SOURCE: Reino, Joseph. “Fantasies of Summer and Fall: Full of Sound and Fury.” In Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary, pp. 117-35. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.

[In the following essay, Reino provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of the novellas comprising Different Seasons.]

With brief seasonal subtitles, Different Seasons (1982) attempts to bind together four unusual novellas of varying lengths and moods. Taken from the optimistic “Essay on Man” of the eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope, “Hope Springs Eternal” is the subtitle of the vernal season, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption—a subtitle that is, at the tag-end of the violence-ridden twentieth century, little more than a pleasant, but not quite believable, cliché. The second and longest of the novellas, the sinister Apt Pupil, is a “Summer of Corruption”—an apparent variation on the “winter of our discontent” from the oft-quoted opening line of Shakespeare's Richard III. The third and autumnal season, The Body (widely acknowledged as the most nearly autobiographical of King's works), flirts with the attractive deceptions of an American Eden and is, consequently, a “Fall from Innocence.” The fourth, The Breathing Method, easily the most fantastic of the group, is appropriately subtitled with Shakespeare's late fantasy-romance, The Winter's Tale. While this brilliant quartet of tales does not deal with the unabashed horrors and terrors of the more famous novels, nevertheless, according to King's personal observations, “elements of horror can be found in all of the tales, not just in The Breathing Method—that business with the slugs in The Body is pretty gruesome, as is much of the dream imagery in Apt Pupil” (DS, 502). Although King raised sharp objection to psychiatrist-author Janet Jeppson, when she suggested that he has been “writing about it ever since”—“it” being the train accident that killed a young playmate—he admits in his afterword to Different Seasons that, with respect to horror in general, only “God knows why,” sooner or later, “my mind always seems to turn back in that [gothic] direction” (502).

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, the first “season,” is the most strangely titled of all King's stories, the kind of story (“with a homosexual rape scene”) that Susan Norton's mother complained that “sissy-boy” novelist Ben Mears had written. Taking place in an imaginary Maine prison called Shawshank, the story is supposedly narrated by one of the inmates (nicknamed “Red”), a clever entrepreneur who can “get it for you” for a price, that is, obtain whatever a prisoner might like, or need, from the outside world: pictures, comic books, posters, panties from a wife or girl friend, etc. Red's hundred-page story concerns a banker-prisoner, Andy Dufresne, sentenced to life imprisonment because of incriminating circumstantial evidence in the murder of his wife and her lover. Though consistently denied parole, and tragically unfortunate in attempting to prove his innocence, Andy becomes the financial wizard of the prison (“quiet, well-spoken, respectful, non-violent” [95]), with an unusual smile and a cool far-away look. Red is intrigued by Andy's strange requests, two in particular: a rock-hammer and a Rita Hayworth poster. What Andy is doing with these objects—the Hayworth poster changing to other shapely females as the years go by—is revealed only at the end of the novella, when the reader learns that for years and years (1949-75) Andy had been digging himself a tunnel, and successfully concealing the cellblock escape route (the “hole”) behind sexy, and inevitably distracting, pin-up posters.

Both the prolonged tunneling and the subsequent escape are as improbable as the incriminating evidence that incarcerated Andy in Shawshank State Prison in the first place (18-25). But King makes the narrative plausible by having whole sections of Red's account reported as gossip, rumor, and prison talk, slowly turning Andy Dufresne into a legendary folk hero about whom (like Robert Frost's Paul Bunyon, Washington Irving's Icabod Crane, or some medieval Arthurian knight) one tends to expect the unexpected. Unlike the final section of Carrie, which attempts to verify everything through newspaper reports, eyewitness accounts, and court transcripts, here King exercises his ingenuity by having everything sustained through sheer guesswork and speculation.

Of all the plot improbabilities in Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, however, the most hilarious is the author's success in hiding in his rectum a one-hundred-page (or more) manuscript about Andy Dufresne's life, prison escape, and detailed plans for secret life in Mexico (30, 101). On the occasion of the author-prisoner's parole, this rectal secreting is done so as to escape detection from guards during a strip-down physical examination prior to final release. Thus what the average King enthusiast has been devouring with such interest derives from the same part of the human anatomy that is naturally used to eliminate foul-smelling body wastes, but was “unnaturally” violated (and presumably also much enlarged) by the prison “sisters” during one of their many sodomitic escapades.¹ Both this rectal literary joke, and the impossibles and improbables of the quasi-legendary prison career of Andy Dufresne, give the Popean subtitle, “Hope Springs Eternal,” a rather hopeless resonance indeed—implying, one supposes, that if you believe this “story,” you will believe just about anything.² The “redemption” part of the title has various implications, not the least of which is the elimination of the Bible-quoting Warden Norton, who never so much as cracked a smile and “would have felt right at home” with those infernal New England preachers, the “Mathers, Cotton and Increase” (56).

