Nothing but the Night

by John Williams

  Down the steps they jogged in short, rhythmic cadences, their bodies moving together, feet in unison. In the vastness of the long hall, in the troubled silence, their footsteps were inordinately loud and brutal. Somehow, and he could find no reason why, it seemed to him that they should make no sound, that it was in some obscure way unfitting, sacrilegious even, for the sounds of their movement to be so unflinchingly and brazenly evident. It seemed to him that they should tiptoe down, ever so gently, in mute obeisance to the ancient impending ritual.

  The darkness did not catch and hold him in its usual net of magic. No dull calm settled upon him. On the contrary, his awareness was intensified, his perception magnified. The dull slap of his captor’s untied shoe laces on the leather of his slippers became the lashes of a thonged whip beating against the skin of a recalcitrant slave: the slow squeaks of the soles were pain-filled protesting cries of anguish. The man’s heavy breathing, insistent and warm against the back of his neck, was like the ominous prelude to a terrible storm, a wind soughing and whistling threateningly through the bleak white boulders of a trackless waste.

  They reached the door at the bottom of the stairs and went outside. The street light on the corner was a dirty smudge against the blue purity of the night. It thrust its tentative fingers up the blurred length of the street and half-illumined, half-shadowed the pale heavy face of the man beside him. The man glared hastily up and down the street, turned and faced him squarely. A loose, importunate smile hung on his thick lips, and he breathed heavily. His voice was gentle, still almost kindly, yet edged with some obscene insistence.

  ‘You shouldn’t ought to have done that, sonny. It’s not nice to come into ladies’ rooms and knock hell out of them. You know that?’

  He did not move.

  The man’s voice became gentler, more persuasive. ‘You know what’s going to happen, don’t you?’

  Gathering his strength, he nodded.

  The large man licked his lips. He said softly, almost affectionately, ‘Take off your glasses, sonny.’

  He tried to lift his arms, tried desperately, but his hands were leaden weights that hung at his sides and would not move. Dully, he shook his head again, trying to transmit wordlessly to the other man the utter unreasonableness of his demand.

  Then suddenly the pale stubbled face in front of him contorted and became something hideous and unspeakable. The lips worked soundlessly, and little flecks of saliva dribbled from the corners of his mouth.

  He saw the huge ham-like fist contract, saw the muscles bulge up from the wrist until the whole arm was like a marble pillar, carved roughly, hurriedly by an unskilled sculptor. It all seemed to happen very slowly. First the man’s shoulder hunched toward him slightly, then drew back; and with that motion, the fist lifted up and the fist and arm followed the body’s backward movement. He shifted again, leaned forward on the balls of his feet, and the huge fist came toward him leisurely, growing larger and larger in its flight.

  Then something exploded in his face. He felt the socking, painless crush of flesh and bone. He toppled backward, hit the sidewalk with a peculiarly resilient bounce, rolled over once and lay still. He lifted himself on one elbow. With the other hand, he rubbed the numb salty area that was his mouth. His glasses hung at a crazy angle across his nose. He adjusted them and struggled to his feet.

  The man hit him again with a jolt which snapped his head backward and to the side. He felt a hot gust of blood spurt down over his mouth and chin. He stumbled and fell, rolled over, tried to lift himself up. His hand slipped off the curb and the sidewalk into the slime of the gutter. He raised himself to his knees and remained there, kneeling for a moment, ineffectually trying to wipe off the filth of his hand on his trouser leg. When he finally got to his feet, the face that loomed exorably above him was only a pale blur against the yellowed darkness. He lifted his clean hand up to his eyes and discovered that his glasses were gone. He walked toward the man, waving his hands before his face, burbling inarticulate words through broken lips, trying to make him understand that he could not see.

  He heard a wild sound of laughter; then he felt his head go soft and boneless from a sudden, inhumanly powerful blow, and he drifted up and back upon the air, unfeeling and unaware, until he hit the now unyielding surface of the sidewalk. He tried to lift himself again, but his hand and his arm went limp beneath him, slipped, and he lay inert and immobile on the hard concrete.

  After a while, when a little of his strength returned, he painfully elevated himself to a sitting position, and he peered about him owlishly. The large man was nowhere to be seen.

  He lifted curious hands and explored the raw open wounds of his face. Then he got on his hands and knees. For a few moments he scrabbled over the sidewalk, looking for his glasses. He did not find them.

  He pushed himself up, swayed dizzily for a moment, then regained his balance. Unsteadily he began to walk down the long narrow street toward where the darkness converged and there was no light, where the night pressed in upon him, where nothing waited for him, where he was, at last, alone.

  JUNGLE OF THE SOUL

  John Williams, a Portrait

  An Interview with Nancy Gardner Williams

  Much of my life has been lived in such secrecy. It has never been politic for me to let another know my heart.

