Ethics and Education

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Love and work: a reading of John Williams Stoner

Jeff Frank

To cite this article: Jeff Frank (2017) Love and work: a reading of John Williams Stoner, Ethics
and Education, 12:2, 233-242, DOI: 10.1080/17449642.2017.1316900

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Ethics and Education, 2017
VOL. 12, NO. 2, 233242
https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2017.1316900

Love and work: a reading of John Williams Stoner

Jeff Frank
Education Department Canton, St Lawrence University, NY, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article offers a close reading of the novel Stoner by John Philosophy of literature;
Williams. Stoner, and not the countless reports and jeremiads John Williams; Stoner; Philip
on teaching, helps us find what we are searching for: a way Jackson; teacher education
to live and talk about teaching in a dignified and artful
way. We need to seek out voices that remind, recall and reveal
teaching for the beautifully lovingly difficult work that it is.
We need more voices like the one Williams provides in Stoner
as we work at teaching, teacher education and educational
reform. When we think about educational policy related to
teaching, we must remember that philosophical readings of
literature have much to offer our thinking. My hope is that this
essay turns our attention back to Stoner while encouraging
us to see the potential that literature holds for how we think
about teaching. Though a more superficially uplifting book
may initially feel like the right book to keep teachers excited
to teach, I find that Stoner is the work that I keep returning
to as a check against demoralization and a reminder of what
living teaching means.

William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year of 1910, at
the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his
Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University,
where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the ranks of assistant
professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken
his courses Stoners colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was
alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that
awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense
of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.
(Williams 2003, 3, 4)
So begins John Williams Stoner; not only one of the best novels ever written, but
also a book that communicates and expresses the life of teaching in a way that
very few have. A teacher affecting eternity Stoner is not. But, a human who lives
teaching in a way that is somehow representatively interesting to all who care

CONTACT Jeff Frank jfrank@stlawu.edu

2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
234 J. FRANK

about the practice of living as a teacher; this is what Williams humbly, directly,
powerfully offers readers.
Some context. Stoner was originally published in 1965 to little notice. Although
Williams eventually wins (or more accurately co-shares) the National Book Award
in 1973 for his epistolary novel Augustus, Stoner stays neglected. In a recent appre-
ciation of the novel, Mel Livatino writes:
The most famous appraisal of the novel came from C. P. Snow upon the novels debut
in Great Britain in 1973. He wrote in the May 24 issue of the Financial Times, Very few
novels in English, or literary productions of any kind, have come anywhere near its level
for human wisdom or as a work of art. He then asked, Why isnt this novel famous? His
answer was that we live in a peculiarly silly age and that John Williams doesnt fit the
triviality of the day. (Livatino 2010, 422)
Like Snow, fellow writers and readers have expressed deep appreciatory praise for
the very existence of the novel, and yet still it remains a book that has not gen-
erated the attention it deserves.1 A main goal of this essay is to however modestly
bring this novel to a wider audience. In particular, I aim to bring this work to philos-
ophers of education because Stoner has a great deal to teach us about what living
teaching looks like. Perhaps of most importance, the novel can remind us what it
means to speak of teaching, teachers and what we value about the work that we do.
The novel can be summed up briefly. William Stoner grows up on a farm; all he
knows is labor. Then, a representative from a newly formed agricultural school at
the University approaches Stoners father and the family agrees that Stoner should
receive an education that may make life farming more manageable. Stoner attends
University diligently fulfilling his agricultural promise until he takes his first English
class. The class somehow forces Stoner in the most subtle deeply evocative way
to come to the realization that he cant help but study English. He changes majors
and never leaves the University. He becomes a professor, he marries the marriage
is unbearable to everyone has a child whom he loves deeply, but who is irrev-
ocable damaged given the toxic environment she knows, acknowledges and lives
through from birth2 decides to become a good teacher, has a short-lived affair,
feuds with a fellow professor over academic standards, publishes a minor book,
grows into a teacher he can assent to being, and eventually dies of cancer. As
the opening of the novel quoted above shows, there is nothing particularly notable
about Stoners life, and the novel stridently resists sentimentality, romanticism or
anything like melodrama. Stoner and Stoner represent something like modern
Stoicism, or the good life that doesnt appear to be anything like it when viewed
superficially or with haste. Livatino notes,
Most academic novels are farces and satires, comedies of academic manners, but Stoner
is not one of these: it is as heartfelt a probe into academic life and the vocation of scholar
and teacher as one is ever likely to read. (Livatino 2010, 419)
Another way to get at the style of the book and the man Stoner is to attend to some-
thing Williams writes in an introduction to his excellent anthology of Renaissance
poetry. Williams notes:
 ETHICS AND EDUCATION 235