The Breathing Method, the fourth and last “season,” and a gothic/fantasy successor to such traditional Christmas stories as the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol, is an out-and-out tall tale best suited to winter in which, as one editor points out in connection with Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, “no one expects any probability.”³ In folklore and legend (the Roman Saturnalia, ancient rituals surrounding the birth of Mithra, the tradition of the modrenacht among the Angles, etc.), the season of the winter solstice (21 December) is often filled with fantasy. The main incident in the fourth season is the birth of a child from an accidentally decapitated woman (Sandra Stansfield) occurring “on the eve of that birth we have celebrated for two thousand years” (462). The young woman is unmarried and wearing a false wedding ring, and this mysterious and/or magical birth thus parallels, or even parodies, the traditional Christian belief in the virgin birth recounted in the gospel of Luke. Despite the potential for blasphemous satire (which King does not elsewhere resist), the parallel is not overstressed, and at several points only gently reinforced: (1) by a quotation from a Roman Stoic that might well have come from the Pauline epistles, to the effect that “There is no comfort without pain; thus we define salvation through suffering” (461, 482-83); and (2) by having the tall tale of an impossible Christmas Eve birth told by an eighty-year-old physician, who thereby parallels the author of the gospel of Luke, traditionally believed to have been a physician, from whom the story of the virgin birth is almost exclusively derived.

Without demeaning the power of these spring and winter narratives, Rita Hayworth and Breathing Method appear as prologue and epilogue to the central tales of summer and fall that are among King's finest creations: Apt Pupil and The Body. The former concerns a thirteen year old's not-quite-accidental discovery of a Nazi war criminal living secretly in California, while the latter recounts the adventures of several twelve year olds who set out to find the dead body of a boy struck by a train, and in the process one of them (the teller of the tale) makes significant discoveries about his personal sensitivity and poetic proclivities. Taken together, Apt Pupil and The Body are youth-oriented companion pieces, offering in-depth analyses of young boys who can easily take their place among King's other preteens: Mark Petrie, Richie Boddin, Danny and Ralphie Glick, Danny Torrance, and Marty Coslaw. Interestingly, in both Apt Pupil and The Body, King again explores depth after desperate depth of feelings about father-son relationships that are central to a sympathetic understanding of much of his work—a psychological dimension too often glossed over by reviewers, who seem to harp exclusively on elements of terror, horror, and the supernatural.⁴

CORPSES THAT REFUSE TO STAY BURIED

The protagonist of Apt Pupil is a thirteen-year-old “innocent” in the pleasant-enough beginnings of this California revelation, but a seventeen-year-old criminal in its tragic conclusion. A stereotypical American boy of WASP background—the family was Methodist (164)—Todd Bowden has the kind of “summer” face that might easily be found advertising Kellogg's Corn Flakes: “hair the color of ripe corn, white even teeth, lightly tanned skin marred by not even the first shadow of adolescent acne” (109). Despite the gradual deterioration of Todd's personality throughout this 175-page “Summer of Corruption,” his face matures but never loses its boyish attractiveness: “young, blond, and white” (281). Even toward the end of Apt Pupil, when Todd is one of four victorious boys named to Southern Cal's All Stars, the newspaper photograph is “grinning openly out at the world from beneath the bill of his baseball cap” (254). When identified as the probable killer of local derelicts, he is remembered as having an “ain't-life-grand” air about his improbable face (282).

In addition to a happy-time television reaction to nearly everything (good or bad), several other aspects of Todd's personality—always superficially favorable—receive considerable attention: his “aptness” as a school student, his high degree of intelligence and foresight, his full-blooded teenage slang, and his outstanding athletic abilities. These apparent positives in Todd's All-American makeup, however, inevitably deteriorate. So boyishly appealing and attractive at first, showing “perfect teeth that had been fluoridated since the beginning of his life and bathed thrice a day in Crest toothpaste” (113), his smiles sour into the sardonic expression of a psychopath beaming out “rich and radiant” (131) as he eagerly absorbs Nazi stories about gas chambers, conspirators hung by piano wires, or lampshades designed of human skin. On one occasion, when the old concentration camp commander (Kurt Dussander, whom Todd all-too-willingly befriends) is forced to tell Todd about the experimental nerve gas (poetically nicknamed Pegasus) that caused its victims to scream, laugh, vomit, and helplessly defecate, the All-American Boy is happily consuming two delicious chocolate Ring Dings. Even old reprobate Dussander reacts negatively, not only in being forced to remember horrors he himself eagerly perpetrated in German concentration camps, but especially because of Todd's enthusiastic “That was a good story, Mr. Dussander” (136). Ironically, King puts in the mouth of the old Nazi, wanted by the Israelis for being “one of the greatest butchers of human beings ever to live” (262), reactions that are likely to pass through readers themselves when he says aloud to the boy, “You are a monster.” Innocent-looking Todd reminds Dussander that “according to the books I read, you're the monster, Mr. Dussander,” who sent thirty-five hundred a day into the ovens “before the Russians came and made you stop” (127). The next time Dussander (in something resembling teenage slang) is tempted to damn Todd as “putrid little monster,” he only thinks it (135), keeping to himself his disgust with Todd's behavior, even though that behavior is viciously patterned after his own (giving an inkling of King's attitude toward the relationship of postwar American behavior to the Nazis.)

