"John Williams: Plain Writer"by Dan Wakefield from Fall/Winter Ploughshares 1981

"plain (plan) adj. 1. clear or distinct to the eye or ear: persons in plain sight. 2. clear to the mind; evident, manifest, or obvious: to make one's meaning plain. 3. conveying the meaning clearly or simply; easily understood: plain talk. 4. downright; sheer: plain folly. 5. free from ambiguity or evasion; candid, outspoken. 6. without special pretensions, superiority, elegance, etc.: plain people. 7. not beautiful; homely: plain face. 8. without intricacies or difficulties. 9. ordinary, simple, or unostentatious. 10. with little or no embellishment, decoration, or enhancing elaboration; plain clothes.

—The American College Dictionary

I had never heard of John Williams or his work when I met him on the eve of The Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 1966, and a fellow staff member identified him as the author of Stoner, "a novel that's supposed to be terrific." I was engaged in innocuous cocktail party conversation when Williams, a short, wiry, intense man with black hair, a sharp beard, and glasses, came up and joined the chatter, and in a matter of moments he and I got in a nasty argument over the merits of a minor political figure whom it later turned out neither of us really gave a damn about one way or other. We were tired from travel, nervous on the eve of the annual two-week marathon of book talk and booze, and already fuelled by our first Bloody Marys. It was hardly an auspicious beginning.

I attended his lecture the following morning only from a sense of noblesse oblige, tinged with curiosity. In a lucid, disarmingly simple manner, he spoke about the varieties of literary style, concluding that his own preference was for what he called "the plain style." As illustration, he read some passages from Stoner, the story of a farm boy who becomes an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri, and maintains his professional dedication and personal dignity in the face of worldly defeat and private frustration. The passages read were so elequent, so moving in their understated passion, that I rushed out after the lecture, bought the book, and spend the rest of the day reading it.

William Stoner's might be yet another of Thoreau's "lives of quiet desperation" except that his strength of character, his relentless perception of himself and adherence to his own ideals, make his experience not only bearable but noble. Toward the end of his days Stoner receives a scholarly book dedicated to him by his former student and lover, Katherine Driscoll, and, flooded by emotion, "it occurred to him that he was nearly sixty years old and that he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, such love."

In a kind of epiphany of his life (and of the novel) Stoner reflects on this primal passion and realizes that

". . .he was not beyond it, he knew, and never would be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. . . He had, in odd ways, given it 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 a poem it said simply: Look! I am alive."

When I finished the book I searched out the author and told him it was one of the finest, most personally rewarding novels I had read.

Not surprisingly, we've been friends ever since.

In the fifteen years since I've known John Williams, I have not only enjoyed the trust, support, and good humor of his friendship, but I have also been inspired, encouraged, and sustained by the example of his work. It provides for me as a writer a standard of excellence and a model of integrity that remind me of my own responsibilities and refresh my belief in the honor of fiction.

When I was asked to be the guest editor of an issue of Ploughshares, my first thought was John Williams. I knew that he had a new novel in progress, and I hoped to be able to publish a portion of it and do some kind of interview that would bring his work to the attention of other appreciative readers. The abiding frustration of the "cult" of dedicated Williams fans is that his books are not nearly as well known as they deserve to be. That is a common complaint among writers, but John's case seems perversely unique.

When Stoner was published by The Viking Press in 1965, it sold about 2,000 copies, and the only review it received in any national publication appeared in the "Briefly Noted" column of The New Yorker. A year later, someone recommended the novel to Irving Howe, who was moved to write an appreciative essay about it in The New Republic, which, as Williams says, "didn't sell a single copy, but gave the book a kind of underground life."

When the novel was published in England in 1973, C.P. Snow began a glowing notice by asking the question that continues to perplex and disturb the devoted admirers of Stoner:

"Why isn't this book famous?"

Snow went on to say that "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."

Yet today, the book is out of print. It can be found in some libraries, and its going price on the used book market is $25.

