by George Beahm
Sanford Phippen at the UMO bookstore.
King Graduates: A Blessed Event?
When King graduated from high school, his yearbook photo showed a conservative young man with neatly trimmed hair and large glasses, straight out of a fifties or sixties’ television sitcom, recalling Leave It to Beaver or My Three Sons. But on the cover of the school newspaper, The Maine Campus (January 15, 1970), it depicted a maniacal-looking Stephen King brandishing a shotgun.
As Tabitha King wrote in Murderess Ink, “There is a striking resemblance to Charles Manson, and the picture trades on it. It is the very face that made my parents less than enthusiastic when I first brought him home.”
We also find, in Prism, the yearbook from the University of Maine at Orono, a photo of King at an antiwar rally. He’s sporting long hair, a thick beard, and brandishing papers in his upright hand. Standing six feet three and weighing over two hundred pounds, King stood out on campus: He was indeed a big man on campus, in stature and in reputation. In four turbulent years, he had grown from an apprehensive freshman wearing the requisite beanie to a world-and-war-weary senior. It’s little wonder, then, that he wrote about graduation as a “BLESSED (?) EVENT” in his final “King’s Garbage Truck” column dated May 21, 1970:
This boy has shown evidences of some talent, although at this point it is impossible to tell if he is just a flash in the pan or if he has real possibilities. It seems obvious that he has learned a great deal at the University of Maine at Orono, although a great deal has contributed to a lessening of idealistic fervor than a heightening of that characteristic. If a speaker at his birth into the real world mentions “changing the world with the bright-eyed vigor of youth” this young man is apt to flip him the bird and walk out, as he does not feel very bright-eyed by this time: in fact, he feels about two thousand years old.
King’s senior picture from high school.
King on the cover of the Maine Campus.
1 Edward M. “Ted” Holmes was the long-time creative writing professor at the University of Maine where he also taught American literature. He was the first to declare Stephen King “a writer.” Ted himself was the author of two short story collections: Driftwood and A Part of the Main, and one novel, Two If By Sea. He was an expert in the works of William Faulkner whose first editions are collected by King. Holmes also wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe: Woman and Artist. He lived to be 99 years old.
2 Ed. note: This idea never reached fruition, though the Kings did establish the Haven Foundation to help “freelance writers and artists experiencing career-threatening illness, accident, natural disaster or other emergency or personal catastrophe.” (King’s official Web site)
7
RICK HAUTALA
MAINE’S OTHER HORROR WRITER
A lot of interviews try to turn me into ‘Steve King Jr.’ I’m sure Steve blurbed my books because he genuinely liked them, not because we are friends and he wanted to get me started. Now and again he’s offered advice that’s been right on target, and again, I’d be a fool not to listen. He’s had a helluva lot more experience with publishing than I have!
—RICK HAUTALA, CASTLE ROCK
When you think of Maine writers, Stephen King comes first to mind, but standing in King’s long shadow in Maine was another horror writer who also attended the University of Maine at Orono: Rick Hautala (1949–2013), a self-effacing man who was too shy in college to introduce himself to Stephen King.
Riding the shock wave created by King’s popularity, Rick was able to sell horror novels, until the bottom dropped out of the market.
I first contacted Rick back in 1988 when I was working on the first edition of this book, to solicit an interview. He happily gave one, but pulled it at the eleventh hour for private reasons. Here, for the first time, the original interview finally sees publication.
I’d spent time with Rick on two occasions, both in Portland, in the company of two Maineiacs, the writer David Lowell and illustrator Glenn Chadbourne. I look back at both times with fond memories.
Portrait of Rick Hautala by Glenn Chadbourne.
What I want to write about is an act of kindness by King that helped Rick launch his career. It’s a good example of how King’s star power and connections opened doors for another talented Maine writer, and speaks well of King’s unpublicized efforts to help other writers less fortunate than himself.
The small community of horror and fantasy writers comes together annually at the World Fantasy Convention and the World Horror Convention, where King’s name is justly celebrated: His work transcended the horror genre, making it more legitimate and mainstream, and his support of the field’s small presses has kept them afloat, by allowing them to make a profit on his books without risk. Today, a signed Stephen King limited edition always sells out its entire print run in a matter of hours, months before its publication.
Rick Hautala had gotten not one but two blurbs from King, emblazoned on the covers of his mass market paperback novels: Moondeath and Moonbog.
In his posthumous autobiography, The Horror … The Horror, Hautala tells of working as a clerk at a Waldenbooks in 1975 in Portland, Maine. King walks in, and they talk. When Rick tells King that he’s writing a horror novel, King offers to read it, but there’s one problem: Rick hasn’t finished the novel. Two years later, it’s finally done. Rick ships it off to King, who reads it, writes an enthusiastic cover letter to accompany it, and sends the package on to his literary agent, Kirby McCauley.
What Rick didn’t know was that King went the extra mile and furnished an unsolicited blurb.
