John E. Williams PDF

John Williams, Plain Writer
Author(s): Dan Wakefield

Source: Ploughshares, Vol. 7, No. 3/4, 10th Anniversary (1981), pp. 9-22
Published by: Ploughshares
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9
Dan Wakefield
John Williams, Plain Writer
"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 S toner, "a novel that's supposed to be terrific." I was
engaged in innocuous cocktail party conversation when Wil-
liams, 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, dis-
10 WAKEFIELD
armingly simple manner, he spoke about the variet

literary style, concluding that his own preference w
what he called "the plain style." As illustration, he read
passages from Stoner, the story of a farm boy who bec
an assistant professor of English at the University of Mi
and maintains his professional dedication and per
dignity in the face of worldly defeat and private frustr
The passages read were so elequent, so moving in
understated passion, that I rushed out after the lec
bought the book, and spend the rest of the day read
William Stoner' s might be yet another of Thor
"lives of quiet desperation" except that his strength of c
ter, his relentless perception of himself and adherence
own ideals, make his experience not only bearable but n
Toward the end of his days Stoner receives a scholarl
dedicated to him by his former student and lover, Kat
Driscoll, and, flooded by emotion, "it occurred to hi
he was nearly sixty years old and that he ought to be b
the force of such passion, such love."
In a kind of epiphany of his life (and of the n
Stoner reflects on this primal passion and realizes that
". . .he was not beyond it, he knew, and never would b
Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was th
intense and steady; it had always been there . . . He had, in
ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps give
most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a pas
neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that c
prehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love,
specific substance. To a woman or a poem it said simply: Loo
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,
WILLIAMS 11
and sustained by the example of his work. It provides fo

as a writer a standard of excellence and a model of integ
that remind me of my own responsibilities and refresh
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 tech-
12 WAKEFIELD
nical performance ... it ranks with Thornton Wilder

Ides of March as a work of literature. " Still, though it e
what is known in the trade as a "modest but respec
hardcover sale of 10,000, it was almost universally igno
the literary press until its nomination for The Nationa
Award the following year prompted several ucatc
reviews.
To the delight and surprise of Williams and his cult
are accustomed to Stonerian frustration), August
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 Mac-
millan in I960) 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
WILLIAMS 13
the son of a Boston clergyman who goes to Colorado in

1880s to join a buffalo hunt, in order to experience
Western frontier. Though in fact it is a superb tale of adv
ture (as well as a brilliant study of a young man's indoctri
tion to the values of nature and society) it is not in the g
of the cowboy and Indian shoot-em-up that we associate w
the category of "A Western." Rather than have the m
leading label applied to the novel, Williams simply tur
down the publishing offer. (It has since been brought out
a non- trade hardcover edition for library use by Gregg P
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 some-
times 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
14 WAKEFIELD
James Merrill's house, drinking wine and talking and

the Conch Chowder that is the local specialty and Jo
now added to his culinary repertoire, a favorite right u
with his Texas Jailhouse Chili (the purist concoction w
tomatoes.) Finally John said he wasn't really comfo
with the idea of "an interview," and wondered if we
just have "a conversation." I said that was fine with me
insisted on dragging out the menacing tape machine
We sat outside in the tropically warm evening at a
on the pleasant brick patio of John's small white f
house, with a jug of Gallo Chablis that we drank from
talked- when we finally started to talk. First I had
tape recorder on top of the table, turned it on, and
that John wouldn't be bothered by its presence. As we
few tentative words a tiny red light on the machine
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 ciga-
rettes he chain-smokes.
It was obvious the machine was inhibiting our prospec-
tive 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
WILLIAMS 15
to * watch' the radio - listen to the words while our eye

glued to that thing from which the sound came, look
almost as if it were TV. I loved to read the books of Zane
[a popular writer of Western romances, such as Riders
Purple Sage] and the stories in the pulp fiction magaz
used to read ones like Tlying Aces of World War 1/ t
like that, when I was nine or ten, then when I got a
more pubescent, fourteen or fifteen, I began to get one
* Spicy Adventure/ ' Spicy Detective' - they always h
'spicy' in the title. They were very soft porn, r
Marvelous, just marvelous. I guess TV has taken ove
function of the good old healthy pulp magazines."
"I knew I was a writer in Junior High School wh
teacher of mine named Annie Laurie Smith assigned
ordinary topic for a theme - she asked us to write o
favorite movie star. Mine was Ronald Colman. She re
theme aloud in class because she thought it was goo
wrote on the paper This is up to the work of a c
student.' It was one of the first compliments I ever had
life about anything I'd done, and I said 'My God, I've
my vocation.'"
"In High School I had a kind of stammer, so I decide
take some courses in drama, elocution. Even at age fo
it was pointed out to me that I had a kind of deep, reso
voice, so I began to volunteer doing work for the local
station, both as a writer and actor. I would write a half
play every week and kind of produce it, play a part m
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 reli-
gious 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
16 WAKEFIELD
stand him, but I'll always honor him because he brough