The name Todd suggests “toddy,” a pleasant drink of brandy or whiskey mixed with hot water, sugar, and spices. Like the boy's blue-eyed All-American appearance, therefore, his name has sweet connotations. Winter suggests a sinister undercurrent—quite apt, one might add—to this attractive first name, since “Todd” is similar to the German word for death, Tod.⁵ Kurt Dussander's name derives from Peter Kurtin, Monster of Düsseldorf, a novel about an actual criminal included in Father Callahan's recollections of gothic junk in 'Salem's Lot (296). But Dussander's American pseudonym is the kinder-sounding “Arthur Denker,” the first name deriving from the mythic medieval king,⁶ and the patronym from yet another German word, “thinker” (Denker). The fake last name covertly suggests the octogenarian's cleverness in concealing his true identity by skillfully avoiding detection and capture by sharp Israeli authorities for so many years. Dussander's ability to “think” things through is so masterful that inexperienced Todd, who at one point had the potential of being an absolute blackmailer, comes to feel that “his skull had turned to window-glass and all things were flashing inside in large letters” (201). The living room of Dussander's house contains a neat symbol of all the false facades in Apt Pupil (Americans and ex-Nazis included): “the fake fireplace” that was “faced with fake bricks” (115).

The Jekyll/Hyde qualities of the Todd/Denker names seem—and indeed are—the exact opposite of what they pleasantly suggest, and have parallels in some unusual literary techniques. The most important of these is the series of empty-headed clichés, banalities, proverbs, and (on Todd's part) slang simplicities that are placed in plot situations in such a way as to point up their utter shallowness. As names reverse (e.g., from sweet “toddy” to grim “death”), so do the cliché-drenched conversations among the doomed older characters.

Important among these typically American pseudoprofundities are the following. Todd's parents “don't believe in spanking” because “corporal punishment causes more problems than it cures” (115). Todd's father (Dick Bowden) thinks that “kids should find out about life as soon as they can—the bad as well as the good.” His silly rationale is that “life is a tiger you have to grab by the tail, and if you don't know the nature of the beast it will eat you up” (120). Dick Bowden balances off his wife's cliché, “Waste not, want not,” with his own innocuous “Not by a long chalk” (138). Todd's teacher (the well-intentioned Mrs. Anderson) lectures the students of the California school (of which sweet-looking Todd is one) about finding “YOUR GREAT INTEREST,” hers being “collecting nineteenth-century post cards” (117). The guidance counselor (satirically nicknamed “Rubber Ed,” ‘’Sneaker Pete,” and the “Ked Man” by mocking high school students) idiotically supposes that his rubber-covered Keds gives him “real rapport” with the students. He too has an assortment of dismal colloquialisms on which he thinks he can structure educational success: that he could “get right down to it” with the kids, “get into their hangups,” knew what a “bummer” was, and understood and sympathized when “someone was doing a number on your head” (166).

The upshot of all this “right-thinking,” superficial claptrap that passes for wisdom—a parody of certain educational practices that dominated American society during the period of the 1976 bicentennial, the time-frame of the story (206)—is that Todd Bowden, one of the young people these insights were supposed to direct into proper channels of patriotic behavior, becomes a Nazi admirer and hobo murderer. King is not saying that benign and “liberating” clichés are inherently wrong or that they cause Todd's inclination toward social misbehavior. Rather, his gothic perspective is that benevolent philosophies, reduced to thoughtless aphorisms and innocuous clichés, are utterly powerless against the boy's adamantine malevolence. Todd, too, is entrapped in his own kind of verbal superficiality, mostly teenage American slang that might have been considered “cute” in something other than a California neo-Nazi context: “Gotcha,” “Right on,” “You'll go ape,” “School's cool,” “Crazy, baby,” “It blows my wheels,” “Blasts from the past,” etc. Only infrequently does Todd trot out some really humorous wit, as on the occasion when his mother brings up a matter that Todd does not want to deal with, and he leaves her with the wise crack: “I've gotta put an egg in my shoe and beat it” (134). All too frequently, unfortunately, his mind reverts to mindless banalities, as when, entrapped by Dussander, he thinks of a “cartoon character with an anvil suspended over its head” (202).

