In the Spring of 1949, William Stoner receives a circular in the mail announcing the publication of a book by Katherine Driscoll, who is teaching at a good liberal arts college in Massachusetts and remains unmarried. That same day, Stoner resigns his position at the university, calmly tells Edith that he is leaving her the house and all its possessions, and travels east by train, where he is reunited with Katherine. He finds a position at a college near hers and they spend their remaining years learning and loving in a cozy cape bungalow.
Kidding!
This is Stoner, people. You get perfect martyrdom, not actualization.
Instead, Stoner immediately orders the book, all the better to flog himself. As he reads the dedication (To W.S.) his eyes blur and he sits “for a long time without moving.” You will have noticed by now that Williams does this a lot; he shows us Stoner lodged, paralyzed really, in a moment of affliction. Because he has invariably set out the precise cause and nature of this affliction there is no need to elaborate. It’s enough for us to have to sit with the guy, knowing all we do, and to feel what he feels. Which is, of course, our own particular version of his pain.
I want to emphasize this because so often writers believe—are encouraged in this belief by agents and editors and the like—they have to show characters doing things, making their emotions manifest, taking action. But a person trapped in stillness, thinking and feeling deeply—is action. The action of the inner life.
Stoner reads the rest of Katherine’s book in one sitting. In the passion and clarity of her prose, in the literary fervor that fueled their courtship, Katherine comes alive again. It’s as if she’s in the next room. Stoner’s hands begin to tingle. A sense of loss engulfs him. At nearly sixty, Stoner thinks, he should be beyond the force of such passion. But he’s not beyond his passion, and he knows in this moment that he never will be.
Archer Sloane may have been the first person to recognize the churning heart beneath his stillness. But Stoner has given his passion instinctively, first to literature, then to Edith, and later Katherine. “He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving,” Williams writes. “It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.”
This is the ocean that roils within all of us, that will not relent, nor be subdued by our mightiest suppressive efforts. We cannot stop paying attention to the world, seeking attention from it, and because attention is the first and final act of love, we cannot stop loving.
*
How enchanting to land on that last line. Look! I am alive. It always makes me feel like I’m going to live forever. And I think Williams knew this. Because it is at this point in the novel that he begins to lower the boom. And by boom, I mean mortality. Within a few pages, Stoner is listening to a young pink-faced doctor who informs him, hesitantly, that there is a giant tumor in his intestines, which they need to remove as soon as possible. The last twenty pages of the novel are devoted to a tender and meticulous accounting of Stoner’s death.
This may sound like a dismal way to end the story. But it may be the most radical decision Williams makes. As Americans, we spend an expanding share of our psychic and material reserves railing against mortality, trying to prolong the journey, rendering death a villainous interloper, rather than the natural culmination visited upon every living creature. There’s a lot of money to be made from terror, of course, so the industrialization of death denial is inevitable in a society struggling to feel alive and deranged by greed.
But I’m equally fascinated by the mask death wears in popular culture. Our screens are awash with corpses, nearly all of them the product of some traumatic criminal event. Half the dramas on basic cable involve sexy forensics sleuths. All they care about is how the living got dead. You barely ever see any consideration of those bodies that die slowly, unheroically, of the physical deterioration wrought by disease, and, in particular, of the restless mind within that expiring flesh.
This remains a mystery, even within our literature: what do the dying think about? How do they reckon with their past, with what’s happening to them, with the end of their existence? The inner life of death. That’s the last province Stoner visits.
*
You’ve already figured out that Stoner isn’t going to make it easy for himself. Indeed, for a hardcore masochist, a serious and undetected cancer is just what the doctor ordered. Stoner keeps his illness a secret naturally. This isn’t forbearance, or denial. It’s a kind guardianship. He knows he doesn’t have much time and he’s not ready to have his attention distracted by the drama of dying.
Fresh off the fatal diagnosis, he pauses to take in a set of stairs he’s traversed thousands of times but never really seen. “The steps were marble,” Williams notes, “and in their precise centers were gentle troughs worn smooth by decades of footsteps.” Stoner thinks of “time and its gentle flowing” and suddenly the stone is transformed into a relic of the living, the solid made liquid, the inanimate made mortal. I love that about the guy. He never stops paying attention.
