The Once and Future Stephen King
Jill Owens, Powells.com
My first Stephen King book was my also first "adult" book — It, clocking in at over a thousand pages. I read It the way many of King's young readers do — under the covers at night with a flashlight, way past my bedtime. Of course, the book scared me to death. But over the years, it has become apparent that frightening readers, though indisputably one of his strengths, is certainly not the only tool in King's arsenal. His 2000 memoir On Writing is a classic of the genre, filled with pragmatic advice, colorful examples, and a genuine love of language. Novellas such as Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and short stories like "The Last Rung on the Ladder" have proven that sometimes King's strongest work isn't overt horror at all, that he is just as adept at chronicling the universal themes of love, family, and the human condition.
Lisey's Story is a hybrid of the most effective traits of both: while the novel has supernatural elements and truly horrific moments, this deeply involving love story includes some of King's best prose yet. Lisey is the widow of Scott Landon, a bestselling and award-winning author. Two years after his death, she is beginning the lonely work of going through his unpublished papers. Alternating Lisey's memories of her life with Scott and some disturbing goings-on in the present, including a mentally troubled sister and a deranged fan after Scott's legacy, Lisey's Story is an intimate, playful, and deeply moving tribute to marriage and the art of writing. Kirkus Reviews calls the novel "one of King's finest works," and Washington Post Book World applauds, "With Lisey's Story, King has crashed the exclusive party of literary fiction, and he'll be no easier to ignore than Carrie at the prom."
Jill: How did Lisey's
Story begin? Was it a character, or a particular image?
King: Yes, it was a character, and it was a situation. I was in the
hospital for pneumonia, and my wife decided to redo my studio. When I came back,
she said, "I wouldn't go in there; it's disturbing." So of course
I went in there, and it was disturbing. I was still in deep recuperation, and
I felt like a ghost anyway. But going in there, I felt even more like a ghost,
because the books were all off the shelves, and the furniture had been pulled
out because my wife was getting it reupholstered, and the rugs had been rolled
up. I thought, This is what this place is going to look like after I die.
Because I'd cleaned out my mother's house, and I knew that that was true. When
I thought of my wife cleaning out my papers, a light went on. Lisey's Story
bloomed from that.
I started to write it because I thought it would be really great to write a
story about a writer's wife behind the scenes, because they're always behind
the scenes. You know, academics and critics are the biggest sexists in the world.
They would holler and scream and say it isn't true, but if you have a famous
writer, unless their spouse is somebody like Sylvia
Plath, you never hear about them. They're totally ignored, even though they
can be very influential in that writer's work. Robert
Louis Stevenson wrote Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and his wife told him it was an awful book. So he threw
it in the fire, and burned it up, and rewrote the whole thing from scratch.
For years, critics have mourned that, and thought that he probably threw away
a masterpiece and wrote a lesser book. That is errant sexism, right there. They're
assuming that the wife couldn't recognize meretricious quality. For all we know,
she was looking at something that was bad, and the second book he wrote was
the masterpiece, and the one he threw away was crap.
So I wanted to write a book where the woman who was behind the scenes was always
saving this guy's bacon. I saw it almost as a kind of a comedy, but it didn't
turn out that way. It turned out to be a love story, instead.
Jill: Private language, like that between Lisey and Scott, which has been a
theme in your other books as well, is much more pronounced here. Was that a
conscious choice before you started writing the novel, or was that something
that developed as the characters evolved?
King: It was a conscious choice. If you're writing about a marriage,
particularly a long marriage — and that's what I wanted to write about,
the world of a long marriage — it seemed to me, and it seems to me, that
that creates its own ecosystem that has all sorts of aspects. For example, a
kind of telepathy develops over the years, and that's why you stay married,
that's one of the benefits of a long marriage. If you're at a party, you're
able to look across the room at each other, and you get a certain kind of look
and you both know it's time to leave the party. It's that sort of thing, with
both big decisions and little decisions.
Because you're together, all that time, you develop your own language for things,
inside that ecosystem. They might start as jokes, or punchlines of jokes, and
they become part of that inner vocabulary. That's also part of the benefit of
a long marriage; it's part of creating your own world. People sometimes describe
it as building a wall between you and the outside world, but I don't think it's
a wall. I think it's a dome that you can actually look through, that's permeable.
