“I’m not asking you to believe in the boys in the basement,” my host assured me. “But you do have to believe that I believe in them.”
Near as I could tell, Stephen King and I were alone—seated in the lived-in living room of his lakeside home in western Maine, the relatively modest summer cottage of an immoderately prosperous cottage industrialist, an entirely pleasant setting on an unpleasantly humid July afternoon. There’d been no awkward preliminaries, and about an hour into the conversation we’d arrived at an especially interesting topic: King’s funny-little-green-men theory of artistic creativity, which sounded as much like an excuse or an apology as a postulate. When it came to the hard work of writing, he seemed to be saying, the part of his brain that rendered rational decisions was otherwise engaged. (Never, by the way, would I have stooped to ask the great literary terrorist where he gets his ideas. Besides, I already knew the standard reply: “Utica, New York.”) We were talking about process and intuition, not about inspiration, and he was steering the discussion. How did the job get done? The guys you really need to chew this over with, he explained—and what a shame it was they spoke only to him—were the accomplices who had custody of his imagination. Or, as Michael Noonan, the novelist protagonist of his forthcoming book, “Bag of Bones,” muses, “Eighty-five percent of what goes on in a novelist’s head is none of his business. . . . So-called higher thought is, by and large, overrated. . . . I find it’s generally better to just stand aside and let the boys in the basement do their work.”
What, then, have the boys in the basement dictated this time? “Bag of Bones” is, à la King, not a slender volume. “I have a real problem with bloat,” he once confessed. “I write like fat ladies diet.” Here, for more than five hundred pages, he stirs an ample assortment of subplots, skillfully shuttling between the natural and supernatural worlds, along the way exploring the simple and profound intimacies of marriage and love and small-town life. There is, as well, the expected quota of stuff gothic, grisly, and bizarre—the stalking of the present by the past, sudden deaths, ghosts (one with a major attitude), evil wearing a human face, telepathy, scarifying dreamscapes—all of this animated by characters, circumstances, and dialogue that affirm King’s blindfolded familiarity with everything indigenous to Maine.
Some of the most overheated passages in “Bag of Bones” are Noonan’s narrations of his crippling struggle with writer’s block, lamentations one has difficulty imagining rattling the couch even in an Upper West Side shrink’s office and, therefore, a measure of the improbability of that particular subplot. In King’s lineage of novelist-artist-heroes-who-aren’t-quite-alter-egos—following Paul Sheldon in “Misery,” Gordon Lachance in “The Body,” Thad Beaumont in “The Dark Half,” and John Edward Marinville in “Desperation”—Noonan, a scrivener of suspense tales that occupy the middle and lower rungs of the best-seller list, is the first genuine writer to be derailed by verbal constipation. For all I know, Noonan’s symptoms, triggered by the sudden death of his wife—“I can’t write two paragraphs without going into total mental and physical doglock . . . I’m like a claustrophobe in a sinking submarine . . . once when I tried to force a sentence or two . . . I had to grab the wastebasket and vomit”—might be cribbed from a case study in a medical journal. Or they might just be something the boys in the basement phoned in during their coffee break.
What the world knows is that King himself has never been similarly afflicted. Beginning with “Carrie,” in 1974, he has published what and when he pleases—novels, novellas, short stories, occasional nonfiction; usually a book a year, sometimes two or three. According to the biographical note on the inside back cover of many of the forty or so fiction titles that have been published in mass-market paperback editions, he is “the world’s best-selling novelist”—since 1974, three hundred million books sold, in thirty-three languages. (When the spirit moves him, he agrees to write the inevitable screenplay adaptation; when disinclined, he still cashes a check.) In 1996, he simultaneously released two books—“Desperation” and “The Regulators,” a pair of novels (the latter under his nom de plume Richard Bachman)—with a repertory company of identically named players in radically different predicaments. King’s other over-the-top feat that year was “The Green Mile,” a beat-the-clock six-volume serial novel that one week occupied the first, fourth, tenth, twelfth, fourteenth, and fifteenth positions on the Times paperback-best-seller list, which his novel “Rose Madder” had vacated some months before. To the average tortoise with a word processor, King’s sheer productivity can arouse as much dread as any creature lurching across the pages of his horror stories.
Introducing King when he gave a reading at Princeton last year, Joyce Carol Oates referred to him as a “great writer . . . both a storyteller and an inventor of startling images and metaphors, which linger long in the memory and would seem to spring from a collective, unconscious, and thoroughly domestic-American soil.” King’s prolific habits make him, like Oates, suspect in certain circles, and his immense popularity compounds the resentment. Hence, the verdict a while back by the critic Leslie Fiedler that “none of us will be remembered as long or revered as deeply as our contemporary, Stephen King” wasn’t embraced by those arbiters of the official canon who, without bothering to read King, feel comfortable dismissing him as a hack.
