The Stephen King Companion

by George Beahm

  I remember a meeting in which the students and faculty were supposed to get together and talk about the curriculum of the English department. Several people have a memory of Steve standing up and denouncing the department, because he had never been able to read a Shirley Jackson novel in any of the courses he had taken. So he criticized the curriculum and constantly insisted on the value and importance of popular culture and mass culture.

  What I’m trying to circle toward here is the fact that either during his junior or senior year, he proposed a course on popular American fiction. He wanted to do a special seminar, which produced a crisis because here was an undergraduate proposing to teach a course. Graham Adams agreed to be a front person for the course, but I didn’t participate. Nobody seems to have tuned in to Graham as somebody who had an important part in Stephen’s life.

  GB: Why is Shirley Jackson not relegated to the horror genre?

  Burton Hatlen: What’s worth remembering about Shirley Jackson is that she was married to one of the most influential literary critics at that time. Not only was there the connection with Stanley Edgar Hyman, who taught at Bennington College, but Kenneth Burke, a high-powered, erudite critic who was also teaching there, and he was writing about Shirley Jackson early on. She had entrée into the literary world.

  GB: After King graduated from the university, he returned to teach as a writer in residence. How did that come about?

  Burton Hatlen: Ted Holmes was forced to retire at sixty-five, so we then had the question of what to do with a creative writing position. Ted also had the Lloyd Elliot chair. So what the department decided, instead of bringing in a permanent creative writing teacher, was to bring in writers for relatively short periods. Steve was invited, and he accepted the offer.

  The understanding was that it was for one year, although we tried to talk him into extending it, but he didn’t want to. I think he wanted to come back and be in the university in the English department in a different role than previously. Perhaps it was a curiosity: What would teaching be like?

  When he was a student, he was never really quite a student, but he was never really a faculty member, either. Now, he had a position as a member of the faculty. He was so different from most students. He had such a clearly defined identity and a sense of purpose. I think that’s quite unusual—for a student to know so clearly and decisively what he wanted to do, and [to be] on the way to doing it as an undergraduate.

  GB: He had a real sense of purpose as a writer.

  Burton Hatlen: Yes. Remember, he started writing Rage before he came [to the university], between his high school graduation and his first year of college. Rage does not seem to me to be a fully successful book. I still think The Long Walk is a first-rate book. I think it’s a better book than Carrie. I think it was the best thing he wrote as an undergraduate, and the best thing he wrote until ’Salem’s Lot.

  GB: I believe that the mechanics of writing can be taught, unlike the art of storytelling, which is innate.

  Burton Hatlen: I agree with that. That was what was most striking about The Long Walk. Steve had a fully developed sense of narrative and pace. One day I happened to have brought it home and laid it on the dining room table. My wife picked it up, started reading it, and couldn’t stop. That was also my experience. The narrative grabbed and carried you forward. The narrative sense was fully developed. It was like it was all there already. It was really quite amazing to see that.

  GB: What about the Bachman pen name? Was it an open secret at the university?

  Burton Hatlen: A few of us knew. I obviously knew, but I was sworn to secrecy and preserved it.

  GB: Did you ever have Tabitha King as a student?

  Burton Hatlen: She was never a student of mine. I came to know her through the poetry workshop because there was another special seminar that’s important to this story: We had a great success with it in the spring semester of 1968, so in the fall of 1969, the seminar was repeated.

  The Kittery Bridge connecting New Hampshire and Maine.

  “Welcome to Maine” road sign after crossing the Kittery Bridge.

  9

  CROSSING THE KITTERY BRIDGE1 INTO MAINE’S HEART OF DARKNESS

  I have been asked time and again why I want to live here. Of course we fell in love with the house we live in. [West Broadway] attracted us, with its graceful Victorian homes, its lovely trees, and its feeling of being a peaceful sort of inlet very close to the bustle of downtown.

