After a near-fatal road accident in 1999, Stephen King endured seven years of pain, almost died twice and eventually retired from writing - a decision he later reversed to write his intensely personal new book. John Connolly met him in New York
Stephen King chews another grape and smiles happily. The first reviews of his latest novel, Lisey's Story, have begun to trickle in on this, the first day of publication, and all are hugely positive. They may, in fact, be the best reviews of his career, and his delight, even 33 years after the publication of his first book, is genuine and undisguised.
The pleasure has a number of roots. It's clear that Lisey's Story is important to him, which is why he has taken to the promotional trail for the first time in seven years in order to publicise it. He knows that it is one of his best books, a beautifully written study of a long marriage and the grief that follows the death of a spouse, as well as an examination of the sometimes ambivalent relationship between the writer and the creative process. "Every long marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark," as the book puts it at one point and, even if King is keener to point out the ways in which it differs from his own life rather than the resemblances, it is obvious that this is an intensely personal book.
"I thought it was the best one when I had written it," he says. "I think you get a feeling about certain books. Sometimes I feel like a baseball player in that some books feel like singles and some books feel like doubles and every so often you get a Rose Madder, which feels like a pop-out - but every now and then you write a book and think, 'Wow, I got all of that', and you really feel like you swatted it out of the park."
But it is also clear that he understands how close Lisey's Story came to never being written at all. In June 1999, King was struck by a minivan while walking near his home in Center Lovell, Maine. He suffered multiple fractures to his right hip and leg, scalp lacerations, and a collapsed right lung. Six pounds of metal were implanted in his body during the initial surgery, and were not removed until 2001. During his recuperation, he bought the minivan in question and set about reducing it to scrap metal with the aid of a baseball bat. In a final twist to the tale, the driver of the van, Bryan Smith, died the following year, passing away in his trailer on September 21st, Stephen King's birthday, a plot twist worthy of the writer himself.
Since then, he has endured seven years of constant pain, has come close to dying twice, and at one point announced his retirement from writing, a decision that cannot have been taken lightly by this most prolific of writers. Now, on a cool evening, he sits backstage in the Symphony Space on Broadway while a long line of fans snakes around the block outside. Some of them have been queuing since early morning in the hope of securing a good seat for his only public appearance in New York, and perhaps picking up one of a handful of pre-signed copies of the new book in the process.
He looks well, dressed in a jacket bearing his son Owen's name and the colours of his beloved Red Sox (his second home in Florida is, not entirely coincidentally, near the team's winter training ground). He is tall, his eyes a little too small for his head, his head a little too large for his body. He moves slowly, although it is hard to tell if this is a product of the suffering he has endured or of a life lived at the steady, deliberate pace of his native Maine. He is droll and self-effacing, but not, I think, unaware of his position in the literary pecking order. He is modest, but not falsely so.
As we talk, we can hear the sounds of the audience entering the auditorium. In less than an hour, the first sight of him as he steps on to the stage will bring forth a massive round of applause, quickly joined by a wave of cheers that will break only when he sits down and raises a hand in thanks. Here is that rare author, one who is held as much in affection as esteem by his fans, and there is something very moving about their joy at being in the same room as him.
As they applaud, I applaud with them.
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947. His father abandoned the family while King was very young, leaving his mother to raise her two sons alone.
He met his wife Tabitha, who is also a writer, while at college, and they now have three children, two boys and a girl. For years, he worked at a laundry, just as his mother had done, washing motel and hospital linens while he worked on his first novel, Carrie. It eventually sold in 1973, and since then he has published more than 50 novels, novellas, short story anthologies, and works of non-fiction, selling more than 300 million books in the process.
He was also a drug addict and an alcoholic for much of that time, even delivering his mother's graveside eulogy while drunk. He wrote The Tommyknockers with cotton wool stuffed in his nostrils to stem the cocaine bleeding, and can barely remember writing another novel, Cujo. (At one point during the course of our interview, he struggles to remember the title of the third novel in the Dark Tower series. "I did write it," he says, "but I also did a lot of drugs at one time or another." He laughs, and sighs. "Kids, don't do drugs."
Eventually, his wife confronted him and gave him a stark choice between his family or his addictions and, although fearful of being unable to write if he wasn't feeding his addictions, he kicked the worst of his habits. There is a description in his non-fiction book On Writing of his wife emptying the trash bag from his office in front of him during the intervention. It contained beer cans, cigarette butts, cocaine in gram bottles and cocaine in plastic "baggies", coke spoons caked with snot and blood, Valium, Xanax, bottles of Robitussin cough syrup and NyQuil cold medicine, even bottles of mouthwash. (He preferred to drink Scope rather than Listerine, as it was tastier and mintier.)
