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JOHN WILLIAMS (1922-1994) was born and raised in Northeast Texas. Despite a talent for writing and acting, Williams flunked out of a local junior college after his first year. He reluctantly joined the war effort, enlisting in the Army Air Corps, and managing to write a draft of his first novel while there. Once home, Williams found a small publisher for the novel and enrolled at the University of Denver, where he was eventually to receive both his B.A. and M.A., and where he was to return as an instructor in 1954. Williams was to remain on the staff of the writing program at the University of Denver until his retirement in 1985. During these years, he was an active guest lecturer and writer, publishing two volumes of poetry and three novels, Butcher's Crossing (forthcoming from NYRB Classics), Stoner, and the National Book Award—winning Augustus.




Introduction by JOHN McGAHERN

NYRB New York


Copyright © 1965 by John Williams Introduction copyright © 2003 by John McGahern All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Williams, John Edward, 1922- Stoner / John Williams.

p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics) ISBN 1-59017-199-3 (alk. paper)

1. Literature—Study and teaching—Fiction. 2. English teachers—Fiction. 3. College teachers—Fiction. 4. Marital conflict—Fiction. 5. Middle West Fiction.

6. Adultery—Fiction. I. Tide. II. Series. PS3545.I5286S7 2006 813'.54—dc22

; 2005022751

ISBN 978-1-59017-199-8

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. 10 9 8 7 6



















On the opening page of this classic novel of university life, and the life of the heart and the mind, John Williams states bluntly the mark Stoner left behind: "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 that evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers." In plain prose, which seems able to reflect effortlessly every shade of thought and feeling, Williams proceeds to subvert that familiar worldly judgment by bringing Stoner, and everything linked to him—the time, the place, the people—vividly to life, the passion of the writing masked by coolness and clarity of intelligence.

Stoner's origins were as humble as the earth his parents worked. In the beginning they are shown as hardly more animate than their own clay, but in vivid scenes, such as their attendance at Stoner's wedding to a banker's daughter, their innate dignity and gentleness contradict that easy judgment, and towards the novel's end Stoner himself seems to acquire their mute, patient strength.

Stoner was an only child, and though good at school had no other expectation than to one day take over the fields he was already helping to work. One evening after the day's toil his father said, "Country agent came by last week... Says they have a new school at the University of Columbia. They call it a college of agriculture. Says he thinks you ought to go."

At the university he earns his bed and board by working on a nearby farm owned by a first cousin of his mother. This is bare board and hard, brutal work, but he gets through it stoically, in much the same way as he gets through the science courses at the university. "The course in soil chemistry caught his interest in a general way... But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before."

The instructor Archer Sloane changes his life. He abandons science to study literature. At the prompting of his mentor, he stays on at the university, laboring on the cousin's farm while obtaining his Master of Arts. At his graduation he tries to tell his parents that he will not be returning to their farm when they come to attend the degree ceremony. "If you think you ought to stay here and study your books, then that's what you ought to do," his father concludes towards the end of that moving scene.

The novel then details the outwardly undistinguished career of an assistant professor of English within the walls of the university: his teaching, his reading and his writing, his friendships, his falling in love with an idealized woman, his slow and bitter discovery of that person once they marry, and how their gentle, pliable daughter becomes the wife's chosen battleground. Outside the marriage, stoner's affair with a young teacher becomes entwined in bitter, vindictive university politics.

This love affair between two intelligent people is brought to life with a rare delicacy. A healthy sensuality is set against their vulnerability as they discover the glory of the first day of the world. "The life they had together was one that neither of them had really imagined. They grew from passion to lust to a deep sensuality that renewed itself from moment to moment." They study, they converse, they play. "They learned to be together without speaking and they got the habit of repose." Not only did they find pleasure in one another but meaning, which is drawn with playful, affectionate irony. "Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible."

Integral as it is to the plot, the love affair serves more importantly in the overall vision as a source of light in the darkness of Stoner's marriage, a powerful suggestion of the happiness that might have been.

Stoner's wife is a type that can be glimpsed in much American writing, through such different sensibilities as O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald—beautiful, unstable, educated to observe the surfaces of a privileged and protected society—but never can that type of wife have been revealed as remorselessly as here:

She was educated upon the premise that she would be protected from the gross events that life might thrust in her way, and upon the premise that she had no other duty than to be a graceful and accomplished accessory to that protection, since she belonged to a social and economic class to which protection was an almost sacred obligation … Her moral training both at the schools she attended and at home, was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual. The sexuality, however, was indirect and unacknowledged; therefore it suffused every other part of her education, which received most of its energy from that recessive and unspoken moral force. She learned that she would have duties towards her husband and family and that she must fulfill them... Her needlepoint was delicate and useless, she painted misty landscapes of thin water-color washes, and she played the piano with a forceless but precise hand; yet she was ignorant of her own bodily functions, she had never been alone to care for her own self one day of her life, nor could it ever have occurred to her that she might become responsible for the well-being of another... Upon that inner privacy William Stoner now intruded.

They marry without knowledge of one another and with nothing in common but desire. Their sexual incompatibility is described with the same chasteness as the deep sensuality of the lovers:

When he returned, Edith was in bed with the covers pulled to her chin, her face turned upward, her eyes closed, a thin frown creasing her forehead. Silently, as if she were asleep, Stoner undressed and got into bed beside her. For several moments he lay with his desire, which had become an impersonal thing, belonging to himself alone. He spoke to Edith, as if to find a haven for what he felt; she did not answer. He put his hand upon her and felt beneath the thin cloth of her nightgown the flesh he had longed for. He moved his hand upon her; she did not stir; her frown deepened. Again he spoke, saying her name to silence; then he moved his body upon her, gentle in his clumsiness. When he touched the softness of her thighs she turned her head sharply away and lifted her arm to cover her eyes. She made no sound.

Her sexuality then changes violently when she decides she wants a child and ceases completely as soon as she is pregnant. Soon after their daughter is born, the child becomes the focus of the mother's inner turmoil, her unresolved hatred of Stoner. If the portrait has a flaw, it is in its remorselessness, yet such is the clarity of the understanding that we come to accept it simply as the way things are, in the same way as the love affair becomes the way things ought to have been.

In the many minor portraits the touch is equally sure and psychologically astute: "Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance. Every ten or fifteen minutes he removed a large gold watch from his vest pocket, looked at it, and nodded to himself." There are Stoner's friends, the brilliant David Masters, who gives voice to some of John Williams's own views on the nature of a university, goes to the war and is killed in France; the worldly Gordon Finch who returns from the war with military honors to the university, where he rises to be dean of the faculty. Finch remains Stoner's loyal if sometimes exasperated ally and protector within the university, and his uncomplicated friendship is there for the whole of Stoner's life. We witness, too, the slow decline of Stoner's mentor, Archer Sloane, and the rise of his replacement, Hollis Lomax, who becomes Stoner's implacable enemy. In a novel of brilliant portraits, that of Hollis Lomax is the most complex. Some of the scenes of conflict are almost unbearable in their intensity.

Stoner is also a novel about work, the hard unyielding work of the farms; the work of living within a destructive marriage and bringing up a daughter with patient mutability in a poisoned household; the work of teaching literature to mostly unresponsive students. How Williams manages to dramatize this almost impossible material is itself a small miracle.

In a rare interview given late in life, John Williams says of Stoner:

I think he's a real hero. A lot of people who have read the novel think that Stoner had such a sad and bad life. I think he had a very good life. He had a better life than most people do, certainly. He was doing what he wanted to do, he had some feeling for what he was doing, he had some sense of the importance of the job he was doing. He was a witness to values that are important... The important thing in the novel to me is Stoner's sense of a job. Teaching to him is a job—a job in the good and honorable sense of the word. His job gave him a particular kind of identity and made him what he was... 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... 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.

John Williams is best known for his novels, Nothing But the Night, Stoner, Butcher's Crossing, and Augustus, for which he won the National Book Award in 1973. He also published two volumes of verse and edited a classic anthology of English Renaissance poetry. The novels are not only remarkable for their style but also for the diversity of their settings. No two novels are alike except for the clarity of the prose; they could easily pass for the work of four different writers. In the course of the long and fascinating interview that Williams gave to Brian Wooley from which I have quoted his remarks about Stoner, it grows clear that of the four novels Stoner is the most personal, in that it is closely linked to John Williams's own life and career, without in any way being autobiographical. The interview was given in 1985, the year Williams retired as Professor of English from the University of Denver where he had taught for thirty years. Pressed towards the end of the interview he complains about the change away from pure study within the universities, the results of which cannot be predicted, towards a purely utilitarian, problem-solving way of doing things more efficiently, both in the arts and sciences, all of which can be predicated and measured. Then, more specifically, Williams complains about the changes in the teaching of literature and the attitude to the text "as if a novel or poem is something to be studied and understood rather than experienced. " Wooley then suggests playfully, "It's to be exegeted, in other words." "Yes. As if it were a kind of puzzle." "And literature is written to be entertaining?" Wooley suggests again, "Absolutely. My God, to read without joy is stupid."