When Williams' next novel, Augustus, was published by Viking in 1972, it was praised by Orville Prescott in an advance reading as "the most brilliant novel I have read in many years. . .an absolutely astonishingly impressive technical performance. . . it ranks with Thornton Wilder's The Ides of March as a work of literature." Still, though it enjoyed what is known in the trade as a "modest but respectable" hardcover sale of 10,000, it was almost universally ignored by the literary press until its nomination for The National Book Award the following year prompted several "catch-up" reviews.

To the delight and surprise of Williams and his cult (we are accustomed to Stonerian frustration), Augustus was named co-winner of The National Book Award for Fiction with John Barth's Chimera. At last, our man had got his due; surely the NBA would bring him and his work to the wider audience it so richly deserves. But it hasn't really happened that way. Augustus is still in print in a Penguin paperback edition, but there hasn't seemed to be any carryover to Williams' other books, or his larger recognition as a writer.

When I mention John Williams to otherwise literate readers, I sometimes get only a blank stare, and sometimes a look of recognition followed by "Oh, you mean John A. Williams, the black writer." No, I don't. I know and respect the work of John A. Williams, who is a fine novelist himself, but not the one I mean. So common is this confusion that some people now refer to "the white John Williams" to distinguish him from John A., but I personally prefer to think of him as "the plain John Williams," in reference to his own description of his chosen style of writing, as well as his omission of the use of a middle name or initial.

Perhaps the lack of recognition of "the plain John Williams" is traceable in part to the very principles and ideals that serve as the subject matter of much of his fiction, and are reflected in the precision and integrity of his "plain" style. His own refusal to compromise cost him a re-publication of his novel Butchers Crossing (originally published by Macmillan in 1960) in a paperback edition when the interested publisher stipulated they would only bring it out if the cover identified the book as "A Western." Butchers is a novel about the son of a Boston clergyman who goes to Colorado in the 1880s to join a buffalo hunt, in order to experience the Western frontier. Though in fact it is a superb tale of adventure (as well as a brilliant study of a young man's indoctrination to the values of nature and society) it is not in the genre of the cowboy and Indian shoot-em-up that we associate with the category of "A Western." Rather than have the misleading label applied to the novel, Williams simply turned down the publishing offer. (It has since been brought out in a non-trade hardcover edition for library use by Gregg Press of Boston.)

In the current era of promotional hype, blockbuster bucks, and talk-show celebrity (the lure of which, if not the achievement, I've hardly been immune to myself) I sometimes think of John Williams as The Last Writer. He is also a teacher, a member of the faculty of the University of Denver since 1954, where he founded The University of Denver Quarterly, and since 1976 has been Laurence Phipps Professor of Humanities. Teaching on the University's quarter system, he is able to divide his time between an apartment in Denver and a house in Key West, Florida, where he and his wife Nancy have spent the winter months since 1977.

John and I have visited back and forth between Denver and where I live in Boston on many occasions since our first meeting at Bread Loaf (he was my neighbor on Beacon Hill when he taught for a semester at Brandeis in the fall of 1973) but I had never been to his place in Key West until I went down last February to read the new novel he is working on and do an interview with him for this issue.

I was armed with a new Sony portable tape recorded, and John was as leery of it as a rattlesnake. For three days he managed to avoid it altogether, as he took me around to some of the bars, beaches, and restaurants of the island, dropping in on old friends like the poets Richard Wilbur and John Ciardi, meeting his new friend and Key West neighbor Peter Taylor, the short story writer, going to a party at poet James Merrill's house, drinking wine and talking and eating the Conch Chowder that is the local specialty and John has now added to his culinary repertoire, a favorite right up there with his Texas Jailhouse Chili (the purist concoction with no tomatoes.) Finally John said he wasn't really comfortable with the idea of "an interview," and wondered if we might just have "a conversation." I said that was fine with me, but insisted on dragging out the menacing tape machine.

We sat outside in the tropically warm evening at a table on the pleasant brick patio of John's small white frame house, with a jug of Gallo Chablis that we drank from as we talked — when we finally started to talk. First I had set the tape recorder on top of the table, turned it on, and hoped that John wouldn't be bothered by its presence. As we said a few tentative words a tiny red light on the machine began blinking.

