`The Tradition is Civilization'

A friend recently finished reading Stoner, by John Williams, after I had written about it, and concluded it was the best novel she had ever read. It’s the sort of near-perfect but perennially forgotten book, old-fashioned and decidedly unfashionable, that inspires ardency. Also, my friend has reached early middle age, roughly Williams’ age when he wrote the novel, and that is precisely the time when a reader may be ready to appreciate and perhaps even empathize with such a profoundly sad story. Younger people are too impatient, too full of untested hope, to recognize its “terrible beauty,” to borrow Yeats’ phrase. The late John McGahern, in his introduction to the recent New York Review Books edition, quotes from an interview Williams gave in 1985, 20 years after Stoner was published:

“You never know all the results of what you do. I think it all boils down to what I was trying to get at in Stoner: You’ve got to keep the faith. The important thing is to keep the tradition going, because the tradition is civilization.”

Coincidentally, I’ve just read an interview with McGahern (where he also praises Williams) in which he says something similar:

“Tradition, when all is said and done, is civilization, which needs to be continually renewed and revitalised; and what proves to be good or useful in the new will become part of tradition.”

If I understand Williams’ comments correctly, he’s speaking on at least two levels. He refers to Stoner in his role as university teacher, to his “sense of a job,” his dedication to his students, his love for them and for the works of literature he teaches. Williams says:

“It’s the love of the thing that’s essential. And if you love something, you’re going to understand it. And if you understand it, you’re going to learn a lot. The lack of that love defines a bad teacher.”

My sense is that “love” and “teaching” is a rare pairing of words today, and perhaps it has always been that way. Stoner and, by likely implication, Williams, felt a calling to pass on the love of literature as something of mortal consequence. It’s not an intellectual game or some other species of diversion. As he complains elsewhere in the interview, students too often are encouraged to behave “as if a novel or poem is something to be studied and understood rather than experienced.”

On a second, deeper level, when he stresses the importance of keeping “the tradition going, because the tradition is civilization,” Williams perhaps refers to his own efforts as a writer and the efforts of all serious writers. No obvious literary influences on Stoner come immediately to mind. Rather, I’m reminded of works suffused with a kindred sensibility, by writers with a comparably serious purpose. I think of stories and novels by Chekhov, Edith Wharton and William Maxwell – and John McGahern. But in its cumulative power and sadness, Stoner reminds me of nothing so much as Henry James’ final, hopeless sentence in Washington Square: “Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlor, picking up her morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again – for life, as it were.”