An Open Letter to Stephen King (4.21.13)

I think of you, Stephen King. I wouldn’t say I’m your Number One Fan, but I’ve certainly admired you over the decades. Sure, we’ve had our rough patches, our moments of disillusionment. The Nineties weren’t especially kind to your work, and your output in the Aughties didn’t fair much better. I’m not sure what you were doing with The Dark Tower; I gave up about a third of the way through Wizard and Glass in ‘01 — but that could just have been because I was traveling through Europe at the time.

But Europe wasn’t it. I just didn’t take to that one, just as I didn’t take to any of them after ‘94’s Insomnia, and even that was a slog to get through.

And then…the light. Late 2011. Downloaded your latest at that time, 11/22/63. And the clouds parted.

I think of myself, Stephen King. I think of your sons Joe and Owen, how lucky they are. I think of how you got lucky too back in ’73 and avoided the trap I’m about to fall into.

I saw a movie once, can’t remember the title, made in the Seventies I’m pretty sure. The movie, a drama, centers on a boy falling in with the wrong crowd. At the start the boy is basically a good kid, and he has a teacher, tall and middle-aged, who tries his hardest to get his students to appreciate not just literature but one book in particular. The boy protagonist and his “friends” think the teacher and his book are stupid, so one night they sneak into the school and destroy the classroom. Overturn desks, spray-paint the walls, make a mess of everything. They even take their teacher’s prize copy — in fact his only copy — of that great book and tear it to pieces. Next morning the teacher comes into the classroom and discovers the vandalism. He can take all of what he sees — except for the shredded book on the floor. He picks the remnants up, sits on the edge of his desk, the way he does when teaching, and turns the scraps over in his hands. Then he begins to cry long and hard. His sobs break the classroom’s silence. The scene spooled out forever when I was a kid, the camera focused on this poor man, this teacher, alone, with his book. The memory of that scene will stay with me forever. If I am not already that teacher I will be that teacher soon. I can feel the pull of the classroom: the trap.

I’d like to say I could have avoided that pull, but it was always with me, from the time I started reading you. My problem was that I was thinking of the end result of publication — fame, wealth, immortality — long before I was thinking of the actual words I was putting on the page. That was my problem; was it ever yours? You once said that if Tabitha had not rescued your manuscript for Carrie from the garbage you would still be teaching high school.

I wonder about that statement. Would you still be teaching high school? With any luck, now, at age 65, you would be retired. But I suspect you would have quit long before, or been fired. I think of you, Jack Torrance, and the assault you made on the kid you caught slashing your tires in the teacher parking lot. I think of you, Stephen King, and of how my father claimed that you had drawn all your material from your life, all the loserdom, all the anger, all the fear. I think of my father, too, and of how similar he looked at the time to your author photo on the back jacket flap of ‘91’s Needful Things. I think too, of the time I received Needful Things, in hardcover, as a Christmas present in a cabin in Idylwild. And of how I didn’t catch on, at age 13, what was happening at the end of that novel with the woman and the Elvis painting.

A lot of what you wrote went over my head as a boy. I see through to you now. But it’s too late. I need a job. It’s so very difficult to make it. I need a job.

Just promise me this: that you will never forget the classroom. That’s what I loved about 11/22/63. You had not forgotten the classroom. Keep that promise, and I’ll keep mine.

Yours always,

David Ewald