Jill: One of the last lines of the Newsday review of the book
is "Language is where we go when we're gone," which I thought worked
on two levels with your book: Lisey going to the pool, which is the source of
language and story, to bring back Scott and Amanda, when both of them were "gone,"
mentally, and she also retreated to their private language to grieve him and
to draw strength from.
King: Yes. I heard the concept of the pool from a lecture in 1968 in
English class, where Burton Hatlen talked about the pool where we all go down
to drink. He talked about the myth-pool. I can't remember if he was talking
about the Odyssey or the Iliad;
it might have even been Hans
Christian Andersen, for all I know. But it's true that those things are
global, shared. A myth like Cinderella,
for instance — every culture has a Cinderella story. The names change,
but the story of ostracism, the third sister from the family, always remains
the same. But, I thought to myself, if you believe in a thing enough, and if
you have a powerful enough imagination to actually find another world, at the
center of that world would be that pool of imagination. Imagination is a wonderful
thing, but it's also a terrible thing. I tried to make that other world, Boo'ya
Moon, a place that had two sides, two faces, like Jekyll and Hyde. It's sweet
in the daytime and awful at night. A lot of times that's the way our imaginations
are.
Jill: Certain objects in your books can take on a kind of mythical,
totemic quality — sometimes from being in the right place at the right
time, and other times because of the intensity of the characters' belief in
those objects. In Lisey's Story, one of those would be the silver shovel
that ends up saving both Scott and Lisey's lives.
King: The silver shovel is a saving object, and it's silver for a reason.
Like silver bullets. There are things that are supposed to be good at killing
monsters. Dooley is a monster; Gerd Allen Cole was a monster. It's more of a
goof than anything else, but it's also symbolic in the sense that silver is
supposed to be purifying.
Also, though, the lesson I took from Dickens
is that nothing should be wasted. Nothing should be wasted, in a book. There's
nothing that's coincidental in the world of fiction. One of the great pleasures
of fiction is that you enter a world where coincidence is allowed and characters
come back and things recur, so that the shovel becomes a part of Lisey's life
again, after it's sat in the barn for all those years. It's the only time, in
my view, that Scott in the book ever really speaks to Lisey from beyond the
grave. He says, Find the shovel. So she does, and it's perfectly logical
that she should want that shovel and that the shovel should be where it is.
That's one of the pleasures of fiction, that Dickensian feel, that things should
recur.
You know, I played for a long time with the idea of Dooley actually turning
out to be Gerd Allen Cole.
Jill: There are definitely similarities between the two.
King: Yes; I compromised on that, because that felt too Agatha
Christie to me. That felt a little bit too far. But you can see that some
of the clues were planted there. There's the Southern thing, and I thought to
myself, Well, yeah, it's possible because Cole never really says that much,
and his hair isn't blonde anymore, it's brown, and that could be him. Then I
thought, no — that's a step too much. Coincidence is allowed, because coincidence
is a part of our lives.
Jill: Often the parts we remember the most strongly.
King: Reality is Ralph.
Jill: Faith, in one way or another — in love, in God, in goodness
itself — figures pretty prominently in your books. Do you believe faith
is an active, protective mechanism, something that we're naturally inclined
towards?
King: I want to believe. And so I do. There's a difference there between
saying, I do absolutely believe that it's my fate that this should happen or
that should happen. I don't believe in God in the rational part of my mind,
but in the emotional part of my mind, yeah, I do. I have reasons to feel the
way that I do. I don't go to church or anything, because I think organized religion
is dangerous, so I don't do that — I don't do that at all. But faith,
God, those things... Let's put it this way: one of the great philosophers said,
If you don't believe, and you die, and there is a God, you're going to get the
world's biggest surprise on the other side of the veil. If you do believe, and
you die, and there isn't a God, well, what have you lost?
Jill: Pascal's
wager, I think.
King: It might be; you might be right.
Jill: Something else I've noticed in your books is the importance of
accuracy of experience. I'm thinking in Lisey's Story when Lisey's setting
the scene with her car, when she's gone up to rescue Amanda, when she's fixing
the details in her mind, the license plate, the bumper sticker, and thinks...
King: Something's not quite right.
Jill: And that happens frequently in your characters' memories, as well; there's
a kind of "click" moment when everything lines up perfectly.