  —JOHN WILLIAMS, Augustus

  Nancy Gardner Williams, John Williams’s widow, lives in a small bungalow in Pueblo, Colorado, close to the desert. This town near the Rocky Mountains was once known for its steel industry. Nancy, a tall woman who holds herself straight, is attentive and observant, friendly yet somewhat reserved. She is not decisively talkative, but you realize immediately that she must have been on equal terms with her husband. “No bluster, no fashion, no pomp,” as Dan Wakefield once remarked about John Williams. That seems to be true for her as well. Nancy studied English literature at the University of Denver; her lecturer was John Williams.

  Patricia Reimann: Ms. Williams, you met John in Denver in 1959. He was your professor, what was he like?

  Nancy Williams: He always wore an ascot and was always smoking cigarettes, even while he was lecturing, I don’t think he ever came to teach not wearing his ascot. And he was a good teacher. He fancied his stuff neat and had a neat and tidy demeanor.

  PR: He came from a rather poor background ...

  NW: Yes, they were poor. His mother loved to read true romance magazines. When he was twelve years old, he got a little job at the bookstore in town, and the guy in the bookstore took an interest in him. Sometimes John would find his mother crying, but those were tough times, my God . . . it is hard to imagine, the pressure and worry to make enough money to have food on the table. They farmed, so they did have food. John once showed me the farm . . . it was very small, a small building, small acreage.

  PR: How did he manage to go to university?

  NW: He would not have had any chance to go to study, there was no money. But anybody who had served in the armed forces in the Second World War could go to school. The government would pay for it. Lucky for him, I mean, it was just wonderful.

  PR: The first book to bring him recognition as a writer was Butcher’s Crossing. The settings of his novels vary, also the genres, however Butcher’s Crossing seems to be very far from the reality of a young professor, as he was at that time. Do you know what made him choose this Western genre?

  NW: Well, he lived in the West. And all of that mountainous terrain and the rivers and so forth were just around to him. When he was writing Butcher’s Crossing, he would just go and camp out in the forests, in the mountains. I think, he found, he did not quite agree with Emerson, who is talking about how nature is benign . . . I don’t believe that Butcher’s Crossing is autobiographical, but there is a lot of his experience in there. The killing that goes on and on.

  PR: An analogy to the war?

  NW: Yes. I think so.

  PR: What did he do during the war?

  NW: He had a big voice. And when he
was in high school he got a job as a radio announcer. Then he took some further radio training, so when he enlisted in the Army Air Force, they immediately sent him for more training, and he became a radio operator on a C-45, a trip and surveillance plane. So that’s what he did during the war. In China, Burma, and India. He was shot down. The plane was flying very low and zipped along the top of the trees and finally gravity brought it all the way down. And John found himself outside the plane, sitting, he didn’t know whether he had taken himself out or been thrown out of the plane, but he and the two other men who had been in the front of the plane survived and the five men in the back died. And that fact haunted him all his life. How come I lived and they died? When I first knew him he had nightmares, he had recurrences of malaria, and that was fifteen years after the war. The nightmares subsided with time but he still had occasional ones, it never went away, two and a half years of killing, killing, and killing. It never went away.

  PR: In the first novel, Nothing but the Night, a son, alienated from his father and traumatized by some early-childhood experience, is in the center of the story. I was completely taken by it, it is a book which hits you with its urge to write and the talent. You feel the energy, the power of a person who went through fire. It amazed me and then I realized that he wrote the novel during his wartime in Burma when he was only twenty-two.

  NW: Yes.

  PR: Why did he distance himself from it?

  NW: I don’t know. I wish I had reread it before you came, so I would be up on it. Well, he worked on it while he was recovering from the plane crash. According to the rules he should have been sent home, but there was no way to do that. But he was relieved of duty, that was the policy, if you are injured, you don’t have any more duties. God knows where he got the paper, imagine, he was in a tent, he had a pet mongoose who came to visit a couple of times a day, there was a clearing in the jungle, several other tents, otherwise nothing, no movie, no radio, no library, literally nothing, he was there in the nothing, in a little clearing in the jungle, and he just wrote to keep himself from dying of boredom.

  When he felt well enough, when he had recovered, he volunteered to go . . . to take the ID tags off a downed pilot from a plane that had crashed. They knew the pilot was dead but if they had not gone in to get his ID tags, his family would never have known what happened to him. So he and two other guys went through the jungle, chopping their way in, quite an adventure of its own, but he needed something to do, so he wrote the novel and he went to take the guy’s dog tags.

  PR: Did he make you a partner in his writing?

  NW: No, except once when he came downstairs with the end of Augustus and I knew right away, I said, you have gone on too long, you need to stop sooner, but that was the only thing I ever told him about his writing.

  PR: And did he follow your advice?

  NW: Yes, he did.

  PR: Did he write every day?

