♡ + ☮ = INFORMATION
What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn’t be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.
Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis
In 1967, King was at University and had written a piece for Maine Campus, the university newspaper, expressing support for Vietnam albeit with reservations (this is not a view he retains, thankfully). A few years later, he is advised by Professor Carrol F. Terrel to write about something topical, something like the war in Vietnam. Eventually, he wrote the book Sword in the Darkness, around 150,000 words long and unpublishable, save for a single chapter in the book Stephen King: Uncollected and Unpublished, which has one chapter and extensive notes describing the book’s plot.
But King would write about Vietnam, in his own roundabout way. The Long Walk is a potent metaphor for the loss of life in that war, and a character in The Langoliers is identified as a vet, albeit briefly. And yet, despite what a role the Vietnam has played in America, it is not something King has ever really touched upon in detail. This probably mostly is due to the fact that King did not serve. His mother, terrified of the draft, sent him to University. He would not have made the draft in any case, having flat feet, burst eardrums and terrible vision. His experience of the war is not of the war itself, but seeing the effects of it at an age when he was becoming more politically aware. This book, whilst not autobiographical in the same way something like The Body is, tries to imagine for its readers what it was like to live in that time for those who weren’t there, man. In trying to do so, I think also speaks to a more universal frustration present for generations of his age.
In trying to broach such a large subject, King has structured his book in an unconventional way. It opens with a long novella, probably the one most pleasing to King fans, followed by another shorter novella, two short stories and a coda to the whole book. Characters come and go, and there’s no central narrative except the continued meditation of what the hell happened to the 60s, with the Vietnam War clawing around the edges of the book. If it weren’t for King’s name on the cover, this wouldn’t even get listed in the horror section of your local library. With its disjointed narrative, there was a part of me that wondered if I should break the book down into its constituent sections; I have elected to treat the book as a whole in this case, but each story is worth consideration in their own right too.
As such, it may seem odd for a book ostensibly about the Vietnam War to begin in the years prior to the war, not really discussing what led to the war but spending a long time with children in what some King fans simply see as a Dark Tower-adjacent story (see below for the many references it contains). But within this first story is packed the themes that rest of the book will slowly reveal. We need to see innocence before it is broken. It is not until the penultimate story, Why We’re in Vietnam, that it becomes clear what the book is doing, reflecting on the loss of what is presented in the rest story.
With Bobby and Carol, and to a lesser extent Sully-John and Willie Shearman, we are witness to characters in the prime of their potential. The future ahead of them is unknown and exciting, innocent of what the real world is like. The adults, especially Bobby’s mother Liz, and Ted Brautigan, are not quite as naive, hardened by the world in different ways. Liz perpetuates the cycle of disappointment with her own son, and though Ted tries to be better, he is ultimately as helpless and instil in the child characters the same hopelessness he lives with on the run from the Low Men. The book starts with these children’s great potential, and, unlike the Losers from It, they just don’t achieve anything of great note. But they do get to live. Sometimes, that can be enough.
This is what King I think is discussing in the book. He was part of a generation that truly believed it could change the world, but then Vietnam happened (not to mention Manson and all those political assassinations) and snuffed out the belief. It becomes less about trying to change the world or save it; instead, it’s simply about trying to get through each day, whether that’s with a card game for get-out-of-town money or standing on the streets taking money from strangers. There is a failure of a generation who believed they really could change the world, instead resorting to just surviving it. Life itself is a battleground.
Yet in that first story, we have Liz and Ted, most likely members of the Greatest and Silent Generations. They fought in WWII, and unlike Vietnam really did save the world – only to land it in a seemingly interminable Cold War, massive inequality and a less clear cut world. There’s was a generation of seemingly endless potential, then squandered also. Ted tries to warn Bobby about this with his choice of reading material, such as Lord of the Flies and Of Mice and Men, but what persist in the end as the relic of innocent times is the baseball glove, once forgotten and discarded but perhaps the most important thing of all. It represents when things could have been simple; growing up makes things complicated. The cycle repeats, and though there is change it is slow and takes generations.
Vietnam represents that wasted potential. It’s very easy to point to the war and loss life as a demonstration of its pointlessness, and King doesn’t shy away from that viewpoint. But Vietnam looms over this book like a spectre, a threat of what could happen. Think of the students playing Hearts in their dorm lounge – they are not under immediate threat of being drafted, yet the stress of the war, in addition to everything else, either drives them to protest or lose themselves in a card game. Even if they try to fight against it, Carol and Stokely ‘Rip-Rip’ Jones demonstrates that idealism eventually becomes lost in the sea of Everything Else. Eventually, we stop having ideals and have to get jobs.