Critics tempted to punish King for his success have frequently seen fit to review his contracts and the prepublication hype along with his texts. “Bag of Bones,” perhaps more than his other books, will have to bear this burden. In June, King’s new publisher, Scribner, in the opening volley of a promotional barrage, dispensed nine thousand advance “readers’ copies” of “Bag of Bones,” along with an audiocassette that included a half-hour King monologue and his reading of a chapter excerpt, aimed mainly at bookstore clerks, the most likely bell-ringers in any word-of-mouth campaign. Next came the obligatory Web site, along with refrigerator magnets and a crossword puzzle (both motifs in the novel) and, in general, the sort of all-pervasive marketing assault that makes “synergy” such an obnoxious concept. (Scribner is a division of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by Viacom Inc.) At Scribner, September has been designated Stephen King Month—“Bag of Bones” is to be the imprint’s only new title during that period—and, if all goes well, when the first million three hundred sixty thousand hardcover copies appear on bookstore shelves, a couple of weeks from now, prospective buyers either will be oblivious of or will have stopped caring about the indecorous spectacle that brought King to this juncture in his career.
A year ago, King delivered to his longtime publisher—Viking, which is an imprint of Penguin Putnam—an all but polished draft of “Bag of Bones,” whereupon a doomed negotiation got under way. As if to taunt Penguin Putnam before the bargaining began, King spiked the manuscript with some titillating dropping of real-life publishing-industry figures’ names. For instance, Noonan, a Putnam author, at one point is badgered by his agent, who mentions Phyllis Grann, the Penguin Putnam president, who was certain to become a key player in the haggling over “Bag of Bones.” The agent asks, “Are you dissatisfied with Putnam?” and adds, “I . . . think Phyllis Grann would do damned near anything to address any concerns you might have.”
Perhaps she would for Michael Noonan but not, it turned out, for Stephen King. What could have been a straightforward enough transaction soon degenerated into an unhappy stalemate that terminated when King’s attorney and business manager, Arthur Greene, sent letters to several other publishers announcing his client’s availability. This tactic guaranteed that the matter would get an airing in the press, and the resulting news accounts flattered none of the participants, least of all King, who was portrayed as venal and perhaps past his prime. King arranged to be far from the negotiating table—he not only took off on a cross-country motorcycle trip, the country in question was Australia—while Greene sought an eighteen-million-dollar advance against royalties for “Bag of Bones.” Complicating this silliness was the recent corporate merger that had brought under the same roof Viking, which was already part of Penguin, and Putnam, a house where a new strategic plan would be in order if Tom Clancy suddenly lost his ability to push a few buttons every eighteen or twenty-four months to sell a couple million or so good-guy, bad-guy techno-thrillers. There were rumors that King had demanded a contract no less lucrative than Clancy’s. Never mind that King, who cares plenty about cultivating his literary reputation, had no need to get into a pissing contest with the likes of Clancy. Nor, of course, did he need the money. (In the 1997 Forbes survey of the world’s forty most ridiculously overpaid entertainers, King occupied the No. 8 position, with an estimated haul of fifty million dollars, an increase of sixteen million from 1996.)
In retrospect, King blames mainly himself for the P.R. maladroitness—“I never should have asked for all that money. It was so stupid . . . a bad move”—yet at the same time assumes that this chapter of his professional life will have a merrier outcome than those in many of his fictional inventions. His agreement with Scribner is, in most respects, unprecedented. For each of three books—“Bag of Bones,” a collection of stories, and a nonfiction work on the craft of writing—he receives a two-million-dollar payment that technically isn’t an advance because he and Scribner have a profit-sharing arrangement that splits the net roughly fifty-five/forty-five in his favor. He benefits from the enthusiasm of a publisher eager to prove that it can attract fresh readers as well as regain those who checked out years ago, when the agonies recounted in books like “Cujo” and “Pet Sematary” and “Gerald’s Game” became more than they could bear. And, in the long run, he has the potential to make out better than if Penguin Putnam had coughed up his asking price. Also, if one accepts that, at King’s rarefied altitude, two million dollars is a token guarantee, the greed quotient has been neutralized. His only lingering regret, he told me, is that he should have waived even that up-front sum.
“The purpose of an advance,” King said, “is to keep a writer going when he says, ‘I need to pay my rent, my mortgage. I need this to keep them from repossessing my car.’ I already have the freedom to write. Elvis Presley once said something like ‘I looked around myself when I was a teen-ager and saw I was in a tiny little pasture with all these other cows, chomping at grass and shitting. I broke through a fence somehow, I don’t know how I did it, and I was in a bigger pasture. I looked and there were still fences all around, but I was by myself. So I grazed.’
“I don’t have to be in a small pasture or a big pasture. All I have to do is write books. So I can’t be going and taking a huge number in terms of the dough, because then I have to go out and justify the advance. It commits me to too much. If I could do it all over again, I’d have asked Scribner for a dollar a book.”
