of Ooze
This is the first newspaper interview he’s given for 20 years. What’s Stephen King got to be afraid of? Peter Conrad reports
To be Stephen King is a traumatic fate: his head serves as an incubator for the world’s bad dreams. His face – currently bare of the beard behind which he hibernates during the New England winter – resembles an implacable tombstone, and his eyes blink wearily, having witnessed too many nocturnal wrestling matches with demons. King, like the heroine of his first novel, Carrie, possesses a “wild talent”. In her case, it is telekinesis: she can cause an innocent knife to jump off the table and skewer you. King has a talent for detecting and agitating subterranean reservoirs of dread.
I found him hunkered with his nightmares in the soupily humid town of Bangor, Maine, described by one of his characters as “a pimple on the cock of New England”. He lives in a Victorian mansion, with towers apparently designed for the detention of insane relatives, behind a fence whose wrought iron imitates the webs of spiders and the wings of vampires; but he conducts business in a portable cabin on a gravel truck beside the airport. It’s an apt location: a writer so fiendishly productive belongs in an area zoned for industrial use.
His neighbours are the harbingers of the apocalypse. At the corner is a General Electric power plant, getting ready (as a drunkard rails in The Tommyknockers) “to kill millions and render huge tracts of land sterile”. Opposite King’s office, a cabin like his own is occupied by the International Paper Research Centre, which advertises something euphemistically called “fibre supply”.
“They’re shits over there,” said King, gesturing towards the headquarters of the tree-killers. “We have wars over the parking spaces.” King’s novels protest against logging, but he must take personal responsibility for deforestation: 80-million copies of his books are currently in circulation.
A victim of these commercial circumstances, the 51-year-old King has never had his due as a moral historian, whose adult life coincides with the United States’s betrayal of its spiritual mission. “My generation,” he said to me, “traded God for Martha Stewart. She’s this priestess of etiquette who says that when you shovel snow from your drive, you oughta leave an inch or two at the sides, because it looks so nice.” He paused to retch at the prissy notion. “We started off protesting the Vietnam War; then we sold out. We never atoned for Vietnam, so the war isn’t over. One of the books I’ll be publishing next year is a collection of stories called Why We Are in Vietnam.” “Wait a minute,” I said, “[Norman] Mailer wrote that.” “OK,” he said, making a hurried adjustment, “so I’ll call mine Why We’re in Vietnam. I’ll use an apostrophe, I’m more colloquial than Mailer.”
He then resumed his account of the country’s collapse. “No one my age will admit to being around during the Sixties. It’s like a stag party when the police arrive. The government bribed us to become Reagan yuppies. They gave us junk bonds, fine clothes, all the cocaine we could snort.” As he ranted I began to understand King’s scruffy persona – the jeans at half- mast on his ass, the dented pick-up truck he drives – and the squalid litter of his office, with its empty cans of Diet Pepsi and paper cups containing spent tea bags. Though an average advance for one of his books is $17-million, he maintains his rectitude by living like a blue-collar worker and renting premises in a trailer park.
In Needful Things, he derives American affluence from a satanic pact. “Everything’s for sale, and the only price is your immortal soul. I thought that book was fucking hilarious!” King is a satirist, who creates in order to give himself the prolonged pleasure of destroying. In his new novel, Bag of Bones, the narrator’s wife perishes on the first page: “Oh, I just loved that – killing off a major character right at the start!” In Salem’s Lot and The Tommyknockers, King populates entire Maine towns with affable, warty, homespun characters, then arranges for those people to be sucked dry by vampires or gutted by aliens. In The Stand, he expunges the entire US, infecting his countrymen with a lethal, incurable virus.
I asked why he took such pains to bestow life and then tormented its possessors. In reply, he compared himself to the only other creator who is as copious, as indefatigable, and as recklessly inartistic as he is. “It’s just like what God did to us,” he said, and added a curse worthy of Melville’s Ahab – “the bastard!” He then enumerated our afflictions, his voice tolling like a funeral bell. “Cancer, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, people trapped in burning houses – and still we go on. The skin of the world is thin, that’s what my books show.”
King uncoiled from the chair in which he crouched, and fulminated in mid-air like a preacher. “We’re small!” he bellowed. Well, I thought, I am, but King seemed to touch the cabin’s plyboard ceiling. “Something’s gonna happen to us,” he declared, “and we don’t know what it is. We’re all gonna die. Everybody in this room is gonna die.” Since the room only contained me and him, this was alarming news. Did he intend to prove the truth of his proposition, eliminating me like one of his expendable characters before spectacularly offing himself? After all, he has compared himself to a “mad bomber”.
