Stoner

by John Williams

  But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand. Deep in him, beneath his memory, was the knowledge of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain. Though he seldom thought of his early years on the Booneville farm, there was always near his consciousness the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak.

  And though he looked upon them with apparent impassivity, he was aware of the times in which he lived. During that decade when many men’s faces found a permanent hardness and bleakness, as if they looked upon an abyss, William Stoner, to whom that expression was as familiar as the air he walked in, saw the signs of a general despair he had known since he was a boy. He saw good men go down into a slow decline of hopelessness, broken as their vision of a decent life was broken; he saw them walking aimlessly upon the streets, their eyes empty like shards of broken glass; he saw them walk up to back doors, with the bitter pride of men who go to their executions, and beg for the bread that would allow them to beg again; and he saw men, who had once walked erect in their own identities, look at him with envy and hatred for the poor security he enjoyed as a tenured empoyee of an institution that somehow could not fail. He did not give voice to this awareness; but the knowledge of common misery touched him and changed him in ways that were hidden deep from the public view, and a quiet sadness for the common plight was never far beneath any moment of his living.

  He was aware, too, of the stirrings in Europe like a distant nightmare; and in July 1936, when Franco rebelled against the Spanish government and Hitler fanned that rebellion into a major war, Stoner, like many others, was sickened by the vision of the nightmare breaking out of the dream into the world. When the fall semester began that year the younger instructors could talk of little else; several of them proclaimed their intention of joining a volunteer unit and fighting for the loyalists or driving ambulances. By the close of the first semester a few of them had actually taken the step and submitted hasty resignations. Stoner thought of Dave Masters, and the old loss was brought back to him with a renewed intensity; he thought, too, of Archer Sloane and remembered, from nearly twenty years before, the slow anguish that had grown upon that ironic face and the erosive despair that had dissipated that hard self—and he thought that he knew now, in a small way, something of the sense of waste that Sloane had apprehended. He foresaw the years that stretched ahead, and knew that the worst was to come.

  As Archer Sloane had done, he realized the futility and waste of committing one’s self wholly to the irrational and dark forces that impelled the world toward its unknown end; as Archer Sloane had not done, Stoner withdrew a little distance to pity and love, so that he was not caught in the rushing that he observed. And as in other moments of crisis and despair, he looked again to the cautious faith that was embodied in the institution of the University. He told himself that it was not much; but he knew that it was all he had.

  In the summer of 1937 he felt a renewal of the old passion for study and learning; and with the curious and disembodied vigor of the scholar that is the condition of neither youth nor age, he returned to the only life that had not betrayed him. He discovered that he had not gone far from that life even in his despair.

  His schedule that fall was particularly bad. His four classes of freshman composition were spaced at widely separated hours six days a week. During all his years as chairman, Lomax had not once failed to give Stoner a teaching schedule that even the newest instructor would have accepted with bad grace.

  On the first class day of that academic year, in the early morning, Stoner sat in his office and looked again at his neatly typed schedule. He had been up late the night before reading a new study of the survival of the medieval tradition into the Renaissance, and the excitement he had felt carried over to the morning. He looked at his schedule, and a dull anger rose within him. He stared at the wall in front of him for several moments, glanced at his schedule again, and nodded to himself. He dropped the schedule and the attached syllabus into a wastebasket and went to his filing cabinet in a corner of the room. He pulled out the top drawer, looked absently at the brown folders there, and withdrew one. He flipped through the papers in the folder, whistling silently as he did so. Then he closed the drawer and with the folder under one arm went out of his office and across the campus to his first class.

  The building was an old one, with wooden floors, and it was used as a classroom only in emergencies; the room to which he had been assigned was too small for the number of students enrolled, so that several of the boys had to sit on the window-sills or stand. When Stoner came in they looked at him with the discomfort of uncertainty; he might be friend or foe, and they did not know which was worse.

  He apologized to the students for the room, made a small joke at the expense of the registrar, and assured those who were standing that there would be chairs for them tomorrow. Then he put his folder on the battered lectern that rested unevenly on the desk and surveyed the faces before him.

  He hesitated for a moment. Then he said, “Those of you who have purchased your texts for this course may return them to the bookstore and get a refund. We shall not be using the text described in the syllabus—which, I take it, you all received when you signed up for the course. Neither will we be using the syllabus. I intend in this course to take a different approach to the subject, an approach which will necessitate your buying two new texts.”

  He turned his back to the students and picked up a piece of chalk from the trough beneath the scuffed blackboard; he held the chalk poised for a moment and listened to the muted sigh and rustle of the students as they settled at their desks, enduring the routine that suddenly became familiar to them.

  Stoner said, “Our texts will be”—and he enunciated the words slowly as he wrote them down—” Medieval English Verse and Prose, edited by Loomis and Willard; and English Literary Criticism: The Medieval Phase, by J. W. H. Atkins.” He turned to the class. “You will find that the bookstore has not yet received these books—it may be as much as two weeks before they are in. In the meantime I will give you some background information upon the matter and purpose of this course, and I shall make a few library assignments to keep you occupied.”

