Stephen Koch

When The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop came out, more than one reader asked me why on earth I’d said what I’d said about Stephen King. There was genuine bewilderment over my praise for King’s work. How could a highbrow such as myself, (a stereotype I did precious little to discourage), speak so respectfully about the author of Carrie?

 Well there’s a little story in there somewhere. As with many stories, there’s an official version and there is a more real, get-down version. Herewith, a chunk of the latter.

Sometime in the innocent days of 2000, just as I was coming up from my first plunge into the writing of The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop, I was strolling back to my tiny office from lunch when I spotted in Barnes and Noble’s window a huge stack of a new book called On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

By Stephen King.

I stopped. I stared. Then the still small voice within me murmured, “Well, shit. I’m writing my big opus on writing, and what happens? Before I’m even done with draft numero uno, Stephen effing King beats me to it, and his book is in Barnes and Noble’s window in a stack as high as the Tower of Babel.”

Now let me be clear. I had never read one single syllable by Stephen King. Nor did I have the slightest intention of reading one single syllable by him.  Ever. Why would I read Stephen King? I was a highbrow, remember?

But this? This was the competition. I had no choice but to read it. Right?

So with grinding jaw I acquired On Writing and began to read.

 I opened the book and sort of glanced in.  (”I’ll just skim,” I told myself.) Then King said something about being a kid who wildly wants to write, and it was just exactly like what it had been for me to be a kid who wildly wanted to write. Then he made me laugh out loud with a story about poison ivy. Pretty soon I wasn’t skimming any more. Or skipping one line. And then the universe began to jiggle a little around me. On the table, teaspoons were skittering to the edge all on their own, and clattering to the floor. The known world—my known world—was shaking on its foundations.

Because this man was getting it right. It was just plain right.  I had been working up close and personal with young writers for twenty years, reading their work, watching it take shape, confronting their typical problems, listening to their fears and hopes more times than I could count. And now….this celebrity, whom I thought unworthy of my attention, was getting the big things right again and again and again.

I was kind of dazzled, and it was kind of exciting to be dazzled. Troubling too, but undeniably exciting.

Clearly, I was going to have break down and read an actual novel by Stephen King.  Still pretty sure  this was just a passing fancy, an amusing aberration, an inexplicable, not uninteresting, but trivial ripple on my serene literary pond, I strolled into Barnes and Noble and almost at random picked up—because I had seen the movie, of course!—The Shining.

It happened that just then I was due to go to Hungary. Double Lives had been translated into that country’s magical and mysterious language, and I was told that it was doing well enough to warrant a trip across the pond. Even the Prime Minister—then Victor Orban—had read it and given copies to friends. It was in the news. It was selling.

So off I went. In Budapest, I gave some lectures and an interview, went to some wonderful book signings, did not meet his Excellency the Prime Minister, but was shown the city of my ancestors. (My father’s grandfather had been a Hungarian, active in the revolution of 1848, who fled to America when the Habsburgs were restored.) At one book signing, I met the descendants of Theodore Maly—one of the most moving and remarkable figures in modern espionage, about whom I’d written in Double Lives. It was all a lot of fun, and when it was over, I got on the plane wondering what am I going to with these eight plus very cramped hours? (I and six-foot two, and please do believe me, I feel every millimeter of my height crunched into a standard airplane seat.)

Then I remembered. The Shining was still in my shoulder bag. I’d been too busy in Budapest even to glance at it, but these eight hours were going to be wasted hours anyway. Right?

As the seat in front of me ground down my bones, I read every word of The Shining, and as the hours and chapters flew by, I saw more and more clearly that I was dealing with something—some kind of masterpiece—which I had no idea how to accommodate in my old ways of thinking.

By the time we landed in Kennedy, it was clear that my life—my literary life, and therefore my whole life—would have to change.

How it changed is another and longer story, for another time.

After our sweet Massachusetts Christmas, the Most-Important-Grownup and I spent a few days alone together, gazing at the steely, restless, sublime Atlantic from our cozy room at the Emerson Inn in Rockport, sleeping late, eating well at Duckworth’s Bistro, seeing Valkyrie, and once again soaking up the elegant wide room that’s home to a few great, and a few more almost-great, Fitz Henry Lanes in Gloucester’s Cape Ann Museum.

I was also reading. And have I got a book for you!

If you agree that ripping out roots of the twentieth century’s political horrors is a prime task of the twenty-first, then Jonathan Brent’s Inside the Stalin Archives belongs in your knapsack. Don’t be misled by a title that suggests something strictly for scholars. This is an intellectual adventure story about a descent into history’s hell, a quest to unearth the facts behind one of the shaping events—and shaping lies—of modernity.  Inside the Stalin Archives is the historical sleeper of the year, and it easily ranks among the best studies of totalitarianism I know.

Jonathan Brent is the editorial director of the Yale University Press. As such, his was the relentless executive mind behind Yale’s Annals of Communism series, in which incidentally, you will find a fair number of the other best studies of totalitarianism I know.

Brent is also that rarity, a publisher who writes not just respectably, (many do), but wonderfully. An earlier Brent book (you can see him discussing it here) explores the Jewish Doctor’s Plot and other intrigues surrounding Stalin’s death. The first book was good. Inside the Stalin Archives is better: more original, personal, and significant.

Brent’s struggle to uncover the documents of the Soviet regime began in quixotic hope, and became the definitive success of the series. While I was writing Double Lives, (and later, its second edition) I myself was a remote witness, an extra without lines, in some of this story. (While I was personally never in the archives or Moscow, several of the researchers who worked on the Yale project were also helpful to me.)  But in the snowy serenity of Gloucester, I read Brent’s story fresh: enthralled by its baffled twists and turns; spooked, repelled, and enchanted by its people and places; and greatly moved by the quiet heroism and nobility Brent encountered among many Russians. The man writes with an almost Dickensian sensitivity to human strangeness, sadness, and ruin. His memoir swept me beyond the standard clichés to start to see and feel, the new Russia, the old Russia, and the bond between them.

All this is capped with a grand intellectual payoff. The book’s final four chapters deal with Brent’s breakthrough into the darkest secret cave of all: Stalin’s personal archive. From any scholarly point of view, that’s of course important. But Brent lifts the merely documentary interest of, say, Stalin’s private annotations in the margins of his own books and manuscripts to a newly arresting level of insight. Looking through this one man, Brent reveals something beyond the man: the vision of power, the concept of humanity and human governance, the collective mind that Stalin fulfilled to lethal perfection. Stalin was not just a monster, not just a killer, not just an enemy of decency and truth. He was all of those things of course, but he subsumed them all in something larger, and maybe worse. Stalin was a system. He was the dictatorship. He embodied post-humanistic power. What’s more, he knew it. Stalin did not see himself as a man. For him, Stalin the man—the short, shrewd, heartless creature who liked American Westerns, sickening jokes, and slept alone on his couch— was unimportant. What counted was Stalin the thing.

To most of us, the dictator’s limitless cruelty seems incomprehensible: just blank, blind, mad, mindless, inexplicable evil. Our incomprehension is misleading and naive. Stalin the system was necessary. He was the thing—the only thing—-that made post-humanist power coherent. He—it—stood beyond the individual, beyond all the individualism that humanism’s many enemies despised and still despise. Both more and less than inexplicable evil, Stalin the thing fulfilled Lenin’s dream: total—and I do mean total—power.

Such, at any rate, is Brent’s hypothesis, and it is dazzlingly discussed in this book.

Talk to you next Friday!