if we read as if we were not mortals listening to another mortal the style may seem flat,
bare, almost lifeless. But if we listen to the poem, we shall hear beneath the emphatic
stresses, beneath the bare and essential speech, the human cadence of the human
voice, speaking to us as if we were alive. (Williams 2016, xxvii)
This quotation is interesting in that Williams doesnt say the expected: reading
poetry that is centuries old may surprise us in that it remains something live,
something that speaks to us. Williams, instead, inverts this notion; he assumes the
vitality of the poem, and questions whether or not we are alive. We cant assume
our humanity; humanity is an achievement. Sentimentality and a vague romanti-
cism, though seemingly charged with deep emotion, keep us lifeless. But the bare
essential voice of humanity even as it gives the appearance of being lifeless can
reach us, can wake us, can make us see what it would mean to live or be alive.
This is one of the reasons why Stoner is an important novel. Too often the prac-
tice of teaching is sentimentalized or satirized in fiction and film. The teacher at
the college or high school level is savior or out of touch and aloof; saintly or
lecherous; warm and interested or self-absorbed and absentminded. These pic-
tures hold the imagination captive, and lead us away from living teaching. The
pedagogical imagination needs to be expanded. It is important that we think
about what teaching might actually be; we cannot limit ourselves to idealized,
sentimentalized or simplistic pictures of the practice so many of us are deeply
committed to and troubled by, often at the same time. Exploring living teaching
remains important at the present moment especially because there are so many
forces outside of teaching clamoring to tell us what our work is or should be.
Politicians, policymakers and so-called educational entrepreneurs are ready to
remake teaching into whatever faddish limiting vision bounded imaginations are
beholden to. Generating much sound and fury, they signify nothing and distract us
from attending to teaching; worse, they can tie us to mythologies and distorting
lenses. Philip Jackson realized this presciently years ago. Writing in response to
the Holmes Report a prominent much-discussed report that sought to improve
the preparation of teachers Jackson notes:
What alternatives [to the limited visions of teaching expressed by the Holmes Report]
are available? They are legion. Nor need we turn to other human endeavors, like the
practice of law or the ministry, to find them. They lie within teaching itself. We uncover
them as we consider the actions of model teachers, living and dead. We learn of them
as we study the writings of those who have sought to penetrate the mysteries of the
educative process. We encounter them at firsthand, sometimes with a jolt, during those
moments when our own performance as teachers or as teachers-to-be engenders a kind
of self-awareness that was not there before. (Jackson 1987, 388)
Though this comes to us from almost thirty years ago, we have to see that Jackson
is speaking to us as if we were alive in the present age. Calls to make the educa-
tion of future teachers into the clinical preparation of doctors or the professional
initiation of lawyers remain with us and seem to be gaining renewed attention.3
As well, we are told that a handful of pedagogical moves can make almost anyone
teach like a champion (Lemov 2010). On and on we go, talking at teaching instead
236 J. FRANK

