Shields Charles J. - The man who wrote the perfect novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the writing life

Jess and Betty Jo Hay Series

The MAN WHO WROTE the PERFECT NOVEL

John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life

CHARLES J. SHIELDS

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright 2018 by Charles J. Shields

Published by University of Texas Press under license from Lebowski

Publishers/Overamstel Uitgevers B.V.

All rights reserved

First English-language edition, 2018

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions

University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 787137819

utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Shields, Charles J., 1951, author.

Title: The man who wrote the perfect novel : John Williams, Stoner, and the writing life / Charles J. Shields.

Description: First English-language edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018012653

ISBN 978-1-4773-1736-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1737-2 (library e-book)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1738-9 (nonlibrary e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Williams, John, 1922-1994. | Authors, American20th centuryBiography. | Williams, John, 19221994. Stoner.

Classification: LCC PS3545.I5286 Z86 2018 | DDC 813/.54 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012653

doi:10.7560/317365

To my wife

Contents

Introduction

Driving slowly down North Woolsey Avenue in Fayetteville, Arkansas, hunting for an address, Anne Marie Candido had no idea what kind of house she was looking for. John Williams, she had been given to understand, was a novelist and former professor at the University of Denver. Hed moved to Fayetteville for his healththe lower altitude was easier on his breathing. A friendship between him and John Harrison, dean of the libraries at the University of Arkansas, had led to Williams agreeing to donate his papers to the universitys special collections.

But that had been a year ago, in 1987, and all of Williams materials were still awaiting disposition in cardboard boxes at the library. When Candido, a PhD in literature, heard there was grant money available to hire someone to organize the collection, she applied for the positionanything to do with books and manuscripts sounded interesting.

She hadnt read any of Williams novels, though. She wondered whether she should have before coming over to his house. Maybe it was presumptuous or discourteous to arrive without having done her homework. Her husband, a professor of English, was a fan of Williams, and he had been glad to praise him: Williams novels were outstandingespecially Stoner, about a Missouri farm boy who becomes a professor. Williams was from Texas during the Depression, so it could be autobiographical. He won the National Book Award for Augustus, a fictional life of the Roman emperor. But the committee split the fiction award between him and John Barth that yearthe first time it had ever happened in that category. Some said Williams got half as a kind of consolation prize for the committee having ignored Stoner ten years earlier. And there was one other novel, too, which was about buffalo huntingButchers Crossing, published early in his career. Too bad his books were out of print, but they had just never caught on for some reason.

Candido slowed down to see the house numbers on North Woolsey, a humble street like an afterthought without curbs or streetlights. She expected some kind of rambling old place, fit for a professor in retirement, an author whose career had peaked some time ago. And then there it wasnumber 1450. Set back in the bare January trees, a small house with a large, steeply pitched roof like a building on a farm that had been remodeled. It looked rural, somehow.

For the next three months, she arrived at John Williams home every other week with her special file folder of mysteries. Items in his papers, such as letters without dates, handwritten drafts of correspondence, photos of unidentified peopleoddments from his life that might be important. She wanted to be thorough. So she sat at the dining room table, observing him as he read from the folder.

He was a small man, petite, in his late sixties with thick hair that was still resolutely dark. Could he be part Native American? He was cordial, almost courtly. He took care to be presentable for their sessions. House slippers, green slacks, and tangerine shirt with socks to match on one occasion. His voice was deep, a baritone with a trained, musical quality. He chuckled at his own droll comments. Most striking, though, were his eyes: very large, light blue, and owlish, behind a pair of heavy, black-framed glasses that she never saw him without.

Now and then while they were working together, Nancy, his wife, would pause during her comings and goings to check on them. She was tall and much younger than he was. As a couple, they seemed comfortable around each other, Nancy making the point that the mystery file was Johns thing.

It was curious how uninterested he was about dates and the details of his life. Often he would just smile and say, I dont rememberI cant recall, as if some kind of story had already been told, and these typewritten carbons and penciled notes were like wood shavings from a completed cabinet, or lint from the office hed occupied for thirty years in the English Department at Denver. Sometimes, as they talked, he took a mist inhaler from his pants pocket and pumped a puff of vapor into his mouth. He was a chain-smoker, never quit. If he wanted to fetch something from his second-floor study, she waited. She heard him struggling to breathe between his slow footfalls on the stairs.

She grew to like him. His fields of study had been Elizabethan poetry and creative writing. By coincidence, her father had attended the University of Denver and majored in English, and he was an English Renaissance scholar too. She invited John and Nancy to her house for dinner the next time he was visiting.

The two men did have much in common, and she and her husband enjoyed hearing a pair of older heads reminisce about their careers in academe. Both World War II veterans, theyd been in graduate school in the 1950s. And theyd both known many of the same peoplenames that had kept appearing in Williams papersthe literary critic Yvor Winters and his wife, the novelist Janet Lewis; the poets Wallace Stegner, John Ciardi, and J. V. Cunningham; and Alan Swallow, the owner of a small press in Denver. So many names from long ago that the room, illuminated by the candlelight, seemed inhabited by listening ghosts, eager to hear themselves mentioned.

She found it hard to reconcile the English Department talk with a photograph of John shed come across in his papers. It was a black-and-white studio portrait from the 1940s, the kind youd have to make an appointment for. He was in his early twenties then. In the picture, he was wearing a lightweight sports jacket with a small-checkered pattern, over a button-down white shirt with a dark, regimental-stripe tie. His face was turned slightly to the side, his smooth cheek reflecting some of the light that fell favorably on his narrow lip mustache, parted in two artistic brushstrokes, left and rightthe image of a young man who wants to give the impression of sophistication. She hadnt seen it on the book jacket on any of his novels, so maybe it was taken before hed been published.

Now he was across the table, half a century later. She caught herself thinking how lined his face had become since that photograph. Proof once again of her belief that sometimes you can tell just by looking at people how interesting their lives must have been.