The Novels of John Williams by Joe

The American literary scene of the 1960s was awash with big personalities writing books full of big ideas. Clearly, there was something in the water that led to an almost unrivalled spirit of creativity and experimentalism resulting in the production of novels that are, to this day, some of the most influential and pertinent stories in the public consciousness. Authors like Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut broke new ground in their writing, often crafting books that were maximalist and presented a highly ambitious array of characters and themes. Seen through this lens, the subtle writing of John Williams feels like something of an enigma.

Williams penned four novels in his lifetime: Nothing but the Night (1948), Butcher’s Crossing (1960), Stoner (1965) and Augustus (1972). It has been said that Williams distanced himself from Nothing but the Night, and while I could not find any evidence of Williams stating this himself, it seems to have been confirmed by his widow Nancy in a 2019 interview she gave to the Paris Review. The novel was republished by New York Review of Books— also in 2019 – and has found moderate success in recent times, although it is talked about as a fascinating insight into the mind of a writer who was yet to hone their craft, rather than a masterwork in itself.

This leads us on to the three works of fiction that have come to define John Williams as an essential figure amongst the literary canon of twentieth century America. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Williams was primarily concerned with the interrogating the emotions of a single character and exploring their internal conflicts, ambitions, self-worth and desires. A John Williams novel is certainly not plotless, but there is a feeling that the plot is deployed as a tool to allow Williams to investigate the deepest recesses of his protagonist’s psyche. This has led to Williams being described by many as a writer of ‘quiet’ stories, a term which accurately describes the overall atmosphere of his work but also fails to capture the emotional impact of his writing.

On the surface, Butcher’s Crossing, Stoner and Augustus appear to have very little in common. Butcher’s Crossing is an ‘anti-Western’ set in the American Midwest of the 1870s, Stoner is a ‘campus novel’ based within the University of Missouri during the first half of the twentieth century, and Augustus concerns the man at the heart of the birth of the Roman Empire. Yet the three novels share a philosophy that binds them together. The subject matters may be opposing, however the guiding principles are deeply intertwined. At the core of each text is an attempt to infiltrate the mind of a man, namely Will Andrews in Butcher’s Crossing, William Stoner in Stoner and Gaius Octavius (who went on to become Caesar Augustus, first Emperor of Rome) in Augustus, to try to understand exactly what guided them on their journey through life.

Butcher’s Crossing

The protagonist of Butcher’s Crossing, Will Andrews, is a lost soul who drops out of Harvard and heads into the wilderness with the intention of finding adventure and purpose in his existence. He joins a hunting expedition in search of a herd of buffalo, led by the experienced huntsman Miller, and Will is emersed into a new world of brutal landscapes, brutal people, and is forced to grapple with the brutal reality that his starry-eyed vision of a self-fulfilling life might not be all that he imagined it would be:

The reality of their journey lay in the routine detail of bedding down at night, arising in the morning, drinking black coffee from hot tin cups, packing bedrolls upon gradually wearying horses, the monotonous and numbing movement over the prairie that never changed its aspect, the watering of the horses and oxen at noon, the eating of hard biscuit and dried fruit, the resumption of the journey, the fumbling setting up of camp in the darkness, the tasteless quantities of beans and bacon gulped savagely in the flickering darkness, the coffee again, and the bedding down. This came to be a ritual, more and more meaningless as it was repeated, but a ritual which nevertheless gave his life the only shape it now had. It seemed to him that he moved forward laboriously, inch by inch, over the space of the vast prairie; but it seemed that he did not move through time at all, that rather time moved with him, an invisible cloud that hovered about him and clung to him as he went forward.

Will is forced to quickly acclimatise to the savagery of frontier life. Exposure to the elements, the repetition of the daily routine and the systematic and cruel nature of the hunt cause Will to go through something of a metamorphosis, as he rapidly becomes desensitised to the repressive nature of his new existence and the drudgery that comes with it. Yet the leader of the expedition, Miller, represents a level of ruthlessness that even Will is unable to fathom. Miller is a man who knows nothing other than the hunt. Unlike Will, his animalistic fight to survive is intrinsic and deep-rooted, and as the journey progresses, the reader bears witness to Miller’s descent into a madness akin to that of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It is the juxtaposition between the characters of Will and Miller that allows Williams to really explore Will’s psyche, his motivations and his emotions. A surface level skim of the blurb might lead the unassuming reader to interpret the book as a story that has all the tropes of a classical tale of the American frontier, but this is not a novel that aims to glorify the lifestyle.

