There are conservatives, mostly among the followers of Russell Kirk, who hold a special place in their hearts for the old pulp fiction of Ray Bradbury. And there are others, mostly libertarians, who hold a special place in their hearts for the old pulp fiction of Robert Heinlein. But they may all wish to reconsider, for what’s become apparent in recent years is that the single most popular pulp writer of the twentieth century is also the most conservative. And his name is Stephen King. The champion of horror fiction is proving with his latest efforts to be able both to express a surprising level of moral sophistication and — in a much harder trick — to bring his enormous audience along with him as he rises from low-brow pulp to solid middlebrow fiction.
King is back in the news this week, thanks to the just-released movie version of his 1996 serial novel The Green Mile, directed by Frank Darabont. “Darabont has the world’s smallest cinematic specialty,” says King: “Stephen King prison movies.” And he’s right. The forty-year-old Darabont has directed just three films: a thirty-two minute short based on King’s short story The Woman in the Room, and two full-length features, the 1994 Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, both screen adaptations of jail-themed King books.
More than any other of the directors who’ve created the thirty-five King stories now on film, Darabont brings both seriousness and a light touch. Based on a six-part novel, The Green Mile tells the story of Paul Edgecomb (played by Tom Hanks), a death-row prison guard in 1932 Louisiana. A large black man named John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan) comes under his care, convicted of raping and murdering two young girls. Coffey, however, has mystical powers of healing, and the film tells the moral struggle of a prison guard who must, to perform his duty, put to death a man he gradually comes to believe is innocent. The Green Mile is sure-fire Oscar material, but the real revelation in the film is the growing power and confidence of the author himself.
Born in 1947 in Portland, Maine, King grew up poor, the younger of two children. His parents, Donald and Ruth Pillsbury King, were Down-East Yankees to the core (his maternal grandfather had been Winslow Homer’s handyman), but when King was two, his father left and his mother took a variety of jobs to keep the family solvent.
Mercifully, King himself rejects the pop psychology that would look to the traumas of those days for the explanation of his adult writing. He attributes his infatuation with the macabre to his discovery, while rooting through his aunt’s attic, of a trove of pulp books when he was twelve: Frank Belknap Long, Zelia Bishop, A. Merritt, and, most important, H. P. Lovecraft’s The Lurking Fear and Other Stories. He was instantly hooked and began writing his own pulp fiction, diligently submitting short stories to magazines.
After winning a scholarship to the University of Maine, King continued writing feverishly, finishing his first stab at a novel before his freshman year began. (It went unpublished until 1977.) It was there at school he met Tabitha Spruce, whom he married in 1971. With college finished, King embarked on life as a struggling writer, working at a laundry during the day, typing away at short stories during the night. At one point he took a job teaching high school English.
Gradually, however, his stories began appearing in men’s magazines. And then, in 1973, he wrote a short novel called Carrie and showed it to an editor. He was never a struggling writer again. Carrie became a bestselling horror franchise: hardcover and paperback books, a movie and sequel, and even a short-lived Broadway musical. Since Carrie, King has published more than forty books in thirty-three languages, selling over three hundred million copies.
King may be the richest writer in American history, but unlike most contemporary wealthy authors, he has been generous with his money. In 1998 he recounted to the New Yorker the day he sold the rights to Carrie:
Ruth King was working at Pineland Training Center, a home for the mentally retarded. “She served meals, cleaned up s –, wore a green uniform,” King said. “One day I went to Pineland to tell her I’d sold this book. She was pulling a truck of dishes. She looked so strung out. She’d lost forty pounds and was dying of cancer but it hadn’t even been diagnosed. I looked at her and said, ‘Mom, you’re done.’ And she was. That was her last day working.”
After she died, King built the Ruth King Theatre at the school his sons attended.
His philanthropy has been wide-spread. He built the Shawn T. Mansfield Baseball Complex in Bangor in memory of the son of one of his friends, and recently bequeathed $ 4 million to the University of Maine, where he sometimes lectures. He subsidizes the National Poetry Foundation, and he is a champion of other writers, trying to give recognition to men such as Thomas Williams, Don Robertson, David Goodis, and Jack Ketchum, whom he calls “American craftsmen who’ve been over-looked.”
All of this makes sense after one reads his books. While his popularity suggests comparison to such writers as Tom Clancy, John Grisham, or Michael Crichton, his prose is more on the level of Elmore Leonard or Cormac McCarthy — and that, despite his staggering level of production. He typically writes a novel a year, and early in his career, wrote so much that he published some under the penname “Richard Bachman” to avoid saturating the market. In 1996 alone, he brought out the six parts of The Green Mile in addition to a pair of interlacing novels, Desperation and the Bachman-penned The Regulators. In one week, King was first, fourth, tenth, twelfth, fourteenth, and fifteenth on the New York Times paperback bestseller list.
