I interviewed Stephen King for the UK Sunday Times Magazine. The interview appeared a few weeks ago. The Times keeps its site paywalled, so I thought I'd post the original version of the interview here. (This is the raw copy, and it's somewhat longer than the interview as published.)
I don't do much journalism any more, and this was mostly an excuse to drive across Florida back in February and spend a day with some very nice people I do not get to see enough.
I hope you enjoy it.
Edit to add - the Sunday Times asked me to write something small and personal about King and me for the contributors' notes, and I wrote this:
“I think the most important thing I
learned from Stephen King I learned as a teenager, reading King's
book of essays on horror and on writing, Danse Macabre. In
there he points out that if you just write a page a day, just 300
words, at the end of a year you'd have a novel. It was immensely
reassuring - suddenly something huge and impossible became strangely
easy. As an adult, it's how I've written books I haven't had the time
to write, like my children's novel Coraline.”
“Meeting Stephen King this time, the
thing that struck me is how very comfortable he is with what he does.
All the talk of retiring from writing, of quitting, the suggestions
that maybe it's time to stop before he starts repeating himself,
seems to be done. He likes writing, likes it more than anything else
that he could be doing, and does not seem at all inclined to stop.
Except perhaps at gunpoint.”
The first time I met Stephen King was
in Boston, in 1992. I sat in his hotel suite, met his wife Tabitha,
who is Tabby in conversation, and his then-teenage sons Joe and Owen,
and we talked about writing and about authors, about fans and about
fame.
“If I had my life over again,” said
King. “I'd've done everything the same. Even the bad bits. But I
wouldn't have done the American Express “Do You Know Me?” TV ad.
After that, everyone in America knew what I looked like.”
He was tall and dark haired, and Joe
and Owen looked like much younger clones of their father, fresh out
of the cloning vat.
The next time I met Stephen King, in
2002, he pulled me up onstage to play kazoo with the Rock Bottom
Remainders, a ramshackle assemblage of authors who can play
instruments and sing and, in the case of author Amy Tan, impersonate
a dominatrix while singing Nancy Sinatra's “These Boots are Made
For Walkin'”.
Afterwards we talked in the tiny toilet
in the back of the theatre, the only place King could smoke a furtive
cigarette. He seemed frail, then, and grey, only recently recovered a
long hospitalisation from being hit by an idiot in a van, and the
hospital-infections that had followed it. He grumbled about the pain
of walking downstairs. I worried about him, then.
And now, another decade, and when King
comes out of the parking bay in the Sarasota Key to greet me, he's
looking good. He's no longer frail. He is 64 and he looks younger
than he did a decade ago.
Stephen King's house in Bangor Maine is
gothic and glorious. I know this although I have never been there. I
have seen photographs on the internet. It looks like the sort of
place that somebody like Stephen King ought to live and work. There
are wrought iron bats and gargoyles on the gates.
Stephen King's house on a key in
Florida near Sarasota, a strand of land on the edge of the sea, lined
with big houses (“that one was John Gotti's,” I learn as we pass
one huge white high-walled building. “We call it murder mansion”)
is ugly. And not even endearingly ugly. It's a long block of concrete
and glass, like an enormous shoebox, It was built, explains Tabby, by
a man who built shopping malls, out of the materials of a shopping
mall. It's like an Apple store's idea of a McMansion, and not pretty.
But once you are inside the glass window-walls have a perfect view
over the sand and the sea, and there's a gargantuan blue metal
doorway that dissolves into nothingness and stars in one corner of
the garden, and inside the building there are paintings and
sculptures, and, most important, there's King's office. It has two
desks in it. A nice desk, with a view, and an unimpressive desk with
a computer on it, with a battered, much sat-upon chair facing away
from the window.
That's the desk that King sits at every
day, and it is where he writes. Right now he's writing a book called
Joyland, about an amusement park serial killer. Below the
window is a patch of well-fenced land, with an enormous African
Spurred Tortoise nosing around in it, like a monstrous ambulatory
rock.
My first encounter with Stephen King,
long before I met him in the flesh, was on East Croydon station in
about 1975. I was fourteen. I picked up a book with an all-black
cover. It was called Salem's Lot. It was King's second novel;
I'd missed the first, a short book called Carrie, about a
teenage girl with psychic powers. I stayed up late finishing Salem's
Lot, loving the Dickensian portrait of a small American town
destroyed by the arrival of a vampire. Not a nice vampire, a proper
vampire. Dracula meets Peyton Place. After that I
bought everything King wrote as it came out. Some books were great,
and some weren't. It was okay. I trusted him.
