THE
STEPHEN KING COMPANION
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PART ONE
MAINE ROOTS Durham at that time was a different place than it is now. The old small farm ethic—which had been the rule for many generations past—was just on its way out; and what we had was a community where people got up in the morning and went to work in the factories in the surrounding towns. It was a working class rural town. —Chris Chesley, interviewed in The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia
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1 Family Roots Donald Edwin Pollock At his winter home in Florida, Stephen King sat down with Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. for an appearance on the PBS television show Finding Your Roots. Combing genealogical and military records, Gates’s research team turned up a wealth of information about King’s father, Donald. The compiled information, assembled scrapbook-style for King’s perusal, was an eye-opener for King, who understandably wanted to know more about the father who abandoned his family in 1949, when Stephen was two years old. According to what he remembers his mom said, his dad went out for a pack of cigarettes and never returned. Leafing through the leather-bound scrapbook, Stephen King turned the page and saw a black-and-white photograph of a six-foot-tall man with glasses. Gates asks, “Now you know who that is.”
A military file photo of Donald Edwin Pollock (Stephen King’s father), from PBS’s television show, “Finding Your Roots” with Dr. Henry Lousie Gates.
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The Stephen King Companion
Stephen King replies, “Not right offhand.” He pauses. “Is that my dad?” In a shock of late recognition, Stephen exclaims, “He looks like me! . . . a little bit.” He shakes his head, and has a wistful expression on his face. “No kidding,” said Gates. It was Stephen King’s father. But his birth name isn’t Donald Edwin King. As Gates pointed out, a record of birth and military records show that his name was Donald Edwin Pollock. Twenty-five at the time of his marriage to Nellie Ruth Pillsbury, Donald listed his occupation as “seaman” in the merchant marine. On David King’s birth record, his father’s occupation is listed as “master mariner.” And on Stephen King’s birth certificate, he’s listed as “captain, merchant marine.” From there, Gates takes Stephen King on a genealogical trip into the past, showing that his roots go all the way back to Ireland on his father’s side. Despite the considerable passage of time, there are still unresolved issues and anger that fester in Stephen King, who is upset at the circumstances and consequences of his dad’s unexplained departure. Stephen King told Gates, “I can remember as a kid, thinking of myself, well, if I ever meet my dad, I’m going to sock him in the mouth for leaving my mother. And as I got older, I would think, well, I want to find out why he left and what he did, and then I’ll sock him.” King and Gates have a good laugh over that, but the question that’s haunted Stephen King for all those years will forever remain unanswered: Who was Donald E. Pollock? Stephen King’s father died at age sixty-six in Wind Gap, Pennsylvania, but as to which cemetery, I couldn’t determine. The largest, though, is Fairview Cemetery, near a town called . . . Bangor. As to his public records, they show that he remarried, and genealogical records online indicate five children by that marriage. As to what he left behind in the wreckage of his first marriage: What we do know is that Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King picked up the shattered pieces of her family’s lives and heroically moved on. Scrambling to make ends meet in her new, and unexpected, role as the family’s breadwinner, survival became an extended family affair, with her four sisters helping out. David King recalls moving all over the map, until they finally dropped anchor and settled in for the long haul in Durham. Aided financially by her siblings, Nellie Ruth was a single mother who not only raised two young boys but also her aging parents in a small, two-story house in Durham, Maine, that lacked a bathtub or shower. It’d be difficult enough to be a caregiver even with a spouse to share the burden, but to do it essentially alone was an act of quiet courage and iron resolve: She was not going to abandon her family as her husband did.
A Child’s Worst Nightmare The emotions of fear and horror are inextricable in King’s fiction, and justifiably so. There was, as Chesley pointed out, no respite for Stephen King’s powerful imagination, which conjured up awful possibilities.
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Family Roots 5 A road sign showing the way to Freeport, Pownal, and Bradbury Mountain in southern Maine.
