Banging the Drum for Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison, sir? Lor' bless you. Of course I remember Harlan Ellison. Why if it wasn't for Harlan Ellison, I doubt I'd even be in this line of work.

I first met Harlan Ellison in Paris in 1927. Gertrude Stein introduced us at one of her parties. "You boys will get on," she said. "Harlan's a writer. Not a great writer, like I am. But I hear he makes up stories."

Harlan looked her in the eye, and told her exactly what he thought of her writing. It took him fifteen minutes and he never repeated himself once. When he finished, the whole room applauded. Gertie got Alice B. Toklas to throw us out into the rain, and we stumbled around Paris, clutching a couple of wet baguettes and a half a bottle of an indifferent Bordeaux.

"Where are the snows of yesteryear?" I asked Harlan.

He pulled out a map from an inside pocket, and showed me.

"I would never have guessed that was where they end up," I told him.

"Nobody does," he said.

Harlan knew all kinds of stuff like that. He was braver than lions, wiser than owls, and he taught me a trick with three cards which, he said, would prove an infallible method of making money if I was down on my luck.

The next time I saw Harlan Ellison was in London, in 1932. I was working in the music halls, which were still going fairly strong, though they weren't what they used to be. I had worked up a mentalist's act, in a small way. I wasn't exactly bottom of the bill-that was Senor Moon and his Amazing Performing Budgerigar-but I was down there. That was until Harlan came along. He found me at the Hackney Empire vainly trying to intuit the serial number on a temperance crusader's ten-shilling note. "Give up this mentalism nonsense, and stick with me, kiddo," he said. "You've got a drummer's hands, and I'm a man needs a drummer. Together, we'll go places."

We went to Goole and Stoke Poges and Accrington and Bournemouth. We went to Eastbourne and Southsea and Penzance and Torquay. We were doing literature: dramatic storytelling on the seafront to move and entertain the ice-cream-licking multitudes, wooing them away from the baggy-trousered clowns and the can-can girls, the minstrel shows and the photographer's monkey.

We were the hit of the season wherever we went. I'd bang my drum to gather the people around, and Harlan would get up there and tell them one of his stories-there was one about a fellow who was the Paladin of the Lost Hour, another about a man who rowed Christopher Columbus ashore. Afterwards I would pass the hat around, or simply take the money from the hands of the stunned holidaymakers, who would tend simply to stand there when Harlan had finished, their mouths agape, until the arrival of the Punch and Judy man would send them fleeing to the whelk stall in confusion.

One evening, in a fish and chip shop in Blackpool, Harlan confided his plans to me. "I'm going to go to America," he told me. "That's where they'll appreciate me."

"But, Harlan," I told him, "we've got a great career here, performing on the seafronts. That new dramatic monologue of yours about the chappie who had no mouth but had to scream anyway-there was almost thirty bob in the hat after that!"

"America," said Harlan. "That's where it's at, Neil."

"You'll have to find someone else to work the seafronts of America with, then," I told him. "I'm staying here. Anyway, what's America got you won't find in Skegness, or Margate, or Brighton? They're all in a hurry in America. They'll not stand still long enough for you to tell them one of your stories. That one about the mind-reading fellow in the prison, why it must have taken you almost two hours to tell."

"That," said Harlan, "is the simplicity of my plan. Instead of going from town to town, I shall write down my stories, for people to read. All across America they'll be reading my stories. America first, and then the world."

I must have looked a little dubious, for he picked up a battered saveloy from my plate and used it to draw a map of America with little arrows coming out of it on the table, using the vinegary tomato catsup as paint.

"Besides," asked Harlan, "where else am I going to find true love?"

"Glasgow?" I suggested bravely (for I "died" once as a mentalist at the Glasgow Empire), but he was obviously no longer listening.

He ate my battered saveloy and we headed back to the streets of Blackpool. When we got to the seafront I banged my little drum until we had gathered together a small crowd, and Harlan proceeded to tell them a story about a week in the life of a man who accidentally telephoned his own house, and he answered the telephone.

There was almost fifty shillings in the hat at the end of that story. We split the proceeds, and Harlan caught the next train to Liverpool, where he said he thought he could work his passage on a steamer, telling stories to the people on board. There was one about a boy and his dog he thought would go over particularly well.

