Read: The Gunslinger (revised)–“The Gunslinger”
A fifth of the way through this dopey vanity project of King’s and I’m already tired of it. I don’t know how else to characterize this revision but “vanity project”; it doesn’t give me any choice. It’s the work of a guy convinced he knows better than the author he once was–if he could just expand this one sentence into three, if he could just take that amorphous sense of mystery and load it with clues, then it’ll be a better book, right?
Good golly miss Molly, wrong.
Case in point: The first section of The Gunslinger‘s first chapter, also called “The Gunslinger,” was in its original form maybe the best pure prose King ever set to paper. Ruthless, relentless, economical, terse, mysterious, haunting. Minimal distractions of mythos or invented patois, but still enough to hint at deep waters beneath the still surface. So when I started rereading it in this revised format, I gave it a straight read through, then went back and flipped between the two versions every paragraph. The still, Sergio Leone opening has ballooned. It’s been made flabby and flaccid with extra conjunctions, extra sentences, extra paragraphs. It’s like watching someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder try to comb his hair, incapable of leaving well enough alone.
Like the rest of “The Gunslinger,” it’s also laden with forced references to events from the other books in the series, those already published and those yet to be, as if King’s internal editor had stepped aside and his internal Dark Tower Concordance publisher burst forth to say “Hey, didja know about the Manni cult? Or that we call Jesus ‘the Man Jesus’? Or that the north star is Old Mother? Or that Roland had a horn once? And that that’s REALLY important? Or that he went to this place called Mejis and his girlfriend was burned to death and a guy named Eldred Jonas led a bunch of guys called the Big Coffin Hunters and there was a Charyou Tree ceremony and livestock grow mutated and autumn is called Reap and thankee-sai and kennit and crimson king and Sheemie had a mule and the beam and LaMerk machinery and Jericho Hill and long days and pleasant nights and blah blah blah blah blah blah…” Exhausting. King has noted his detractors’ diagnosis of his condition as “diarrhea of the typewriter.” Now I understand what they mean. Look, all of these things are not equally important. They’re definitely not as important as telling a good story in an artful fashion. They leave you swiveling your head in all directions instead of staring straight across the desert with the gunslinger. We had four fucking books to learn all that shit and did just fine, thanks. The conviction that it’s all SO IMPORTANT that it just HAS to be in the FIRST CHAPTER of the FIRST BOOK? Vanity.
See, it’s not just his typewriter that has the green apple splatters; if it were, that might be forgivable. (Might–watching what he did to this chapter even from a purely stylistic perspective isn’t pretty.) It’s his imagination, an imagination that had conjured up an epic that was already pretty damn engaging, for crying (your pardon) out loud. Now you find that some of the most fundamental things you thought you knew about it are wrong, and that there are whole new things you need to learn and fit into what you already had internalized about it. Out of nowhere comes the number 19, and with it a new subplot in which the man in black (now outed as Walter from the get-go, and how the hell does that make sense?) uses it as a “don’t think about a blue polar bear”-type mental trap to goad the gunslinger’s lady friend Allie into unlocking the secrets of the afterlife and driving herself insane. Try to imagine if The Illuminatus! Trilogy had been more than half-completed and published before Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea went back and inserted the number 23 into the first part, then re-released it. Equally fundamental, I’m half-guessing half-sure, is this “Resumption” business that’s tagged onto the beginning of the book, and that dizzy sense Roland gets that the world momentarily blinked out of reality. If it was so vital to the entire enterprise, why wasn’t it there when Steve King As The Apotheosis Of All 19-Year-Olds wrote this fucking thing years ago? And since it wasn’t, may I submit that it shouldn’t have been jammed in there years later by the director of Maximum Overdrive?
Here, though, because I’m a fair guy, is the one part of the revisions I really liked. Not because of what it imports for the story, because like I said I think it’s cheating, but because it’s well-written and creepy. It’s the man in black Walter O’Dim’s farewell note to Allie.
Allie
You want to know about Death. I left him a word. That word is NINETEEN. If you say it to him his mind will be opened. He will tell you what lies beyond. He will tell you what he saw.
The word is NINETEEN.
Knowing will drive you mad.
But sooner or later you will ask.
You won’t be able to help yourself.
Have a nice day! 🙂
Walter O’Dim
P.S. The word is NINETEEN.
You will try to forget but sooner or later it will come out of your mouth like vomit.
NINETEEN.
“Sooner or later it will come out of your mouth like vomit.” That’s beautiful. I wish King had learned his own lesson.