Plus, well, sure, his share of the profits.
“The desire to please—or try to—seems hard-wired into my system,” King once told a gathering at his alma mater, the University of Maine. “When I was a kid, my mother sometimes used to say, ‘Stevie, if you were a girl, you’d always be pregnant.’ ” Nothing I observed during the couple of days I spent in the village of Center Lovell, King’s summer retreat, led me to suspect otherwise. His manner was affable, self-deprecating, free of pretense—whether he was humoring me or a café proprietor who leaned across the counter and sagely advised, “You know what you need to do next is write a book about mosquitoes.” In the mornings he wrote, and in the afternoons and early evenings we chatted. At his request, I arranged my visit for a time when his wife, Tabitha, was tending to business in Bangor, where they live the rest of the year. She’s a writer with seven published novels to her credit who can do without certain intrusions—say, pilgrims mainly curious about the King with thirty-two novels on the shelf. Given the frequency with which her husband adverted to her superior wisdom, she might as well have stuck around. The Kings have been married twenty-seven years and have three children. The youngest, Owen, who is a college senior, wandered in and out. Another son, Joe, a writer who’s begun publishing short stories in small magazines, was staying at a guesthouse across the lake and also dropped by. Naomi, the eldest, was in New York, where she recently began studying for the Unitarian ministry.
King is six feet three and ambulates in a loose, slightly gawky manner that reminds one of a label Time pinned on him several years back: “The world’s oldest teen-age author.” This referred mainly to the prevailing themes of his work and to his absorption with pop culture, but it also describes his everyday getup—bluejeans, T-shirt, beat-up sneakers—and his mushroom-farmer complexion, the look of an avid indoorsman who spends a lot of time noodling with a guitar, listening to headbanger rock music, watching videos, and peering into a computer screen. He has a chipmunky grin, dark-brown hair that sweeps the top of his wire-rims, and eyes that I gather are blue, though it’s hard to tell because the lenses of his glasses are so thick. The official publication date of “Bag of Bones” falls the day after his fifty-first birthday.
The four or five cigarettes King smokes each evening are an improvement over his former two-and-a-half-pack habit; he chews a lot of toothpicks. In 1988, he quit drinking—he says cocaine was also a problem—and started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, which he still does. King weighs a hundred and ninety pounds, thirty less than he did a year ago, when he undertook a daily walking regimen.
One afternoon, I watched Stephen and Owen play tennis on a neighbor’s court. Both would prefer that I keep off the record what I witnessed. Let me just say this: One plays badly, and the other lost. The stakes were provocative—the loser owed the winner a homemade, rather than store-bought, audio version of Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair”—and the banter was Grand Slam calibre.
Owen (inflected like Billy Bob Thornton in “Sling Blade”): I reckon you’re gonna double-fault here.
Stephen (same inflection): I reckon I won’t. I reckon after I’m done whuppin’ you I’m gonna put my arm around you. . . . (Normal voice) And, you know, that’s all right, Owen. Even if you lose, you’ll always be a winner in my heart.
Stephen (later, wilting in the heat, pausing for a drink of water between games): I just got an idea for a story. A really good idea. There’s this writer, and he agrees to be interviewed by this magazine. So this journalist comes to visit. And the writer is, like, this great guy, you know what I’m saying? And he’s got this son, only the son has this clubfoot. And the reporter discovers the writer is cheating on close points. It’s always “Oh, sorry! Out!” And the clubfoot kid is better, but the reporter sees that this revered, wonderful guy is cheating his clubfooted son. It’s a Roald Dahl story, don’t you think, if it had a twist, a McGuffin.
Stephen (on the brink of defeat, desperate, shameless): Say, Owen, have you read the new John Irving, “A Widow for One Year”? You know, there’s a squash sequence in that book. This girl’s always wanted to beat her father at squash. Her whole life she’s waited for this. And she finally does, and it kills him. Literally kills him. What do you think of that, Owen?
That evening, King fixed us dinner—baked breaded chicken breasts, salad, yellow rice, iced fruit tea—and afterward we repaired to his small study, where a laptop computer rested on a rolltop desk. While we talked, he autographed hundreds of bookplates for a British limited edition of “Bag of Bones.”
King’s only nonfiction book, “Danse Macabre,” is a lively survey of the horror genre in movies and literature that interweaves anecdote, history, and criticism. In it, he digresses autobiographically with a story he says his mother, Ruth Pillsbury King, told him about himself—an incident he couldn’t remember, because he was four years old when it occurred. One day he went to play with a neighbor child who lived near a railroad line. About an hour later, he returned, “white as a ghost,” and didn’t speak for the rest of the day:
Remarkably, instead of citing this episode—one that at the time apparently struck him dumb—to account for his preoccupation with phenomena ghastly and brutal, he argues precisely the opposite. “I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams or childhood trauma—that becoming a writer . . . is a direct result of conscious will,” he continues. “Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity. . . . What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing.”