I hear he's doing all right in the New World. Well, here's to him. And as an occasional toiler in the fields of literature myself, I often have cause to remember, with pleasure, all the things I learned back then from Harlan Ellison.

I'm still using them now.

Anyway, sir. Three cards. Round and round and round they go, and where they stop, nobody knows. Are you feeling lucky today? D'you think you can find the lady?

I wrote this for the ReaderCon 11 program book, 1999. It is not to be factually relied on.

On Stephen King, for the Sunday Times

I began life as a journalist, interviewing authors. I don't do it any longer. But I'd never interviewed Stephen King. Cathy Galvin, then at the Sunday Times, called and asked if I would interview King for them. By perfect coincidence, I was in Florida writing a book, not far from where King was staying. I took a day off from my own book, and I drove west.

Preamble THE SUNDAY TIMES asked me to write something small and personal about King and me for the contributors' notes, and I wrote this: I think the most important thing I learned from Stephen King I learned as a teenager, reading King's book of essays on horror and on writing, Danse Macabre. In there he points out that if you just write a page a day, just 300 words, at the end of a year you'd have a novel. It was immensely reassuring-suddenly something huge and impossible became strangely easy. As an adult, it's how I've written books I haven't had the time to write, like my children's novel Coraline.

Meeting Stephen King this time, the thing that struck me is how very comfortable he is with what he does. All the talk of retiring from writing, of quitting, the suggestions that maybe it's time to stop before he starts repeating himself, seems to be done. He likes writing, likes it more than anything else that he could be doing, and does not seem at all inclined to stop. Except perhaps at gunpoint.

THE FIRST TIME I met Stephen King was in Boston, in 1992. I sat in his hotel suite, met his wife, Tabitha, who is Tabby in conversation, and his then-teenage sons Joe and Owen, and we talked about writing and about authors, about fans and about fame.

"If I had my life over again," said King, "I'd've done everything the same. Even the bad bits. But I wouldn't have done the American Express 'Do You Know Me?' TV ad. After that, everyone in America knew what I looked like."

He was tall and dark haired, and Joe and Owen looked like much younger clones of their father, fresh out of the cloning vat.

The next time I met Stephen King, in 2002, he pulled me up onstage to play kazoo with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a ramshackle assemblage of authors who can play instruments and sing and, in the case of author Amy Tan, impersonate a dominatrix while singing Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'."

Afterwards we talked in the tiny toilet in the back of the theater, the only place King could smoke a furtive cigarette. He seemed frail, then, and gray, only recently recovered after a long hospitalization from being hit by an idiot in a van, and the hospital infections that had followed it. He grumbled about the pain of walking downstairs. I worried about him, then.

And now, another decade, and when King comes out of the parking bay in his Florida house to greet me, he's looking good. He's no longer frail. He is sixty-four and he looks younger than he did a decade ago.

Stephen King's house in Bangor, Maine, is gothic and glorious. I know this although I have never been there. I have seen photographs on the Internet. It looks like the sort of place that somebody like Stephen King ought to live and work. There are wrought iron bats and gargoyles on the gates.

Stephen King's house on a key in Florida near Sarasota, a strand of land on the edge of the sea, lined with big houses ("that one was John Gotti's," I learn as we pass one huge white high-walled building. "We call it murder mansion"), is ugly. And not even endearingly ugly. It's a long block of concrete and glass, like an enormous shoe box. It was built, explains Tabby, by a man who built shopping malls, out of the materials of a shopping mall. It's like an Apple store's idea of a McMansion, and not pretty. But once you are inside the glass window-walls have a perfect view over the sand and the sea, and there's a gargantuan blue metal doorway that dissolves into nothingness and stars in one corner of the garden, and inside the building there are paintings and sculptures, and, most important, there's King's office. It has two desks in it. A nice desk, with a view, and an unimpressive desk with a computer on it, with a battered, much sat-upon chair facing away from the window.

That's the desk that King sits at every day, and it is where he writes. Right now he's writing a book called Joyland, about an amusement park serial killer. Below the window is a patch of well-fenced land, with an enormous African spurred tortoise nosing around in it, like a monstrous ambulatory rock.

