The Road to The Dark Tower (57 page)

“
I will help you with that part,
came the reply. I didn’t know who the voice belonged to on that day . . . but I do now, because I have looked into his eyes across a whore’s bed in a land that exists very clearly in my imagination. Roland’s love for Susan Delgado (and hers for him) is what was
told to me by the boy who began this story.” [DT4] By twenty-two-year-old Stephen King, in other words.

King calls himself a popular novelist, the kind who asks what a story would mean to others, as opposed to the literary novelist who asks what writing a certain story would mean to himself. The “serious” novelist is looking for answers; the “popular” novelist is looking for an audience. Both are equally selfish, he says. “I believe now that the best stories are stories that are generous and welcome the reader in.”
¹²

Ted Brautigan warns against being a snob, citing the Clifford D. Simak novel that was King’s inspiration for parallel universes. Brautigan says Simak’s story is great, but the writing is not so great. “Not bad, I don’t mean to say that, but take it from me, there is better.” There are also books full of great writing without good stories. Brautigan counsels Bobby to read sometimes for the story and sometimes for the language. “When you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.” [HA] Good books, he says, don’t give up all their secrets at once. “A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give . . . eventually.” [HA]
¹³

In his dedication to the final book, King writes, “He who speaks without an attentive ear is mute. Therefore, Constant Reader, this final book in the Dark Tower cycle is dedicated to you,” acknowledging his readership as a necessary part in the process. Though he welcomes readers into the story, in the afterword he is careful to keep this invitation from seeming more than it is. “My books are my way of knowing you. Let them be your way of knowing me, as well. It’s enough.” [DT7]

Roland reaches the Dark Tower a thousand years after he set out from Gilead and more than three decades after King wrote, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” For the author, the story could have ended there. After all, “Fair is whatever God wants to do,” as he writes in an epigraph at the beginning of
Song of Susannah
.

From his long experience with fans, though, King knows that merely standing Roland in front of the door of the Tower, bringing together the man and the object of his quest, as Robert Browning did, will not be enough. For King, the journey and what was learned along the way is
what’s important, not the goal itself. Addressing those hypothetical readers who would shriek in outrage if the series ended there, those who would insist they paid their money to follow Roland into the Tower, King says, “You are the cruel ones who deny the Grey Havens, where tired characters go to rest.”

“I hope you came to hear the tale, and not the ending,” he writes. Endings are nothing more than the final page in a book, which readers could turn to without experiencing the journey. He writes endings only because it is the “custom of the country,” like putting on his pants in the morning. There has never been an ending as happy as a beginning like “Once upon a time.” Endings are heartless, just another word for good-bye. Closed doors that can never be opened.

Elsewhere, he says:

Did they all live happily ever after?
¹⁴
They did not. No one ever does, in spite of what the stories may say. They had their good days, as you do, and they had their bad days, and you know about those. They had their victories, as you do, and they had their defeats, and you know about those, too. There were times when they felt ashamed of themselves, knowing that they had not done their best, and there were times when they knew they had stood where their God had meant them to stand. All I’m trying to say is that they lived as well as they could, each and every one of them; some lived longer than others, but all lived well, and bravely, and I love them all, and am not ashamed of my love. [ED]

Roland once said, “No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves, don’t we?” [DT5] King has provided one ending already, as close to “happily ever after” as he could get. Eddie, Susannah and Jake are together with a promise that some version of Oy might join their happy little family. He warns readers that they may not find what comes next as satisfying.

He takes that last key from his belt and opens the
UNFOUND
door—which now reads
FOUND
—and follows Roland through the portal to a staircase that winds upward through his life, until he at last reaches the top.

Did the series end as he planned? “It’s like shooting a nuclear missile over 3,000 miles. You’re happy if it lands in the same neighborhood where
you wanted it to finish up. And that’s pretty much what I did. I would say that once I got a little way down the path, I was pretty well locked in on where it was going to come out.”
¹⁵

In the final afterword, though, he writes,

I wasn’t that crazy about the ending, either, if you want to know the truth, but it’s the right ending. The only ending, in fact. You have to remember that I don’t make these things up, exactly; I only write down what I see.

I never worked harder on a project in my life, and I know—none better, alas—that it has not been entirely successful. What work of make-believe ever is? And yet for all that, I would not give back a single minute of the time that I lived in Roland’s world. Those days in Mid-World and End-World were quite extraordinary.

