by George Beahm
It was an educational experience for all of us. We were in high school. I might have been fifteen, maybe sixteen.
GB: What’s it been like for you, an aspiring writer, to be a writing buddy with the young boy who seemed destined to be the bestselling author Stephen King?
Chris Chesley: It’s been a very fortunate experience to have known Stephen King, but it’s very inhibiting for me. I know this guy. I was in the position of watching him develop as a kid. I could see the kind of talent he had. I’m the first to admit that I’d been doing other things, but at the same time, having known someone who is that good, why aren’t you? What are the probabilities?
Steve showed some concern and said, “Don’t worry about that. You can’t think like that. You have to do your own stuff.”
GB: Give me a sense of what it was like to be around him when he turned on his powerful, imaginative storytelling machine.
Chris Chesley: Last night I was trying to think of a way to describe what it was like—his intense use of imagination—and I came up with the only way I can describe it, by trying to find something in your experience. So I say to you: You’ve been in a position where somebody you really care about, like your wife, hasn’t showed up at the right time; it’s dark and your imagination begins to work overtime, suggesting possibilities. You can see them vividly in your mind.
Well, take that intensity of imagination and make it a constant in your life. Imagine having that ability, not just in times of stress or joy, of constant imagination, and you have a picture as to what Steve was like as a kid.
A literary example: One of my favorite ghost stories is The Turn of the Screw. Is there a ghost? Is there not a ghost? The governess is out there on a big place with the kids, but do the kids see the ghost?
My own opinion is that the governess’s imaginative function is so Stephen Kingish, so intense, that she is able to create for the children a sense of the actual existence of the ghost, which winds up destroying them. That’s what it was like to go to Stephen King’s house and write stories with him.
There was a sense that these things weren’t just things in a book. When you walked inside, there was a sense of palpability, almost as if the characters in the books, the stories, and the atmosphere had real weight.
Imagination made it real, not only for him but also for me. To go inside his house was like being pulled into a different world than Durham with its cowsheds and its lack of imagination, and that’s why trying to describe it to people is so difficult. It’s what drew me to go see him. He had that ability. If you went inside his house and were susceptible, you’d be drawn into that. And when you read stories with him, they took on weight. His was almost a world unto itself, which I was privileged to enter.
Even as a kid, a teenager—remember, this wasn’t an adult creating a world—Stephen had the power to do that. It was an amazing thing. He’d be working on The Long Walk or another story, and when I got there I’d ask, “What have you done? What’s happened with this character?”
Basically, you had a kid who, from the time I knew him, wrote between two and four hours, or maybe more, a day. It was like someone who has a talent for the piano: You sit down and just do it.
GB: What about the fabled Underwood typewriter with missing keys?
Chris Chesley: I tend to think it was a Smith Corona. It wasn’t the world’s best typewriter. It was missing letters, like the o. Then the e broke off, and I remember typing a page and then filling in the letters; he did that, too, because we weren’t content in leaving the space blank.
GB: What did you do out here in the sticks to entertain yourselves?
Chris Chesley: That’s one of the interesting things about Durham back then: There weren’t any social activities. It’s unimaginable for someone who came from an urban or suburban environment. In fact, it wasn’t until we became teenagers that they had dances down at the local hall. At one point there were Boy Scout activities, but that was in Pownal, the next town over. Here in Durham, you were pretty much on your own. School was really the only institution that affected us.
You did what you would do in any small little town. It was like Mayberry, where people are walking down a road, kicking up dirt: You did that. You went fishing. You went over to see your friends. You hung around. You rode your bikes. And that was it. You made your own fun, and with not many people around to do it with.
That situation contributed to Steve’s ability to create fictional worlds. A definite lack of outside stimulation allowed his own creative abilities to come to the forefront.
A manual Underwood typewriter similar to what King’s mother bought him.
GB: Any local haunts?
Chris Chesley: There used to be a house that Dave mentioned in The Shape Under the Sheet [The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia]. Steve and I got a hold of a movie camera. We weren’t seriously trying to make a movie; we were trying to figure out by taking shots how you designed it to make it scary. We were trying to figure out how you got the person up and down the stairs, and how to get the shadows.
It was a deserted house, the kind of place that had enough vibes so that you didn’t want to spend the night there. I don’t think we ever got enough nerve to do that. It had enough of a feeling of previous occupancy so that you didn’t want to hang around too long.
Inside those little rooms, it was different. It had the staircase that Steve mentions in ’Salem’s Lot, where they went upstairs and found a hanged man, Hubie Marsten.
GB: Were there any television shows Steve particularly liked?
Chris Chesley: Sure. The Fugitive. Thriller. Steve especially liked The Outer Limits, which didn’t stay on the air that long. He was crazy about that show. Twilight Zone. Those shows were on during the heyday of television, which sucks now. Back then, they used to have shows that were entertainment-oriented, and not so market- and issue-oriented.
In those days, television had no competition, and that made a difference.
GB: Did any of the shows affect Steve as a writer?
Chris Chesley: Earlier today, you were speaking about the kinds of shows that were on: Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, My Three Sons.