Experience yields subject matter, but that doesn’t make subject matter synonymous with motive. Elsewhere in “Danse Macabre,” King relates in a few paragraphs, with transcendent self-restraint, everything worth knowing about his father, Donald King. Dad was “a man with an itchy foot,” or, as Ruth King is quoted in another context, “Stephen, your father was the only vacuum-cleaner salesman Electrolux ever had that sold vacuum cleaners to widows at two o’clock in the morning.” Ruth also used to tell Stephen that one day when he was two and his brother, David, was four, Donald King announced that he was going out to buy cigarettes, and he never returned. Cheap and easy though it might be to rake his father over the coals, King says, in effect, Why bother? (“I don’t remember him at all.”) Instead, he writes of an ironic and revelatory moment when he was eleven or twelve and, in the attic of his aunt and uncle’s garage, in Durham, Maine, he happened upon “a box of my father’s books . . . paperbacks from the mid-forties”:
It’s not the vanished father that matters but the men in the box in the attic, fraternally linked to the boys in the basement. For nine years, the family lived here and there in the Midwest and in Connecticut, finally settling in Durham, which King thinks of as his childhood home town. Along the way, his mother, “with a great and sometimes eccentric sense of humor . . . somehow kept things together.” She was a “talented pianist”—her son donated the funds to build the Ruth King Theatre, at Milton Academy, where his two older children attended prep school—but she ended up working at “a succession of low-paying jobs: presser in a laundry, doughnut-maker on the night shift at a bakery, store clerk, housekeeper.” The move to Durham came about because Ruth’s siblings had drafted her to care for their ancient parents, an experience that was transformed thirty years later into the tour de force “Dolores Claiborne,” a morally riveting confession from the earthy mouth of a sixty-six-year-old Maine coastal-island native with a granite-hard life but not a grain of self-pity.
“Those were very unhappy years for my mother,” King told me. “She had no money, she couldn’t buy clothes, everything was handed down to her. Relatives brought canned goods. David and I never saw cash. It was like we’d become sharecroppers. She was always on duty. My grandmother had total senile dementia and was incontinent. We had an old wringer washing machine. When my mother would hang out the diapers in the winter her hands would crack and bleed and she’d have to cover them with this lanolin sheep stuff. It wasn’t good.”
Yet there’s scant evidence of neurotic residue. A serious engagement with a wide range of social and political issues forms the undercurrent of much of King’s work, but it is free of cant or dogma. His characters speak up, never lapsing into thumbsucking anomie. King himself, rather than picking at emotional scabs, taps directly into the underlying marrow, and, though there are notable exceptions, a consistent message resonates: “It really isn’t about your parents; it’s about you’re afraid.” King’s balm is his generosity as a storyteller. “He’s got to be the most casually dismissed great storyteller we have,” his friend the humorist Dave Barry believes. “What makes writing interesting is the story. Except for English majors and English teachers, most people like a story. And Steve just has the capacity to see a story everywhere and in everything.”
What makes King’s horrors so seductive is his skill at rendering scenes and places that reassure us with their bland familiarity. We’ve been taught, of course, that soon enough some razor-clawed dagger-fanged slime-dripping beast—some thing in a very bad mood—is going to pop out of the fridge and leave behind a mess that resists tidying up. But until that moment arrives we’re lulled by characters not unlike ourselves, recognizable by their middle-American diction, mundane concerns, and old-shoe habits.
The static that the preadolescent Stevie King sought refuge from wasn’t emanating from the exterior world but from inside his own head, and he opted early for the writing cure—what one of his writer heroes has described as falling “through the hole in the paper.” He was twelve when he started submitting stories to pulp magazines, and his mother blessed this ambition, providing a secondhand typewriter that was soon missing the “n” key—a machine that turns up, to excruciatingly funny effect, in “Misery.” A scholarship enabled him to attend the University of Maine at Orono, a debt he has repaid repeatedly—most recently with a four-year, four-million-dollar gift, half earmarked for faculty salaries, half for undergraduate financial aid. The summer before his freshman year, he wrote a novel, “Rage,” which, like three other early novels, he held off publishing until after the successes of “Carrie,” “ ’Salem’s Lot,” and “The Shining”—and, even then, as paperback originals by Richard Bachman. (“Dark-toned, despairing . . . not a very nice guy,” Bachman’s creator blithely described him. In 1984, when King wrote “Thinner” and decided, on a whim, to give Bachman the byline—the doppelgänger had not yet been unmasked—a Literary Guild reader lauded the novel as “what Stephen King would write like if Stephen King could really write.”)
“Rage,” a chilling monologue by an extremely angry eighteen-year-old who takes a gun to school, fatally shoots two teachers, and holds a roomful of classmates hostage, is the only book that King deliberately intends to let go out of print. Beyond its spooky prescience—it was written more than thirty years ago—it displays an extraordinarily confident technical control.
