by Vincent, Bev
6 The irony here is that, having reached the top of his Tower, the end of his own personal quest for closure to a series that has occupied his life, King returns to the beginning, to a line he wrote in 1970, and Roland returns to the point in his quest where he sensed there was a chance he might succeed.
NOTE: Some quotes in this chapter are from the real Stephen King and others are from King the fictional character. While King is probably echoing his own sentiments through his fictional representation, what the character says does not necessarily reflect King’s real beliefs. Fiction is not reality after all. Or is it?
7 “Honesty’s the best policy.”
8 “What Is Metafiction and Why Are They Saying Such Awful Things About It” in Metafiction, Mark Currie, ed., Harlow, 1995.
9 According to Ted Brautigan.
10 For example, in an interview with the Bangor Daily News, November 1988.
11 www.stephenking.com, June 2002.
12 Interview on NewsNight with Aaron Brown, June 24, 2003.
13 He also says that one nice thing about science fiction and mystery writers is that they rarely “dither” five years between books. “That is the prerogative of serious writers who drink whiskey and have affairs.”
14 King repeats this line in The Dark Tower after Susannah reunites with Jake and Eddie Toren.
15 Interview on Amazon.com, May 2003.
ARGUMENT
MAGNUM OPUS?
On the way to the Dark Tower, anything is possible.
[DT2]
Magnum Opus: From the Latin for “Great Work,” usually the masterpiece or greatest work of an artist’s life.
Who decides what is the greatest work of a person’s career? Is it determined during the artist’s lifetime or not until the dispassionate eye of the future casts its gaze over the entire body of work that person produced? Can a writer have more than one magnum opus?
Will future critics even care? The first indication that they might came when the National Book Foundation named King as the 2003 recipient of a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. While some self-appointed gatekeepers of the literary canon criticized giving the award to a popular writer, the response to this decision was overwhelmingly positive.
Individuals will have different opinions about what work qualifies as Stephen King’s magnum opus. For some fans, it will be The Stand, that enormous, tapestried exploration of good versus evil. “[A]s far as the most passionate of the ‘Stand-fans’ are concerned, I could have died in 1980 without making the world a noticeably poorer place,” King said, referring to the strongly held belief of many readers that The Stand was his best book. [DT1, foreword]
Others will choose It, which rivals The Stand both in size and scope. These two books usually battle for the number one and two positions on fans’ favorites lists. Critics may well consider the complex and insightful The Shining as one of King’s most powerful and sophisticated works. Or the poignant The Green Mile. The literary style of Bag of Bones made many critics sit up and pay attention to King as more than a genre writer.
Many of King’s creations have become part of the lexicon of modern society. Think of a mad dog? Cujo. Scary car? Christine. Prom night? Carrie. Worst vacation resort? The Overlook. Vampires? ’Salem’s Lot, a book that inspired many others to exhume horror from traditionally Gothic settings and bring it into the bright light of contemporary society. Even people who haven’t read King’s books are familiar with many of these icons.
Apart from these stands the Dark Tower series, seven books totaling nearly 4,000 pages that span the entirety of King’s writing career to date. Janet Maslin, book and film critic with the New York Times, called it his magnum opus even before the complete series was published.1
As the preceding chapters have shown, these seven books have exerted their influence on many of his nonseries novels. Still, a substantial percentage of King’s core readership has yet to visit Mid-World. Perhaps with the publication of the final volumes, that will change.
King has known for more than fifteen years where he wanted to go with the series. “In that sense, the long pauses between the books have worked for me, because the books that I wrote instead of the Dark Tower from probably 1988 on . . . all of them refer to the Dark Tower books in some way or another.”2
Peter Straub, King’s collaborator on two books with Dark Tower connections, says that the way King has interwoven the fictional reality of his novels is both playful and serious.