There is entertainment of a very high order to be found in Stoner, what Williams himself describes as "an escape into reality" as well as pain and joy. The clarity of the prose is in itself an unadulterated joy. Set a generation back from Williams's own, the novel is distanced not only by this clarity and intelligence but by the way the often unpromising material is so coolly dramatized. The small world of the university opens out to war and politics, to the years of the Depression and the millions who "once walked erect in their own identities," and then to the whole of life.

If the novel can be said to have one central idea, it is surely that of love, the many forms love takes and all the forces that oppose it. "It [love] was a passion neither of the mind nor of the heart, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance."







He was born in 1891 on a small farm in central Missouri near the village of Booneville, some forty miles from Columbia, the home of the University. Though his parents were young at the time of his birth—his father twenty-five, his mother barely twenty—Stoner thought of them, even when he was a boy, as old. At thirty his father looked fifty; stooped by labor, he gazed without hope at the arid patch of land that sustained the family from one year to the next. His mother regarded her life patiently, as if it were a long moment that she had to endure. Her eyes were pale and blurred, and the tiny wrinkles around them were enhanced by thin graying hair worn straight over her head and caught in a bun at the back.

From the earliest time he could remember, William Stoner had his duties. At the age of six he milked the bony cows, slopped the pigs in the sty a few yards from the house, and gathered small eggs from a flock of spindly chickens. And even when he started attending the rural school eight miles from the farm, his day, from before dawn until after dark, was filled with work of one sort or another. At seventeen his shoulders were already beginning to stoop beneath the weight of his occupation.


The house was built in a crude square, and the unpainted timbers sagged around the porch and doors. It had with the years taken on the colors of the dry land—gray and brown, streaked with white. On one side of the house was a long parlor, sparsely furnished with straight chairs and a few hewn tables, and a kitchen, where the family spent most of its little time together. On the other side were two bedrooms, each furnished with an iron bedstead enameled white, a single straight chair, and a table, with a lamp and a wash basin on it. The floors were of unpainted plank, unevenly spaced and cracking with age, up through which dust steadily seeped and was swept back each day by Stoner's mother.

At school he did his lessons as if they were chores only somewhat less exhausting than those around the farm. When he finished high school in the spring of 1910, he expected to take over more of the work in the fields; it seemed to him that his father grew slower and more weary with the passing months.

But one evening in late spring, after the two men had spent a full day hoeing corn, his father spoke to him in the kitchen, after the supper dishes had been cleared away.

"County agent come by last week."

William looked up from the red-and-white-checked oilcloth spread smoothly over the round kitchen table. He did not speak.

"Says they have a new school at the University in Columbia. They call it a College of Agriculture. Says he thinks you ought to go. It takes four years."

"Four years," William said. "Does it cost money?"

"You could work your room and board," his father said. "Your ma has a first cousin owns a place just outside Columbia. There would be books and things. I could send you two or three dollars a month."

William spread his hands on the tablecloth, which gleamed dully under the lamplight. He had never been farther from home than Booneville, fifteen miles away. He swallowed to steady his voice.

"Think you could manage the place all by yourself?" he asked.

"Your ma and me could manage. I'd plant the upper twenty in wheat; that would cut down the hand work."

William looked at his mother. "Ma?" he asked.

She said tonelessly, "You do what your pa says."

"You really want me to go?" he asked, as if he half hoped for a denial. "You really want me to?"

His father shifted his weight on the chair. He looked at his thick, callused fingers, into the cracks of which soil had penetrated so deeply that it could not be washed away. He laced his fingers together and held them up from the table, almost in an attitude of prayer.

"I never had no schooling to speak of," he said, looking at his hands. "I started working a farm when I finished sixth grade. Never held with schooling when I was a young 'un. But now I don't know. Seems like the land gets drier and harder to work every year; it ain't rich like it was when I was a boy. County agent says they got new ideas, ways of doing things they teach you at the University. Maybe he's right. Sometimes when I'm working the field I get to thinking." He paused. His fingers tightened upon themselves, and his clasped hands dropped to the table. "I get to thinking—" He scowled at his hands and shook his head. "You go on to the University come fall. Your ma and me will manage."

It was the longest speech he had ever heard his father make. That fall he went to Columbia and enrolled in the University as a freshman in the College of Agriculture.

He came to Columbia with a new black broadcloth suit ordered from the catalogue of Sears & Roebuck and paid for with his mother's egg money, a worn greatcoat that had belonged to his father, a pair of blue serge trousers that once a month he had worn to the Methodist church in Booneville, two white shirts, two changes of work clothing, and twenty-five dollars in cash, which his father had borrowed from a neighbor against the fall wheat. He started walking from Booneville, where in the early morning his father and mother brought him on the farm's flat-bed, mule-drawn wagon.

It was a hot fall day, and the road from Booneville to Columbia was dusty; he had been walking for nearly an hour before a goods wagon came up beside him and the driver asked him if he wanted a ride. He nodded and got up on the wagon seat. His serge trousers were red with dust to his knees, and his sunand wind-browned face was caked with dirt, where the road dust had mingled with his sweat. During the long ride he kept brushing at his trousers with awkward hands and running his fingers through his straight sandy hair, which would not He flat on his head.

They got to Columbia in the late afternoon. The driver let Stoner off at the outskirts of town and pointed to a group of buildings shaded by tall elms. "That's your University," he said. "That's where you'll be going to school."

For several minutes after the man had driven off, Stoner stood unmoving, staring at the complex of buildings. He had never before seen anything so imposing. The red brick buildings stretched upward from a broad field of green that was broken by stone walks and small patches of garden. Beneath his awe, he had a sudden sense of security and serenity he had never felt before. Though it was late, he walked for many minutes about the edges of the campus, only looking, as if he had no right to enter.

It was nearly dark when he asked a passer-by directions to Ashland Gravel, the road that would lead him to the farm owned by Jim Foote, the first cousin of his mother for whom he was to work; and it was after dark when he got to the white two-storied frame house where he was to live. He had not seen the Footes before, and he felt strange going to them so late.

They greeted him with a nod, inspecting him closely. After a moment, during which Stoner stood awkwardly in the doorway, Jim Foote motioned him into a small dim parlor crowded with overstuffed furniture and bric-a-brac on dully gleaming tables. He did not sit.

"Et supper?" Foote asked.

"No, sir," Stoner answered.

Mrs. Foote crooked an index finger at him and padded away. Stoner followed her through several rooms into a kitchen, where she motioned him to sit at a table. She put a pitcher of milk and several squares of cold cornbread before him. He sipped the milk, but his mouth, dry from excitement, would not take the bread.

Foote came into the room and stood beside his wife. He was a small man, not more than five feet three inches, with a lean face and a sharp nose. His wife was four inches taller, and heavy; rimless spectacles hid her eyes, and her thin lips were tight. The two of them watched hungrily as he sipped his milk.

"Feed and water the livestock, slop the pigs in the morning," Foote said rapidly.

Stoner looked at him blankly. "What?"

"That's what you do in the morning," Foote said, "before you leave for your school. Then in the evening you feed and slop again, gather the eggs, milk the cows. Chop firewood when you find time. Weekends, you help me with whatever I'm doing."

"Yes, sir," Stoner said.

Foote studied him for a moment. "College," he said and shook his head.


He was quartered on an upper floor that had once been a storeroom; his only furniture was a black iron bedstead with sagging frames that supported a thin feather mattress, a broken table that held a kerosene lamp, a straight chair that sat unevenly on the floor, and a large box that he used as a desk. In the winter the only heat he got seeped up through the floor from the rooms below; he wrapped himself in the tattered quilts and blankets allowed him and blew on his hands so that they could turn the pages of his books without tearing them.

He did his work at the University as he did his work on the farm—thoroughly, conscientiously, with neither pleasure nor distress. At the end of his first year his grade average was slightly below a B; he was pleased that it was no lower and not concerned that it was no higher. He was aware that he had learned things that he had not known before, but this meant to him only that he might do as well in his second year as he had done in his first.

