The Dark Half(8)

'The hardest part was actually coming up with the name,' Beaumont continues, nipping lightly at the pencil. 'But it was important. I knew it could work. I knew it could break the writer's block I was struggling with . . . if I had an identity. The right identity, one that was separate from mine.

How did he choose George Stark?

'Well, there's a crime writer named Donald E. Westlake,' Beaumont explains.

'And under his real name, Westlake uses the crime novel to write these very funny social comedies about American life and American mores.

'But from the early sixties until the mid-seventies or so, he wrote a series of novels under the name of Richard Stark, and those books are very different. They're about a man named Parker who is a professional thief. He has no past, no future, and in the best books, no interests other than robbery.

'Anyway, for reasons you'd have to ask Westlake about, he eventually stopped writing novels about Parker, but I never forgot something Westlake said after the pen name was blown. He said he wrote books on sunny days and Stark took over on the rainy ones. I liked that, because those were rainy days for me, between 1973 and early 1975.

'In the best of those books, Parker is really more Re a killer robot than a man.

The robber robbed is a pretty consistent theme in them. And Parker goes through.the bad guys - the other bad guys, I mean - exactly like a robot that's been programmed with one single goal. 'I want my money,' he says, and that's just about all he says. 'I want my money, I want my money.' Does that remind you of anyone?'

The interviewer nods. Beaumont is describing Alexis Machine, the main character of the first and last George Stark novels.

'If Machine's Way had finished up the way it started out, I would have shoved it in a drawer forever,' Beaumont says. 'Publishing it would have been plagiarism. But about a quarter of the way through, it found its own rhythm, and everything just clicked into place.'

The interviewer asks if Beaumont is saying that, after he had spent awhile working on the book, George Stark woke up and started to talk.

'Yes,' Beaumont says. 'That's close enough.'

Thad looked up, almost laughing again in spite of himself. The twins saw him smiling and grinned back around the pureed peas Liz was feeding them. What he had actually said, as he remembered, was: 'Christ, that's melodramatic! You make it sound like the part of Frankenstein where the lightning finally strikes the rod on the highest castle battlement and juices up the monster!'

'I'm not going to be able to finish feeding them if you don't stop that,' Liz remarked. She had a very small dot of pureed peas on the tip of her nose, and Thad felt an absurd urge to kiss it off.

'Stop what?'

'You grin, they grin. You can't feed a grinning baby, Thad.'

'Sorry,' he said humbly, and winked at the twins. Their identical green-rimined smiles widened for a moment.

Then he lowered his eyes and went on reading.

'I started Machine's Way on the night in 1975 I thought up the name, but there was one other thing. I rolled a sheet of paper into my typewriter when I got ready to start . . . and then I rolled it right back out again. I've typed all my books, but

George Stark apparently didn't hold with typewriters.'

The grin flashes out briefly again.

'Maybe because they didn't have typing classes in any of the stone hotels where he did time.'

Beaumont is referring to George Stark's 'jacket bio', which says the author is thirty-nine and has done time in three different prisons on charges of arson, assault with a deadly weapon, and assault with intent to kill. The jacket bio is only part of the story, however; Beaumont also produces an author-sheet from Darwin Press, which details his after-ego's history in the painstaking detail which only a good novelist could create out of whole cloth. From his birth in Manchester, New

Hampshire, to his final residence in Oxford, Mississippi, everything is there except for George Stark's interment six weeks ago at Homeland Cemetery in Castle Rock, Maine.

'I found an old notebook in one of my desk drawers, and I used these.' He points toward the mason jar of pencils, and seems mildly surprised to find he's holding one of them in the hand he uses to point. 'I started writing, and the next thing I knew, Liz was telling me it was midnight and asking if I was ever going to come to bed.'.Liz Beaumont has her own memory of that night. She says, 'I woke up at 11:45 and saw he wasn't in bed and I thought, 'Well, he's writing.' But I didn't hear the typewriter, and I got a little scared.'

Her face suggests it might have been more than just a little.

'When I came downstairs and saw him scribbling in that notebook, you could have knocked me over with a feather.' She laughs. 'His nose was almost touching the paper.

The interviewer asks her if she was relieved.

In soft, measured -tones, Liz Beaumont says: 'Very relieved.'

I flipped back through the notebook and saw I'd written sixteen pages without a single scratch-out,' Beaumont says, 'and I'd turned three-quarters of a brand-new pencil into shavings in the sharpener.' He looks at the jar with an expression which might be either melancholy or veiled humor. 'I guess I ought to toss those pencils out now that George is dead. I don't use them myself. I tried. It just doesn't work. Me, I can't work without a typewriter. My hand gets tired and stupid.