"Look at that," John said. "The damn thing must be voice-activated."

"I guess," I said.

John coughed, and lit another of the long filter cigarettes he chain-smokes.

It was obvious the machine was inhibiting our prospective conversation, so I had the bright idea of putting it under the table.

"Now," I said, "You can pretend it's not even here."

"I see," John said. "It's sort of like Watergate."

We laughed, nervously, and fumbled our way into what became several hours of talk in which John answered my questions about his work and career. Mercifully, I managed to avoid mistakenly erasing any of the tapes, and have selected and edited the following material from them.

John was born in the small town of Clarksville, Texas, in 1922, and his early "literary influences" were the radio soap operas and pulp fiction magazines of the day.

"I grew up listening to `Ma Perkins,'`One Man's Family,' all of'em. Back when we were young, the whole family used to `watch' the radio — listen to the words while our eyes were glued to that thing from which the sound came, look at it almost as if it were TV. I loved to read the books of Zane Grey [a popular writer of Western romances, such as Riders of the Purple Sage] and the stories in the pulp fiction magazines. I used to read ones like `Flying Aces of World War I,' things like that, when I was nine or ten, then when I got a little more pubescent, fourteen or fifteen, I began to get ones like `Spicy Adventure,' `Spicy Detective' — they always had the `spicy' in the title. They were very soft porn, really. Marvelous, just marvelous. I guess TV has taken over the function of the good old healthy pulp magazines."

"I knew I was a writer in Junior High School when a teacher of mine named Annie Laurie Smith assigned us an ordinary topic for a theme — she asked us to write on our favorite movie star. Mine was Ronald Colman. She read my theme aloud in class because she thought it was good, and wrote on the paper `This is up to the work of a college student.' It was one of the first compliments I ever had in my life about anything I'd done, and I said `My God, I've found my vocation.'"

"In High School I had a kind of stammer, so I decided to take some courses in drama, elocution. Even at age fourteen it was pointed out to me that I had a kind of deep, resonant voice, so I began to volunteer doing work for the local radio station, both as a writer and actor. I would write a half-hour play every week and kind of produce it, play a part myself and get local actors around to play the others."

"At around the same time I first read Thomas Wolfe. I leapt onto Look Homeward, Angel at the Public Library a little after it first came out, I think I was about fifteen. It was damn near a mystical experience. Something happened to me almost immediately — not that you suddenly have a religious experience, but something happens inside you. It's really strange. I don't even care whether Thomas Wolfe is that good or not — I re-read him some years later and couldn't stand him, but I'll always honor him because he brought a part of myself alive."

After graduating from High School, John went for one semester to Hardin Junior College in Wichita Falls, Texas, where he flunked freshman English ("I richly deserved to flunk — I didn't do my work") then took a job at a radio station, and went into the Army Air Corps in World War II, serving as a radio operator and co-pilot in the China-Burma-India theatre.

"I wrote the first draft of my first novel while I was in the Army, writing in longhand on ruled tablets. Nine-tenths of the Army is boredom and you have very little to do. Sometimes you were busy for two weeks and were exhausted, and other times there was nothing to do, and during those times I worked on the novel."

When the war was over, John went to Miami to look for a job in radio, and took a position as manager and announcer for a new station in Key West, but was soon disillusioned with the work.

"I knew I could make a living as a writer for radio, but it meant you just hacked it out. I grew up a little bit, and realized this was a crappy way to live your life — to be a radio announcer and hawk products, or whatever."

John decided to re-work his novel, and went to live for a while with his parents, who had moved to Pasadena, California. He got a Veterans benefit called "Fifty-two-twenty" which paid $20 a week for a year, and supplemented this income by working as a reader of gas meters. When he finished the novel he sent it around to several publishers in New York who turned it down, and then he heard about a new publishing house in Denver, a small "`New Directions' kind of press" founded and operated by Alan Swallow. Swallow published the novel (as well as a book of John's poems, The Broken Landscape.) The novel made no stir when it was published in 1948, and John says now "Please don't read it. Well, it's not that bad, but I've read many, many better first novels."