No first-time novelist could wish for more from anyone, much less King.
McCauley eventually sells Moondeath (1981) to Zebra, and it’s published as a mass market paperback emblazoned with King’s blurb on the top. You can’t miss it: “One of the best horror novels I’ve read in the last two years!”
Rick published a second novel, Moonbog (1982), with a King blurb on its front cover: “Hautala’s new book is an impressive novel of suspense and dark horror.”
Rick’s bestseller was Night Stone (1986), the first book to have a hologram on the cover, which helped goose sales to over a million copies in mass market paperback. (I think, though, that the writing had a lot more to do with it than Rick admits.)
In 2012, the year before he died, Hautala received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association. It meant the world to him, to be recognized by his peers. It also speaks volumes about just how good a writer he was, especially since he was his own worst critic, and suffered from self-esteem problems, which he took no pains to conceal.
Book cover to Rick Hautala’s Moondeath, with a cover blurb by King.
RICK HAUTALA: AN INTERVIEW
1988
Sure a blurb from Steve helps sell a book, but even better, I like knowing that he’s read my books and liked them. Steve’s been a tremendous inspiration for me in my career because he was the first “flesh and blood” writer I ever knew, and that gave a reality to the possibility of me getting my own work published. I don’t think I would have had that if I hadn’t known him before he or I got a book under contract.
—Rick Hautala, interviewed by David M. Lowell
(Castle Rock, March 1989)
GB: What was King’s role in the horror boom in the eighties?
Rick Hautala: King took what began with The Exorcist and gave it another boost of legitimacy as a viable form of fiction. Until that time, any kind of writing with supernatural overtones, or straight-out horror novel, was under the umbrella of science fiction.
GB: What were your impressions of King’s ambitious novel ’Salem’s Lot?
Rick Hautala: The first thing that hit me was that King used small-town Maine stuff, settings, and characters I knew and experienced. I felt an incredible amount of identification with the characters and settings, and ’Salem’s Lot scared me. I’ve read a lot of horror fiction and seen a lot of horror movies, and it freaked me out: I wasn’t ready for it
. I remember it was the first, and only, time I had to sleep with the lights on.
GB: What do you feel is King’s best book?
Rick Hautala: I view The Dead Zone as his best book because I saw it as a culmination of that phase of his career. I know a lot of people who also think that it is his best book.
GB: How would you describe your relationship with King vis-à-vis asking for a helping hand?
Rick Hautala: I have made it a personal point of honor that I won’t beg Steve for help. I won’t do it. But when he offered help, I wasn’t stupid enough to reject it. When he offered to read Moondeath and liked it, he sent it around to some people he knew, and turned it over to his agent, Kirby McCauley, and that got my career going. Kirby made it clear that he wasn’t handling me as a client; he was doing it as a favor for Steve.
GB: You were a contemporary of King’s at the University of Maine at Orono. How was he perceived on campus?
Rick Hautala: There was a group of writers, English majors, who were also publishing in the literary magazine and the newspaper, and of those writers he was the one whose stuff stood out. There were a lot of poseurs and sensitive poets, but his was the only stuff I consistently read because it delivered. He was the most talented of the English majors. I didn’t dare show my writing. I didn’t hobnob with the students who were writing.
GB: In terms of success and other writers in the horror field, how would you describe King’s success?
Rick Hautala: I think people are beginning to realize that there isn’t going to be another person in the field who writes like King does; no one else is getting $40 million for three or four books like King.
GB: What accounts for his success, and his growing audience?
Rick Hautala: He always delivers a story, and he proves himself with every successive book. I’m convinced that if he released a book under another name that nobody knew about, it would disappear without a trace. The Bachman books didn’t set any bestseller records when nobody knew it was Steve.
GB: So, is King going to retire anytime soon?
Rick Hautala: When he “retired” a few years back, as soon as I read that, I laughed. Steve not write? It just isn’t in his makeup. He said in print that he writes to keep himself from going crazy. He needs that outlet.
8
BURTON HATLEN:
AN INTERVIEW
1988
On the one hand, there have been a lot of people who are regarded as major writers who were very popular—Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare. I think that there’s another issue here, and that is that Steve’s work really in some ways grows out of a conscious critique of that cultural split itself, and his critique of it is that what the split does is automatically write off everything that’s on the popular culture side as mere commodity, trash, a contribution to the debased tastes of an illiterate mob.… We have a massive rethinking of the whole issue of canonicity and canonization; Steve’s work is one of the forces that has initiated this rethinking of that issue.
—BURTON HATLEN, STEPHEN KING’S AMERICA
The late Burton Hatlen was King’s professor, mentor, and close friend. In a postscript to Lisey’s Story, a novel published in 2006, King wrote:
Finally, great thanks to Burton Hatlen, of the University of Maine. Burt was the greatest English teacher I ever had. It was he who first showed me the way to the pool, which he called “the language-pool, the myth-pool, where we all go down to drink.” That was in 1968. I have trod the path that leads there often in the years since, and I can think of no better place to spend one’s days; the water is still sweet, and the fish still swim.
