Overarching all Rushdie’s works are two grand symbolisms: one – most fully developed in The Ground Beneath her Feet – is that of Orpheus, the postmodernist icon. Torn apart, his dismembered head continues to sing, unstoppably. The other grand symbol is that of Scheherazade and the 1001 nights – the story which must go on, if life is to go on. Rushdie is rarely one for short narratives. His oeuvre has been lumbered with the label ‘magic realism’. What is more significant is how that fiction divides commentators into ferociously opposed camps. He refuses to recant, pull in his horns, or recycle – ‘Midnight’s Grandchildren’ will never happen. And, with every change of step, Rushdie irritates. But, as Cocteau said, savage reviews are love letters, of a kind. Like fatwas.
FN
Salman Ahmed Rushdie
MRT
Midnight’s Children
Biog
www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5531/the-art-of-fiction-no-186-salmanrushdie
288. Stephen King 1947–
I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries.
Like others of my generation (and his), I have grown old with Stephen King. I first encountered his work, some thirty-five years ago, with the primal ‘Gunslinger’ episodes in the magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction. The mixture of Mallory and Sergio Leone was not to my taste – although sufficient numbers of fans liked it well enough to encourage King to continue it as his seven-part Dark Tower saga. His first-published ‘Our-World’ novel, Carrie (1974), was indeed to my taste. Carrie White is an unhappy little girl in a crummy little town who discovers she has ‘powers’. It’s payback time for all those school mates who have picked on her. She goes on a telekinetic shooting, slaughter and urban demolition spree. It’s justified Columbine.
Carrie bears the hallmarks of King’s later fiction. He had a deprived childhood himself and – a sickly, geeky kid – was bullied. He found comfort in comic books. The picked-on child, from Carrie, through Arnie Cunningham (Christine, 1983) to Duddits (Dreamcatcher, 2001), is a fixture in King’s fictional universe. So, too, is the gory nemesis for whole communities – whether by vampiric infestation (Salem’s Lot, 1975), diabolic takeover (Needful Things, 1991), telekinetic flame-throwing (Fire-starter, 1980), alien invasion (The Tommyknockers, 1987), nasty things seeping out of the sewers (It, 1986), or – most preposterously – a demonically possessed saloon car (Christine, 1983). There are many energies at work in King’s fiction, but fantasised revenge on his long-ago tormentors is clearly among the more powerful. ‘Lost childhoods’, as Graham Greene observed, make interesting novelists. Authors, like generals, need luck and King has had a lot of it. Carrie was Class-A pulp, but what gave it the edge over, say, John Farris’s The Fury (1976), or David Seltzer’s The Omen (1976)? King’s first stroke of luck was his publisher, Doubleday, landing a $400,000 deal for the paperback rights. He was, at one leap, in the big time. The second stroke of luck was the film rights being optioned for a movie directed by Brian De Palma.
Like John Grisham, Mario Puzo and Peter Benchley, King has been blessed with film tie-ins frankly better than the novels they adapt. Stanley Kubrick (The Shining, 1980), John Carpenter (Christine, 1983), David Cronenberg (The Dead Zone, 1983), Rob Reiner (Stand by Me, 1986), George Romero (The Dark Half, 1993), have added collateral lustre to King’s reputation. And it’s not just directors – King’s narratives elicit terrific performances. One thinks of Jack Nicholson’s ‘Here’s Johnnie!’ (which, incidentally, King hated), but even more unexpected is James Mason doing a prince of darkness in a TV Salem’s Lot (1979) – the role the velvet-voiced one was born to play. The Dead Zone (1979) is not one of King’s great works, yet Christopher Walken – maimed and bent on presidential assassination – gives the performance of a lifetime. Even actors whose facial expression is as constipated as James Caan’s (Misery, 1990) or as inscrutable as Tim Robbins’s (The Shawshank Redemption, 1994) relax in the narrative environment King creates. And, without King, Kathy Bates (Misery, Dolores Claiborne, 1995) would still be a supporting actress. If, as the Hollywood proverb goes, there are actors whom the camera ‘likes’, there are also writers too. There have, of course, been clunkers – The Lawnmower Man (1992) which King disowns; and The Running Man (1987) which he ought to disown, come to mind, though even they have a kind of horrible watchability. Who would miss the spectacle of the future Governor of California in skin-tight spandex, doing battle with the future Governor of Minnesota dressed up as a tin can?
