by George Beahm
THE LITERATI STRIKES BACK
Like the stormtroopers in Star Wars hastily putting on body armor and digging in to take offensive positions, when the committee for the National Book Awards sent out a press release announcing King as a recipient, the literati began their war of words.
In an article by Orlando Sentinel book critic Nancy Pate (November 19, 2003), on the day King accepted his award, critics nationwide chimed in in unison:
Harold Bloom, quoted in The New York Times, said of King that “He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls. That they could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy.”
J. Peder Zane (book review editor of the North Carolina Raleigh News and Observer): “There’s nothing wrong with being elitist when you’re talking about literary standards. Stephen King receiving a literary award is just another sign that we don’t take books and culture seriously. We’re equating arts and culture with entertainment. I don’t think King being honored by the National Book Awards is a good thing.”
Dennis Loy Johnson (of Melville House, a small press): “There appears to be some confusion. No, King’s not getting the National Book Award. But there’s still a big difference from when Oprah got the award for promoting readership. He’s an entertainer. Giving Stephen King the award is not as bad as giving Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize, but it’s right up there. Being literary is not being elitist, it’s just being literary. And if anyone is elitist, it’s the National Book Awards because they’re so expensive.”
89
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
2002
King says he has always wanted to “build a bridge between wide popularity and a critical acceptance. But my taste is too low, there is a broad streak of the vulgate, not the ‘vulgar,’ in my stuff. But that is the limitation of my background, and one of my limitations as a writer. I’ve got a lot of great things out of a small amount of talent.”
—STEPHEN KING, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, JANUARY 24, 1991
By conventional rules, when compiling an anthology, the lead story should be the strongest in the collection, and the final piece the second strongest. In the case of Everything’s Eventual, the lead story should have been “The Man in the Black Suit,” and the final story should have been “The Little Sisters of Eluria,” with its thematic suggestion that there are many open roads yet to explore.
This time, though, King used a pack of cards to determine the arrangement of the stories.
No matter.
Consider the arrangement, then, like a box of chocolates without the “cheat sheet” telling you what’s in each piece: Take a chance, this collection suggests, and you’ll find most, if not all, of them tasty. Go ahead: Take a bite.
If you’re pressed for time, though, read “The Man in the Black Suit.” One of three stories in this book drawn from the pages of The New Yorker, “The Man in the Black Suit” won the World Fantasy Award and also the O. Henry Award for Best Short Fiction (Prize Stories 1996: The O. Henry Awards, edited by William Abrahams).
What levels the playing field is that all the stories for Prize Stories are blind submissions; they are judged on their own merits.
When Stephen King won its top prize, it took a lot of people by surprise. As Megan Harlan of Entertainment Weekly (May 10, 1996) wrote, “Stephen King is the inexplicable winner of this year’s prestigious O. Henry first prize, for a fair-to-middling psychological horror story.… Perhaps this was a dry year for American short-fiction writers? Clearly not, as the nineteen other stories included are … overall, rich and eclectic.”
She wasn’t alone in dissing King’s contribution: Publishers Weekly called it “one of the weaker stories in this year’s collection.”
The story had its origin in a conversation with a friend, whose grandfather claims to have had a face-to-face encounter with Satan himself. King took that idea and wrote the story, which he’s said in interviews is an homage to a Nathaniel Hawthorne story, “Young Goodman Brown,” published in 1835.
The weakest story in Everything’s Eventual is “In the Deathroom.” Meant to be a serious story it unfortunately reads like a parody.
But anthologies aren’t graded on their worst stories; they’re assessed on their best stories, and along with “The Man in the Black Suit,” a short story from King’s Dark Tower story cycle is compelling reading: “The Little Sisters of Eluria” strikes all the right notes and can be read as a stand-alone story, though it’s obviously part of a much larger work in progress, the tapestry that is the Dark Tower series.
On that note, I strongly urge you to check out eBay and AbeBooks, since no trade edition from Scribner exists of Little Sisters of Eluria,1 which includes the revised first novel in the Dark Tower series, The Gunslinger. This gorgeous Donald M. Grant edition also sports illustrations by Michael Whelan, which alone is worth the price of admission.
This collection, as People magazine points out, is “an eclectic but finely balanced group. There are some pieces that could even be called uplifting, and one (“1408”) … that provides an almost perfect glimpse into madness. Anyone who appreciates a good yarn, especially those for whom a little King goes a long way, should give Everything’s Eventual a turn.”
1 The story itself is in Everything’s Eventual.
90
FAITHFUL
2004
I’m always bummed out on the day baseball goes back into hibernation.
—STEPHEN KING, TWITTER, OCTOBER 30, 2014
An aerial view of the Shawn Trevor Mansfield baseball park.
Directly behind the Kings’ home in Bangor is a state-of-the-art ballpark. It was a gift to the city from its most famous residents, who dug deep into their pockets to pay $1.5 million for its construction. No one would have complained if, like other donors, the park had been named in their honor, but that’s not the Kings’ style.