King: Yes. What's a concern with me when I write is — I'm an imagist.
When I was in college I turned on to a lot of modern poetry, particularly James
Dickey and William
Carlos Williams and a lot of the disciples of Williams, though not all of
them. I always liked Wallace
Stevens, although I didn't have a fucking clue what that man was talking
about. Not even in "On Sunday Morning." As a matter of fact, there
is one that I did know what he was talking about, and that was "The Emperor
of Ice Cream." I just loved that poem. There's also Randall
Jarrell, W. H. Auden,
and all those people — another one is Dylan
Thomas. A lot of them are a little bit old-fashioned now, but there's a
new-fashioned poet that I like, too, a guy from Pittsburgh named Chard
deNiord who's really, really good. He's got a book out called Night
Mowing.
What these people do is what formed me in that last great period when you're
plastic, when you're in college and you're still kind of a sponge, you're still
open to change in every way. It goes on a little while after that, but not a
long while after that. That's when you say, Teach me. I'm ready to learn;
teach me what to do. What I was taught was really be specific in your writing.
Never, never, never, never tell the reader. Always show. And you know, I tripped
on that a bit, particularly in my reading that didn't have anything to do with
school. People like Raymond
Chandler. I always loved Chandler, and I never really connected with Dashiell
Hammett. But I loved Chandler. Chandler was crystal clear to me. When I
read him, it was like being in ecstasy, almost. Somebody else was Thomas
Wolfe, although he never met an adverb he didn't like, I'll tell you that.
I'm like that with what Lisey's doing in that scene. It's a case
of saying, I want to be able to visualize this place exactly, and come back
to where I left these things. It was a pleasure to write that scene, because
it's like a total visualization. The more I can do that, the more excuse I have
to do that, the better I like it.
Jill: Speaking of visualizing things, I was reading On
Writing for the first time a couple of a days ago, and I was reading the
passage about writing as telepathy, and picturing the white rabbit with the
number eight painted on its back, and I thought, Wait a minute — where have
I just seen this?
King: It was on Lost.
Jill: Exactly!
King: I saw it on the show and I thought to myself, that looks sort
of familiar, but I couldn't really think why. I think part of the reason why
was that when I wrote a lot of On Writing, I was in a lot of pain from
the road accident, and I was taking a lot of pain drugs, so that I guess I didn't
remember that part.
Jill: The line of poetry that Scott writes in Lisey's Story is
a beautiful line, and seems to sum up a theme you come back to frequently: that madness, insanity, is never
very far away.
King: It's actually a version of a poem I wrote in college. I looked
and looked — you know how you do workshops, and they make offprints of
material. I thought I had some offprints from that, and I didn't, and so I called
the prof who taught the class, and I said, Do you have any of those offprints?
He looked, and he couldn't find it, either. Really, all I remembered of the
poem was the first line, "The arguments against insanity fall through with
a soft shirring sound," and I really didn't have much of a clue beyond
that. So I worked on it a little bit, and it actually worked better, because
it was more specific to the book.
But don't forget, there's another poem — there's a Hallmark card. They're
like apples and oranges. I worked hard on that Hallmark card. I actually had
someone ask me if I'd gotten permission from the Hallmark company. I was proud
of that.
Stephen King appeared in Portland through Portland Arts and Lectures, a program of Literary Arts, on November 2, 2006. The following is a transcript of the audience Q&A portion of his reading that evening.
Q: Is there anything you're too scared to write about?
King: No. If I write about things, then I don't have to worry about
them. You know what I mean? This is the best gig in the world, I can't even
tell you, because other people pay like eighty bucks an hour to go to a shrink
— and it's not even a full hour, it's a fifty-minute hour. I write these
things down and people pay me. It's great! It's wonderful. People say to me,
Do you have bad dreams? And the answer is, yes — when I don't write,
then I get bad dreams.
Q: When you received your medal at the National Book Awards in 2003, you talked
about building bridges between popular and literary fiction. Are you satisfied
that those bridges are being built?
King: No. The problem, I think, is that there's almost no understanding
in the serious critical establishment, and when I say that, I mean in the journals
— everything from Harold Bloom to Ploughshares to — pick your
poison, the Antioch Review, etc. I read these things. Do the people who
publish them read me? That's a good question. If they do, a lot of them probably
don't admit it. If their literary friends come over, they might put my books
under the bed like... lit-porn. You people may have faced this; some friends
will come over and say, "Oh, you read him? Really? You read Stephen King? Well,
all righty. Guess we won't be coming here again."