Vietnam represents a generational disappointment for King. I’m sure there’s an element of survivor’s guilt at play too. King is absolutely a critic of the war, his viewpoint of it being a loss of potential from a generation who could have done so much more, if it weren’t for old government men fighting proxy wars. King was in his early 50s at the time of the book’s publication and though he had certainly lived a life I am sure he was happy with, I think at the same time he sees what a waste it was for so many not as lucky as him to have flat feet and a college education. What impact can one life have?
The closest thing this book has to an actual hero is Ted Brautigan. Though his appearance happens before the outbreak of war, his desperation to avoid the Low Men could just as easily be characterised as a draft dodger trying to avoid the war. It may not be Vietnam he’s evading, but he exemplifies those who do not want to fight. War consumes everything, so even the boys who go to college can only not think about it until it consumes them too. It is the eater of hope. Ted’s capture is sad, but inevitable in the world he comes from. There is hope, maybe, in just living a life that is good. Very few people can change the world, but Bobby did his best and may have saved one life. That can be enough.
His next book, the non-fiction On Writing, truly marks the next significant change in King’s writing; Hearts in Atlantis, coming as it does in the last year before the new millennium, is his last novel before everything changes. Though it lacks the scares a King audience would have come to expect, it has something to say about Vietnam and war in five differing ways. While not his strongest book, it feels like a more literary effort from King confronting and exploring parts of his past that he had otherwise ignored until this book. The 90s have been a thoughtful and reflective time for King. Having got sober after The Tommyknockers, King has proved to himself not only that he can still write, but he can write with a seriousness his younger, coke-addled self could not. If what happened next to King did not happen, it would be interesting to see what kind of writer King would have turned into next. As it is, the next phase in his writing career is going come at him with a crash.
Observations and Connections
Though there are a fair few, the vast majority of them appear within the first novella, with a couple references scattered throughout the remainder of the book.
When Brautigan initially talks about his past, he says he is from Hartford, which was the safe place whispered of in The Mist. Brautigan also jokes about missing fines with late books and being sought by the Library Police, which King fans know is not something to be joked about. Brautigan is also hinted at having some kind of shine to him, though he is more fully defined as being a Breaker. What a Breaker is isn’t clear at this point, but definitely links in some way with the Dark Tower (see below). It’s hinted that Bobby also has a mild version of the same, only he calls is a winkle. The rose petals Ted sends are from the fields of roses around the Tower itself, which is a recurring image throughout that series.
During one of Ted Brautigan’s blank outs, he uses lots of Dark Tower-type phrases, including, ‘All things serve the beam,’ from The Waste Lands and, ‘There will be water if God wills it.’ The phrase ‘other worlds than these,’ the last words of Jake from The Gunslinger, crops up when Bobby is trying to imagine and ignore the Low Men. Ka is mentioned when it is discussed how Bobby should stay with his mother, which shows up in numerous Dark Tower and Dark Tower-adjacent books. Finally, when Ted is on the phone to Len it is described as palaver, which isn’t said by the characters but is an unusual enough word to use in the text that it must be a deliberate choice to reference the palaver that happens in the Dark Tower books.
If that weren’t enough, the Gun slinger and his ka-tet are specifically spoken of as having arrived at End-World, which is where we left them at the end of Wizard and Glass.
The sigil of the Crimson King, who first appeared in Insomnia, appears throughout the book, particularly during a nightmare of Bobby’s which is implied to happen at the top of the Tower itself. The Low Men from the novella are agents of the King, and are described as being similar to The Regulators. The term can-toi is used to describe them, which first was used in Desperation. It implies that Tak may be of some relation to the Low Men.
The cars the Low Men drive are described as being alive. They may be creatures from the world of Roland, but also have a similar ‘low’ feeling as Christine. Maybe there’s a link there?
Raymond Fiegler, the character who causes issues for Carol later on, is implied to be an incarnation of Randall Flagg, who first appeared in The Stand, as well as The Eyes of the Dragon and now the Dark Tower books, as well as possibly in others. Carol mentions learning how to make herself ‘dim,’ furthering the link between Randall and the Walter O’Dim identity.
In a final King reference, Derry is mentioned a few times, mostly in the second novella, as being near to the university. Derry of course is the setting of many books including most notably It and Insomnia.
Some outside references. Given the weirdness of the first part of the book, King sending Bobby’s mother to Providence feels like a shout out to HP Lovecraft. Haystacks Calhoun is also brought up in a discussion about wrestling, which is where Ben got the nickname from in It.
Finally, the colour yellow recurs semi-regularly throughout the book. There is of course the Low Men who wear yellow, but the tarp that covers the anti-war message is also a yellow colour. Yellow has long been a sign of weirdness and horror, including Robert W. Chambers’ seminal weird fiction horror The King in Yellow, and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
UP NEXT: King spends a little time shooting the shit On Writing.
Deeper Thoughts for the Horror Inclined 