The summer after his first year of college he returned to his father's farm and helped with the crops. Once his father asked him how he liked school, and he replied that he liked it fine. His father nodded and did not mention the matter again.


By his second year he was a familiar figure on the campus. In every season he wore the same black broadcloth suit, white shirt, and string tie; his wrists protruded from the sleeves of the jacket, and the trousers rode awkwardly about his legs, as if it were a uniform that had once belonged to someone else.

His hours of work increased with his employers' growing indolence, and he spent the long evenings in his room methodically doing his class assignments; he had begun the sequence that would lead him to a Bachelor of Science degree in the College of Agriculture, and during this first semester of his second year he had two basic sciences, a course from the school of Agriculture in soil chemistry, and a course that was rather perfunctorily required of all University students—a semester survey of English literature.

After the first few weeks he had little difficulty with the science courses; there was so much work to be done, so many things to be remembered. The course in soil chemistry caught his interest in a general way; it had not occurred to him that the brownish clods with which he had worked for most of his life were anything other than what they appeared to be, and he began vaguely to see that his growing knowledge of them might be useful when he returned to his father's farm. But the required survey of English literature troubled and disquieted him in a way nothing had ever done before.


Away from the classroom, doing his chores about the farm or blinking against the dim lamplight as he studied in his windowless attic room, Stoner was often aware that the image of this man had risen up before the eye of his mind. He had difficulty summoning up the face of any other of his instructors or remembering anything very specific about any other of his classes; but always on the threshold of his awareness waited the figure of Archer Sloane, and his dry voice, and his contemptuously offhand words about some passage from Beowulf, or some couplet of Chaucer's.





Stoner swallowed and tried to open his mouth.


"That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west;

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourisht by.

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long."


"This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long."









When he was much older, he was to look back upon his last two undergraduate years as if they were an unreal time that belonged to someone else, a time that passed, not in the regular flow to which he was used, but in fits and starts. One moment was juxtaposed against another, yet isolated from it, and he had the feeling that he was removed from time, watching as it passed before him like a great unevenly turned diorama.

He became conscious of himself in a way that he had not done before. Sometimes he looked at himself in a mirror, at the long face with its thatch of dry brown hair, and touched his sharp cheekbones; he saw the thin wrists that protruded inches out of his coat sleeves; and he wondered if he appeared as ludicrous to others as he did to himself.

He had no plans for the future, and he spoke to no one of his uncertainty. He continued to work at the Footes' for his room and board, but he no longer worked the long hours of his first two years at the University. For three hours every afternoon and for half a day on the weekends he allowed himself to be used as Jim and Serena Foote desired; the rest of the time he claimed as his own.

Some of this time he spent in his little attic room atop the Foote house; but as often as he could, after his classes were over and his work at the Footes' done, he returned to the University. Sometimes, in the evenings, he wandered in the long open quadrangle, among couples who strolled together and murmured softly; though he did not know any of them, and though he did not speak to them, he felt a kinship with them. Sometimes he stood in the center of the quad, looking at the five huge columns in front of Jesse Hall that thrust upward into the night out of the cool grass; he had learned that these columns were the remains of the original main building of the University, destroyed many years ago by fire. Grayish silver in the moonlight, bare and pure, they seemed to him to represent the way of life he had embraced, as a temple represents a god.

In the University library he wandered through the stacks, among the thousands of books, inhaling the musty odor of leather, cloth, and drying page as if it were an exotic incense.

Sometimes he would pause, remove a volume from the shelves, and hold it for a moment in his large hands, which tingled at the still unfamiliar feel of spine and board and unresisting page. Then he would leaf through the book, reading a paragraph here and there, his stiff fingers careful as they turned the pages, as if in their clumsiness they might tear and destroy what they took such pains to uncover.

He had no friends, and for the first time in his life he became aware of loneliness. Sometimes, in his attic room at night, he would look up from a book he was reading and gaze in the dark corners of his room, where the lamplight flickered against the shadows. If he stared long and intently, the darkness gathered into a light, which took the insubstantial shape of what he had been reading. And he would feel that he was out of time, as he had felt that day in class when Archer Sloane had spoken to him. The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in a way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class, who found a local habitation in a large university in Columbia, Missouri, and who walked unheeding in a midwestern air.

In a year he learned Greek and Latin well enough to read simple texts; often his eyes were red and burning from strain and lack of sleep. Sometimes he thought of himself as he had been a few years before and was astonished by the memory of that strange figure, brown and passive as the earth from which it had emerged. He thought of his parents, and they were nearly as strange as the child they had borne; he felt a mixed pity for them and a distant love.

Near the middle of his fourth year at the University, Archer Sloane stopped him one day after class and asked him to drop by his office for a chat.

It was winter, and a low damp midwestern mist floated over the campus. Even at midmorning the thin branches of the dogwood trees glistened with hoarfrost, and the black vines that trailed up the great columns before Jesse Hall were rimmed with iridescent crystals that winked against the grayness. Stoner's greatcoat was so shabby and worn that he had decided not to wear it to see Sloane even though the weather was freezing. He was shivering as he hurried up the walk and up the wide stone steps that led into Jesse Hall.

After the cold, the heat inside the building was intense. The grayness outside trickled through the windows and glassed doors on either side of the hall, so that the yellow tiled floors glowed brighter than the gray light upon them, and the great oaken columns and the rubbed walls gleamed from their dark. Shuffling footsteps hissed upon the floors, and a murmur of voices was muted by the great expanse of the hall; dim figures moved slowly, mingling and parting; and the oppressive air gathered the smell of the oiled walls and the wet odor of woolen clothing. Stoner went up the smooth marble stairs to Archer Sloane's second-floor office. He knocked on the closed door, heard a voice, and went in.

The office was long and narrow, lighted by a single window at the far end. Shelves crowded with books rose to the high ceiling. Near the window a desk was wedged, and before this desk, half turned and outlined darkly against the light, sat Archer Sloane.

"Mr. Stoner," Sloane said dryly, half rising and indicating a leather-covered chair facing him. Stoner sat down.

"I have been looking through your records." Sloane paused and lifted a folder from his desk, regarding it with detached irony. "I hope you do not mind my inquisitiveness."

Stoner wet his lips and shifted on the chair. He tried to fold his large hands together so that they would be invisible. "No, sir," he said in a husky voice.

Sloane nodded. "Good. I note that you began your course of studies here as an agriculture student and that sometime during your sophomore year you switched your program to literature. Is that correct?"

"Yes, sir," Stoner said.

Sloane leaned back in his chair and gazed up at the square of light that came in from the high small window. He tapped his fingertips together and turned back to the young man who sat stiffly in front of him.

"The official purpose of this conference is to inform you that you will have to make a formal change of study program, declaring your intention to abandon your initial course of study and declare your final one. It's a matter of five minutes or so at the registrar's office. You will take care of that, won't you?"

"Yes, sir," Stoner said.

"But as you may have guessed, that is not the reason I asked you to drop by. Do you mind if I inquire a little about your future plans?"

"No, sir," Stoner said. He looked at his hands, which were twisted tightly together.

Sloane touched the folder of papers that he had dropped on his desk. "I gather that you were a bit older than the ordinary student when you first entered the University. Nearly twenty, I believe?"

"Yes, sir," Stoner said.

"And at that time your plans were to undertake the sequence offered by the school of Agriculture?"

"Yes, sir."

Sloane leaned back in his chair and regarded the high dim ceiling. He asked abruptly, "And what are your plans now?"

Stoner was silent. This was something he had not thought about, had not wanted to think about. He said at last, with a touch of resentment, "I don't know. I haven't given it much thought."

Sloane said, "Are you looking forward to the day when you emerge from these cloistered walls into what some call the world?"

Stoner grinned through his embarrassment. "No, sir."

Sloane tapped the folder of papers on his desk. "I am informed by these records that you come from a farming community. I take it that your parents are farm people?"

Stoner nodded.

"And do you intend to return to the farm after you receive your degree here?"

"No, sir," Stoner said, and the decisiveness of his voice surprised him. He thought with some wonder of the decision he had suddenly made.

Sloane nodded. "I should imagine a serious student of literature might find his skills not precisely suited to the persuasion of the soil."

"I won't go back," Stoner said as if Sloane had not spoken. "I don't know what I'll do exactly." He looked at his hands and said to them, "I can't quite realize that I'll be through so soon, that I'll be leaving the University at the end of the year."