I'm probably being overly sensitive about it — but not too much. What
I mean is that there's a whole range of people who are doing really, really good
work, that we call popular fiction. First of all, it's an artificial distinction
between literary fiction and popular fiction. I sometimes think that literary
fiction is a term that writers and critics give to a certain kind of well-written
fiction that doesn't sell very much. That's the criteria, and a certain prejudice
kicks in against you if you do sell a lot of books. The way the prejudice works,
it's never scathing, outright, but it goes something like this: If three million
people are reading X, I don't really need to read X to know that that is a bad
writer's work. Because all I do is divide three million by the average IQ and
come out with a minus number, and that's the IQ of people reading that book.
That's bullshit, is all, it's just bullshit. There are people like Scott
Turow. Scott Turow's in the
band with me; he's kind of a rarity, because he can actually sing. I'm also
thinking about Michael
Connelly, who is a terrific writer; George
Pelecanos, who's an amazing writer, Dennis
Lehane, who's a terrific writer, and those are just a few.
A good example of what happens to a good writer with literary aspirations is
what's happening to Scott
Smith, who wrote A Simple
Plan and a book called The
Ruins that was out this past summer. If you read the reviews that the critic
in the New York Times wrote about those books, Michiko Kakutani, it isn't
so much the reviews themselves — she hated the books, but then Michiko
hates a lot of books. The thing is, it's a colossal misunderstanding about what
those books were about, and the tradition they come from, which is naturalistic
fiction, Theodore
Dreiser and Thomas
Hardy, going all the way back. Then the divide gets wider, and it becomes
more and more of a challenge and more and more of a risk for so-called literary
writers, people who are taken as literary writers, to write popular, accessible
fiction for the masses.
You get somebody like Jonathan
Safran Foer, who is really a good writer, when he lets his hair down to
do it, but Extremely Loud
and Incredibly Close, the book about the World Trade Center, is so tight-assed,
and so literary. His first
book has some wonderful passages, so he's capable of that. Another writer
who's taking that risk and has been able to deal with it is Michael
Chabon. Michael Chabon lives in both worlds, as a literary writer and as
a popular writer. But you are listening to a guy who's a little bit paranoid
about that, because I've had my ass burned a lot of times.
Q: How does Tabitha feel about Lisey's Story? When did you know
that she was your ideal reader?
King: I knew that Tabby was my ideal reader from the first time that
I gave her something to read, before we were married, which was a story called
"I Am the Doorway" that's in my first collection, Night
Shift. She said, "This is really good." And that's usually the
extent of her comments, if she likes something. She will line-edit, and she
will always tell me if she thinks something really sucks. She'll say, "This
is terrible." With Lisey's Story, she said, "It's good."
She said, "It makes me nervous, because people are going to take the two
characters for you and me." "Well," I said, "it's not you
and me." She said, "I know that, but will they know that?" And
I said, "I'll tell 'em." She said, "They won't necessarily hear
you."
So: Scott and Lisey are not me and Tabby. We have been married a long time,
but unlike Lisey, Tabby did graduate from college, and she's written books of
her own, and they're good ones. Scott and Lisey are childless, and we have three
wonderful kids that are no longer kids and are all grown up. We actually have
three grandchildren now, so that's a good thing.
Q: Will you sing us a song?
King: No. I'm not going to do that. I love the old folkies, and I always
have. I'm just a grown-up folkie, an old folkie (and an old fogey, that's true).
I learned guitar from a lot of folk musicians, Tom Rush and Phil Ochs, and a
guy named Dave von Ronk. The computer is a wonderful thing, and I discovered
the crack of my generation: it's called iTunes. I love that thing. It's painful
for me because I love it so much. I try to find old Dave van Ronk stuff, there's
an old song called "Cocaine Blues," and he's got a version on there
that I never heard before, and it goes, If you've got something that you
want him to tell, just give him a mirror and a twenty-dollar bill. I love
that. Maybe you had to be into the stuff.
Q: Name a book or a story you wish you'd written.