part of myself alive. "
After graduating from High School, John went for on
semester to Hardin Junior College in Wichita Falls, Tex
where he flunked freshman English ("I richly deserved
flunk- I didn't do my work") then took a job at a ra
station, and went into the Army Air Corps in World War
serving as a radio operator and co-pilot in the China- Burm
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. Some-
times 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, Cali-
fornia. 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,
WILLIAMS 17
many better first novels."

Swallow became important to John as a mentor as
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 ordi-
nary 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 un-
prepossessing, 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 Univer-
sity 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 publica-
tion. 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."
18 WAKEFIELD
"I never allow a student in a writing class to read his

stuff aloud. I either mimeograph it, or at times I myse
it aloud. There's a great pedagogical thing for a stud
actually hear what he has written because if you rea
you've written yourself you fill in certain kinds of gaps
you hear it read aloud you become aware of the gap
ideal way of doing a writing class for decent students is
say a damn thing about their work, just read it aloud,
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 "experi-
mental" kind of novel were in fact of such different intent,
that rather than attempt to judge one kind against the other,
WILLIAMS 19
it made more sense to honor the best of each almost as

rate but equal" categories. I wondered if John felt this
sensible way of judging current fiction.
"I think not, and I'm not trying to knock Barth at
saying this. I enjoyed Chimera, it was kind of fun, b
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 impre-
cise, 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
20 WAKEFIELD
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 some-
thing 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 ra-
dio operator and a co-pilot in China-Burma-India, but I was
WILLIAMS 21
trying to write about things that were too close to me, to

mediately close to what I had done. It wasn't an emoti
problem, it was just that I thought I couldn't handle i
thentically. There was some nice prose in it, but then I go
volved with this current one, which mainly takes place qu
bit after the war, sometime during the Nixon Administra
(Nixon is never mentioned in it, though), but there are s
parts of it that go back to the time of the war and deal with
war experience of some of the characters."
"I think we still don't understand World War II, b
think it was a 'just war' insofar as a war can be 'just,' whi
can't be, ever, but I believe it was a war which reluctantly
to be fought. But it did something very bad to this count
John had told me before that the theme of the novel
the corruption of this country brought on by World Wa
and I wondered how a "just war" that had to be fought c
bring about corruption.
"World War II happened to us. It's like cancer, you do
ask for cancer, but you have no choice. Despite all the
sionist history we had no choice about World War II, we
to get into the goddam war. But finally I think World W
brutalized this country. People almost got used to pe
being killed."
At the time of my visit to Key West, John h
completed a little more than 100 pages of the novel,
agreed to let me use the first chapter for publication in
issue, stressing that it is part of a work that is still in progr
We had talked for more than two hours out on the p
when John said quietly "You know what it's doing n
Dan? It's raining." A soft drizzle had begun to fall, a
took my tape recorder out from under the table, pick
the jug of Gallo, and we went inside to warm up Joh
Conch Chowder.
Later, back home in Boston, I kept remembering some-
thing else John said on one of the other nights on the island,
out of another long and rambling conversation about our
22 WAKEFIELD
work, and friends, and lives, not in answer to any que

but just as a comment, an observation, something that
pened to be going through his mind.
"You know, novels are 'useless,' really, we don't hav
have them, like food or shelter, but we make them an
and making those 'useless' things, that's what separa
from the animals."

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John Williams, Plain Writer

Author(s): Dan Wakefield

Ploughshares is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to

John Williams, Plain Writer

"plain (plan) adj. 1. clear or distinct to the eye or ear: persons

I had never heard of John Williams or his work when I

armingly simple manner, he spoke about the variet

and sustained by the example of his work. It provides fo

nical performance ... it ranks with Thornton Wilder

the son of a Boston clergyman who goes to Colorado in

James Merrill's house, drinking wine and talking and

to * watch' the radio - listen to the words while our eye

stand him, but I'll always honor him because he brough

many better first novels."

"I never allow a student in a writing class to read his

it made more sense to honor the best of each almost as

from Harvard with all kinds of Emersonian notions comes to

trying to write about things that were too close to me, to

work, and friends, and lives, not in answer to any que

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