Swallow became important to John as a mentor as well as a publisher.

"We corresponded about the novel and what I was doing, and Alan suggested that if I was at loose ends, why didn't I use the G.I. Bill and become a teacher. It had never occurred to me because it always seemed to me that a teacher was a very mysterious kind of person who was beyond ordinary mortals. But I said what the hell, I'd give it a try. I went to the University of Denver, where Swallow was teaching, and got my B.A. [1949] and M.A. [1950] there."

"Swallow was a very good friend and helped me almost as much as anybody has, as far as letting me find out what I should do. He was an extraordinary man, in some ways unprepossessing, very quiet. To see him, you'd have taken Alan as somewhere between a slightly-built bus driver and a clerk in a hardware store. He was a very energetic guy — he had a quiet kind of energy — and he was teaching and running his own publishing operation, and I got my B.A. and M.A. more or less `under him' and then I went away to the University of Missouri for my doctorate mainly because it was the only place that offered me a job."

After earning his Ph.D. at Missouri in 1954, John returned to teach at the University of Denver and later founded the creative writing program there, serving as its first director. He still teaches courses in fiction writing, and I wanted to know his ideas about that much-debated process.

"You can tell a student everything you know yourself about writing in 45 minutes. The most valuable thing of a writing course is that students get a sense of the audience. When a student writes a story it is read by every member of the class, and in a way I think of that as their first publication. When they give me a story I figure it's published — it's published because others will read it. Getting a sense of audience is valuable — not just to learn what they want, but to see if they understand what you're trying to say."

"I never allow a student in a writing class to read his own stuff aloud. I either mimeograph it, or at times I myself read it aloud. There's a great pedagogical thing for a student to actually hear what he has written because if you read what you've written yourself you fill in certain kinds of gaps, but if you hear it read aloud you become aware of the gaps. The ideal way of doing a writing class for decent students is not to say a damn thing about their work, just read it aloud, almost with no comment."

"A problem with students, a hangover of the Sixties, is that some students got the idea that every work of fiction had to reflect them. The real value of fiction is that it allows you to know someone other than yourself. Someone asked Ford Madox Ford what the value of the novel was, and he said `It allows you to know your neighbor.' I thought that was kinda good."

I asked John what his own idea of "audience" was, and how he took it into consideration in doing his own work.

"I write for the reader, more than I write for myself. The reader who puts down ten or twelve bucks for a book—really much more than that now—deserves some respect and consideration. We're arrogant about this, and people are more intelligent than we think they are. The so-called `common reader' is sometimes an `un-common reader' and can click in and understand and like things more than most of us think they can."

John feels the reader deserves a story, too, and that "The so-called `new novel," whatever that is, almost tries to make fun of the idea of story. They use it, but they use it almost as a parody kind of thing."

When Williams' Augustus and Barth's Chimera were named co-winners of the NBA fiction prize for 1973, it seemed to me that the judges were acknowledging that the "story" or "traditional" type novel, and the "new" or "experimental" kind of novel were in fact of such different intent, that rather than attempt to judge one kind against the other, it made more sense to honor the best of each almost as "separate but equal" categories. I wondered if John felt this was a sensible way of judging current fiction.

"I think not, and I'm not trying to knock Barth at all in saying this. I enjoyed Chimera, it was kind of fun, but the other kind of stuff that he does and the kind of stuff [William] Gass does, I really think it's a dead end. I think the difficulty is that if you're too `original'—in quotes—you become repetitive, and it becomes less and less `original' as things go on. It's almost like the thing of `it has to be new' because if it's been done once it can't be done again. When people tell me that I try to remind them about sex—you don't just do it once, you know?"

We got to discussing different definitions and concepts of the novel, and John expressed his own feelings about it.

