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Mrs. Todd's (Pastoral) Shortcut

A surprisingly complex feature of Stephen King's 1985 story collection Skeleton Crew is its six-page appendix, modestly entitled "Notes." Located after the final story and containing accounts of most of the foregoing contents, the notes are largely anecdotal: this or that story was written when I was living here; this or that magazine originally turned the story down. But in these notes King also tells us what inspired some of Skeleton Crew's tales and gives us a glimpse at not just where and when he wrote them, but how and even why. Plenty of writers (plenty of artists in every medium, for that matter) have given productive and interesting accounts of the creative process. An earlier writer of weird stories, King's literary ancestor and sometime fellow New Englander Edgar Allan Poe, for example, famously described in his 1846 essay "The Philosophy of Composition" how his poem "The Raven" was the result of a series of thoroughly rational decisions based around an initial selection of a subject--the death of a beautiful woman--and a vowel sound--the long o, as in the concatenation word Nevermore. The rest of the poem, Poe confides to us, unfolded with a certain degree of inevitability. Most readers of the essay come to doubt Poe's sincerity, either because of its immodest claims or because its rapid appearance seems designed to cash in on the poem's celebrity. But while the motives behind retrospective statements of authorial intention like this may always be open to skepticism, they seem to feed a very real appetite among consumers of emerging literature for interpretive guidance. When a story or a novel first appears, where are we supposed to locate it among its sources and analogues, or among the writer's other works? What else, beyond the words on the page, is the author willing to tell us about the genesis of the work, or its denouement, or any given moment in-between? Inquiries like these seem to be very persistent, especially in a consumer culture like ours, and the answers they elicit are often very instructive--though sometimes, as in the Poe case, more for what they don't say than for what they do. The present essay addresses the possible causes and definite effects of an authorial assertion about "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut," an unassuming twenty-two page story toward the front of Skeleton Crew. Despite the story's modest proportions, I believe it belongs to the ancient tradition of pastoral literature (extending back in time ultimately to the Greek poet Theocritus and including such notable practitioners as Virgil, Petrarch, Edmund Spenser, Robert Frost, and Seamus Heaney). Furthermore, I think we can tell that King was consciously and deliberately writing within that tradition even though his own account of the genesis of the story is singularly unhelpful in recognizing that fact. Stephen King, who graduated from the University of Maine with a BA in English a decade and a half before Skeleton Crew appeared and who taught literature and writing at both the high school and college levels thereafter, knew full well that his readers didn't need to be told the provenance of his ideas. He draws our attention to that fact with familiar candor: you don't have to understand the internal-combustion engine to drive a car, and you don't need to know the circumstances which surrounded the making of a story to get a bit of pleasure from it. Engines interest mechanics; the creation of stories interests academics, fans, and snoops.... (507) Having said this, adding that the first and the last are "almost synonymous, but never mind," he then shares his retrospections with us anyway. Ample and apparently candid disclosure were already a regular part of King's authorial persona in 1985, but there's a lurking aggressiveness in this dismissal of academic snooping. In his passing comment King sets academic inquiry at odds with authentic enjoyment; he suggests that there is a sort of boundary line to the right scrutiny of his fiction-writing process beyond which one is no longer a reader but a species of pest. …