  NW: Yes, when he could. But only during summers, otherwise he was teaching. He was an extremely methodical writer, he took great pains with his writing, and he outlined very carefully. Because he didn’t want to have to rewrite anything. He started very early in the morning, around seven thirty, eight o’clock, after some coffee perhaps. He wasn’t a breakfast eater. Then he would go upstairs to his studio and I didn’t see him again until lunchtime, except every once in a while I would see him out in the garden, he would be out with his vegetables, a farmer . . . he loved that garden, and I thought, oh well, he got stuck somewhere and needs to relax, and after a while he’ll go back up and write. Then he would come down for lunch— we often had lunch together—then maybe he would go to the university to get his mail or talk to somebody, and then, in the afternoon, he would go back upstairs for maybe two or three hours, planning the next day’s work. So when he went to work he knew what he wanted to accomplish.

  PR: In 1973 he got the National Book Award. He had to share it with John Barth, and he also had to share the money which was not much anyway, and yet he is known to have said, “I don’t care, I never expected to earn money with my writing.” Where did he take this attitude from? Allegedly he also once said that he didn’t care whether he had one thousand or one hundred thousand readers ...

  NW: He was nothing if not independent, and willful. He had a good way of living for the day. He didn’t have any anxiety about whether his work was accepted or not.

  PR: Did John have trust in mankind, in the power of reason?

  NW: It is not a question that would interest him, I think. He was just not interested in the abstract. He wanted to get down to cases. I am just thinking of his teaching twentieth-century poetry. . . he just loved the thing itself. He loved the poem, he probably loved the poet, too. But as far as turning it into some wonderful philosophical something, no, not at all. He was not interested in that.

  PR: And yet there is this underlying question, not only in Stoner: What is a good life?

  NW: God, yes. But a good life is immediate. A good life doesn’t exist in any philosophical round. A good life is you and me talking together.

  PR: He actually wrote his whole work, those three big novels between 1960 and 1972—in the era of the Cold War, of the Cuba crisis, the Vietnam War, the Black Panther movement. Did he feel that a writer has a political or a social function?

  NW: No. No, he had a personal one. He didn’t feel he carried direct political responsibility with his writing. Though it did come into his writing in Augustus, in the sense of recording or at least inventing a world that bears some relation to our world, to the real world, as he explores the question of war. It is the same in Stoner. But as far as any immediate responsibility is concerned, for example to go on television and say something—no, not at all.

  PR: There is a line in Augustus saying, it is so easy to be judgmental and so difficult to increase one’s knowledge.

  NW: It’s right out of John’s mouth, he would think being judgmental was the worst thing you could do . . .

  PR: That was in 1972, thirteen years later, in 1985, he retired from university. What happened to his writing after 1972?

  NW: He was not well. He was not well at all. After Augustus he didn’t have the energy. He started another novel, Sleep of Reason, God, it’s wonderful.

  PR: Talking about his not being well—are you referring to his lung disease? Or to his drinking?

  NW: Well, both.

  PR: Was there an event that triggered his alcoholism?

  NW: No, he grew up in Texas, drinking seemed a very grown-up and sophisticated thing to do. It started in high school. Drinking, drinking beer, he told me.

  PR: But at a certain point apparently his drinking got out of control?

  NW: It isn’t the word I would use, he was dependent, he drank every day. . . but he was pretty quiet about it. He would become less pleasant as the evening wore on, but there was never . . . he somehow always got up and managed to do what he had to do, every day, mainly teaching.

  PR: Did it affect his self-esteem?

  NW: No. He had a very healthy ego, nothing was going to interfere with his self-esteem. He had his demons. And I just let him have his beer. I had seen the nightmares and seen the sorrow from the war, I had seen the malaria, I had seen all of that, and I thought, no wonder he drinks.

  PR: In Stoner he speaks about the self as a jungle and of living in the self like in exile.

  NW: Well, that’s right, that’s all we have. We just have our selves. I think that would be pretty close to the way John thought about things. The self as a jungle. Something impenetrable, suffocating, hot, wild. He certainly knew the jungle . . . The mind is a jungle. It’s not a particular place, according to his experience.

  PR: Actually he wanted to choose a motto for Stoner, a line by Ortega y Gasset, in the end he didn’t use it, but the line was: “A hero is a man who wants to be himself.” What would that have meant for him personally?

  NW: That’s really central and getting right into it, isn’t it? Well, look how much is standing in
the way of our being ourselves. Our circumstances, in John’s case it was poverty. In this context John came as close to succeeding as anybody I have ever met. He did what he wanted to do. I mean, even though he couldn’t start writing until he was in his thirties, he damn well started. So he came as close as anyone I can imagine to becoming himself, and to be willing to make whatever sacrifice or to face whatever challenge. He just kept going.

  I think he wasn’t much interested in exploring himself, or maybe that’s what he did with his novels. I mean, he was not interested in talking about himself at all. He was witty and he was funny and always doing something, pickling his cucumbers, he was very active. The last thing he wanted was to have an earnest conversation.

  NW: Was he a man of contradictions?

  PR: No. I wouldn’t think so. He was all of a piece. He was all one, he wasn’t contradictory or contradicted about himself. It’s a big pleasure for me to talk about him, I can’t imagine that I’ve done him justice, he was a good man, good, good.

  PR: Nancy, thank you so very much for this conversation.