Sloane said casually, "There is, of course, no absolute need for you to leave. I take it that you have no independent means?"

Stoner shook his head.

"You have an excellent undergraduate record. Except for your"— he lifted his eyebrows and smiled—"except for your sophomore survey of English literature, you have all A's in your English courses; nothing below a B elsewhere. If you could maintain yourself for a year or so beyond graduation, you could, I'm sure, successfully complete the work for your Master of Arts; after which you would probably be able to teach while you worked toward your doctorate. If that sort of thing would interest you at all."

Stoner drew back. "What do you mean?" he asked and heard something like fear in his voice.

Sloane leaned forward until his face was close; Stoner saw the lines on the long thin face soften, and he heard the dry mocking voice become gentle and unprotected.

"But don't you know, Mr. Stoner?" Sloane asked. "Don't you understand about yourself yet? You're going to be a teacher."

Suddenly Sloane seemed very distant, and the walls of the office receded. Stoner felt himself suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," Sloane said softly.

"How can you tell? How can you be sure?"

"It's love, Mr. Stoner," Sloane said cheerfully. "You are in love. It's as simple as that."


In the first week of June, in the year 1914, William Stoner, with sixty other young men and a few young ladies, received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Missouri.

To attend the ceremony, his parents—in a borrowed buggy drawn by their old dun mare—had started the day before, driving overnight the forty-odd miles from the farm, so that they arrived at the Footes' shortly after dawn, stiff from their sleepless journey. Stoner went down into the yard to meet them. They stood side by side in the crisp morning light and awaited his approach.

Stoner and his father shook hands with a single quick pumping action, not looking at each other.

"How do," his father said.

His mother nodded. "Your pa and me come down to see you graduate."

For a moment he did not speak. Then he said, "You'd better come in and get some breakfast"

They were alone in the kitchen; since Stoner had come to the farm the Footes had got in the habit of sleeping late. But neither then nor after his parents had finished breakfast could he bring himself to tell them of his change of plans, of his decision not to return to the farm. Once or twice he started to speak; then he looked at the brown faces that rose nakedly out of their new clothing, and thought of the long journey they had made and of the years they had awaited his return. He sat stiffly with them until they finished the last of their coffee, and until the Footes roused themselves and came into the kitchen. Then he told them that he had to go early to the University and that he would see them there later in the day, at the exercises.

He wandered about the campus, carrying the black robe and cap that he had hired; they were heavy and troublesome, but he could find no place to leave them. He thought of what he would have to tell his parents, and for the first time realized the finality of his decision, and almost wished that he could recall it. He felt his inadequacy to the goal he had so recklessly chosen and felt the attraction of the world he had abandoned. He grieved for his own loss and for that of his parents, and even in his grief felt himself drawing away from them.

He carried this feeling of loss with him throughout the graduation exercises; when his name was spoken and he walked across the platform to receive a scroll from a man faceless behind a soft gray beard, he could not believe his own presence, and the roll of parchment in his hand had no meaning. He could only think of his mother and father sitting stiffly and uneasily in the great crowd.

When the ceremonies were over he drove with them back to the Footes', where they were to stay overnight and start the journey home the following dawn.

They sat late in the Footes' parlor. Jim and Serena Foote stayed up with them for a while. Every now and then Jim and Stoner's mother would exchange the name of a relative and lapse into silence. His father sat on a straight chair, his legs spread apart, leaning a little forward, his broad hands clasping his kneecaps. Finally the Footes looked at each other and yawned and announced that it was late. They went to their bedroom, and the three were left alone.

There was another silence. His parents, who looked straight ahead in the shadows cast by their own bodies, every now and then glanced sideways at their son, as if they did not wish to disturb him in his new estate.

After several minutes William Stoner leaned forward and spoke, his voice louder and more forceful than he had intended. "I ought to have told you sooner. I ought to have told you last summer, or this morning."

His parents' faces were dull and expressionless in the lamplight.

"What I'm trying to say is, I'm not coming back with you to the farm."

No one moved. His father said, "You got some things to finish up here, we can go back in the morning and you can come on home in a few days."

Stoner rubbed his face with his open palm. "That's—not what I meant. I'm trying to tell you I won't be coming back to the farm at all."

His father's hands tightened on his kneecaps and he drew back in the chair. He said, "You get yourself in some kind of trouble?"

Stoner smiled. "It's nothing like that. I'm going on to school for another year, maybe two or three."

His father shook his head. "I seen you get through this evening. And the county agent said the farm school took four years."

Stoner tried to explain to his father what he intended to do, tried to evoke in him his own sense of significance and purpose. He listened to his words fall as if from the mouth of another, and watched his father's face, which received those words as a stone receives the repeated blows of a fist. When he had finished he sat with his hands clasped between his knees and his head bowed. He listened to the silence of the room.

Finally his father moved in his chair. Stoner looked up. His parents' faces confronted him; he almost cried out to them.

"I don't know," his father said. His voice was husky and tired. "I didn't figure it would tum out like this. I thought I was doing the best for you I could, sending you here. Your ma and me has always done the best we could for you."

"I know," Stoner said. He could not look at them longer. "Will you be all right? I could come back for a while this summer and help. I could—"

"If you think you ought to stay here and study your books, then that's what you ought to do. Your ma and me can manage."

His mother was facing him, but she did not see him. Her eyes were squeezed shut; she was breathing heavily, her face twisted as if in pain, and her closed fists were pressed against her cheeks. With wonder Stoner realized that she was crying, deeply and silently, with the shame and awkwardness of one who seldom weeps. He watched her for a moment more; then he got heavily to his feet and walked out of the parlor. He found his way up the narrow stairs that led to his attic room; for a long time he lay on his bed and stared with open eyes into the darkness above him.


Two weeks after Stoner received his Bachelor of Arts degree, Archduke Francis Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist; and before autumn war was general all over Europe. It was a topic of continuing interest among the older students; they wondered about the part America would eventually play, and they were pleasantly unsure of their own futures.

But before William Stoner the future lay bright and certain and unchanging. He saw it, not as a flux of event and change and potentiality, but as a territory ahead that awaited his exploration. He saw it as the great University library, to which new wings might be built, to which new books might be added and from which old ones might be withdrawn, while its true nature remained essentially unchanged. He saw the future in the institution to which he had committed himself and which he so imperfectly understood; he conceived himself changing in that future, but he saw the future itself as the instrument of change rather than its object.

Near the end of that summer, just before the beginning of the autumn semester, he visited his parents. He had intended to help with the summer crop; but he found that his father had hired a Negro field hand who worked with a quiet, fierce intensity, accomplishing by himself in a day nearly as much as William and his father together had once done in the same time. His parents were happy to see him, and they seemed not to resent his decision. But he found that he had nothing to say to them; already, he realized, he and his parents were becoming strangers; and he felt his love increased by its loss. He returned to Columbia a week earlier than he had intended.

He began to resent the time he had to spend at work on the Foote farm. Having come to his studies late, he felt the urgency of study. Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.

He finished his course work for the Master of Arts degree in the spring of 1915 and spent the summer completing his thesis, a prosodie study of one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Before the summer was out the Footes told him that they would not need him any longer on the farm.

He had expected his dismissal and in some ways he welcomed it; but for a moment after it happened he had a twinge of panic. It was as if the last tie between himself and the old life had been cut. He spent the last weeks of the summer at his father's farm, putting the finishing touches on his thesis. By that time Archer Sloane had arranged for him to teach two classes of beginning English to incoming freshmen, while he started to work toward his Ph.D. For this he received four hundred dollars a year. He removed his belongings from the Footes' tiny attic room, which he had occupied for five years, and took an even smaller room near the University.


But in the first classes he met, after the opening routines of rolls and study plans, when he began to address himself to his subject and his students, he found that his sense of wonder remained hidden within him. Sometimes, as he spoke to his students, it was as if he stood outside himself and observed a stranger speaking to a group assembled unwillingly; he heard his own flat voice reciting the materials he had prepared, and nothing of his own excitement came through that recitation.

He found his release and fulfillment in the classes in which he himself was a student. There he was able to recapture the sense of discovery he had felt on that first day, when Archer Sloane had spoken to him in class and he had, in an instant, become someone other than who he had been. As his mind engaged itself with its subject, as it grappled with the power of the literature he studied and tried to understand its nature, he was aware of a constant change within himself; and as he was aware of that, he moved outward from himself into the world which contained him, so that he knew that the poem of Milton 'sthat he read or the essay of Bacon's or the drama of Ben Jonson's changed the world which was its subject, and changed it because of its dependence upon it. He seldom spoke in class, and his papers rarely satisfied him. Like his lectures to his young students, they did not betray what he most profoundly knew.

