8. Monk Radical: Stoner as an Anti-War Novel

Precisely two sentences into the novel, we learn that William Stoner receives his PhD at the height of World War I. It’s a subtle but telling detail, and Williams spends several pages describing the circumstances that lead to his decision.

Even before war is declared, and even within the ivied walls of the university, the tides of nationalism are surging. A number of students and younger instructors sign up as ambulance drivers for the allies and they are hailed as heroes. An anti-German fervor grips campus, leading to demonstrations “in which students shouted incoherently and waved American flags.” A mob even confronts an aging German professor.

Stoner himself is precisely the kind of young man expected to enlist, which is to say poor and relatively powerless, reared with an obedience to authority, and therefore ripe for the instant heroism of soldiery. His friends Gordon Finch and Dave Masters both sign-up, and Finch—engorged with a sudden sense of his own purpose—cajoles Stoner to follow suit. “Gordon feels the first strength of virtue he’s ever been allowed to feel,” Masters explains, “and he naturally wants to include the rest of the world in it, so that he can keep on believing.” This comment evokes the weeks and months after the terrorist attacks of 2001, when so many otherwise humane Americans converted the rubble of a tragedy into a righteous pretext for vengeance.

For all his insight, Masters himself succumbs to cynicism. He confesses that he doesn’t care about the moral stakes of the war, but that it might be “amusing to pass through the world once more” before retreating to the academy. It doesn’t really matter whether he enlists or not, he reasons. Still, he urges Stoner to follow his example, not for God or country, but for himself. Trapped between this bewildering nihilism and Finch’s self-aggrandizing fanaticism, Stoner is left no refuge.

But when he meets with Archer Sloane to announce his reluctant decision to enlist, the older man nearly lunges at him. To this point, Sloane has maintained a manner of courtly and ironic detachment toward his protégé. The contents of his heart now come pouring out.

He reveals that he has no memory of his own father, who was killed in the Battle of Shiloh. “A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men,” he tells Stoner. “It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime … the scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has aimed his life to build.”

I didn’t pay much attention to this passage in 1995. It may even have struck me as histrionic. But Sloane’s words have taken on an entirely different valence in the America of 2019, a nation that has been at war for the past two decades, and that has witnessed, over that same span, a moral regression so profound that the brute now presides over our republic.

It’s not just that work of academics and scientists has been cast aside. Our political leaders are now virtually indistinguishable from warlords. They traffic in racial incitement and fantasize about ethnic cleansing; they knowingly stoke the ire of domestic terrorists and embolden armed goon squads. They shrug when journalists are dismembered and liquefied in baths of acid. This is precisely what Sloane foresees. He understands that a population enthralled by martial heroism will inevitably devolve into a cult of violence whose only cause is an annihilating hatred.

*

Sloane eventually calms himself and counsels Stoner to remember who he is and what he has chosen to become. “There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history,” he explains.

As we know, Stoner is not in the habit of introspection. But he accepts the import of the verdict he must reach and sequesters himself in his room for two days. Over that span, he comes to realize that he’s not frightened to join the fight, nor morally offended. What he feels is even more forbidden: a towering indifference. He simply cannot attach himself to the abstract mission of nationalism, or the atavistic ire that lies at the heart of patriotism. He realizes what he’s known all along: that an unexpected passion for language rescued him from the deadness of agricultural servitude and that he has no interest in squandering that rebirth for the sake of a glory accorded by men more afraid of cowardice than moved by bravery.

Again: all this is happening in the earliest days of World War I. The entire population is ginned up on war. The Kaiser is being hung in effigy. Virtually every young man in his circle is enlisting, including his only two friends on earth. William Stoner chooses to heed the call of his inner life.

*

Gordon Finch immediately warns Stoner that he’ll rue the decision. And as the war grinds on, Stoner does notice the contempt of older colleagues, and even students. But he doesn’t care. He’s simply unmoved by the public accounting of courage. Instead, as lists of the dead mount, Stoner begins to see mortality in a new way, not as a literary event or the body’s slow surrender to illness but “the explosion of violence upon the battlefield, the gush of blood from the ruptured throat.” A year into the war, word arrives that Dave Masters has been slain in France. The senselessness of this loss haunts Stoner for the rest of his life.

If Stoner remembers Masters as a defiant young man erased by war, Archer Sloane becomes a kind of dwindling shade. When Stoner meets with him to accept a full-time teaching position, he is shocked at Sloane’s appearance. His eyes have gone dull, the skin of his face, “once tough as thin leather, now had the fragility of ancient, drying paper.” It’s like staring at a death mask.

On Armistice Day, the campus erupts and Stoner is caught up in a parade of students who sail past Sloane’s office. Stoner returns to find his mentor weeping bitterly “at a defeat only he could see,” the barbarism of celebrating a victory in which millions of human beings have been killed and dispossessed and traumatized for no purpose beyond the whim of the powerful. Sloane dies not long after.

Both of the men Stoner most admires in life are destroyed by war. Stoner thinks of Sloane two decades later, with the onset of World War II. He has come to understand, more fully, the truths that ravaged Sloane, “the futility of committing one’s self wholly to the irrational and dark forces that impelled the world towards its unknown ends.”

Williams began writing the novel in 1960, and sent a finished draft to his agent in 1963. The Vietnam War wouldn’t begin for another two years, and there was no anti-war movement to speak of. I mention this to clarify that Williams wasn’t motivated by his disgust at any particular war. Nor was he a pacifist. He served proudly in the Second World War, as a radio operator on transport planes in Burma. Three of his four published novels deal explicitly with masculine ambition and include scenes of extreme violence. His final book, unfinished at his death, was inspired by his war experiences.

Stoner is again the outlier. Its most persistent argument is that war represents, in every case, the harnessing of our inner life for the purpose of mass murder. There is no such thing as a good war, because the entire project disfigures the soul and dishonors the conscience.

To be clear, William Stoner has no political consciousness to speak of. He would never fight in a war, but it would never occur to him to protest one either. He is more like a monk who wishes only to be left alone in his abbey with his manuscripts. To him, literature is the purest expression of human enlightenment, the search for meaning and beauty. War is a desecration of that mission.

There is no shortage of novels in accord with this perspective. Many of Williams’s own contemporaries, fellow veterans such as Mailer and Vonnegut and Heller, mined their military misadventures to craft famous anti-war novels. What sets Stoner apart is its refusal to place the drama of war at the center of human experience. In the world of the novel, war is something that happens elsewhere. But it is enabled by civilians who exalt the cause with no conception of its carnage.

Stoner predicts the moral disorder of our present, a world in which the sanctification of military endeavor is reflexive, while the horror of combat grows ever more abstract, in which airstrikes have become televised entertainment, in which the duty of service is peddled as a patriotic perk to the poor, in which young men are dispatched overseas to patrol villages with high-tech weapons, all to promote a set of interests that amount to a lucrative vendetta.

Archer Sloane sees it all coming. And he weeps.