9. Desire Shall Be Placed in Doubt

William Stoner is remarkably resilient in the face of hardship. But he’s not impervious. At age forty-two, with his marriage and career in ruin, he reaches the end of his endurance. Unable to muster the attention necessary even to read, he sits for long periods, staring at nothing. He yearns for something, “even pain—to pierce him, to bring him alive.”

In short, Stoner begins to wonder if his life is worth living. One snowy night, he turns out the lights in his office and listens to the silence, the sounds absorbed “by the delicate and intricately cellular being of the snow. Nothing moved upon the whiteness; it was a dead scene.” He slips out of his own body and everything, from the trees to the pale planes of snow to the stars—appears tiny and far away, as if “dwindling to a nothingness.”

This is the individual apprehended in a moment of pain so intense it triggers a cosmic disassociation. You don’t have to be an English professor to hear the echoes here of Joyce (“his soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling”) and Frank O’Connor (“the old woman and the birds and the bloody stars were all far away, and I was somehow very small and very lonely”). But the passage has a more immediate echo; Stoner is encountering the ghost of his own parents, who spent their lives on the brink of being devoured by barren land.

I often point my students to this passage, as a demonstration of what I mean when I tell them to slow down where it hurts. I stress this because our tendency is to do just the opposite, to hurry past our most abject moments, as if by doing so we might erase them from the record of our inner life. Williams doesn’t run from the darkness within Stoner. He runs into that darkness.

*

And yet.

And yet it’s equally true that at this point in Stoner—we’ve hit page 180 of 278, folks—most readers are waiting for something good to happen to the guy. Not just waiting. Yearning. And Williams knows this. He understands the immutable logic of parable, in which the audience’s hopes are inversely correlated to the hero’s degree of tribulation.

Thus, as Stoner sits in his office staring suicidally at the shadows creeping across campus, he becomes aware of a figure standing behind him: Katherine Driscoll, the young instructor who showed such promise in his seminar.

Katherine asks Stoner to read a draft of her dissertation, explaining, quite nervously, that she revised her approach based on the class she took with him. He agrees. But he then spends a week ducking the task. Katherine hasn’t just intruded upon his depression. She’s asked him to feel alive again. When at last he sits down to read the draft (an hour before he’s agreed to meet with her) its cogency startles him. He becomes so immersed that he misses their appointment and must drop by her apartment to find her. They talk for several hours. Stoner, we are told, leans so close “he could have extended his hand and touched her.” But there is nothing leering in his regard for Katherine Driscoll. He’s enthralled by her intellect and exhorts her to pursue the project, as Archer Sloane once did for him.

Katherine again mentions how vital his seminar was to her thinking. When he brushes off the compliment, she has one of those outbursts so common in Stoner, the sort that arise from feelings long concealed. It’s shameful, she declares, how the class was turned against him.

He assures her the dispute is unimportant, and instantly recognizes the truth of his words. For the first time in months, he feels the weight of his depression lift. As he walks home, he notices a street light pushing “feebly against the darkness” and the smell of smoke from back yard fires “held by the mist.” The world as a sensual experience comes alive again.

*

“And so he had his love affair.”

We know this because Williams tells us so, even though the lovers in question will not consummate their desires for another six weeks. I note this to reiterate the singular pleasure of a narrative style in which the reader knows more than the characters.

The fact that William Stoner is a bit dense when it comes to his own motives, and slow to act on them, creates tremendous tension. Because the reader is constantly in a state of delayed gratification. We know what awaits Stoner, and because he doesn’t we feel both curious and protective of him. I sometimes think of this as the Wile E. Coyote Principle.

Wile E. Coyote, for those of you not raised by a television, is a cartoon character who spends his life chasing the Roadrunner around the desert. From time to time, his enthusiasm sends him skittering off a cliff. Thanks to the wonders of animation, he will often stand suspended in the air for a few seconds before peering down and noticing his predicament, at which point gravity yanks him down. It is this moment of defiant ignorance that makes me love Wile E. Coyote, no doubt because I spend so much time in the same state.

When it comes to Katherine Driscoll, Williams has been dropping clues from the start—and making sure Stoner misses every one. The first time they talk, during the seminar, she blushes furiously and her eyes glint. He sees her “wreathed in radiant, secret, and intimate delight” and almost pulls back “from the sudden involuntary warmth.”

After their initial discussion, Stoner begins to visit Katherine, always with the pretext of providing intellectual guidance. It’s a form of courtship that mortifies Stoner. He thinks of himself as a “faintly ridiculous figure,” a middle-aged man marooned in a miserable marriage, foisting himself upon a younger colleague. And yet he has to physically restrain himself from going to see her. Katherine feels the same countervailing passions. As they devote more energy to concealing their ardor, their encounters grow painfully awkward. Certain that his attentions have become an obligation, Stoner ceases visiting altogether.

