In 1992, Terry Gross interviewed Stephen King on her show Fresh Air. Gross was the 2003 recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Award. It is available on audible. This interview took place just after the publication of Gerald’s Game.
Gerald’s Game:
The novel began with the idea of a woman chained to the bed. He compared it to Cujo. “What a lot of that book was was two people in a very small room.” Gerald’s game goes a step further: a story about just one person confined in a room. The S/M stuff is really just the device the get her in the room and carry the story (Hitchcock’s “Mcguffin”.)
Gross asked King if he had taken the horror novel to a more explicit place than it had been before. King said yes, he did take it there – but guys like Clive Barker had taken it further yet! King discusses tales of the crypt and horror movies. Gross asked if the movies scared or amused him. King is definite at this point -- They scared him big time!
King points out that the power of writing is that it offers flawless special effects. “I realized that when I wrote a story, you never saw the zipper going up the monsters back,” King said. “When the imagination was in charge of special effects, they were always perfect.”
Gross pointed out that in order to write the way he does, King must have some grasp on how people deal with fear and pain. She asked King if he handled pain well, and if that had ever been tested. King said no one knows how someone else deals with the pain, suffering in their life. That we are oceans apart. This is interesting, since the next interview in the line up is right after Kings’ accident, and again deals with the issue of pain. This made me wonder if King’s insights to characters and their suffering has changed any since the 1999 accident. Obviously, King gave us Duma Key, which is almost a modern retelling of the book of Job – except that at the end, God doesn’t come down, the devil comes out!
He says that some of his favorite passages in Gerald’s Game were the parts where very simple things (getting a glass of water, so on) became a challenge.
Gross asked if when he started publishing his novels, and people who he knew understood what kind of thoughts went through his mind, if people he knew began to see him differently. King says there was a kind of pulling away, a uestion in their eyes, “Okay, where are all the bodies buried, Steve?” Or a casual, “By the way, Steve, what was your childhood like? Were you ever beaten? Did they burn with you cigarettes? Or what was it?” Kind said he would respond by saying that he is just like everyone else – and that really did scare them.
King compares horror writing to being a comedy writer. “You say, what is the one thing no one wants to talk about? The one thing that would be like taking a fork and scraping it across the blackboard?” He says most people, once it is said, are glad someone said it!
Misery:
Gross asked if the story of Misery was based on a single incident or deranged fan. King insisted no single person embodies Annie Wilkes.
Of course, there are the people, King says, who think he steals their stories, or want to be intimately involved with his family. “You begin to realize the power of fans. Just interacting with them, there is a kind of fan psychology, that for the object of that fan adulation gets to be really uncomfortable sometimes.”
King notes how quickly fans can change when he says he can’t sign a book or sit and talk a spell. He says that in the most devoted fans that there is almost a kind of resentment, a feeling that “you have what is really meant for me. In the best of all possible worlds, I would be you. You see this quite often in the male.”
It's interesting to note what King says about fear, suffering and how that might relate his writings.
ReplyDeleteI think I've said this before, however if I had to answer the question I would have to say his mother Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King is the one responsible for the career her son has and why he thinks the way he does.
I once read a book of Jungian psychology, and what it said was that kids pick up on the subconscious issues parents are going through. From what little he's written about her, I have to say King's Mom must have been an extraordinary woman, yet she was also a very frightened woman. She and her son had to face the rest of their lives cast off on their own resources for the most part because of a latch-key Dad, and for Ruth King it must have meant long frets and worries along the lines of what would become of them. I'm convinced King just picked up on that at subconscious level so that it left him with the ability to see the worst case scenario coming from several different directions, it didn't help that he was born with a good imagination.
I'll go even further and say it was his upbringing coupled with his encounter with the paranoia of the sixties that informed a lot of what became Richard Bachman. I think Bachman is the personification of the worst possible imaginings he ever had.
I also think that a lot of it, in fact most of it, was just imagination, and that as time went on even King has realized this. To take an example, there's a passage in Danse Macbre were King, writing in a particular Bachman frame of mind, says he believes we are each isolated from each other and have to face the universe alone.
Fast forward to On Writing, post accident. In apassage detailing how he kicked the drug and drinking habit King returns to the exact same concept from Danse Macbre, this time with a whole different attitude, stating that ti;s the kind of idea common among users and abusers, citing famous authors and philosophies as examples. It's clear King rejects this kind of thinking. I'm sure he now believe what his son Owen once wrote, We're all in this Together.
I think a lot of what changed his mind had to do with kicking the habit and the accident, King once said not long after that you can see the small stuff for what it is once you've been near the pearly gates. Technically, this all might have been the best thing that could have happen to him, although I think there are better ways of going about it, I mean...you know what I mean.
ChrisC
In an interesting portion of the interview, King discusses the statement "no man is an island to himself." Except, King argues, when it comes to pain, we are Islands to ourselves. Meaning, no other person can really experience what I experience. Even a broken leg, cut arm, stubbed toe feels different to different people.
ReplyDelete