He began to be on familiar terms with a few of his fellow students who were also acting instructors in the department. Among those were two with whom he became friendly, David Masters and Gordon Finch.

Masters was a slight dark youth with a sharp tongue and gentle eyes. Like Stoner, he was just beginning his doctoral program, though he was a year or so younger than Stoner. Among the faculty and the graduate students he had a reputation for arrogance and impertinence, and it was generally conceded that he would have some difficulty in finally obtaining his degree. Stoner thought him the most brilliant man he had ever known and deferred to him without envy or resentment.

Gordon Finch was large and blond, and already, at the age of twenty-three, beginning to run to fat. He had taken an undergraduate degree from a commercial college in St. Louis, and at the University had made various stabs at advanced degrees in the departments of economics, history, and engineering. He had begun work on his degree in literature largely because he had been able, at the last minute, to get a small instructing job in the English Department. He quickly showed himself to be the most nearly indifferent student in the department. But he was popular with the freshmen, and he got along well with the older faculty members and with the officers of the administration.

The three of them—Stoner, Masters, and Finch—got in the habit of meeting on Friday afternoons at a small saloon in downtown Columbia, drinking large schooners of beer and talking late into the night. Though he found the only social pleasure he knew in these evenings, Stoner often wondered at their relationship. Though they got along well enough together, they had not become close friends; they had no confidences and seldom saw each other outside their weekly gatherings.

None of them ever raised the question of that relationship. Stoner knew that it had not occurred to Gordon Finch, but he suspected that it had to David Masters. Once, late in the evening, as they sat at a rear table in the dimness of the saloon, Stoner and Masters talked of their teaching and study with the awkward facetiousness of the very serious. Masters, holding aloft a hard-boiled egg from the free lunch as if it were a crystal ball, said, "Have you gentlemen ever considered the question of the true nature of the University? Mr. Stoner? Mr. Finch?"

Smiling, they shook their heads.

"I'll bet you haven't. Stoner, here, I imagine, sees it as a great repository, like a library or a whorehouse, where men come of their free will and select that which will complete them, where all work together like little bees in a common hive. The True, the Good, the Beautiful. They're just around the corner, in the next corridor; they're in the next book, the one you haven't read, or in the next stack, the one you haven't got to. But you'll get to it someday. And when you do—when you do—" He looked at the egg for a moment more, then took a large bite of it and turned to Stoner, his jaws working and his dark eyes bright.

Stoner smiled uncomfortably, and Finch laughed aloud and slapped the table. "He's got you, Bill. He's got you good."

Masters chewed for a moment more, swallowed, and turned his gaze to Finch. "And you, Finch. What's your idea?" He held up his hand. "You'll protest you haven't thought of it. But you have. Beneath that bluff and hearty exterior there works a simple mind. To you, the institution is an instrument of good —to the world at large, of course, and just incidentally to yourself. You see it as a kind of spiritual sulphur-and-molasses that you administer every fall to get the little bastards through another winter; and you're the kindly old doctor who benignly pats their heads and pockets their fees."

Finch laughed again and shook his head. "I swear, Dave, when you get going—"

Masters put the rest of the egg in his mouth, chewed contentedly for a moment, and took a long swallow of beer. "But you're both wrong," he said. "It is an asylum or—what do they call them now?—a rest home, for the infirm, the aged, the discontent, and the otherwise incompetent. Look at the three of us—we are the University. The stranger would not know that we have so much in common, but we know, don't we? We know well."

Finch was laughing. "What's that, Dave?"

Interested now in what he was saying, Masters leaned intently across the table. "Let's take you first, Finch. Being as kind as I can, I would say that you are the incompetent. As you yourself know, you're not really very bright—though that doesn't have everything to do with it."

"Here, now," Finch said, still laughing.

"But you're bright enough—and just bright enough—to realize what would happen to you in the world. You're cut out for failure, and you know it. Though you're capable of being a son-of-a-bitch, you're not quite ruthless enough to be so consistently. Though you're not precisely the most honest man I've ever known, neither are you heroically dishonest. On the one hand, you're capable of work, but you're just lazy enough so that you can't work as hard as the world would want you to. On the other hand, you're not quite so lazy that you can impress upon the world a sense of your importance. And you're not lucky—not really. No aura rises from you, and you wear a puzzled expression. In the world you would always be on the fringe of success, and you would be destroyed by your failure. So you are chosen, elected; providence, whose sense of humor has always amused me, has snatched you from the jaws of the world and placed you safely here, among your brothers."

Still smiling and ironically malevolent, he turned to Stoner. "Nor do you escape, my friend. No indeed. Who are you? A simple son of the soil, as you pretend to yourself? Oh, no. You, too, are among the infirm—you are the dreamer, the madman in a madder world, our own midwestern Don Quixote without his Sancho, gamboling under the blue sky. You're bright enough—brighter anyhow than our mutual friend. But you have the taint, the old infirmity. You think there's something here, something to find. Well, in the world you'd learn soon enough. You, too, are cut out for failure; not that you'd fight the world. You'd let it chew you up and spit you out, and you'd lie there wondering what was wrong. Because you'd always expect the world to be something it wasn't, something it had no wish to be. The weevil in the cotton, the worm in the beanstalk, the borer in the corn. You couldn't face them, and you couldn't fight them; because you're too weak, and you're too strong. And you have no place to go in the world."

"What about you?" Finch asked. "What about yourself?"

"Oh," Masters said, leaning back, "I'm one of you. Worse, in fact. I'm too bright for the world, and I won't keep my mouth shut about it; it's a disease for which there is no cure. So I must be locked up, where I can be safely irresponsible, where I can do no harm." He leaned forward again and smiled at them. "We're all poor Toms, and we're a-cold."

"King Lear," Stoner said seriously.

"Act Three, Scene Four," said Masters. "And so providence, or society, or fate, or whatever name you want to give it, has created this hovel for us, so that we can go in out of the storm. It's for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons, and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that's just protective coloration. Like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn't give a damn about the laity or even about God, we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive—because we have to."

Finch shook his head admiringly. "You sure make us sound bad, Dave."

"Maybe I do," Masters said. "But bad as we are, we're better than those on the outside, in the muck, the poor bastards of the world. We do no harm, we say what we want, and we get paid for it; and that's a triumph of natural virtue, or pretty damn close to it."

Masters leaned back from the table, indifferent, no longer concerned with what he had said.

Gordon Finch cleared his throat. "Well, now," he said earnestly. "You may have something in what you say, Dave. But I think you go too far. I really do."

Stoner and Masters smiled at each other, and they spoke no more of the question that evening. But for years afterward, at odd moments, Stoner remembered what Masters had said; and though it brought him no vision of the University to which he had committed himself, it did reveal to him something about his relationship to the two men, and it gave him a glimpse of the corrosive and unspoiled bitterness of youth.

On May 7, 1915, a German submarine sank the British liner Lusitania, with a hundred and fourteen American passengers on board; by the end of 1916 submarine warfare by the Germans was unrestricted, and relations between the United States and Germany steadily worsened. In February 1917 President Wilson broke off diplomatic relations. On April 6 a state of war was declared by Congress to exist between Germany and the United States.

With that declaration, thousands of young men across the nation, as if relieved that the tension of uncertainty had finally been broken, besieged the recruiting stations that had been hastily set up some weeks before. Indeed, hundreds of young men had not been able to wait for America's intervention and had as early as 1915 signed up for duty with the Royal Canadian forces or as ambulance drivers for one of the European allied armies. A few of the older students at the University had done so; and although William Stoner had not known any of these, he heard their legendary names with increasing frequency as the months and weeks drew on to the moment that they all knew must eventually come.

War was declared on a Friday, and although classes remained scheduled the following week, few students or professors made a pretense of meeting them. They milled about in the halls and gathered in small groups, murmuring in hushed voices. Occasionally the tense quietness erupted into near violence; twice there were general anti-German demonstrations, in which students shouted incoherently and waved American flags. Once there was a brief-lived demonstration against one of the professors, an old and bearded teacher of Germanic languages, who had been born in Munich and who as a youth had attended the University of Berlin. But when the professor met the angry and flushed little group of students, blinked in bewilderment, and held out his thin, shaking hands to them, they disbanded in sullen confusion.

