Stoner

by John Williams

  Stoner felt lifted from him a burden of regret and worry that he had not known he carried; the relief was almost physical, and he felt light on his feet and a little giddy. He laughed.

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course that’s true.”

  The smile eased itself off her face, and she looked at him gravely for a moment more. Then she bobbed her head, turned away from him, and walked swiftly down the hall. Her body was slim and straight, and she carried herself unobtrusively. Stoner stood looking down the hall for several moments after she disappeared. Then he sighed and went back into the room where Walker waited.

  Walker had not moved from the desk. He gazed at Stoner and smiled, upon his face an odd mixture of obsequiousness and arrogance. Stoner sat in the chair he had vacated a few minutes before and looked curiously at Walker.

  “Yes, sir?” Walker said.

  “Do you have an explanation?” Stoner asked quietly.

  A look of hurt surprise came upon Walker’s round face. “What do you mean, sir?”

  “Mr. Walker, please,” Stoner said wearily. “It has been a long day, and we’re both tired. Do you have an explanation for your performance this afternoon?”

  “I’m sure, sir, I intended no offense.” He removed his glasses and polished them rapidly; again Stoner was struck by the naked vulnerability of his face. “I said my remarks were not intended personally. If feelings have been hurt, I shall be most happy to explain to the young lady—”

  “Mr. Walker,” Stoner said. “You know that isn’t the point.”

  “Has the young lady been complaining to you?” Walker asked. His fingers were trembling as he put his glasses back on. With them on, his face managed a frown of anger. “Really, sir, the complaints of a student whose feelings have been hurt should not—”

  “Mr. Walker!” Stoner heard his voice go a little out of control. He took a deep breath. “This has nothing to do with the young lady, or with myself, or with anything except your performance. And I still await any explanation you have to offer.”

  “Then I’m afraid I don’t understand at all, sir. Unless ...”

  “Unless what, Mr. Walker?”

  “Unless it is simply a matter of disagreement,” Walker said. “I realize that my ideas do not coincide with yours, but I have always thought that disagreement was healthy. I assumed that you were big enough to—”

  “I will not allow you to evade the issue,” Stoner said. His voice was cold and level. “Now. What was the seminar topic assigned to you?”

  “You’re angry,” Walker said.

  “Yes, I am angry. What was the seminar topic assigned to you?”

  Walker became stiffly formal and polite. “My topic was ‘Hellenism and the Medieval Latin Tradition,’ sir.”

  “And when did you complete that paper, Mr. Walker?”

  “Two days ago. As I told you, it was nearly complete a couple of weeks ago, but a book I had to get through inter-library loan didn’t come in until—”

  “Mr. Walker, if your paper was nearly finished two weeks ago, how could you have based it, in its entirety, upon Miss Driscoll’s report, which was given only last week?”

  “I made a number of changes, sir, at the last minute.” His voice became heavy with irony. “I assumed that that was permissible. And I did depart from the text now and then. I noticed that other students did the same, and I thought the privilege would be allowed me also.”

  Stoner fought down a near-hysterical impulse to laugh. “Mr. Walker, will you explain to me what your attack on Miss Driscoll’s paper has to do with the survival of Hellenism in the medieval Latin tradition?”

  “I approached my subject indirectly, sir,” Walker said. “I thought we were allowed a certain latitude in developing our concepts.”

  Stoner was silent for a moment. Then he said wearily, “Mr. Walker, I dislike having to flunk a graduate student. Especially I dislike having to flunk one who simply has got in over his head.”

  “Sir!” Walker said indignantly.

  “But you’re making it very difficult for me not to. Now, it seems to me that there are only a few alternatives. I can give you an incomplete in the course, with the understanding that you will do a satisfactory paper on the assigned topic within the next three weeks.”

  “But, sir,” Walker said. “I have already done my paper. If I agree to do another one I will be admitting—I will admit—”

  “All right,” Stoner said. “Then if you will give me the manuscript from which you—deviated this afternoon, I shall see if something can be salvaged.”

  “Sir,” Walker cried. “I would hesitate to let it out of my possession just now. The draft is very rough.”

