Stoner is a quiet look at a man's largely unheroic and drab life, "an adventureless tale" as Joyce wrote (and in many respects William Stoner, the protagonist, comes right out of Dubliners). I was suspect, too, because I'm not one for academic novels, unless they're farcical, because the only thing there seems to be at stake in academic novels is tenure, which in my opinion, doesn't make for such great reading. I'd never heard of this author or this book until I read an essay about him in an old back issue of Ploughshares by the novelist Dan Wakefield. I hope that Rexroth had occasion to read "Stoner". Like Tietjens, William Stoner refuses to cast off the liabilities of his life for any reason in his review of the Ford novel for the Saturday Evening Post, Rexroth graced Tietjens with the summit of his own brand of critical praise (hard won indeed) by deeming him one of the last of the magnanimous men in literature. As we read of his difficulties and of the people in his life who constantly torment and betray him, the lower part of our nature continually cries out to this fictional character, "Get out,for God's sake! Just leave!" But of course it is just his refusal to "get out" which gives Stoner his longevity and nobility, and which redeems him in the final moments of his life (I can hardly ever remember being so moved by the closing pages of a novel.) Stoner is reminiscent of Ford Madox Ford's Christopher Tietjens, the center point of his tetralogy, PARADE'S END, another forgotten 20th century masterpiece. This great novel chronicles the life of a man embodying that rare quality which Kenneth Rexroth described as "magnanimity".
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