by George Beahm
A sign welcoming drivers to Lisbon Falls, Maine.
An open field in Durham, Maine, taken in front of the two-story King home.
A fall in Lisbon Falls, Maine.
After that we went to live with my grandmother on my father’s side in Chicago for a period. I was in kindergarten at the time. I can remember at one time seeing a picture of me in my kindergarten class. All of us in the class had made Easter bonnets out of paper and whatnot. I don’t know if that picture is still in existence or not.
I can vaguely remember that we had a dog, and that the dog was kept in the front yard, and so you had to be very careful where you walked.
After Wisconsin, we then went to live with my father’s sister Betty, and a lady she stayed with named Rudy. We have a picture of that somewhere, too—Stevie and I sitting on a lawn in front of a house. That was in the Fort Wayne, Indiana, area. Aunt Betty was a schoolteacher, as was Rudy, and I skipped second grade because she thought that I should.
After that we lived in an apartment of our own in Fort Wayne. I can remember some of that. We shared the apartment with a number of cockroaches. It was an apartment house, but I’m not sure if it was a single-family dwelling or if there were a couple of apartments in it.
They finally planted geographic roots in Durham, Maine, in 1958. For the next eight years, it would be the place they called home.
The Kings’ small home was a stone’s throw from Methodist’s Corner (named after a local church). It housed Ruth, her two sons, and also her parents, then in their eighties, and in declining health.
Like most towns in Maine, Durham is rural. Chris Chesley, who was a young teenager living there in the late fifties, recalled that most people in town commuted to bigger, nearby towns to make a living. Chris’s recollection was that they were all “poor.” Or, at least, not well off.
In 1962, noted Stephen King in On Writing, Durham’s population was approximately 900. Its population according to the 2000 census was only 1,496 households (3,381 people).
Unlike most writers who grew up in comfortable surroundings, whether in urban or suburban environments, Stephen King and his family had a hardscrabble life. There were no luxuries. Understandably, his early fiction reflected a desire to escape, and he did it through his rich imagination, which transported him away from the rural dreariness of Durham.
Runaround Pond in Durham, Maine.
Lisbon Falls High School, which King attended.
It was the only world he knew, though in later years he made more frequent trips to nearby Lisbon Falls, where he saw life unfold in small-town Maine. A working-class town, with the Worumbo Mill as its primary employer, it was surrounded by small-town stores, shops, and businesses. (The mill burned down in 1987.)
Durham is mostly open fields, farmland, inexpensive single-family homes strung out on remote roads, and churches that formed its social hub. Its principal landmark is a large lake called Runaround Pond.
In later years, Stephen King’s references to himself as a “hick” can be seen as self-deprecation. Clearly, he was never a stereotyped Mainer, parodied in Creepshow, in which he played a hayseed farmer named Jordy Verrill.
Back then, in the late fifties and early sixties, Stephen King knew that financially his family wasn’t well off, but he did not consider them poor. Grounded in the reality of living in rural Maine, King’s early values—hard work, honoring the family, self-sustainment, and lack of pretense—would later be reflected in the naturalism of his fiction. King wasn’t the literary equivalent of John Updike writing about the solidly middle-class folks who come “from away” (a Maine term for non-Mainers). King didn’t write about the affluent tourists who come to Bar Harbor or other scenic destinations; instead, he wrote about the blue-collar working class because that was what he saw growing up in Durham.
Without the distractions of big-city life, or even small-city life on the scale of nearby Lisbon Falls, Durham was simple and unglamorous. His friends back then accepted him for who and what he was: a big, goofy kid who found self-worth in writing. He wore thick, black glasses and spent most of his time inside a cramped upstairs bedroom that he shared with his older brother David, who, along with an old, battered manual typewriter and his overactive imagination, were Stephen’s constant companions.
King’s life and times as a teenager were captured with fidelity in his story “The Body,” set in rural Maine and fictionalized as Castle Rock (the film version was shot in Oregon). In “The Body,” King wrote: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?”
Adapted by director Rob Reiner as Stand by Me, “The Body” perfectly encapsulates the life and times of a young Stephen King growing up in rural Maine: the first-person narrator, in fact, is King as Gordie LaChance, who finds validation in himself through his storytelling.
Gordie’s great fear, even as a young teen, is that he, like many of the others, would be trapped in Castle Rock and never realize his dreams. At one point Gordie’s best friend Chris asks him, “I’m never gonna get out of this town am I, Gordie?”
Gordie replies, “You can do anything you want, man.”
In the end, it is not Gordie who becomes a permanent resident of Castle Rock: that would be John “Ace” Merrill, who bullied him when they were younger and has become a fixture in the small town. As an adult, Gordon sees Ace leaving work from his job at the local mill and heading into a bar called the Mellow Tiger; Ace is now a thirty-two-year-old man, no longer lean and mean as he was in his teens, but overweight and resigned to his mundane life. Gordie looks on and thinks, “So that’s what Ace is now.”
