by Vincent, Bev
[M]y basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course). . . . When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer (Mark Singer) that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn’t believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believe it. . . . Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. [OW]
As King tells Roland and Eddie, “To peek in Gan’s navel does not make one Gan, though many creative people seem to think so.” Because he sees something in his mind’s eye and writes it down does not make him responsible for having created it. He says he once thought he was Gan, but that was pride. Artists are prophets or singers of that which they discover—a little more genteel than “the teller is not worth a tin tinker’s fart,” but the idea is the same.
Pennywise believed in an Outsider, a force beyond the universe, the Turtle’s creator and “the author of all there was.” That description might apply to Stephen King. He claims he killed Jake in The Gunslinger because he didn’t know what else to do with him. “That’s why you usually got rid of characters.” He attempts to allay Roland’s discomfort when the subject comes up. “It was me, after all. I was the one who made you do it.” He recants a few minutes later, admitting that he had lied and that Roland let Jake fall on his own.
When the time arrives for King to write of Jake’s final death, he again distances himself from responsibility, stating that the song of the Turtle, the voice that carries messages from Gan, became Jake’s death song, something he could not ignore. He knows it’s going to anger many readers, but it’s the truth of the story. “He died on his own. I didn’t tell him to,” he often said in defense of Tad’s death in Cujo. “I just looked back at him and he was gone.”10
He tells Roland he would have been much better off if the gunslinger had died on the Western Sea beach after his encounter with the lobstrosities. “I love to write stories, but I don’t want to write your story.” Often he’s an unwilling instrument, hating ka for making him kill beloved characters. He has no choice. That’s how the artifact revealed itself when King exposed it.
When The Waste Lands ended in a cliff-hanger, King wrote in the afterword, “Books which write themselves (as this one did for the most part) must be allowed to end themselves.” Around the same time, he told Writer’s Digest that working on the Dark Tower was like excavating a huge buried city. In a pessimistic mood, he said he’d never live to uncover it all.
In a letter to fans prior to the release of Wizard and Glass, he wrote, “The creative part of what passed for my mind does not run on a timetable.” In the book’s afterword, he echoes words uttered by Susannah Dean to describe returning to the series after each prolonged break between books: “It’s hard to begin.” But in the coda to Song of Susannah, his fictional counterpart says, “Writing this story is the one that always feels like coming home.”
King’s history with the Dark Tower can be summed up with this quote: “The wind blows and the story comes. Then it stops blowing, and all I can do is wait, the same as you.” With no clear idea where the story was going, each time he sat down to work on the next installment after a break of four or five years, he had to open himself up to whatever the Muses had in store for him. “This [story] is so out of control it’s ridiculous. It really is more like watching something happen—or listening to a song—than writing a damned made up story.” [DT6]
Though he once created a complex outline of the series, he lost it. In On Writing he talks about writers “enslaved to . . . the tiresome tyranny of the outline.” People asked him how the story was going to turn out, afraid they wouldn’t live to see the next installment or that King wouldn’t live to complete the story. He sympathized, but couldn’t answer. “To know I have to write . . . I have no more idea what’s inside that damned Tower than . . . well, than Oy does!” [DT6] The parts of the story that he hadn’t written yet were trapped, sleeping inarticulate in his subconscious, “creatures without breath locked behind an unfound door,” as Walter o’Dim said. [DT7]
When Roland and Eddie meet King, they have already lived beyond the part of the story he’s written. King hasn’t uncovered Eddie yet, and knows nothing of Breakers or the Crimson King. His own creations force him to continue the story, but they never tell him what to write. They leave hints of things that have already happened to them, but nothing more.
At the same time, though, the members of the ka-tet seem to acquire knowledge that King has discovered about the series while writing nonseries books. For example, most of Roland’s information about the Crimson King and his intentions comes from no outside source, yet he goes from barely recognizing the name in The Gunslinger to knowing ancient prophecies about him in The Dark Tower. King, apparently, imparts his discoveries to his creations.
Roland understands how Gan is working through King and trusts ka to do what it will. King isn’t meant to force the story or try to map it out. Roland tells him, “When you can’t tell any more, when the Turtle’s song and the Bear’s cry grow faint in your ears, then will you rest. And when you can begin again, you will begin again.” [DT6]
As creator, King’s mistakes and continuity errors become reality for his characters. He mistakenly placed Eddie’s home of Co-Op City in Brooklyn instead of the Bronx. As far as Eddie is concerned, Co-Op City is in Brooklyn. He grew up and played basketball with his brother there. “I refuse to believe that I was raised in Brooklyn simply because of some writer’s mistake, something that will eventually be fixed in the second draft,” Eddie says.
Odetta Holmes lost her legs under the A train at the Christopher Street station. The only problem with that is that the A train doesn’t go to Christopher Street in Keystone Earth, the 1/9 does. That little detail is small comfort to Odetta, legless in spite of King’s error.