Carrie was the book that King
started and abandoned, and which Tabbie King pulled out of the waste
paper basket, read and encouraged him to finish. They were poor, and
then King sold Carrie, and everything changed, and he kept
writing.
Driving down to Florida I listened, for
over thirty hours, to the audiobook of King's time travel novel,
11/22/63. It's about a High School English teacher (as King
was, when he wrote Carrie) who goes back from 2011 to 1958,
via a wormhole in time located in the stockroom of an ancient diner,
with a mission to save John F. Kennedy from Lee Harvey Oswald.
It is, as always with King, the kind of
fiction that forces you to care what happens, page after page. It has
elements of horror, but they exist almost as a condiment for
something that's partly a tightly researched historical novel, partly
a love-story, and always a musing on the nature of time and the past.
Given the hugeness of King's career, it
is difficult to describe anything he does as an anomaly. He exists on
the border of popular fiction (and, on occasion, non-fiction). His
career (writers do not have careers, most of us. We just write the
next book) is peculiarly teflon. He's a popular novelist, which used
to be, perhaps still is, a description of the author of a certain
type of book: one that will repay you for reading it in pleasure and
in plot, like John D. MacDonald (whom King tips his hat to in
11/22/63). But not just a popular novelist: It does not matter
what he writes, it seems, he is always a horror writer. I wonder if
that frustrates him.
“No. No it doesn't. I
have got my family, and they are all okay. We have enough money to
buy food and have things. Yesterday, we had a meeting of the King
Foundation (the private foundation King funds that gives to many
charitable causes). My sister-in-law, Stephanie, she organises it
and we all sit down and give away money. That’s frustrating. Every
year we give away the same money to different people... it's like
chucking money into a hole. That’s frustrating.
I
never thought of myself as a horror writer. That’s what other
people think. And I never said jack shit about it. Tabby came from
nothing, I came from nothing, we were terrified that they would take
this thing away from us. So if the people wanted to say “You're
this”, as long as the books sold, that was fine. I thought, I am
going to zip my lip and write what I wanted to write. The first time
that anything like what you’re talking about happened, I did this
book Different Seasons, they were stories that I had written like I
write all of them, I get this idea, and I want to write this there
was prison story, “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”,
and one based on my childhood called “The Body,” and there is a
story of this kid who finds a Nazi, “Apt Pupil”. I sent them to
Viking, who was my published my editor was John Williams – dead
many long years - terrific editor – he always took the work dead
level. He never wanted to pump it. I sent them Different Seasons, and
he said well, first of all you call it seasons, and you have just
written three. I wrote another one, “The Breathing Method” and
that was the book. I got the best reviews in my life. And that was
the first time that people thought, woah, this isn’t really a
horror thing.
I was down here in
the supermarket, and this old woman comes around the corner this old
woman – obviously one of the kind of women who says whatever is on
her brain. She said, 'I know who you are, you are the horror writer.
I don’t read anything that you do, but I respect your right to do
it. I just like things more genuine, like that Shawshank
Redemption.'
“And I said, 'I
wrote that'. And she said, 'No you didn’t'. And she walked off and
went on her way.”
It happens, over and
over. It happened when he published Misery,
his chronicle of toxic fandom; it happened with Bag
of Bones, his gothic ghost story about
a novelist, with nods to Du Maurier's Rebecca;
it happened when he was inducted into the National Book Foundation's
Medal for Contribution to American Letters.
We're not talking in the
huge concrete shoebox house. We're sitting by the pool in a smaller
house the Kings bought on the same street, as a guest house for their
family. Joe King, who writes under the name of Joe Hill, is staying
there. He still looks like his dad, although no longer a clonal
teenage version, and now has a successful career of his own as a
writer of books and graphic novels. He carries his iPad everywhere he
goes. Joe and I are friends.
In Bag
of Bones, Stephen King has an author
who stops writing but keeps publishing stockpiled books. I wonder how
long his publishers could keep his death a secret?
He grins. “I got
the idea for the writer in Bag of Bones
having books because somebody told me years ago that every year
Danielle Steel wrote three books and published two, and I knew
Agatha Christie had squirrelled a couple away, to put a final bow on
her career. As
of right now, if I died and everybody kept it a secret, it would go
on until 2013. There's a new Dark Tower novel, The
Wind in the Keyhole.That comes out
soon, and Dr Sleep
is done. So if I got hit by a taxi cab, like Margaret Mitchell, what
wouldn’t be done, what would be done. Joyland
wouldn’t be done but Joe could finish it, in a breeze. His style is
almost indistinguishable from mine. His ideas are better than mine.
