{"id":6508,"date":"2016-04-17T12:52:36","date_gmt":"2016-04-17T12:52:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/04\/17\/unsuccessful-in-lov\/"},"modified":"2016-04-17T12:52:36","modified_gmt":"2016-04-17T12:52:36","slug":"unsuccessful-in-lov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/04\/17\/unsuccessful-in-lov\/","title":{"rendered":"Unsuccessful in Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Collected Poems and Epigrams of J. V. Cunningham<\/strong>, Chicago, The Swallow Press, 1971.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Epigram 57<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Here lies my wife. Eternal peace<\/span>
Be to us both with her decease.<\/span><\/p>\n

Epigram 59<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

I married in my youth a wife.<\/span>
She was my own, my very first.<\/span>
She gave the best years of her life.<\/span>
I hope nobody gets the worst.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

J. V. Cunningham is the model for John Williams' 1965 novel  Stoner.<\/em>  An underappreciated and unfortunately titled masterpiece, it is about one William Stoner, an obscure professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia.  At its publication in '65 it pretty much fell still-born from the press, but the years have been kind to it and it is now valued<\/a> as the great novel that it is.  Unfortunately, Williams, who died in 1994, did not live to see its success. <\/span><\/p>\n

In Five Books of Professors<\/a>, the late D. G. Myers describes it like this:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

(4.) John Williams, Stoner<\/em> (1965). Based on the life of J. V. Cunningham and especially his disastrous marriage to Barbara Gibbs. Easily the best novel ever written about the determined renunciations and quiet joys of the scholarly life. Stoner suffers reversal after reversal\u2014a bad marriage, persecution at the hands of his department chair, the forced breakup of a brief and fulfilling love affair with a younger scholar\u2014but he endures because of two things: his love for his daughter, who wants nothing more than to spend time with her father while he writes his scholarship, and his work on the English Renaissance. His end is tragic, but Stoner does not experience it that way. A genuinely unforgettable reading experience.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

"Genuinely unforgettable" sounds like hype, but this is one novel I, for one, will not forget.  For more by Myers on Stoner<\/em>, see here<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

My copy of the novel sports a blurb by Myers: "It will remind you of why you started reading novels: to get inside the mystery of other people's lives."  Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Companion post:  A is A: Monism Refuted<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Related articles<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"\"<\/a>Stoner<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>A is A: Monism Refuted<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>'Traditional Marriage' or 'Natural Marriage'?<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Collected Poems and Epigrams of J. V. Cunningham, Chicago, The Swallow Press, 1971. Epigram 57 Here lies my wife. Eternal peaceBe to us both with her decease. Epigram 59 I married in my youth a wife.She was my own, my very first.She gave the best years of her life.I hope nobody gets the worst. … Continue reading “Unsuccessful in Love”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,134,316,161,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-matters","category-marriage","category-maxims-mottoes-epitaphs-etc","category-poetry","category-sex-love-lust"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6508\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}