King’s characters also express some of his views about being a public person. After a lengthy meet-and-greet session on the steps at Took’s General Store in Calla Bryn Sturgis, Eddie notes how draining it was and observes how he and his friends sometimes resorted to giving “weaselly politicians’ answers” to the villagers. In an interview with Janet Beaulieu, King talked about how there is a tendency to pull “little cassettes” off the shelf and play them in response to questions he’s been asked before, conveniently brief answers that aren’t necessarily true but satisfy the interviewer.
When the Calla-folken pester Jake with questions while he is tending to Oy’s water bowl, the scene is reminiscent of a story King has often told about how tourists photographed him while he walked his dog Marlowe (on whom Oy is based).
King’s real-life accident in 1999 motivated him to finish the last three books in the series. He worried that he might not live long enough to complete the story and, having built the Dark Tower in the collective imagination of a million readers, felt responsible for keeping it safe for as long as people wanted to read the books. Roland’s way of making the Tower safe is by removing the threat to the Beams. King had to do it by finishing the story.
SOMETIMES IN THE NIGHT, when King wakes up from dreams he can’t quite remember, he hears voices. As a writer, it comes with the territory, he says. It’s like he has a Cave of Voices inside his head. When he interviewed himself on his Web site during the late stages of writing The Dark Tower, he said, “All writers talk to themselves. This [self-interview] is just another version of that.”11
Many of his characters share this trait, not only in the Dark Tower series but also in other novels and stories. In Gerald’s Game, trapped alone in a cabin, handcuffed to the bed, Jessie Burlingame holds extended conversations with voices whom she identifies either as other forms of herself or as friends from her past. Ms. Practical-Sensible offers Rosie advice in Rose Madder.
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Roland has a head full of voices offering unsolicited advice. Often it is Cort, his old tutor, nagging him or berating him when something goes wrong. He also hears from Abel Vannay and from Walter and Cuthbert. Eddie sometimes thinks in the voices of other people. “He guessed lots of people did that—it was a way of changing perspective a little, seeing stuff from another angle.” [DT5] Most often he hears his late brother’s voice.
Members of the ka-tet routinely hear each other’s voices advising them, setting them straight. Some of this can be attributed to the extrasensory contact they have with each other, but mostly it comes from their psychological makeup. When Susannah attempts to communicate with Eddie in her Dogan, she gets no answer and thinks that this “wasn’t a situation where talking to herself in Eddie’s voice would do any good.” [DT6]
Secondary characters aren’t immune to this phenomenon. Tian Jaffords hears the voice of his dead father when he has the jitters before the Town Hall meeting in Calla Bryn Sturgis. The voices aren’t always from the subconscious, though it may seem that way. Roland knows that “often the voices that sound the most like our own when they speak in our heads are those of the most terrible outsiders, dangerous intruders.” [DT4]
King’s narrative appearances within The Dark Tower are like his subconscious voice speaking to the reader. With only fifty manuscript pages left, he speaks again, this time referring to himself a little more obliquely.
The road and the tale have both been long, would you not say so? And as Stephen King nears the point where the pages of his manuscript must be told in four figures instead of three, we are all weary of journeying (none more than King himself, who was hurt badly that day on the highway and is still not entirely better of it). The trip has been long and the cost has been high . . . but what of that? No great thing was ever attained easily. A long tale, like a tall Tower, must be built a stone at a time. [DT7]
When Roland is about to see the Tower for the first time, King positions himself with the reader at the top of the hill as the gunslinger and Patrick approach.
Don’t worry, he can’t see us (although he may in truth sense the weight of our eyes). He crests the hill, so close to us that we can smell the sour tang of his sweat. . . . And it’s here we must join him—sink into him—although how we will ever con the territory of Roland’s heart at such a moment as this, when the single-minded goal of his lifetime at last comes in sight, is more than I can tell. Some moments are beyond imagination. [DT7]
Like Johnny Smith from The Dead Zone, the author and his audience are in the vision but unable to interact with anything, only watch. They’ve been swept up on a Beam hurricane. This omniscient viewpoint is reminiscent of the one used in Black House. King wraps his arm around the reader’s shoulder and personally shows him events of incredible import. Reaching this part of the story has been King’s lifelong quest, as well as Roland’s and some of King’s readers’.
One of the most difficult transitions in the series takes place during the night after Roland becomes a gunslinger. In 1970, King wrote the scene in which Roland bests Cort. He returned to Gilead twenty-six years later in Wizard and Glass, continuing with events the following morning. “I found myself confronting myself across a whore’s bed—the unemployed schoolboy with the long black hair and beard on one side, the successful popular novelist . . . on the other.” [DT4] King asked himself if he was capable of tackling a story of youthful romance.