Stoner has been engaged in this dance between the physical and metaphysical worlds his entire life; the prospect of dying creates a new urgency. But he has worldly tasks to complete before he can attend to the question of his own meaning. Lomax has been clamoring for him to retire, for instance, hoping to draw him into one last feud. To avoid any such rancor, Stoner drags his ailing body through a dismal retirement dinner. He’s too weak to teach, but meets with his doctoral students during the day and reads over their theses and dissertations at night.
The last ten pages of the book take place in his study, a little room that he knows will become his entire world. He forgives, and is forgiven, by Edith, who cares for him as he grows weaker. (“She has her child again, he thought, at last she has her child that she can care for.”)
Grace appears and his mind drifts back to the era of their quiet communion. He can see the still, beautiful child she was. He hears her small laughter echo in the distance. “You were always there,” he murmurs. But she can’t go back there with him. The disappointment is too much for her to bear. She stares at her father “almost in disbelief,” then turns away. It’s the last time Stoner will see his daughter and he knows it.
His friend Gordon Finch appears and Stoner, his mind again unmoored within the flow of time, asks, “Where’s Dave?” He means Dave Masters, “the defiant boy they had both loved” as young graduate students. But Finch is alarmed to have this ghost awakened, and unsettled by Stoner’s physical deterioration. Like Grace, he turns away and quits the room.
This is how death often plays out. Survivors do not always look upon the dying with a misty benevolence and a determination to love them purely before the end. They are more often besieged by complex and harrowing feelings: fear, guilt, anger, betrayal. That’s a start. Nobody wants to face what’s happening.
*
Stoner is an exception. He has no wish to die. And yet, after bidding his farewells, there are moments when he looks forward to death impatiently, and others in which he covets solitude, knowing that the dying can be selfish: “They want their moments to themselves, like children.”
He has one final relationship to reckon with: the one with himself. This process begins with a voice speaking to him. He has reached a point in his illness where he can’t always recognize who is in the room with him, or make out what they’re saying. He knows only that someone is talking about his life. Suddenly, “with the fierceness of a wounded animal” his mind pounces on the question of how others view his life.
“Dispassionately, reasonably, Stoner contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be.” He has had two friends, one of whom suffered a premature and senseless death. He sought the “still connective passion” of marriage and it, too, died almost before it began. He desired and found love with Katherine, yet relinquished it. He became a teacher but was an indifferent one for most of his life. “He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance. And what else? he thought. What else?”
Everyone harbors this merciless voice of judgment. It’s the byproduct of a mind that measures worth using the math of the obituary, in which only the visibly heroic survives the final edit—life minus the inner life. In Stoner’s case, this lacerating appraisal may also represent a protective impulse: it’s easier to depart a failed life, after all.
But something fascinating happens after Stoner’s done pummeling himself. He falls into a lengthy slumber and awakens with his strength returned. He lifts himself up in bed and feels sun and shade upon his face. He gazes at the “sheen upon the leaves of the huge elm tree” in his backyard. He smells the early summer air “crowded with the sweet odors of grass and leaf and flower” and breaths “the sweetness of the summer” into his lungs. A child of barren soil, Stoner has always been exquisitely attuned to the natural world. Here, roused from his moment of doubt, sensation swoops in to revive him.
He knows that he’s close to death, but calmness envelopes him, as if he “has all the time in the world.” He hears laughter and notices a trio of young couples cutting across his yard. “The girls were long-limbed and graceful in their light summer dresses, and the boys were looking at them with a joyous and bemused wonder. They walked lightly upon the grass, hardly touching it, leaving no trace of where they had been.”
Stoner is suffused with an abrupt joy, which signals the arrival of grace within the perishing body: “He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure—as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been.”
*
He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure—as if it mattered.
Has there ever been a more forgiving sentence written in the English language, a more hopeful sentence? It represents the eternal wish: that the arrival of death will cleanse our souls of the petty judgment by which we dishonor the miracle of our inner lives.