The ballpark is named the Shawn T. Mansfield Stadium, after the late son of Dave Mansfield, who coached a Little League team that made it all the way to the Maine state championship. (Shawn, who suffered from cerebral palsy, died in 1980. He was only fourteen years old.) A plaque at the entrance to the ballpark states that it’s dedicated to “Shawn Trevor Mansfield and all the other kids who never got to play baseball.”
The year that the Bangor Little League team went on to win the state championship, Stephen King’s son Owen was on the team, and Stephen, who was an assistant coach, was surprised at the poor state of the field; when the season was over, he decided to do something about it.
“I thought to myself, what a shame it is that [children] have to make adjustments on substandard fields with shoddy equipment.… It’s not on par with world peace or ending hunger here in Bangor, but I was taught that charity begins at home,” he told Ryan R. Robbins (bangorinfo.com, 1992).
The baseball park is now one of the most actively used facilities in the Queen City.
King and baseball go back a long way. Before he was drafted to write about sports in high school for a local newspaper, King, who grew up without a father, found that baseball filled a need in him. Even as a nine-year-old child, he watched with rapt attention the 1956 World Series on a black-and-white television.
“Baseball has saved my life,” he told Bob Haskell, in The Complete Handbook of Baseball (1992). “Every time I needed a lifeline, baseball was it. I grew up alone. My mother worked. I was a latchkey kid before anyone knew what that was. I would watch baseball when I got home from school. I listened to the games on the radio before that.”
A plaque mounted at the entrance of the Shawn Trevor Mansfield baseball park.
A coach talks to the players at a game being played at the Shawn Tevor Mansfield baseball park (circa 1989).
Unlike other small boys who played catch with their fathers in the backyard or sat next to them at baseball games or played Little League baseball with their fathers watching f
rom the bleachers, King missed out because, as the saying went in their small family, “Daddy done gone.” But baseball remained, King became a lifelong fan, and the game still plays an integral part in his life.
CLEARING THE BASES
Life, as King has said, has a funny way of coming around full circle, and so it has with King’s writings about baseball. From “Head Down,” his insightful diary turned article about Little League baseball published in The New Yorker (1990) to a book about the Red Sox titled Faithful, cowritten with novelist Stewart O’Nan, King has rounded the bases all the way to home plate.
“Head Down” is the story of how Bangor West, a Little League team, made it all the way to the state championship, and won; Faithful is the story of how the Red Sox made it all the way to the World Series in 2004, and won—their first in eighty-six years.
But King, who frequently employs baseball metaphors when explaining his own writing career, usually strikes out with literary critics who summarily dismissed his fiction, the ones who published in such tony magazines as The New Yorker and in literary journals where the bona fides often mentioned grant support, which infuriated King when he was a struggling writer who didn’t have resources to fall back on.
But when Stephen King published “Head Down” in the April 16, 1990, issue of The New Yorker, it signaled a sea change. King was establishing himself on their home turf, and the critics could no longer ignore him.
I can’t help imagining some of those hifalutin literary writers sitting down at the breakfast table with scones and coffee and opening up that issue, only to find King’s lengthy contribution staring them right in the face. The writer who said his work was the equivalent of a Big Mac and large fries had created literary cordon bleu: He had published in their magazine, and the evidence stared them in the face. King can write. In baseball terms, it was a whole new ball game. Make no mistake: Stephen King was clearly in a league of his own; he could write for the masses and for the literary crowd as well. He had, in effect, built a bridge from pop culture to literature, which he had been working toward since his college days. The two, he suggested, could coexist; they were brothers separated at birth, and shared a common heritage—storytelling.
“Head Down” is a fine piece of nonfiction writing. As an assistant coach for the team, Stephen King had a great view from the sidelines. He chronicled the young boys’ hopes and dreams as they triumphed over their counterparts: On August 5, 1989, in an 11-8 victory, Bangor West won the Maine State Little League Championship.
In the movie A League of Their Own, actor Tom Hanks famously said, “There’s no crying in baseball.” Well, it may be true of pro baseball, but not so in Little League, where the young boys wear their hearts on their sleeves. As King recounted in “Head Down,” at the 1989 Little League championship game, when the pitcher of the team that lost to Bangor West realized in the final moments that they were going to lose, “he begins to weep.”
The essay was reprinted as the final piece in King’s 816-page anthology, Nightmares and Dreamscapes. (The audiobook for “Head Down” was read by Stephen King.)
It’s no surprise that baseball metaphors sprinkle King’s conversation in interviews, in his nonfiction, and especially in his fiction: a Sandy Koufax baseball card in Needful Things that is prominent in the plot, and the key figure of Tom Gordon in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. King also published a short book, Blockade Billy, about a promising young ball player from the game’s old days named William Blakely, whose career crashed and burned. “I love old-school baseball, and I also love the way people who’ve spent a lifetime in the game talk about the game,” said King, talking about the book.
But if you want to talk about King, baseball, and enduring love, you gotta talk about the Boston Red Sox. You gotta.
SEMPER FIDELIS
On December 6, 2014, tickets for the Red Sox’s spring training games went on sale. The prices ranged from $5 for a lawn seat to $48 for a home-plate dugout box. There were eighteen home exhibition games played at JetBlue Park’s stadium at 11500 Fenway South Drive in Fort Myers, Florida, and my guess is that there was a tall man with square-framed wire glasses wearing a ball cap and a T-shirt, who either was holding a book to read between innings or a notebook in which to write. That man would be Stephen King, who makes his winter home in nearby Sarasota.
