes Edith’s doomed rejoinder. “I’ll try.”
*
The entirety of Stoner’s marriage can be thought of as one long and bruising lesson in the pathologies of class. Edith has been “educated upon the premise that she would be protected from the gross events that life might thrust in her way, and upon the premise that she had no other duty than to be a graceful and accomplished accessory to that protection, since she belonged to a social and economic class to which protection was an almost sacred obligation.”
Cosseted by her privilege, Edith is unprepared for the gross events that marriage and motherhood require. In defiance of the prevailing gender norms, Stoner becomes her indentured servant. He’s up before dawn, grading papers, preparing lectures, feeding wife and daughter, and cleaning their apartment. Then he rushes off to his teaching job. Edith responds by chastising him for being unable to furnish her a proper home. She insists that she can’t live in an apartment because of the noise made by her husband and her child. Worst of all, she’s forced to smell the baby. This monstrous entitlement is a direct result of her wealth, the fact that Edith has never had to care for herself, even one day of her life. “Nor could it ever have occurred to her that she might become responsible for the well-being of another.”
Stoner argues, explicitly and persistently, that the pursuit and acquisition of wealth represents a corruption of the spirit. It comes as no surprise that Horace Bostwick takes his own life days after the crash of 1929, having made ruinous decisions with other people’s money, like his disgraced father.
After the funeral, Edith embarks on a new project: reinventing herself. This involves purchasing a new wardrobe, painting her face, smoking cigarettes, and cultivating a European accent. Stoner, meanwhile, dedicates himself to his daughter and his teaching. As he sands down planks of wood for a new bookcase he notices “the roughness of the surface disappearing … it was himself he was making possible.” When Edith returns home, she recognizes at once that it is her husband, and not she, who has undergone a genuine transformation.
This is the template of their marriage: Stoner places his faith in hard work and a halting introspection. Edith collects affectations and attempts to drown her boredom in empty materialism. She’s incapable of psychic growth. When Stoner fails Charles Walker, provoking Lomax’s wrath, Edith’s reaction travels to the heart of her essential amorality. She notes that they’ve been poor so far, and that they’ll carry on being poor. What she can’t understand is why her husband insists on defending his principles. “What difference could it make?” she mutters.
Her response to Grace’s pregnancy is even more striking: “Oh, my God. Oh, Gracie. How could you—oh, my God. Like your father. Your father’s blood. Oh, yes. Filth. Filth—” Here at last Edith reveals the blood libel that has governed their entire marriage.
It is one that Stoner well recognizes, for “deep in him, beneath his memory” is an awareness of his origins. He rarely thinks of his early years on the farm outside Boonville, but the “blood knowledge of his inheritance” pervades his consciousness, a knowledge bequeathed to him by “forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak.”
Edith’s bigotry takes root in the very soil of his character.
*
The novel’s preoccupation with class extends well beyond a toxic homestead. Stoner is aware of the age in which he lives, and inwardly devastated by the effects of the Great Depression, which he witnesses unfolding around him. He sees the vacant faces of men whose vision of a decent life have been shattered, and are thus left to wander the streets and skulk up to back doors to “beg for the bread that would allow them to beg again.” Stoner recognizes the perch of his own privilege, as well. “He saw men,” Williams writes, “who had once walked erect in their own identities, look at him with envy and hatred for the poor security he enjoyed as a tenured employee of an institution that somehow could not fail. He did not give voice to this awareness; but the knowledge of common misery touched him and changed him in ways that were hidden deep from the public view, and a quiet sadness for the common plight was never far beneath any moment of his living.”
To this point, the novel has focused persistently on personal tribulation. But Stoner has been conscious of the larger drama of class the whole time. These observations are not a footnote to the action, but a revelation of his worldview.
*
Does Stoner traffic in caricatures of the wealthy and the poor? Absolutely. Not all rich men are mendacious blowhards, nor are their daughters vapid viragos. The lives of all subsistence farmers are not “expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed.” That would be as absurd as, say, labeling impoverished African-American women “welfare queens.”
But the portrayals of class in Stoner are about on par with what Dickens offers up in A Christmas Carol. Or Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. Or, for that matter, what Jesus proclaims in the Sermon on the Mount. Which is to say that they are, by the standards of capitalism, heretical.
What I want to argue here is that Stoner is, in many ways, a far more radical social novel than works we commonly associate with that term. Because it suggests that the tolls of class cannot be overcome by individual action, that our inner lives are shaped by the economic injustice we experience, and witness, whether we ever say or do anything about it.
The social novels of the nineteenth century highlighted the transcendent power of personal resilience. Protagonists such as Jane Eyre and Pip are born low, but manage to scrap their way out of hardship. The thrill of these books is in seeing quality of character rewarded, both in romantic and economic terms. But there’s always a certain genteel hedging. Yes, Jane Eyre marries her rich man in the end, but only after he’s been mauled by fire and she’s been bequeathed an inheritance.