As someone who struggles with that voice of petty judgment, someone who has dedicated his life, fitfully, to the transmission of love through the arrest of attention, someone who yearns openly for such a state of grace, I have been elated, always, to encounter this line. It’s like the chunk of chocolate that used to drift to the bottom of the pints of ice cream I devoured on summer evenings, in the days before lactose lanced my aging gut.
But a strange thing happened the last time I arrived at this line: I broke down sobbing. I broke down sobbing because I thought of my mother and the long, agonizing manner of her death.
*
It makes no sense to describe that death, as Stoner attests, without telling something of the life that preceded it. Barbara Almond was born in 1938, and raised in the Bronx. Her parents were Jewish immigrants who lived in the tenements of the Lower East Side. They grew up during the Great Depression and because of what they saw in those years, they concluded that the bounty of the earth should be divided more or less equally among its inhabitants. This was a dangerous view to hold in the years after World War II, and my grandmother, who taught grade school in Harlem, was eventually hauled before the New York City Board of Education. This was all part of the work done by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Rather than testify, my grandmother retired.
My mother never knew the full extent of her parents’ political activities but, like little Grace Stoner, she absorbed the anxiety that flowed through their apartment, along with a pervasive sense of secrecy.
Both my grandparents were strivers, and my grandfather, in particular, pushed my mom to achieve. She wound up as one of five women in the Yale Medical School class of 1960, scattered among eighty-five men, one of whom was my father. During her residency, she gave birth to three children, all boys, in the space of two years. Amid all this, she protested for civil rights and later joined the anti-war movement.
During my childhood, she saw patients all day, then raced home and got dinner on the table and did most of the household cleaning. She was, by any objective measure, a powerful and accomplished woman, a respected therapist, a brilliant pianist, a loving matriarch.
But there were moments when the strain became unmistakable. Sometimes, as she drove around on errands, she would forget we were in the backseat and I could hear her drift into addled soliloquys, whispered enumerations of all that weighed upon her. Or I would catch sight of her staring into the distance, shaking her head, as if seeking to make peace with the burdens of her circumstance, or gathering herself for the next depredation.
She was bullied in our family, as I’ve noted, the unacknowledged victim of masculine privilege and the assumed healer of masculine doubt. (I believe I have just described every woman on earth.) She didn’t have enough allies, really. It was all sons and patriarchs.
When my older brother graduated from medical school, my mom called her father to share the good news. “Well, pop,” she said, “we’ve got three doctors in the family now.”
Her father paused. Then he asked, in genuine puzzlement: “Oh yeah, who’s the third?”
My mother had by this time had been a psychiatrist in private practice for twenty-five years and was training to become a psychoanalyst.
*
Many years later, on a vacation in the mountains, I went on a hike with my parents, during which my father, an intrepid trekker, pushed my mom to embrace certain challenges—a perilous river crossing, a steep, exposed trail—for which she didn’t feel physically equipped. This led to a few long, tense, humiliating episodes. By which I mean that my mom was immobilized by terror, sometimes on her hands and knees. I should have defended her. I should have apologized. But I was afraid of my father’s disapproval, and I saw in her struggle too much of my own weakness.
My mom made it through the hike but wound up in the ER with a racing heart. When we met the next day, she had recovered physically, but was uncharacteristically subdued. I assumed she was ashamed, though I can see now that I was ashamed. She glanced down for a moment then said, very quietly, “Stevie, I was the nigger of this family.”
Why would my mother—who had marched into segregated restaurants with African-American students and demanded service—utter such an indefensible word?
She was struggling, I think, to convey how powerless she felt, the enormity of the hurt she’d experienced living within our family, nearly all of it invisible. The word was meant to startle and offend, in the same way Yoko Ono and John Lennon meant when they released “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.” Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that she was simply unburdening herself of her most closely guarded secret: the sorrow of her inner life.
*
I think of this episode, in part, because the last decade of my mother’s life was conducted under the shadow of calamity and illness. On a family vacation, while walking to the store to buy ketchup for her grandkids, she was hit by a truck and suffered a broken pelvis and internal bleeding. The next summer, doctors found the first cancer.