During those first days after the declaration of war Stoner also suffered a confusion, but it was profoundly different from that which gripped most of the others on the campus. Though he had talked about the war in Europe with the older students and instructors, he had never quite believed in it; and now that it was upon him, upon them all, he discovered within himself a vast reserve of indifference. He resented the disruption which the war forced upon the University; but he could find in himself no very strong feelings of patriotism, and he could not bring himself to hate the Germans.

But the Germans were there to be hated. Once Stoner came upon Gordon Finch talking to a group of older faculty members; Finch's face was twisted, and he was speaking of the "Huns" as if he were spitting on the floor. Later, when he approached Stoner in the large office which half a dozen of the younger instructors shared, Finch's mood had shifted; feverishly jovial, he clapped Stoner on the shoulder.

"Can't let them get away with it, Bill," he said rapidly. A film of sweat like oil glistened on his round face, and his thin blond hair lay in lank strands over his skull. "No, sir. I'm going to join up. I've already talked to old Sloane about it, and he said to go ahead. I'm going down to St. Louis tomorrow and sign up." For an instant he managed to compose his features into a semblance of gravity. "We've all got to do our part." Then he grinned and clapped Stoner's shoulder again. "You better come along with me."

"Me?" Stoner said, and said again, incredulously, "Me?"

Finch laughed. "Sure. Everybody's signing up. I just talked to Dave—he's coming with me."

Stoner shook his head as if dazed. "Dave Masters?"

"Sure. Old Dave talks kind of funny sometimes, but when the chips are down he's no different from anybody else; hell do his part. Just like you'll do yours, Bill." Finch punched him on the arm. "Just like you'll do yours."

Stoner was silent for a moment. "I hadn't thought about it," he said. 'It all seems to have happened so quickly. I'll have to talk to Sloane. I'll let you know."

"Sure," Finch said. "You'll do your part." His voice thickened with feeling. "We're all in this together now, Bill; we're all in it together."

Stoner left Finch then, but he did not go to see Archer Sloane. Instead he looked about the campus and inquired after David Masters. He found him in one of the library carrels, alone, puffing on a pipe and staring at a shelf of books.

Stoner sat across from him at the carrel desk. When he questioned him about his decision to join the Army, Masters said, "Sure. Why not?"

And when Stoner asked him why, Masters said, "You know me pretty well, Bill. I don't give a damn about the Germans. When it comes down to it, I don't really give a damn about the Americans either, I guess." He knocked his pipe ashes out on the floor and swept them around with his foot. "I suppose I'm doing it because it doesn't matter whether I do it or not. And it might be amusing to pass through the world once more before I return to the cloistered and slow extinction that awaits us all."

Though he did not understand, Stoner nodded, accepting what Masters told him. He said, "Gordon wants me to enlist with you."

Masters smiled. "Gordon feels the first strength of virtue he's ever been allowed to feel; and he naturally wants to include the rest of the world in it, so that he can keep on believing. Sure. Why not? Join up with us. It might do you good to see what the world's like." He paused and looked intently at Stoner. "But if you do, for Christ's sake don't do it for God, country, and the dear old U. of M. Do it for yourself."

Stoner waited several moments. Then he said, "I'll talk to Sloane and let you know."

He did not know what he expected Archer Sloane's response to be; nevertheless he was surprised when he confronted him in his narrow book-lined office and told him of what was not quite yet his decision.

Sloane, who had always maintained toward him an attitude of detached and courtly irony, lost his temper. His long thin face went red, and the lines on either side of his mouth deepened in anger; he half rose from his chair toward Stoner, his fists clenched. Then he settled back and deliberately loosened his fists and spread his hands upon his desk; the fingers were trembling, but his voice was steady and harsh.

"I ask you to forgive my sudden display. But in the last few days I have lost nearly a third of the members of the department, and I see no hope of replacing them. It is not you at whom I am angry, but—" He turned away from Stoner and looked up at the high window at the far end of his office. The light struck his face sharply, accentuating the lines and deepening the shadows under his eyes, so that for a moment he seemed old and sick. "I was born in 1860, just before the War of the Rebellion. I don't remember it, of course; I was too young. I don't remember my father either; he was killed in the first year of the war, at the Battle of Shiloh." He looked quickly at Stoner. "But I can see what has ensued. A war doesn't merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that's left is the brute, the creature that we— you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime." He paused for a long moment; then he smiled slightly. "The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has aimed his life to build."

Stoner cleared his throat and said diffidently, "Everything seems to have happened so quickly. Somehow it had never occurred to me, until I talked to Finch and Masters. It still doesn't seem quite real."

"It's not, of course," Sloane said. Then he moved restlessly, turning away from Stoner. "I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'll simply say this: it's your choice to make. There'll be a conscription; but you can be excepted, if you want to be. You're not afraid to go, are you?"

"No, sir," Stoner said. "I don't believe so."

"Then you do have a choice, and you'll have to make it for yourself. It goes without saying that if you decide to join you will upon your return be reinstated in your present position. If you decide not to join you can stay on here, but of course you will have no particular advantage; it is possible that you will have a disadvantage, either now or in the future."

"I understand," Stoner said.

There was a long silence, and Stoner decided at last that Sloane had finished with him. But just as he got up to leave the office Sloane spoke again.

He said slowly, "You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do."

For two days Stoner did not meet his classes and did not speak to anyone he knew. He stayed in his small room, struggling with his decision. His books and the quiet of his room surrounded him; only rarely was he aware of the world outside his room, of the far murmur of shouting students, of the swift clatter of a buggy on the brick streets, and the flat chug of one of the dozen or so automobiles in town. He had never got in the habit of introspection, and he found the task of searching his motives a difficult and slightly distasteful one; he felt that he had little to offer to himself and that there was little within him which he could find.

When at last he came to his decision, it seemed to him that he had known all along what it would be. He met Masters and Finch on Friday and told them that he would not join them to fight the Germans.

Gordon Finch, sustained still by his accession to virtue, stiffened and allowed an expression of reproachful sorrow to settle on his features. "You're letting us down, Bill," he said thickly. "You're letting us all down."

"Be quiet," Masters said. He looked keenly at Stoner. "I thought you might decide not to. You've always had that lean, dedicated look about you. It doesn't matter, of course; but what made you finally decide?"

Stoner did not speak for a moment. He thought of the last two days, of the silent struggle that seemed toward no end and no meaning; he thought of his life at the University for the past seven years; he thought of the years before, the distant years with his parents on the farm, and of the deadness from which he had been miraculously revived.

"I don't know," he said at last. "Everything, I guess. I can't say."

"It's going to be hard," Masters said, "staying here."

"I know," Stoner said.

"But it's worth it, you think?"

Stoner nodded.

Masters grinned and said with his old irony, "You have the lean and hungry look, sure enough. You're doomed."

Finch's sorrowful reproach had turned into a kind of tentative contempt. "You'll live to regret this, Bill," he said hoarsely, and his voice hesitated between threat and pity.

Stoner nodded. "It may be," he said.

He told them good-by then, and turned away. They were to go to St. Louis the next day to enlist, and Stoner had classes to prepare for the following week.

He felt no guilt for his decision, and when conscription became general he applied for his deferment with no particular feeling of remorse; but he was aware of the looks that he received from his older colleagues and of the thin edge of disrespect that showed through his students' conventional behavior toward him. He even suspected that Archer Sloane, who had at one time expressed a warm approval of his decision to continue at the University, grew colder and more distant as the months of the war wore on.

He finished the requirements for his doctorate in the spring of 1918 and took his degree in June of that year. A month before he received his degree he got a letter from Gordon Finch, who had gone through Officer's Training School and had been assigned to a training camp just outside New York City. The letter informed him that Finch had been allowed, in his spare time, to attend Columbia University, where he, too, had managed to fulfill the requirements necessary for a doctorate, which he would take in the summer from Teachers College there.

It also told him that Dave Masters had been sent to France and that almost exactly a year after his enlistment, with the first American troops to see action, he had been killed at Château-Thierry.


A week before commencement, at which Stoner was to receive his doctorate, Archer Sloane offered him a full-time instructorship at the University. Sloane explained that it was not the policy of the University to employ its own graduates, but because of the wartime shortage of trained and experienced college teachers he had been able to persuade the administration to make an exception.

Somewhat reluctantly Stoner had written a few letters of application to universities and colleges in the general area, abruptly setting forth his qualifications; when nothing came from any of them, he felt curiously relieved. He half understood his relief; he had known at the University at Columbia the kind of security and warmth that he should have been able to feel as a child in his home, and had not been able to, and he was unsure of his ability to find those elsewhere. He accepted Sloane's offer with gratitude.