The other thing that King had going for him was energy of composition. The ‘firestorm’, as fans called the spate of writing in his early career, was fuelled, as a cleaned-up King later confessed, by cocaine and booze (he cannot, he claims, remember writing Cujo (1981), his shaggy-dog horror tale). In the ten years following Carrie, King turned out eighteen full-length novels and four volumes of collected stories. When his publisher felt he might be glutting the market, he invented an alter ego, Richard Bachman, to share the burden. Bachman, alas, has since died of ‘cancer of the pseudonym’. It remains a supreme feat of authorial athleticism.
And it paid off. In 2003, Stephen King made number 14 on the Forbes wealthiest celebrity list, with an estimated income of $50 million-plus. Only novelist Michael Crichton ranked higher, and Crichton was, by contrast with King, a child of privilege. He was writing bestselling novels while a Dean’s List medical student at Harvard. Stevie King had no such advantages and believes that he is denied respect. Unlike Crichton, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, from mobile home to mansion. In his acceptance speech for the lifetime award given him in 2003 by the National Book Foundation, he recalled how he, and his wife Tabitha, ‘lived in a trailer and she made a writing space for me in the tiny laundry room with a desk and her Olivetti portable between the washer and dryer … When I gave up on Carrie, it was Tabby who rescued the first few pages of single spaced manuscript from the wastebasket, told me it was good, said I ought to go on.’
Big as his sales are, King’s inferiority complex is bigger. He has a burning sense of ‘injustice’ – against himself. He despises ‘smarmy’ literary critics but yearns for their attention. The main thrust of his NBA speech was Carrie-style payback. They hadn’t emptied a bucket of pig’s blood over his head, but the literary establishment was guilty of ‘tokenism’ – treating him like a house Negro with their confounded ‘lifetime award’. What did they know of his life? The literary establishment declined to be cowed by some hack, who had struck it rich with a reading public even less cultivated than himself. Harold Bloom, who is to literary criticism what Einstein was to physics, declared that the NBA’s decision to give an award to King was ‘another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I’ve described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.’
He deserves better than Harold Bloom. What sets King apart from other super-selling authors is his constant straining against the limitations of genre. Works like Gerald’s Game (1992; a wife is victimised by an S&M loving husband), Rose Madder (1995; a wife goes on the run from a sadistic husband), and Dolores Clai-borne (1992; a battered wife is driven to homicide) are, probably, husbandly homage to the admirable Tabitha. But they also indicate King’s willingness to write against the grain of his branded product. Ever restless, King revived the Dickensian novel in numbers, issuing The Green Mile (1996) in serial instalments. Less successfully, he had a stab at the e-novel, with Riding the Bullet and The Plant. Together with Peter Straub, King has pulled off, with The Talisman (1984) and Black House (1989), that rarest of literary achievements, the tandem-authored novel that is, at least, half decent.
Few novelists have been as graphic about the trials of authorship. The Shining (1977) is, on one level, about the problem of writing with a wife and child distracting you (why not chop them up?). In Misery, the writer is – as King must often
feel – in bondage to his number one fan. King’s fear of unconsciously plagiarising is dramatised in Secret Window, Secret Garden (1990). In The Dark Half (1989), the novelist hero is bifurcated into a ‘class’ novelist and a ‘hack’ – King’s own agonising dualism. Bag of Bones (1998) is a fantasy about writer’s block: few writers have allegorised their professional plight as imaginatively as King. As the many websites testify, Stephen King stimulates what can only be called cultism among his more devoted followers – those who could earnestly discuss for hours whether ‘Ka’ turns clockwise or anti-clockwise. Running through his work is the vision of a Manichaean struggle between the powers of light (almost always represented by a child) and the powers of darkness – variously incarnated as Randall Flagg, Walter o’Dim, the Fisherman, the Man in Black or – latterly – the Crimson King. King’s dualistic cosmos is most starkly portrayed in The Stand (1978). After a global epidemic, the world is stripped down to two camps; Armageddon and apocalypse ensue. Who wins the day is enigmatic.