Still later, between the second and third cancers, she fell on the path outside her office. This fall had a curious effect. It sent her tumbling back to the Bronx of her childhood. She kept asking where her mother was. She was certain I was her uncle. Sometimes she would wake to find herself lying in a strange white room with needles and tubes taped to her arms. “Stevie,” she would whisper. “I’ve just had the most terrible dream.”
By the end of it, my mother had endured half a dozen bouts with cancers and chemo, two surgeries, and radiation. All this “treatment” exacerbated a cognitive decline that dulled her fierce intellect, impaired her work, and, toward the end, robbed her of the great refuge of her life, which was reading.
During one of her deliriums, I sat by her bed and read her Dickens, her favorite author. I’d chosen David Copperfield, and I could see that my mother—who now struggled to recall her home address—knew the first chapter by heart. The novel begins, of course, with this immortal line: Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
If only that were how it worked.
But it is we, the authors of our lives, who are charged with that obligation. We are the ones who must decide whether we led lives of meaning, whether, like Stoner, we came to know and accept ourselves at the end. And it is here that I must square up and face the truth I keep dancing around, which is that my mother was disgraced by the process of dying.
Having worked so hard to build a career, and seen her troubled sons into lives of stability, she yearned to reap what she had spent so long in sowing, to deepen her work as a psychoanalyst and writer, to indulge her young grandchildren, to live. Like many ambitious people, she experienced illness as a narcissistic injury. As cancer strafed her mind and body, she blamed herself for being weak. It was as if the journey toward death was another awful hike, designed, once again, to savage her dignity, to bring her to her knees.
*
I don’t mean to suggest that her dying was without its idylls of grace. Like Stoner, she was exquisitely attuned to the beauty of the earth. My father took her on short hikes into the Stanford hills where she would pause to examine the wild-flowers, to caress a petal between her fingertips, to drink in its color. She gazed at the oak trees and their skirts of black shadow. She closed her eyes and turned toward the sun. She listened to the birds.
She played piano when she had the strength, and the music of Mozart and Bach washed through the house, as it had throughout my childhood. Toward the end, when she could no longer play, she managed to attend a local concert of works by Schubert, her favorite composer. She had entered the concert hall so weak that my father had to support her. But as the music played, she felt flushed by a strange euphoria. “I don’t know how to explain this,” she wrote to me. “It was as if there was still beauty in the world.”
She also retained her sense of humor to the very end. “There is some good news,” she muttered, after her final surgery. “The doctors tell me there’s not much left for them to take out.” And still later she greeted an old friend who’d come to visit by rolling her eyes and doing a double take. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said. “Not to get ahead of myself.” Like all depressives, she understood the comic impulse as a form of self-forgiveness.
*
My mother felt so much about dying—terror, outrage, shame—that she could hardly acknowledge it was happening to her. Walking into her bedroom, one felt the smothering denial, that queasy code of silence that prevails when a group of people have agreed, tacitly and uneasily, to live within a frail dream. We couldn’t talk about what was really happening. We couldn’t say farewell.
And thus, my mother’s anguish was redoubled by loneliness. For she alone was the person growing smaller, grayer, less responsive, bearing the mortal toll. As illness consumed her, she became more and more unsettled by our company. She turned inward, toward the self-doubt and anxiety that had been her most loyal companions.
There came a point, as in Stoner, where sickness took her hostage. She couldn’t leave her room without the risk of collapse. We worried constantly that she would fall. One day, I came into her bedroom to check on her and saw that she had escaped her bed. The bathroom door was shut, and I could hear splashing.
She had managed to get herself into the bath somehow but lacked the strength to get herself out. It was left to my brother Dave and me to lift her from the tub and dry her skin and wipe away the trickles of blood from where she had tried to shave her legs. She was trembling violently the entire time, in tears, clutching at a towel, panicked at the thought that her sons would see her ravaged body. Her body looked beautiful. She looked like Eve.