Thank you for going there with me. [DT7]

¹
“Also, she wrote good old Western stories that you could really sink your teeth into, not all full of make-believe monsters and a bunch of dirty words, like the books that fellow who lived up Bangor way wrote.” [TK]

²
“You were starting to sound a little like a Stephen King novel for a while there” (
Thinner,
by Richard Bachman).

³
For a slightly different take on the relationship between art and creation, see King’s novelette “Stationary Bike” in
Borderlands 5,
Borderlands Press, 2003.

⁴
“Slade,”
The Maine Campus,
June–August 1970.

⁵
“The Blue Air Compressor,” first published in
Onan
magazine (The University of Maine, Orono), January 1971. Later revised for
Heavy Metal
magazine, July 1981.

⁶
The irony here is that, having reached the top of his Tower, the end of his own personal quest for closure to a series that has occupied his life, King returns to the beginning, to a line he wrote in 1970, and Roland returns to the point in his quest where he sensed there was a chance he might succeed.

NOTE: Some quotes in this chapter are from the real Stephen King and others are from King the fictional character. While King is probably echoing his own sentiments through his fictional representation, what the character says does not necessarily reflect King’s real beliefs. Fiction is not reality after all. Or is it?

⁷
“Honesty’s the best policy.”

⁸
“What Is Metafiction and Why Are They Saying Such Awful Things About It” in
Metafiction,
Mark Currie, ed., Harlow, 1995.

⁹
According to Ted Brautigan.

¹⁰
For example, in an interview with the
Bangor Daily News,
November 1988.

¹¹
www.stephenking.com
, June 2002.

¹²
Interview on
NewsNight with Aaron Brown,
June 24, 2003.

¹³
He also says that one nice thing about science fiction and mystery writers is that they rarely “dither” five years between books. “That is the prerogative of serious writers who drink whiskey and have affairs.”

¹⁴
King repeats this line in
The Dark Tower
after Susannah reunites with Jake and Eddie Toren.

¹⁵
Interview on
Amazon.com
, May 2003.

ARGUMENT
MAGNUM OPUS?

On the way to the Dark Tower, anything is possible.

[DT2]

Magnum Opus: From the Latin for “Great Work,” usually the masterpiece or greatest work of an artist’s life.

 Who decides what is the greatest work of a person’s career? Is it determined during the artist’s lifetime or not until the dispassionate eye of the future casts its gaze over the entire body of work that person produced? Can a writer have more than one magnum opus?

Will future critics even care? The first indication that they might came when the National Book Foundation named King as the 2003 recipient of a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. While some self-appointed gatekeepers of the literary canon criticized giving the award to a popular writer, the response to this decision was overwhelmingly positive.

Individuals will have different opinions about what work qualifies as Stephen King’s magnum opus. For some fans, it will be
The Stand,
that enormous, tapestried exploration of good versus evil. “[A]s far as the most passionate of the ‘
Stand
-fans’ are concerned, I could have died in 1980 without making the world a noticeably poorer place,” King said, referring to the strongly held belief of many readers that
The Stand
was his best book. [DT1, foreword]

Others will choose
It,
which rivals
The Stand
both in size and scope. These two books usually battle for the number one and two positions on fans’ favorites lists. Critics may well consider the complex and insightful
The Shining
as one of King’s most powerful and sophisticated works.
Or the poignant
The Green Mile
. The literary style of
Bag of Bones
made many critics sit up and pay attention to King as more than a genre writer.

Many of King’s creations have become part of the lexicon of modern society. Think of a mad dog?
Cujo
. Scary car?
Christine
. Prom night?
Carrie
. Worst vacation resort? The Overlook. Vampires?
’Salem’s Lot,
a book that inspired many others to exhume horror from traditionally Gothic settings and bring it into the bright light of contemporary society. Even people who haven’t read King’s books are familiar with many of these icons.

Apart from these stands the
Dark Tower
series, seven books totaling nearly 4,000 pages that span the entirety of King’s writing career to date. Janet Maslin, book and film critic with the
New York Times,
called it his magnum opus even before the complete series was published.
¹

As the preceding chapters have shown, these seven books have exerted their influence on many of his nonseries novels. Still, a substantial percentage of King’s core readership has yet to visit Mid-World. Perhaps with the publication of the final volumes, that will change.

King has known for more than fifteen years where he wanted to go with the series. “In that sense, the long pauses between the books have worked for me, because the books that I wrote instead of the Dark Tower from probably 1988 on . . . all of them refer to the Dark Tower books in some way or another.”
²