Copyright Ténèbres 2000 - visit Ténèbres on the web at www.tenebres.com.
Ténèbres : Peter Straub, if you were the character
of a novel that you'll never write, what would the opening paragraph -
describing this character - read like ?
Peter Straub: "Porter Strum, one of those men who could be either
an accountant or a contract killer, moved unhesitatingly to the bar, ordered a
vodka martini, produced a cigarette from nowhere, and lit it with a gold
Dunhill. His dark, double-breasted Armani suit almost hid his paunch, and his
bald head gleamed. Behind the reptilian lenses of his glasses, his narrow eyes
surveyed the room. In answer to a question from Polly, the bartender, he said,
"Like wigsville, baby, dig? All the blues ain't in B flat, and Harold
Arlen didn't write 'Stormy Weather" for nothin'." Strum's voice was
filled with dangerous laughter. Later, after all the excitement had died down,
Polly told everyone that in spite of being old, fat, and bald, he had looked a
great deal like the young Clint Eastwood."
Ténèbres : As a friend and a writer, if you had to describe Stephen King
(the friend and the writer), what would you say?
Peter Straub: I'd say that he is a brilliant, funny, generous, compassionate
man whose character is made up of layer upon layer. I'd say what you see is not
only not what you get, it isn't even what you see. I'd say he is a mansion
containing many rooms. I'd say that all of this makes him wonderful company. As
a writer, he is profoundly imaginative, immediately engaging, and humane.
Ténèbres : As writers, what are the basic differences between you and SK
? And what do you have in common ?
Peter Straub: He is more straightforward than I am, far less given to
complexity of both plot and characterization. This relative simplicity is a
great strength. We both love the sweep of narrative; we share an old-fashioned
love for the novel form. We are both attracted to grandeur, and we are
intensely interested in the various manifestions of evil. And I guess our
senses of humor must coincide at many points, because we can reduce each other
to helpless laughter.
Ténèbres : Among SK's books, is there one that you would have liked to
write ? And among yours, is there one - in your opinion - that SK would have
liked to write ? And why ?
Peter Straub: I would be very proud to have been the author of The
Shining. As for Steve, I can't say, but I think there were some aspects of
Shadowland he rather enjoyed. When I read IT, which I admired unreservedly, I
had the feeling that he was sort of playing my game, packing stories into wider
stories, and doing it beautifully, in fact probably doing it better than me.
Ténèbres : Do you remember the first time you met SK ? Can you tell us
about this meeting ?
Peter Straub: I first met Steve at Brown's Hotel, a nice, cozy little
hostelry in London. I remember being impressed by his size - Steve is even
taller than Porter Strum! - and his volubility, also his humor and
intelligence. We had been trying to get together for weeks, and when we finally
spotted each other in a clubby, chintz-and-leather interior near the hotel's
bar, he yelled my name, really yelled it, and threw up his arms. We went into
the bar and had a long conversation, a lot of it about money. All writers talk
about money. We felt each other out about the books we liked and discovered a
good deal of common ground. I'll never like Shane Stevens as much as he does,
and he'll never like The Good Soldier at all, but we agreed on Raymond Chandler
and a bunch of other crime writers. In the main, I came away with the
impression of having met a very driven, passionate, aware, interesting and
valuable man, one with whom I had struck up an instant frienship that pleased
me greatly.
Ténèbres : Let's get a closer look at The Talisman. Do you remember the
chain of events that lead to the birth and the realization of this project ?
Peter Straub: I think Steve raised this possibility the first night he
and Tabby came to our house on Hillfield Avenue, London N8. Our wives had gone
to bed, and we were sitting up, gabbing away like maniacs and drinking an
enormous quantity of beer. "We ought to write a book together," he
said, or something similar, and right away we tried to work out when we could
do that. It turned out that previous committments meant that we couldn't begin
for four years. We made a date to work together four years hence and eventually
went to bed.
Over the intervening years, we now and then talked about what we could do. When
the time drew near, my wife and I went to Portland, Maine, to stay with the
Kings for something like three or four days, so that he and I could expand our
vague ideas into an actual story, or at least the outline of a story. All we
had at that point was the situation from a story Steve had begun in college and
then abandoned, that of a boy who must find some sacred object that will save
his dying mother's life. Most of the rest emerged in the course of a series of,
I think, twenty-mile car journeys from the King house to a shopping mall in
Portland: we had to keep driving back and forth because Steve kept forgetting
to bring something or other he needed in order to make the right purchase. Then
he found that he'd brought the wrong thing, and had to try again. We went back
and forth three times, I believe, so we spent hours in the car. These hours
were very useful. We managed to work out most of the essential components of
the story.
Ténèbres : Can you tell us, in details, how you organized the work on
The Talisman between the two of you, from the first draft to the corrections,
the schedule you had, etc ?