I shouldn’t have been alarmed. Despite his resemblance to a rampant grizzly, King is a gentle giant. It’s just that language, like a demon taking possession, likes to have its volatile way with him. In conversation as in print, his natural mode is the tirade, as unstoppable as prophecy or vomit. His cascading words resonate like water in a drainpipe: in fact, in an essay on the gargoyles which leer on New York rooftops, he compares the writer to a drain, whose imagination gives him “a way of ventilating mental waste made up of our hidden fears and inadequacies”. The spillage of a whole, crazed, angry country seems to gush through King.
“It’s like the tribulation of Job in my new TV thing, Storm of the Century. I have Job complaining to God about his sufferings.”
“Oh Lord,” wailed King, with the ululating tone of a holy roller, “you have cast me down, you have killed my sons, you have tormented my body so it hurts when I take a piss – and now, Lord, I find it was all a bet between you and the devil!”
He swayed above me like a skyscraper buffeted by gales, and pummelled the ceiling with bunched fists. “There is silence,” he said, relishing the echo of his uproar in the portable building. “But then God answers. We see a black cloud travelling across the sky. Finally, it arrives directly overhead, and a voice speaks out of it.” King loomed like a funnelling twister, cupped his hands to make a megaphone, and – as I recoiled – he spoke on God’s behalf in a sinister whisper. “`Job,’ says God, `I guess there’s just something about you that pisses me off.'” At which King erupted in a thunderclap of wicked merriment.
The notion of divine ventriloquism comes naturally to him. No one could write as much as King does without assistance from elsewhere. Hence the fantasy of a telepathic typewriter in The Tommyknockers, which transcribes thoughts without the writer needing to pound its keys, or the bout of automatic scribble in Bag of Bones, where an astral pencil leaps into the fingers of a blocked writer and spells out occult messages.
King is a workman who both loves and hates his tools. He grimly recalled his first typewriter, bought for $35 – “a great big iron thing, like an instrument of torture. The letter m broke off, and I had to fill it in by hand. I’d be upstairs during the summer pounding away in underpants, streaming with sweat. It was a liberating tool, but also an enslaving one. I felt like James Bond on Goldfinger’s exercise machine. He’s pedalling away, and he croaks out, `Do you expect me to speak?’ And Goldfinger says, `No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!’ The word processor is exquisite, like skating – but it’s all on the surface, like the words are behind glass.”‘
Convinced that manual toil is virtuous, King has occasionally gone back to pushing a pen. “I wrote most of Misery by hand, sitting at Rudyard Kipling’s desk in Brown’s Hotel in London. Then I found out he died at the desk. That spooked me, so I quit the hotel.” Is King the stenographer employed by some higher source? He does not deny it. The third volume of his mock-medieval saga, The Dark Tower, thanks his secretary for goading him to continue it.
When I asked about this, he yelled for Marsha and made her testify to the sacks of mail she’d opened from little old ladies who begged King to resume the story so they could read it before they died. Marsha flushed and scuttled out to answer the telephone. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d returned to say she had God on the blower, ready to dictate a sequel.
Such arcane considerations come with the genres King works in. Social novels describe a secularised world, with humanity situated somewhere east of Eden; but King’s interest in supernatural or extra-terrestrial visitings requires him to speculate about the numinous perimeter of our lives. In The Gunslinger, which couples Arthurian chivalry with the cosmological shoot-outs of the spaghetti western, a boy mysteriously jolted between epochs reports that: “There are other worlds than these.”
King nodded when I mentioned this. “Fiction,” he said, “is crafted to discuss just those questions – why we’re here, the difference between predestination and randomness.”
He then lifted his eyes to the sky, or to the room’s low, sweaty ceiling, and once more directly addressed the deity. “What’s it all about, Alfie?” he boomed. A novelist takes it upon himself to demonstrate what it’s all about by devising plots which serve as models of God’s benign provision for us or function like diabolical jests.
King, a citizen of a country which he nicknames the People’s Republic of Paranoia, has sometimes trapped himself inside his own plots. For years, he explained his reclusiveness by describing a brush with John Lennon’s killer. He emerged, he claimed, from a television interview at Rockefeller Centre, and was accosted by a weedy youth who breathed: “I’m your number one fan.” King distinctly remembered signing an autograph “with best wishes to Mark Chapman”. It was a good story, except that it happened not to be true.