King’s philosophy of bestsellerdom, ruefully expressed over the years, is that the money is nice, the adulation is nice, but he yearns for an ordinary man’s privacy – the privilege, for example, of going to a Red Sox game and not being recognised. Ever since his horrific accident, when he was run down walking along the high road in Maine in June 1999, there was something missing from King’s fiction. He noted it himself, in typically wry fashion: ‘I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.’
FN
Stephen Edwin King
MRT
The Stand
Biog
S. Spignesi, The Essential Stephen King (2001)
289. Robert Jordan 1948–2007
I’m not a guru or a sage. I’m a storyteller. The only times I get disturbed is when I find people who seem to be taking this too seriously.
When it came out in mid-October 2009, Robert Jordan’s posthumous A Memory of Light (completed by another hand) shot to the top of the hardback American bestseller list. Jordan’s publishers, Tor Books, were unsurprised. They had authorised a first print run of a million copies on the basis of the novel’s thirteen predecessors in The Wheel of Time cycle. A Memory of Light caters to hard-core initiates of fantasy fiction. If you have to ask who Robert Jordan is, you’ll probably never know or care to find out. According to Amazon, those who like this book also go for the sword, sorcery and pseudo-religious sagas of George R. R. Martin, Terry Goodkind, Raymond E. Feist, Robin Hobb and Fritz Leiber – names which will ring few bells with the general reader, but all of whom have their faithful bands of devotees.
Jordan (real name James Oliver Rigney Jr) was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and was proudly Southern his whole life. An older brother introduced him to the works of Jules Verne (at four years old, Jordan claimed), which left an indelible impression. It was not, in his early manhood, destined to be a literary life. He served two tours in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner, winning a chest full of medals (most honourably the Distinguished Flying Cross, for gallantry under fire). On being discharged he took a degree in physics at the Citadel, the military academy in South Carolina, and then he was assigned to the US Navy, as a nuclear engineer. Jordan did not begin writing seriously until 1977. ‘From the age of five I intended to write, one day. When I had established myself in a more stable profession. Then I had an accident that resulted in a month’s stay in the hospital, during which I almost died, and I decided life was too short to wait on “one day”. So I started writing.’
It came easily to him. Under the pseudonym ‘Reagan O’Neal’, he turned out a series of pirate romances set in mid-eighteenth-century Charleston. His career as an author was assisted by his wife, Harriet McDougal, his editor at Tor Books. The couple lived in a 1797 Charleston mansion, of which Jordan was inordinately proud. As his skills developed he moved on from swashbuckling to Westerns, then – most successfully – to sword and sorcery. He did not, he later attested, ever want to write about Vietnam – or anything even allegorically connected with that horror. Fiction was escape; it may even have been therapy.
Jordan is credited with seven Conan novels between 1982 and 1984, beginning with Conan the Invincible and ending with Conan the Victorious (see Robert E. Howard for the origin of the Barbarian hero). On the American version of Desert Island Discs, Jordan chose his trusty M16 rifle as one of the three objects he would take with him. Like dog-owners, authors, it seems, come to resemble their heroes.
The first in the ‘WoT’ series, The Eye of the World, came out in 1990. Like Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry Jenkins’s bestselling Left Behind series – a fictionalised Book of Revelation – Jordan aimed to complete his series in twelve volumes (in the writing, it extended to fourteen). Both series concluded with versions of Armageddon, the final battle.
Despite the parallels, it is doubtful that their readerships overlap. Jordan casts his net beyond the evangelical belief system of LaHaye and Jenkins deep into heathenish hinterlands. It’s easy to read his fantasy as an allegory of current, real-world American anxieties. It was observed that sales of Jordan’s series jumped after 9/11.