Being around Joe is like being next to a catherine wheel throwing off
sparks, all these ideas. I do want to slow down. My agent is
dickering with the publishers about Dr
Sleep, that's the sequel to The
Shining, but I held off showing them
the manuscript because I wanted time to breathe.”
Why would he write a sequel to The
Shining? I do not tell him how much that book scared me when I
was sixteen, nor how much I loved and at the same time was
disappointed by the Kubrick movie.
“I did it because it was such a
cheesed-off thing to do. To say you were going back to the book that
was really popular and write the sequel People think of that book,
they read it as kids. Kids read it and say it was a really scary
book, and then as adults they might read the sequel and think, this
isn’t as good. The challenge is, maybe it can be as good - or maybe
it can be different. It gives you something to push up against. It's
a challenge.
“I
wanted to write Dr Sleep because I wanted to see what would
happen to Danny Torrence when he grew up. And I knew that he would be
a drunk because his father was a drunk. One of the holes it seemed to
me in The Shining is that Jack Torrance was this white-knuckle
dry drunk who never tried one of the self-help groups, the like
Alcoholics Anonymous. I thought, okay, I'll start with Danny
Torrence at age forty. He is going to be one of those people who says
'I am never going to be like my father, I am never going to be
abusive like my father was'. Then you wake up at 37 or 38 and you're
a drunk. Then I thought, what kind of a life does that person like
that have? He'll do a bunch of low-bottom jobs, he'll get canned, and
now he works in a hospice as a janitor. I really want him to be in a
hospice worker because he has the shining and he can help people get
across as they die. They call him Dr Sleep, and they know to call for
him when the cat goes into their room and sits on their bed. This was
writing about guy who rides the bus, and he's eating in a McDonalds,
or on a special night out maybe Red Lobster. We are not talking about
a guy who goes to Sardi's.”
Stephen and Tabitha met in the stacks of the
University of Maine library in 1967, and they married in 1971. He
couldn't get a teaching position when he graduated, so he worked in
an industrial laundromat, and pumped gas, and worked as a janitor,
supplementing his meagre income with occasional stories, mostly
horror, sold to men's magazines with names like Cavalier. They
were dirt poor. They lived in a trailer, and King wrote at a
makeshift desk between the washer and the dryer. All that changed in
1974, with the paperback sale of Carrie for $200,000. I wonder how
long it has been since King has stopped worrying about money.
He thinks for a moment. “1985. For a long time
Tabby understood that we didn’t have to worry about these things. I
didn’t. I was convinced they would take all this away from me, and
I was going to be living with three kids in a rental house again,
that it was just too good to be true. Around about 1985 I started to
relax and think ‘this is good, this is going to be okay’.
“And
even now this” (he gestures, taking in the swimming pool, the guest
house, the Florida Key and all the many McMansions) “”is all very
strange to me, even though it's only three months of the year. Where
we live in Maine is one of the poorest counties. A lot of the people
we see and hang with cut wood for a living, drive trash, that sort of
thing. I don’t want to say I have the common touch, but I am just a
common person, and I have this one talent that I use.
“Nothing bores me more than to be in New York and
have a dinner in a big fancy restaurant, where you have to sit for
three fucking hours. You know and people will have drinks before,
wine after, then three courses, then they want coffee and someone is
going to ask for a fucking French press and all the rest of this
crap. To me my idea of what’s good is to drive here and go to
Waffle House, get a couple of eggs and waffle. When I see the first
Waffle House, I know I’m in the South. That’s good.
“
They pay me absurd amounts of money,” he
observes, “For something that I would do for free.”.
Stephen King's father went out for cigarettes when King was
four, and he never came back, leaving King to be brought up by his
mother. Steve and Tabby have three children: Naomi, a Unitarian
Minister with a digital ministry; Joe and Owen, both writers. Joe is
finishing his third novel. Owen's first novel is coming out in 2013.
I wonder about distance and change. How easy is it to write about
characters who are working blue-collar jobs in 2012?
“It is definitely harder. When I wrote Carrie
and Salem's Lot, I was one step away from manual labour.
– but it’s like also true - Joe is going to find out this is
true, that when you have small children of a certain age, it is easy
to write about them because you observe them and you have them in
your life all the time.