Their world has moved on, and when life’s cards have been dealt, it’s Ace who holds the losing hand: He’s the joker. The winning hand is held by Gordie, who grew up, matured, and finally escaped the confines of rural Maine:
I’m a writer now, like I said. A lot of critics think what I write is shit. A lot of the time I think they are right … but it still freaks me out to put … those words, “Freelance Writer,” down in the Occupation blank of the forms you have to fill out at credit desks and in doctors’ offices.
But time is a river, and like the rushing waters of the Androscoggin River that runs through Lisbon Falls, past the abandoned Worumbo Mill where Stephen King once worked, life, too, moves on.
Worumbo Mills and Weaving
SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT
I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry.
—DR. FREDRIC WERTHAM,
ON AN INDUSTRY HE RAILED AGAINST
Crime SuspenStories (April/May 1954)
The infamous cover to Crime SuspensStories, an EC Comics book, showed a man with a bloody ax in one hand … and a severed woman’s head in the other. Just so the readers get the point, her lifeless body lays on the floor.
The message, the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham pointed out to a Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency, was that comics—all comics, not just the grisly fare EC Comics published—were in effect a seduction of the innocent: children had to be protected from the insidious scourge of comic books. In his 1954 Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth, he writes about Batman:
Several years ago a California psychiatrist pointed out that the Batman stories are psychologically homosexual. Our research confirms this entirely. Only someone ignorant of the fundamentals of psychiatry and of the psychopathology of sex can fail to realize a subtle atmosphere of homoerotism which pervades the adventures of the mature “Batman” and his young friend “Robin.”
Wonder Woman and Black Cat get no better treatment. “The Lesbian counterpart of Batman may be found in the stories of Wonder Woman and Black Cat. The homosexual connotation of the Wonder Woman type of story is psychologically unmistakable.”
To which any sane person should reply: horse pucky, as did Michael Chabon, who, in The New York Times (February 19, 2013), said: “You read the book, it just smells wrong. It’s clear he got co
mpletely carried away with his obsession, in an almost Ahab-like way.”
Now thoroughly discredited, most significantly by Carol L. Tilley, from the University of Illinois’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Wertham’s “findings” were twisted to serve his purposes. As Tilley told Dave Itzkoff, a writer for The New York Times, Wertham “manipulated, overstated, compromised and fabricated evidence,” leading her to conclude that he was “carried away with his own preconceptions, his own agenda, that became perhaps disconnected from the kids that he was treating and observing” (“Scholar Finds Flaws in Archenemy of Comics,” February 19, 2013). Wertham’s book was a sign of the times. It was the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who saw communists under every bed. For good reason, cartoonist Walt Kelly, in his strip Pogo, depicted the senator as a bobcat named Simple J. Malarkey.
The fifties was a time of national fear. The bogeyman didn’t lurk in the closet to come out under cover of darkness; he lived in radioactive clouds and communism, and in an atmosphere of suspicion and censure that bracketed the baby boomers’ lives, including a young, impressionable Stephen King.
Back then, pop culture, especially movies, reflected the fear of atomic attack such as Japanese movies that proclaimed their public fear of nuclear annihilation, and for just cause: In 1945, two atomic bombs spread radioactive death on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Back in the day, in the fright-filled fifties, popular culture—including movies, comic books, cheap horror and science fiction paperbacks, and television shows—was the fountain from which impressionable youth drank. Among them: youngsters named George Lucas (three years older than King) and Steven Spielberg (one year older than King), who wholeheartedly embraced popular culture, adamantly rejecting Wertham’s thesis that comics—and by extension, popular movies and television—constituted a wholesale “seduction of the innocent.”
If comics were a seduction, then Stephen King was willingly seduced … and so were millions of other kids who found pop culture theirs to embrace. It was, in short, their preferred literature.
It was also the final years of radio dramatizations as a form of mass entertainment. As King pointed out in Danse Macabre, “I am of the last quarter of the last generation that remembers radio drama as an active force—a dramatic art form with its own set of reality.”
In 1947, for instance, there were 40 million radios in American homes, but only 44,000 television sets. In the fifties, when King was growing up, TV displaced radio, and by 1958 television was the undisputed king. Back then, viewers used antennas on top of televisions (“rabbit ears”) to get reception and could choose among only three networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC, and programs were broadcast in black-and-white.
CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED
Ruth King clearly had a mind of her own, and did not share the views of Dr. Fredric Worthless—er, Wertham. She enjoyed reading comics aloud to her sons, who loved listening to her. From the time Stephen was six years old until he was ten, Ruth read comics to her sons. Celebrated for her dramatic skills in high school, Ruth was an excellent reader and chose her reading material well. She read from the Classics Illustrated line (Classic Comics until 1947), which issued adaptations of classics in the public domain, among them: Ivanhoe, The Count of Monte Cristo, Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, and Robin Hood. The comics were well drawn and, clearly, wholesome fare, though Wertham’s book specifically cited their unwholesome and corrupting adaptions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The comic books, accessible and bought at local drugstores or other retailers, were pathways to “real” books. Classics Illustrated enjoyed a long run and went on to produce 169 issues.
Classics Illustrated comic book (no. 118).