A lovesick Katherine responds in kind: she stops showing up at school. Stoner hurries to her apartment, thinking her ill. She must eventually clarify that she is not under the weather but desperately unhappy.

Stoner still doesn’t get it.

Only after seeing her eyes “brilliant in pools of tears” does the truth land. At last, he confesses his feelings. Her reaction is a small masterpiece of understatement. “She did not move,” Williams writes. “Two tears welled over her lashes and ran down her cheeks; she did not brush them away.” Stoner prattles on, fumbling to explain his actions, until Katherine—speaking for all of us by now—tells him to shut up.

What follows is not a cinematic clinch but something much more familiar to those of us who recognize love as a force of profound disequilibrium. “Tentatively, clumsily, their hands went out to each other; they clasped each other in an awkward, strained embrace; and for a long time they sat together without moving, as if any movement might let escape from them the strange and terrible thing that they held between them in a single grasp.”

*

No matter how often I read Stoner, I am always nearly breathless at this point, because Williams has so patiently constructed the ramp of desire. Both his lovers are delirious with wants their inhibitions forbid. And the reader is thus left to absorb all the ache. Which reminds me of something else I tell my students: the most exciting thing about sex is desire.

Which is not to say that the novel skimps on sex. William Stoner most definitely fucks. When he shows up at her place in the morning, they couple almost before they speak, on a bed “still rumpled and hot from Katherine’s sleeping.” After classes, they retreat to her apartment to make love, work on their books, then make love again.

So long denied the pleasures of the body, Stoner lets his “blunt fingers play upon the moist, faintly pink skin of thigh and belly” and lingers on the contours of her torso as well. Her flesh, we learn, has “a warm ruddy undertone like light flowing beneath a milky translucence. And like the translucent flesh, the calm and poise and reserve which he had thought were herself, masked a warmth and playfulness and humor whose intensity was made possible by the appearance that disguised them.” Translation: Katherine is an angel in the streets and a devil in the sheets. Actually, the word she uses is more explicit: “Sometimes, with you, I feel like the slut of the world, the eager faithful slut of the world.”

Well then.

As a reminder: all this is happening in the 1930s. In the Midwest. In the context of an extramarital affair between two professors of literature. But if there was one area Williams knew intimately, it was the academic affair.

For all the carnal abandon, the relationship is primarily one of tenderness. Stoner has lived through considerable strife. He possesses the nimble and curious mind of a scholar. But he is a fundamentally innocent person, one who has never experienced genuine intimacy. Consequently, he spends a lot of time simply trying to understand what love is.

This requires undoing some of the delusions he has acquired as a student of literature, the notion, for instance, that a life of the mind is at odds with a life of the senses. Katherine (no doubt speaking for Williams himself) flatly rejects this notion. She places her entire faith in “lust and learning.” Stoner also frets that his infidelity will cause a marital crisis that jeopardizes his relationship to his daughter. Just the opposite happens. As he spends more time with Katherine, his relationship with Edith and Grace improves markedly.

Given the ruinous record of infidelity in literature, this twist might come off as a kind of wish fantasy for adulterers. In Stoner, the math works. Edith has long resented her husband’s physical and emotional needs. The affair allows him fulfillment elsewhere, and alleviates the pressure on their loveless marriage. It also solidifies Edith’s dominion over Grace. She begins to relax and her attitude toward Stoner softens into a kind of affection. For the first time in years, she allows him to spend time with Grace, and fixes up a spare bedroom for him. She also makes it clear that she knows about the affair and, to his astonishment, tacitly approves, so long as it doesn’t threaten her security.

When Edith teases him about the youth of his paramour, Stoner briefly considers how others must see him, as a kind of desperate, wrinkled Lothario. But this caricature dissolves before his eyes.

Stoner is free. Not just to make love to Katherine, but to contemplate the meaning of love. The conclusion he reaches is one I have returned to again and again, in an effort to make sense of my own marriage, and my deepest friendships. As a child, Stoner conceives of love as an “absolute state of being” that one locates by good fortune. As a young man mired in a dead marriage, he dismisses it as “the heaven of a false religion.” Only after meeting Katherine does he recognize that love is “neither a state of grace nor an illusion.” He sees it as “a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”

*

The author, having thus seduced us into shouldering the burden of hope, does what every great author must: he slowly strangles that hope.

The lovers are granted a blissful summer. In the fall, as campus fills up again, their affair becomes common knowledge. And yet no one seems to care. They begin to believe that they might be allowed to pursue their love, and with some dignity. Over the winter vacation, while Edith takes Grace to visit relatives, Stoner and Katherine head off to a cabin the Ozarks. They spend a week tromping through the snow, making love, laughing, and lying naked before a fire. It’s a kind of idyll that provides a dreamy rejoinder to his nightmare honeymoon.

