by George Beahm
Stephen King: Man and Artist provides an invaluable next step in the critical transformation of our assumptions about King, elevating him from mere shockmeister to acknowledged voice of an age. Terrell is to be congratulated as much for his courage in accepting such a task as for the wealth of knowledge and perception he marshalls in fulfilling it.
Terrell, an early reader of The Long Walk, found himself in an awkward position. He knew King wanted feedback, and was hopeful that the book was publishable, but Terrell wasn’t optimistic. As he wrote in Stephen King: Man and Artist,
My dilemma can be posed as a question. How could I talk to him about his book and do three things at the same time: (1) Tell him how remarkable it was, but (2) tell him there wasn’t a nickel’s worth of chance that anyone would publish it; and (3) because of these two things encourage him to keep working; that is, to hold out hope but not false hope. At this distance in time I remember only a few things about our discussion, but even so I remember a whole lot more than I do of talks with anyone else twenty years ago. After praising the book as a whole, I told him it posed certain technical problems which would require more practice for him to solve. The design of the book made the action repetitive and got him into a kind of “another Indian bit the dust” trap. The solution to that might be a more extensive use of flashback to flesh out the characters.
I am conscious now that I thought The Long Walk was a first novel. But I should have known that it could have been no such thing: No one could have written such a balanced and designed book without a lot of practice; not just aimless practice, but conscious and designed practice. It wasn’t until some years later that I knew about the several books he had written in high school. They have the same problem: certainly no one could write Rage or The Running Man without a lot of practice. The evidence we have before us shows that he must have started writing as early as the sixth grade. Both of these books showed a conscious knowledge of unities and form, as well as a deep understanding of the causes of slowly maturing emotional states.…
Buoyed by the enthusiasm of his college professors, King submitted the fledgling novel, hoping for a quick sale, but Terrell felt that wasn’t a likely possibility. As he explained to King: “I thought the book was potentially marketable, but not something in 1969 that a publisher would give an advance on. So I told him they’d read it, tell him it showed great promise, and invite him to send the completed version, but they wouldn’t give an unknown either an advance or a contract. A few weeks later, he handed me a letter from a publisher and said something like: ‘At least you hit this nail on the head.’”
PART TWO:
PRE-CARRIE:
A HARDSCRABBLE LIFE
Reimagining of the Kings’ rented trailer in Hermon, Maine by Glenn Chadbourne.
11
A WRITER’S NIGHTMARE, A WRITER’S DREAM
All the claustrophobic fears would squeeze in on me then, and I’d wonder if it hadn’t already all passed by me, if I weren’t just chasing a fool’s dream, and I’d say to myself, “Shit, King, face it; you’re going to be teaching fuckin’ high school kids for the rest of your life.”
—STEPHEN KING, PLAYBOY, 1983
A MINIMUM WAGE EARNER
After graduating from college, Stephen King moved out of a cabin by the river and into an apartment in Orono. Encouraged by Chris Chesley’s enthusiastic comments, King picked up pages he had written about what would become one of his most famous characters, a gunslinger named Roland, and continued to write. He was on the long road of chronicling the epic tale of Roland and his journey to the Dark Tower.
Like others armed with recently minted teaching certificates, King discovered that having a diploma didn’t automatically open doors. Teaching positions were scarce, and he was unable to find gainful employment in his field in the surrounding school systems. Had he chosen to range afar and look in other cities or move to a larger city in another state, the odds of finding a teaching job would have been significantly enhanced, but he chose not to do that. Being geographically dislocated from Tabitha Spruce was the major consideration; she was in her senior year and carrying a full load, not only academically but personally: she was visibly pregnant with Naomi.
With no professional employment in the works, King took work where he could find it, pumping gas for $1.25 an hour at a station in nearby Brewer. Later, when an opportunity arose to improve his income, he grabbed it: His wages leaped up to $1.60 an hour at the New Franklin Laundry in Bangor, where he handled industrial loads.
In June 1970, “Slade,” the humorous Western story, began serialization in the University of Maine at Orono campus newspaper; it ran through August. It was free exposure for King’s writing, but also free of charge to the newspaper.
From Stephen King’s perspective, the American dream of earning a college diploma, with its implicit promise of a good-paying job, more closely resembled a Kafkaesque nightmare.
STARTING A FAMILY
On December 29, 1970, a marriage license was issued to Stephen and Tabitha; they lived on North Main Street in Orono. Between Stephen’s poor-paying job at the laundry for which he earned $60 a week, and Tabitha’s rapidly depleting savings account and student loans, they made ends meet as best they could. Their situation, though, became more acute when Naomi Rachel King was born, because it meant another mouth to feed and more bills.
On January 2, 1971, the Kings were married in a church in nearby Old Town.
In March, Stephen King sold his second story to Cavalier: “I Am the Doorway,” which, despite its science fiction trappings, was a horror story. He was on his way, but not fast enough to relieve him of his financial straits.
