According to Bev Vincent, "When Stephen King started working on the first story of the first book
that would become the Dark Tower series, his intentions were nothing
grander than to write the longest popular novel in history. Now a
grandfather in his late fifties, King looks back with sympathy and
understanding at the youthful hubris that gave rise to such an aspiration. “At
nineteen, it seems to me, one has a right to be arrogant. . . . Nineteen is the
age where you say Look out world, I’m smokin’ TNT and I’m drinkin’
dynamite, so if you know what’s good for ya, get out of my way—here comes Stevie.” The Lord of the Rings inspired King, though he had no intention of
replicating Tolkien’s creations, for his inspirations went beyond that epic
quest fantasy to embrace romantic poetry and the spaghetti westerns of the
1960s and 1970s. After graduating from college, he decided it was time to
stop playing around and tackle something serious. He began a novel “that
contained Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic but set against [director Sergio] Leone’s almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop (275)". Earlier on in the same book, Vincent elaborates a bit more on what has to remain the quirkiest idea that ever occurred to the still reigning King of Horror. "The story that would become"
The Dark Tower series "had its genesis almost a decade before the first" installment "appeared in F&SF, when King and his wife-to-be, Tabitha Spruce,
each inherited reams of brightly colored paper nearly as thick as cardboard
and in an “eccentric size.”
"To the endless possibilities of five hundred blank sheets of 7" x 10"
bright green paper, King added “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
by Robert Browning, a poem he’d studied two years previously in a course
covering the earlier romantic poets. “I had played with the idea of trying a
long romantic novel, embodying the feel, if not the exact sense, of the
Browning poem.” In an unpublished essay called “The Dark Tower: A Cautionary Tale,”
King says, “I had recently seen a bigger-than-life Sergio Leone Western, and it had me wondering what would happen if you brought two very
distinct genres together: heroic fantasy and the Western.” After graduating from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, King
moved into a “skuzzy riverside cabin” and began what he then conceived of
as a “very long fantasy novel,” perhaps even the longest popular novel in
history. He wrote the first section of The Gunslinger in a ghostly,
unbroken silence—he was living alone—that influenced the eerie isolation
of Roland and his solitary quest. The story did not come easily. Sections were written during a dry spell in
the middle of ’Salem’s Lot, and another part was written after he finished
The Shining. Even when he wasn’t actively working on the Dark Tower, his
mind often turned to the story—except, he says, when he was battling
Randall Flagg in The Stand, which is ironic since both Flagg and a superflu
decimated world became part of the Dark Tower mythos many years later (7-8)". That's the closest I think anyone's ever come to granting a basic outline of how King contrived his most erratic narrative.
It's a story that both Vincent and the author himself have related time and again over the years. There's nothing very new to be said about it, as of this writing, except perhaps for one overlooked element. It has to do with, of all things, not any famous literary text (or at least, maybe not
directly) but rather a filmmaker. I'm talkin specifically now about an Italian filmmaker named Sergio Leone. However strange this may sound. it kinda-sorta turns out he's one of the key components that King used in constructing his grandiose, yet somehow forever incomplete secondary world. He's yet another part of of the tale Vincent and King have to tell about how the Tower had its genesis. Ever since catching a fateful viewing of
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly at a local movie theater in about the year 1967-8 (
web), King has made no secret of the impact that the artistry of Leone has had on his own work as a writer. This appears to be one of those deep influences for the author. Something that has been allowed to become at least part of the artist's personal storehouse of potential Inspirations. In his 1981 non-fiction book
Danse Macabre, King even devotes a few pages to Leone and his filmic creativity. As is typical of the author, he brings Leone up in the course of discussing the art of the Horror genre. To be specific, he's contemplating how a work like
Frankenstein can become its own modern form of myth?
"The most obvious answer to this question is, the movies.
The movies did it. And this is a true answer, as far as it goes.
As has been pointed out in film books ad infinitum (and possibly
ad nauseam), the movies have been very good at providing that cultural echo chamber... perhaps because, in terms of
ideas as well as acoustics, the best place to create an echo is
in a large empty space. In place of the ideas that books and
novels give us, the movies often substitute large helpings of
gut emotion. To this American movies have added a fierce
sense of image, and the two together create a dazzling show.
Take Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, for instance.
In terms of ideas, the film is an idiotic mishmash. In terms of
image and emotion—the young kidnap victim being pulled
from the cistern at dawn, the bad guy terrorizing the busload
of children, the granite face of Dirty Harry Callahan himself—
the film is brilliant. Even the best of liberals walk out of a film
like Dirty Harry or Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs looking as if they
have been clopped over the head... or run over by a train.