“I could never have met Chapman,” King admitted. “The dates just don’t fit. He was in Hawaii during that visit I made to New York. So I guess you could say I’m only moderately paranoid.” He looked bereft. But then instantly began to fabricate an alternative plot. “I did have an obsessive fan around that time, who was always making me sign things. And he had little round glasses, like the ones Lennon used to wear …” I left him to elaborate the tale later: perhaps in time he’ll convince himself that the stalker was Lennon, not his murderer.
Having reluctantly surrendered Chapman, King has adopted another fanciful soulmate, Lee Harvey Oswald. A fictitious historian quoted in Carrie claims that “the two most stunning events of the 20th century” are Oswald’s assassination of John F Kennedy and the murderous rite of spring when Carrie incinerates her Maine hometown.
King mentioned Oswald to me during one of his revved-up arias about Vietnam: “We felt we could unseat the president and change everything! This was the Ark of Days! We were now the man in the Dallas Book Depository, we had our fingers on the trigger!”
He must be the only survivor of the Sixties who views the campaign against Lyndon B Johnson as a wishful repetition of JFK’s killing, and – mashing together Oliver Stone and Steven Spielberg in what he calls “the trash-compactor of cultural garbage” in his head – associates that murder with a quest for the lost ark.
King’s slab-shaped forehead, itself a book depository, guards the US’s most secret and most dangerous longings, articulated by serial killers and bestselling novelists alike.
These spooky whimsies are the conjectural stuff of his art. “I’ve never seen a ghost,” he said, “but sometimes at night I’ll see a pattern of shadows and I’ll be convinced it tells me about the later stages of existence. Or there’s the textured quality of dreams. What other worlds do they come from?”
King, known as the Wizard of Ooze, has a reputation for grossness. Carrie menstruates in full view, and showers in pig’s blood; the hero of Rose Madder is a cannibal cop. In The Dark Half, a novelist who runs amok nails a victim’s tongue on the wall. Yet he’s disgusting only as a last resort. His proper concern is terror, not horror, and he values the fear which he disseminates because it is a symptom of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “holy dread”. The haunted novelist in Bag of Bones plans to confront his personal incubus, relying on “that bit of New Age wisdom which said that the word `fear’ stands for face everything and recover”. He then thinks better of that, recalling a more ancient wisdom, less glibly therapeutic: fear is a warning to “fuck everything and run”.
I wondered which of the acronyms King himself preferred.
“Me?” he said. “Depends whether we’re talking daylight or night time!” When I asked him to define fear, he said: “It’s an intensity.” The Romantics would have called it sublimity: the sense of awe provoked by frowning mountains or turbulent oceans, visible signs of divine energy. Fear demarcates a metaphysical border. In The Prelude, William Wordsworth is grateful for the sanctimonious “ministry of fear”, and thanks it for alerting him to the mysteries of existence. Graham Greene adopted the phrase as the title for his thriller, The Ministry of Fear.
King, who admires the book, hadn’t previously recognised the title’s religious import, which confirms the worshipful awakenings in his own work. Wordsworth’s state of visionary susceptibility is exactly what King calls a “shining”, and he too bestows this freakish gift on a child.
“Wow,” said King, “is that what The Ministry of Fear means? I always thought it was some sort of political thing – like the ministry of propaganda. Man, that’s great. Gee, that gives me goose bumps.” In the swampy, unair-conditioned room, he felt a chill. I watched contentedly as he relished the sensation, and imagined bristles of hair erecting themselves on his thick neck, or skin prickling all the way down his long body as he scented the presence of a ghost or a god. I had briefly managed to frighten Stephen King.
American truths are usually stranger than fiction, though, and the country has caught up with King’s most lurid imaginings. Teenagers no longer need talents like Carrie or Charlie: this spring they took to gunning down playmates and teachers. Today, it wouldn’t be wise for King to call himself a mad bomber. After the 1995 explosion in Oklahoma City, the US discovered that it possessed a militia of home-grown terrorists, one of whom was, like King, a publishing phenomenon: the Unabomber blackmailed newspapers across the land to print his verbose manifesto, threatening to blitz cities if they refused.
King is fond of a phrase used by the editor Maxwell Perkins to describe Thomas Wolfe, whom he called a “divine wind chime”, responding to cultural breezes. A wind chime is not quite King’s instrument – he doesn’t delicately tinkle – and I’m not sure that the inspiring breath is divine. Let’s call him a demonic foghorn.