John Williams and the American canon
The New Yorker ran a Leo Rosten critique about the author of "Stoner", "Augustus", and "Butcher's Crossing" a couple of weeks ago. I love all three novels, so I read the article. Here's a link:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...ight-have-been
I'd never heard of Yvor Winters or his influence on criticism and art until reading the article, and I found it interesting. Here's a teaser about the different artistic schools (politically indecent by today's standards):
Quote:
When “Stoner” appeared, in April, 1965, the best-selling book in America was Saul Bellow’s “Herzog.” Published by the same press, Viking, it, too, concerned an assistant professor with a wife who doesn’t love him, a daughter whom he dotes on, a lover who is also his student, and an enemy with a limp. There’s a crucial difference. Herzog is a Romantic by allegiance—the author of a book on Romanticism, at work on a second—and by inclination. While Stoner does things “dispassionately” and “reasonably,” Herzog writes letters “endlessly” and “fanatically.” He is “foolish, feeling, suffering Herzog.” (Bellow’s later novel “Humboldt’s Gift” concerned the downfall of a confessional poet whom “even Yvor Winters had a good word to say for.”) “Herzog” sold a hundred and forty-two thousand copies in hardback; “Stoner,” fewer than two thousand. In lecture notes, Williams argued that most contemporary writing “encourages us to be merely ourselves, to think or feel merely as we have always done.” This may have explained why “Herzog” found the large audience that eluded “Stoner.”
There’s a more flattering way to explain Bellow’s success. In early novels like “The Victim,” Bellow had accepted what he called a “Flaubertian standard,” a desire to make his novel “letter-perfect,” but he soon found it too constricting. At first, when writing “The Adventures of Augie March,” he had gone too far in the other direction. With “Herzog,” he found a middle ground: he succeeded in being the author of “The Victim” and “The Adventures of Augie March,” of writing the city and the country and the ivory tower, of channelling the virtues of control and exuberance. Reviewing the novel a quarter century after diagnosing America’s literary bipolarity in “Paleface and Redskin,” Philip Rahv saluted its “masterful combination”—the demotic and literary, the astringent and poetic.
Apparently part of the controversy is Williams (and Winters) aversion to the notion that a writer must (for example) write crazily in order to depict a crazed character. Nonetheless, it seems to me that one of the beauties of "Stoner" is that the "mood" of the reserved, dispassionate, morally sound William Stoner is captured in the formal, dispassionate style of the novel. It works both ways.