It was only when he looked back at the depiction of the doomed writer Jack Torrance in The Shining that he realised it was essentially a self-portrait, and he gave his addictions a female form in Misery, in which a famous writer is kept captive by a crazed fan, Annie Wilkes. Cocaine was his Annie Wilkes, and he was its pet writer. Now he still goes to AA meetings, and permits himself three cigarettes each day, but in his reluctance to use painkillers to deal with his day-to-day battle with the consequences of his injuries it is possible to discern the addict's fear of becoming hooked once again.
Lisey's Story, the tale of Lisey Landon, a writer's widow who is struggling with the aftermath of her husband Scott's death, the disturbing truth about his youth and the source of his stories, and the attentions of a vicious, sadistic fan, is a book born out of King's pain. Two years after his accident, and believing himself to be on the road to recovery, he discovered that the bottom part of his right lung remained damaged. He contracted pneumonia, and the lung was removed from his chest so that surgeons could repair it. While he was recuperating, his wife announced that she was going to have his office renovated so that it would be ready for him when he returned home.
As things turned out, he was discharged before the renovations were complete."I couldn't sleep because I couldn't get comfortable or anything," he remembers, "and one night at around two o'clock, with the wind literally howling outside and the sleet banging against the windows, I went into the office, and it was upsetting because I had lost about 30 pounds in the hospital that I couldn't afford to give away, and all the books were out of the shelves and they were in boxes, and all the rugs were rolled up, and I felt ghostlike anyway because I'd picked up one of those bugs in the hospital and I had the shakes. And I looked at it and I thought, 'this is what my office would look like if I had died. I feel like a ghost in this place'. And I thought, 'there's a story there'."
I suggest to him that it must have been a difficult novel for his wife to read, as its depiction of a writer's widow struggling to come to terms with her husband's death must have seemed uncomfortably close to the reality of her own situation in recent years. He shifts uncomfortably in his seat. It is clear that this is a line of questioning he would prefer not to encourage, but he endeavours to answer nonetheless.
"She's very quiet about this book. Tabby is usually very free with her opinions and will give me a critical opinion with absolutely no paint on it. It's right there in your face, quivering. With this one it was real, real quiet. I think that the book really kind of upset her, in some ways, and let's leave it at that. It was a book that was quite upsetting for her."
In 2003, King was awarded the National Book Foundation (NBF) Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a decision that reduced the critic Harold Bloom to a state of near apoplexy. In an article for the Boston Globe he described the award as a "terrible mistake", denouncing King as an "immensely inadequate writer" for whom even the term "writer of penny dreadfuls" was too kind. It was a spectacularly vitriolic attack, albeit one rendered less effective for me by my instinct that Bloom probably hadn't read a great deal of King's work and what he had read he had probably consumed in the nauseated manner of an elderly Baptist minister forced to flick through samples of pornography in order to prepare for a sermon on vice.
King professes not to understand the distinction between literary and popular fiction, pointing out that there is really only good and bad fiction, but it's easy to see that he has been hurt in the past by criticism of his work. Shirley Hazard, the recipient of the NBF medal in 2004, seemed to wield the cudgel against him once again, taking issue with the writers of popular fiction namechecked by King in his acceptance speech and announcing grandly that she didn't need a reading list from Stephen King.
The elegance of the writing in Lisey's Story seems almost a deliberate riposte to such criticisms but, in addition to being a better writer than both Bloom and Hazard were able, or willing, to acknowledge, King is one of the most perceptive and committed explorers of the nature of writers and the vocation of writing. Writers recur as central figures in his novels - The Shining, The Dark Half, and Bag of Bones among others - and, far from depicting them as heroic artistic figures, there is instead a strong sense of ambivalence in his work about the nature of what they do for a living. In Lisey's Story, the source of Scott Landon's stories is given a name, Boo'ya Moon, and becomes an actual physical place, haunted by the spectres of the dead and by those who have succumbed entirely to its lure; literally, they are captives of their own imaginations.