My first encounter with Stephen King, long before I met him in the flesh, was on East Croydon station in about 1975. I was fourteen. I picked up a book with an all-black cover. It was called 'Salem's Lot. It was King's second novel; I'd missed the first, a short book called Carrie, about a teenage girl with psychic powers. I stayed up late finishing 'Salem's Lot, loving the Dickensian portrait of a small American town destroyed by the arrival of a vampire. Not a nice vampire, a proper vampire. Dracula meets Peyton Place. After that I bought everything King wrote as it came out. Some books were great, and some weren't. It was okay. I trusted him.

Carrie was the book that King started and abandoned, and which Tabby King pulled out of the wastepaper basket, read and encouraged him to finish. They were poor, and then King sold Carrie, and everything changed, and he kept writing.

Driving down to Florida I listened, for over thirty hours, to the audiobook of King's time travel novel, 11/22/63. It's about a high school English teacher (as King was, when he wrote Carrie) who goes back from 2011 to 1958, via a wormhole in time located in the stockroom of an ancient diner, with a mission to save John F. Kennedy from Lee Harvey Oswald.

It is, as always with King, the kind of fiction that forces you to care what happens, page after page. It has elements of horror, but they exist almost as a condiment for something that's partly a tightly researched historical novel, partly a love story, and always a musing on the nature of time and the past.

Given the hugeness of King's career, it is difficult to describe anything he does as an anomaly. He exists on the border of popular fiction (and, on occasion, nonfiction). His career (writers do not have careers, most of us. We just write the next book) is peculiarly Teflon. He's a popular novelist, which used to be, perhaps still is, a description of the author of a certain type of book: one that will repay you for reading it in pleasure and in plot, like John D. MacDonald (to whom King tips his hat in 11/22/63). But not just a popular novelist: it does not matter what he writes, it seems, he is always a horror writer. I wonder if that frustrates him.

"No. No it doesn't. I have got my family, and they are all okay. We have enough money to buy food and have things. Yesterday, we had a meeting of the King Foundation [the private foundation King funds that gives to many charitable causes]. My sister-in-law, Stephanie, she organizes it and we all sit down and give away money. That's frustrating. Every year we give away the same money to different people . . . it's like chucking money into a hole. That's frustrating.

"I never thought of myself as a horror writer. That's what other people think. And I never said jack shit about it. Tabby came from nothing, I came from nothing, we were terrified that they would take this thing away from us. So if the people wanted to say 'You're this,' as long as the books sold, that was fine. I thought, I am going to zip my lip and write what I wanted to write. The first time that anything like what you're talking about happened, I did this book Different Seasons, they were stories that I had written like I write all of them, I get this idea, and I want to write this. There was a prison story, 'Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,' and one based on my childhood called 'The Body,' and there is a story of this kid who finds a Nazi, 'Apt Pupil.' I sent them to Viking, who was my publisher. My editor was Alan D. Williams-dead many long years-terrific editor-he always took the work dead level. He never wanted to pump it. I sent them Different Seasons, and he said, 'Well, first of all you call it seasons, and you have just written three.' I wrote another one, 'The Breathing Method,' and that was the book. I got the best reviews in my life. And that was the first time that people thought, Whoa, this isn't really a horror thing.

"I was down here in the supermarket, and this old woman comes around the corner, this old woman-obviously one of the kind of women who says whatever is on her brain. She said, 'I know who you are, you are the horror writer. I don't read anything that you do, but I respect your right to do it. I just like things more genuine, like that Shawshank Redemption.'

"And I said, 'I wrote that.' And she said, 'No you didn't.' And she walked off and went on her way."

It happens, over and over. It happened when he published Misery, his chronicle of toxic fandom; it happened with Bag of Bones, his gothic ghost story about a novelist, with nods to du Maurier's Rebecca; it happened when he was awarded the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

We're not talking in the huge concrete shoe box house. We're sitting by the pool in a smaller house the Kings bought on the same street, as a guesthouse for their family. Joe King, who writes under the name of Joe Hill, is staying there. He still looks like his dad, although no longer a clonal teenage version, and now has a successful career of his own as a writer of books and graphic novels. He carries his iPad everywhere he goes. Joe and I are friends.

In Bag of Bones, Stephen King has an author who stops writing but keeps publishing stockpiled books. I wonder how long his publishers could keep his death a secret?