We were taught that there were certain ideals that TV represented, and that’s what we learned—the ideals of what Americans lived like.
I think what Steve does in his books, in Pet Sematary, for example, he’s got an ideal family that’s moved to Maine. The happy family is living in a rural setting. Steve sets it up beautifully, so that when [their young son] Gage dies, you are heartbroken, just devastated. It’s the setup for the whole book.
An abandoned building where Chesley and King shot a movie.
This ideal can be destroyed. Steve not only had a sense of the ideal that he got from living here, he also had a sense of the fragility of that ideal, because a lot of what he saw around here couldn’t live up to it, so there’s tension.
Carrie has got some of that, too, with the ideal high schoolers—the difference between those wonderful, golden youths—and Carrie. The tension of Carrie derives from that. Steve felt like that idea existed, and he wanted to believe it was valuable, and it was the right thing. But of course, coming from where he did—this community and his own life—this idea was distant from it. I think that makes a lot of difference in Carrie.
GB: Do you think there’s a lot of pent-up anger in Carrie?
Chris Chesley: Steve never talked about that. I saw him periodically on the weekends. He never talked very much about his high school years. It was understood that we got together to talk about movies, books, and things like that. I’ve always assumed since then that he didn’t have a wonderful high school experience; it wasn’t that great a time for him.
GB: What was it like in the days when he was actually writing Carrie?
Chris Chesley: Steve and Tabby lived in a double-wide mobile home. When I went to the University of Maine at Orono, I moved in with them at their house on Stone Street in Bangor. The year after that, he moved
to Hermon, and I moved in with them because I wanted to live off-campus. I used to hitchhike to and from school every day. It was about fifteen miles from his home to Orono. It was on top of a windswept hill with snowplows buzzing back and forth during the winter.
I would hitchhike home from school around 2:00 P.M. I had to go from Orono, through Bangor, and out to where Route 2 connects to the turnpike, and down Route 2 to Hermon. I wound up home around 3:30 P.M.
Steve would get home around then, too. He was driving a big, old, midnight-blue gas guzzler, which was on its last legs when he bought it. It was a piece of junk. Sometimes, I’d meet him at the exit ramp on Route 2, where he’d pick me up, if it was just the right time, and I’d ride the rest of the way up to the house.
GB: Where was Tabitha at the time? Working or at home?
Chris Chesley: She was home with the kids. It was an extremely difficult time for both of them. They were in a bind. Joe was a baby at the time, so Tabby was in a position where she couldn’t get out of the house that much. She was taking care of the kids during the day while Steve taught. Plus, in the evenings, he graded papers and wrote. This was long before the days of day care and support systems.
GB: Tabitha is a very private person. We know a lot about Steve but very little about her.
Chris Chesley: One of her qualities is that she gets impatient a lot sooner than Steve. She’s got a much more critical eye toward people than Steve does. Her eye was much more measuring of the world than Steve’s. She had that degree of impatience with what she saw around her, so she might be impatient with the problems that would arise with interviews, where she might be misquoted, or the wrong impression would be led.
GB: Tabitha’s obviously had a big influence on Stephen’s thinking.
Chris Chesley: I would say that’s true. That’s pretty much been the way it was since they were married.
Steve also trusts her opinion. He knows that she can give an accurate opinion of his work. When I knew them back on Stone Street or in Hermon, she didn’t skew what she said. Because she cared for him, she told him the truth. She does not pussyfoot around. It’s one of her more endearing qualities. She knows who she is, and she’s got her own opinions of the world and the people in it.
GB: In the Durham days, would the King family be considered working-class? And to what extent did his family and the rural environment that he had grown up in play a part in him becoming a writer?
Chris Chesley: Right around here was farming, but the majority of towners went out of town to Lewiston, Auburn, or Brunswick. Durham’s farming days had been over after the war, but there was the last breath of that then.
The community’s complexion had changed. When we moved here, the town was basically a working-class town; in a sense, a hard-luck town.
When we talked about Steve’s situation, we have to put it in perspective. A lot of kids we knew, and a lot of people we knew, had the same kinds of problems that he did, or worse.
I’m very careful not to want to attribute his writerliness to his family background. Other kids didn’t become writers, and they had situations that were just as bad, so we have to be careful about how we view the contribution of his family background.
We were all poor. Nobody had any money. Two dollars was a lot of money for us back then. To be able to go to the drive-in once every two weeks was a real big deal. Not to sound like an old mossback, but I think that contributed to the way we valued things. We didn’t buy very much, but when we bought books or something else, we got deals. It wasn’t just for the sake of buying something; we had a sense of value about them. Mainly, we weren’t consumers. We didn’t have the money to be consumers.
You also have to be careful when you say, Well, Steve was a poor boy, so he wanted to become rich. There were a lot of people down here who didn’t have any money, whose houses didn’t have central heating or bathtubs. And, again, a lot of those people didn’t become writers either, so I wouldn’t want to say that Steve’s financial circumstances when he was growing up had that great of a role to do with why he became a writer.