  —STEPHEN KING, FROM A NOVELIST’S PERSPECTIVE ON BANGOR,

  BANGOR HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 1983

  The Sarah Long Bridge connecting Portsmouth, NH to Kittery, Maine,

  The Kings’ main home in Bangor, Maine.

  IT’S WICKED COLD IN MAINE

  Burton Hatlen wrote eloquently about Stephen King’s “myth of Maine.” His thesis was that King chose Maine, and has made it his own, just as Steinbeck claimed California’s Salinas Valley and Faulkner claimed Mississippi’s Yoknapatawpha County.

  Today, King could buy a home anywhere in the world. But before he bought a home in Florida in 2001, and a second Florida home down the road for visiting family in 2007, the Kings called Maine home on a year-round basis. Unlike the “summah folk from away” who only come up when the weather is good, in the spring and summer, Stephen King has spent most of his life in Maine.

  One wag on his Web site suggested “Maine is for Maniacs,” which suggests you’d have to be crazy to live in a state with record-setting cold winters.

  Let’s face it: If you live in Maine, you’ve got to be of hardy stock. The winters aren’t so much experienced as they are endured; and as they say about old age, which is also true for Maine winters: It ain’t for sissies.

  Ayuh, it’s wicked cold in the winter months.

  Stephen King’s main haunts in Maine include: Durham (as a youth), Orono (as a college student), Bangor and environs (pre-Carrie), Bridgton (where he bought his first home, which he has since sold), Center Lovell, and, finally, back to Bangor, on West Broadway, part of the historic district, where lumber barons in the nineteenth century built their palatial homes.

  The Kings’ main home in Bangor is the most distinctive on West Broadway, and fans who come from around the world to see it and take photos will have no difficulty finding it. With its high, cast iron fence decorated with bats and a three-headed creature right out of “The Mist,” the red-colored house is a standout.

  The other folks who live on West Broadway don’t miss any meals, either, but their houses, and the nearby streets, contrast sharply with those near the Penobscot River, where blue-collar folks live. The Kings would recognize that neighborhood because they used to live on Stone Street, in a walk-up apartment.

  If you want to see the “summah” folk, you can start in southern Maine, in York, or in Freeport, which are havens for bargain-hunting shoppers at outlet stores that have sprung up like mushrooms after a warm spring shower.

  Further north is Maine’s capital city, Portland, which is trendy and upscale. The Kings considered moving there—Tabitha preferred Portland; Stephen preferred Bangor—but chose Bangor partly because Stephen needed to research a novel titled It, which was set in Bangor, fictionalized as Derry.

  Still further north, hugging the coastline, is Bar Harbor. It’s a favorite tourist spot, but the prices for lodging at the best resorts in town are surprisingly affordable, especially when contrasted to a big city like Boston. That’s one of the beauties of Maine: prices are reasonable for practically everything.

  HIDDEN MAINE

  The Maine that tourists don’t see, much less visit, are its small towns. Maine is 85.6 percent wooded, and it’s properly characterized more by its small towns than by its two biggest cities, Portland and Bangor. As of 2013, Portland had an estimated population of 66,318, and Bangor’s is about half that, at 32,673, but they’re small potatoes to other New England cities, notably Boston, with 645,966 people.

  But small-town Maine is what King knows best; thus, it’s the
backdrop for most of his fiction. King knows the texture and distinctive “feel” of rural Maine because he’s lived there. For example, in Durham, when the Kings’ well went dry, so did their toilet. They had to go out back to the outhouse, which stank to high heaven in the summer and was wicked cold in the winter.

  Air-conditioning? Out of the question. Television? It was years after they moved to Durham that a used television found its way into the house. Their neighbors—some better off, some worse—worked blue-collar jobs in nearby towns. There’s no town in Durham named Easy Street.

  When Stephen King was a college student living in the dorms in Orono, he was, as Tabitha recalled, as poor as only a college student could be; he had no money, and didn’t care, she wrote. He was only interested in perfecting his craft, learning how to write, and getting out of college to pursue his writing career.