He grins. "I got the idea for the writer in Bag of Bones having books because somebody told me years ago that every year Danielle Steel wrote three books and published two, and I knew Agatha Christie had squirreled a couple away, to put a final bow on her career. As of right now, if I died and everybody kept it a secret, it would go on until 2013. There's a new Dark Tower novel, The Wind Through the Keyhole. That comes out soon, and Doctor Sleep is done. So if I got hit by a taxicab, like Margaret Mitchell, what wouldn't be done, what would be done. Joyland wouldn't be done but Joe could finish it, in a breeze. His style is almost indistinguishable from mine. His ideas are better than mine. Being around Joe is like being next to a Catherine wheel throwing off sparks, all these ideas. I do want to slow down. My agent is dickering with the publishers about Doctor Sleep-that's the sequel to The Shining-but I held off showing them the manuscript because I wanted time to breathe."

Why would he write a sequel to The Shining? I do not tell him how much that book scared me when I was sixteen, nor how much I loved and at the same time was disappointed by the Kubrick movie.

"I did it because it was such a cheesed-off thing to do. To say you were going back to the book that was really popular and write the sequel. People think of that book, they read it as kids. Kids read it and say it was a really scary book, and then as adults they might read the sequel and think, This isn't as good. The challenge is, maybe it can be as good-or maybe it can be different. It gives you something to push up against. It's a challenge.

"I wanted to write Doctor Sleep because I wanted to see what would happen to Danny Torrance when he grew up. And I knew that he would be a drunk because his father was a drunk. One of the holes it seemed to me in The Shining is that Jack Torrance was this white-knuckle dry drunk who never tried one of the self-help groups, like Alcoholics Anonymous. I thought, okay, I'll start with Danny Torrance at age forty. He is going to be one of those people who says 'I am never going to be like my father, I am never going to be abusive like my father was.' Then you wake up at thirty-seven or thirty-eight and you're a drunk. Then I thought, what kind of a life does a person like that have? He'll do a bunch of low-bottom jobs, he'll get canned, and now he works in a hospice as a janitor. I really want him to be a hospice worker because he has the shining and he can help people get across as they die. They call him Dr. Sleep, and they know to call for him when the cat goes into their room and sits on their bed. This was writing about a guy who rides the bus, and he's eating in a McDonald's, or on a special night out maybe Red Lobster. We are not talking about a guy who goes to Sardi's."

Stephen and Tabitha met in the stacks of the University of Maine library in 1967, and they married in 1971. He couldn't get a teaching position when he graduated, so he worked in an industrial laundry and pumped gas, and worked as a janitor, supplementing his meager income with occasional stories, mostly horror, sold to men's magazines with names like Cavalier. The couple was dirt poor. They lived in a trailer, and King wrote at a makeshift desk between the washer and the dryer. All that changed in 1974, with the paperback sale of Carrie for $200,000. I wonder how long it has been since King has stopped worrying about money.

He thinks for a moment. "Nineteen eighty-five. For a long time Tabby understood that we didn't have to worry about these things. I didn't. I was convinced they would take all this away from me, and I was going to be living with three kids in a rental house again, that it was just too good to be true. Around about 1985 I started to relax and think, This is good, this is going to be okay.

"And even now this"-he gestures, taking in the swimming pool, the guesthouse, the Florida key and all the many McMansions-"is all very strange to me, even though it's only three months of the year. Where we live in Maine is one of the poorest counties. A lot of the people we see and hang with cut wood for a living, drive trash, that sort of thing. I don't want to say I have the common touch, but I am just a common person, and I have this one talent that I use.

"Nothing bores me more than to be in New York and have a dinner in a big fancy restaurant, where you have to sit for three fucking hours, you know, and people will have drinks before, wine after, then three courses, then they want coffee and someone is going to ask for a fucking French press and all the rest of this crap. To me my idea of what's good is to drive here and go to Waffle House, get a couple of eggs and a waffle. When I see the first Waffle House, I know I'm in the South. That's good.

"They pay me absurd amounts of money," he observes, "for something that I would do for free."

STEPHEN KING'S FATHER went out for cigarettes when King was four, and he never came back, leaving King to be brought up by his mother. Steve and Tabby have three children: Naomi, a Unitarian minister with a digital ministry; Joe and Owen, both writers. Joe is finishing his third novel. Owen's first novel is coming out in 2013.

I wonder about distance and change. How easy is it to write about characters who are working blue-collar jobs in 2012?

"It is definitely harder. When I wrote Carrie and 'Salem's Lot, I was one step away from manual labor. But it's like also true-Joe is going to find out this is true, that when you have small children of a certain age, it is easy to write about them because you observe them and you have them in your life all the time.