[I]t has given him the liberty to create a grand, gestural suggestiveness as to moral and theological depths ordinarily beyond the scope of individual works of fiction. Great, explanatory meanings hover in the air, musically, as resolution seems to draw near. We know the author has something magnificently significant in mind, and that he is working, maybe even groping, his way toward it. It’s very gutsy. This goes well beyond the normal wish to have all of one’s work eventually be seen as a single entity. . . . What is surprising is that even a writer as true to himself as Stephen King could find so much ongoing possibility, so much space so full of unexpected promise, in an idea which first came to him in his late teens. . . . That King can and wishes to do so indicates two things about him: that his imagination has been internally consistent since his youth, and that even very early on he had an instinct for what would evoke emotional power from him.3
King explores the significance of the Dark Tower series as a part of his body of work in the afterword to Wizard and Glass:
Roland’s story is my Jupiter—a planet that dwarfs all the others (at least from my own perspective), a place of strange atmosphere, crazy landscape, and savage gravitational pull. Dwarfs the others, did I say? I think there’s more to it than that, actually. I am coming to understand that Roland’s world (or worlds) actually contains all the others of my making; there is a place in Mid-World for Randall Flagg, Ralph Roberts, the wandering boys from The Eyes of the Dragon, even Father Callahan, the damned priest from ’Salem’s Lot, who rode out of New England on a Greyhound bus and wound up dwelling on the border of a terrible Mid-World land called Thunderclap. This seems to be where they all finish up, and why not? Mid-World was here first, before all of them, dreaming under the blue gaze of Roland’s bombardier eyes. [DT4]
When asked if he believed the Dark Tower series was his magnum opus, King responded:
Yep, I do. Each time I would stop, I would come back and say, “This time it’s going to be really hard and this time I’m really going to have to dig and force myself to do the job.” And every time it was like the story was just waiting to take me back in. I would say to myself, “Why did I ever stop for as long as I did?” There’s no real answer to that except that when I finished each book there seemed to have to be a pause for the well to refill. . . . Having finished the Dark Tower, it puts a real bow on the whole package. It does kind of summarize everything else. And I think, after that, that everything would be almost kind of like an epilogue to what I’ve done with my life’s work.4
“The Dark Tower finishes everything that I really wanted to say.”5 What else, then, is a magnum opus if not something that both ties together and summarizes a person’s life’s work? On the Today Show, King said that he started working on a novel after finishing the last volume of the Dark Tower series, but it “just went belly-up.” He said he told his wife, “Maybe I really did break it [his creative ability] working on these last three gunslinger books.”6
“I think that probably I’ll find some other things to write. And if I like them, I’ll publish them,” he told Rene Rodriguez of the Miami Herald, but he told the Walden Book Report, “I really don’t know what comes next.”7 As recently as October 2003, King said that he’d tried a couple of times to write a novel but claimed to be struggling. “I’m real flat when it comes to that. I need a little creative Viagra, I guess.”8
King also says that, eventually, all the Dark Tower books will be rewritten. “The same way that if you finished a novel in first or second dra
ft, you’d want to redo it and polish it and make it shine. But I really wanted people to read the new volumes, five, six and seven, because I worked hard on all of them and because the whole thing is finally done.”9
Many readers have traveled with Roland for more than twenty years. Now, the entire story is told, the secrets of Roland’s universe are revealed and the Dark Tower stands firm again as the Beams that support it mend themselves and the field of roses sing.
Roland is back in the desert on the trail of the man in black, but this time there is hope that he will grasp the significance of his quest. That he will come to understand the universe and his place in it. That, in fully understanding himself, he will prevail.
That’s pretty close to “happily ever after.”
A road lined with roses still leads to this slate gray Dark Tower that contains everything, both universal and personal. The magnum opus around which all of King’s realities revolve.
Will people travel down the road to the Dark Tower in years—in generations—to come?
As they say in Mid-World, there will be water if God wills it. In the end, there is only ka.
ENDNOTES
1 Interview with Janet Maslin at the Jacob Burns Film Center, October 30, 2003.
2 Walden Book Report, July 2003.
3 Peter Straub, in “The Dark Tower’s Architecture,” posted to the Penguin Web site in 1997.
4 Interview with Ben Reese on Amazon.com, March 2003.
5 Interview with Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald, May 19, 2003.
6 Interview with Matt Lauer, the Today Show, June 23, 2003.
7 Interview with Walden Book Report, July 2003.
8 Interview with Janet Maslin at the Jacob Burns Film Center, October 30, 2003.
9 Interview with Walden Book Report, July 2003.
APPENDIX I:
TIMELINE (FACT)
Fall 1969: Poem “The Dark Man” published in Ubris.
June–August 1970: “Slade” is published in the Maine Campus newspaper.
June 19, 1970: King starts writing “The Gunslinger.”
December 1971: Poem “The Hardcase Speaks” published in Contraband #2.
October 1978: “The Gunslinger” is published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF).
October 1979: “The Way Station” is accepted for publication in F&SF.
April 1980: “The Way Station” is published in F&SF.
June 1980: King tells his agent, Kirby McCauley, to complete the deal for The Gunslinger with Donald M. Grant.
February 1981: “The Oracle and the Mountains” appears in F&SF.
July 1981: “The Slow Mutants” appears in F&SF.
November 1981: “The Gunslinger and the Dark Man” appears in F&SF.
August 1982: Donald M. Grant publishes The Gunslinger.
September 1983: Pet Sematary is published, and the existence of The Gunslinger becomes known to the world at large.
January 1984: The Gunslinger, second edition, published by Donald M. Grant.
August 1984: NAL pitches the idea of a trade paperback release of The Gunslinger, but King passes.
January 1985: Second printing of The Gunslinger sold out from the publisher. Castle Rock Newsletter (CRN) reports seeing The Gunslinger offered for $50–$100.
February 1985: CRN reports on a Norfolk, Virginia, article that speculated the reason why The Gunslinger was so hard to find was that it was a “dark flop.” The article gave King’s mailing address, which inspired a lot of mail from Virginia.
July 1985: CRN reports $165 for a first printing of The Gunslinger; $65–$85 for second.
October 1985: A 1986 publication date for The Drawing of the Three is postulated.
January 1986: The Gunslinger second printings $75; first printings $200.
June 15, 1986: King begins to write The Drawing of the Three. A tentative release date of “sometime in early 1987” is given in CRN.