  With a grim and restless shame, Stoner continued, “That’s all right. I shall be able to find out what I want to know.”

  Walker looked at him craftily. “Tell me, sir, have you asked anyone else to hand his manuscript in to you?”

  “I have not,” Stoner said.

  “Then,” Walker said triumphantly, almost happily, “I must refuse also to hand my manuscript in to you on principle. Unless you require everyone else to hand theirs in.”

  Stoner looked at him steadily for a moment. “Very well, Mr. Walker. You have made your decision. That will be all.”

  Walker said, “What am I to understand then, sir? What may I expect from this course?”

  Stoner laughed shortly. “Mr. Walker, you amaze me. You will, of course, receive an F.”

  Walker tried to make his round face long. With the patient bitterness of a martyr he said, “I see. Very well, sir. One must be prepared to suffer for one’s beliefs.”

  “And for one’s laziness and dishonesty and ignorance,” Stoner said. “Mr. Walker, it seems almost superfluous to say this, but I would most strongly advise you to re-examine your position here. I seriously question whether you have a place in a graduate program.”

  For the first time Walker’s emotion appeared genuine; his anger gave him something that was close to dignity. “Mr. Stoner, you’re going too far! You can’t mean that.”

  “I most certainly mean it,” Stoner said.

  For a moment Walker was quiet; he looked thoughtfully at Stoner. Then he said, “I was willing to accept the grade you gave me. But you must realize that I cannot accept this. You are questioning my competence!”

  “Yes, Mr. Walker,” Stoner said wearily. He raised himself from the chair. “Now, if you will excuse me ...” He started for the door.

  But the sound of his shouted name halted him. He turned. Walker’s face was a deep red; the skin was puffed so that the eyes behind their thick glasses were like tiny dots. “Mr. Stoner!” he shouted again. “You have not heard the last of this. Believe me, you have not heard the last of this!”

  Stoner looked at him dully, incuriously. He nodded distractedly, turned, and went out into the hall. His feet were heavy, and they dragged on the bare cement floor. He was drained of feeling, and he felt very old and tired.

  X

  And he had not heard the last of it.

  He turned his grades in on the Monday following the Friday closing of the semester. It was the part of teaching he most disliked, and he always got it out of the way as soon as he could. He gave Walker his F and thought no more about the matter. He spent most of the week between semesters reading the first drafts of two theses due for final presentation in the spring. They were awkwardly done, and they needed much of his attention. The Walker incident was crowded from his mind.

  But two weeks after the second semester started he was again reminded of it. He found one morning in his mailbox a note from Gordon Finch asking him to drop by the office at his convenience for a chat.

  The friendship between Gordon Finch and William Stoner had reached a point that all such relationships, carried on long enough, come to; it was casual, deep, and so guardedly intimate that it was almost impersonal. They seldom saw each other socially, although occasionally Caroline Finch made a perfunctory call on Edith. While the
y talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time.

  In his early middle age Finch had the erect soft bearing of one who tries vigorously to keep his weight under control; his face was heavy and as yet unlined, though his jowls were beginning to sag and the flesh was gathering in rolls on the back of his neck. His hair was very thin, and he had begun to comb it so that the baldness would not be readily apparent.

  On the afternoon that Stoner stopped by his office, they spoke for a few moments casually about their families; Finch maintained the easy convention of pretending that Stoner’s marriage was a normal one, and Stoner professed his conventional disbelief that Gordon and Caroline could be the parents of two children, the younger of which was already in kindergarten.

  After they had made their automatic gestures toward their casual intimacy, Finch looked out his window distractedly and said, “Now, what was it I wanted to talk to you about? Oh, yes. The dean of the Graduate College—he thought, since we were friends, I ought to mention it to you. Nothing of any importance.” He looked at a note on his memo book. “Just an irate graduate student who thinks he got screwed in one of your classes last semester.”

  “Walker,” Stoner said. “Charles Walker.”

  Finch nodded. “That’s the one. What’s the story on him?”

