John Williams and the Time a Choice Takes

Part of: The Deep Reader

This essay discusses the endings of Stoner and A Simple Heart, along with early passages from Butcher’s Crossing and Augustus.

William Stoner has already lifted his hands a little when he tries the words “It means” a second time. His teacher, Archer Sloane, has asked what Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 means. Before either attempt, Stoner felt his fingers release the desk, turned his hands to look at his nails, and thought he could feel the blood moving through his fingertips. His answer stops at the verb. [1]

The first paragraph of Stoner crosses forty-six years, from enrollment to death, and establishes assistant professor as his highest rank. John Williams gives more space to a change in what a student can feel than to where that student’s career will end. Literature governs the length of a scene before Stoner knows whether he can make a life around it.

What it would cost to stay

Sloane’s question interrupts a course of study Stoner began for reasons he could give quite plainly. He was sent to the University of Missouri to learn agriculture and would go back to the family farm. After the sonnet class, he sits in the same place for several minutes, scrapes his shoes across the worn floor, then goes to soil chemistry with the feeling of the earlier class still upon him. He had barely passed the survey’s first exam despite learning its literary chronology. The next semester he drops his basic science courses and takes two literature classes. [1]

By his fourth year, changing the declared program at the registrar’s office should take about five minutes. The more serious question concerns what he can afford to do once he graduates. When Sloane asks whether he will go back to the farm, the strength of Stoner’s refusal surprises him. Sloane opens a route he can follow. A year or so of supporting himself through a master’s degree could make paid teaching possible while he works toward a doctorate. There are grades in the folder on Sloane’s desk and conditions attached to the future he describes. Williams has waited long enough for a student’s attachment to become a prospect with expenses. [1]

His parents travel overnight in a borrowed buggy to see him graduate. He starts to speak over breakfast, thinks of the journey and of the years they have waited for him, and puts it off. Even after they are alone again that night, his father takes the news for a delay of a few days. It takes another attempt before he hears that his son plans to stay. Knowing that Stoner will teach leaves us free to worry about how he will tell his parents and what they will make of it. [1]

A future someone can offer you

On his first morning in the town of Butcher’s Crossing, William Andrews finds a man who could keep him busy. He has left Harvard, and McDonald, a hide dealer who knew his father in Boston, needs help with paperwork. The dealer says he is two months behind and handled almost a hundred thousand hides the previous year. He can put that figure behind a promise of further business. He takes Andrews outside and points to a town he expects to grow once the railroad comes. In the course of the pitch, a job keeping a ledger becomes a chance to stake out land and wait. [2]

Andrews looks past the town. Before he can explain why he wants to go out with hunters, a long paragraph follows his thought from the roots of the prairie grass to the elms he remembers in Boston, with stone all around them. He wants to know the country and can say little more than that. McDonald makes one further attempt to tell him what a different life would yield. He reaches “by the time you’re forty, you could be—” and shrugs. The two men go inside. [2]

The broken sentence belongs to the man with a ledger and a plan for the town. Sloane can name an occupation his student might take up. McDonald knows what he needs done this morning. He can ask Andrews to look ahead to forty. The missing words after be would have to name a future Andrews might want.

The rest of the afternoon at Apollonia

In Augustus, Maecenas writes to the historian Livy about the youth of the reigning emperor. He had thought that the young Octavius might settle into scholarly leisure, and doubted he had the energy even for the Senate. During a mock battle at Apollonia, Octavius falls from a horse. His friend Salvidienus starts forward to help, and Agrippa holds him back. Octavius gets up, asks for another horse, and rides for the rest of the afternoon. [3]

In their tent that evening, the friends hear Octavius breathing heavily and call a doctor. Two ribs are broken. With his chest bound, he attends class the next morning and takes part in a quick march that afternoon. A writer could disclose the injury at the moment of the fall. Williams keeps to the sequence in which Maecenas could know it. We have to watch a boy finish an exercise before we learn how much of an effort he was making. [3]

“Perhaps you will transform this into a few sentences of that marvelous history which I have been privileged to admire.”

Maecenas to Livy, Augustus, Book One, chapter 1, document II. [3]

Maecenas can admire the historian’s work and be sorry for what it will have to compress. The fall may help Livy describe the future emperor’s resolve. For Maecenas there was an afternoon to get through before he could hear the boy’s labored breathing and reconsider what he had taken for a lack of energy.

The book in his hand

Near the end of Stoner, the professor takes the book he wrote from the pile beside his bed. He marvels again at his fingers, now at the thinness and jointed movement of them. He riffles the pages, and the touch returns him to an excitement the novel likens to terror. Sunlight on the open page prevents him from seeing the words. In the final sentence, his grip slackens and Williams lets the book take over as the grammatical subject. [1]

“the book they had held moved slowly and then swiftly across the still body”

Stoner, chapter XVII. [1]

The past perfect keeps the grip in the sentence for a moment after it is gone. From there the prose follows the book, changing speed as it slides across him. The last acceleration in the novel belongs to an object a man has ceased to be able to hold.