“I will help you with that part, came the reply. I didn’t know who the voice belonged to on that day . . . but I do now, because I have looked into his eyes across a whore’s bed in a land that exists very clearly in my imagination. Roland’s love for Susan Delgado (and hers for him) is what was told to me by the boy who began this story.” [DT4] By twenty-two-year-old Stephen King, in other words.
King calls himself a popular novelist, the kind who asks what a story would mean to others, as opposed to the literary novelist who asks what writing a certain story would mean to himself. The “serious” novelist is looking for answers; the “popular” novelist is looking for an audience. Both are equally selfish, he says. “I believe now that the best stories are stories that are generous and welcome the reader in.”12
Ted Brautigan warns against being a snob, citing the Clifford D. Simak novel that was King’s inspiration for parallel universes. Brautigan says Simak’s story is great, but the writing is not so great. “Not bad, I don’t mean to say that, but take it from me, there is better.” There are also books full of great writing without good stories. Brautigan counsels Bobby to read sometimes for the story and sometimes for the language. “When you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.” [HA] Good books, he says, don’t give up all their secrets at once. “A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give . . . eventually.” [HA]13
In his dedication to the final book, King writes, “He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute. Therefore, Constant Reader, this final book in the Dark Tower cycle is dedicated to you,” acknowledging his readership as a necessary part in the process. Though he welcomes readers into the story, in the afterword he is careful to keep this invitation from seeming more than it is. “My books are my way of knowing you. Let them be your way of knowing me, as well. It’s enough.” [DT7]
Roland reaches the Dark Tower a thousand years after he set out from Gilead and more than three decades after King wrote, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” For the author, the story could have ended there. After all, “Fair is whatever God wants to do,” as he writes in an epigraph at the beginning of Song of Susannah.
From his long experience with fans, though, King knows that merely standing Roland in front of the door of the Tower, bringing together the man and the object of his quest, as Robert Browning did, will not be enough. For King, the journey and what was learned along the way is what’s important, not the goal itself. Addressing those hypothetical readers who would shriek in outrage if the series ended there, those who would insist they paid their money to follow Roland into the Tower, King says, “You are the cruel ones who deny the Grey Havens, where tired characters go to rest.”
“I hope you came to hear the tale, and not the ending,” he writes. Endings are nothing more than the final page in a book, which readers could turn to without experiencing the journey. He writes endings only because it is the “custom of the country,” like putting on his pants in the morning. There has never been an ending as happy as a beginning like “Once upon a time.” Endings are heartless, just another word for good-bye. Closed doors that can never be opened.
Elsewhere, he says:
Did they all live happily ever after?14 They did not. No one ever does, in spite of what the stories may say. They had their good days, as you do, and they had their bad days, and you know about those. They had their victories, as you do, and they had their defeats, and you know about those, too. There were times when they felt ashamed of themselves, knowing that they had not done their best, and there were times when they knew they had stood where their God had meant them to stand. All I’m trying to say is that they lived as well as they could, each and every one of them; some lived longer than others, but all lived well, and bravely, and I love them all, and am not ashamed of my love. [ED]
Roland once said, “No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves, don’t we?” [DT5] King has provided one ending already, as close to “happily ever after” as he could get. Eddie, Susannah and Jake are together with a promise that some version of Oy might join their happy little family. He warns readers that they may not find what comes next as satisfying.
He takes that last key from his belt and opens the UNFOUND door—which now reads FOUND—and follows Roland through the portal to a staircase that winds upward through his
life, until he at last reaches the top.
Did the series end as he planned? “It’s like shooting a nuclear missile over 3,000 miles. You’re happy if it lands in the same neighborhood where you wanted it to finish up. And that’s pretty much what I did. I would say that once I got a little way down the path, I was pretty well locked in on where it was going to come out.”15
In the final afterword, though, he writes,
I wasn’t that crazy about the ending, either, if you want to know the truth, but it’s the right ending. The only ending, in fact. You have to remember that I don’t make these things up, exactly; I only write down what I see.
I never worked harder on a project in my life, and I know—none better, alas—that it has not been entirely successful. What work of make-believe ever is? And yet for all that, I would not give back a single minute of the time that I lived in Roland’s world. Those days in Mid-World and End-World were quite extraordinary.
Thank you for going there with me. [DT7]
ENDNOTES
1 “Also, she wrote good old Western stories that you could really sink your teeth into, not all full of make-believe monsters and a bunch of dirty words, like the books that fellow who lived up Bangor way wrote.” [TK]
2 “You were starting to sound a little like a Stephen King novel for a while there” (Thinner, by Richard Bachman).
3 For a slightly different take on the relationship between art and creation, see King’s novelette “Stationary Bike” in Borderlands 5, Borderlands Press, 2003.
4 “Slade,” The Maine Campus, June–August 1970.
5 “The Blue Air Compressor,” first published in Onan magazine (The University of Maine, Orono), January 1971. Later revised for Heavy Metal magazine, July 1981.