John Williams: Willa Cather's Lonely Western Heir
The revival of John Williams (1922-1994), in two New York Review Book Classics editions, brings to light a particular kind of outdated American confidence — in the opportunities of youth, and in the assured steeliness of adult life. This confidence lends itself to Williams's realistic style. In his fiction, the world can be trusted to harrow youth. Adventurousness will be fully — and subtly — compensated.
Williams's heroes are nonetheless bookish. In "Butcher's Crossing" (NYRB, 288 pages, $14.95), Will Andrews drops out of Harvard and goes west, inspired by his reading to become Emerson's "transparent eyeball" in nature. He finances a buffalo-hunting expedition with his inheritance.
His companions are unsure how to interpret his wanderlust. "And when you learn what you want to learn, what'll you do? Go back and brag to your kinfolk? Write something for the papers?" Will assures them that he is in Kansas for his own individualistic reasons, and together they set out on a harrowing nine-month trek that leaves Will with a hardened, "bloodless brown" face and a "mirthless grin." In two experiences — once with a sweet-natured whore, once when dressing his first buffalo carcass — Will is overcome by a deep revulsion to the impure and the slimy:
With both arms, he scooped the guts out of the cavity . . . he cut it away and tore the insides from the calf with desperate scooping motions, until they spread in a heavy mass on the ground around his feet.
His reaction is the opposite of transcendence. The West turns out not to be a Hudson River School landscape.
But Williams does not use realism to vanquish Emerson; rather, he depicts the hard loss of Emersonian hopes. He doesn't take refuge in details, like a lesser novelist. At the end of the book, Will feels "as if balancing himself finely at the edge of an abyss." He leaves town a mild existentialist.
The hero of "Stoner" (1965) fares better. William Stoner begins as a farm boy who is wafted by American progress into the College of Agriculture at the University of Missouri at Columbia. There, in the obligatory English survey, Stoner realizes, in his inexplicable failure to satisfy the instructor, that there is just something he doesn't get about literature. This negative epiphany sends Stoner on what should be an inward quest, but turns instead into a tepid academic career.
Soon after he discovers Shakespeare, America enters World War I, and Stoner discovers something else, within himself: "a vast reserve of indifference." Williams initially lets us interpret this indifference as an academic virtue. The university has opened Stoner's eyes not to the world but to the university. Stoner loves Latin more than he loves patriotism. But his indifference is more than that; it is atavistic, a farmer's stubborn stoicism.
There is a kind of social novel that establishes a gripping, crystal-clear reality only so that the author can squish it in the hairpin turns of his didactic plot. Williams does not go so far, but he comes close for a few chapters. He visits Stoner with a series of plagues, as if he really were a farmer. These culminate in a disaster of academic politics that dooms Stoner to an assistant professorship for the rest of his life. He responds only by working harder.
When Stoner first tells his father that he will not return to the farm, his father says, "If you think you ought to stay here and study your books, then that's what you ought to do." His relationship to his books, though not as possessive as the country idiom implies, does resemble a farmer's devotion to his land. Stoner, reading hungrily, occasionally realizes that he will never read all that he wants to, will never achieve "the serenity for which he labors." The semesters come and go, and there is no end to the reading.
The final chapters of "Stoner" find a cool, exhausted tone that rewards the reader for the punishing middle section. Scars heal: Stoner becomes a campus legend, a perceived eccentric, a stiff. "But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand." His "blood knowledge" of the farm fits him for a life of academic obscurity.
Reading John Williams — even to have done so at the time these novels were written — is an exercise in nostalgia, a nostalgia found also in writers like Willa Cather, for whom the West represented a lost redoubt of intellectual dignity. This tradition differs from a more poetical strain, typified by Annie Proulx, that finds inspiration in the weirdness of the modern West. It is tempting to say that Cather's tradition flagged because the West has changed — it is no longer anybody's bildungsroman — but it is safer to say that writers as talented and right-minded as John Williams are not naturally plentiful.