I asked King, “Do you remember the guy who wrote that book?”
A long, long pause. Then: “I don’t know. I think I sort of do. It’s like that chapter in ‘Bag of Bones’ when Noonan, describing a dream, talks about a time when he was really sick. I remember it that way—it’s like remembering yourself when you’re really, really sick. Because I was an adolescent. Adolescents are sick people. Your hormones are crazy, everything’s crazy. I told my kids, ‘If you look back on high school as the happiest days of your life you got a big fucking problem.’ I wrote ‘Rage’ in a second-floor room, under an eave, in the middle of summer. It was broiling hot, I was wearing a pair of shorts, dripping sweat, smelling like a monkey.
“The people who taught me the most about being a novelist were Max Brand and John D. MacDonald and Richard Matheson and James M. Cain. Their work was always about story and at the same time there’s a poetry to their books. Cain writes a scene in ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice,’ where Frank rips Cora’s blouse and says, as if she’d been in a car wreck, ‘You got that climbing out. You caught it in the door handle.’ Then he punches her in the eye and says, ‘And this you don’t know how you got.’ I thought if I could write a line like that I could be happy for the rest of my life, at least for the rest of the day. I remember the first time I came up with a line and said, ‘Nobody ever wrote that before.’ It was in a story I wrote in high school. These two kids were in a cafeteria having a fight, and the narrator says, ‘My soda went flat. My piece of cake just sat there and got a little older.’ It’s not a great line, but it was a real line. It felt like a smart line.”
As an undergraduate, King received solid encouragement from two professors, Edward Holmes and Burton Hatlen; the scholarships King endowed are named in honor of Holmes. King also subsidizes the National Poetry Foundation, of which Hatlen is director. One of its missions is to publish the work of previously uncollected poets. This extends King’s boosterism of writers he refers to as “real American craftsmen who’ve been overlooked,” and he cites Thomas Williams (“The Hair of Harold Roux”), Don Robertson (“The Ideal Genuine Man”), David Goodis (“Nightfall”), and Jack Ketchum (“Off Season”). Hatlen, who taught King contemporary poetry and twentieth-century American literature, recalls a “fairly assertive student,” possessed of strident and fearless opinions. He’d already covered some Shakespeare but was especially taken with Faulkner and Steinbeck, and also Jim Thompson and other proletarians from the gritty-realism school. Despite King’s omnivorousness, Hatlen, who still teaches at the university—including, last fall, a freshman-level course called “Stephen and Tabitha King as Maine Writers”—suspects that significant gaps remain: “Has he read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky?” (The answer: “Anna Karenina” and no.)
King first met Tabitha Spruce when both had jobs in the campus library, but the attraction grew when they enrolled in a poetry-writing seminar taught by Hatlen. “She’s a good poet and a wonderful prose writer,” King told me. “She knew what she was doing, and she could explain it. There was none of that hippie bullshit about the great spirit coming down so I wrote this poem and if we discuss what it means it means that capitalism is good or bad and ‘Off the pigs.’ She was the only poet I was ever involved with in a seminar session in college who dared use words like ‘antecedent’ and ‘predicate.’ ”
Michael Alpert, a poet himself as well as a master printer who helps to run Philtrum Press, an enterprise King established in the early eighties to publish sporadic, private editions, usually of his own writing, believes that the Kings he befriended in college are the same people he knows today.
“Steve had a very strong point of view,” Alpert told me. “He didn’t believe in the official canon—the Harvard curriculum—at all. He thought many of the more popular writers had more to say. He didn’t just talk about subject matter, he talked about language. The sensibility was already formed back then. His work is truly original. If you look at English literature of the nineteenth century, those writers who aren’t of the upper class are considered kind of misfits. That carried over into academic circles right through the nineteen-sixties. For Steve to say not only that that was limited but to do something about it—to create a body of work that’s an alternative—is astounding.
“People who are a bit snobbish think they can read his work from a distance. But some of his writing is so sneaky. I read about halfway through ‘The Dark Half’ and had a nightmare about my mother digging her way out of her grave and I had to stop. The energy in Steve’s writing goes directly to one’s dream life. It bypasses intellect. Skeptics really are undone by it. I’ve become deeply frightened by his writing at times, in a way that’s not pleasant one bit. I’m not sure whether that’s a compliment. As he’s spinning a tale, it’s as though the story is leading him into avenues where he never intended to go. Most people have taboos. When something becomes unacceptable they won’t allow the story to go there. Steve, apparently, won’t allow himself to stop. He won’t let his own fear hinder him from continuing.”
