Stoner

A week before commencement, at which Stoner was to receive his doctorate, Archer Sloane offered him a full-time instructorship at the University. Sloane explained that it was not the policy of the University to employ its own graduates, but because of the wartime shortage of trained and experienced college teachers he had been able to persuade the administration to make an exception.

Somewhat reluctantly Stoner had written a few letters of application to universities and colleges in the general area, abruptly setting forth his qualifications; when nothing came from any of them, he felt curiously relieved. He half understood his relief; he had known at the University at Columbia the kind of security and warmth that he should have been able to feel as a child in his home, and had not been able to, and he was unsure of his ability to find those elsewhere. He accepted Sloane's offer with gratitude.

And as he did so it occurred to him that Sloane had aged greatly during the year of the war. In his late fifties, he looked ten years older; his hair, which had once curled in an unruly iron-gray shock, now was white and lay flat and lifeless about his bony skull. His black eyes had gone dull, as if filmed over with layers of moisture; his long, lined face, which had once been tough as thin leather, now had the fragility of ancient, drying paper; and his flat, ironical voice had begun to develop a tremor. Looking at him, Stoner thought: He is going to die--in a year, or two years, or ten, he will die. A premature sense of loss gripped him, and he turned away.

His thoughts were much upon death that summer of 1918. The death of Masters had shocked him more than he wished to admit; and the first American casualty lists from Europe were beginning to be released. When he had thought of death before, he had thought of it either as a literary event or as the slow, quiet attrition of time against imperfect flesh. He had not thought of it as the explosion of violence upon a battlefield, as the gush of blood from the ruptured throat. He wondered at the difference between the two kinds of dying, and what the difference meant; and he found growing in him some of that bitterness he had glimpsed once in the living heart of his friend David Masters.

His dissertation topic had been "The Influence of the Classical Tradition upon the Medieval Lyric." He spent much of the summer rereading the classical and medieval Latin poets, and especially their poems upon death. He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were a tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed; and he marveled at the bitterness, the terror, the barely concealed hatred he found in some of the later Christian poets of the Latin tradition when they looked to that death which promised, however vaguely, a rich and ecstatic eternity of life, as if that death and promise were a mockery that soured the days of their living. When he thought of Masters, he thought of him as a Catullus or a more gentle and lyrical Juvenal, an exile in his own country, and thought of his death as another exile, more strange and lasting than he had known before.

When the semester opened in the autumn of 1918 it was clear to everyone that the war in Europe could not go on much longer. The last, desperate German counteroffensive had been stopped short of Paris, and Marshal Foch had ordered a general allied counterattack that quickly pushed the Germans back to their original line. The British advanced to the north and the Americans went through the Argonne, at a cost that was widely ignored in the general elation. The newspapers were predicting a collapse of the Germans before Christmas.

So the semester began in an atmosphere of tense geniality and well-being. The students and instructors found themselves smiling at each other and nodding vigorously in the halls; outbursts of exuberance and small violence among the students were ignored by the faculty and administration; and an unidentified student, who immediately became a kind of local folk hero, shinnied up one of the huge columns in front of Jesse Hall and hung from its top a straw-stuffed effigy of the Kaiser.