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Fame & Fortune: Stephen King
A Halloween visit with the king of all things scary |
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King: You can turn on
CSPAN's book channel and you can watch a lady discuss the life of
some financier one week and the next week there will be a guy talking
about his book on 9/11 and the week after that there will be some
people talking about Roosevelt, and I'm thinking to myself, why
don't you guys, some week, have on Anita Shreve or Philip Roth talking
about their novels? And the answer is because they feel that fiction
or figurative language doesn't have the same weight; that it doesn't
matter the way nonfiction does, when in fact it matters more. So
if I was Scott Landon, and part of me is, I'd say you would do better
to study Eudora Welty and a poet like Philip Larkin or (Randall
Jarrell's) "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"
when you want to discuss why we go to war than you would politics
or economics.
Bankrate: You're fairly scathing in "Lisey's Story" toward literary scholars and their tendency to hover vulture-like over authors, scavenging for scraps for their own careers. The whole book worship thing has gotten a little out of hand, hasn't it?
King: The fact is, in
my life, you see after a while that certain people get nuts about
books. I started to notice at autographings, people would bring
me books that were all wrapped up in cellophane and they'd go, 'Oh
please, just be very careful when you lift the cover, that binding
has never been broken!' and I'm like, what in the world are you
talking about, it's just a book! It's not the f---ing Mona Lisa.
And they want to know what you've got in your drawers,
they're convinced there is more and more stuff. Then, you hear myths
that grow about all the manuscripts that J.D. Salinger supposedly
has put away and stories circulate in academic journals and scholarly
journals about Ezra Pound and you see these people at work and you
realize sure, they don't have all their wheels on the road. But
on another level, you just kind of dismiss that and say I'm going
to do the best work that I can and try to ignore that and be very
grateful that the bills are paid.
Bankrate: Scott won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Although your books are beloved worldwide, you've never received those literary awards. As a working-class guy, has commercial success meant more to you than literary awards?
King: If you take a long
view, you just say to yourself, look at some books that were like
cover boys and cover girls of the Times Book Review, the New York
Review of Books, Village Voice. Take your pick, back 25 years ago,
I think a lot of these books you'd just say, 'Huh?' I mean, I don't
think you even remember them.
There are books that were dismissed as trash at the
time, that are just sort of hounded out of the court of any sort
of serious literary opinion, and then years later, a "Peyton
Place," for instance, where people turn around and say, "You
know, that really was sort of a seminal book." There's this
great line in Philip Roth's "Everyman" where he says,
"Amateurs wait for inspiration; the rest of us just go to work."
Most of us (writers) just can't wait to go (to work).
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