The American social novels that preceded Stoner are far more explicit in addressing the systemic ills of class. Writers such as Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Steinbeck, Jack London, and even Ernest Hemingway wrote books that dramatized the plight of modern capitalism. The U.S.A. Trilogy of John Dos Passos offers a sprawling account of men and woman trapped within a merciless caste system. The poor are invariably crushed while those who pursue wealth are dehumanized by greed.
Stoner is by no means a social novel in this tradition. Much of the reason it was overlooked back in 1965, when it was first published, is because critics were more focused on books that addressed the crises then roiling America, from civil rights to race riots. The private travails of a Midwestern academic, particularly one delivered in a reserved narrative style, came off as provincial, even stodgy.
But I’ve always thought of Stoner as a book that manages to fuse the themes of The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath. It shows us what happens when the poor farm boy actually gets the rich girl, which is that he winds up in hell. Not just because the rich girl is cruel and callow, but because she’s been reared within a class system that programs her into passivity and egoism. Still worse, Stoner himself can never shed the stain of his poverty. His material circumstances improve. He’s able to cultivate a vibrant intellect. But when it comes to his happiness, he cannot escape deprivation. Stoner is a fairytale in which the peasant boy becomes a man of means and lives sadly ever after.
*
It’s no accident that my recent readings of this novel have gravitated toward issues of class. When I first read Stoner, I was barely thirty, single, and preoccupied by my artistic fate. If I was focused on politics, it was the personal morass of my graduate program.
But beginning with the election of 2000 and continuing through the atrocity of 9/11, I began to fret about the fragility of our democratic arrangement, a preoccupation that has infiltrated my work. I saw a cultural discourse increasingly driven by corporate hegemony and hostile to economic justice. The government that once launched a War on Poverty began, quite openly, to wage war on the poor.
Our most recent financial hemorrhage came as a result of Wall Street wizards packaging personal debt as assets, betting the house until the house went into foreclosure. Anyone with a functioning frontal lobe can see the seeds of the next great crash. It will again reside in our red ink, the credit cards we use to finance lives more extravagant than we can afford, the debits we accrue in pursuit of education and medical care in a society where the safety net has been meticulously unraveled and spun into gold for oligarchs.
But the depth of our delusions around wealth and poverty came into full view only a couple of years ago, when one of our major political parties nominated a candidate who had rehabbed his ruinous record as a businessman by portraying a gilded mogul on reality TV.
As a candidate, Trump offered little more than a showbiz spin on shopworn conservative cons; ginning up racial resentment, draping plutocratic aims in angry populism. But as a character in our psychic lives, Trump captivated us because he represented an ancient fantasy of wealth—that it confers boundless power, to lie with impunity, to massacre decency with a smirk.
To read Stoner in this age is to confront the true nature of faith in a capitalist theocracy: the rich succeed through virtue and industry, the poor fail because they are morally defective. These are the notions upon which we’ve staked the American story, the reason we’ve elected men who see public service as a means to consolidate wealth and power, protect privilege, and obliterate equal opportunity. No wonder our popular imagination has become consumed by outlaws who deploy gunshots as a shortcut to treasure. We’ve become a nation of wage slaves impatiently dreaming of bottle service, obedient to the dream.
On the campaign trail, our eventual president proclaimed, in all sincerity, “I love the poorly educated!” He knew his success required citizens to choose emotion over intellect, to become suspicious of those who learn too much, who study history or literature or science. The academic is no match for the entertainer in an attention economy. She can offer only the power to reflect, a power that steers us, inexorably, toward the hard truths of the inner life.
In this sense, Stoner is really just a front man, a farm kid who believes he will find refuge from the economic machinery of America in the life of the mind. The anguish he feels in witnessing men begging for bread isn’t for the poverty of their circumstances, but for the shame stored up in their souls, a shame inflicted by those, like his in-laws, who live within the desolation of abundance.
We indulge in fantasies of wealth and power because we want to believe they will bestow us an ease of spirit, will undo the worry stamped upon us as children. But Stoner argues that there is no escape, even for a man like him who forges a life of economic security and spiritual meaning. He never escapes the deprivation of his youth. It merely assumes a new disguise in each phase of his life.
This about squares with my own experiences. From a financial standpoint, I’ve lived a life of extraordinary privilege. And yet I remain persistently anxious about money, self-depriving—my wife might say miserly—and resentful of those who display the audacity to enjoy their wealth. Where does all this angst come from? My own lineage, which includes affluent bankers and card-carrying Communists, provides no coherent explanation. I can only speculate that I’ve been loyal to my parents, who worked hard and lived well below their means. And that I remain the child I was, who knew it was impossible to purchase happiness but hoarded his pennies anyway, just in case.