In May, Tabitha graduated with a B.A. degree in history. But, like Stephen, she was unable to find gainful employment and waitressed the second shift at a Dunkin’ Donuts in downtown Bangor. “Nice aroma at first,” Stephen King told Playboy in an interview. “All fresh and sugary, but it got pretty goddamned cloying after a while—I haven’t been able to look a doughnut in the face ever since.”
In an interview with Douglas Winter, for Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, Tabitha recalled, “I was devastated to get out of college and find that no one wanted to hire me. I had managed to work all of the way through college and make money, only to discover suddenly that my B.A. was worth absolutely nothing.”
Meanwhile, Stephen spent his nights finishing Getting It On, a novel for which he had high hopes. A sale meant welcome money, more than he’d ever earned as a laborer. After reading a suspense novel he borrowed from the library—Loren Singer’s The Parallax View—King said that “it reminded me of my own work” and wrote a query letter to Singer’s editor at Doubleday. But it didn’t go to that editor, who was out sick at the time; it went instead to another Doubleday editor, William G. Thompson, who asked to see the manuscript.
The New Franklin Laundry in Bangor where King worked during college and the summer after graduation.
As King recalled in an essay, “On Becoming a Brand Name”:
I sent him the book. He liked it a great deal, and tried to get Doubleday to publish it. Doubleday declined, a painful blow for me, because I had been allowed to entertain some hope for an extraordinarily long time, and had rewritten the book a third time, trying to bring it in line with what Doubleday’s publishing board would accept.
Thompson delivered the blow as kindly as possible, but it was still a blow.
With both Kings underemployed and their impoverished incomes supplemented with an occasional fiction sale, money was very tight; when a position as an English teacher became available in nearby Hampden, Stephen grabbed the lifeline.
Because Hampden is southwest of Bangor and the Kings lived north of Bangor, it made little sense to stay in the college town. To save on commuting costs—after all, gas cost twenty-five cents a gallon—the Kings moved to downtown Bangor’s Stone Street and defrayed costs by taking on a boarder, Chris Chesley, who was in his first year at the University of Maine at Orono.
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“HOPE IS A GOOD THING”
Teaching is historically a woman’s profession, and as such does not pay well in comparison to other professional jobs. Even today, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor
A sign on the grounds of Hampden Academy, where King taught high school English.
Hampden Academy.
A statue of the Hampden Academy mascot, a bronco.
King reading an issue of Mad magazine in the teacher’s lounge at Hampden Academy.
King in the teacher’s lounge at Hampden Academy.
Statistics report (February 2013), 82 percent of elementary and middle school teachers are women. The same report states that women, on the whole, earn 82 percent of what men earn.
In other words, King had chosen a profession that traditionally doesn’t pay well. King’s salary as an English teacher at Hampden Academy was $6,400. His fear in taking the job was that he’d find himself stuck like a fly caught on flypaper; he’d spend the rest of his life teaching instead of doing what he loved, and what he believed he was born to do: write fiction. If that happened, it would be King’s worst fears realized. But with no prospect of any book sales on the horizon, and no other professional job in the offing, Stephen King took the teaching job. He was gainfully employed, but he knew it came at a cost: it’d take precious time away from writing.
A natural teacher—like his mother, he had a dramatic flair and enjoyed public speaking—Stephen King nonetheless found the teaching experience draining; he described it metaphorically: It was as if he was a car battery and the students were constantly draining him by attaching jumper cables. Moreover, taking papers home to grade and preparing for classes took up precious time in the evenings and weekends. Psychically drained, King forced himself to carve out precious time in the evenings to write fiction. He did so under difficult circumstances, typing on his wife’s portable Olivetti with its square-lettered typeface, hammering away so hard at it that his fingerprints were eventually embedded in its keys.
Because of his low salary, King supplemented his income in the summers by working at the New Franklin Laundry in Bangor for $60 a week. His wife still worked at the doughnut shop, “stealing” her own tips because sharing them, as per the restaurant’s policy, meant she’d take home even less, and they needed every thin dime.
Between their combined incomes, they simply couldn’t get ahead financially. Things had to change. Had to. It meant Stephen would have to keep pursuing his dream as a writer, because his failure meant that they were condemned to live the lives of the working poor, like other people they knew. They’d be living their hardscrabble existence for the foreseeable future—a grim slog.
The following year proved to be no different financially; if anything, it was worse because of more child-related bills: They had their second child, Joseph Hillstrom King, who was born on June 4, 1972. Still a teacher at Hampden Academy, and writing on the side, Stephen at least was able to sell four more stories to Cavalier that year, but once again he had pinned hopes on a “hail Mary” pass, hoping to sell a book to Doubleday written mostly over a Christmas vacation; the novel, Running Man, was science fiction. But the manuscript shot back within a week, albeit with an invitation for King to try again.
Living in a trailer park in Hermon, Maine, money was so tight that they had the phone taken out. In “On Becoming a Brand Name,” King recalled those times as the lowest point in his life. “If anyone should ever ask you, Hermon, Maine, is not Paris, France. It is not even Twin Forks, Idaho. If it is not the pits, it is very close.” But in a Playboy interview, he was less polite, saying that if it wasn’t the asshole of the universe, it was within farting distance of it, which raised a big stink with the town’s officials.