"There are films of ideas, of course, ranging all the way
from
Birth of a Nation to
Annie Hall. But until a few years
ago these were largely the province of foreign filmmakers (the
cinema “new wave” that broke in Europe from 1946 until about
1965), and these movies have always been chancy in America,
playing at your neighborhood “art house” with subtitles, if they
play at all. I think it’s easy to misread the success of Woody
Allen’s later films in this regard. In America’s urban areas,
his films—and films such as
Cousin, Cousine—generate long
lines at the box office, and they certainly get what George
(
Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead) Romero calls
“good ink,” but in the sticks—the quad cinema in Davenport,
Iowa, or the twin in Portsmouth, New Hampshire—these pictures play a fast week or two and then disappear. It is Burt
Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit that Americans really seem
to take to; when Americans go to the films, they seem to want
billboards rather than ideas; they want to check their brains at
the box office and watch car crashes, custard pies, and monsters
on the prowl.
"Ironically, it took a foreign director, the Italian Sergio Leone,
to somehow frame the archetypal American movie; to define
and typify what most American filmgoers seem to want. What
Leone did in
A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More,
and most grandiosely in
Once Upon a Time In The West cannot
even properly be called satire. O.U.A.T.I.T.W. in particular is
a huge and wonderfully vulgar overstatement of the already
overstated archetypes of American film westerns. In this movie
gunshots seem as loud as atomic blasts; close-ups seem to go on for minutes at a stretch, gunfights for hours; and the streets
of Leone’s peculiar little Western towns all seem as wide as
freeways (57-58)". A page or two later, while still discussing
Frankenstein as an example of a new modern
Myth, King once more brings up the significance of Leone's achievement. The funny thing is that he does so by pairing up the Man With No Name alongside King Kong, of all characters, saying, "Like Eastwood in Leone’s spaghetti westerns, Kong is the
archetype of the archetype (61)". It might not seem like much to go on, yet perhaps King has left his readers with some interesting food for thought when it comes to a good starting place for unpacking Leone's particular brand of artistry. To start with, King makes a distinction between films of Ideas, and what I'm going to call a reliance on modern
Emblems. It's a phrase I'm borrowing from scholar
Michael R. Collings, and his 2001 book
Towards Other Worlds.
In the course of a chapter with the stimulating title of Stephen King, Richard Bachman, and Seventeenth-Century Devotional Poetry, Collings theorizes that the author of books like Carrie and The Regulators has taken the Renaissance concept of the Emblem, and "transferred it into an appearance that renders appropriate and acceptable to modern audiences (150)". While the imagery of a book like The Regulators "belongs largely to the world of prose", it is the writer's ability to take the "Cultural icons of suburban Middle America" and treat them as a form of Modern Emblemology, that makes King able to bridge the gap between Idea and Image mentioned above in Danse Macabre. What's interesting to note about Collings take is that the cinema of Sergio Leone is able to fit into King's rubric of modern Emblems (149-50)". I think Collings efforts need to be highlighted here, because unless that happens, the full significance of his words will get all too easily overlooked. What he's saying in this chapter is that not only does Stephen King's artistry owe a great deal to the literary practices of the Age of Shakespeare, he also goes a step further by perhaps leaving room for applying the same consideration to the work of the director of Once Upon a Time in the West. Collings only mentions Leone just that one time, in passing, while keep his focus solely on King. The idea that a guy who writes a book like Christine might be a literary heir to the practices of Elizabethan Drama is a hard sell for most of us.
What are we to do with the notion that the same Renaissance dramaturgy applies to a man who makes films in which Dirty Harry runs around filling most of the cast full of lead? I'll have to admit it's more or less impossible to believe that films like
A Fistful of Dollars amounts to anything like a Story of Ideas, as King calls them. At the very least, this has not been any major part of the reputation that Leone has garnered for himself, whether among critics or audiences. Very few of us can see any reason to take a film like
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, seriously. And so one day I ran across a book about Leone, and somewhere very near the beginning of the text, I made a discovery. It counts as no more than one of those minor revelations tucked away in an otherwise passing comment. Yet I'd argue that if we zero in on it, it might be possible to discover an interesting reason for considering the creator of the Man with No Name as having perhaps a greater integral relation to Stephen King's
Dark Tower Mythos than has previously been assumed. Even the most dedicated
Tower Junkies assume that films like
TGTB&TU amount to little than jumping-off points, something like a simple yet necessary puzzle piece that was required to unlock the door to the artist's Imagination. However, if the work and scholarship of Sir
Christopher Frayling is anything to go by, then there might just be a more vital yet hidden connection between Sergio Leone, and the various tales told about the character of Roland.