Possibly offensive to some readers—and this may explain the negative criticism of Apt Pupil by some reviewers—is the fact that the Nazi proves the more elegant and perceptive in language skills than the sentimental, cliché-ridden Americans, who—as Dussander scornfully points out—“put photographs of firemen rescuing kittens from trees on the front pages of city newspapers” (202). Thus at the dinner table with Todd's parents, when offered another glass of cognac by Todd's mother, Dussander gracefully declines with the proverb, “One must never overdo the sublime” (149). When in the office of the guidance counselor, Dussander convinces his listener by pretending he “was raised to believe that a man's family came before everything” (169)—a cliché, to be sure, but just about the only one in the entire novella known to be false at the time it is uttered. When Todd is completely entrapped by the old Nazi's psychological counterthrusts, Dussander comforts the boy by suggesting that “no situation is static” (202). When confronted with murderous hatred in Todd's eyes (“that dark, burning, speculative glance”), Dussander realizes that he had to protect himself, because “one underestimates at one's own risk” (175). At the complex business of what might be called “verbal survival,” Dussander is extremely crafty: careful to manipulate false words, while never falling victim to them, always rising above his own (and others') deceptive language to remain—desperately necessary for a former Nazi—free to survive! Adolf Hitler once asserted that “something of even the most shameless prevarication will find lodging and stick,”⁷ but Dussander is several notches beyond mere Nazi lies and prevarications. Whatever he does, he pulls off with considerable finesse and with an enviable command of language that makes him all the more dangerous because his basic malevolence is so difficult to detect by naive Americans—like the Bowdens and the Frenches in this novella—who are too easily satisfied with facades and superficialities. As Dussander says on the occasion of his deceptive visit to the office of the guidance counselor in the guise of Todd's grandfather: “In my time I have stayed ahead of Wiesenthal and pulled the wool over the eyes of Himmler himself,” and “if I cannot fool one American public school teacher, I will pull my winding-shroud around me and crawl down into my grave” (165).

One of the perhaps less obvious purposes of Apt Pupil is to dramatize the confrontation between an intelligent but inexperienced teenager (whose German name means “death”) and an intelligent but far more sinister, yet “extremely urbane,” ex-Nazi (whose German pseudonym means “thinker”). King engages in a skillfull balancing act, seesawing the blackmail potential of the boy over against the psychological counterthrusts of the Nazi, highlighting differences in language they both use. What to the boy is “grooving on it,” “getting off on it” (i.e., the Nazi atrocities), to language-sensitive old Dussander is the behavior of an aficionado (121). At first the boy and his American slang seem to win out. For example, every time Dussander “tried to slip into generalities” concerning the atrocities, the “gooshy stuff” that the boy liked to hear about, “Todd would frown severely and ask him specific questions to get him back on the track” (131). With “absurd American self-confidence,” and pummeled by his own knee-jerk slang, Todd never studies the “possible consequences” of the memories he has stirred up and set aswirling (198-99). He acts like the “sorcerer's apprentice, who had brought the brooms to life but who had not possessed enough wit to stop them once they got started” (141). This insensitive, damn-the-torpedoes behavior on the part of an All-American boy, who had been raised by well-meaning parents “without all those needless guilts” (181), and got an A+ on a Nazi research paper from a teacher who never gave such grades, proves fatal. Once the sleeping specters of a pitiless past have been awakened, literate Herr Dussander reverts to Nazism again. “Nostalgia” for a history of gas chambers and hideous ovens takes over his whole personality (135), and like an articulate Red Death that might please even Edgar Allan Poe himself, holds “illimitable [verbal] dominion over all.”

What distinguishes Stephen King from a mere hack writer grinding out novels for popularity and a fast buck is that, in Apt Pupil, he himself never gets self-deceived by the clichés of his own conceptions. Though the subsidiary characters of Apt Pupil (Dick and Monica Bowden, Ed French, etc.) are entrapped by clichés, they are still multidimensional, much deeper than the bromides in which they so ardently believe. Dussander himself may be “one of the greatest butchers of human beings ever to live,” but he is no pasteboard Hollywood Nazi. He may scorn American slang and wince every time young Bowden utters one of his teenage “witticisms,” but every once in a while even Dussander “marvel[s] at the American love of jargon” (159).

Especially interesting is a final exposure to American slang that occurs at the end of the novella when Dussander takes the poison pills he has always kept in clever reserve. Beginning to grow dim with death, Dussander overhears the “quavering” but “triumphant” voices of some cribbage players using typical card-game talk: “How do you like those apples” and “I'll peg out”; and for the first time in his snobbish old life, the conceited concentration camp commander acknowledges to himself that Americans do indeed have a “turn for idiom,” what he is finally and sentimentally capable of realizing is “wonderful.” In his last moments, the childless octogenerian finds himself wishing he could tell his “apt pupil”—a kind of surrogate Nazi son—that “talking to him had been better than listening to the run of his own thoughts” (266). In reading these final meanderings, one must remember that the “apt pupil's” questions and answers had been mostly slangish, and that Dussander's conversation, though conniving and degenerate, was always literate, elegant, and graceful. On his deathbed, the old Nazi inclines toward the Americanisms he had been scorning for more than a hundred pages of narrative. He enters his eternity with the idea that he is somehow—in the American slang—“pegging out.” Of course, Stephen King does not resist a final twist of the ironic knife. Criminal Dussander cannot possibly “peg out.” For hands with “hungry fingers” were “reaching eagerly up” from his deathbed to “grab him” (like the wrathful souls of the River Styx in the seventh canto of Dante's Inferno); and Dussander's death thoughts “broke up in a steepening spiral of darkness, and he rode down that spiral as if down a greased slide, down and down, to whatever dreams there are” (267). As he dies, it is as if the tongues of the “unquiet dead” (the former victims of his gas chamber atrocities) were crying out to him their own colloquialism: How do you like these apples, Dussander?—his eternity being suddenly recognized as a nightmarish place where there is absolutely no possibility of ever “pegging out.”