"I am ambivalent about it," he says. "You can't keep your imagination in a box. It's not a domestic animal. You have to train it to come at certain times of day. Mostly it does, and sometimes it doesn't. Mostly it does what you want it to do, and sometimes it behaves very badly. Anybody who has done this for a living can tell you it's a double-edged sword, that if you spend enough time working with your imagination and training it to think up really terrible things, when your kids are late coming home your mind doesn't immediately go to the idea of, 'Oh, they must have won the lottery and are out celebrating somewhere'. You think of the worst thing you can possibly think of. So, yes, your mind goes to bad places."
Pet Sematary, his 1983 novel about a Maine cemetery with the power to resurrect dead pets, is probably the most difficult of his novels for a parent to read, as Louis Creed, its protagonist, finds himself tempted to place the body of his little son, Gage, in the earth of the cemetery following a gruesome road accident. Even this was derived from King's own experience.
"There was a real pet cemetery near our house," he says. "It's gone now, because the tourists took it. Basically, piece by piece, souvenir hunters took it, but everything in Pet Sematary up to a certain point actually happened, and was true. There was a whole pet cemetery with all of these crosses and markers, and we thought it was just the cutest, quaintest thing until our cat, Smucky, got run over and wound up in the cemetery. The house was beside a busy highway which was used by a lot of heavy trucks, and there was an old geezer who lived nearby who told us, 'You better be careful on that there road, because that there road uses up a lot of animals and you don't want it to use up one of your children'. Then in the spring of that year, 1979, our son Owen, who was 18 months old, ran for the road while we were flying kites one day, and I heard one of those trucks coming, and I tackled him like a football player. I brought him down so, unlike Gage Creed in the book, he lived. But I thought to myself, and again, this is the impulse a lot of times with these things, I'm going to write the worst thing I can think of, and that way it won't happen. So I sat down and wrote Pet Sematary and as bad as I imagined it was going to be, the book turned out worse. And I thought, 'I'm never going to publish this and nobody is going to want to read this', but they did. It just goes to show: you should never underestimate the taste of the reading public."
Underlying much of his work, I suggest, is a fear of the irrational, of the potential for disorder and chaos to suddenly intrude into ordinary lives: an electronic pulse that turns cellphone users into raving homicidal lunatics (or "Bush Republicans", as he half-jokingly refers to them) in Cell; the alien pestilence that attacks a party of hunters in Dreamcatcher; or, in his own life, the careless driver distracted by his dog and the promise of a chocolate bar who breaks almost every bone in the right side of a famous writer's body.
"I think that we've all become sensitised to the irrational act and irrational people, and certainly my lifetime, beginning with Charles Starkweather, who was a mass killer in the 1950s, right up to the suicide bombers in Iraq today, not excluding 9/11, has been marked by that sort of outbreak of just total insanity," he says. "There is a scene in Lisey's Story in which Scott is . . . at a college, and there is an attempted assassination, and I was certainly thinking about John Lennon, although Scott survives, because I think one of the things I'm fearful of is that sort of insanity, the kind of outbreak of irrationality against which there is no real defence. All of a sudden it's just there, it's in your face, and there is no defence against it."
He is already at work on his next novel, all thoughts of retirement now seemingly banished for good. He points out that when he doesn't write he gets irritable, has trouble sleeping, and hangs around the house getting in the way of his wife.
"There's a wonderful line in Philip Roth's book Everyman where he says amateurs wait for inspiration and the rest of us just get up and go to work. That's the way it is, and eventually I just thought to myself, after Lisey was done, that it's time to write something else, although I thought that whatever it is, the chances that it will be as good, or make me feel as good, as Lisey's Story are pretty small. At the same time, it's better than nothing."
He shakes my hand and prepares to leave. I have asked him to sign a pile of books for me, and he has done so uncomplainingly. One inscription thanks me for my kindness, but there was no kindness involved on my part, really. I think of a question that I did not get to ask: if he could alter the events of the past eight years, and divest himself of some of that pain, yet at the same time be forced to sacrifice Lisey's Story, would he accept the bargain? Perhaps he would, for what sane man would not? But I suspect, too, that there might have been a momentary pause before he answered. After all, he is a writer.
Whatever Stephen King now enjoys - the wealth, the acclaim, the affection of his readers, the company and love of his wife, his children, his grandchildren - has been hard earned. He is a man with twin hearts for, like a marriage, every writer's life has a light heart and a dark heart, and if it is the dark heart that gives birth to all that is worthwhile, then it is the light heart that makes such acts of creation bearable.
Lisey's Story is published by Hodder & Stoughton, £17.99