In the past few years, I’ve been thinking about an aspect of Stoner I barely noticed as a younger man: fatherhood. This has to do with my own struggles as a dad, which I’ll come to after some artless stalling.
For now, let’s recall that Grace comes into Stoner’s life as an unexpected blessing, after Edith essentially vanishes. During the first year of her life, the child knows “only her father’s touch, and his voice, and his love.” Grace winds up spending hours in her father’s study, working alongside him at a little desk. She is a quiet and thoughtful child, and the two of them share a kinship Stoner recognizes as central to his existence—until the evening Edith appears in the doorway, determined to evict Grace.
It’s important to note the fluctuations in this scene. Edith orders Grace out. Stoner insists she’s no bother. Edith ignores him and repeats her directive. Bewildered, Grace rises from her chair and walks toward the door. She then pauses in the center of the room, “looking first at her father and then at her mother.” Grace is just trying to figure out who’s in charge, of course. But she’s also, by my reckoning, imploring her father to rescue her.
When you examine the situation from her perspective, you can see why. Stoner isn’t just a doting father. He has been, to this point, her protector, shielding her from a mother who is domineering and destructive. This is why Stoner’s response always lances my heart: “‘It’s all right, Grace,’ he said as gently as he could. ‘It’s all right. Go with your mother.’”
It’s not all right. He’s sending her soul off to an execution.
*
I wish I were overstating this. Williams leaves no room for doubt. Edith immediately overhauls Grace’s life in a manner inimical to her nature. She dresses her up like a doll and forces her to host parties and enlists her in piano lessons. She hovers and controls (as her own mother did) without any expression of love. Stoner can’t quite admit to himself the horror of what’s happening. But Grace knows. One day, he encounters her in the living room. They exchange shy smiles and Stoner kneels to embrace his daughter. Her body stiffens. She’s become a hostage.
In the midst of this hug, Grace’s face again registers bewilderment, a word repeated to emphasize the mystery with which this little girl is contending: she doesn’t understand why her father isn’t trying to protect her.
Stoner does finally confront his wife, imploring her not to “use the child” to punish him. Given their history, we understand why Stoner feels attacked. But Edith’s primary motive has nothing to do with him. She’s trying to rescue herself from a life without purpose or companionship. Grace has never been happier, she insists. Stoner is taken aback by the scale of his wife’s delusion but lacks the strength to impose his will.
Grace eventually retreats into despondence. When Edith tries to browbeat her into sociability, the girl responds by growing fat, “as if something inside her had gone loose and soft and hopeless.” Stoner knows, and has long known, that Grace is “one of those rare and always lovely humans whose moral nature was so delicate that it must be nourished and cared for.” Though “avid for tenderness and quiet” she is left to endure “indifference and callousness and noise.” Stoner sees all this. But there’s a world of pain between seeing and doing, as the novel reminds us over and over.
Stoner chooses instead to regard the emotional abuse of his daughter as a fait accompli. “He did not allow himself the easy luxury of guilt,” Williams writes. “Given his own nature and the circumstance of his life with Edith, there was nothing that he could have done. And that knowledge intensified his sadness as no guilt could have, and made his love for his daughter more searching and more deep.”
*
I honestly have no idea what this is supposed to mean. I think Williams means that Stoner is so inherently passive, and Edith so obstinate, that there is nothing he can do to defend Grace. Any effort he might summon will trigger his wife’s hysteria and further damage his daughter. But honestly: how much worse can things get for Grace? She’s presented as utterly broken in spirit.
Let us imagine, for a moment, the betrayal Grace must be experiencing. The father whose adoration was the central condition of her life has abandoned her to the whim of a disturbed mother. Even if Stoner can’t rescue his daughter, shouldn’t he try? Isn’t that what Grace yearns to see, that she matters at least that much? Because otherwise, what message is she receiving from her father?
I would argue that the helplessness Grace exhibits throughout her life is learned directly from her father, who insists that this helplessness intensifies his love. But what good is love if it remains inert and invisible to its recipient? What good is a father who functions only as a passive witness to his child’s suffering? And if we’re really going to parse this passage—as it appears we’re going to—since when is guilt an easy luxury? That sounds like the kind of sentiment endorsed by someone who’s trying to avoid feeling guilty.
But shouldn’t Stoner feel guilty about his abdication here? This isn’t a matter of his own suffering, or that of another adult, such as Katherine. This is his child we’re talking about.
*
As a teenager, Grace grows into beauty and popularity, which pleases her mother, who has no idea that this popularity arises from her promiscuity. Stoner makes one final effort to advocate on his daughter’s behalf, urging her to move away for college. Edith, who previously signed off on the plan, suddenly implores “Gracie” not to leave her “mommy” all alone. Grace looks at her mother then turns “very briefly to her father” and shakes her head.
Stoner tries to intervene, but Grace won’t look at him again. “It doesn’t matter,” she replies. That’s her verdict on the matter. The acquiescence here isn’t just obedience to an overbearing mother. It’s the inevitable response to a father who has failed to advocate for her, or himself.