“But your kids grow up. It is harder for me to
write about this little twelve year old girl in Dr Sleep than
it ever was for me to talk about five year old Danny Torrence because
I had Joe as a model for Danny. I don’t mean that Joe has the
shining like Danny but I knew who he was, how he played, what he
wanted to do and all that stuff. But look, here’s the bottom line:
if you can imagine all the fabulous stuff that happened in American
Gods, and if I can imagine Magic Doors and everything then surely
I can still put my imagination to work and go: look, this is what I
imagine it's like to work a ten hour day in a blue collar job.”
We're doing the writer thing, now: talking about craft,
about how we do what we do, making things up for a living, and as a
vocation. His next book,
The Wind in the Keyhole, is a Dark
Tower novel, part of a sequence that King plotted and began when he
was little more than a teenager himself. The sequence took him years
to finish, and he only finished spurred on my his assistants, Marsha
and Julie, who were tired of fielding fan letters asking when the
story would be completed.
Now he's finished the story he is trying to decide how much he can
rewrite it, if he views the sequence as one very long novel. Can he
do a second draft? He hopes so. Currently, Stephen King is a
character in the fifth and sixth Dark Tower books, and Stephen King
the non-fictional author is wondering whether to take him out on the
next draft.
I told him about the peculiarity of researching the story I was
working on, that everything I needed, fictionally, was waiting for me
when I went looking for it. He nods in agreement.
“
Absolutely
– you reach out and it's there. The time that it happened the
clearest was when Ralph, my agent then, said to me 'This is a bit
crazy, but do you have any kind of idea for something that could be a
serialised novel like Dickens used to do?', and I had a story that
was sort of struggling for air. That was The
Green Mile. And I knew if I did this I
had to lock myself into it. I started writing it and I stayed ahead
of the publication schedule pretty comfortably. Because...” he
hesitates, tries to explain in a way that doesn't sound foolish,
“...every time I needed something that something was right there to
hand.
“When John Coffey goes to jail – he was going to
be executed for murdering the two girls. I knew that he didn’t do
it , but I didn’t know that the guy who did do it was going to be
there, didn’t know anything about how it happened, but when I wrote
it, it was all just there for me. You just take it. Everything just
fits together like it existed before.
“I never think of stories as made things; I think
of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and
you just pick them up. Someone once told me that that was me
low-balling my own creativity. That might or might not be the case.
But still, on the story I am working on now, I do have some
unresolved problem. It doesn’t keep me awake at nights. I feel like
when it comes down, it will be there...”
King writes every day. If he doesn't write he's
not happy. If he writes, the world is a good place. So he writes.
It's that simple. “I
sit down maybe at quarter past eight in the morning and I work until
quarter to twelve and for that period of time, everything is real.
And then it just clicks off. I think I probably write about 1200 to
1500 words. It's six pages. I want to get six pages into hardcopy.”
I start to tell King my theory, that when people in
the far future want to get an idea of how things felt between 1973
and today, they'll look to King. He's a master of reflecting the
world that he sees, and recording it on the page. The rise and fall
of the VCR, the arrival of Google and smartphones. It's all in there,
behind the monsters and the night, making them more real.
King is sanguine.
“You
know what you can’t tell what is going to last, what’s not going
to last. There’s Kurt Vonnegut quote about John D. McDonald saying
“200 years from now, when people want to know what the 20th century
they ll go to John D. McDonald”, but I’m not sure that’s true –
it seems like he’s almost been forgotten. But I try and
reread a John D. McDonald novel whenever I come down here.”
Authors populate the cracks in a conversation with Stephen King.
And, I realise, all of them are, or were, popular authors, people
whose work was read, and read with enjoyment, by millions.
“You
know what's bizarre? I did the Savannah Book Fair last week.... This
is happening to me more and more. I walked out and I got a standing
ovation from all these people, and it's like a creepy thing... either
you've become a cultural icon, or they are applauding the fact that
you are not dead yet.”
I
tell him about the first time I ever saw a standing ovation in
America. It was for Julie Andrews in Minneapolis on a try out tour of
Victor/Victoria. It
was not very good, but she got a
standing ovation for being Julie Andrews.
“
That’s so dangerous though, for us.
I want people to like the work, not me.”
And the lifetime achievement awards?
“It makes them happy to give they to me. And they
go out in the shed, but the people don't know that.”
Then Tabby King turns up to tell us that it is time
for dinner, and, she adds, that back at the big house the gargantuan
African Spurred Tortoise had just been discovered trying to rape a
rock.