Dussander's desire for “rest,” while dying from a deliberate overdose of pills, is disrupted by a fear of hideous dreams that the dead and damned might have to endure. His thoughts, of course, echo Hamlet's famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be”); and this technique of literary echo is typical of King, who sometimes—though not here—goes out of his way to specifically justify a literary allusion. The glancing reference to Hamlet's famous fear (“for in that sleep of death what dreams may come”—hardly an original thought at this late date) interweaves ominously into the wise sayings, banalities, and bromides that hammer away at Apt Pupil for more than a hundred pages. Dussander may be a former Nazi, but he is the kind of sophisticated old degenerate who would have read and in part probably memorized Hamlet, a Nordic play on a revengeful Nordic subject. It is consistent with his temper and flair for the histrionic to pass away into the “dreams” of death with a graceful Shakespearean flourish.

THE TARGET WAS A DEAD BOY

Nothing in the novels of Stephen King, not even the autobiographical parts of Danse Macabre, is so intensely personal as the two-hundred-word introduction to The Body, the third novella of Different Seasons, composed immediately after the first draft of 'Salem's Lot and exploiting nonvampire aspects of masculine identity—this time in teenage boys. The Body is supposed to be narrated by protagonist-novelist Gordie Lachance, who is the presumed author of the introduction. But the mask is papery thin, and more than once—by including adaptations of previously published short stories⁸ and by concluding the novella with blatantly autobiographical snatches (432)—the problematic psyche of Stephen King breaks through. From time to time, there are glancing autobiographical parallels even among other characters. In 'Salem's Lot, Ben Mears, when under suspicion of combined murder and perversion, quotes Mark Twain (who significantly has the same first name as Ben's young mirror-image, Mark Petrie) as having said that a “novel was a confession to everything by a man who had never done anything” (97). While such popular stories as “Graveyard Shift” may recount the terror of an actual descent into the basement of a rat-filled factory, The Body makes deeper psychological cuts into the “everything,” the “dreadful possibilities,” the “awful … unknown”—and attempts “to look the [subconscious] Gorgon in the face” (SL, 374). As the poet Hart Crane once phrased it, the “scimitar” of self-appraisal found “more than flesh to fathom in its fall.”⁹

Punning on his own name, Gordon, the protagonist-novelist of The Body realizes what a “thin film there is between your rational man costume—the writer with leather elbow-patches on his corduroy jacket—and the capering, Gorgon myths of childhood” (418). Lachance (though actually King) works out his word-problems more matter-of-factly than some twentieth-century poets, but no less poignantly. In “Burnt Norton,” T. S. Eliot believes that “Words strain / Crack sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision.” Lachance-King's repeatedly stated anguish is simply that the “most important things are the hardest things to say” because they “lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried”—interesting sensitivity on the part of one who, under his own name, elsewhere explains that the “business of creating horror is much the same as the business of paralyzing an opponent with the martial arts … finding vulnerable points and then applying pressure there” (DM, 68). The tripartite appearance of the secret-heart motif (289, 390, 395) obviously indicates its sensitive importance, but one cannot help remembering the “life of careful academicism” (i.e., Matt Burke's in 'Salem's Lot) that “refuse[d] to plant an intellectual foot on any ground until it had been footnoted in triplicate” (299). The vulnerable point for Gordie Lachance, as also for novelist Ben Mears in 'Salem's Lot, is the secret self, the creative and sensitive nature that can all too easily be cruelly misunderstood. The secret self of alcoholic Father Callahan of 'Salem's Lot, for instance, was the effeminate face of “Mr. Flip,” his imaginary boyhood companion with “thin white face and burning eyes,” the “thing that hid in the closet during the days and came out [at nights] after his mother closed the bedroom door” (352).

Assuming a poetic and almost mystical posture, Gordie recognizes that “words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out.” Tellingly, this popular twentieth-century author of horror tales—for one must remember that King more than Lachance is speaking here—reveals his personal horror: that the “most important things … are landmarks to a treasure” that “your enemies would love to steal away.” Later in the novella, a half-retarded boy (Vern Tessio) tries to retrieve a “quart jar of pennies” hidden under the front porch of his house. Unfortunately, like Lachance-King's landmarks to a treasure that one's enemies would love to steal away, Vern's treasure map was accidentally burned by his mother (an “enemy”) along with old homework papers, candy wrappers, comic magazines, and joke-books, in order to start the cook fire one morning, and Vern's map for locating his copper treasures went “right up the kitchen chimney.” Vern is half-afraid that his crafty brother (yet another “enemy”) might have found the secret penny jar, an explanation that was clear enough to all his twelve-year-old buddies (whose corpse-searching activities form the basis of the novella), but “Vern refused to believe it” (297). Toward the end of the novella, Lachance-King will wrap up his secret in a symbol, a missing blueberry bucket, perhaps imaginary, belonging to a dead boy (Ray Brower), whose train-struck body is what the morbidly curious boys are seeking.