What to steal from John Williams

Give a choice more than one date. Stoner can be moved by a poem, change courses, and still need somebody to explain how he might stay at the university. Mark the first desire, the first workable opening, and the commitment in a draft of your own. If two occur in the same scene, check that the scene contains what makes both possible. A plan may need a wage or someone with the authority to offer one. The earlier attraction can then keep its uncertainty without asking the plot to wait idly.

Decide when a fact becomes available. Octavius rides through the afternoon after his fall. The injury enters Maecenas’s letter with the doctor that evening. Try moving the equivalent fact in your own scene and read the interval both ways. Whose conduct can the reader judge before the information comes? Where does the revised placement give the reader something new to reconsider?

What not to steal from John Williams

The fingers on the last page belong to the farm boy who once handled library books as if his hands might tear the pages. To copy the hesitations, the academic reserve, and the book in failing hands together would import a recognizable life along with the technique. Give a last gesture a history in the work a character has done.

McDonald grabs Andrews by the arm and pitches a whole town. He speaks softly when he starts his last forecast. The trailing words have their force after the shouting. If you need such a pause, listen first to the voice that will lose its momentum.

Where John Williams falls short

Edith Bostwick begins speaking just as Stoner turns to leave after a visit. She was the youngest at her school. Her father sat on its board and made the arrangement. Her voice stays high and level, even as she tells him how she came to love it. Stoner sits down again. An hour and a half of talk passes in a paragraph that measures this disclosure against all their later conversations. [1]

Stoner hears something like a confession, and the appeal for help is “what he thought he understood.” Several paragraphs of upbringing lead back to the moment she called him back, and the narrator assigns the action to “some instinct.” The word some leaves the impulse indistinct. With made, the narrator still asserts what caused the speech. We have only the beginning of Edith’s effort to say who she is. [1]

The Bostwick household has its own history, and it helps explain why an unguarded conversation is so hard for Edith. The novel is weaker where that history takes over from the speech. It spends several paragraphs on what trained her to keep quiet and passes over most of what she says on an evening when she finally has the floor.

After John Williams — similar authors and further reading

• Willa Cather, The Professor’s House. At the end of Book One, Professor St. Peter hears the story Tom Outland has been keeping back. Book Two begins in Tom’s first person, with a poker game in New Mexico. Read across that join. Cather lets the younger man set the beginning and pace of his past for himself. After Edith’s visit, it is worth asking what a novel can gain by letting someone else determine where their history starts. [4]

• Gustave Flaubert, A Simple Heart. Read the final chapter alongside Stoner’s last page. Roses have almost covered Félicité’s stuffed parrot on the courtyard altar. At her last breath she believes she sees the bird overhead, enormous. Flaubert gives the small object the scale of her vision. Williams follows the book as it slides across a body. [5]

FAQ

Where should I begin if I want to study Williams’s pacing?

Read Chapter I of Stoner through the conversation after graduation. Set the opening’s forty-six years beside the pause before Stoner’s unfinished answer. Then find the place at breakfast where he puts off speaking to his parents. Follow him to the next attempt that evening.

Is Williams a model for writing shorter sentences?

Read the wagon’s descent into town at the start of Butcher’s Crossing. One long sentence holds the wheels dropping into ruts, the freight shifting, the canvas striking its supports, and a passenger bracing himself with both hands. Its clauses have to keep those movements together. In Stoner a career can be stated quickly and a perception may take several clauses to become complete. Study what the sentence has to hold before deciding how long to make it. [1] [2]

Sources

[1] John Williams, Stoner, NYRB Classics, 2006, chapters I, III, and XVII. Original English. Publisher-authorized opening excerpt. Chapter III covers the first extended visit to Edith and the account of her upbringing. Chapter XVII supplies the final book scene.

[2] John Williams, Butcher’s Crossing, NYRB Classics ebook, 2011, Part One, chapters I–II. Original English. Edition and text preview.

[3] John Williams, Augustus, NYRB Classics ebook, 2014, Book One, chapter 1, document II, Maecenas to Titus Livius, 13 B.C. Original English. Edition and text preview.

[4] Willa Cather, The Professor’s House, Alfred A. Knopf, 1925, close of Book One and opening of Book Two, “Tom Outland’s Story.” Project Gutenberg edition.

[5] Gustave Flaubert, “Un cœur simple,” Trois contes, Louis Conard, 1910, chapter V. Original French. Wikisource edition.