Peter Straub: By this time, my wife and I had moved back to America, and
when we were ready to begin, Steve drove from Maine to my house in Westport,
Connecticut, to start the actual writing. He stayed maybe four days, during
which we wrote the first fifteen or tweny pages, taking turns at my word
processor. Then he went back to Maine, and I spent ten days writing up a
seventy-page, single-spaced outline based on everything we had discussed. After
that, he continued from where we had left off, transmitted his pages to me, and
I picked up from his last sentence. We went on like this for about a year and a
half, each of us firing off hundred-page, hundred-and-fifty-page segements at
intervals of a month or so. When we were nearing the end, my wife and I went
back to Maine, and Steve and I wrote the last fifty or so pages at his house,
taking turns sitting down before his machine.
Not long after submission, our editor joined us at Steve's place, and we went
through the book, making whatever cuts and changes seemed necessary.
Ténèbres : Do you have anecdotes to share with us regarding the writing
of The Talisman ?
Peter Straub: When my wife and I went to Maine for the final push, I
brought along a jazz record by Michel Legrand called "After The
Rain," which featured two of my favorite saxophonists, Phil Woods and Zoot
Sims. I played this record whenever it was my turn to sit in the chair and
write a couple of paragraphs. When it was Steve's turn, he put on a record
called "Electric Avenue," by Eddy Grant. He loved a certain moment
when something in the background made a sound exactly like a diving board going
boing after someone has just bounced off it. At one point, I was typing away,
and Phil Woods and Zoot Sims were playing simultaneously, sort of winding their
sounds around each other. Steve said, "Hey, Peter! They're like you and
me!"
Ténèbres : Did you get to discover new aspects of SK during this project
?
Peter Straub: Sorry, but I think this question is too fannish to answer.
Ténèbres : The Talisman was published 16 years ago. In retrospect, what
do you think of the book ? Did you read it again recently ? Would you and SK
write it the same way today ?
Peter Straub: I reread it about six months ago, as preparation for the
new one. It struck me as even better than I had remembered it, exciting but
also very tender. There's a lot of nice writing in the book. If it has one
flaw, it's that it is too long, and if we were to write it today, we would try
to keep that from happening.
Ténèbres : A few months ago, you and SK announced your intention to
write Talisman 2. How and when did the desire to work together again appear ?
Peter Straub: Steve came up with the notion of collaborating again. He
remembered an idea I had mentioned during the first book, and I guess it
intrigued him. Since he is an honorable guy, he asked me if I would consider
working with him on a book based on this old idea. That was about a year and a
half ago. Our minds seemed to be converging, anyhow, since both of us had
alluded to "Rebecca" and "Bartleby, the Scrivener" in our
most recent works. What are the odds of two writers fastening on to those
particular, very different tales, more or less at the same time? It dseemed
like an excellent omen.
Ténèbres : Why chose to write a sequel to The Talisman instead of doing
something completely different from that first experiment ? Did you and SK have
other ideas that you decided not to follow ?
Peter Straub: A sequel to our first effort just seemed the best, most
logical thing to do. In fact, I don't think it ever occurred to either one of
us to write anything but a sequel. Here was all this material that we had
evolved between us, and it was inevitable that we should decide to make use of
it.
Ténèbres : We know from the press that Talisman 2 will be about an older
Jack Sawyer and much darker than the first book. Can you tell us a little more
about it ? Do you think that it will also be a "Bildungsroman" ?
Peter Straub: Well, it can't be a Bildungsroman, since Jack Sawyer is
already an adult. I can tell you that he is living in a small town in Western
Wisconsin and has retired, for reasons obscure to him , from a very promising
career as a Homicide detective in Los Angeles. A series of hideous crimes
gradually brings him back into involvement with the world.
Ténèbres : Same question as # 7, but for the Talisman 2, if you changed
anything in the way you and SK work together.
Peter Straub: This time, we worked out a lot of the basic material by
e-mail, writing back and forth almost daily for a couple of months. Then I went
to a place the Kings had rented in Florida, and Steve and I spent five days
hammering out a map of the action. It was like a fast-forward version of the
novel. When I went back home to New York, we began writing fifty-page
installments and sent them back and forth as e-mail attachments. We're still
doing that. Right now, we are a little more than two hundred pages along.
Ténèbres : Last - and ritual- question ; if you were on your deathbed
(not that we wish you any harm) what would be your famous last words addressed
to SK ?
Peter Straub: My last words are to be addressed to Steve King? Let's say
he has come to say goodbye to me. I would probably tell him that I loved him,
and that it had been a tremendous pleasure to know him and work with him. Then
I would remind him of the last words James Ellroy heard from his dying father,
and we'd both crack up. I can't tell you what those words were, though, they
aren't suitable for young readers.