I should admit here that I felt a special burden, in part because I was living across the country as my mother died, but also because I saw us as life-long allies: the family empaths, the lefthanders, the readers. I had always known how vulnerable she was, beneath her indomitable energies, and I felt, in some secret part of myself, that it was my duty to make her happy, to dance the tango with her across the scuffed floors of our kitchen, to get her giggling when she was blue by imitating Harpo Marx.
For this reason, it was difficult to spend time with her at the end, because there was nothing I could do to quell her despair, to lure her back into the province of hope. William Stoner reached out to his loved ones at the end. But my mother had gone the other way. I couldn’t reach her, and, feeling helpless, I fled.
Every child probably thinks this of his mother, that he’s the special one, so I’ll admit that this is just my version of the story. But much later, at one of those dreadful gatherings where the guest of honor is missing, a young woman who had tended to my mother in her final weeks took me aside. She told me that my mother had sat up at one point and looked around, suddenly alert. Then she had spoken a single word.
“Stevie?”
*
One of her last coherent conversations was with her sister Alice, with whom she had shared a bedroom, all those years ago in the Bronx. “So I didn’t get an A-plus,” my mother declared. “So what?” Then, in Bronxian bemusement, she blew a raspberry.
It was a kind of bewildered epitaph. But beneath the sly humor, I heard the scoff of judgment. My mother had, by then, survived years longer than the doctors who discovered her first cancer expected. Between bouts of chemo, she had written her critically acclaimed book about maternal ambivalence and continued to see patients and supervise training analysts. She flew east half a dozen times to visit her grandchildren.
She lived and died heroically by all accounts but the one that mattered: her own. Until the very end, she believed she was falling short. She lacked the strength to cook us meals, to come downstairs, to read stories to the kids, to drink her chocolate milkshakes. She was consumed by a sense of inadequacy, and her dying only affirmed that failure.
This is why Stoner haunts me. Because its final pages present a vision of death that is quietly triumphant. For all his shortcomings, William Stoner learns to exist in relation to himself. That languor creeps upon his limbs. He experiences that sudden sense of his own identity, and feels the power of it: He was himself, and he knew what he had been.
My mother deserved that. She deserved to die at peace with her inner life, to spend her final moments in the promised land of forgiveness.
*
In the closing paragraphs of Stoner, the dying man reaches out and grasps the book he wrote years ago. He knows the volume will be forgotten, that it served no use. But the question of its utility seems “almost trivial. He did not have the illusion that he would find himself there, in that fading print; and yet, he knew, a small part of him that he could not deny was there and would be there.”
Stoner riffles his fingers through the book and feels a tingling, as if the pages are alive. Then his fingers loosen and the book tumbles from them and “into the silence of the room.”
I can remember how I felt when I reached these words for the first time. I was sitting in that little carriage house in North Carolina, having read the book straight through. At some point, night had come and gone and wound a purple ribbon around the edge of the dawn. I was still dreaming that I was going to be a famous writer someday, revered and remembered.
I was so grateful to be alive! To have found such a wise and merciful book, to have become, in some mystical manner, a student of William Stoner. And at the very same instant, I felt the poison of pure desolation, in the knowledge that I would never write such a novel, would never summon the attention necessary to transmit my love so purely.
It’s twenty-five years later now and I feel the same way. I’ve published more books than I dared imagine and become a teacher and found a lovely wife and become a father to three fragile and ecstatic souls. I’ve made a life of deep connection and meaning.
And still, I live in terror of the possibility that I’ll leave this world as my mother did, trembling, untouched by mercy, consumed by the novels unwritten, the relationships botched, the years squandered in egoism and distraction. That I’ll have come all this way only to discover my inner life is as broken and cruel as the world around it.
That, my friends, is why I keep reading Stoner. Because every time I open the book Stoner is still perched at the front of the classroom, ready to bear my complaints, to sort me out. And the part of this story I love the most is that when I give myself over to the guy and let everything else drift away, when it’s just him and me with one heart between us, he does something perfectly absurd: he laughs.
There I am, strangling the English language, dreading death, rehearsing my indictments, and William Stoner—who barely snickers during the course of his literary life—laughs so hard he can barely get the words out: “Is that you again, Almond? You’re still thinking about failure? Okay, let’s try this again.”