I was one of John Williams’ graduate students in the doctoral program in creative writing at the University of Denver in the early 1980s, and he and I coincided in the sense that I took my Ph. D. in 1985, the year he retired from teaching. He was pretty well burnt out by the time I studied with him, and I did most of my grad studies, and all of my dissertation, under the direction of other professors in the program, though I did take two courses from Williams, a fiction-writing seminar and a literature course, and spoke with him on many occasions outside of those courses, at departmental parties and during his office hours, though never on subjects that anyone would consider non-academic, limiting my exposure to him as a teacher and as a writer.

I should begin with an account of his somewhat diminished capacities during those final years. In my inexpert diagnosis, Williams suffered from advanced emphysema and even more advanced alcoholism, to which he seemed to pay fleeting attention. For his emphysema, he carried around an oxygen tank hooked up to a nasal tube, but this burden didn't discourage him from smoking at least two packs a day, which could be an unsettling sight. By the time I knew him, he’d taken to conducting his graduate seminars in creative writing out of the assigned classroom at DU and into the Stadium Inn, a bar on Evans Avenue a few blocks off campus, where he could hold his three-hour seminars while keeping his alcohol supply steadily replenished.

His courses were the most formal I’ve ever taken. He was consistently dignified, even courtly, in his dealings with students, speaking in a slow, deep, resonant voice, and presenting a serious, often somber, figure: I never saw him without his well-tailored sports jacket over a long-sleeved shirt (with cufflinks) into which he tucked a colorful ascot. His goatee was neatly trimmed, and his full head of graying hair was combed in an orderly fashion. He was in his early sixties then, and was the least eccentric-looking creative writing professor I can remember having, and I’ve had plenty of them, each vying for recognition as the most casually dressed or most unusually coiffed.

Professors of creative writing generally engage intensely with the fiction their students wrote, often addressing the emotional aims behind the stories, criticizing the protagonists’ choices, and so on, but Williams was a purely objective analyst of his students’ work, dwelling on technical flaws, point-of-view inconsistencies, inelegant sentence constructions, register shifts, and the like. He would patiently intone principles of story structure, a bit repetitiously (because student writing tends to suffer from the same problems), reciting those literary principles and adages and homilies that he had long since committed to heart. I have no doubt he was sincerely passing along sound wisdom, although to those students who understood and perhaps had mastered those principles, these repetitions felt a bit mechanical, which may be what I’m terming Williams’ burnt-out style of teaching. It felt as if, after three decades of teaching fiction-writing, he was going through the motions, though it also felt respectful, polite and low key in comparison to other professors’ style.

He spoke deliberately, in well-formed sentences and paragraphs that sounded as if he had worked them out in his mind carefully before they left his mouth, and I enjoyed being his audience, more so in the literature course I took from him than the creative writing course. His graduate course in Modern American Literature was conducted in the form of lectures lasting about an hour and forty-five minutes. As was my wont, rather than taking notes on his lectures, which might have been useful, I would draw in ink detailed portraits of Williams as he lectured, so I have few specifics to quote here, but his style was to deliver a concise biography of the author under discussion, then an overall analysis of his or her career, and finally a detailed close reading of key passages in the novel under discussion. His exams simply presented a great number of these key passages, sometimes only a brief quotation of an image, and from these snippets, we would choose some and explicate their significance at length. We read Cather’s Professor’s House, Faulkner ‘s Sound and the Fury, Wharton’s Age of Innocence, Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Norris’s McTeague, James’ Portrait of a Lady, and such—all standard works, in other words, unarguable mainstream mainstays of Modern American Literature, and eminently defensible choices. I mention his conventional choices because every other literature professor I’ve ever studied with might have included at least a few edgier, sexier, and more controversial contemporary works—Catch-22, perhaps, or Gravity’s Rainbow, maybe even Kerouac or Mailer or Vonnegut or someone else we all had read on our own time—but such trendy choices were contrary to Williams’ taste in curriculum design.

The clearest sign that Williams had reached the end of his effective teaching days came during his lecture on Portrait of a Lady, which began conventionally with the line “Henry James was born in 1843,” a bland-enough line that continues to baffle and shock me, because I heard it for two weeks running. That is to say that a week after delivering his dignified lecture on James and Portrait…, Williams began his next lecture with the same exact words. His graduate students exchanged puzzled glances, checked our notes from the previous week, whispered among ourselves, as Williams continued to intone, word for word, the previous week’s lecture.

