John William’s Stoner is one of the best novels that you’ve never read, probably never even heard of.
It tracks the career of a farmboy done good. He happens into a college degree, graduate studies, and eventually a tenured position at the local State U. While all of that might sound uplifting, the book starts at the end of his run, with a note on the legacy he failed to leave:
“When he died his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University library. This manuscript may still be found in the Rare Book Collection, bearing the inscription: “Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues.”
“An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past, and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.”
I’m romantically disposed to the fable of the self-made-man. I like to believe in meritocracy, class-fluid mobility; the power of sui generis, self-forged volition over indomitable destiny. But most of us will only rise so far, and will only have the opportunity to fail gently, if at all.
Our trajectories are set at birth. Family connections, college funds, down-payments, piano lessons will either be provided or not. We are born into a set of normalizing expectations, prodded along or tamped down by the the overall economic climate, the whims of history, and the generational peculiarities into which our souls have stumbled.
A few generations ago most folks, like Stoner, never traveled far beyond their hometown. Now we jet around the world; we take jobs that pull us from coast to coast. But moving away usually involves relocating to another redundant version of the same kind of spot, from one interchangeable suburb to another, or one subway-tunneled conurbation to the next, depending on your bent.
And once there we do the same things, wear the same clothes, post the same pics, down the same IPAs, and obsess about the same trendy foods (poke! have you tried the poke!) with a new set of the like-minded. The map is bigger, but when you zoom in the landscape is much the same.
From where I stand, making it means you’re pulling down six-figures. Failure comes with those standard shames: credit card debt, divorce, perhaps drunkenness or some other form of dissipation. These are mentioned in whispers and often resolved, at least temporarily, with a family bailout. I have no claim to silver-spoons, but strong-woven safety-nets surround me. Such foolish pride to deny it.
Much as I like to see myself as a footloose hippie wanderer, riding the rails to adventure with little more than a backpack and guitar in my hand, I wake most mornings staring at the lined face of a middle-aged, middle-class man — safely moored to a mortgage and a 401k, a handmaiden to the harangues of mid-western respectability — who spends his days dutifully scrounging shekels and his fitful nights feeding Walter Mitty dreams.
It’s the world that’s got me. Like it’s got you. Like it got William Stoner, Phd.: a farmer by birth, a teacher by vocation, raised up from mule-plowed Missouri earth, the worn soil to which he will soon return once again. He spent years seeking refuge in the illusory asylum of academia, but as he admits towards the end, “So we are the world after all…”
Is that a bad thing? If you can come to peace with it, if you can catch on going in, work with it, figure out how to swing it and leverage your assets, then life ain’t half bad. Ain’t half bad at all. Just know your place and accept your fate.
Give Stoner a read. No, it won’t leave you feeling grand about your chances, but John Williams’ measured, thoughtful prose might provide a moment to dial in your expectations. Perhaps you’ll find a better contentment for the season to come: sowing your seeds, praying for rain, awaiting the harvest.