And as he did so it occurred to him that Sloane had aged greatly during the year of the war. In his late fifties, he looked ten years older; his hair, which had once curled in an unruly iron-gray shock, now was white and lay flat and lifeless about his bony skull. His black eyes had gone dull, as if filmed over with layers of moisture; his long, lined face, which had once been tough as thin leather, now had the fragility of ancient, drying paper; and his flat, ironical voice had begun to develop a tremor. Looking at him, Stoner thought: He is going to die—in a year, or two years, or ten, he will die. A premature sense of loss gripped him, and he turned away.

His thoughts were much upon death that summer of 1918. The death of Masters had shocked him more than he wished to admit; and the first American casualty lists from Europe were beginning to be released. When he had thought of death before, he had thought of it either as a literary event or as the slow, quiet attrition of time against imperfect flesh. He had not thought of it as the explosion of violence upon a battlefield, as the gush of blood from the ruptured throat. He wondered at the difference between the two kinds of dying, and what the difference meant; and he found growing in him some of that bitterness he had glimpsed once in the living heart of his friend David Masters.

His dissertation topic had been "The Influence of the Classical Tradition upon the Medieval Lyric." He spent much of the summer rereading the classical and medieval Latin poets, and especially their poems upon death. He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were a tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed; and he marveled at the bitterness, the terror, the barely concealed hatred he found in some of the later Christian poets of the Latin tradition when they looked to that death which promised, however vaguely, a rich and ecstatic eternity of life, as if that death and promise were a mockery that soured the days of their living. When he thought of Masters, he thought of him as a Catullus or a more gentle and lyrical Juvenal, an exile in his own country, and thought of his death as another exile, more strange and lasting than he had known before.

When the semester opened in the autumn of 1918 it was clear to everyone that the war in Europe could not go on much longer. The last, desperate German counteroffensive had been stopped short of Paris, and Marshal Foch had ordered a general allied counterattack that quickly pushed the Germans back to their original line. The British advanced to the north and the Americans went through the Argonne, at a cost that was widely ignored in the general elation. The newspapers were predicting a collapse of the Germans before Christmas.

So the semester began in an atmosphere of tense geniality and well-being. The students and instructors found themselves smiling at each other and nodding vigorously in the halls; outbursts of exuberance and small violence among the students were ignored by the faculty and administration; and an unidentified student, who immediately became a kind of local folk hero, shinnied up one of the huge columns in front of Jesse Hall and hung from its top a straw-stuffed effigy of the Kaiser.

The only person in the University who seemed untouched by the general excitement was Archer Sloane. Since the day of America's entrance into the war he had begun to withdraw into himself, and the withdrawal became more pronounced as the war neared its end. He did not speak to his colleagues unless departmental business forced him to do so, and it was whispered that his teaching had become so eccentric that his students attended his classes in dread; he read dully and mechanically from his notes, never meeting his students' eyes; frequently his voice trailed off as he stared at his notes, and there would be one, two, and sometimes as many as five minutes of silence, during which he neither moved nor responded to embarrassed questions from the class.

William Stoner saw the last vestige of the bright, ironic man he had known as a student when Archer Sloane gave him his teaching assignment for the academic year. Sloane gave Stoner two sections of freshman composition and an upper division survey of Middle English literature; and then he said, with a flash of his old irony, "You, as well as many of our colleagues and not a few of our students, will be pleased to know that I am giving up a number of my classes. Among these is one that has been my rather unfashionable favorite, the sophomore survey of English literature. You may recall the course?"

Stoner nodded, smiling.

"Yes," Sloane continued, "I rather thought you would. I am asking you to take it over for me. Not that it's a great gift; but I thought it might amuse you to begin your formal career as a teacher where you started as a student." Sloane looked at him for a moment, his eyes bright and intent as they had been before the war. Then the film of indifference settled over them, and he turned away from Stoner and shuffled some papers on his desk.

So Stoner began where he had started, a tall, thin, stooped man in the same room in which he had sat as a tall, thin, stooped boy listening to the words that had led him to where he had come. He never went into that room that he did not glance at the seat he had once occupied, and he was always slightly surprised to discover that he was not there.

On November 11 of that year, two months after the semester began, the Armistice was signed. The news came on a class day, and immediately the classes broke up; students ran aimlessly about the campus and started small parades that gathered, dispersed, and gathered again, winding through halls, classrooms, and offices. Half against his will, Stoner was caught up in one of these which went into Jesse Hall, through corridors, up stairs, and through corridors again. Swept along in a small mass of students and teachers, he passed the open door of Archer Sloane's office; and he had a glimpse of Sloane sitting in his chair before his desk, his face uncovered and twisted, weeping bitterly, the tears streaming down the deep lines of the flesh.

For a moment more, as if in shock, Stoner allowed himself to be carried along by the crowd. Then he broke away and went to his room near the campus. He sat in the dimness of his room and heard outside the shouts of joy and release, and thought of Archer Sloane who wept at a defeat that only he saw, or thought he saw; and he knew that Sloane was a broken man and would never again be what he had been.

Late in November many of those who had gone away to war began to return to Columbia, and the campus at the University was dotted with the olive drab of army uniforms. Among those who returned on extended leaves was Gordon Finch. He had put on weight during his year and a half away from the University, and the broad, open face that had been amiably acquiescent now held an expression of friendly but portentous gravity; he wore the bars of a captain and spoke often with a paternal fondness of "my men." He was distantly friendly to William Stoner, and he took exaggerated care to behave with deference toward the older members of the department. It was too late in the fall semester to assign him any classes, so for the rest of the academic year he was given what was understood to be a temporary sinecure as administrative assistant to the dean of Arts and Sciences. He was sensitive enough to be aware of the ambiguity of his new position and shrewd enough to see its possibilities; his relations with his colleagues were tentative and courteously noncommittal.

The dean of Arts and Sciences, Josiah Claremont, was a small bearded man of advanced age, several years beyond the point of compulsory retirement; he had been with the University ever since its transition, in the early seventies of the preceding century, from a normal college to a full University, and his father had been one of its early presidents. He was so firmly entrenched and so much a part of the history of the University that no one quite had the courage to insist upon his retirement, despite the increasing incompetence with which he managed his office. His memory was nearly gone; sometimes he became lost in the corridors of Jesse Hall, where his office was located, and had to be led like a child to his desk.

So vague had he become about University affairs that when an announcement came from his office that a reception in honor of the returning veterans on the faculty and administrative staff would be held at his home, most of those who received invitations felt that an elaborate joke was being played or that a mistake had been made. But it was not a joke, and it was not a mistake. Gordon Finch confirmed the invitations; and it was widely hinted that it was he who had instigated the reception and who had carried through the plans.

Josiah Claremont, widowed many years before, lived alone, with three colored servants nearly as old as himself, in one of the large pre-Civil War homes that had once been common around Columbia but were fast disappearing before the coming of the small, independent farmer and the real-estate developer. The architecture of the place was pleasant but unidentifiable; though "Southern" in its general shape and expansiveness, it had none of the neo-classic rigidity of the Virginia home. Its boards were painted white, and green trim framed the windows and the balustrades of the small balconies that projected here and there from the upper story. The grounds extended into a wood that surrounded the place, and tall poplars, leafless in the December afternoon, lined the drive and the walks. It was the grandest house that William Stoner had ever been near; and on that Friday afternoon he walked with some dread up the driveway and joined a group of faculty whom he did not know, who were waiting at the front door to be admitted.

Gordon Finch, still wearing his army uniform, opened the door to let them in; the group stepped into a small square foyer, at the end of which a steep staircase with polished oaken banisters led upward to the second story. A small French tapestry, its blues and golds so faded that the pattern was hardly visible in the dim yellow light given by the small bulbs, hung on the staircase wall directly in front of the men who had entered. Stoner stood gazing up at it while those who had come in with him milled about the small foyer.

"Give me your coat, Bill." The voice, close to his ear, startled him. He turned. Finch was smiling and holding his hand out to receive the coat which Stoner had not removed.

"You haven't been here before, have you?" Finch asked almost in a whisper. Stoner shook his head.

Finch turned to the other men and without raising his voice managed to call out to them. "You gentlemen go on into the main living room." He pointed to a door at the right of the foyer. "Everybody's in there."

He returned his attention to Stoner. "It's a fine old house," he said, hanging Stoner's coat in a large closet beneath the staircase. "It's one of the real showplaces around here."