  Stoner shrugged. “As far as I could tell, he didn’t do any of the reading assigned—it was my seminar in the Latin Tradition. He tried to fake his seminar report, and when I gave him the chance either to do another one or produce a copy of his paper, he refused. I had no alternative but to flunk him.”

  Finch nodded again. “I figured it was something like that. God knows, I wish they wouldn’t waste my time with stuff like this; but it has to be checked out, as much for your protection as anything else.”

  Stoner asked, “Is there some—special difficulty here?”

  “No, no,” Finch said. “Not at all. Just a complaint. You know how these things go. As a matter of fact, Walker received a C in the first course he took here as a graduate student; he could be kicked out of the program right now if we wanted to do it. But I think we’ve about decided to let him take his preliminary orals next month, and let that tell the story. I’m sorry I even had to bother you about it.”

  They talked for a few moments about other things. Then, just as Stoner was about to leave, Finch detained him casually.

  “Oh, there was something else I wanted to mention to you. The president and the board have finally decided that something’s going to have to be done about Claremont. So I guess, beginning next year, I’ll be dean of Arts and Sciences—officially.”

  “I’m glad, Gordon,” Stoner said. “It’s about time.”

  “So that means we’re going to have to get a new chairman of the department. Do you have any thoughts on it?”

  “No,” Stoner said, “I really haven’t thought of it at all.”

  “We can either go outside the department and bring in somebody new, or we can make one of the present men chairman. What I’m trying to find out is, if we did choose someone from the department—Well, do you have your eyes on the job?”

  Stoner thought for a moment. “I hadn’t thought about it, but—no. No, I don’t think I’d want it.”

  Finch’s relief was so obvious that Stoner smiled. “Good. I didn’t think you would. It means a lot of horse-shit. Entertaining and socializing and—” He looked away from Stoner. “I know you don’t go in for that sort of thing. But since old Sloane died, and since Huggins and what’s-his-name, Cooper, retired last year, you’re the senior member of the department. But if you haven’t been casting covetous eyes, then—”

  “No,” Stoner said definitely. “I’d probably be a rotten chairman. I neither expect nor want the appointment.”

  “Good,” Finch said. “Good. That simplifies things a great deal.”

  They said their good-bys, and Stoner did not think of the conversation again for some time.

  Charles Walker’s preliminary oral comprehensives were scheduled for the middle of March; somewhat to Stoner’s surprise, he received a note from Finch informing him that he would be a member of the three-man committee who would examine him. He reminded Finch that he had flunked Walker, that Walker had taken the flunk personally, and he asked to be relieved of this particular duty.

  “Regulations,” Finch answered with a sigh. “You know how it is. The committee is made up of the candidate’s adviser, one professor who has had him in a graduate seminar, and one outside his field of specialization. Lomax is the adviser, you’re the only one he’s had a graduate seminar from, and I’ve picked the new man, Jim Holland, for the one outside his specialty. Dean Rutherford of the Graduate College and I will be sitting in ex-officio. I’ll try to make it as painless as possible.”

  But it was an ordeal that could not be made painless. Though Stoner wished to ask as few questions as possible, the rules that governed the preliminary oral were inflexible; each professor was allowed forty-five minutes to ask the candidate any questions that he wished, though other professors habitually joined in.

  On the afternoon set for the examination Stoner came deliberately late to the seminar room on the third floor of Jesse Hall. Walker was seated at the end of a long, highly polished table; the four examiners already present—Finch, Lomax, the new man, Holland, and Henry Rutherford—were ranged down the table from him. Stoner slipped in the door and took a chair at the end of the table opposite Walker. Finch and Holland nodded to him; Lomax, slumped in his chair, stared straight ahead, tapping his long white fingers on the mirrorlike surface of the table. Walker stared down the length of the table, his head held stiff and high in cold disdain.

  Rutherford cleared his throat. “Ah, Mr.”—he consulted a sheet of paper in front of him—”Mr. Stoner.” Rutherford was a slight thin gray man with round shoulders; his eyes and brows dropped at the outer corners, so that his expression was always one of gentle hopelessness. Though he had known Stoner for many years, he never remembered his name. He cleared his throat again. “We were just about to begin.”