King: I wish I'd written Lord
of the Flies. I love that book. People will ask, What's the first book that
ever scared you?, and that was the first book that ever really scared me. It
terrified me.
As far as stories, I think that a lot of the early Ray
Bradbury stories were ones that made an impression. There's one about a
little boy who has a dog that brings things to him, and the little boy is sick,
he has rheumatic fever and he can't get out of bed. The dog brings back visitors,
a lot of times, and he's in the fourth grade, and he misses his class so, and
he loves his teacher, Miss Martin. So the dog brings back classmates, and the
dog brings back the smell of the fall, and the kid puts his face in the dog's
fur and smells the leaves and the frost. The boy says to the dog, "I really
wish that you would bring back Miss Martin, I wish you'd bring back Miss Martin
to visit." The dog goes out again, and the kid's mother comes in and says,
"I have something terrible to tell you. Miss Martin died. She died a few
weeks ago, and we hadn't wanted to tell you quite yet. She died, and she's been
buried." Then the dog comes back, this time looking very tired, he's limping,
and this time when the little boy smells his fur, he smells dirt and rot, and
pretty soon there's a shadow that falls across his bed, and he wakes up, and
the last line of the story is, "The little boy had company." [laughter]
We laugh, because we feel embarrassed about screaming at something. But this
stuff is like a capsule; it's time release. You'll think about it later. When
you get into your car. In the dark.
I never forgot that, in The
Haunting of Hill House, the first one, the good one, the Robert Wise black-and-white
one, the housekeeper keeps saying, "No one lives any closer than town,
no one will come any closer than that, so no one will hear you if you scream.
In the dark. In the night."
Q: What's the question you'd most like to be asked but never have been?
King: What's the question you'd most like to be asked.... Okay, let's
just forget that one, because I can't think of any right now. What color underwear
am I wearing? I've never been asked that. Somebody once asked me at one of these
readings, "What is it? Boxers or briefs?" And I said, "Depends."
My wife was at that one, and she said, "Nobody loves a smart-ass."
Q: What is your favorite book written by you?
King: My favorite book is Lisey's Story, which is why I'm here.
[laughter] You know, I like Misery,
and I have a soft spot for The
Dead Zone because I thought that was my first real novel, but there were
a lot of good ones that I still like. And I like Cujo,
because it was the first one set all in one place.
I have such a reputation for being a horror writer; we have a place in Florida
where we go in the wintertime. We didn't want to go, but at a certain age it's
a law. My wife goes, and she does the weekly shopping on Friday, and if we need
something else during the week, then I go, which seems like a fair tradeoff,
because I always get to use the express lane. So I'm there one day, and I'm
going up the aisle that has pet food on one side and things on the other side
— which is, you know, things, like potato mashers and things that have
Teflon on them. Things. The ones they sell on cable tv. So this woman comes
up to me and she goes, "I know who you are." I guess she's about eighty;
she's got that orange hair. She says, "I know who you are! You're that
horror writer. You're Stephen King." I said "Yes, guilty as charged."
She said, "I don't read what you do. I respect what you do, but I don't
read it. Why don't you do something uplifting sometime, like that Shawshank
Redemption?" I said, "I did write that." She said, "No,
you didn't." It was surreal. It was like, What question have you never
been asked? What clothes have you never worn? What person did you never meet?
It was weird.
Q: Are you going to write an autobiography?
King: I don't think so. I got as close to that as I'm going to get in
On Writing.
Q: When you were writing the Dark Tower series, did you know that
it would bring together all the worlds of your previous works?
King: From almost the beginning, I thought to myself, if I'm going to create fictional
towns in Maine, really, they all ought to be close to one another, and I ought
to be able to go back to those places, and it just seemed natural to refer to
some of the other books. I've read other novelists who do that, and by then,
I'd been working on the Dark Tower series longer than any of the other books,
except for a couple of the Bachman
books, like The Running
Man and The Long Walk,
which I wrote before I was able to shave, and they show it.
Particularly after I knew that I was going to play a part in the books, I think
what really made that a necessity in my own mind was that a lot of the continuity
was screwed up in the early books. There were a lot of mistakes in those books.