  Living in Hermon, in a trailer from which they were unceremoniously evicted, the Kings saw snow-covered fields and heard snowmobiles buzzing across the landscape. The fields were alive with the sound of gunshots, and one day a trigger-happy hunter shot the Kings’ family dog; Stephen carried it back home on his back, with one leg nearly shot off. He has no good memories of Hermon and has said so to the media, to the town’s discomfort. (No wonder they canceled Stephen King Day, about which he never gave a tinker’s fart.)

  King sees a view of Maine filled with rented trailers, backyards littered with used cars, and modest one-story homes where the working class live. It’s rural Maine where woodstoves heat the house in the winter and where it’s thirty-year mortgages because people can’t afford a shorter-term loan. It’s used cars, not new ones; dinners in, not dinners out; and “staycations” instead of real vacations, which are what folks with money can enjoy.

  When the tourists in their Mercedes and Audis go home, heading south to cross the Kittery Bridge when the weather turns cold, away from the heart of darkness, they leave behind the lifelong Mainers who have to stick it out during the harsh winters and the even harder times.

  In one of his essays on Stephen King, Burton Hatlen, who came from California to finally settle down in Maine, quoted a longtime resident: “The only people who stay here are the ones who can’t scrape together enough money to leave.”

  They leave like the Joads did from Oklahoma, on their trek to California, the promised land, chronicled in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Hatlen, similarly, writes of an exodus of the poor from Maine:

  And as you watch the fleet of cars heading south over the Kittery Bridge in the last week of August, you’ll see a few Maine cars mixed in, towing trailers loaded not with camping gear but with faded mattresses and chrome and Formica kitchen sets, headed south for Connecticut or wherever, hoping to leave behind that darkness back among the fir trees—although, as Stephen King also likes to remind us, you always carry that dark spot in your heart with you, wherever you go.

  They can escape and get away, but as King reminds us, you can take the man out of Maine, but you can’t take Maine out of the man.

  That “dark spot” is Maine’s real heart of darkness.

  OUTSIDERS

  The conventional perception is that Mainers are naturally suspicious of outsiders, and there’s some truth in that. In “The Mist,” a big-city lawyer named Brenton Norton refuses to accept reality, even when the evidence is incontrovertible; he stubbornly resists going to the back area of the supermarket to see the physical remains of a monster’s tentacle. He figures it’s just another example of how he, the outsider, will be the butt of the townsfolk’s jokes.

  As he told the Mainers:

  It’s a banana skin and I’m the guy that’s supposed to slip on it. None of you people are exactly crazy about out-of-towners, am I right? You all pretty much stick together. The way it happened when I hauled you into court to get what was rightfully mine. You won that one, all right. Why not? Your father was the famous artist, and it’s your town. I only pay my taxes and spend my money here!

  “Keep Maine Green, Bring Money” is a slogan on a sign mentioned in King’s short story, “The Road Virus Heads North.” Those Mainers readily accept the cash but won’t easily accept the tourists into their compartmentalized lives.

  But sometimes they are accepted, as in The Colorado Kid, which features a pretty twenty-two-year-old recent college graduate nicknamed Steff, who is an intern writing for The Weekly Islander. She’s “from away,” a Maine expression for out-of-towners, but her mentors, well-seasoned Maine old-timers (Dave is sixty-five, and Vince is ninety), like and respect her—although they do like to “shock her young bones.”

  Steff earns her mentors’ respect and is accepted by them, but that’s not usually the case. Mainers look askance at strangers, and are bemused by rich tourists who come with their airs and preconceived notions of how to fit in. They’re usually city folk who only see the veneer of Maine; they never see its true, dark nature.

  Burton Hatlen called them the “Summer People” and characterized them as

  lean and quietly polite and carefully casual when you meet them in the corner store, copies of the Maine Times tucked under their arms. They’re headed for a cedar-shingled cottage (“been in the family for three generations”) nestled among the pines, a few yards up from a piece of rock-rimmed shoreline … and with a neat, white sailboat (“just a thirty-footer”) bobbling picturesquely, discreetly, a dozen yards or so offshore.

