Stoner

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 20^th 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.