Co-op City in New York was in the wrong borough. The A Train in New York doesn't
stop where Susanna originally lost her legs. I thought, Well, if those things
are wrong, they're wrong because I got them wrong. If I'm the influence in their
world, that's got to be the only reason why. To me, there's never really
a problem, there's always an opportunity. What I don't refer to in the other
works is that I'm the creator of all these works. It's always seemed to me that
a writer in some ways is a God in his worlds. If that person dies, the world
would kind of freeze, if you see what I mean.
Q: What books are on your nightstand?
King: Not too much right now, because I'm traveling, but there's novel
called China Lake, and
I brought something else to read that is so vivid that I can't remember what
it is. It's in my bag; it's a galley. I have mostly been reading short stories
this year. I've got to edit Best
American Short Stories, so I've been caught in short story hell. I've read
like 400 of those suckers — the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Q: Do you find anything in Oregon scary?
King: Actually, I have a history with Oregon, because my daughter went
to Reed for two years. When she transferred back to the University of Southern
Maine, she had a car, and she asked me if I would drive it back across the country.
I said that I would, and I came out here, and I stayed at the Heathman Hotel,
and I couldn't sleep. In the course of that night, I thought, Maybe I have insomnia.
That idea occurred to me; that was the kernel of that idea, and I worked it
out in the book.
Then, just a few days later, when I was driving through some little town in
Nevada, there was nobody on the streets, and that place was entirely deserted.
Except there was a cop car parked in one of the slanted parking spaces, and
I saw the cop walking down the sidewalk. He was a big guy, and I thought to
myself, Oh, I know where everybody is — that cop killed them all.
That was the idea for Desperation.
So if I'm going to get ideas like that every time I'm in Oregon, then I just
love this place.
Q: How's the Dark Tower comic series coming along?
King: It starts next February, and it's beautiful.
Q: Do you miss Roland?
King: Yes, I do. I miss all those characters.
I'm not a strong believer in spoilers. I hate that; it's childish for people
to say, "Oh, you spoiled that! You told me something that spoiled that!"
I don't think you can really spoil something — or, under ordinary circumstances
you can't do so. There was a college freshman who came to interview James
M. Cain towards the end of his life. Cain was the guy who wrote The
Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred
Pierce, and Double Indemnity.
Double Indemnity was made into a wonderful movie
with Frederick McMurray. I never forgot the scene where Barbara Stanwyck hands
him a glass of iced tea, and he takes a sip, and she says, "How is it?"
And he says, "A little bourbon would really get this up on its feet."
I love that line.
The premier literary critic at that time, the Harold Bloom of his day, was
Edmund Wilson,
and he dismissed the book in one line. He said, "We don't need the jungle
in the lunchroom." A lot of times, that's what popular fiction's had to
contend with, that immediate dismissal. But that's beside the point; that's
neither here nor there. James Cain revolutionized — he opened my eyes,
let's put it that way. And this guy came and sat down with Cain, and the first
thing that he said was, he moaned about how the movies had ruined all James
M. Cain's books. Cain said, "No, they haven't, young fella; they're all
right behind me," and pointed at the shelf in the back of the room. And
that's true, they're all there, so I don't think there are such things as spoilers,
and I think it's hard to ruin a book because they're still up on shelves.
Anybody who's ever read a book and then reread a book knows that the pleasure
is sometimes even deeper with a good book the second time through. You find
things that you forgot, and say, Oh, this is a good part. You find things
that you remember and you say Oh, this is a great part. So I miss Roland.
Sometimes I'm glad that that series is over because the last three books just
about killed me, to the point that I announced my retirement. For a while there,
I thought I was going to announce my death. It was the equivalent of writing
twenty-five hundred pages, all at the same time, all at a go. On that score,
I was glad to wave goodbye. But on the other hand I got to like them all. Roland
and Susannah and Eddie Dean, and Oy; I liked those guys a lot. They were good
company over the years for me.
The funny thing is, people asked for those
books. Not everybody — they were a special community, a pretty large
one though by no means a gigantic one, a subset of what I would call the fan
base, but they were very, very loyal, and I felt the same way. I would finish
a Dark Tower book, and some years would go by, and I would think, I don't know
if I want to do any more of this. I'm kind of used up on it. But when I went
back, it was always like, Let me in. I can't wait to do more. So that
was good.
And you've been good; you've been a great audience. I really appreciate
you having me here, and take a look into the back of your car.
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