A Failed Life?

From the first page of John Williams’ Stoner, we know this is the tale of a failure.

Not a Grand Failure whose failures are in any way noteworthy.  Just the routine kind of failure where nothing in life ever really works out very well and then after death nobody ever thinks about the person again.

Lest you be worried that this review contains spoilers, this is all on the first page of the story of William Stoner.

He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses…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

Before thinking about the interesting idea underneath this novel, a word about the prose style.  In the passage above, did you catch the almost unbearable sense of a vague sadness? Not the sharp sadness of a tragedy, but the sort of resigned unrelenting sadness about a thing which you really don’t want to think about too much because then you will get really sad? The sadness that comes when the brief fleeting thought goes through your mind, and you ignore the thought, but that sense of sadness remains like the faint odor of a perfume which triggers some subconscious reminder of something which you know would be unbearably sad if you could just remember where you smelled that odor before.

The whole book has exactly that tone.  It is remarkable.  Unrelentingly, the prose carries that vague sense of loss.  I have no idea how Williams pulled that off.  This is either a master at work or an author knows no other tone because his whole life has that sense about it.

But, the story. William Stoner grows up on a farm, goes to college, becomes a professor of English, marries, has a kid and an affair, publishes a book nobody reads, gives a bunch of lectures nobody remembers, has an argument with a colleague about something relatively unimportant, and eventually dies.

William Stoner, in other words, is a failure.  Nothing he does ever really succeeds.  He fails at being a scholar, a teacher, a colleague and a mentor.  He fails at being a husband and a father and a lover. He fails at being a son, and a son-in-law, and a friend, and a student.

And yet, despite all that failure, when looking back at his life, the only conclusion that can be drawn is this: William Stoner led a good life.

On his deathbed, on the last page of the novel, Stoner reflects

What did you expect? he thought again.
A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure—as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been.

What had his life been?  At every moment in the book, faced with a decision, Stoner did exactly what he thought he needed to do.  He muddled through life, doing the best he could. 

The decisions he makes never really turn out all that well.  The problems at work could easily have been avoided, but Stoner felt the need to do the right thing even though he knows full well the stakes are small and the personal consequences are potentially large.  The signs that his marriage would be a failure were obvious even to Stoner before he was married, but he had made the decision, so he stuck with it. 

His life is periodically punctuated by happiness.  At times in his life, he actually teaches well.  He is for a time a good father.  His affair brings him fleeting joy.  None of those moments of happiness last. 

And yet, what did you expect?

The question of what you expected is the key.  This book is the antidote to the message we send the young all the time about what they should expect their lives to be.  We tell them over and over to go out and do great things and change the world. We teach them that Love is this enormous emotional high lasting forever and that work is always fulfilling. 

And then, the young go through life and discover that most of life is not a psychological high.  Few people really do change the world.  Few people really are the best in their profession.  Few people really are the perfect spouse or parent. 

And in this way, we have set up the young to suffer from crushing disappointment later in life.  What do they do when they realize they will not be the success they imagined they would be back when they were young?  What do they do when reality intrudes into the dream and says there is no castle on the hill, no happily ever after?  They feel like failures.

Shame on us for teaching that lesson.  William Stoner’s life is not a failure.  It looks like a failure because we have collectively told him it is a failure.  But, it was a life well-lived.  He did his part faithfully. He tried to make good decisions. He lived with the consequences of his decisions without complaining.  He never said that life was unfair. 

Stoner endures.  The dude abides. When did we stop thinking that such a thing was the very definition of a successful life?