of attending to it. This is something Stoner deliberately and through exactingly

measured prose does not do; it resides and thinks with teaching, attempting to
plum depths and mark twains. As Jackson notes, this type of thinking with teaching
is tremendously important; our imaginations need to be expanded so that we can
find evocative and illuminative pictures. We dont need to wander far afield or seek
other fields for guidance when it comes to teaching. Instead, teaching needs to
be explored and expressed as it is and may become if we could trade illusions and
misperceptions for study [of ] the writings of those who have sought to penetrate
the mysteries of the educative process (Jackson 1987, 388).
This is what Williams does in Stoner. Stoner doesnt idealize teaching; the novel
reminds us what happens when we are transformed by education and try to live
as a teacher in gratitude and appreciation for the reality that education can
fundamentally change a human being. This is important, because transformative
educational experiences are easy to misunderstand and misleadingly describe.
Educational reformers often miss the mark just as those who would sentimentalize
and romanticize an experience that deserves a fitting non-clich expression.
Williams wants us to think about how it can happen that a young person like
William Stoner a young person who knows nothing but the work of farm life and
the desire to be a decent son can read poetry with a college professor [in this case,
professor Sloane] for one semester and realize that he cant decide but to dedicate
his life to study and teaching. Importantly for our understanding of Stoner the
Professor who leads to what can be described as Stoners transformative moment
is not a teacher who would fit the mold of the inspirational teacher; he is nothing
like the character Robin Williams plays in the film Dead Poets Society. If anything,
he can be described curmudgeonly. But he loves what literature can do and what
literature can be. Sloane doesnt see teaching in terms of the personality of the
teacher; he sees it in the ways in which a teacher can let students experience what
makes learning the unpredictably life-changing thing it can become. Teaching
and this is jumping ahead is not about the personality of the teacher in the
way it is commonly understood; teaching is about finding a way to embody for
students that transformation happens when a student experiences a love without
wanting to please a teacher or become someone who the admired teacher is or
appears to be; the transformation happens because of a shared experience with
a text, an idea or an author that will forever connect teacher and student in a way
that teaches how learning is not about personality, but about what it means to
aspire to become to use WEB Du Bois (2009) evocatively apt way of putting it
co-workers in the kingdom of culture. The teacher and student are co-workers, not
equals in certain ways (the teacher is often on the way in a manner the student is
not, for example), but equals in ways that matter. For example in the shared desire
to commit to the promise of learning something of value and importance. This
co-working is profound and deeply tied to what it means to teach. Again, there
may not be anything romantic or overtly inspirational about this picture, but it
has much to suggest itself to us, as I aim to demonstrate below.
 ETHICS AND EDUCATION 237

Again, this is getting a bit ahead of my discussion of the novel, so I want to

return to William Stoner as a child of farmers and introduce some of the things
Williams says about teaching in his few published interviews. Starting with farm-
ing, William Stoner cannot help but feel and live (or as Stanley Cavell would write,
acknowledge) the realization that work and life are intertwined.4 Everything of
value comes about because of work. Sometimes the work appears fruitless the
crops are ruined, the idea never materializes into manuscript but the fact of
work remains.5 The working, even if it leads to or appears to lead to nothing
of value, is life. Expecting rewards or recognition outside of this work, or failing to
see that one neednt wait for or chase inspiration, keeps us from doing the work
appointed to us. This is exactly what William Stoner does: he sets out to do the
work of teaching, not hoping for reward and not expecting to inspire; he does
the work of teaching because that is all that he can do given the love of literature
awakened in him through the work of Sloanes classroom. Williams makes this
point when asked about how he came to write Stoner. In one interview, he notes:
By that time I was fairly involved in the teaching profession and began to think about
what does it mean to be a teacher. It [Stoner] began like that, so it has nothing to do
really with that teacher [a teacher Williams had], but I started to realize that although
that man may not have been one of the great teachers of all time he had dedicated him-
self to something that I thought was extremely important and it didnt matter whether
he was a success or whatever, and I found some kind of heroism involved there, and
thats where it began. (Wakefield 1981, 20)
I think the point here is relatively clear. Williams writes Stoners character as a tes-
tament to the veiled heroism of work, or, as Williams notes in another interview,
finding teaching to be nothing more though nothing less than a job in the good
and honorable sense of the word (Woolley 1986, 21). What might be easy to lose
sight of in all of this talk of work and jobs is the sense of love and dedication that
stands behind it.6
It is not only the sense of committing to something and working at it that is
important; it is the sense of being in love and dedicating oneself to it regardless
of whether it leads to anything like what might be called a success. It is important
not to confound this love with love that is foolish, quixotic, sentimentalized or
superficial. The love is real and directed at something meaningful, valuable, good;7
it is the outcome that is in question and that may never materialize into success.
Here is Williams again:
its the love of the thing thats essential. And if you love something, youre going to
understand it. And if you understand it, you are going to learn a lot. It all grows out of
the love of the thing. The lack of love defines a bad teacher. And there are a lot of bad
teachers. (Woolley 1986, 30)
This is an interesting point for Williams to make, especially because he is so upfront
about the ways in which Stoner fails to live up to many of the ideals we have when
it comes to teaching. But though he fails to live many of these ideals often ones, as
I maintain above, that can be misleading and misguided he is not a bad teacher,
238 J. FRANK