  He paused. Many of the students were bent over their desks, assiduously noting what he said; a few were looking at him steadily, with small smiles that wanted to be intelligent and understanding; and a few were staring at him in open amazement.

  “The primary matter of this course,” Stoner said, “will be found in the Loomis and Willard anthology; we shall study examples of medieval verse and prose for three purposes—first, as literary works significant in themselves; second, as a demonstration of the beginnings of literary style and method in the English tradition; and third, as rhetorical and grammatical solutions to problems of discourse that even today may be of some practical value and application.”

  By this time nearly all the students had stopped taking notes and had raised their heads; even the intelligent smiles had become a trifle strained; and a few hands were waving in the air. Stoner pointed to one whose hand remained steady and high, a tall young man with dark hair and glasses.

  “Sir, is this General English One, Section Four?”

  Stoner smiled at the young man. “What is your name, please?”

  The boy swallowed. “Jessup, sir. Frank Jessup.”

  Stoner nodded. “Mr. Jessup. Yes, Mr. Jessup, this is General English One, Section Four; and my name is Stoner—facts which, no doubt, I should have mentioned at the beginning of the period. Did you have another question?”

  The boy swallowed again. “No, sir.”

  Stoner nodded and looked benevolently around the room. “Does anyone else have a question?”

  The faces stared back at him; there were no smiles, and a few mouths hung open.

  “Very well,” Stoner said. �
�I shall continue. As I said at the beginning of this hour, one purpose of this course is to study certain works of the period roughly between twelve and fifteen hundred. Certain accidents of history will stand in our way; there will be linguistic difficulties as well as philosophical, social as well as religious, theoretical as well as practical. Indeed, all of our past education will in some ways hinder us; for our habits of thinking about the nature of experience have determined our own expectations as radically as the habits of medieval man determined his. As a preliminary, let us examine some of those habits of mind under which medieval man lived and thought and wrote ...”

  That first meeting he did not keep the students for the entire hour. After less than half the period he brought his preliminary discussion to a close and gave them a weekend assignment.

  “I should like for each of you to write a brief essay, no more than three pages, upon Aristotle’s conception of the topoi —or, in its rather crude English translation, topic. You will find an extended discussion of the ‘topic’ in Book Two of The Rhetoric of Aristotle, and in Lane Cooper’s edition there is an introductory essay that you will find most helpful. The essay will be due on—Monday. And that, I think, will be all for today.”

  For a moment after he dismissed the class he gazed at the students, who did not move, with some concern. Then he nodded briefly to them and walked out of the classroom, the brown folder under his arm.

  On Monday fewer than half the students had finished their papers; he dismissed those who handed their essays in and spent the rest of the hour with the remaining students, rehearsing the subject he had assigned, going over it again and again, until he was sure they had it and could complete the assigned essay by Wednesday.

  On Tuesday he noticed in the corridors of Jesse Hall, outside Lomax’s office, a group of students; he recognized them as members of his first class. As he passed, the students turned away from him and looked at the floor or the ceiling or at the door of Lomax’s office. He smiled to himself and went to his office and waited for the telephone call that he knew would come.

  It came at two o’clock that afternoon. He picked up the phone, answered, and heard the voice of Lomax’s secretary, icy and polite. “Professor Stoner? Professor Lomax would like you to see Professor Ehrhardt this afternoon, as soon as possible. Professor Ehrhardt will be expecting you.”

  “Will Lomax be there?” Stoner asked.

  There was a shocked pause. The voice said uncertainly, “I—believe not—a previous appointment. But Professor Ehrhardt is empowered to—”

  “You tell Lomax he ought to be there. You tell him I’ll be in Ehrhardt’s office in ten minutes.”

  Joel Ehrhardt was a balding young man in his early thirties. He had been brought into the department three years before by Lomax; and when it was discovered that he was a pleasant and serious young man with no special talent and no gift for teaching, he had been put in charge of the freshman English program. His office was in a small enclosure at the far end of the large common room where twenty-odd young instructors had their desks, and Stoner had to walk the length of the room to get there. As he made his way among the desks, some of the instructors looked up at him, grinned openly, and watched his progress across the room. Stoner opened the door without knocking, went into the office, and sat down in the chair opposite Ehrhardt’s desk. Lomax was not there.

  “You wanted to see me?” Stoner asked.

  Ehrhardt, who had a very fair skin, blushed slightly. He fixed a smile on his face, said enthusiastically, “It’s good of you to drop by, Bill,” and fumbled for a moment with a match, trying to light his pipe. It wouldn’t draw properly. “This damned humidity,” he said morosely. “It keeps the tobacco too wet.”

  “Lomax won’t be here, I take it,” Stoner said.

  “No,” Ehrhardt said, putting the pipe on his desk. “Actually, though, it was Professor Lomax who asked me to talk to you, so in a way”—he laughed nervously—”I’m really sort of a messenger boy.”

  “What message were you asked to deliver?” Stoner asked dryly.

