Stoner

It was a commonplace among his colleagues--especially the younger ones--that he was a "dedicated" teacher, a term they used half in envy and half in contempt, one whose dedication blinded him to anything that went on outside the classroom or, at the most, outside the halls of the University. There were mild jokes: after a departmental meeting at which Stoner had spoken bluntly about some recent experiments in the teaching of grammar, a young instructor remarked that "To Stoner, copulation is restricted to verbs," and was surprised at the quality of laughter and meaningful looks exchanged by some of the older men. Someone else once said, "Old Stoner thinks that WPA stands for Wrong Pronoun Antecedent," and was gratified to learn that his witticism gained some currency.

But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand. Deep in him, beneath his memory, was the knowledge of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain. Though he seldom thought of his early years on the Booneville farm, there was always near his consciousness the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak.

And though he looked upon them with apparent impassivity, he was aware of the times in which he lived. During that decade when many men's faces found a permanent hardness and bleakness, as if they looked upon an abyss, William Stoner, to whom that expression was as familiar as the air he walked in, saw the signs of a general despair he had known since he was a boy. He saw good men go down into a slow decline of hopelessness, broken as their vision of a decent life was broken; he saw them walking aimlessly upon the streets, their eyes empty like shards of broken glass; he saw them walk up to back doors, with the bitter pride of men who go to their executions, and beg for the bread that would allow them to beg again; and he saw men, who had once walked erect in their own identities, look at him with envy and hatred for the poor security he enjoyed as a tenured employee of an institution that somehow could not fail. He did not give voice to this awareness; but the knowledge of common misery touched him and changed him in ways that were hidden deep from the public view, and a quiet sadness for the common plight was never far beneath any moment of his living.

He was aware, too, of the stirrings in Europe like a distant nightmare; and in July 1936, when Franco rebelled against the Spanish government and Hitler fanned that rebellion into a major war, Stoner, like many others, was sickened by the vision of the nightmare breaking out of the dream into the world. When the fall semester began that year the younger instructors could talk of little else; several of them proclaimed their intention of joining a volunteer unit and fighting for the loyalists or driving ambulances. By the close of the first semester a few of them had actually taken the step and submitted hasty resignations. Stoner thought of Dave Masters, and the old loss was brought back to him with a renewed intensity; he thought, too, of Archer Sloane and remembered, from nearly twenty years before, the slow anguish that had grown upon that ironic face and the erosive despair that had dissipated that hard self--and he thought that he knew now, in a small way, something of the sense of waste that Sloane had apprehended. He foresaw the years that stretched ahead, and knew that the worst was to come.

As Archer Sloane had done, he realized the futility and waste of committing one's self wholly to the irrational and dark forces that impelled the world toward its unknown end; as Archer Sloane had not done, Stoner withdrew a little distance to pity and love, so that he was not caught in the rushing that he observed. And as in other moments of crisis and despair, he looked again to the cautious faith that was embodied in the institution of the University. He told himself that it was not much; but he knew that it was all he had.

In the summer of 1937 he felt a renewal of the old passion for study and learning; and with the curious and disembodied vigor of the scholar that is the condition of neither youth nor age, he returned to the only life that had not betrayed him. He discovered that he had not gone far from that life even in his despair.

His schedule that fall was particularly bad. His four classes of freshman composition were spaced at widely separated hours six days a week. During all his years as chairman, Lomax had not once failed to give Stoner a teaching schedule that even the newest instructor would have accepted with bad grace.