In all this writing, King has demonstrated his commercial craftsmanship. When he submitted his 1,200-page manuscript for The Stand in 1978, his editors told him that he needed to trim 400 pages so the printing costs could be kept in line with the book’s $ 12.95 cover price. Without throwing a tantrum or campaigning for his “artistic rights,” King made the cuts. “Writers are made, not born or created out of dreams or childhood trauma,” he declared in Danse Macabre, his non-fiction study of the horror genre. “Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing.”
But he has also done the hardest thing of all for an enormously popular and highly rewarded author: He has improved himself, and his audience with him. The earliest King books are good, juicy, satisfying pulp, but nothing more. Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter, Cujo, all share an urgency to shock. From the pig’s blood at Carrie’s prom to Cujo’s attack on young Tad, there is a reliance on the lesser angels of his audience’s nature, as King himself now seems to realize. “Mostly I cringe,” he says about his early books. “I really cringe. I think, boy, this is raw.”
So he strove for better. His prose, never immortal, got good enough that you rarely noticed it. Then, in a conscious way, he began to raise the level of his tales. Misery, Needful Things, Bag of Bones, and The Green Mile all carry firm moral under-pinnings, and his non-horror short stories, such as Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and The Body (later made into the movie Stand By Me) showed a growing sense of humanity. Suddenly his legions of readers found themselves reading passable fiction instead of Weird Tales schlock.
The Stand, which remains by far King’s most popular book, is also his most explicit morality play. In The Stand a minor mishap results in a government-engineered plague. The plague virus, known as “Captain Trips,” kills all but a handful of people, and the survivors assemble into two camps, one led by Randall Flagg, “the devil’s imp,” and the other led by an elderly black woman named Mother Abigail who is expressly identified as an agent of Christ. Following God’s orders relayed through Mother Abigail, four members of her camp make a pilgrimage to Flagg’s base of operations (in Las Vegas, of course) to take their stand against evil. When they arrive to confront Flagg, the hand of God reaches down and smites the devil.
King’s novel is riddled with religious references — and not the feel-good stuff either. The Stand concerns tests of faith and crucifixions and sins of pride. It even showcases the most daring of contemporary views: a small brief against abortion. “The horror story most generally not only stands four-square for the Ten Commandments, it blows them up to tabloid size,” King wrote in Danse Macabre.
It may be precisely because he comes out of a pulp tradition — with its cardboard figures representing good and evil — that King understands what his contemporaries seem to have forgotten: the necessity of a moral framework in successful middlebrow fiction. “The horror story,” King says, “beneath its fangs and fright wig, is really as conservative as an Illinois Republican in a three-piece pinstriped suit; its main purpose is to reaffirm the virtues of the norm by showing us what awful things happen to people who venture into taboo lands.”
But for all his understanding of the necessity for moral structure, King does fall prey to one thoroughly modern sensibility: the notion that true moral wisdom can be found only in the hearts of children. Adding together the Victorians’ belief in the sexual purity of children, the American Transcendentalists’ Romantic belief in innocence as the highest moral condition, and modern pop psychologists’ belief in indulgence, the first wave of Baby Boomers pioneered the idea that children are morally superior to their parents. They firmly believed that good parenting meant allowing their children to express themselves without being tainted by adult constructs, all of which were symptomatic of some fall from grace.
And secretly King believes this too. “Children see everything, consider everything; the typical expression of a baby which is full, dry, and awake is a wide-eyed goggle at everything,” he writes. About The Stand, he says, “I was able to envision a world in which all the nuclear stockpiles would simply rust away and some kind of normal moral, political, and ecological balance would return to the mad universe we call home.” But then he realized “that the survivors would be very likely to first take up all the old quarrels and then all the old weapons.”
The only truly pure characters in King’s work are children or adults who act like children. At the end of The Green Mile, John Coffey, who is slow to the point that he’s considered daft and is so afraid of the dark that he asks the prison guards to leave a light on at night, is put to death by a guard who believes that Coffey is innocent. The guard, Paul Edgecomb, is sympathetic in every way, a kind man who understands his stern duties. Yet because he is part of the adult world, working for “the system,” King visits a horrible fate upon him at the film’s end.
At last, the component missing from King’s view of the world is what the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls “second innocence” — an awareness that the highest moral condition is not the retreat into the first innocence of childhood but an advance through adult guilts into a new and grownup form of moral life.
But if King’s moral sophistication isn’t yet whole, so be it. By elevating his pulp and pulling his readers along with him, he’s done the broader culture a service. He’s brought his thinking and writing a long way from Carrie to The Green Mile. Maybe he’ll go even further. At his present pace, he has another forty or fifty books in which to try.
