Dear Sarah,
A personal digression, in partial response to your last question of yesterday (concerning the needless words you’ll find in Dreamcatcher). I happen to know for a fact that Stephen King sits still for editing because my father was his editor for a time, first at Viking and then at Putnam–from Firestarter, I think, through The Tommyknockers. My Pa was really crazy about King, partly because he was tickled pink to be midwifing honest-to-God blockbusters (he usually ran more toward high lit, the more British the better), but also because he thought he was fun. It didn’t hurt that King, who was in a wilder phase of his life, took my Pa to great parties and introduced him to rock stars. My father died a few years ago, and it is thanks to King that I have a sweet memory of him coming home and announcing, somewhere in his early ‘60s, that Blondie (he meant Debbie Harry) seemed like a very nice young woman. My theory is that they got along swimmingly because King fed my father’s curiosity about things popular while my father wrote him editorial notes that Arthur Haley probably never got from an editor, such as: “p. 50. It’s Horatius, not Horatio … p. 130 et seq. The deus ex machina comes originally from Greek drama, not medieval times.”
Anyway, here’s a strange thing: I have a copy of a letter my father wrote to King, actuallyasking him to put in something about defecation. The letter was about Misery (which he didn’t edit but read in manuscript)–the story, you’ll remember, of an injured writer imprisoned by a crazy nurse. My father wrote, “I do think there ought to be just a bit more bedpan mechanics, maybe just a detail or two early on. I hope you won’t color me coprophilic, but I do think that in a story so real in its pain and dilemma many readers are going to wonder how he copes.”
My father, for the record, was a guy. Loved your theory, by the way, that men obsess about their digestive tracts because they don’t have fallopian tubes to amuse them.And I’m glad you demonstrated to our readers, by quoting, that we’re not just engaging in a massive fit of prissiness here.
But here’s a counter to the theory that Stephen King is writing for guys: I looked back at King’s book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft and found that he says his ideal reader is his wife, Tabby. “[S]he’s the one I write for, the one I want to wow.” Isn’t that interesting–especially when combined with the news, contained in Dreamcatcher’s author’s note, that for a while she went around referring to it as “that book” or “the one about the shit-weasels”?
The fact that he was willing to piss off even his ideal reader with Dreamcatcher does make one circle back to the circumstances under which he wrote it: coming off of five different surgeries to repair a shattered hip and a lower leg that had been reduced, as one of his surgeons put it, to “so many marbles in a sock.” He writes with vivid pain about his accident of June 1999 in the closing chapters of On Writing–an account originally published in The New Yorker. And of course he’s woven the accident into the character Jonesy’s life, as an event that nearly made him lose his reason and made him at minimum the channel for (if not the cause of) the near-ending of the world. It’s hard not to spring to the hunch that it’s King’s rage that is tunneling its way through all these characters’ bowels, giving this dimension of the book its defiant, fuck-you-if-you-don’t-like-it quality. I suspect it’s this force that made me so want to put the book down 100 pages in.
My, for two people who hated this dimension of the book, we certainly have given it a full airing, haven’t we?
In closing, and in response to your defense of Duddits, I want to note that a theme is developing in our exchanges–at least in our conversations about popular fiction. As with John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener, you have shown yourself to be the more generous reader, more willing to bring to an (I would say) incomplete character a trove of association that allows you to flesh out and enjoy what I seize on as a problem. I say, “But the book has this flaw, and this, and this”; and you say, “Well sure it does, but it also has this charm, and this, and this.” I am beginning to think that you have a genius for nurturing your pleasure; in the face of it, I feel a little like Mr. Gray, weaned on a diet of good, tart information about the origin of the deus ex machina. … Next time we do this, I am going for the bacon: I’m going to try the experiment of outflanking you on the appreciative side and see if I can get you to be the cranky one. Ya think?
It’s been huge fun, as always. Best,
Marjorie
