(SALON) -- Publishing insiders
and general readers alike have been eagerly anticipating “Bag of Bones,” which
is both one of Stephen King’s most ambitious novels and his first for Scribner
after his much-publicized split with Viking, his longtime publisher. All the
fanfare has focused the literary world’s attention, gradually and groggily, on
what should have been obvious all along: King is one of the most important
writers of our age.
In this interview, the horror
master talks about the latent violence of males, childhood terror and an “odious
little man” named Kenneth Starr.
1.
There’s a relationship in “Bag of Bones”
between a middle-aged man and a much younger woman, and it’s presented in
strongly unfavorable terms. I was wondering if that reflects your views about
that, and how it relates to current events.
2.
You’re the first person to ask me that
question, about Mike’s relationship with Mattie. And I’d say that what I
presented, I presented from the viewpoint of a 50-year-old man who’s been happily
married and happily monogamous for the entire course of that marriage. But
certainly, we’ll be driving along the street and my wife will say to me, “What
are you looking at?” And she knows perfectly well what I’m looking at. There’ll
be some cute little girl on the other side of the street, maybe 22 years old,
wearing shorts and a mini-top. And I’ll always tell her what my brother used to
tell me: “A man on a diet can read a menu.” But there is a real attraction in
guys my age to women who are younger. It’s a male version of the body clock,
where women start to look at babies and want one as they get older. Because you
get to a stage in your life where it just becomes a biological imperative. It’s
probably your body’s way of saying, “You’ve only got so many years left where
you’re viable as a reproductive entity. Hurry up!” And that comes later with
men than it does with women, because we last longer as reproductive entities.
Stephen King reads Chapter 7 of “Bag of Bones”
(Audio only,
35 min.)
Windows
Media: 28k or 56k
Real: 28k or
56k
(Courtesy Simon & Schuster Audio)
An interview with Stephen King
(Audio only,
25 min.)
Windows
Media: 28k or 56k
Real: 28k or
56k
(Courtesy Simon & Schuster Audio)
Begin reading “Bag of Bones”
3.
To get back to “Bag of Bones,” you seem to
be suggesting that the kind of attraction Mike feels for Mattie, and that she
feels toward him, creates an imbalance that presents the opportunity for bad
things to happen. Do you think that happens in real life?
4.
I don’t think it really happens. I think that
what Mike feels, particularly in this case ... Here’s a guy that’s been
grieving for four years. It’s been raining in his life for four years. And she’s
the first ray of sunshine that he sees. He’s sexually attracted to her -- she’s
young, she’s beautiful, she’s vivacious, she has all of that energy. What he
sees in her is a kind of joyfulness. And I certainly react very positively to
that.
5.
Mike says to himself that just because you
want something, you don’t necessarily have the right to have it. Not every
thirst should be slaked.
6.
That’s the married man’s philosophy. It’s
gotta be.
7.
That’s an interesting thing to appear in a
novel now, when there is almost a guiding ethos that you’re supposed to take
whatever you want from life.
8.
Well, we have a problem both ways. The
foreign press around the world will look at the situation we’re going through
right now and their reaction -- and that of a lot of American people, including
myself -- is to throw up your hands and say, “Oh, please -- get over it. This
is a juvenile preoccupation. People are starving in Africa. People are killing
each other in Africa. Stop worrying about Monica Lewinsky’s thong panties.”
9.
I won’t give away how you resolve the
issue between Mike and Mattie. But in the book Mike sees the resolution of this
dilemma as an unsatisfying novelist’s trick. How do you plead to that charge?
10.
