Mornings now, the first
thing I do is turn on the heat. By the time I sit down and take my first sip of
coffee, the room is deliciously warm. Is it a stretch to call a flavor serious?
No, I truly believe there’s something inherently solemn about coffee. Tea gets
perky from percolation. But coffee gets serious when it diffuses throughout a
black powder of ground beans and drips through a filter into a porcelain pot.
It’s as if it were thought itself penetrating and diffusing throughout a
substance, meditating on it, saturating it, then dripping its infusion into the
pot. This why coffee is hot and rectifying and serious. It makes me feel
corrected. Specific. Palpable. An unequivocal being newly arrived from the
nebulous oblivion of sleep.
Consciousness seeps in
slowly. Coffee helps with that process, because it’s something to react to,
immediately, and conveniently. Habit makes it easy. I could do it in my sleep.
This works out well, since I’m half awake. Same with the cat. She wants
attention. Affection. Which I give freely, and pleasurably. She lies down,
fully extending her body and lying on her back, exposing the white warm fur of
her belly. There’s an ease to this that allows consciousness to enter the skull
without crashing into too much furniture. Whatever clutter a dream, or series
of dreams, have left behind. Dreams are messy. Disorganized. The spoor of
something beyond the material world trying to communicate with you in a
language of labyrinths and tapioca helicopters.
1:30 p.m. We go for a run
on upper Queen Anne. There aren’t that many crows out today. After numerous
conflicts with the neighbors, we stopped feeding them. But the crows still
remember us and get excited when they see us. Most of all, they still expect peanuts.
It’s a bit sad, and more than a little aggravating. Today there’s only been a
couple here and there.
We stop by the library. R
picks up The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing and I drop off Stoner,
by John Williams.
Stoner was
an odd book. Not at all what I thought it was going to be. All I knew was that
a few days ago on Facebook a lot of people were raving about it. Naturally, I
was intrigued. The book is titled Stoner. How could that not be
intriguing? When I saw it had been published in 1965, I grew even more
intrigued. I’d never heard of it. I was a senior in high school in 1965. I
graduated that summer. That was a time when quite a few celebrities were
writers. Kerouac, especially. But also Malcolm X, Henry Miller, Saul Bellow,
Kurt Vonnegut and Ken Kesey. Sylvia Plath and John Updike. Betty Friedan and
Harper Lee. Truman Capote was a frequent guest on late night talk shows. And
spent some time wth the Rolling Stones. Which appears not to have gone all that
well. But not as disastrous for Capote as Answered Prayers. Lots of
writers were engaged with, and influential of, mainstream society in the 60s. Brautigan’s
Trout Fishing in America turned him into a rock star. It was thanks to
Bob Dylan I discovered writers like Gertude Stein and Arthur Rimbaud and movements
like Dada and Surrealism. So it struck me as odd I’d never heard of an
extremely popular book published in 1965 called Stoner.
As I said, Stoner
wasn’t at all what I thought it would be. It had nothing to do with drugs.
Stoner was the surname of the main character. The story begins in the early 20th
century. The tone, as well as the architecture of the narrative, is stark and
dreary. A courthouse, not a Grand Palais. Stoner’s parents are tough, enduring, hard-working
people maintaining a small farm in Missouri. They’re laconic, in the extreme.
They seem locked in their bodies, holding tightly to whatever helps keep them
sane, and most importantly, alive. Their son, William Stoner, attends college
and so leaves home for the first time. He worries if his parents will be ok
without his help. He’s that kind of son: dutiful and loving. His intention at
college is to earn a degree in agriculture, so that he can help his parents run
the farm more profitably. But he falls in love. Not with a woman, but an idea:
literature.
I wasn’t gripped by the
story. Not at first. What kept me going was the phrasing, the beautifully
crafted sentences. They were a pleasure to read, soothing and reassuring. The
book’s dependable, comfortable rhythm pulled me along in a kind of trance, a stillness
like the surface of a puddle on a windless day, reflecting an elm or the gnarly
entanglements of an American sycamore.