The momentary formula in the penny-jar incident, however, is King equals Lachance equals Vern, and this ought to be apparent to perceptive readers. But as Henry James points out in his “Art of Fiction,” too often such subtle symbolic parallels are likely to be overlooked. Therefore, the protagonist-author of The Body who has—in James's phrase—“reasons of his own” for considering these sensitive parallels important, continues more explicitly in his introduction so that the reader can “see it”: “And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you have said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.” The entire novella is balanced and counterbalanced with this need-to-reveal versus fear-to-reveal paradox, and thus the ultimate revelation turns out to be nothing more than a blue symbol (the “blue bucket” that Gordie goes groping after in the incessant pursuits of his imagination [419-20]), timeless yearnings for meaning and understanding, perhaps not entirely understood even by the author himself—imponderables that the death-haunted poet Percy Shelley, in his Prometheus Unbound, sought for in the “unascended heaven / Pinnacled deep in the intense inane” (3:203-4).

Several portions of these fearful needs are repeated on the occasion when Gordie prepares to keep nightwatch for his sleeping buddies against improbable ghosts. What Gordie Lachance sees is not a “grotesquely ambulatory bedsheet” stealing spectrelike through the trees (38), but something so delicately ambiguous that one cannot tell, for an instant or two, whether it is girl or female deer: “her eyes weren't brown but a dark, dusty black”—“she looked serenely at me”—“my stomach and genitals filled with a hot dry excitement” (389). Deliberately paraphrasing Robert Frost's poem, “Two Look at Two” (except that in this case it becomes a boy looking at a doe—as it were, “one-looking-at-one”), the four-paragraph passage sounds Gordie-depths of Frost-like feelings of delicacy and sensitivity. King even exploits the implications of Frost's name when Gordie is “frozen solid” with fear and awe and perhaps even loving expectation. For a brief and ecstatic moment, Gordie has chanced upon his American Eden.

A similar echo (this time from Frost's “After Apple-Picking”) occurs in 'Salem's Lot when novelist Ben Mears compares looking at one of the avenues of the soon-to-be-haunted town to “looking through a thin pane of ice—like the one you can pick off the top of the town cistern in November,” and everything is “wavy and misty and in some places it trails off into nothing” (SL, 13).¹⁰ The Frost allusion in 'Salem's Lot is perhaps not so subtle as that of The Body, although in both instances the quasi-quotation is intended to emphasize delicate aspects of the male psyche, a matter of considerable significance in both novel and novella. Interestingly, both Ben and Gordie, novelist-protagonists in successive and presumably entirely different stories, are delicately drawn together through an allusion to momentary Edens in Robert Frost's poetry.

It is on the tip of Gordie's tongue to tell his companions about the sudden appearance of the doe and the wonder and astonishment it caused, but he ends up keeping it to himself. In fact, “I've never spoken or written of it until just now, today.” Gordie privately acknowledges in his novella what he never would have openly acknowledged to his adventuring twelve-year-old pals: that the delicate, or should one say feminine, feelings about a beautiful doe, rather than the machismo of actually looking at the mangled and decaying body of a boy struck by a train (obviously the main thrust of the story), were the “best part of that trip, the cleanest part” (390). All this by contrast with the diminished pleasure that literary success produces in a maturer Gordie of later years, writing being once associated with “guilty masturbatory pleasure,” but later—at the time of the composition of The Body—associated with “cold clinical images of artificial insemination” (361).

Nonetheless, when trouble arose in Gordie's life—as on the first day in Vietnam, or when he thought his youngest son might be hydrocephalic—he would find himself “almost helplessly” returning to that morning, to “the scuffed suede of her ears, the white flash of her tail” (390). Similarly, in Firestarter, when Andy Magee and his daughter Charlie have been pursued by the C.I.A. to a point of total exhaustion, Andy sees a large Frost-like doe “looking at him thoughtfully,” and “then [she] was gone into the deeper woods with a flip of her white tail.” Like Gordie in the midst of his fears, Andy, too, “felt encouraged” (127). As for The Body, what Gordie half hopes for is that the reader's memory will jog back to the time when (some thirty pages earlier) friend Richie discovered Gordie's hidden stories in a carton in a closet. Gordie expressed reluctance to have his storytelling propensities revealed to the other boys. “I want it to be a secret,” Gordie said—to which friend Richie responded, “Why? It ain't pussy. You ain't no queer. I mean, it ain't poetry” (361).