because his dedicated love leads to an understanding that forms the root of a life
of learning that is central to what it means to teach.
For Williams and Stoner one teaches out of love. We first see this idea
expressed in Stoner when Sloane approaches Stoner to inquire into his future plans.
Stoner only knowing the life of his family farm, though awakened to something
difficult for him to comprehend as a way of life tells Sloane that he is not sure what
to do: he cannot and doesnt want to go back to the farm, but knowing nothing
else he is at a loss, lost. To this, Sloane again, not a teacher who is inspirational
in the regular sense of the word, says something deeply important: But dont you
understand, Mr. Stoner? Sloane asked. Dont you understand about yourself yet?
Youre going to be a teacher . Its love, Mr. Stoner, Sloane said cheerfully. You
are in love. Its as simple as that (Williams 2003, 20). I find this a fascinating start to
Stoners career. He doesnt want to be like Sloane or his other teachers, but Sloane
recognizes that Stoner also cannot help but live the life of teaching; a life Stoner
hasnt thought about as possible, and one that he doesnt know how to undergo
and enact. And, Stoner is a slow learner. Awkward lectures, difficulties interacting
with colleagues and students, engagement with many texts but not much by
way of publication. Still, the love persists. He understands more, and through that
understanding learns, and grows and becomes who he is as a teacher. Williams
(2003, 113) puts it this way:
the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, ten-
tatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly He suspected that he was begin-
ning, ten years late, to discover who he was; and the figure he saw was both more and
less than he had once imagined it to be. He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher
to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness
or inadequacy as a man. It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which
changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence.
Remember that Stoner is not a good teacher; but he is also not a bad one because
he is moved by love. And so the presence that no one can mistake and that Williams
writes about is potentially curious; worth considering. What is the presence that
Stoner aims to express? A presence beyond good and bad but that provides a
teacher with a dignity of art.
One way of trying to respond to this line of inquiry is to think again about the
role of love in life and teaching. Another long quotation, but one that I take to be
as educative as it is beautiful:
In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if
one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven
of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently
familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to
know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of
becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by
day, by the will and the intelligence of the heart. (Williams 2003, 195)
Again, I think Williams has a direct style that doesnt need much comment, but in
this passage as in many others I value how Williams subverts expectation. It is
 ETHICS AND EDUCATION 239

not that love is built by will or intelligence, it is built by the will and intelligence
of the heart, something that often defies our desire to control and direct. Stoner
doesnt plan to become a teacher, but that is the only thing he can be. The heart
moves Stoner in ways that are hard to understand, but which are nonetheless
deeply and fundamentally willing work guided by seeking intelligence. Work and
live, work and seek, work is love. On his deathbed, Stoner thinks of it this way:
He had, in odd ways, given it [his love] to every moment of his life, and had perhaps
given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the
mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they
were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said sim-
ply: Look! I am alive. (Williams 2003, 250)
Stoner lives teaching; it is a force that is hard to comprehend, but which none-
theless develops presence. Though it may not move students directly or inspire
them into the teachers line of inquiry or way of life, it matters; it is impactful.
Teaching reminds us of one way of being alive. The way that giving feedback shows
a certain form of love, the way that reading texts out of responsibility and desire
shows love; we work at this each day, and though it may not feel like it, it shows
a passionate presence that cant help but make some difference, even though
it may never be labeled success. The loving work of teaching has a dignity hard
to describe, but one that Williams so movingly and importantly expresses in
Stoner and through Stoner.
This loving work may be best described when Williams describes how Stoner
(now much advanced in his life as a teacher) responds to students who are attend-
ing college after serving in the second world war. Working with these older stu-
dents, Stoner finds something, something of what I take to be his ideal of what
teaching can be. Williams (2003, 248, 249) writes that Stoner:
worked harder than he had ever worked; the students, strange in their maturity, were
intensely serious and contemptuous of triviality. Innocent of fashion or custom, they
came to their studies as Stoner had dreamed that a student might as if those studies
were life itself and not specific means to specific ends. He knew that never, after these
few years, would teaching be quite the same; and he committed himself to a happy
state of exhaustion which he hoped might not end. He seldom thought of the past or
the future, or of the disappointments and joys of either; he concentrated all the energies
of which he was capable upon the moment of his work and hoped that he was at last
defined by what he did.
What can be added to this statement of what teaching can look like when love,
work, and energy are so intertwined that one finds oneself almost wholly in the
present, almost wholly in ones profession, seeking nothing other than to keep
working and being? I know that when I teach Deweys Experience and Education
many students are troubled by the idea that education shouldnt be preparation
for the future, but that cultivating the fullest possible present experience is the
best way to have a future: to develop a life and education worthy of the name. This
passage in Stoner helps bring to mind what Dewey is getting at in Experience and
Education. The passage also calls to mind the physician example in Democracy and
240 J. FRANK