  Stoner nodded, rested his forearms on the table, clasped his fingers, and contemplated them as Rutherford’s voice droned through the formal preliminaries of the oral examination.

  Mr. Walker was being examined (Rutherford’s voice dropped to a steady, uninflected hum) to determine his ability to continue in the doctoral program in the Department of English at the University of Missouri. This was an examination which all doctoral candidates underwent, and it was designed not only to judge the candidate’s general fitness, but also to determine strengths and weaknesses, so that his future course of study could be profitably guided. Three results were possible: a pass, a conditional pass, and a failure. Rutherford described the terms of these eventualities, and without looking up performed the ritualistic introduction of the examiners and the candidate. Then he pushed the sheet of paper away from him and looked hopelessly at those around him.

  “The custom is,” he said softly, “for the candidate’s thesis adviser to begin the questioning. Mr.”—he glanced at the paper—”Mr. Lomax is, I believe, Wr. Walker’s adviser. So ...”

  Lomax’s head jerked back as if he had been suddenly awakened from a doze. He glanced around the table, blinking, a little smile on his lips; but his eyes were shrewd and alert.

  “Mr. Walker, you are planning a dissertation on Shelley and the Hellenistic Ideal. It is unlikely that you have thought through your subject yet, but would you begin by giving us some of the background, your reason for choosing it, and so forth.”

  Walker nodded and began swiftly to speak. “I intend to trace Shelley’s first rejection of Godwinian necessitarianism for a more or less Platonic ideal, in the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,’ through the mature use of that ideal, in Prometheus Unbound, as a comprehensive synthesis of his earlier atheism, radicalism, Christianity, and scientific necessitarianism, and ultimately to account for the decay of the ideal i
n such a late work as Hellas. It is to my mind an important topic for three reasons: First, it shows the quality of Shelley’s mind, and hence leads us into a better understanding of his poetry. Second, it demonstrates the leading philosophical and literary conflicts of the early nineteenth century, and hence enlarges our understanding and appreciation of Romantic poetry. And third, it is a subject that might have a peculiar relevance to our own time, a time in which we face many of the same conflicts that confronted Shelley and his contemporaries.”

  Stoner listened, and as he listened his astonishment grew. He could not believe that this was the same man who had taken his seminar, whom he thought he knew. Walker’s presentation was lucid, forthright, and intelligent; at times it was almost brilliant. Lomax was right; if the dissertation fulfilled its promise, it would be brilliant. Hope, warm and exhilarating, rushed upon him, and he leaned forward attentively.

  Walker talked upon the subject of his dissertation for perhaps ten minutes and then abruptly stopped. Quickly Lomax asked another question, and Walker responded at once. Gordon Finch caught Stoner’s eye and gave him a look of mild inquiry; Stoner smiled slightly, self-deprecatingly, and gave a small shrug of his shoulders.

  When Walker stopped again, Jim Holland spoke immediately. He was a thin young man, intense and pale, with slightly protuberant blue eyes; he spoke with a deliberate slowness, with a voice that seemed always to tremble before a forced restraint. “Mr. Walker, you mentioned a bit earlier Godwin’s necessitarianism. I wonder if you could make a connection between that and the phenomenalism of John Locke?” Stoner remembered that Holland was an eighteenth-century man.

  There was a moment of silence. Walker turned to Holland, removed the round glasses, and polished them; his eyes blinked and stared, at random. He put them back on and blinked again. “Would you repeat the question, please.”

  Holland started to speak, but Lomax interrupted. “Jim,” he said affably, “do you mind if I extend the question a bit?” He turned quickly to Walker before Holland could answer. “Mr. Walker, proceeding from the implications of Professor Holland’s question—namely, that Godwin accepted Locke’s theory of the sensational nature of knowledge—the tabula rasa, and all that—and that Godwin believed with Locke that judgment and knowledge falsified by the accidents of passion and the inevitability of ignorance could be rectified by education—given these implications, would you comment on Shelley’s principle of knowledge—specifically, the principle of beauty—enunciated in the final stanzas of ‘Adonais’?”