"The novel is a terribly old form—The Iliad and The Odyssey are novels in verse—despite what critics say. I've said some of that bullshit in my classes, like `the modern novel begins with Flaubert,' or some crazy thing like that, which is true in a sense but it's not altogether true, it's only a point of departure. I love the novel because it's a form that's imprecise, in flux, and it takes advantage of every known literary form that's gone before—poetry, the essay, drama. I think the novel is in a sense `A Life.' The birth, living and death doesn't have to be explicit in the novel, but I think it has to be about birth, living, and death. I think any good novel ends with a kind of death. It doesn't mean that the hero has to die at the end, but it should be `A Life.'"

I asked John if he would tell about the idea or germ of conception of his own novels.

Butchers Crossing: "When I came to Denver to teach in '54 I became interested in The West. There's a very real sense in which `The West' does not, did not ever, exist. It's a dream of The East—almost as if The East made up The West. The germ of the novel was the attitudes about The West, the romantic things of Emerson and Thoreau. What if a guy from Harvard with all kinds of Emersonian notions comes to The West and sees nature, sees what it is and what's going to happen to him, and that's where the novel begins."

Stoner: "There was a teacher I knew just briefly who flunked me at the University of Missouri, not in a course but a kind of pre-examination for the doctorate in Middle English, or Anglo-Saxon, something like that, I've forgotten. He had an oddish wife whom I met only once and the rumors were that he had had a long feud with a fairly well-known scholar who was slightly crippled. 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 began like that, so it has nothing to do really with that teacher, but I started to realize that although that man may not have been one of the great teachers of all time he had dedicated himself to something that I thought was extremely important and it didn't matter whether he was a `success' or whatever, and I found some kind of heroism involved there, and that's where it began."

Augustus: "I had no idea I wanted to write a novel about Augustus, I just got curious about the emotional thing of a father exiling his own daughter [Julia.] I began to look up Augustus in the Encyclopedia, just casually, and then I went to look for Julia and I kept looking around more and more, and the more I looked, after a couple of years, I realized there was a novel there."

The Sleep of Reason: "I don't think there's been even a halfway decent novel written about World War II, barring none. I think in a sense World War II was impossible to write about because it was really about sixteen different wars. Tolstoy could do it in War and Peace because although it was over a vast territory it was a localized war. So I kind of decided to try to deal with some things about the war, about war itself, and before this present novel I'm working on I started one called The Tent. It called upon some of my experience as a radio operator and a co-pilot in China-Burma-India, but I was trying to write about things that were too close to me, too immediately close to what I had done. It wasn't an emotional problem, it was just that I thought I couldn't handle it authentically. There was some nice prose in it, but then I got involved with this current one, which mainly takes place quite a bit after the war, sometime during the Nixon Administration (Nixon is never mentioned in it, though), but there are some parts of it that go back to the time of the war and deal with the war experience of some of the characters."

"I think we still don't understand World War II, but I think it was a `just war' insofar as a war can be `just,' which it can't be, ever, but I believe it was a war which reluctantly had to be fought. But it did something very bad to this country."

John had told me before that the theme of the novel was the corruption of this country brought on by World War II, and I wondered how a "just war" that had to be fought could bring about corruption.

"World War II happened to us. It's like cancer, you don't ask for cancer, but you have no choice. Despite all the revisionist history we had no choice about World War II, we had to get into the goddam war. But finally I think World War II brutalized this country. People almost got used to people being killed."

At the time of my visit to Key West, John had completed a little more than 100 pages of the novel, and agreed to let me use the first chapter for publication in this issue, stressing that it is part of a work that is still in progress.

We had talked for more than two hours out on the patio when John said quietly "You know what it's doing now, Dan? It's raining." A soft drizzle had begun to fall, and I took my tape recorder out from under the table, picked up the jug of Gallo, and we went inside to warm up John's Conch Chowder.

Later, back home in Boston, I kept remembering something else John said on one of the other nights on the island, out of another long and rambling conversation about our work, and friends, and lives, not in answer to any question, but just as a comment, an observation, something that happened to be going through his mind.

"You know, novels are `useless,' really, we don't have to have them, like food or shelter, but we make them anyway, and making those `useless' things, that's what separates us from the animals."

Copyright © Dan Wakefield