William Stoner
And the Battle for
the Inner Life
© 2019 by Steve
Almond
Ig Publishing
Box 2547
New York, NY 10163
ISBN:
978-1-63246-08-75
REVIEW BY WENDELL SMITH
The title of this
monograph on display at Porter Square Books grabbed my attention
because reading Stoner by John Williams had provoked an
abreaction five years ago. Once I read Almond’s introduction with
my Sunday coffee I did not put it down except for bodily necessities
until I finished it so I could go to bed. That kind of absorption is
unique in my experience reading criticism.
For a book to have
had such an emotional impact as this one has had on the both of us,
Stoner is deceptively simple. Here Is Almond’s masterful
succinct summation of the story:
Stoner, the only son of subsistence farmers, attends college,
unexpectedly falls in love with literature, and becomes a teacher; he
endures a disastrous marriage, a prolonged academic feud, and a
doomed love affair, then falls ill and dies.
That hardly seems a story capable of
meeting Aristotle’s requirement for a tragedy, but, as Almond will
show us, William's genius takes his spare tale and infuses it with a
power that is more than sufficient to evoke pity and fear and the
weeping purging of those emotions.
The success of
Almond's essay rests on a foundation he creates with his subtitle,
“and the battle for the inner life,” and his willing engagement
and perseverance in that battle. My engagement with Almond’s
argument was created by the rhythm of his writing as he swings
between lucid, if traditional, explication of the work, and narrative
considerations of his own life problems elicited by Stoner. He
has read the book some 13 times precisely because it provokes him to
self-examination.
Here's a lengthy
illustration from Almond’s third chapter, “Love Makes Us Zombies
(aka Worst Marriage Ever).” First with a sample of his explication
from the chapter’s middle:
The description of this honeymoon spends six excruciating pages. We
know from the jump that Stoner’s abject desire will be met by
dread, because the narrator tells us so. And yet these scenes are
among the most heart-rending of the entire book, because Williams
does just what most writers lack the courage to do: he slows down
where his characters are most exposed and helpless.
Then as he concludes this chapter
Almond, in his battle, charges into a territory that I would not have
considered to be part of literary criticism, suggesting, as he does,
when he shifts from an analysis of Stoner’s marriage into an
arrestingly candid discussion of his own, that literature has a use
as marriage counseling:
This is why Williams portrays them as zombies, I think: to suggest
they have no conscious capacity to choose one another. Stoner is
dumbstruck at the site of Edith and decides that he must marry her.
She accedes to his ardor. They operate at the level of glandular
instinct and social programming.
*
It's an extreme portrait, but anyone who has been in a long-term
monogamy, especially a marriage, will recognize the outlines.
Romantic love always begins with the dream, one designed to liberate
us from the burdens of the past but inexorably bound to them. Erin
and I dreamed of building a family impervious to the bullying and
anxiety we'd experience growing up, though our relationship was
fraught with elements of both.
I've often portrayed our romance as a tale of heroic
self-determination, in which we boldly hurtled from long-distance
lovers to rookie parents in a few exuberant months. But I was
consistently controlling during our courtship, and Erin too often
silenced her doubts and resentments, for fear I would abandon her.
Like William Stoner, I fell in love with an idea and charged ahead,
ignoring the woman I claimed to adore.
This approach reminds me of a mantra of
my medical residency: See one; Do one; Teach one. I think Almond is
advocating something similar: Read Stoner; Think about Stoner;
Think about your life as you thought about Stoner, and, if you
can be as honest about your failures as Williams is honest about
Stoner’s failures, then the exercise may prove worthwhile. Indeed,
later in the essay Almond will assert that this is the purpose of
literature and that Stoner is supreme in fulfilling it.
That last sentence
makes Almond sound all too serious, when he full of wit and
self-aware self-deprecation. He follows chapter 5, “Everybody Loves
a Good Fight (A Short History of My Many Feuds),” with chapter 6,
“The Perfect Martyr,” which begins
The foregoing chapter should make two facts pretty obvious:
1. Most of Stoner is about a guy getting pummeled
2. The author of this book is somewhat pathologically inclined
toward feuds.
And he is pragmatic when he shows us
how these understandings that have come from his facing up to his
feuds in the “battle for the inner life,” may have a use in in
politics:
Edith and Lomax dominate Stoner in the same way demagogues dominate
their political opponents; not through superior ideas or logic but
the seductive force of uninhibited aggression. This is the secret
sauce modern conservatives used to advance a plutocratic and bigoted
agenda. At a primal level, they project a willingness to fight.
If John Kerry had turned to George Bush during any of their
presidential debates and said, “In 1969, I was on the Duong Keo
River killing the Vietcong and watching my friends bleed out. Where
were you in 1969?” he would've been elected president. Just as
Hillary Clinton would be president today if, during her second debate
with Trump, she had turned to him and said: “Stop stalking me
around the stage. It doesn't make you look tough, Donald. It makes
you look like a creep who harasses women.”
But look: that's not who liberals are. They don't punch bullies. They
go high, like Stoner, and wind up on the ground wondering what went
wrong.
Almond applies this same intelligent
analysis to the rest of the novel as Stoner deals with parenting,
teaching, reading, writing, and death.
But for all of his
book’s virtues and Almond‘s insights and humor that claimed my
attention for that Sunday, a flaw in the last chapter brought me up
short with its unconscious white privilege. Here is the flaw, which
continues to rankle me:
My mom made it through the hike [during which her husband bullied
her] 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 and then said very quietly,
“Stevie, I was the n[xxx]er 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 experience 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 N[xxx]er 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.
This is the one
place in his essay where, I think, his public exposure of a private
detail doesn't work. I find his apology for her insufficient; it
reveals a failure of the inner life of his mother and of Almond. I
think it reveals that, because of their white privilege, neither of
them know what “n[xxx]er” means in its historically American
context, which is far uglier and more complex than what it means in
the context of, say, Conrad’s The N[xxx]er of the Narcissus.
Almond’s list of his mother's liberal credentials and his
speculation about her motive does not excuse her lapse nor does the
equally egregious example he gives of Yoko Ono and John Lennon's use
of the word. John was British and Yoko Japanese so neither of them
could have known the ugly extent of the word in American usage. We
know his mother isn’t aware of what the word means in these United
States because she has the leisure to play Bach and Mozart, because
she's a graduate of Yale Medical School, because she's a
psychoanalyst, because the day before she made this claim she had
been on a vacation hike in the mountains, and because she (and
Almond) don’t have to worry about him being shot at a routine
traffic stop. They are Jews so they should know that Almond’s
mother isn’t the “n[xxx]er” of her family for the same reasons
that a goy who survived Auschwitz isn’t a survivor of The
Holocaust.
In an ideal world
Ig Publishing would recall this edition until Almond could do battle
with a revision, but ideal worlds can be dangerous, so let’s hope
in the world we have that this book will get to a second printing and
that by the time it does he will have found the resources in his
inner life to craft an adequate revision. But, I must admit when I
saw Almond's book on display at Porter Square, I was primed to pay
attention and my attention was rewarded with an essay as engrossing,
in spite of its genre, as I once found John Williams’ masterpiece;
when I finished I had to reread Stoner and Almond’s
criticism has enriched my re-experience of the novel.
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