I can’t honestly say that I remember the immediate outcome. Maybe someone brought the repetition to Williams’ attention, and he then delivered a more appropriate lecture on that week’s assigned reading, or maybe we let him go on for the entire class, or maybe he realized his error himself after seeing his students’ consternation. I seem to have forgotten what the outcome was, only that Williams did not remember having given his talk on Henry James only the week before, and my shock that the old man had finally lost his grip.

He had been a respected member of the faculty up until that point, perhaps the most respected senior member of a rather distinguished group of scholars and writers. (Personally, I was more drawn to the Americanist Robert D. Richardson and the Shakespeare scholar Gerald W. Chapman, both of whose expertises were broad and extremely deep, but Williams had a certain amount of prestige around the department because of his publication record, including sharing a National Book Award for his novel Stoner and his elegant anthology of Renaissance poetry, and because he had nearly single-handedly built a small creative-writing component into a nationally recognized program that regularly turned out competent young scholar-writers.) But incidents such as the repeated Henry James lecture that I witnessed myself, and other similar incidents, including a general withdrawal from the day-to-day workings of the department, led Williams into retirement shortly after my last class with him.

As to the novel Stoner, that had been my introduction to him: upon being accepted into the doctoral program, I decided to familiarize myself with the faculty, beginning with Williams. My acceptance came when I was finishing up my master’s degree in creative writing at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, where coincidentally I’d studied with Williams’ co-winner of the 1973 N.B.A., John Barth, whose writing was as experimental as Williams’ was traditional, so my acquaintance with Williams began with his slim novel about the academic life. I was overwhelmed by the novel’s content, which details the scholarly career of William Stoner, and duly impressed with the challenges that lay ahead of me, both from the perspective of all the hard reading I would have to do and the intrigues of academe that I would need to master.

My first impression of Stoner, in the summer of 1980 on my way out to Denver, was devastating. An elegant depiction of the ignorant young farmer William Stoner’s rise through the academic world to become a distinguished professor and then his tragic fall caused by conflicts with colleagues and making an embittering marriage, Stoner was a model of plain and lucid writing.

I did seriously misunderstand one element of this novel, however, a misunderstanding that leapt off its pages once I re-read it after completing the Ph. D. program, which may explain the novel’s lack of popular appeal. In one crucial scene that ultimately blocks all advancement to Stoner’s career, a doctoral candidate is being examined orally by Stoner and his colleagues. Stoner poses a few pointed questions at the candidate, who offers answers that Stoner finds wholly inadequate. But this candidate’s champion, a professor with whom Stoner had previously had friendly relations, argues that the answers were acceptable, and he and Stoner have a falling out over this matter that escalates, ultimately, to the ruination of Stoner’s career.

What I didn’t get in my first reading was that those pointed questions Stoner asks were eminently fair questions, virtual softball questions, and that the student’s inability to answer them was an obvious disqualification. The reason I didn’t get this point was simple: I sympathized with the student because I didn’t know the subjects he was being quizzed on any better than he did, and I assumed that questions were obscure, fussy, and very unfair. In fact, they were so fair that I could have answered all of them by the end of my first year of doctoral study and would have considered them patronizingly simple by the end of my coursework.

This realization leads me to think that many other readers who hadn’t studied literature on the graduate level might also have missed Williams’ rapier-like point, and had quite possibly felt confused by the novel’s more scholarly details. It’s a strange novel whose subtleties demand a certain degree of expertise in English literature to catch all of its points. Its appeal is limited to those with at least a keen interest in studying literature on the graduate level.

The other work that made a profound impression on me was Williams’ anthology of Renaissance Poetry. It was among the most helpful books I read, not only because it filled in some sizable gaps in my reading but because Williams’ prefatory notes drew distinctions between two opposed schools of English Renaissance poets I hadn’t realized existed, and gave me a new way to conceive of poets’ styles that radiated outward from 16th and 17th century poets to all writers in all languages and all styles, those who made everything clearer and more focused and those who made everything more complicated and mysterious. It presented an entirely new way for me to think about writers’ aims, and argued its case boldly but not tendentiously. It was a marvel of learning and of scholarly argumentation, a model I sought to follow in my own writing.

In my own academic career, I would find very useful John Williams’ comportment and his understated delivery of literary knowledge, as well as his deft prose in books that I read and re-read many times over the decades to come. The impression he made on me was entirely professional and not at all personal. For all I learned from him over the four years I was his student, I can’t remember having a single conversation in which I was sure he knew my name.

Steven Goldleaf

My Studies with John Williams