In 1971, Stephen and Tabitha married and set up housekeeping in a rented trailer in the rural town of Hermon. Like mother, like son: he’d been working in a commercial laundry for a dollar and sixty cents an hour (fodder for his short story “The Mangler” and a Bachman novel, “Roadwork”). A job teaching high-school English materialized, at an annual salary of six thousand four hundred dollars. “I thought by teaching school I was insuring myself a middle-class life,” he told me. “I didn’t think it meant poverty. Teaching school is like having jumper cables hooked to your ears, draining all the juice out of you. You come home, you have papers to correct, and you don’t feel like writing. We were planning to have a car, we were supposed to have a real life, and we were worse off than when I was in the laundry. In fact, in the summer I had to go back to the laundry. Tabby worked at Dunkin’ Donuts because it was literally the only job she could get. I worked days, and she’d work from seven until eleven at night, sometimes seven to two. We had a baby, then two babies. We couldn’t afford a babysitter. We had the phone disconnected. We had an old TV we got at a yard sale. That was the only time in my entire life when I thought, You’re living in a fool’s dream. This is not going to happen! You’re just like everybody else who says ‘I was born to do x or y’ but never does it. It got to the point where I was saying to myself, ‘The best you can hope for is they’ll give you the debate club next year and you’ll get an extra two hundred dollars.’ ”
I asked, “Would Tabby say you’re a calculating fellow?”
“No, she’d say, ‘Steve’s never planned ahead for anything.’ ”
His office was the laundry room of the trailer. The stories he’d begun selling to men’s magazines like Cavalier and Gent—with titles like “Graveyard Shift” and “The Boogeyman”—provided an occasional source of extra cash, and when they were published he diligently sent photocopies to his mother, taking care to black out, on the jump pages, the cheesy ads for 8-mm. films featuring talent like Chesty Morgan. More or less through the slush pile, he’d found his way to Bill Thompson, an editor at Doubleday, which in 1973 agreed to publish a short story that had grown into a short novel—“Carrie,” about a small-town Maine teen-age girl with telekinetic powers who, to avenge serial humiliations at the hands of casually cruel schoolmates and a religious-fanatic mother, unleashes a fiery cataclysm. (Copies of the hardcover first printing of “Carrie” have become so scarce that when Elaine Koster, who as publisher at Dutton N.A.L. had bought the paperback rights, came across a specimen not long ago marked at five hundred dollars, she recognized it as a steal—even though the price happened to be one-fifth of King’s original advance from Doubleday.) Koster’s first reading of “Carrie,” she says, “revealed Steve’s talent for transcending the horror genre; I was most impressed by his perceptive and sensitive portrayal of Carrie as an outsider who had only her own considerable strength to rely upon.” At her urging, Dutton N.A.L. made an extravagant peremptory offer for the paperback rights—four hundred thousand dollars—which still turned out to be a terrific bargain.
When “Carrie” came out, Ruth King was working at Pineland Training Center, a home for the mentally retarded. “She served meals, cleaned up shit, wore a green uniform,” King said. “One day I went to Pineland to tell her I’d sold this book. She was pulling a truck of dishes. She looked so strung out. She’d lost forty pounds and was dying of cancer but it hadn’t even been diagnosed. I looked at her and said, ‘Mom, you’re done.’ And she was. That was her last day working. I didn’t have the paperback money yet but I borrowed from a bank. She went to stay with my brother, in Mexico, Maine, and she lived another eight months.”
King disparages much of his early work and says he avoids rereading it: “Mostly I cringe. I really cringe. I think, Boy, this is raw.” This is a highly subjective appraisal, of course, and one that fails to credit, for example, “Carrie” ’s narrative inventiveness—a collage of third-person omniscience, interior monologues, news dispatches, and excerpts from memoirs, letters, sworn testimony, and scientific papers. Virtually every subsequent King novel has been optioned or sold to filmmakers—as have a dozen or so shorter pieces, too—but none had as rewarding an impact as Brian DePalma’s adaptation of “Carrie.” Its release, in 1976, helped sell an additional million paperbacks. By then, King had already published the vampire novel “ ’Salem’s Lot,” sold its paperback rights for a half-million bucks, moved to Colorado for a year and discovered the setting for “The Shining,” moved back to Maine, and bought a house.
In “Danse Macabre,” King recalls this point in his life: “Suddenly all of my friends thought I was rich. That was bad enough, scary enough; what was worse was the fact that maybe I was. People began to talk to me about investments, about tax shelters, about moving to California. These were changes enough to try and cope with, but on top of them, the America I had grown up in seemed to be crumbling beneath my feet.” In response, he wrote “The Stand,” a postapocalyptic opus his most ardent champions believe will be his most enduring. Imagining “the destruction of the world as we know it became an actual relief. No more Ronald McDonald. No more Gong Show or Soap on TV—just soothing snow! No more terrorists! No more bullshit! . . . In The Stand I got a chance to scrub the whole human race, and it was fun!”
King’s fantasy wasn’t absolute nihilism but, rather, a neo-Edenic tabula rasa: “By simple agreement with myself to allow a few survivors—no survivors, no story, am I right?—I was able to envision a world in which all the nuclear stockpiles would simply rust away and some kind of normal moral, political, and ecological balance would return to the mad universe we call home. . . .
