The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel by Charles J. Shields

Author:Charles J. Shields [Shields, Charles J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2018-11-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Stoner

And though I may seem to take something away from Stoner in the end at his death, I don’t really; I give him more than he has had before, and more than any of us ever gain—his own identity.

—JOHN WILLIAMS, 1966

News from his agent about A Matter of Light—renamed now A Matter of Love in an effort to give it a fresh start—was not encouraging. After a desultory period at the end of 1963 when a series of editors returned the manuscript to Marie Rodell, a response from Simon and Schuster in March confirmed what she had been warning Williams about from the beginning: the story of Professor Stoner was depressing. “Several others here have now read the manuscript,” she wrote him, “and we’re all in agreement that it is a book to be respected highly but that it has such a pale grey character that it would be most unlikely to earn its keep in hard covers and almost impossible to sell to a paperback house. . . . What a simpatico writer—yet what a problem he presents.”1

Falling down the ladder of large publishers, rung by rung, A Matter of Love passed through the hands of Pyke Johnson as well, editor of the contentious poetry anthology, who said, “I found it a very moving story, one that might have been told of several professors I met along the academic path, as well as people completely outside the Groves.” But ultimately, Johnson concluded, it wasn’t right for him.2

Until now, Williams had been campaigning for his work with zeal, trying to put the sunniest light even on rejections. To Rodell, he speculated that perhaps the book was destined for a more “literary house.” It might be slow to find a home, but “I still cannot convince myself that we are going to have an impossible time getting it placed. Whatever its ‘commercial’ possibilities, I believe finally that its quality will, if nothing else, shame someone into wanting to do it. I may be naïve; but I cannot help believing that somewhere, someone will feel compelled to publish a good novel.”3

He kept up the good front, but within days of A Matter of Love being characterized as having “a pale grey character” and being “impossible to sell,” he also received a dispiriting letter from the director of the University of Missouri Press, quoting an outside reader’s opinion of his poetry collection, The Shape of the Air. “The poems reflect his academic experience,” the reader had decided. “Most of the poems . . . lack the vitality which distinguishes the exciting poet from the hand of the craftsman, the passion of the poet is missing. . . . The imagery in the epigraphs is banal and the philosophical content, on which their merit might conceivably rest, is scarcely worthy of serious consideration.”4

Remarks of that sort seemed to be telling him that he was an academic trying to become something he was not. Signs pointed to the advisability of dropping anchor in the harbor of academia and forgetting about the high seas of literature altogether.

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