  “Well, as I understand it, there have been a few complaints. Students— you know.” He shook his head commiseratingly. “Some of them seem to think—well, they don’t really seem to understand what’s going on in your eight o’clock class. Professor Lomax thought—well, actually, I suppose he’s questioning the wisdom of approaching the problems of freshman composition through the—the study of—”

  “Medieval language and literature,” Stoner said.

  “Yes,” Ehrhardt said. “Actually, I think I understand what you’re trying to do—shock them a bit, shake them up, try a new approach, get them to thinking. Right?”

  Stoner nodded gravely. “There has been a great deal of talk in our freshman comp meetings lately about new methods, experimentation.”

  “Exactly,” Ehrhardt said. “No one has more sympathy than I for experimentation, for—but perhaps sometimes, out of the very best motives, we go too far.” He laughed and shook his head. “I certainly know I do; I’d be the first to confess it. But I—or Professor Lomax—well, perhaps some sort of compromise, some partial return to the syllabus, a use of the assigned texts—you understand.”

  Stoner pursed his lips and looked at the ceiling; resting his elbows on the arms of the chair, he placed the tips of his fingers together and let his chin rest on his thumb-tips. Finally, but decisively, he said, “No, I don’t believe the—experiment—has had a fair chance. Tell Lomax I intend to carry it through to the end of the semester. Would you do that for me?”

  Ehrhardt’s face was red. He said tightly, “I will. But I imagine—I’m sure Professor Lomax will be most—disappointed. Most disappointed indeed.”

  Stoner said, “Oh, at first he may be. But he’ll get over it. I’m sure Professor Lomax wouldn’t want to interfere with the way a senior professor sees fit to teach one of his classes. He may disagree with the judgment of that professor, but it would be most unethical for him to attempt to impose his own judgment—and, incidentally, a little dangerous. Don’t you agree?”

  Ehrhardt picked up his pipe, gripped its bowl tightly, and contemplated it fiercely. “I’ll—tell Professor Lomax of your decision.”

  “I’d be grateful if you would,” Stoner said. He rose from his chair, walked to the door, paused as if reminded of something, and turned to Ehrhardt. He said casually, “Oh, another thing. I’ve been doing a little thinking about next semester. If my experiment works out, next semester I might try something else. I’ve been considering the possibility of getting at some of the problems of composition by examining the survival of the classical and medieval Latin tradition in some of Shakespeare’s plays. It may sound a little specialized, but I think I can bring it down to a workable level. You might pass my little idea along to Lomax—ask him to turn it over in his mind. Maybe in a few weeks, you and I can—”

  Ehrhardt slumped in his chair. He dropped his pipe on the table and said wearily, “All right, Bill. I’ll tell him. I’ll—thanks for dropping by.”

  Stoner nodded. He opened the door, went out, closed it carefully behind him, and walked across the long room. When one of the young instructors looked up at him inquiringly, he winked broadly, nodded, and—finally—let the smile come over his face.

  He went to his office, sat at his desk, and waited, looking out the open doorway. After a few minutes he heard a door slam down the hall, heard the uneven sound of footsteps, and saw Lomax go past his office as swiftly as his limp would carry him.

  Stoner did not move from his watch. Within half an hour he heard Lomax’s slow, shuffling ascent of the stairway and saw him go once more past his office. He waited until he heard the door down the hall close; then he nodded to himself, got up, and went home.

  It was some weeks later that Stoner learned from Finch himself what happened that afternoon when Lomax stormed into his office. Lomax complained bitterly about Stoner’s behavior, described how he was teaching what amounted to his senior course in
Middle English to his freshman class, and demanded that Finch take disciplinary measures. There was a moment of silence. Finch started to say something, and then he burst out laughing. He laughed for a long time, every now and then trying to say something that was pushed back by laughter. Finally he quieted, apologized to Lomax for his outburst, and said, “He’s got you, Holly; don’t you see that? He’s not about to let go, and there’s not a damn thing you can do. You want me to do the job for you? How do you think that would look—a dean meddling in how a senior member of the department teaches his classes, and meddling at the instigation of the department chairman himself? No, sir. You take care of it yourself, the best way you can. But you really don’t have much choice, do you?”

  Two weeks after that conversation Stoner received a memo from Lomax’s office which informed him that his schedule for the next semester was changed, that he would teach his old graduate seminar on the Latin Tradition and Renaissance Literature, a senior and graduate course in Middle English language and literature, a sophomore literature survey, and one section of freshman composition.

  It was a triumph in a way, but one of which he always remained amusedly contemptuous, as if it were a victory won by boredom and indifference.

  XV

  And that was one of the legends that began to attach to his name, legends that grew more detailed and elaborate year by year, progressing like myth from personal fact to ritual truth.

  In his late forties, he looked years older. His hair, thick and unruly as it had been in his youth, was almost entirely white; his face was deeply lined and his eyes were sunken in their sockets; and the deafness that had come upon him the summer after the end of his affair with Katherine Driscoll had worsened slightly year by year, so that when he listened to someone, his head cocked to one side and his eyes intent, he appeared to be remotely contemplating a puzzling species that he could not quite identify.