I plead guilty and not guilty at the same
time. The situation that Mike is in is a melodramatic one. You have to ask
yourself, What happens to these relationships when, say, the man is 60 and the
woman is 40? Or when the man is 80 and the woman is 60? In several of the
reviews of “Bag of Bones,” people have said, about Mattie, that she’s an
unformed character -- that she’s not as satisfying as some of the other
characters in the book. Well, I’m sorry, but when you have a 20-year-old girl
who lives in a trailer, who’s been married since the age of 17 and widowed a
couple of years later, who’s trying to sort of scrape by -- that is not the
stuff of which fascinating, paradoxical, bewitching characters are made. So, I
did the best with it that I could. What I’m saying is, you get married, or you
have a relationship, you have weeks, months, maybe a year of delirious sex.
Then one morning you come down at breakfast and you look at each other and you
say, “What do I talk about?” In the course of “Bag of Bones,” as you say, we
won’t give this away, but that situation is resolved. I have a lot of questions
about the way the situation is resolved, and I think I express them in the
book.
11.
One thing that happens in a lot of your
books -- it happens in “Bag of Bones” perhaps less dramatically than in other
books -- is that the vector for the evil in the universe, or in the situation,
is a man. Very often a husband or a father. I wonder to what extent you really
think that inside every normal man, normal husband, normal father, there’s a
monster, a wife-killer, a child-killer sort of waiting to come out.
12.
I don’t think it’s in every man, but I think
it’s in most men. I think most men are wired up to perform acts of violence,
usually defensive, but I think that we’re still very primitive creatures, and
that we have a real tendency toward violence. Most of us are like ... well,
most of us are like most airplanes. Remember TWA Flight 800, the one that
exploded over Long Island Sound? That was an electrical problem, or at least
they feel that it was probably an electrical problem, and a fire started in the
wiring. And when you see a guy who suddenly snaps, a guy who goes nuts, a
Charles Whitman, who goes to the top of the Texas tower and shoots a whole
bunch of people, when a guy goes postal -- that’s the current slang -- that’s a
guy with a fire in his wires, basically. That’s the exception rather than the
rule. But of course, we get a lot of press on that sort of thing. I remember
saying to a girl that I went out with in high school ... well, we dated until
we were in college and we stopped dating because we wanted to “see other people”
-- we always say that -- but she wanted to see other people, and we
broke up, essentially. And I saw her a while later and she had a bruise under
her eye. And I said, “What happened?” And she said, “I don’t want to talk about
it.” And I said, “C’mon, let’s go get a cup of coffee.” Because she was clearly
upset. So we did. She’d been out with a guy, and the guy wanted to do some
stuff that she didn’t want to do, and he punched her. And I never forgot that.
And it became the basis of things in a number of different fictions that I’ve
written. I can remember saying to her that day, “It takes courage to go out
with a guy, doesn’t it?” Maybe you’re sort of attracted to him, you’re sort of
interested in him, but basically you’re saying, “I’m going to get into your
car, I’m going to go somewhere, and I’m going to trust you to bring me back in
one piece.” It takes courage. And she said, “You’ll never know.” Men are
dangerous. We’re big animals. I’m 200 pounds on the hoof, and I can hit. So don’t
make me mad. And if you do make me mad, I’ll try to smile and everything, but
if I didn’t I could probably do some damage.
13.
Aren’t you also often playing on what must
be the worst fear of being a father -- being a parent -- is that your kids will
come to some terrible harm and it will be your fault?
14.
Of course. I mean, it’s a dreadful
responsibility. I think a lot of people who say no to parenthood, and a lot of
men who say no to fatherhood in particular, do so because they’re daunted by
that responsibility. It’s like saying, you’re in charge of these lives and you’re
the only thing that’s standing between this little person and this little
person’s death. You have to be the protector. In terms of “Bag of Bones,” you
have to be the big guy because they’re the little guy. So it is a challenge,
and it’s a huge responsibility. My own feeling ... as a kid, my mother used to
say, when we were scared, “Whatever you’re afraid of, say it three times fast
and it will never happen.” And that’s what I’ve done in my fiction. Basically,
I’ve said out loud the things that really terrify me and I’ve turned them into
fictions, and they’ve made a very nice living for me and it seems to have
worked. Because as of today, as far as I know, the kids are all fine.