"Yes," Stoner said. "I've heard people talk about it."

"And Dean Claremont's a fine old man. He asked me to kind of look out for things for him this evening."

Stoner nodded.

Finch took his arm and guided him toward the door to which he had pointed earlier. "We'll have to get together for a talk later on this evening. You go on in now. I'll be there in a minute. There are some people I want you to meet."

Stoner started to speak, but Finch had turned away to greet another group that had come in the front door. Stoner took a deep breath and opened the door to the main living room.

When he came into the room from the cold foyer the warmth pushed against him, as if to force him back; the slow murmur of the people inside, released by his opening the door, swelled for a moment before his ears accustomed themselves to it.

Perhaps two dozen people milled about the room, and for an instant he recognized none of them; he saw the sober black and gray and brown of men's suits, the olive drab of army uniforms, and here and there the delicate pink or blue of a woman's dress. The people moved sluggishly through the warmth, and he moved with them, conscious of his height among the seated figures, nodding to the faces he now recognized.

At the far end another door led into a sitting parlor, which was adjacent to the long, narrow dining hall. The double doors of the hall were open, revealing a massive walnut dining table covered with yellow damask and laden with white dishes and bowls of gleaming silver. Several people were gathered around the table, at the head of which a young woman, tall and slender and fair, dressed in a gown of blue watered silk, stood pouring tea into gold-rimmed china cups. Stoner paused in the doorway, caught by his vision of the young woman. Her long, delicately featured face smiled at those around her, and her slender, almost fragile fingers deftly manipulated urn and cup; looking at her, Stoner was assailed by a consciousness of his own heavy clumsiness.

For several moments he did not move from the doorway; he heard the girl's soft, thin voice rise above the murmur of the assembled guests she served. She raised her head, and suddenly he met her eyes; they were pale and large and seemed to shine with a light within themselves. In some confusion he backed from the doorway and turned into the sitting room; he found an empty chair in a space by the wall, and he sat there looking at the carpet beneath his feet. He did not look in the direction of the dining room, but every now and then he thought he felt the gaze of the young woman brush warmly across his face.

The guests moved around him, exchanged seats, altered their inflections as they found new partners for conversation. Stoner saw them through a haze, as if he were an audience. After a while Gordon Finch came into the room, and Stoner got up from his chair and walked across the room to him. Almost rudely he interrupted Finch's conversation with an older man. Drawing him aside but not lowering his voice, he asked to be introduced to the young woman pouring tea.

Finch looked at him for a moment, the annoyed frown that had begun to pucker his forehead smoothing as his eyes widened. "You what?" Finch said. Though he was shorter than Stoner, he seemed to be looking down on him.

"I want you to introduce me," Stoner said. He felt his face warm. "Do you know her?"

"Sure," Finch said. The start of a grin began to tug at his mouth. "She's some kind of cousin of the dean's, down from St. Louis, visiting an aunt." The grin widened. "Old Bill. What do you know. Sure, I'll introduce you. Come on."

Her name was Edith Elaine Bostwick, and she lived with her parents in St. Louis, where the previous spring she had finished a two-year course of study at a private seminary for young ladies; she was visiting her mother's older sister in Columbia for a few weeks, and in the spring they were to make the Grand Tour of Europe—an event once again possible, now that the war was over. Her father, the president of one of the smaller St. Louis banks, was a transplanted New Englander; he had come west in the seventies and married the oldest daughter of a well-to-do central Missouri family. Edith had lived all her life in St. Louis; a few years before she had gone east with her parents to Boston for the season; she had been to the opera in New York and had visited the museums. She was twenty years of age, she played the piano, and had artistic leanings which her mother encouraged.

Later, William Stoner could not remember how he learned these things, that first afternoon and early evening at Josiah Claremont's house; for the time of his meeting was blurred and formal, like the figured tapestry on the stair wall off the foyer. He remembered that he spoke to her that she might look at him, remain near him, and give him the pleasure of hearing her soft, thin voice answering his questions and making perfunctory questions in return.

The guests began to leave. Voices called good-bys, doors slammed, and the rooms emptied. Stoner remained behind after most of the other guests had departed; and when Edith's carriage came he followed her into the foyer and helped her with her coat. Just before she started outside he asked her if he might call on her the following evening.

As if she had not heard him she opened the door and stood for several moments without moving: the cold air swept through the doorway and touched Stoner's hot face. She turned and looked at him and blinked several times; her pale eyes were speculative, almost bold. At last she nodded and said, "Yes. You may call." She did not smile.

And so he called, walking across town to her aunt's house on an intensely cold midwestern winter night. No cloud was overhead; the half-moon shone upon a light snow that had fallen earlier in the afternoon. The streets were deserted, and the muffled silence was broken by the dry snow crunching underfoot as he walked. He stood for a long while outside the large house to which he had come, listening to the silence. The cold numbed his feet, but he did not move. From the curtained windows a dim light fell upon the blue-white snow like a yellow smudge; he thought he saw movement inside, but he could not be sure. Deliberately, as if committing himself to something, he stepped forward and walked down the path to the porch and knocked on the front door.

Edith's aunt (her name, Stoner had learned earlier, was Emma Darley, and she had been widowed for a number of years) met him at the door and asked him to come in. She was a short, plump woman with fine white hair that floated about her face; her dark eyes twinkled moistly, and she spoke softly and breathlessly as if she were telling secrets. Stoner followed her into the parlor and sat, facing her, on a long walnut sofa, the seat and back of which were covered with thick blue velvet. Snow had clung to his shoes; he watched it melt and form damp patches on the thick floral rug under his feet.

"Edith tells me you teach at the University, Mr. Stoner," Mrs. Darley said.

"Yes, ma'am," he said and cleared his throat.

"It's so nice to be able to talk to one of the young professors there again," Mrs. Darley said brightly. "My late husband, Mr. Darley, was on the board of trustees at the University for a number of years—but I guess you know that."

"No, ma'am," Stoner said.

"Oh," Mrs. Darley said. "Well, we used to have some of the younger professors over for tea in the afternoons. But that was quite a few years ago, before the war. You were in the war, Professor Stoner?"

"No, ma'am," Stoner said. "I was at the University."

"Yes," Mrs. Darley said. She nodded brightly. "And you teach—?"

"English," Stoner said. "And I'm not a professor. I'm just an instructor." He knew his voice was harsh; he could not control it. He tried to smile.

"Ah, yes," she said. "Shakespeare . . . Browning . . ."

A silence came between them. Stoner twisted his hands together and looked at the floor.

Mrs. Darley said, "I'll see if Edith is ready. If you'll excuse me?"

Stoner nodded and got to his feet as she went out. He heard fierce whispers in a back room. He stood for several minutes more.

Suddenly Edith was standing in the wide doorway, pale and unsmiling. They looked at each other without recognition. Edith took a backward step and then came forward, her lips thin and tense. They shook hands gravely and sat together on the sofa. They had not spoken.

She was even taller than he remembered, and more fragile. Her face was long and slender, and she kept her lips closed over rather strong teeth. Her skin had the kind of transparency that shows a hint of color and warmth upon any provocation. Her hair was a light reddish-brown, and she wore it piled in thick tresses upon her head. But it was her eyes that caught and held him, as they had done the day before. They were very large and of the palest blue that he could imagine. When he looked at them he seemed drawn out of himself, into a mystery that he could not apprehend. He thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he said impulsively, "I—I want to know about you." She drew back from him a little. He said hastily, "I mean—yesterday, at the reception, we didn't really have a chance to talk. I wanted to talk to you, but there were so many people. People sometimes get in your way."

"It was a very nice reception," Edith said faintly. "I thought everyone was very nice."

"Oh, yes, of course," Stoner said. "I meant . . ." He did not go on. Edith was silent.

He said, "I understand you and your aunt will be going to Europe in a little while."

"Yes," she said.

"Europe . . ." He shook his head. "You must be very excited."

She nodded reluctantly.

"Where will you go? I mean—what places?"

"England," she said. "France. Italy."

"And you'll be going—in the spring?"

"April," she said.

"Five months," he said. "It isn't very long. I hope that in that time we can—"

"I'm only here for three more weeks," she said quickly. "Then I go back to St. Louis. For Christmas."

"That is a short time." He smiled and said awkwardly, "Then I'll have to see you as often as I can, so that we can get to know each other."

She looked at him almost with horror. "I didn't mean that," she said. "Please . . ."

Stoner was silent for a moment. "I'm sorry, I— But I do want to call on you