It is impossible to summarise, with any lucidity, the swirling plots of the ‘WoT’ saga. One of Jordan’s devotional websites makes a gallant stab at doing so for the first in the series:
A crazed Lews Therin Telamon wanders through the wreckage of his palace, not seeing the corpses of his wife and children. A man named Elan Morin Tedronai appears to kill him, but is angered to realize that Lews Therin is too insane to recognize him, and heals him (painfully) using the Dark One’s power. Returned to sanity, Lews Therin sees the dead body of his wife Ilyena and begins sobbing uncontrollably. Tedronai offers to bring her back from the dead if Lews Therin will serve the Dark One.
It gets more complicated over the next fourteen volumes – and cosmic in its time and space frames:
‘Ten years! You pitiful fool! This war has not lasted ten years, but since the beginning of time. You and I have fought a thousand battles with the turning of the Wheel, a thousand times a thousand, and we will fight until time dies and the Shadow is triumphant!’
In book-trade terms, ‘WoT’ (as ‘WoT maniacs’ like to call it) is a prime example of ‘franchise fiction’ – spinning off, profitably, into computer games, comics and sponsored competitions. Later titles were promoted by ‘Internet Hunts’, in which experts could navigate twelve riddling websites to win their prize. There is also a ‘theoryland’ website devoted to exegesis of the finer points of Jordanology.
In early 2006, Jordan announced on his Dragonmount blog that he was suffering from cardiac amyloidosis, that it was fatal, and that he would not live more than four years – if that. He stated, gallantly, that he would keep writing to the end and that he would fight the disease. New treatments for Jordan’s rare ailment proved unavailing and he died a few months later. His huge collection of knives and swords was sold on eBay, including such favourites as the Nepalese Kukuri, the Japanese Katana, the Cold Steel Magnum Tanto and an Applegate-Fairbairn fighter. His cycle was completed by a disciple.
FN
Robert Jordan (born James Oliver Rigney, Jr)
MRT
A Memory of Light
Biog
www.imdb.com/title/tt1298655/ (documentary film by Hunter Wentworth)
290. Ian McEwan 1948–
Sometimes I think I’ll never quite escape my early reputation.
Ian McEwan was born in 1948, a dreary year, in that dreariest of garrison towns, Aldershot. His father, David, was a senior NCO, later an officer, in the British Army. A pen portrait of him is given as a motorbike dispatch rider in Atonement, in the Dunkirk section. He was, his son recalls, ‘very handsome, erect, with a dangerous look about him. A hard-drinking man, quite terrifying. He was a great stickler for all the spit and polish of traditional army life, and at the same time he adored me as I grew older.’ A Glaswegian, David McEwan lied about his age to sign up in 1933 (a
n even drearier year than 1948) to escape the dole and see the world. Both he and his mother, McEwan recalls, ‘were rather frightened of him’. She was a fourteen-year-old school leaver who had gone into service; he was a child of the post-war ‘bulge’ – as significant, demographically, as being an Indian midnight’s child. It meant, after some time in postings abroad, a good boarding school education, while his parents continued to follow the pipe and drum across the shrinking Empire.
Vivid flashes of McEwan’s childhood found in the fourth chapter of The Child in Time (1987) – his father, for example, slathering Brylcreem on his son’s pomaded, then short back and sides, sticks in the mind. As an adult, while he still had it, McEwan’s hair would run very wild. At school he read widely, was ‘rather lonely’, and toyed with science A-levels before being redirected to literature by a charismatic teacher. L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between is cited as lastingly influential and could, one suspects, furnish an interesting Ph.D. on the topic of juvenile treachery – a favourite theme of both novelists. On leaving school, McEwan went to Sussex, one of the ‘new’ 1960s universities built to accommodate the ‘bulge’ and the previously excluded cohort liberated into higher education by the 1944 Education Act. The syllabus was flexible and cross-disciplinary. It suited him well. The boundary between science and humanities has never been an insurmountable obstacle for Ian McEwan.
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Page 116