After Stoner confesses
his change of major to literature to his parents (you can feel their deep
disappointment, their dreams collapsing, but they abide by their son’s decision
with a respectful acquiescence), I was expecting fireworks. He’s a young guy in
college. Heterosexual, bisexual, or gay, I was ready for some action. None
came. The five years Stoner attends college he makes two male friends, neither
of whom seem to have much interest in libidinal distractions. Or even sports,
which is really unusual. I kind of liked this. I felt comfortable with this guy
and his two friends and their monastic demeanor, their quiet asceticism. The
student as monk. Or anchorite. Frivolity kept to a minimum. Sly jokes and
witticisms were the order of the day; the occasional Animal House bacchanals
and heroic quantities of booze I remember from my college days are strangely
absent. So are the maniacal outbursts of
sports events. These are people who dress formerly for their classes. Who have
a strangely mature outlook for people so young, a wry understanding of life.
Who immerse themselves in books. Any book. Any day of the week. Any hour of the
day. And reemerge from its chrysalis in a blaze of wonder. Gazes glazed with
reflection, with the ineffable gleam of elsewhere in their enraptured faces.
Stoner rents an attic
with an older couple who also provide food in exchange for his doing a few
chores on the property. Stoner complies easily. He’s a nose to the grindstone
kind of guy. Stoic as a hunger artist. Ascetic as a Hindu sannyasi.
What I was really waiting
for was Stoner’s passion for literature. I was anticipating dithyrambic
raptures, a long, beautiful unfolding of nuances and flowers of verbal fire,
roses plucked from the air and placed in a Qingbai porcelain vase, panegyrics
for Melville and Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson and Whitman. Inebriations of air.
Raptures of language. A slow dance with syntax. But none came. I read, instead,
that Stoner has no instinct of introspection. Say what? How can that be? How
can anyone have a love of literature with no flair nor inclination for
introspection? Literature is introspection. What the hell kind of book
is this? Were it not for the soothing musicality of its sentences – and an
obsessive drive to complete any book I begin - I doubt I would’ve continued.
The story plods along
like a mournful adagio. Events have an almost mechanical inevitability to them.
Until, subtly, quietly, slyly, they don’t. Things start to get real. And a
little surreal. Stoner meets a woman at a faculty party, Edith Bostwick, the daughter
of a banker, and falls in love. Edith, on the other hand, seems a little
dismissive and indifferent. Theres nothing spontaneous about her. Nothing done
on impulse, or out of a burst of emotion. She seems gloomy and uninterested in
anything. She may as well be a mannequin in a department store window. When
Stoner asks for her hand in marriage, she consents. This perplexed me. I felt
sure she was going to turn the guy down. Nevertheless, it’s weird, this
consent. It’s given grudgingly, with a certain contrecœur, as the French
put it. Its sober neutrality is markedly bare of emotion. It’s like a nod to a
legal agreement. There’s no description of what she’s feeling, no clue as to
her mood, or designs, or plans, or the remotest enthusiasm. She doesn’t seem to
be feeling anything.
The marriage, of course,
is a total failure. A loveless marriage in a modest apartment on a professor’s
dismal salary. As things evolve, the one constant is Edith’s resentment toward
William. The best they achieve is an amiable indifference toward one another.
And even manage, out of that fog, to produce a daughter, who is named Grace,
and who becomes an alcoholic in her adulthood.
Three-quarters of my way
in to this strange novel I began to respect Stoner. Or Bill, as he was
sometimes called. The events in Bill’s life, the weight of mediocrity and easy
compromise measured against his deep respect for excellence and legacy, was
beginning to reflect an evident toxicity in American culture and education I
hadn’t been expecting, even though the book had been leading up to it all
along. Its observations were being so quietly and gently dispensed that its
disquieting insights entered the bloodstream like a timed pharmaceutical. The
core revelation at the heart of this book is extremely pertinent. It had to do
with quality, with high aesthetic value and intellectual integrity, and the
nearly impossible stance – the heavy sacrifice - required to maintain a body of
high aesthetic worth, especially when corruption begins to quietly infiltrate and
erode an institution, or an entire culture.
“Art from the west becomes
more and more a shriek of torment recording pain,” writes Doris Lessing in her
introduction to The Golden Notebook. “Pain is becoming our deepest
reality.”