And if that’s all there was to the novel, if it ended right there on page 206, I imagine most readers would set the book down with a dazed and grateful grin.

Alas, this is Stoner.

Gordon Finch calls Stoner to his office. Right on schedule, the novel delivers us to the intersection of astonishment and inevitability. “It’s Lomax,” Finch tells his old friend. “Somehow the son-of-a-bitch has got hold of it.” His plan is to fire Katherine Driscoll on the basis of moral complaints made against her. The threat of a public hearing designed to sully her reputation will force Stoner to resign. If Stoner refuses, Lomax will publicly interrogate Katherine and he’ll be dragged into the scandal, as if by accident.

*

Stoner staggers out of Finch’s office and into the prison of the world. The single era of bliss in his life is over and a part of him feels “so near to death that he could watch the approach almost with calm.” The dogwood trees are in bloom but they tremble “like soft clouds, translucent and tenuous” and the air is drenched with the “sweet scent of dying lilac blossoms.” Stoner arrives at Katherine’s apartment in a state of feverish gaiety, desperate to make her laugh, a laughter that is like “a dance that life makes upon the body of death.” When at last he explains the situation, they quickly agree that they have no choice but to split up.

This isn’t true. Stoner could resign and move elsewhere with Katherine. There would be a steep price: an acrimonious divorce from Edith, losing Grace, the anguish of the scandal. Stoner insists he’s willing to bear all of it. But he can’t abide the loss of their teaching careers, “the destruction of ourselves, of what we do.”

I’m not sure I buy this, either. Even given the moral codes that prevailed in the 1930s, it seems plausible that Stoner would be able to find work as a professor eventually, or a headmaster. Katherine might have a harder time of it. But the idea that a divorce arising from infidelity would render them unfit to work as teachers of any kind in a city or town far from Columbus, Missouri, is pretty far-fetched.

Once again, Williams presents Stoner as a perfect martyr who has no choice but walk away from the love of his life. Every time I read this scene, Katherine’s assent registers as both histrionic and avoidant (“I’ve known it all along, I guess … But dammit all Bill! Dammit it all!”) Within a few hours of their final doomed coupling, she submits her resignation and leaves town, an exit Stoner realizes she’s been planning for some time.

It’s all too convenient.

*

I say this because I can’t stand to see Stoner throw away his only true shot at happiness. But I say it advisedly. I’m infected with a particular modern illness, the belief (perhaps it’s a delusion) that human beings have a moral obligation to pursue joy, that the miraculous good fortune of finding a soulmate should transcend any other consideration, should compel us to absorb the risks of reinventing our lives. Stoner makes a different argument: that the preservation of selfhood inevitably requires the sacrifice of gratification.

I hate this idea. It makes me want to rip Stoner to shreds. Maybe it makes me want to rip the book to shreds because I fear it’s true. But I don’t think so. I see Stoner as a guy who’s never forgiven himself for abandoning the family farm. He allows himself the ecstasy of loving Katherine. But only after decades of marital abuse, and only for a matter of months. Offered the chance to abandon a miserable marriage and job, he flinches, then attempts to recast his masochism as a moral imperative.

I didn’t used to get so worked up about this, by the way. But the longer I’ve been alive, the more familiar I’ve become with the machinations of the inner life, the ways in which we sabotage our happiness by circling back to the sorrows of our youth. I’ve spent most of my adult life in pursuit of the feelings that dominated my childhood: loneliness, anxiety, humiliation. And that’s before you get to the feuding.

But I’ve also spent a lot of time and money trying to undo this pattern, to overcome my hang-ups around happiness and success, to rid myself of the stubborn fiction that virtue resides in suffering.

It’s not that William Stoner is making a disastrous decision here—that’s true of virtually every character in the canon. It’s that he regards his decision as saintly rather than self-punishing. Where, I always wonder, is the guy who celebrated love as a human act of becoming? The guy resurrected emotionally, erotically, even spiritually? How can that guy justify his decision to climb back into the crypt?

What a betrayal.

*

Williams was right about the nature of love. It is a process built by the will and the intelligence and the heart. I only wish that his novel offered a proving ground for that process, something more rigorous than an abject marriage or an ecstatic affair. Or that Stoner possessed the courage to live his creed. Most stories—maybe all of them, ultimately—arise from desire placed in doubt. But the fruition of desire generates its own vast and holy body of doubt. I know this from my own marriage. The true work of love resides in sticking with the process, especially in those moments, and eras, when desire is forced to coexist with doubt.