It was Hatlen who wrote the first major review of Carrie. A well-respected scholar who published dozens of essays in journals, he wrote several pieces on King. Hatlen also worked with Carroll Terrell to build the National Poetry Foundation and became its director in 1991.
Though Hatlen never collected his critical writings in book form, his wife, Virginia Nees Hatlen, told me that she’s currently working on a collection.
When Stephen and Tabitha King made a generous donation to their alma mater of 4 million, they gave the first installment of one million dollars to Hatlen to hire more arts and humanities professors.
When Hatlen died at age seventy-one, King, contacted by the local paper for a comment, said that Hatlen “was more than a teacher to me. He was also a mentor and a father figure. He made people—and not just me—feel welcome in the company of writers and scholars, and let us know there was a place for us at the table.”
King paid homage to Hatlen in “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” (in Different Seasons) by naming one of its characters after him: a prison librarian named Brooks Hatlen.
This interview was conducted in the summer of 1988 at Hatlen’s book-filled home in Bangor.
GB: When did you first encounter Stephen King?
Burton Hatlen: During my first year here, which was his sophomore year, he took a course from me on modern American literature. He did read some stuff in that course that I think had an influence on him, including John Steinbeck. We read Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, and I remember him being very struck by that. He got very interested in Steinbeck, and is still a Steinbeck fan.
Within the last four years, Steve, as a way of giving his kids jobs to do, paid them to tape-record novels. They recorded Steinbeck’s short stories and East of Eden. When he was traveling, he would listen to the tapes.
In a recent conversation, he and I were talking about various things, and I mentioned that I hadn’t read East of Eden, and he was surprised. So I immediately ran off and read it; he’s always been able to do that to me. It’s a good book, and I liked it. It’s regional stuff, and that’s one of the things he got from Steinbeck, a sense of place that he could make his own.
We also read Faulkner’s Light in August in that class, and he was very excited by it.
He was very taken with William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, and when we did a hundredth anniversary conference at Orono in 1983 on Williams, Steve did a reading from it.
So several of the things that he read in that course have had an impact on him, though I don’t think Faulkner has been as strong a force as Steinbeck on him.
He’s still interested in Faulkner, and in recent visits to his house he showed me a first edition of The Town, one of the middle-period Faulkner novels. He was excited he had found it.
During that year—the fall semester of his sophomore year—Jim Bishop and I came up with the idea that we wanted to do a course on contemporary American poetry, the first special seminar offered at the university.
We had a very exciting class composed of twelve students. It included Stephen King, George MacLeod, and Bruce Holsapple, who went to Portland and started a magazine called Contraband, in which there were some early King poems in the first couple of issues.
The course was a very dynamic experience for a lot of people. Many of them started writing poetry as a result of it, and then a poetry workshop grew out of that, which lasted for the rest of King’s college career. As a poet, I thought Steve was very good.
GB: Who influenced him at the University of Maine at Orono?
Burton Hatlen: Jim Bishop, one of Steve’s teachers, had The Long Walk dedicated to him. Ted Holmes was also one of the most affirmative of his work when Steve was a student.
GB: King is best known, or at least pigeonholed, as a horror writer. Do you read much in that genre?
Burton Hatlen: I read a lot, but I didn’t read horror fiction then, and in fact I don’t read it now. It’s not a major interest. That’s not the dimension of his work that interests me.
I’ve written about him as a writer who happens to use the conventions of the genre but is interested in some very serious issues, including American society. He has basically a counterculture, New Left perspective. Although our politics are pretty similar in some respects, he was radicalized to some extent by the experiences of the sixties, of which I was very much
a part of that process, very involved in the antiwar protests. He was listening to me. I felt I really had an impact on him. He’s testified to this on many occasions.
GB: What about the question, attributed to you in Rolling Stone, that Douglas Winter alluded to in The Art of Darkness: “Is there such a thing as white soul? Is there a suburban soul?”
Burton Hatlen: Steve attributes that to me, but it’s my distinct memory that it was he who came to me and said, “Well, here I’ve been reading all this stuff about black soul, and what I’m interested in is whether there’s such a thing as white soul.”
I was struck by it. That’s why I remembered it, which is why I can envision the conversation, because we were walking somewhere and he’s talking about his own writing; he wants to make his writing an expression of white soul.
It also has a racist overtone to it that I don’t like. It’s not the kind of thing I would say.
GB: As you know, King said that he couldn’t see why popular culture—particularly in literature—was held in such low regard. What are your recollections of his position?
Burton Hatlen: I want to elaborate a little bit about that business of popular culture and traditional or high culture.
Steve took his courses, read everything, and was actually a very good student, but he was also quite critical of the faculty.
