Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone by Madison Smartt Bell (review)

In Robert Stone's fourth novel, Children of Light, a screenwriter, Gordon Walker, wakes up in a "sodden state" next to a young woman he's spent the night with. How to relieve his condition? Enterprisingly, Walker turns on the shower, vomits, then finds in the medicine cabinet a tube of Valium ("a perfect hostess," he thought, "a marvelous girl"). With lines from King Lear running through his head (he has played in it) he heads for the kitchen and a glass of vodka topped with clam juice. Finally, by uneasy stages, he procures his stash of cocaine, rolls up a convenient hundred-dollar bill (he has just had a good fortune at the track), lays out a line and inhales it. It takes no more than a few pages to assure us that we are in the presence of the archetypal Stone protagonist, about to embark on another day's worth of controlled substances. Of course, we must not conflate the protagonist of a novel with the author who invented him; still, anyone familiar with American fiction in the later decades of the last century might confidently ascribe the paragraphs to Robert Stone.

Stone died in 2015 after producing a respectable oeuvre of seven novels, two collections of short fiction, a memoir of the 1960s, and various occasional pieces on American virtues and follies. (Stone's occasional pieces are to be found in The Eye You See With: Selected Fiction, edited by Madison Smartt Bell.) He taught in many different colleges and universities, while never turning down the chance to appear at this or that literary or social event. The selection of a fellow novelist and friend, Madison Smartt Bell, as his biographer was made by his wife, Janice, with permission to use whatever might contribute to a portrait of the artist (including many of Stone's and his wife's journals). The result is a large tome of 550 pages, which, so it seems, excludes nothing of the slightest possible significance to the man and his work. Roughly a fifth of the book is taken up with pretty much a page-by-page description of the plot, characters, and critical response to each book of Stone's, the expectation being that the reader is committed enough to his importance as a writer to justify this extensive tracing.

The most revealing detail of Stone's life, some of it not hitherto set down, is to be found in the opening chapter devoted to his youth and profoundly telling experience as a fatherless child, cared for somewhat haphazardly by a schizophrenic mother, living in various cramped rooms on New York City's west side. His schooldays with the Marist fathers at St. Ann's—a cross between a school and an orphanage—is given a memorable picture in the story "Absence of Mercy." For all the unpleasantness connected with the place, Stone in his early teens became strongly attached to the Catholic faith, a devotion soon to be broken but leaving an indelible mark. His years previous to joining the Navy at age 18, were marked by unruliness, attachment to a gang and to alcohol (it was fun to drink four beers before school began), even as he maintained steadily high grades and made his first attempts at writing fiction.

A notable feature in the biographer's account of those years is Stone's life as a reader, distinctive in a surprising way. He admits that the Marist fathers at St. Ann's instructed him well in matters of grammar and usage, also in the study of Latin, but a significant discovery was Carlyle's French Revolution, which students had been assigned. This formidable text, then and now, somehow caught the young man's fancy: Carlyle, Stone said, "was the first person who gave me what I would call a literary experience, who taught me something about how language works and what writing was about… My first reaction to it was, I can't...