In a conversation about the novelist John Williams – most famous as the recently rediscovered author of Stoner – Charles J. Shields and William Giraldi compare his posthumous reputation with that of Herman Melville, riffing on why his writing resonates now:
Charles J. Shields: The literary parallel that comes to my mind is what happened to Melville. He died in such deep obscurity that more than one New York newspaper began his obituary with a sentence like, “The current reading generation will not be familiar with the name Herman Melville, but there was a time when the writer’s work was on everyone’s lips.” The Melville Revival didn’t occur until 45 years after his death. Williams didn’t die unknown of course in 1994, but he saw nothing during his lifetime like the attention that’s been given to his novels recently. And I bring up the Melville-Williams connection for another reason, too. You mention “the architecture of an expert craftsman.” As an experiment, I broke one of Melville’s shorter chapters in Moby-Dick into free verse — it read and sounded gorgeous. Williams was that sort of craftsman, too. … What’s your opinion about why Williams is being carried into the pantheon dead instead of living?
William Giraldi: Our need for beauty and wisdom is such that we will find it: sooner or later, one way or another, beauty and wisdom will have out.
Williams’s fate was such that he couldn’t be granted the laurels he deserved while living, and that’s a familiar enough story among great artists. Would he have been less resentful in life, less prone to drain the bottle and smoke his lucks black, had he been awarded the fame that his tremendous talented warranted? Impossible to say, since fame is its own kind of noose. I like your correlation to Melville because in many ways America was unready for Melville’s cosmic vision; it took the cataclysm of the First World War to bring Melville’s far-reaching mythos back into our grasp. Although nothing on that scale has happened to precipitate this Williams revival, I do think that entire zip codes of readers are thirsting for the purity and depth of Williams’s prose, for his expert craftsmanship, his gorgeous storytelling. Discerning people everywhere are fed up with electronic inanity, with the sovereignty of cyberspace. They feel blitzed by it all and are seeking the sane and lasting pleasures in the breed of literature Williams created, in those perfect sentences you mentioned.
The Dish 