“In spite of its apocalyptic theme, The Stand is mostly a hopeful book that echoes Albert Camus’s remark that happiness, too, is inevitable.
“More prosaically, my mother used to tell my brother David and me to ‘hope for the best and expect the worst,’ and that expresses the book I remember writing as well as anything.”
At more than eleven hundred printed pages, “The Stand” is King’s longest book—that is, if one doesn’t count as a single work his multivolume “Dark Tower” epic, which is now thirty years in the writing, with four installments published and at least three to go. An unabridged version of “The Stand” wasn’t issued until 1990; at the insistence of the Doubleday accounting department, King had amputated four hundred manuscript pages from the 1978 edition. (After which, still scalpel-happy—he had a problem with what he perceived to be Doubleday’s plantation mentality, plus some complaints about money—he severed his tie with the house and moved to Viking.) The novelist David Foster Wallace, who has taught “Carrie” and “The Stand” to undergraduates at Illinois State, applauds the stylistic clarity of the early King books. “He’s one of the first people to talk about real Americans and how they live, to capture real American dialogue in all its, like, foulmouthed grandeur,” Wallace says. “He has a deadly ear for the way people speak, and for the nasty little domestic shit they pull on each other. Students come to me and a lot of them have been led to believe that there’s good stuff and bad stuff, literary books and popular books, stuff that’s redemptive and commercial shit—with a sharp line drawn between the two categories. It’s good to show them that there’s a certain amount of blurring. Surface-wise, King’s work is a bit televisual, but there’s really a lot going on.”
Several years ago, King, who plays rhythm guitar, was invited to join a classic-rock-and-roll band whose other members included Dave Barry, Amy Tan, Roy Blount, Jr., Barbara Kingsolver, and a dozen or so other writers and music critics, plus a few professional musicians. The Rock Bottom Remainders played their first gig at an American Booksellers Association convention in the spring of 1992, did a six-city tour the following year, and performed most recently in Bangor last spring. Though these events invariably benefit charities that combat illiteracy and homelessness and the like, King shares the sentiment of Amy Tan, who claims she’d happily show up for a kill-the-whales fund-raiser if it afforded yet another opportunity to dress up in a black-leather-and-leopardskin biker-slut S & M outfit and strut through her unexampled renditions of “Leader of the Pack” and “These Boots Are Made for Walking.” King’s showstopper is a customized version of the tragic ballad “Last Kiss” which contains such improvised lyrics as “I saw my baby lying there; I brushed her liver from my hair.” Barry has a vivid memory of a concert, in either Atlanta or Nashville, during which the suspense novelist and bass player Ridley Pearson sidled over and said, “Check out the woman in front of Steve.” A worshipful female fan had raised her hands above her head and all ten of her fingernails were on fire. Pearson told Barry, “I don’t ever want to be that famous.”
Fame, King long ago learned, has its vicissitudes. In Bangor, his house is a stately red-clapboard-with-cream-trim twenty-two-room Victorian pile that sits on a huge, exquisitely manicured lot in a quiet neighborhood a few blocks from downtown. Even if it didn’t have a wrought-iron fence festooned with cartoonishly menacing bats and a dragon, it would be a major tourist attraction. Another must-see is the city’s most monumental testament to King’s philanthropy, the splendid-looking Shawn T. Mansfield Baseball Complex, dedicated six years ago in memory of the son of a Little League coach and friend of King’s who died at fourteen of cerebral palsy.
King writes at home but maintains a business office in a nondescript one-story building near the airport. His administrative assistants, Julie Eugley and Marsha DeFilippo, answer the five hundred to a thousand letters from readers that arrive each month. “A lot of fan mail isn’t fan mail at all but people sending religious pamphlets and letters with no return address, alerting Steve that they’re praying for his soul,” Eugley told me when I dropped in a few days after my visit to Center Lovell. One four-drawer file cabinet is reserved for correspondence from “disturbed or disturbing” people. “A couple of times a month we get one from someone who’s really out there,” DeFilippo said. “Those are a lot scarier than any of Steve’s books.” In 1991, a young man named Erik Keene, laboring under the impression that he had provided the original story for “Misery” and eager to discuss a sequel with King, showed up at the office. A few weeks later, he threw a brick through the kitchen window when Tabby was home alone. Fittingly, Keene was holed up in a third-floor belfry when the police arrested him. Then, a few years back, there was the guitar-toting stalker from California who spent several months in Bangor, playing Beatles songs on the sidewalk and passing out leaflets detailing King’s role as the triggerman in the assassination of John Lennon.
“What are you afraid of?” I once asked King, a throwaway existential question.
“Whaddya got?” he replied reflexively. “You look at things a certain way and you’re not fearful. You look at ’em another way and you are.”