Grace does find a way to escape her home: she gets pregnant, the result of a drunken tryst her first year in college. Edith orchestrates a hasty marriage of convenience. Stoner gazes upon the bride and thinks of the girl who once kept him company and “looked at him with solemn delight, as a lovely child who long ago had died.”
Grace moves to St. Louis with her new husband, who ships off to World War II, where he is promptly killed. She gives birth to a son but refuses to return to Columbia. Rather than embracing motherhood, Grace surrenders the care of her child to her in-laws. It might be said that she is repudiating her mother’s catastrophically controlling behavior, or that she’s reenacting her father’s negligence. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
What becomes apparent during her rare visits home is that Grace copes with her life by drinking. Watching her hopeless descent into alcoholism, Stoner feels a sense of loss he can “scarcely bear.” He can see the dimensions of her future, that she will continue to drink, more and more each year, “numbing herself against the nothingness her life had become. He was glad she had that, at least; he was grateful that she could drink.”
I know what Stoner means. But it’s a damning indictment of him as a parent, ultimately, a feeble acknowledgment that his own daughter has been reduced to a slow suicide.
*
It may come as a surprise that Grace appears on only a handful of pages. Fatherhood is a harrowing but peripheral aspect of Stoner, perhaps because fatherhood was a peripheral aspect of John Williams’s life. Like most of his male contemporaries (Bellow, Updike, Mailer, et al) his energies were devoted to more worldly ambitions.
In the same way he created an idealized love affair with Katherine—hot, soul-nourishing, and undone by a cruel meddler—Williams portrays Stoner’s paternal instincts as impeccable. If not for Edith, we are left to presume that Stoner would have guided Grace into a happy and actualized adulthood. It’s a vision of unrequited fatherhood devised by a man who chose not to spend much time with his kids.
But the portrayal of family in Stoner, however extreme, captures a couple of indelible truths. First, that troubled people tend to be the most powerful figures in a family, the most effective at exporting their internal discord into the world around them. Second, that inaction, especially by parents, often matters more than misguided action.
In the stories I tell about growing up, the central feature usually isn’t the tyranny of my parents but their absence, and the resulting bedlam. Then again, families are complex systems. My parents have pointed out, rather reasonably, that at a certain point they could no longer contain the dark energies I and my brothers generated.
I’m thinking here of an episode that took place during high school. I had taken our dog out for a walk after dinner and when I returned home I saw my twin brother Mike brandishing a butcher knife in the manner of a slasher movie villain. He had stationed himself outside the door to our garage and was bellowing homicidal threats at our older brother, Dave, who was locked inside. I had missed the first act of this play, which took place at the dinner table and culminated with Dave plunging a fork into Mike’s thigh.
What I remember most vividly from this episode was my mother’s face, floating behind the window pane beside our front door. Her expression was one of utter helplessness. It wasn’t just that my brothers were too physically strong for her to control. It was the intensity of their hatred, which was by then beyond the reach of maternal love.
*
Stoner presents a family in which a broken mother and a submissive father undermine their daughter. Grace becomes human wreckage. I recognized the tragedy of her fate before I had kids. But I never got riled up about it. I never turned on Stoner. And I never broke down at the vision of her drunken surrender, as I do now.
The arrival of my three children has brought immense joy to my life, which is what every parent says right before they confess to how exhausting and exasperating and tedious their kids are. In fact, those are the easy emotions, the punchlines. It’s much harder to talk about how responsible we feel as parents, and how terrified.
Because we were often lonely and frightened during our own childhoods, Erin and I tend to fixate on the happiness of our kids. We’re more identified with them, more protective of them, more vulnerable to their moods.
This has been especially true of Rosalie, our youngest. She’s the sort of kid who registers as impervious. At age five, she does a lot of yelling and not much listening. Her mind gallops. She can be inconsiderate, even vicious, without much apparent remorse. Every week or so, she steps on someone’s last nerve and that someone, usually me, yells at her. At which point she crumbles. “Everybody hates me!” she’ll wail. “Everybody wants me to die.”
What’s gutting about such moments is the sudden revelation of her fragility. Beneath all the bluster is a little girl overmatched by the world of giants around her, painfully aware of the frustration she generates, and scared she’ll be abandoned. I do what any parent would. I whisper an apology for losing my patience. I set my lips to her burning brow. I pledge my love. And yet I can’t help but feel that I’ve failed her somehow.
This is how it works with kids. They don’t do subterfuge. One way or another, they tell you the truth. The only question is whether you can bear to hear it.
I still remember the tantrum our son Jude threw after his uncle’s wedding. Erin and I were at odds, the ceremony had everybody stressed out, and Jude, at age three, had absorbed these dark valences. He was so inconsolable that I eventually had to carry him upstairs to a little apartment above the reception area. “I want you to help me come down, Papa!” He kept howling these words at me.