Just so you know, he’s not there to sign autographs, and he’s not there to give you advice on how to get published or how to get an agent. He’s there, just like you, to watch his favorite baseball team practice before it moves back north to its real home in Boston, in Fenway Park, where hope springs eternal: The team won the World Series in 2004, and fans want to see a repeat, and a three-peat, and, well, you get the idea.
The weather’s always warm in Fort Myers. I’ve spent my fair share of time there, because my mother-in-law made a permanent move down from Delaware to the City of Palms, as it’s called. When Maine’s getting hit with massive snowstorms that intimidate snowplows, sitting on a bleacher in sunny Fort Myers and watching your favorite baseball team under a clear blue sky, feeling a light breeze with the temperature in the high seventies, holding a cold brewski in one hand and a juicy hot dog slathered with condiments in the other … well, life doesn’t get much better than that.
It’s a time when the Red Sox are working out the kinks, shaking off the winter doldrums, before things get serious, really serious, when they get back to Fenway, which comes alive every spring with a packed crowd cheering on the home team as they take to the field.
In the bleachers at Fenway, you’ll find Stephen King. Sometimes he’s alone, and sometimes he’s with a friend, but he’s always got a book to read and a notebook for the down times during the game. He sometimes fills that notebook with fiction, which will get transcribed by an assistant when he gets back to Bangor, a three-hour, forty-minute drive.
King is a permanent fixture at the games. He’s even thrown out the first ball of the season, but that doesn’t mean he’s public property, which acquisitive fans soon find out. He absolutely doesn’t sign for “graphers”—a term his daughter Naomi employed in an article she wrote for Castle Rock—because this is his personal time; he’s just a baseball fan who happens to be a guy named Stephen King.
In other words, save yourself some trouble and disappointment and don’t play the role of a demanding fan. If you want to show your appreciation, give him what he wants: Let him enjoy the game in peace, just as you’d want to do, too.
King may not mind if people come up and talk baseball—that’s what they’re all there for, after all—but if you ask his thoughts on how the team is going to do that year, you get his stock answer: “I’m not an expert; I’m just a fan, and I don’t know. I’m hoping for the best, just like you are.” (He told NPR’s Michele Norris that’s what he tells everyone who asks.) It’s short, it’s quick, and it satisfies the fan who wants to be able to go home and tell the wife, “Guess what, honey? I saw Stephen King at the game, and I talked to him for a minute.”
How big is Stephen King? And how big a fan is Stephen King? Big enough on both counts that when the Red Sox published a retrospective, Fenway Park: 100 Years, they turned to—you guessed it—Stephen King to write an introduction, and he obliged. It’s a $75 book, and according to the team’s official Web site, in short supply and available nowhere else, so get it while you can.
ABOUT FAITHFUL: TWO DIEHARD BOSTON RED SOX FANS CHRONICLE THE HISTORIC 2004 SEASON
“As far as writers go, Stewart and I were the two luckiest sons of bitches alive. Events conspired to even make it an uplifting book.… Thanks to the Red Sox, it even has a beginning, a middle, and an end!” said Stephen King in an Audiofile interview, on Stewart O’Nan’s and his good fortune to write a book about the Red Sox during the season the team won the World Series.
King and O’Nan are buddies, now, but their professional relations got off to a rocky start. If you take a gander at the spine of the first printing of Stewart O’Nan’s novel The Speed
Queen, you’ll notice something odd: There’s a white bar running down its length, with black text overprinted: “The Speed Queen, Stewart O’Nan, Doubleday.” What’s underneath that white bar is Dear Stephen King, the original title, which King hated, spurring his lawyers into action. Obviously, by the time Doubleday got the legal complaint, it was too late to stop the presses. Either the books had already been printed and bound or the cover boards, in black, had already been printed. Regardless, the publisher was forced to go back and overprint.
“I loved the book, hated the title. I felt he was using me,” King told Audiofile.
In “Necessary Evil,” an original article written for Phantasmagoria, a King zine, Stewart O’Nan explained, “The Speed Queen, Dear Stephen King—by any name, the book is a hot, funny, sexy, wild ride. It’s fast as hell and I think the voice is the best I’ve done. Go to the work, and you’ll see.”
The legal entanglements aside, good writers admire good writing, and King saw that O’Nan had the goods. They also shared something else in common: They are both Red Sox fans, and in time became fast friends that collaborated on a nonfiction book titled Faithful, a chronicle of the 2004 season in which the Red Sox won the World Series.
In King’s essay, in the back part of the book, he paints a word picture:
It may still be March in the Northeast, with air as raw as hamburger and snow up to David Ortiz’s belt buckle, but as the Boston Red Sox take the field against the St. Louis Cardinals here on the afternoon of March 16 for a World Series rematch, it feels like midsummer in Florida; the sunshine is hazy, the temperature is a humid 80 degrees, and the clouds over the Gulf of Mexico promise thunderstorms later.