That day in Bangor, in King’s office, we watched a videotape of footage from “Storm of the Century,” a six-hour television miniseries written by him which will air on ABC in 1999. (King has a cameo role in “Storm,” and in several other adaptations of his work.) Earlier this year, he completed a screenplay draft for a theatrical version of “Desperation.” A film of “The Green Mile,” starring Tom Hanks, recently went into production, and a “Rose Madder” movie for HBO is also in the works. In October, a film based upon the novella “Apt Pupil” appears in theatres. At one point, King excused himself to keep an appointment with an eye doctor. He suffers from acute genetic myopia—other than the box of books in the attic, his only significant inheritance from his father—and is predisposed to macular degeneration, a progressive condition that in time could severely limit his vision.
When he returned, I followed him home, tailing his Harley-Davidson. Because he and Owen had another tennis date, he gave me an abbreviated tour. We were in the room where he writes, a loftlike sitting area adjacent to his bedroom, when I asked to see his library. He led me through a hidden passageway in a bookcase—straight out of a Vincent Price movie—down a couple of flights of stairs, along a corridor, and into a spacious subterranean chamber permeated with an air of perfect orderliness. At one end was a round marble-top table, at the other a large desk with computer equipment, and in between well-cushioned furniture, a pool table, a TV, a stereo, and, surrounding everything, books, books, and books, lining floor-to-ceiling cherrywood shelves. I was reminded of a conversation we’d had in Center Lovell, when I arrived at noon one day and he announced that that very morning he’d finished the final story in a collection, thus completing the second of the three books in his Scribner contract.
“And now they owe you another two million dollars,” I said.
“I haven’t even thought about that money,” he declared. “I’ve thought about how good it feels to finish a story and to fulfill another part of my contract. Let me put it this way: I won’t do anything with my two million. It goes to the back of the line. You know, every week Arthur Greene sends me a check for four hundred dollars. I cash it. If I don’t spend it all, I bank it. The credit-card bills? All the bills go to Arthur. I never write a check. But I did get something new last month that I’m very proud of—a bank-machine card. I’ve used it a couple of times just to see if it would really work. You know what money in my pocket means? It means I can buy all the books I want. I guess I have with books what Imelda Marcos had with shoes. We’ve helped lots of different libraries in Maine—I can’t even imagine how much we give away each year to libraries—but I haven’t taken a book out of the library more than four times in the last twelve years. I buy what I want because I can.”
We were standing in the middle of the room, and King pointed to an adjacent shelf and said, “Did you notice the house next door? A retired neurosurgeon lives there and he’s getting on in years. I’ve been thinking wouldn’t it be great if, after old Doc Irwin dies, I bought his house and gutted it and just filled it with books and—just like with that bookcase upstairs—this spot would be the underground passageway to that house. You’d ride through a tunnel on a little trolley. I fantasize about this and Tabby says, ‘Why do we need to do that?’ And you know what I tell her?” He got about three inches from my face and raised his voice into a gleeful shout: “ ‘Because we could!’ ”
“Nightmares & Dreamscapes,” King’s 1994 short-story collection, includes a prefatory essay in which he reminisces about the wholesale credulity of his childhood: “When I was a kid I believed everything I was told, everything I read, and every dispatch sent out by my own overheated imagination.” He had a particular weakness for the “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” paperback series—“the world’s most wonderful sideshow.” Rhetorically, he asks, “Were all of Ripley’s fabulous curiosities and human monsters real? In this context that hardly seems relevant. They were real to me. . . . Remember it’s belief we’re talking about here, and belief is the cradle of myth. I think that myth and imagination are, in fact, nearly interchangeable concepts, and that belief is the wellspring of both.”
Was that the place, then, where the boys in the basement did their heavy lifting? And what about another comment King had made to me: “Muse is a ghost. In a real sense, writing comes as it comes. It really is like ghostwriting. It’s like it comes from someplace else. Maxwell Perkins, I think, said that Thomas Wolfe wasn’t a writer, he was a divine wind chime. The wind blew through him and he just rattled. And I think that’s true of a lot of writers. It’s true of me.”
Ghosts. What about ghosts, really?—a question I had, until that moment, been too sheepish to utter.
“I don’t know how to answer it,” King said. “But, if you insist, I guess the closest I can get is what Mike Noonan thinks when he’s walking along the road at dusk and he says it looks like there are faces in the leaves and it feels like reality is thin and that the world is something that we skate on—it’s like ice and we’re always turning toward home. Just the act of turning . . . to me, when you skate, when you turn, there’s this sort of giddy feeling of being in control and out of control at the same time, this real swoop like the corner on an amusement-park ride. Except that’s clattery and noisy and defeats the whole sense of wonder, whereas ice skating is this quiet thing. I think the metaphor serves because reality is slippery. People slide on it and break their bones all the time. And if the ice is thin you can fall through.” ♦