Education; Dewey describes a physician who decides to continue doing medical

work even at great risk; not from so-called selfish motives, but because he has
founded a self. As Dewey writes,
A mans interest in keeping at his work in spite of danger to life means that his self is
found in that work; if he finally gave up, and preferred his personal safety or comfort, it
would mean that he preferred to be that kind of a self. (Dewey 1985, 361)
Stoner does not prefer personal safety or comfort, he is a teacher. He reads papers
with meticulousness; he cares about educational standards that he can assent to.
Through working at teaching, Stoner forms a self that would never give up; he
prefers to be that kind of self.
There are many loving/working teachers like this amongst us, and I worry that
we dont have a language to express why these teachers matter as much as they
do; not only a language for those in our profession, but especially for those who
have never taught. Teaching is work loving work but it is work. There is no
magical inspiration; it is a human act of becoming, a condition invented and
modified moment by moment and day by day (Williams 2003, 195). This needs to
be appreciated. We need to give up quick fixes and hopes for heroic inspirational
teachers and trade this for appreciative understanding of the work of teaching.8
There is much more that could be said about this novel, but I will close with
another quotation from Jackson (1987, 388) on the Holmes Report.
If we searched within teaching itself for a conception of what the profession might
become, abandoning forever our dreams of a science of education, could we come up
with an exciting program of reform? I think we could.
Stoner, and not the countless reports and jeremiads on teaching, helps us find
what we are searching for: a way to live and talk about teaching in a dignified
and artful way. We need to seek out voices that remind, recall and reveal teaching
for the beautifully lovingly difficult work that it is. We need more voices like the
one Williams provides in Stoner as we work at teaching, teacher education and
educational reform. When we think about educational policy related to teaching,
we must remember that philosophical readings of literature have much to offer
our thinking. My hope is that this essay turns our attention back to Stoner while
encouraging us to see the potential that literature holds for how we think about
teaching. Though a more superficially uplifting book may initially feel like the right
book to keep teachers engaged with the work of teaching, I find that Stoner is the
work that I keep returning to as a check against demoralization and a reminder of
what living teaching means.9

Notes
1.
As I was finishing this essay a found a wonderful exception to this in Fulford (2016).
2.
The language of acknowledgment is a direct response to the work of Cavell (1999).
3.
There is a renewed push to make teacher education practice-based. For an engaging
journalistic overview, see Green (2015).
 ETHICS AND EDUCATION 241

4.
There is something interesting about how Emerson (1983) makes a similar point about
working and living in The Over-Soul. Here also I want to bring to mind Cavells (1999)
distinction between knowing and acknowledging again. William Stoners life stands in
acknowledgement of the deep connection between work and life.
5.
Here I am reminded of the arresting line from Robert Frosts Mowing: The fact is the
sweetest dream that labor knows (Frost 1995, 26). For an excellent gloss of this poem,
and the place of work in Frost see Poirier (1990).
6.
David Hansens moving tribute to Philip Jacksons life and work titled Philip
W. Jackson and the Meaning of Dedication at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the
American Educational Research Association helped me think a great deal about how
the term dedicate and the art of dedication are central to education.
7.
I see something of a similar point made by Wolf (2012) when she discusses meaning
in life.
8.
For a discussion of understanding (and its relation to love), see Frank (2015).
9.
For an excellent discussion of demoralization, see Santoro (2001). For a response to this
work, see Frank (2016).

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Paul Smeyers for his editorial work on this paper, and Richard Smith for
his very careful and helpful edits. Finally, I want to express deep gratitude to my undergradu-
ate advisor Stanley Bates for showing me what a life of teaching and learning at a liberal arts
college could look like and giving me confidence to hope that I might make that life my own.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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