But the fear began early on in King’s life when he was abandoned by his father—a small child’s worst nightmare. Parents, after all, are supposed to be a bedrock, a solid platform on which children build their lives. But when one parent leaves for whatever reasons, children often blame themselves (“Was it something I did?”); they endlessly torture themselves asking a question that can’t be answered: “Why?” Conjecture is no replacement for knowledge, and understandably the fear of abandonment prefigures largely in King’s early fiction: Carietta White (Carrie), whose mother is a fundamentalist Christian, raising her alone; Danny Torrance (The Shining), whose dysfunctional father is slowly spiraling out of control; Charlene “Charlie” McGee (Firestarter), whose mother dies at the hands of the nefarious federal agents at “The Shop”; and others. The repercussions of parental abandonment reverberate in King’s fiction, as they clearly do for Stephen King himself, who was never able to take out his long-simmering anger on his dad and punch him out. He can only live with the knowledge that, as Dick Hallorann tells Danny Torrance in the epilogue to The Shining, The world’s a hard place, Danny. It don’t care. It don’t have you and me, but it don’t love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they’re things no one can explain. . . . But see that you get on. That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on. With his mother as his shining example, Stephen King went on to do just that: He went on.
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The Stephen King Companion
Flotsam and Jetsam The expression around the King family was that “Daddy done gone,” and what he left behind, the physical artifacts from his past, had been boxed and stored at a relative’s house down the street. Aunt Ethelyn and her husband, Oren, kept the flotsam and jetsam of Donald King’s life in their attic, where one day Stephen went to see what he could find, the only physical remains of what once was presumed to be a good marriage. In Spignesi’s The Complete Stephen King Encyclopedia, David King was asked “What do you remember about your father?” David King replied: Nothing. I don’t remember the man personally at all. I do remember that at one point—I guess when we got back to Durham, Maine—Stevie and I found a trunk up in Aunt Ethelyn’s garage that contained a lot of books on seamanship and that sort of thing, and in fact, there was even one of his Merchant Marine uniforms in it. We also had several still pictures of him and one sixteen-millimeter film that he had taken. One scene from that film that I can remember was of the ship he was on going through a storm. There were waves crashing over the bow and everything. And surprisingly (since this was the mid-1940s), there were also some shots on that reel in color—footage of both Stevie and I as little kids running around. In Danse Macabre, Stephen King wrote that he found in their attic boxes of his father’s past, now gathering dust and long abandoned: merchant marine manuals and scrapbooks of his travels worldwide, including an 8mm movie reel, sans sound, which he shared with David; they saw, for the first time, their father waving to them in absentia. From Danse Macabre: He raises his hand; smiles; unknowingly waves to sons who were then not even conceived. We rewound it, watched it, rewound it, watched it again. And again. Hi, Dad; wonder where you are now. Their dad, as it turned out, left Maine permanently and headed to Pennsylvania, where he would settle down permanently; he would remarry and raise kids with his new wife. But the boys had no way of knowing that. All they knew was that their father had left. One thing Donald did leave behind, a blessing in disguise, was a box of cheap paperbacks, science fiction and horror, which Ruth said were his main interests, the kind of fiction he enjoyed reading. An aspiring writer, Donald King had tried his hand at writing fiction, even submitting items for publications, collecting a few rejection slips. In time, if Donald King had applied himself to the craft of writing fiction, he might have produced a salable manuscript. But that never happened, possibly because, as Stephen, in Danse Macabre, recalls Ruth explaining, “Your father didn’t have a great deal of stick-to-it in his nature.”.
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Family Roots 7
That afternoon in the dusty attic was a defining moment for a young Stephen King, who in Danse Macabre recalls what happened afterward: “The compass needle swung emphatically toward some mental true north” when he found a “treasure trove” of horror novels published by Avon. It was his first fictional encounter with the bogeyman of Providence, Rhode Island, a tall, saturnine-looking man named Howard Phillips Lovecraft, better known as H. P. Lovecraft. A Lovecraft collection was, recalled King, “the pick of the litter.” Lovecraft, “courtesy of my father . . . opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me: Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Fritz Leiber, and Ray Bradbury among them.” Had Stephen King not found the box of horror books, would he have eventually turned to horror fiction? Or would he had turned in another direction, perhaps the books he’d eventually pen under the Richard Bachman pen name? It’s a moot point because King found himself comfortably at home with the horror writers, the fantasists, the dark dreamers. Stephen, as a fledgling writer, would ironically follow in his father’s footsteps, but where his father ultimately failed, Stephen would eventually succeed, and brilliantly so, because unlike his father, Stephen had, as his mother termed it, a “stick-to-it” nature, which must have come from his mother.
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