September 1986: King finishes writing The Drawing of the Three.
February 1987: Donald M. Grant starts taking orders for The Drawing of the Three: 800 signed ($100) and 30,000 trade ($35 postpaid) copies. Paperback sale of The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three for a proposed 1988 release.
April/May 1987: Excerpt of The Drawing of the Three released in CRN.
June 1987: The Drawing of the Three is published. NAL trade paperback of The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three announced for late 1988 release with a mass-market paperback to follow.
September 1987: Last call from Donald M. Grant on the limited trade of The Drawing of the Three. Signed edition is out of print and appears in ads for $500.
May 1988: NAL audio of The Gunslinger released.
September 1988: Plume trade paperback of The Gunslinger released.
January 1989: NAL audio of The Drawing of the Three released. Grant trade hardcover selling for $75–$100.
March 1989: Plume trade paperback of The Drawing of the Three released. King says in CRN that volume three is two or three years away from publication.
June 1989: Paperback of The Drawing of the Three is fifth on the best-seller list.
October 1989: King begins The Waste Lands.
January 1990: King completes The Waste Lands.
December 1990: “The Bear,” an excerpt of The Waste Lands, appears in F&SF.
1991: NAL audio of The Waste Lands issued.
August 1991: Donald M. Grant edition of The Waste Lands published.
January 1992: Plume trade paperback of The Waste Lands published.
April 1994: Insomnia published.
August 29, 1994: King says on Larry King Live that he will finish the Dark Tower series in back-to-back books.
July 1995: Rose Madder published.
May 1996: A summer 1997 release of Wizard and Glass is announced in The Green Mile, part 3, “Coffey’s Hands.”
July 4, 1996: King begins Wizard and Glass.
September 1996: Desperation and The Regulators published.
October 1996: King writes introduction to Wizard and Glass preview booklet.
November 1996: Preview booklet of Wizard and Glass released in time for Christmas, bundled with Desperation and The Regulators. King issues his infamous “pissing and moaning” commentary to newsgroup alt.books.stephen-king.
March 1997: First draft of Wizard and Glass complete. Plume release date announced.
April 3, 1997: Donald M. Grant gets the final draft of Wizard and Glass.
August 9, 1997: First copies of Wizard and Glass ship.
August 15, 1997: Wizard and Glass appears.
September 20, 1997: Wizard and Glass appears on the New York Times hardcover list, the first time a book from a specialty publisher has ever done so.
October/November 1997: “Everything’s Eventual” appears in F&SF.
November 15, 1997: Plume trade paperback of Wizard and Glass appears.
Fall 1997: Donald M. Grant Wizard and Glass out of print.
September 1998: Donald M. Grant issues The Gunslinger (third printing), The Drawing of the Three (second edition) and The Waste Lands (first edition) as a slipcased gift set.
October 1998: “The Little Sisters of Eluria” published in Legends.
June 19, 1999: King is struck and nearly killed by a minivan while walking along the roadside near his summer home.
September 1999: Hearts in Atlantis published.
July 2001: King starts writing Wolves of the Calla.
August 21, 2001: Prologue from Wolves of the Calla posted at www.stephen-king.com. King announces plans to finish the series back-to-back. Estimated time to publication: two years.
September 11, 2001: King writes the chapter from Wolves of the Calla dealing with Father Callahan as he travels across America, fighting vampires and keeping ahead of the low men.
September 15, 2001: Black House published.
October 3, 2001: Stephen King day at UMO. King reads the section written September 11, 2001.
December 8
, 2001: King finishes Wolves of the Calla and announces the title and illustrator (Bernie Wrightson). Immediately begins Book VI, as yet untitled.
February 24, 2002: King visits Frank Muller. Writes the chapter where Roland and Eddie meet King en route.
March 2002: Grant begins production of Wolves of the Calla.
March 24, 2002: King finishes writing Song of Susannah.
April 2002: King announces title of Song of Susannah. Begins The Dark Tower. Illustrator for Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower announced.
June 2002: King interviews himself about the Dark Tower books on Web site. He’s a third of the way through The Dark Tower and will take a month off to recharge after producing 1,900 manuscript pages in the past year.
July 2002: King returns to The Dark Tower.
September 2002: Tentative publication dates for Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower issued by King’s official Web site.
September 30, 2002: King tells Mitch Albom he has two or three pages left to The Dark Tower.
October 3, 2002: King finishes the first draft of The Dark Tower.
January 26, 2003: King writes introduction to Robin Furth’s Dark Tower Concordance.
February 2003: “The Tale of Gray Dick,” an excerpt from Wolves of the Calla, published in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, edited by Michael Chabon.
February 13, 2003: Joint press release from Viking, Grant and Scribner outlining their publication schedules.
February 25, 2003: King explains his decision to rewrite The Gunslinger for the new hardcover issue.
March 11, 2003: King finishes revisions and proofing of Wolves of the Calla.
May 28, 2003: King finishes revising Song of Susannah.
June 23, 2003: First four Dark Tower books reissued in trade hardcover by Viking with new introductions. The Gunslinger is revised and expanded.