"But your kids grow up. It is harder for me to write about this little twelve-year-old girl in Doctor Sleep than it ever was for me to talk about five-year-old Danny Torrance because I had Joe as a model for Danny. I don't mean that Joe has the shining like Danny but I knew who he was, how he played, what he wanted to do and all that stuff. But look, here's the bottom line: if you can imagine all the fabulous stuff that happened in American Gods, and if I can imagine magic doors and everything, then surely I can still put my imagination to work and go: look, this is what I imagine it's like to work a ten-hour day in a blue-collar job."

We're doing the writer thing, now: talking about craft, about how we do what we do, making things up for a living, and as a vocation. His next book, The Wind Through the Keyhole, is a Dark Tower novel, part of a sequence that King plotted and began when he was little more than a teenager himself. The sequence took him years to finish, and he only finished spurred on by his assistants, Marsha and Julie, who were tired of fielding fan letters asking when the story would be completed.

Now he's finished the story he is trying to decide how much he can rewrite it, if he views the sequence as one very long novel. Can he do a second draft? He hopes so. Currently, Stephen King is a character in the fifth and sixth Dark Tower books, and Stephen King the nonfictional author is wondering whether to take him out in the next draft.

I told him about the peculiarity of researching the story I was working on, that everything I needed, fictionally, was waiting for me when I went looking for it. He nods in agreement.

"Absolutely-you reach out and it's there. The time that it happened the clearest was when Ralph, my agent then, said to me, 'This is a bit crazy, but do you have any kind of idea for something that could be a serialized novel like Dickens used to do?,' and I had a story that was sort of struggling for air. That was The Green Mile. And I knew if I did this I had to lock myself into it. I started writing it and I stayed ahead of the publication schedule pretty comfortably. Because . . ." He hesitates, tries to explain in a way that doesn't sound foolish. ". . . Every time I needed something that something was right there to hand. When John Coffey goes to jail-he was going to be executed for murdering the two girls. I knew that he didn't do it, but I didn't know that the guy who did do it was going to be there, didn't know anything about how it happened, but when I wrote it, it was all just there for me. You just take it. Everything just fits together like it existed before.

"I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that that was me lowballing my own creativity. That might or might not be the case. But still, on the story I am working on now, I do have an unresolved problem. It doesn't keep me awake at night. I feel like when it comes down, it will be there . . ."

King writes every day. If he doesn't write he's not happy. If he writes, the world is a good place. So he writes. It's that simple. "I sit down maybe at quarter past eight in the morning and I work until quarter to twelve and for that period of time, everything is real. And then it just clicks off. I think I probably write about twelve hundred to fifteen hundred words. It's six pages. I want to get six pages into hard copy."

I START TO tell King my theory, that when people in the far future want to get an idea of how things felt between 1973 and today, they'll look to King. He's a master of reflecting the world that he sees, and recording it on the page. The rise and fall of the VCR, the arrival of Google and smartphones. It's all in there, behind the monsters and the night, making them more real.

King is sanguine. "You know what, you can't tell what is going to last, what's not going to last. There's a Kurt Vonnegut quote about John D. MacDonald saying, 'Two hundred years from now, when people want to know what the twentieth century was like they'll go to John D. MacDonald,' but I'm not sure that's true-it seems like he's almost been forgotten. But I try and reread a John D. MacDonald novel whenever I come down here."

Authors populate the cracks in a conversation with Stephen King. And, I realize, all of them are, or were, popular authors, people whose work was read, and read with enjoyment, by millions.

"You know what's bizarre? I did the Savannah book fair last week . . . This is happening to me more and more. I walked out and I got a standing ovation from all these people, and it's like a creepy thing . . . either you've become a cultural icon, or they are applauding the fact that you are not dead yet."

I tell him about the first time I ever saw a standing ovation in America. It was for Julie Andrews in Minneapolis on a tryout tour of Victor/Victoria. It was not very good, but she got a standing ovation for being Julie Andrews.

"That's so dangerous though, for us. I want people to like the work, not me."

And the lifetime achievement awards?

"It makes them happy to give them to me. And they go out in the shed, but the people don't know that."

Then Tabby King turns up to tell us that it is time for dinner, and she adds that back at the big house the gargantuan African spurred tortoise has just been discovered trying to rape a rock.