The Body is constructed in a series of episodes, each emphasizing some boyish secret, until in the final paragraphs, under the not-so-subtle guise of Gordie Lachance, King tries to give symbolic expression, through the imaginary blue bucket belonging to the dead boy, to what has been bothering him throughout a lifetime. The first secret is a place, a treehouse made of scavenged planks, splintery and knotholed, the roof of corrugated tin sheets “hawked from the dump,” and built by four twelve-year-old boys: the slow-witted Teddy and Vern, the quick-witted and perceptive Chris, and the narrator Gordie. This secret place contains yet another secret place, a 12 × 10 inch compartment under the floor in which the boys hide such things as ashtrays, girlie books, Master Detective murder magazines, and playing cards “when some kid's father decided it was time to do the we're-really-good-pals routine” (290). What the boys do in this secret treehouse is normal enough boy-stuff: complain about parents, play cards, look at spicy magazines, use off-color language, share jokes—behavior so common among teenage boys one almost wonders why secrecy is necessary.

Visible from the outside, yet hiding the activities and even thoughts of the occupants, the secret treehouse is a necessary refuge from the irrationalities of Castle Rock parents, especially fathers. The most brutal was Teddy's psychopathic father, who “shoved the side of Teddy's head down against one of the cast-iron burner plates [of the stove] … yanked Teddy up by the hair of the head and did the other side,” Teddy being, as a consequence, half-deaf and half-blind (292). As the author of the novella words it, “the thick glasses and the hearing aid [Teddy] wore sometimes made him look like an old man” (291). Chris's father was not much better than Teddy's, for Chris was “marked up every two weeks or so, bruises on his cheeks and neck or one eye swelled up and as colorful as a sunset, and once he came into school with a big clumsy bandage on the back of his head” (302).

Considering the often callous behavior of these parents, it is not surprising that their twelve-year-old sons entangle everything they do, consciously or unconsciously, in a web of secrets and ignorances. In addition to those already mentioned, consider that the malevolent parents are not informed of the twenty-mile adventure to find a dead body (301), that hostile rival gangs are unaware of each other's plans for the trip (301), that Billy Tessio does not realize his whispered conversation with Charlie Hogan is overheard by his despised brother (299), that Gordie remains unwilling to expose his vicious attacker (427), and that (in Gordie's story) Chico's affair with Janet occurs without his parent's knowledge (312).

Secrets confront secrets when rival gangs meet over the dead body of the boy struck by a train. The temporary triumph of the younger gang over the older (406-11) and the subsequent revenge of the defeated older boys (425-28) climax the ever-developing theme of manliness in The Body, and are reminiscent of, though perhaps somewhat more believable than, the teenage confrontation between feminine Mark Petrie and masculine Richie Boddin in 'Salem's Lot. The tangle of boyish secrets can be summed up in Gordie's words: “The story never did get out … what I meant was that none of our parents ever found out what we'd been up to that Labor Day weekend” (424). “Nobody knew exactly what had happened … a few stories went around [in the schoolyard]; all of them wildly wrong” (428). Secrets are interlaced in interesting ways too numerous to catalog here, with author-to-be Gordie becoming like that “benevolent spider,” the town gossip Mabel Werts of 'Salem's Lot, who sat at her window with telephone and high-powered binoculars “in the center of a communications web” (72)—except that here in Castle Rock, it might be more accurate to speak of it as Gordie's non-communications web.

The deepest secrets, however, are those encircling Gordie's poetic dispositions (so shied away from in the conversation with Richie), creating imaginative enclosures of horror from which escape is impossible. These involve not so much the discovery of the body of the blueberry boy, although the details are graphic enough to keep one awake for many a night, but the insidious accuracy with which poetic Lachance reconstructs the accident. The deceased is not found mangled on the railroad tracks, as one might have expected, but rather some distance away. The body is “down here” (that is, at the bottom of a railroad embankment) and “relatively intact,” with its filthy low-topped Keds caught in tall blackberry brambles. Neatly punning on “kid” and “Keds,” as though he were a poet, Lachance explains that “I could go on all day and never get it right about the distance between his bare feet on the ground and his dirty Keds hanging in the bushes. It was thirty-plus inches, but it was a googol of light years. The kid was disconnected from his Keds beyond all hope of reconciliation. He was dead” (405). Characterizing the nonexistent future of the dead boy as “can't, don't, won't, never, shouldn't, wouldn't, couldn't,” Gordie realizes how relentlessly the train engine had “knocked him out of his Keds just as it had knocked the [kid] out of his body.” Full realization was “like a dirty punch below the belt” (404).

Readers are, of course, permitted the opinion that the train's indifference to the life of Ray Brower was less terrible than the insensitivity of Teddy's father, when he shoved the side of the boy's head against one of the cast-iron burner plates of the oven, a cruelty that turns Teddy's bleak future into a living parody of the dead boy's “can't, don't, won't, never, shouldn't, wouldn't, couldn't.” Lachance's terrifyingly plausible reconstruction of the train accident appears with a complaint about the magnetic powers of the narrator's imagination: “a little mind-movie” one can have “whenever things get dull”—the trouble being that the little mind-movie-projector “turns around and bites” with “teeth that have been filed to points like the teeth of a cannibal” (404). Five-year-old Danny Torrance in The Shining has similar unnerving mental projections when a hotel's emergency fire-hose (like an insidious snake) appears to hiss out the words: “What would I want to do to a nice little boy like you … except bite … and bite … and bite?” (173).