GB: If you had to sum up your friendship with Steve, how would you describe it?
Chris Chesley: It was a special occasion.
Road sign: “Welcome to Orono: (home of the University of Maine).
A statue of a Black Bear, the UMO mascot.
Burton Hatlen, friend and mentor, and college professor who taught King.
The Penobscot River that runs past the University of Maine at Orono.
“Ted” Holmes, a college professor who taught King.
The Old Town public library, which Tabitha King frequented.
Road sign: “Welcome to the city of Old Town,” where Tabitha King was born.
Carroll E. Terrell, a college professor who taught King.
6
STEPHEN KING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MAINE A WRITER IN THE MAKING
BY SANFORD PHIPPEN
UNIVERSITY OF MAINE AT ORONO, CLASS OF ‘64
FALL 1989
“University of Maine” sign on campus.
King inside at a protest rally against the Vietnam war.
King outside at a protest rally against the Vietnam war.
He is certainly the University of Maine’s most famous graduate. (Can you name another who has made the cover of Time?) What F. Scott Fitzgerald is to Princeton, what Nathaniel Hawthorne is to Bowdoin, and what Thomas Wolfe is to Chapel Hill, Stephen King is to Maine.
People tend to fall in love with authors more than with engineering programs, forestry schools—maybe even athletic teams. Look at the people who come to the state because of E. B. White, Robert McCloskey, even Helen and Scott Nearing. On a recent literary tour of the Bangor-Brewer area, Mary Lou Colbath (a Maine Public Broadcasting Network staffer) and I had to cut short part of a planned itinerary because so many of the librarians and teachers, mostly from Ohio, wanted to be sure they reached Stephen King’s house to have their pictures taken before it got too dark. Students are now enrolling at Maine because of King’s influence. And in the creative writing department, where I taught for a year (1987–88), his presence is strongly felt. One of my former colleagues says, “I don’t mind Stephen King, but I wished he lived in Arizona. So many students try to imitate him—and badly. They think writing like this is an easy way to make money.”
The influence of King on the university seems natural enough. The fact is that U Maine is where Stephen King started to become STEPHEN KING. Orono is where he first began to publish his work, both in his regular columns for The Maine Campus and the college literary magazine, and in national magazines like Cavalier. Orono is where he impressed his professors as a good student and was encouraged by them in his writing. Orono is where he received an important forum and feedback for his early work. Orono is where he made lasting friendships. And Orono is where he met his wife, Tabitha Spruce (‘71), from Old Town.
Of course, the era he attended the university was also an important factor in the development of Stephen King. It didn’t hurt to be a writer in the making on a college campus during one of the most turbulent times of the twentieth century. Steve was a student from 1966 to 1970, and while no race riots or antiwar demonstrations got wildly out of hand at Maine, there were demonstrations and protests, there was a Students for Democratic Society group on campus, and there was a three-day unofficial moratorium after the Kent State University tragedy in the spring of 1970. And Maine, like other U.S. colleges at the time, was undergoing many changes, especially in the areas of students’ rights and residential life.
King’s popular column “Garbage Truck,” which appeared in The Maine Campus from February 20, 1969, through May 21, 1970, reflects much of what was going on at the time. While mostly he reviewed movies, TV shows, and rock music (just as he still does in his work), he did call for a general student strike on April 24, 1969. And he wrote in one column about what it was like to be called dirty names and have eggs thrown at you during a relatively peaceful End the War protest ma
rch on campus in May 1969. He attacked such establishment organizations as the All Maine Women, Senior Skulls, Sophomore Owls, and Eagles, calling them irrelevant and elitist. In reaction to such groups, he invented his own organization, which he called the Nitty Gritty Up Tight Society for a Campus with More Cools, and he handed out “gritties,” or awards, to those people at Maine who, in his opinion, did cool things. His columns also attacked Pope Paul and supported the California grape pickers’ strike in October 1969. On the other hand, he wrote in support of police officers and against those at the time who called cops “pigs.”
In a March 3, 1970, column, he suggests that the university would be a better place if it got rid of all required courses and abolished requirements for all branches of the school. In one of his final columns (April 1970), he writes about how he changed from being a conservative who voted for Nixon in 1968 to becoming what he termed a “scummy radical bastard.” The radical image of Stephen King was featured in a photo by Frank Kadi (‘69) on the Campus cover of January 15, 1969. King looked as wild as one of his evil characters, sporting long hair, a beard, a deranged look in his eyes; grinning a bucktoothed grin; and pointing a double-barreled shotgun at the reader. Underneath the picture, in “coming-of-Christ” headline print, is the exclamation: “STUDY, DAMMIT!!”
In a May 1, 1969, column, King wrote about being part of the first “special seminar” created at the university during the fall semester of 1968. This was Contemporary Poetry, taught by Burt Hatlen (‘65) and Jim Bishop (‘61), two of King’s favorite instructors, to whom, along with fellow English professor Edward M. “Ted” Holmes1 (M.A., ‘54), he dedicated The Long Walk, one of the four novels written under King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman.