Comic books were King’s constant companions as a child, when he suffered an extended illness and thus missed much of first grade. Bedridden for the better part of a year, he found entertainment in “six tons of comic books” (On Writing). As he explained, “At some point I began to write my own stories. Imitation proceeds creation; I would copy Combat Casey comics word for word in my Blue Horse tablet, sometimes adding my own descriptions where they seemed appropriate.”
Comics—an artful blend of art and text—rely heavily on the visual, which contributed to how King saw the world, through the lens of four-color comics.
King initially came to writing not from the classics in prose form but through comic book adaptations of the same. At an early age, inspired by movies and comics, he began to write visually, which became one of his trademarks.
As King pointed out in On Writing, his mother was impressed with his early, imitative efforts, but thought little of the physical violence in Combat Casey. She also felt that, if he was going to write, he should do it his way. “I bet you could do better,” she told him. “Write one of your own.”
He would do just that.
AN HONEST BUCK
As Stephen King recounted in On Writing, he was mindful of his mother’s admonition when he penned a four-page story about a character named Mr. Rabbit Trick who was the leader of “magic animals who rode around in an old car, helping out little kids.”
After confirming that this was an original story, Ruth praised it. “She said it was good enough to be in a book. Nothing anyone has said to me since has made me feel any happier,” Stephen asserted in On Writing.
He immediately sat down and pulled four more rabbit stories out of his hat, for which his mother gave him four quarters, and distributed the stories to her four sisters. It was an honest buck earned, and his mother’s encouragement and approval was like manna from heaven for the seven-year-old eager to please his mother and prove himself. No doubt his aunts were bemused by his fledgling literary effort. It was a good start, but not King’s milieu. Bunny rabbit stories, like Trix cereal, are for kids. He was destined for more gruesome fare. (Rabbit stew, anyone?)
In time, the needle swung, hovering over the true north of his fictional interests. In The Art of Darkness, King recalls the first horror/science fiction story he ever wrote, at age seven: “I wrote about this big dinosaur that was really ripping ass all over everything.…”
Though low on scientific plausibility, the dinosaur is eventually dispatched by leather clothing and boots thrown at it. It was a start. His patented stories would get better over time, but given King’s lack of interest and aptitude with science in general, storytelling, not science, would always carry the day, if not the tale.
KING SUBMITS FICTION PROFESSIONALLY
In terms of his interests in writing, the turning point came when King was twelve, when he got his first typewriter, a heavy-duty Underwood, which allowed him to produce professional-looking manuscripts, which was critical because magazine publishers didn’t accept handwritten manuscripts.
But King’s typewriter couldn’t bear up under his constant key pounding, which eventually broke off the ends of some type bars, which meant he had to fill in missing letters by hand.
Douglas E. Winter, in The Art of Darkness, explains that King submitted to Fantastic, edited by Cele Goldsmith. She was also its slush-pile reader and would have been the one who read King’s early submissions and would likely have been surprised to learn that he was a young teenager.
We don’t know what short fiction he submitted to Goldsmith. We only know that his stories were rejected with preprinted rejection slips, with variations of “thank you but no thanks.” In Sam Barry and Kathi Kamen Goldmark’s book, Write That Book Already!, King recalled of this time:
When I was sixteen, I pounded a spike into my bedroom wall and started spiking rejection slips. The spike tore out of the wall four years later. I was home on semester break from college when it went. I counted, and there were over 150 rejection slips on it (which didn’t count the slips that came to my college dorm). After that I just piled them up. I sold my first story about eight months later.
Among them, King submitted to the most prestigious publication in the field, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. As with Fantas
tic, Fantasy and Science Fiction initially rejected King’s work with form rejection slips that were like stretch socks—one size fit all.
Like Fantastic, Fantasy and Science Fiction didn’t pay fantastic word rates; they paid only a few pennies per word. But, unlike Fantastic, Fantasy and Science Fiction encouraged King. The editor at that time was a well-known fantasy writer named Avram Davidson, an award-winning writer who was at the helm of the magazine from 1962, when King was only fifteen, to 1964.
In Art of Darkness, Winter noted that Davidson had rejected a story on the grounds that it was more horror than science fiction, which was true: King was no Peter Parker in the lab. In fact, in King’s fiction, the science is not rigorous.
Science fiction—especially hard science fiction, the kind written by Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov—was not King’s “thing.” King’s “thing” was anything that slithered, oozed, and went bump in the night: monsters, not handsome, rock-jawed spacemen in shining uniforms dispatching bug-eyed monsters slavering after shapely, buxom blond women in tight-fitting clothes.
No wonder, then, that King instead found his interest in the dark side of human nature, including teenage killer Charles “Charlie” Starkweather, a figure of fascination to a young, impressionable Stephen King. Using a .11 rifle, a .410 shotgun, a handgun, and a knife, Starkweather dispatched his eleven victims in a one-month period between 1957 and 1958, accompanied by his fourteen-year-old girlfriend.
When Stephen constructed a scrapbook of Starkweather’s rampage across Nebraska and Wyoming, it gave Ruth King pause. As Stephen King told Winter in an interview for The Art of Darkness, “My mother was ready to have me placed in analysis.”