The cosmic entity that cruelly shapes the lives of the young preteens of The Body (their many beatings, mistreatments, and eventual early deaths [429-32]) behaves like “some sentient, malevolent force,” some Lovecraftian cosmic horror symbolized by the “big icy hailstones” that were striking Ray Brower's face “with an awful splatting sound that reminded us of … [the dead boy's] terrible and unending patience” (412). Even more frightfully, the dead Brower's eyes “filled up with round white hailstones,” that, melting, ran down his cheeks as if the dead boy were “weeping for his own grotesque position” (413). (Dante employs a similar ice-eyed scene in the lowest depths of his Inferno, the “Ptolomaea” [canto 33] where the eyes of a treacherous reprobate fill up with frozen tears, which the hell traveler callously refuses to remove.) With consummate verbal and psychological skills, King often projects such “sentient malevolent forces” into the overwrought psyches of many of his male characters—forces that in Dante's ninth circle are a “wind” from the great wings of the diabolical Dis that freezes up the infernal slush of Cocytus. High school teacher Jim Norman in “Sometimes They Come Back,” senses this force as a “black noxious beast” in the empty halls of his haunted school, senses it so deeply that he “thought it could hear it almost breathing” (NS, 147).

Concerned with problems of masculine identity and feminine creativity, both The Body and the gracefully shaped 'Salem's Lot … were composed at virtually the same time and, taken together, are extensive in-depth explorations—virtual confessions, as it were—of the deepest sort of personal/creative insecurities in literate and much-divided modern man. Horror and mysticism, crudity and sensitivity, inside and outside evil—not so mutually exclusive as one might at first imagine—overlap and intermingle, in both The Body and 'Salem's Lot, to create two of the most powerful self-analytical narratives in recent American fiction. In both novel and novella, the literary scalpel of Stephen King cuts deep into his own trembling flesh (his much-troubled psyche); and the “patient”—if one might be permitted to negate a famous line in T. S. Eliot's “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—lies painfully [un]etherized upon the table.” As Stephen King is himself both novelist Mears (representing light) and vampire Barlow (darkness) in 'Salem's Lot; just so he is both the novelist Lachance (living) and the train-struck Brower (dead) in The Body. In a real sense, both novel and novella are self-elegies; and no “Orphean lute”—in the words of Robert Lowell's equally despairing “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”—can “call life back.” Considered together, these two haunting narratives of a “body” and a “lot” may eventually—without too much fuss and embarrassment—take their place beside the “succession of flights and drops,” the “little seesaw[s] of the right throbs and the wrong,” in Henry James's psychologically involuted Turn of the Screw.¹¹

Notes

1. “Red” makes a passing remark indicating that he too has been brutalized by gang-rapes in prison: “Am I speaking from personal experience—I only wish I weren't” (33).

2. Another interpretation is given by Winter, who claims that in Rita Hayworth King worked a “theme of innocence as effectively as he considered the theme of guilt in The Shining. … Red's story tells of how the irresistible force of innocence succeeds against the seemingly immovable object of Shawshank” (Art of Darkness, 105-6).

3. G. B. Harrison, ed., Shakespeare: The Complete Works (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), 1431.

4. In an afterword to Different Seasons, King explains the order of the composition of the four novellas. Coming from the author himself, one would expect this information to be unimpeachable, but in a footnote to his chapter on Different Seasons, Winter explains that the sequence of compositions was not exactly as King had originally reported it (Art of Darkness, 207).

5. Winter, Art of Darkness, 207.

6. “Denker” pretends that his first name was given him by his father because of an admiration for Arthur Conan Doyle (116). This is yet another name-game: Doyle's famous Sherlock Holmes, like the crafty Dussander, is a sleuth. Ironically however, shortly after this so-called Conan Doyle explanation of the name “Arthur,” Todd reveals that his mom and dad had given him a fingerprint set for Christmas, which he promptly used to discover Dussander's Nazi identity (124).

7. Richard Hanser, Putsch (New York: Pyramid Books 1971), 241.

8. “Stud City,” Ubris, Fall 1969; “The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan,” Main Review, 1975. As samples of Gordie Lachance's story-telling abilities, the versions that appear in The Body have been revised.

9. Hart Crane, Complete Poems (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), 50.

10. Frost's line reads: “I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight / I got from looking through a pane of glass / I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough / And held against the world of hoary grass.” “After Apple-Picking” is one of Frost's most frequently anthologized poems. Author Ben Mears would surely have known it.

11. From the memorable opening sentence of Henry James's Turn of the Screw.