Stoner

Of Williams’s protagonists, William Stoner is probably the character who requires least of an introduction, yet the titular character of the novel now considered to be Williams’s magnum opus was not always so well-known. Upon its publication in 1965, Stoner originally sold just 2,000 copies and it was the republication of the work in 2006 that finally gave Williams the fame, albeit posthumously, that he deserves. Stoner is a story of an unremarkable man’s reticence as his unremarkable life passes him by. Frankly, this is a plot that is likely to sound unappealing to most people. And yet there is something about the novel – a feeling of melancholy that gets under your skin and refuses to leave – that feels truly remarkable.

William Stoner discovers a love of literature at a young age and chooses to dedicate his life to academia to share his passion with his students. He marries, has a daughter, and lives a life that may appear normal, even idyllic, to outside observers. Yet there is hardly a moment within the story where Stoner feels true happiness. Instead, his life is a myriad of different disappointments which he experiences in an almost detached manner, often leaving Stoner feeling like a passenger in his own life’s story. He gets in to teaching to spread the joy of reading, but is soon ground down by the realities of academia, the indifference of his students and, above all, his inability to captivate his students in a way that does justice to the works he discusses:

Those things that he held most deeply were most profoundly betrayed when he spoke of them to his classes; what was most alive withered in his words; and what moved him most became cold in its utterance. And the consciousness of his inadequacy distressed him so greatly that the sense of it grew habitual, as much a part of him as the stoop of his shoulders.

I had not previously come across a literary character like William Stoner. He exhibits a passivity and stoicism that feels almost alien, particularly when contrasted with the vibrant and distinct protagonists of John Williams’s American contemporaries. He is passionate, but this passion fails to translate into any real sense of joy or fulfilment. He observes, yearns, philosophises and survives, but ultimately exists within his own bubble of melancholy. And despite all of this, there is a humanity to Stoner that is so visceral that it demands the reader’s sympathy. We might not understand why Stoner acts the way he does throughout the book, but we can understand the rawness of his emotions and the building feeling that his life is slipping away from him. There can be beauty in sadness, and John Williams clearly understood this sentiment deeply when writing Stoner.

Augustus

John Williams’s final completed novel, Augustus, sees the author turn to the epistolary form to tell the life story of Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Williams makes the fascinating and effective decision to dedicate the majority of the novel’s page count to fictionalised letters and diary entries penned by a cast of colourful characters – Marcus Agrippa, Marcus Antonius, Ovid, Julia the Elder, Horace, Cleopatra and Livy to name but a few – but notably we do not hear from Augustus directly until the final portion of the book. Just like in Butcher’s Crossing and in Stoner, Williams is primarily concerned with interrogating the psyche of his protagonist, but this time he executes this mission through the eyes of Augustus’s closest confidants and most powerful adversaries, rather than through the eyes of the man himself. The duality of Augustus’s experience – the reverence and admiration he received, the paranoia and angst that plagued his existence – is brought to life through the words of the people within his social circle and the people obsessed with bringing on his downfall.

Williams’s decision to write a book about Caesar Augustus was inspired. Often placed alongside the greatest political leaders in world history, Augustus was a complex and conflicted figure who, although his life was widely documented by the writers and historians of his day, has plenty of gaps in his story that could be filled by Williams’s imagination. The reader feels a sense of catharsis when, near the end of the book, Augustus is finally given an opportunity to represent himself in his own words. Knowing that he is nearing the end of his life, he writes to his good friend Nicolaus of Damascus, ruminating on his leadership, relationships and legacy. This letter, which would be considered personal under any circumstance, is given a heightened sense of profundity because it finally gives Augustus the chance to represent himself:

I have come to believe that in the life of every man, late or soon, there is a moment when he knows beyond whatever else he might understand, and whether he can articulate the knowledge or not, the terrifying fact that he is alone, and separate, and that he can be no other than the poor thing that is himself.

Final thoughts

John Williams died in 1994, and did not get to experience the acclaim that his works have gone on to earn. Stoner, in particular, has taken on a life of its own, especially in Europe following its translation into French in 2011 by Anna Gavalda. Williams is now rightly remembered as a master of the character study, an author who sculpted protagonists who truly demand empathy from the reader. While his contemporaries were often concerned with the bold new ideas of the time, Williams remained focused on subtlety and nuance, inviting the reader to feel the same sensations as his characters. To read a John Williams novel is to step into the shoes of another, to experience their mind and to leave with a greater appreciation of what it truly means to be human.