In December, with a slowly dying Buick in their driveway and writer’s block brought on by King’s anxieties about money, King, lacking any fresh ideas, decided to rewrite a story he had begun a previous summer about an outsider named Carrie White. When pushed beyond her breaking point by her high school peers, she used her latent psychic talent to push back hard, laying waste to the town.
To Stephen King, time was money; in other words, he couldn’t afford to spend what little free time he had in writing a story that wasn’t going to sell immediately to his editor at Cavalier. Frustrated with the beginning of the short story, set in a girl’s locker room, he balled up the first few pages and tossed them in the trash. But Tabitha retrieved them, smoothed the wrinkled paper, and began reading. She liked what she read and encouraged Stephen to carry on. He protested that he didn’t know anything about what went on in a girl’s locker room in high school. She countered, saying that she’d help him, and she did. Stephen carried on.
The problem, though, was that King had hoped to sell it to Cavalier, but the short story had morphed into a novella of twenty-five-thousand words, which was far too long for the magazine. Lacking any other story ideas, though, King figured that he was in for a penny, in for a pound, and began rewriting and adding bogus documentation to boost the wordage to fifty thousand words.
Cavalier as a potential market was out of the question, but perhaps Bill Thompson at Doubleday might possibly be interested in a short novel, since they had asked for another submission.
In “On Becoming a Brand Name,” King wrote, “My considered opinion was that I had written the world’s all-time loser. The only thing I could say about Carrie was that it had a beginning, a middle and an end, and that for some crazy reason my wife liked it better than anything I’d written before.”
12
“A GOOD ANGEL”:
CAVALIER EDITOR NYE WILLDEN
The mechanics of writing fiction back in the days before word processors and computers was no simple matter; from start to finish, it was tedious work. And if the editor who received the manuscript decided changes were warranted, it meant retyping the manuscript again.
Back in the early to mid-seventies when King was submitting to Cavalier, the best typewriter on the market was the IBM Selectric, so named because you could select different typefaces by changing the type element, commonly called a “golf ball.” An electric, state-of-the-art typewriter, the Selectric was the preferred machine of its day found mostly in the offices of Fortune 500 companies that could afford it.
Though King, a two-finger typist, would have loved to have one, he could not afford it. He had instead hammered out stories on his wife’s inexpensive electric typewriter, a Smith Corona.
When King broke in with his first sale at Cavalier, it opened the door to further submissions, to the point where King became a regular, and developed a working relationship with an associate editor, Nye Willden.
But getting paid was no easy matter. Magazines like Cavalier paid on publication, not on acceptance, so it meant waiting months. In contrast, Playboy paid up to two thousand dollars on acceptance, which made it a popular market for professional writers.
Though Cavalier sold principally on its sexy contents, King never submitted any erotic fiction because he couldn’t write it without cracking up. When he was at the University of Maine at Orono and money was very tight, he attempted to write erotica to pay the bills and began a short story about a pair of sexy twin girls in a birdbath, but he did not complete it. He’d leave erotica to other writers who were more bound to please.
In his essay, “On Becoming a Brand Name,” Stephen King characterized Willden as “a good angel.” It was Willden at Cavalier who read, encouraged, and bought Stephen King’s short fiction pieces, most of which were subsequently collected in Night Shift.
King finally broke in at Cavalier in its October 1970 issue with his story “Graveyard Shift,” which appeared under the byline of “Steve King.” This in-your-face story, with artwork accompanying the piece, made no bones about its subject matter. The artwork depicted an extreme close-up of a rat’s face. It recalls Winston Smith’s nightmare in George Orwell’s 1984, when Smith, his head immobilized, sees a rat in a cage staring him in the face, separated only by a thin wir
e gate. (In 2014, in an interview on People TV, with actress Joan Allen of A Good Marriage, King cited 1984 as the scariest book he had ever read precisely because of that scene.)
In “The Glass Floor,” his first professional publication, in Startling Mystery Stories, King’s name was cover worthy for the October 1970 edition of Cavalier. What did help sell copies was the sexy photo on the cover, which featured a color photo of a naked redhead seductively smiling at the reader. When King finally saw his story in print, it was sandwiched in between photos of naked women and ads for marital aids and X-rated movies and photos. Anyone interested in fiction would not think of Cavalier as a place to find it, unlike Hef’s Playboy, which had a deserved reputation for literary excellence.
In Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, Winter writes that he expressed surprise when he encountered King’s fiction for the first time in Cavalier. While waiting to get his shoes shined at an old-fashioned shoeshine parlor, he turned to the reading material at hand, a random selection of men’s magazines. “The magazine covers,” he wrote, “and most of the revealing photographs had been torn away, leaving the customer with the even more dubious textual content.”
But there was a diamond in the rough: He pulled out an issue of Cavalier with a King story and was struck by its excellence:
[I]t captured me, there in a decaying (and now long-ago demolished) shoeshine parlor in downtown St. Louis, taking me away to a strawberry spring in New England where horror walked in every shadow.
It was his first encounter with King, and it changed his life. The story he had read was “Strawberry Spring,” and he immediately became a King fan.