The Gatekeeper

John Williams authored Augustus (1972), which shared the National Book Award for fiction, and Stoner (1965), which is now a globally admired American novel. Williams would demand that this review initiate a contract with the reader. He would strain to say that this review must declare its purpose and the rules of its universe and how that world will operate preferably in the first paragraph or at least by the end of the first page.

I know this for certain because I was one of twelve graduate students in his last fiction workshop taught at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Williams would also insist that I eliminate “would” and all past subjunctive. “Have the character do something once, and we know it is always the case.” Charles J. Shields, author of The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life, does not mention this final workshop so near Williams’ death. In a teaching career that spanned forty-three years and multiple universities, that spring semester workshop in 1991 might only be notable for being his last, if it were notable at all. However, out of those twelve students, six I know of each went on to publish multiple books of fiction, nonfiction, and/or poetry with houses large and small.

It is both traumatizing and enriching to read a good biography of a writer who taught so well and about whom we at that conference table knew so very little. None of us came to the creative writing program at Arkansas specifically to learn from him. Cajoled from retirement in the Ozarks, he agreed to fill in for faculty member William Harrison, who was begging to remain in Hollywood. We were more fortunate than we knew. And yet we should’ve known. Starting in 1988 University of Arkansas Press (a downhill stroll from that workshop table) reprinted Stoner and Butcher’s Crossing (1960), and then Nothing But the Night (1948), and finally in 1995, Augustus.

Surely some Roman of Caesar Augustus’s day left us a couplet of counsel that our heroes were best never met. But then Shields points out Williams who, much like his best known character, assistant professor Stoner, was difficult to know and particularly hard to cast as heroic.

I aim, then, in this review to do some of what a good biography, such as The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel, does. With aid from comrades I intend to help us remember John Williams more clearly and more fully, and to let you know some of what you will get if you read this worthwhile biography.

“He was sick, which was obvious to anyone, and he was tired, also obvious,” my classmate Brad Barkley, author of Money, Love (2000); Another Perfect Catastrophe (2004); Alison’s Automotive Repair Manual (2004); and many others, recalled. Williams suffered from COPD, and despite requiring oxygen, he continued smoking. He died of respiratory failure in 1994, less than three years after completing our workshop. “But what most impressed me was the love in his voice when he would read aloud—with barely the breath to do it—a favorite passage from, say, Madame Bovary. How his voice lingered over, savored each word. And I took away from that to always think of sentences that way. Each word counts. I wanted to write the kind of fiction that John Williams would read aloud with love in his voice.”

Shields discovers and conveys the young life of Williams, a Texan from such hard circumstances that the family explained his biological father’s absence in what became the son’s elaborate first fiction. Born in 1922, Williams worked and studied his way through the Great Depression in cattle and oil country, but did so as an artistic type in a silk scarf and checked coat, like Ronald Colman in A Tale of Two Cities, a glorious detail Shields provides.

Shields explores...