New York, NY: New York Review Books, 2019. 144 pages. $14.95.
Modesty might best describe the work of the late John Williams, whose career has enjoyed a reappraisal on the heels of the reissue of his novels by the New York Review of Books. The quiet restraint of his writing—its steadiness, its intelligent patience, its measured tone—seems its greatest and most lasting quality. Each of his novels is a work of pastiche—a western novel (Butcher’s Crossing), a historical novel (Augustus), a campus novel (Stoner). Continuing the posthumous revival, NYRB is reissuing another Williams, Nothing but the Night, his intense, histrionic, and ultimately disappointing first novel.
Williams wrote Night during World War II while recovering from injuries sustained in a plane crash that killed most of the other crew members. As a result, the book has an understandably feverish and high-strung quality, and fixates on the guilt of survival in the face of flagrant violence. By far his most minor work, Night does reveal the interests and themes Williams would later investigate in lengthier, better projects: psychological torment, the hunt for personal authenticity, the chasm between interior and exterior lives. The ways we become strangers to ourselves was a governing interest of Williams’s work. William Stoner improbably finds his calling as a professor of English, but his life is circumscribed by stymied desires, thwarted ambitions. The outward appearance of his life poorly represents his rich interiors of passion. Augustus faces a similar schism, though for the opposite reason: he is so well represented in the world—the seminal exponent of Roman power and culture, the face on currency, a world-historic figure—that his exterior presentation dwarfs and even invalidates the individual within. Augustus isn’t even his real name. Of the four novels, Night pursues the theme of self-estrangement with a dogged and even morbid fidelity. Night is, in essence, a horror story in which survival is mere prologue to the thorough disfigurement of the self.
Nothing but the Night is the story of Arthur Maxley, who has dropped out of college and now wallows in a hotel. He wanders around the neighborhood, spending his father’s money. He has lunch with a friend; he has dinner with his father. Arthur has no capacity for pleasantness, and both engagements end badly. From heavy hints we gather that Arthur is barely repressing a traumatic memory. At a club where he’s gone to get drunk, he meets a beautiful woman, Claire, who takes him back to her apartment. She takes off her clothes, but her overture of intimacy enrages him. He lashes out at her. A neighbor intervenes, taking Arthur outside to beat him in the street. He stumbles away into the dark. This prosaic schedule of events is a skeletal frame for the true artistic project: a kind of psychological portraiture, a sketch of a fracturing mind. The book successfully depicts Arthur as an aimless and volatile young man with no confidence in his agency and no feeling of ownership over his actions and the movements of his mind: “For he did not act, he had never acted from his own volition. Some unnameable power pushed him from one place to another, down paths he had no wish to travel, through doors he did not know and had no wish to know.” By the end of the novel, the erosion of Arthur is complete, “He was now and forever lost,” and what remains is a cold and efficient will to inflict pain.
The slender novel struggles to bear the gilded weight of its writing. The prose exhibits a showy self-consciousness, a chronic fear of being flat and bland. The writing, though richly figurative and emotionally potent, is almost comically overwrought. Arthur, overcome by a hallucination of his mother, sees “A silver-shot mist hung about her—the halo of fine insubstantial hair caressed her head, just as he remembered it, and her skin was the same tinged ivory that it had been in life.” And later, at the club with Claire: “There was a sticky cloud of almost tangible sordidity which hung about.” At times, the baroque style seems a good match for aristocratic Arthur and his extravagant moping, but it doesn’t well represent the novel’s true aim: to capture and elevate emotional truth. Williams also uses several narrative ploys to keep us interested in Arthur’s story, little tricks that verify what the reader suspects: Arthur’s story isn’t very interesting. The ploys of Night include a long and tedious dream sequence and an extended flashback that functions as the dramatic lynchpin. But most irritatingly, the narrative repeatedly refers to an event of such emotional horror that Arthur’s been instructed not to think about it: “They had told him that there were things he must put out of his mind, that he must forget.” Less assured novels import stakes from their pasts, glancing backward to summon fresh tension. They cook up backstories of hidden trauma, demons in childhood. As the synopsis on the back cover promises, Night will conclude on “a final reckoning with the traumatizing past that readers will not soon forget.” This kind of gimmickry doesn’t suit Williams, who dispensed with it in later work. Stoner, for instance, would be far less interesting if packaged as the shocking tale of young farmer harboring a dark secret: he quite likes English verse.
As a writer of female characters, Williams leaves much to be desired. Here are the women who appear in Night: Arthur’s mother, a specter of loss; Claire, a stranger at a club, drunk and horny; Judy, a dopey maid; Ellen Phillips, Arthur’s father’s new girlfriend, who ruins an intimate moment between father and son. Williams’s women are spoilers, the killers of dreams and joys. They fail to grasp the sensitivity and fragility of men. Only Julia, the emperor’s daughter in Augustus, was granted any substance; perhaps the fact that she was real motivated Williams to make her seem so. At least Night can trot out the excuse of perspective: since Arthur is such a confused mess of repression and self-absorption, his anguished lust flattens everyone else.
Williams was keenly interested in moments of discovery. In Night, he presents one as a dark epiphany. The memory Arthur has dodged for ninety pages finally busts in on page ninety-one. When the vision arrives, Williams treats it as a psychological Rubicon—Arthur becomes, irretrievably, the pawn to his violent trauma. But Williams misjudges this gambit: what if we don’t really want the true Arthur back? What if all we’re losing is an unpleasant sulker? In Night, the epiphany is melodramatic and even soap-operatic, with a hard cut away from the action of the present to the painfully remembered past:
At the moment of remembrance, he was not half-crouching above a table in a hot night club; for none of this existed; it was only a nightmare of the present; and suddenly it was gone, and he was transported back into his own reality. . . .
Williams kept his interest in heightened moments of self-examination, but he fine-tuned his delivery methods. In Stoner, the epiphanic moment occurs in a college classroom. William Stoner, an undergraduate agriculture student in a literature survey course, has struggled to make sense of the readings and the lectures: “The words he read were words on pages, and he could not see the use of what he did.” Then one day the professor reads a sonnet aloud to the class. The moment comes gradually, a gentle dawning:
William Stoner realized that for several moments he had been holding his breath. He expelled it gently, minutely aware of his clothing moving upon his body as his breath went out of his lungs.
When the professor calls on him to explain the poem, he tries to articulate his feelings: “‘It means,’ he said, and with a small movement raised his hands up toward the air [ . . . ]‘It means,’ he said again, and could not finish what he had begun to say.” Williams learned and mastered the poignance of omission. In Stoner, his writing strikes those potent notes of silence to present a quiet tale of conversion, in which a farmer’s son falls in love with literature. Williams renders him speechless, silenced by the vastness of his feelings. Even in Night, densely overstated, Williams saw the promise of the ineffable. Here is Arthur, pondering the limits of language: “But there was the barrier, always the barrier of words; and that which he now felt was beyond words, deeper and more meaningful.”