Stoner enters into a
conflict with Hollis Lomax, the chair of the English Department and a former
friend of long time standing. The conflict stems from Stoner’s refusal, as a
committee member, to pass an incompetent graduate student named Charles Walker,
who is also Lomax’s mentor and gains sympathy from a physical disability. Lomax
seethes with resentment over this and punishes Stoner’s adamant refusal by
giving Stoner a grueling teaching schedule and hindering his career
progression. Stoner takes this within stride, handling these inconveniences and
insulting status with quiet dignity and stoicism; he remains a popular teacher,
which further fuels Lomax’s animus. Nor does Stoner receive any support from
his colleagues. It’s a situation that reminds me of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the
People, or movies like High Noon and Serpico, conflicts in
which the protagonist addresses a morally challenging situation with singular
courage and commitment to principle, and earning nothing but derision and
discouragement from the community.
This conflict hit home
for reasons that should be obvious. We live in a time of overwhelming
corruption. Governments, so steeped in venality and cowardice they’re unable to
serve the public, a situation in the U.S. that has manifested in the public
spectacle of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and the well-documented work of
Whitney Webb revealing the stupefying amount of blackmail in U.S. politics in
her book One Nation Under Blackmail.
I see it in academia,
too. Works of poetry and fiction that are manifest mediocrities – at best –
that are not only published but touted as being works of supreme innovation and
quality. It’s all about schmoozing now, performance and personality over true
merit and quality. Those with high positions in academia are also given a
supreme advantage in institutional backing, invitations to appear on panels and
symposiums and lectures which gives them high visibility and a consequent
ascendency to receiving prestigious literary awards. Those in the margins must
lapse into obscurity while pompous academicians “humbly” accept prestigious and
rich rewards.
Social critic Curtis
White wrote a book about the spread of mediocrity titled The Middle Mind:
Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves, as far back as 2003, in which he
writes “my intention in this book is to explore this poverty, our poverty,
through the media, academia, and politics, the three areas of public life that
provide the vehicles for the great antagonists of the imagination:
entertainment, orthodoxy, and ideology. But I also want to think, more
positively, about the present condition of our religious and civic spirit, as
well as about something that I will call the sublime, that which beckons us
beyond the suffocating if familiar activities of entertainment, academic
orthodoxy, and ideology. The sublime is that indistinct but essential thing that
Stevens called the ‘necessary angel.’ It has something very simple if curiously
distant to say to us. It wants to tell us that change is real and the world can
be other than it is.”
America and Europe – the
so-called western world - has been so fully corporatized, so fully bent to the
toxic prerogatives of corporate greed and technofeudalism, however manifestly
destructive and dystopic its continuing enslavement of world cultures, and
destruction of nature and fragile ecosystems, that the younger generations now
have no frame of reference outside the wake of the capitalist juggernaut. And
now, with the advent of AI, no one even knows what’s real anymore. One wonders,
at this point, what is even left. The last time I stepped into one of Seattle’s
biggest bookstores, what few books were on display were dwarfed by a gift shop tchotchke
mentality, T-shirts and coffee mugs. Nobody reads anymore. Even celebrated
authors have a peculiar, aw shucks, me too, I’ve lost my ability to focus on
things, as if none of this really mattered.
Nor does it help that the
U.S. now has a ridiculously high rate of illiteracy, a problem no one seems to
give a shit about, despite all the numerous books and podcasts and essays
identifying the problem – which is pretty obvious to begin with – that attention
spans have been decimated by the new cybertechnology, and especially
smartphones, which have become a supplementary appendage. This deterioration in
focus and learning even has a name now: brain rot.
I’m not big on solutions.
Things often have a way of evolving in surprising ways. And often, the
so-called solutions have more to do with profit than healing. But the world
could sure use one. I’d go so far as to say the solutions are as obvious as
they are easy: put your smartphone down and open a book. Start a conversation.
Rent a kayak and put yourself in a large body of water, feeling the waves, and
rocking in the sway of your own emotions, the undulating and boundless expanse
of reverie in a universe of endless fascination.
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