I told him I couldn’t bring him downstairs because he was too upset.
“I want you to help me come down! Help me come down, Papa!”
On and on it went until, to my horror, I picked him up and threw him onto a couch. “You’re not going anywhere until you calm down, you little shit!” I thundered. My son looked at me. He was frightened, but also genuinely mystified. And instantly, I realized what he was actually saying to me, what he had been saying for the past half an hour: I want you to help me calm down, Papa.
He’d been pleading with me to soothe him, to tame the panic that had taken possession of his body. And what had I done? Hurled him onto a couch.
*
The point isn’t that I’m a shitty dad. The point is that being a dad means dealing with the shitty parts. Stoner presents a vision of fatherhood that is virtually shit-free. Stoner is either perfectly attuned to his daughter, or ruthlessly torn from her. I get that domestic norms in the 1930s called for mothers to oversee child rearing. But that doesn’t absolve Stoner. Given what he sees happening to Grace, he has a duty to try.
What’s more, the longer I’ve been a father the more I’ve come to feel that this duty is something closer to an honor. The opportunity to comfort your child in a grueling moment, to offer succor, however imperfectly, is sacred and fleeting. Because the influence you wield over your kids starts diminishing the moment they can crawl away from you.
I’ve been wrestling with this unwelcome realization over the past year, as my eldest, Josie, enters the rough sea of adolescence. I can see that she’s worried and sad, as I was at her age, and that she wants me to know this and, at the same time, that she wants to hide every trace of her suffering from me. As I’ve struggled to figure out how to help her, my mind keeps doubling back to the description of Grace from Stoner: she was one of those rare and always lovely humans whose moral nature is so delicate that it must be nourished that it might be fulfilled.
I find myself thinking about her first few weeks of life. Josie had trouble breastfeeding, so she suckled formula from a tiny surgical tube I taped to my finger. While Erin slept down the hall, the two of us sat in a cradle of darkness. It was a hushed and lovely scene, but one steeped in panic. I was frantic to get calories into her. Some irrational part of me looks back at this tableau and sees the anguish of my inner life seeping from my body into hers.
For years, we saw Josie as an ebullient kid, prone to worry but mostly unshadowed by shame. As her body contends with womanhood, she’s become withdrawn, even defiant, the watchful guardian of new and veiled sorrows. I’d spoken with enough parents of teenagers to know we’d reach this point. And yet, as with every other parent on earth, I never quite believed it would happen to me.
The perfect dad would be sensitive and measured in responding to Josie, would recognize her provocations as manifestations of her pain. But there is no perfect dad. He doesn’t exist. When Josie pushes me away, I push back. I badger her to open up, and retreat into petulance when she refuses. I’ve blown up at her. I’ve stood outside her locked door, knowing I’ve fucked up, that I’ve scared her, panting with shame. In such moments, I fear I’ve lost my daughter forever, that we’ll never find our way back to the trust and ease we enjoyed early in her life.
And this is why Stoner has become a different book for me, a book about the loss of a beloved daughter, about the rupture of a special bond and the slow torture of watching a child retreat from your love.
If I’m furious at William Stoner for not doing more to protect his daughter, as I clearly am, it’s mostly because I want to indulge in the fantasy that a sufficiently loving parent can save his child from the grasp of despair. It’s bullshit, and I know it’s bullshit. I know it from my family of origin. My parents did all they could to recognize our struggles and get us help; they still had to watch us battered by depression and bouts of self-destruction, midnight visits to the ER and worse.
When Josie was about six months old, we threw a naming party for her. What I remember most vividly is the talk I had toward the end of the evening with an older couple. They were both therapists, gentle souls. Josie was crawling nearby in her blue velvet dress. The mother gazed at her for a long moment, her eyes gleaming. Then she was weeping, silently, and her husband put his arm around her and murmured that their eldest daughter was living in New York City and was in trouble with drugs and they were completely wrecked.
“It goes so fast,” the mother said. That was all she could get out.
*
I realize this is all sounding rather abject. I don’t mean it to. There’s a great deal of laughter and cuddling in our home. The kids are relentless creators. They make drawings and songs and rocket ships. They read for hours. They’re beloved by teachers and friends. This is what I try to hold onto: their kindness, their bustling imaginations. That’s hard to do, though, when you’re worried sick.
I might condemn William Stoner for his dereliction and his rationalizations, but in the end, he is merely the standard bearer of a helplessness that afflicts every parent. To raise a child is to confront the limits of your power over the inner life of another, even a treasured child. There are no heroes in this club, only survivors.
My own lessons in helplessness have just begun. They’ll stack up around me as my children pass into the world and shape their own fates, hand their hearts to the wrong people, suffer the arrows of outrageous fortune, chase their hopes into unseen hazards. To become themselves, our children will have to outgrow the people we imagine them to be, the ones we can keep safe. What I mean (without especially wanting to) is that every parent winds up gazing backward—like Stoner, like that weeping mother—at a lovely child who died long ago.