  Hatlen explains that they are the “middle class folks with their trailers or their campers or, occasionally, their huge, rectangular motor homes, and the rich folks with their shore estates and their yachts—make the trek north to Maine every summer” because they want to get away from the stress of the people-choked cities and suburbs.

  BUT IF…

  If King had been born into a solidly middle-class family, his fiction would reflect that world, and perhaps focus on the angst of modern-day life in the cities and suburbs. The stories would be mainstream fiction and reflect a world in which many of King’s current readers live in.

  But King doesn’t write those kinds of stories. He writes best about the underprivileged, the put-upon, the unfortunate, the dispossessed: an outsider named Carrie whose monstrous treatment at the hands of her peers causes her to vent her destructive fury; Ben Mears, a one-time successful novelist whose career had stalled, perhaps forever; Jack Torrance, an alcoholic whose writing career, and life, is slowly but inexorably spiraling downward; Johnny Smith, a schoolteacher whose spin on the wheel of (mis)fortune takes a bad turn; Dolores Claiborne from Little Tall Island—the list grows long.

  They aren’t the scions of high society, the captains of industry, the powerful and elite. They are ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances and indelibly captured with the “camera” lens of King’s imagination in word pictures that linger in our mind’s eye.

  Moose Crossing: a replica of a frequently seen road sign in Maine.

  1 The bridge that connects New Hampshire to Maine is called the Piscataqua River Bridge, but because it’s a mouthful to say, locals call it the Kittery Bridge. (It connects Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Kittery, Maine.)

  10

  FROM STUDENT TO TEACHER

  STEPHEN KING AND CARROLL TERRELL

  In 1989, when I was writing the first edition of The Stephen King Companion, I sought out Carroll Terrell, who, as a member of the English faculty at the University of Maine at Orono, served not only as a teacher but a mentor, like Burton Hatlen, to Stephen King.

  In 1988, I spent a pleasant summer afternoon in Orono with Terrell, known to his friends as Terry. He spoke about himself and his connection to Stephen King. That he would turn his critical attention to King spoke of his high regard for his former student, who sought publishing advice.

  On that day I recorded a lengthy interview with Terrell, which I’ve misplaced, but I vividly remember what he wanted to emphasize: the time when King asked him to read and provide feedback on a manuscript (then titled Getting It On and eventually publi
shed by NAL in 1977 as a mass market paperback titled Rage).

  What Terrell told me is exactly what he later wrote in chapter 2 of Stephen King: Man and Artist, which I read in manuscript form. Publishing it at the University of Maine at Orono’s Northern Lights Press, Terrell solicited, and got, blurbs for the book from Stephen King (“I am very pleased and proud to have been the subject of your incisive mind and careful thought”), Dr. Michael R. Collings, and me.

  Professor Terrell, best known as an Ezra Pound scholar, passed away on November 29, 2003. He had also published several volumes of criticism on other poets, including Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Creeley. Fittingly, in Paideuma, a journal of poetry, it was Burton Hatlen who wrote Terrell’s obituary.

  I didn’t know Terrell well, but I knew how much he cherished the memory of that first encounter with King, as well as how carefully he recounted it to me and, subsequently, put it on paper in Stephen King: Man and Artist.

  Long out of print, the first edition of Terrell’s book was published in hardback, in December 1990 (a revised edition, a trade paperback with a print run of 325 copies, was published in 1991).

  I remember giving Terrell advice on how to publish a limited edition for the collector’s market and introduced him to Kenny Ray Linkous, the mercurial artist who illustrated the Philtrum Press edition of The Eyes of the Dragon. Linkous, flattered that Terrell would ask him to illustrate one of his books, drew all the art at no charge and gave the originals to Terrell as a gift. I also wrote a two-page letter praising the book, which he sent out to booksellers with the finished book.

  Of the book, Collings—writing as a scholar evaluating the work of another scholar—said: