University of Southern Mississippi

An Introduction to the Major Novels of John Williams

Author(s): Rexford Stamper
Source: Mississippi Review, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1974), pp. 89-98
Published by: University of Southern Mississippi
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20133049
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 An Introduction to the Ma jor Novels
of John Williams

Rexford Stamper

John Williams has written three very good works of

historical fiction. In these three novels-Butcher's
Crossing, Stoner and Augustus-Williams carefully gives
equal emphasis to the protagonist and to the forces that
define his historical milieu in order to establish a
recurrent theme-moral decisions are at best uneasy
compromises between a character's innate, unique per
sonality and the overpowering political, economic, social,
and hereditary forces that limit the range of moral options
available at any particular time. His novels are an equal
blend of history and fiction, time and personality, tradition
and innovation.
Since the above remarks could apply to a large number
of historical novels, specific qualifications of Williams'
artistic integrity or uniqueness should be made. Although
John Williams writes in the much over-worked and
misunderstood genre of historical fiction, he manages to
overcome the subordination of character to setting which
is the most obvious fault in most historical fiction and to
present the character as equal to the forces that shape his
personality. Instead of emphasizing the scene or the
recorded fact for its own sake, Williams uses historical
material functionally within his novels as a plot device,
being used to clarify the conflict that exists between the
protagonist and society or used as a lens to focus the
reader's attention on the struggle that results when in
ternal and external. values conflict. This balanced
presentation of character and historical setting gives the
three novels a moral tone and emphasis rarely found in
historical fiction.
A look at John Williams' career will help to explain the
blend of scholarship and creativity that marks his fiction.
He was born August 29, 1922, at Clarksville, Texas. He
served in the military during World War II before earning
the B.A. degree at the University of Denver in 1949. He
then enrolled at the University of Missouri, earning the
M.A. degree in 1950' and the Ph.D. degree in 1954. He now

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directs the creative writing program at the University of
Denver.
Williams has written fiction, poetry, and essays, and
compiled an anthology of short lyric poetry from the
English Renaissance. His first novel, Nothing But the
Night, published in 1948, was followed the next year by two
books of poetry, The Necessary Lie and The Broken
Landscape. His first significant novel, Butcher's Crossing,
came out in 1960, followed in 1963 by an anthology, English
Renaissance Poetry. His next novel, Stoner, was published
in 1965, and then in 1972 he published Augustus which was
co-recipient of the National Book Award. Only one other
work has significant bearing on his fiction, an essay en
titled "Fact in Fiction: Problems For the Historical
Novelist," which appeared in the Winter 1973 issue of The
Denver Quarterly. John Williams is an academic writer in
the best sense of that usually maligned epithet; by
utilizing the tools of the trained scholar with the insight of
the artist to join separate perspectives on human ex
perience he makes a significant contribution to both
scholarship and art.
Although Nothing But the Night is by Williams' ad
mission not a significant novel, a fact that should not
surprise anyone who has read Hemingway's first novel
The Torrents of Spring or Faulkner's Mosquitos, it does
give some insight into Williams' development and into his
use of history. The most obvious element in this novel is
the author's attempt to escape history. In "Fact in Fic
tion: Problems for the Historical Novelist," Williams
makes the following comment concerning this novel:

Nothing But the Night was written during World

War II, and was published in 1948. Since I had
grown up in several small Texas towns, the setting
of this novel was vaguely urban, and as
sophisticated as I could make it-it was my own
way of escaping history-in a city that might have
been San Francisco, which I had seen for only a few
hours before being sent across the Pacific in a troop
ship. Its time was contemporary, though in the
novel I resolutely refused to acknowledge the
existence of the war of which I was a wholly
unimportant and somewhat reluctant part. It was a
short novel, and of a genre that was to some extent
fashionable in those days; it was what was called a

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 "psychological" novel, its real landscape was in
ternal.
The primary fault is that the internal landscape lacks
the perspective of an historical frame, and the novel
continually threatens to become incomprehensible.
Williams overcomes this fault in Butcher's
Crossing. This novel is a bildungsroman in which
the adventures of William Andrews embody the
intellectual experience of an entire generation as its
attitude shifted from transcendental idealism to a
reevaluation of the relationship between the in
dividual and nature. Although superficially a
"western," Butcher's Crossing probes at fun
damental philosophical questions as Williams
presents Andrews' struggle to clarify the ambiguous
relation between subject and object and Andrews'
growing realization that the external world exists
independent of the subjective reality of his
emotions, convictions, and beliefs. Andrews em
bodies an historical moment, the period in history
when the concept of harmony between man and
nature was being replaced by a more modern at
titude of fragmentation and otherness.

The novel begins as William Andrews enters the small

prairie town of Butcher's Crossing, Kansas, sometime
during the early 1880's. Andrews, a young man from
Boston who is fleeing his family and his studies at Harvard
University, meets Miller, a buffalo hunter, and agrees to
finance an expedition to Colorado where, according to
Miller, a gaint buffalo herd feeds high in a mountain pass,
unmolested by the hunters who scour the plains. The
party-Andrews, Miller, Charley Hoge, and Schneider
travels west and after much difficulty finds the herd and
systematically annihilates it. On the last day of the hunt
they are trapped by a snow storm that forces them to
winter in the valley. With the coming of Spring, they
return to Butcher's Crossing, but they return without the
hides, which they lose while crossing a river, and without
their entire party, as Schneider is killed in the river
crossing. The loss of the hides, however, is really not a
loss, for the hide market collapsed while they were
trapped in the mountains.
The novel ends as Andrews leaves Butcher's Crossing,
pushing on West, unsure of his exact destination, but with

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a greater awareness of the choices that will be available to
him and confident in his ability to respond to these options.
The conflict between self and other that has shaped his
character remains unresolved at the conclusion of the
novel, but Andrews accepts his condition and freely
strikes out toward the West instead of returning East anf
re-embracing the benevolent world view he had left behind
a year earlier. Andrews has failed to make a fortune, but
he was not seeking a fortune; he does not have a full grasp
of his self-identity, but he has experienced love and death,
has witnessed the destructive element in human and
physical nature, and has found confidence to meet the
challenges he will face in the future.
According to Williams the problem with Nothing But the
Night is its over-emphasis on psychology. If Butcher's
Crossing has a defect, it is the emphasis on ideas that may
stand between the historical fact and a full realization of
character. Williams makes the following comment on the
relationship among history, ideas and character that
exists in this novel:
They were the ideas of Emerson and Thoreau, or
more generally the transcendental ideas about the
relation of man to his universe that animated the
intellectual New England of the middle nineteenth
century.. .It was the conflict between precon
ceived abstract idea and immediate experience, and
a possible result of that conflict, as specified in
character and society. Likewise, the events
themselves ... had their source in certain
historical forces that were crucial in the latter half
of the nineteenth century; in large, the movement
from East to West and the expansion of the
American Frontier; in small, the few years that saw
the extinction of the great buffalo herds of the West
and the concommitant impact upon economics,
politics and man's relation to the land he lived on
and the culture he inhabited. It was, in short, a
species of historical novel, in which specific detail
and character were not minutely determined but
influenced in a large sense by the forces of history.
Due to the balance of history, idea, and character, But
cher's Crossing has a strong emblematic quality. The
central characters too strongly reflect the forces of free
will, nature, and history to be fully realized or to com
pletely resolve the plot. At the conclusion of the novel

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Andrews leaves, but "except for the general direction he
took he did not know where he was going; but he knew
that it would come to him later in the day." Yet, the reader
senses a greater crisis has been resolved. Andrews has
immersed himself in the destructive elements of human
and physical nature, and he has returned whole. He has
succeeded in one respect in realizing his freedom; he is
equally free from the flatulent vanity of romanticism and
from the debilitating dehumanization of knowing himself a
pawn to historical and natural forces. By learning about
himself and about his situation, Andrews gains an
awareness of his freedom.
In Butcher's Crossing Williams joins the two distinct
voices of history and fiction by accurately presenting the
social, economic, and intellectual forces that shaped the
last years of the nineteenth century as these forces af
fected one person. He combines two levels of experience,
one outer and one inner, into a statement that gives a
fuller voice to this experience than either history or fiction
could have done. The combination of these elements forms
the central image that recurs in his later fiction, the
image of man trapped by the imposed limitations of his
milieu but searching for a certainty either in that milieu or
within himself.
Williams further explores the idea of freedom through
knowledge of limitations in his next novel, Stoner,
published in 1965. This novel concentrates on the academic
career of William Stoner who was born in the early 1890's,
or shortly after the time period covered in Butcher's
Crossing. Stoner comes from the hard working,
unimaginative stock of the Midwest and enters the
University of Missouri in 1910 to study agriculture. During
his second year at the University he falls violently in love
with the study of literature and remains so throughout his
life. He remains at the University during World War I,
receives the Ph.D. degree in 1918, becomes an instructor
the same year, writes one unread scholarly book, becomes
an Assistant Professor, quarrels bitterly with his
department chairman over the qualifications of a doctoral
student, and dies in 1956. During this same period Stoner
marries a neurotic, has a daughter he fails to understand,
has a love affair with a graduate student, and manages to
become something of a legend to countless students, to a
few of whom he transmits his love of literature. In all,
Stoner's life, at least on the surface, is rather dull and

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pointless. He is a character trapped by two forces, one
external and one internal. He is trapped by his time-the
war, the depression, his Midwest heritage, and he is
trapped by his love for literature which makes his life a
success despite its limitations.
By concentrating on his teaching, by fighting to uphold
the sometimes undefined standards of his profession, by
the totality of his commitment to the tradition of literary
scholarship, and by the quiet influence by which he
spreads that tradition to a few receptive students, Stoner's
life embodies the historical force of humanism and reveals
how love, a theme Williams touches upon in Butcher's
Crossing, can free an individual trapped by the strongest
elements of heredity and environment. The following
quotation from Stoner illustrates this theme. Stoner has
finally bought a house off the University campus, and
although he is saddled with debts he begins making im
provements on his property, especially concentrating on a
room he plans to use as a study:

As he worked on the room, and as it began slowly to

take a shape, he realized that for many years,
unknown to himself he had had an image locked
somnewhere within him like a shamed secret, an
image that was ostensibly of a place but which was
actually of himself. So it was himself that he was
attempting to define as he worked on his study. As
he sanded the old boards for his bookcases, and saw
the surface roughness disappear, the gray
weathering flake away to the essential wood and
finally to a rich purity of grain and texture-as he
repaired his furniture and arranged it in the room,
it was himself that he was slowly shaping, it was
himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it
was himself that he was making possible.

Although nothing in Stoner's life is of great moment, the

sum of his small successes resulting from his gradual
process of self-identification through love, labor, and
discipline far outweigh his personal setbacks. Stoner of
fers an answer to the question that ended Butcher's
Crossing: "How can an individual find a basis for moral
action if he can not accept external standards for judging
man and nature?" Stoner demonstrates that the backbone
of our civilization, the transmission and love of learning,

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gives an individual the personal strength to shape his
destiny even if he understands himself only vaguely and
his place within the humanistic tradition not at all. It is the
love of learning overcoming all other personal and
professional considerations that makes Stoner's life a
success; it gives him the strength to mold his private life,
and it adds moral stature to his otherwise meaningless
existence.
Augustus, Williams' most technically complex and
ambitious novel, treats a specfic historical person within a
specific historical time. Several problems confront the
novelist who attempts to write this form of fiction. The
writer must not only give equal credence to the actual
historical events and the characters of the period he is
treating, but he must also stress the particular character,
especially that individual's intellectual and emotional
reaction to his world. This treatment is possible in a novel
which uses a fictional character in a well defined
historical context; however, when a well known person
such as a Roman Emperor is used, the novelist is in
danger of falsifying both the history and the truth of that
character's personality. In this form of fiction, the most
important element is the character, yet the novelist must
accurately delineate the lines of force that define that
character's world in order to convey a sense of felt life.
Augustus is an important historical novel because
Williams establishes a model which bridges the gap
between these two types of historical fiction.
Williams overcomes this problem by treating his
character sympathetically yet with irony. The use of an
identifiable character, perhaps the most dangerous
strategy an historical novelist can employ, gives this novel
a complexity lacking in the two earlier works. Butcher's
Crossing and Stoner are objective statements on
knowledge and on the shaping power of love, and they
reveal how these elements are necessary for the synthesis
of public and private roles that is fundamental for any
moral choice. In order to clearly define each role in
Augustus, Williams uses a masterful technique of
characterization to present the public Augustus as seen by
his contemporaries before he reveals the thoughts of the
private man.
In order to give a balanced view of Augustus, Williams
employs a technique of characterization in this novel that
he had not used in his. earlier works. William Andrews

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and William Stoner are dramatic characters; they are
modified by the events they encounter; they learn from
their experiences; they come to understand what is ex
pected of them and how to do what they must do in order to
accommodate these expectations. Augustus is a static
character. Rather than following the growth of his un
derstanding through a chronological narration, the pat
tern in the first two novels, Williams employs an
epistolary technique made up of letters, journal entries,
historical fragments, and satiric verse, to reveal by
degrees a character who changed rather than was
changed by the world. In order to complicate the
character of Augustus and to give the illusion of
development, Williams presents the facets of Augustus'
personality in a thematic rather than in a sequential
pattern. This technique allows for a stereoscopic view of
the man and of the age, so that an event such as Marc
Anthony's revolt is seen by the contemporaries of
Augustus as having an effect upon him, perhaps even of
altering his personality, thus supporting the illusion that
he is changing to pressures brought upon him by the
world, when in fact he is the force that is changing the
world.
In Book III of Augustus, Williams alters his technique.
This section is almost completely an intellectual and
spiritual autobiography of the Emperor as he nears death
and thinks back over many of the events that have been
recounted by other characters in the first two books. One
of the most interesting elements in his character is his
conception of himself as an historical force. He thinks of
the impluse that compelled him to grasp the empire after
Julius Caesar's assassination:

It was more nearly an instinct than knowledge,

however, that made me understand that if it is one's
destiny to change the world, it is his necessity first
to change himself. If he is to obey his destiny, he
must find or invent within himself some hard and
secret part that is indifferent to himself, to others,
and even to the world that he is destined to remake,
not to his own desire, but to a nature that he will
discover in the process of remaking.

Part of the irony of the novel comes from Augustus' final

realization that this secret place changes as the image of

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the world changes, that the material with which a creator
works alters the artist as much as he alters it, and that for
each period of his life he has a different view of the world
and of himself.

The young man, who does not know the future,

sees life as a kind of epic adventure, an Odyssey
through strange seas and unknown islands, where
he will test and prove his powers, and thereby
discover his immortality. The man of middle years,
who has lived the future that he once dreamed, sees
life as a tragedy; for he has learned that his power,
however great, will not prevail against those forces
of accident and nature to which he gives the name of
gods, and has learned that he is mortal. But the man
of age, if he plays his assigned role properly, must
see life as a comedy. For his triumphs and his
failures merge, and one is no more the occasion for
pride or shame than the other; and he is neither the
hero who proves himself against those forces, nor
the protagonist who is destroyed by them. Like any
poor, pitiable shell of an actor, he comes to see that
he has played so many parts that there no longer is
himself.

The old Augustus realizes the irony of his life: he has been
so concerned with establishing the physical, legal, and
religious boundaries of his empire that he never
discovered the boundaries of his inner life; he has failed to
kn .w the man who lived in the hard, secret, invented
place. In fact, this last letter is an attempt to finally
identify this secret self before he dies, but as he probes
deeper he finds that such an understanding is almost
impossible to gain. Writing about the religious ideas
current during his lifetime, he touches upon the
disassociation he feels between his private and his public
roles. He writes, "Perhaps you were right after all
perhaps there is but one god. But if that is true, you have
misnamed him. He is Accident, and his priest is man, and
that priest's victim must be at last himself, his poor
divided self." He at last realizes he is not a force, but a
man, and points out the futility of his acts when he writes,
"I have relinquished Rome to the mercies of Tiberius and
to the accidents of time. I could do no other." He
recognizes that his empire must suffer because of his

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 incompleteness, but he realizes that the love which is
necessary for any creation was beyond his grasp.
Augustus admits that he was unable to establish an ethical
moral system based upon love because he confused love
and power. He says, "I have begun to see that it 'power' is
this kind of love that has impelled me through the years,
though it has been necessary for me to conceal the fact
from myself as well as from others." The love of power, he
concludes, is not the love upon which one can construct a
lasting empire.
The last letter in the novel contains the ultimate irony of
time and chance. In this letter Philippus of Athens writes
to Annaeus Seneca,
Yet the Empire of Rome that he created has en
dured the harshness of a Tiberius, the monstrous
cruelty of a Caligula, and the ineptness of a
Claudius. And now our new Emperor is one whom
you tutored as a boy, and to whom you remain close
in his new authority; let us be thankful in the fact he
will rule in the light of your wisdom and virture,
and let us pray to the gods that, under Nero, Rome
will at last fulfill the dream of Octavius Caesar.
Nero, of course, did fulfill part of the dream, the dream of
crazed, absolute power that is unchecked by the molding
influence of love. The irony is the time. Augustus ruled the
Roman Empire, the known civilized world, from 27 B.C. to
A.D. 14, a period when another man without an empire to
rule was voicing another form of power, love and moral
responsibility, in the eastern deserts of Augustus' empire.
John Williams is an anachronism, a significant con
temporary novelist writing novels of high moral
seriousness. And in the tradition of the best of the great
moral novelists-George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph
Conrad, to name a few-John Williams' technical skill
easily carries the burden which the moral theme puts upon
his art. Williams writes about man and history, one free,
the other determined, and by working within traditional
forms which have roots in the first novels-the
biographical history of Fielding and the epistolary of
Richardson-he manages to construct novels that are
symbols of their content: man can be free only if he
recognizes his limitations. By accepting traditional
novelistic forms John Williams demonstrates this freedom
as he explores timeless moral problems in his fiction.

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