15.
You do such a good job capturing the feeling
of vulnerability and strength that can come from childhood. The confidence, as
well as the fears. Do you have especially vivid memories of your own childhood?
16.
Well, I don’t know if they would otherwise be
more vivid than anyone else’s, but I’ve certainly mined them a lot. The act of
writing is very hypnotic. It’s like dreaming awake. In fact, when those scientists,
those sleep researchers, hook up their EEGs to the heads of people who are
composing, they get those big delta waves that they associate with dreaming. It’s
like regressing somebody in a hypnotic trance. [Typical statement of Joyce
Carol Oates] If I say in a book like “It” or a book like “Stand by Me” (“The
Body”) that I want to write about what it was like to be a kid, when I was a
kid, my first thought is, “Gee, I really don’t remember that much.” But if you
start, little by little you are able to regress, and the more you write the
brighter the images become.
17.
Another thing that is always important in
your books is a sense of place. Often you use Maine, which you know very well,
and often you use other locations, too. Colorado. And in something like “The
Green Mile,” there’s a sense that a given location has a spirit that can be
good or bad. I wonder if you could talk about the importance of that sense that
places have memories.
18.
Well, in any work of the imagination, the
more real you are able to make the characters and the setting, the easier it is
for readers to buy the narration. That’s just a basic. But places do have
spirits. Some places have a kind of eerie resonance that really sort of
amplifies the quality of a scary story. You can hear a scary story in an
apartment building and it’s one thing, but it’s a whole other thing to hear it
around a campfire, with the wind howling. It brings in another dimension of
reality that’s entirely new. So for me, when I use Maine ... I grew up in the
country, and to me it really does feel as though reality is thinner in the
country. There is a sense of the infinite that’s very, very close, and I just
try to convey some of that in my fiction.
19.
Does your evocation of the Maine landscape
owe anything to the fiction you read as a kid -- H.P. Lovecraft in his books
set in the woods of Massachusetts?
20.
No, not really. I mean, it did at the time,
when I was 13, 14, 15 -- which I maintain is the perfect age to read Lovecraft.
Lovecraft is the perfect fiction for people who are living in a state of sort
of total sexual doubt, because the stories almost seem to me sort of Jungian in
their imagery. They’re all about gigantic disembodied vaginas and things that
have teeth. And that sense of the ancient New England landscape ... very
kindly, Lovecraft was a lot less interested in using the landscape as a place
where reality was thin and sort of deserted in the New England community as he
was in trying to express that kind of feeling of ancient life. So I had a
tendency to copy that when I was a kid, and I think later on I just tried to go
back and find a more realistic way to talk about the quality of that landscape.
For instance, you know, when Lovecraft writes “The Dunwich Horror,” about
Dunwich, Mass. I mean, in a way it’s a lot of idealized crap -- he was a city
boy. He didn’t live in the country. And what he knew about it he saw from the
windows of buses going between Providence and New York City.
21.
The other thing about the landscape in your
books is that it almost seems to have a sense of political and social history
-- the legacy of genocide against the Indians and of slavery, of race
relations. These things crop up in various forms. Is there a real sense to you
that this history haunts America?
22.
I have a sense of injustice that came, I think
... My mother was a single parent. Her husband deserted her when I was 2, and
she went through a lot of menial jobs. We were the little people. We were
dragged from pillar to post, and there was none of this equal opportunity stuff
going on at that time. We were latchkey kids before there were latchkey kids,
and she was a female wage earner when, basically, women did scut work and
cleaned up other people’s messes. And she never complained about it a lot. But I wasn’t dumb
and I wasn’t blind. And I got a sense of who was being taken advantage of and
who was lording it over the other people. A lot of that sense of injustice
stayed. It stuck with me, and it’s still in the books today. [Barack Obama.
Joyce Carol Oates. James Patterson.]
Andrew O’Hehir is a regular contributor to Salon.
Ernest Hemingway said, “A
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