The Dark Half

'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.

'George's never did.'

He glances up and drops a cryptic little wink.

   'Hon?' he looked up at his wife, who was concentrating on getting the last of William's peas into him. The kid appeared to be wearing quite a lot of them on his bib.

  'What?'

  'Look over here for a sec.'

  She did.

  Thad winked.

  'Was that cryptic?'

  'No, dear.'

  'I didn't think it was.'

The rest of the story is another ironic chapter in the larger history of what Thad

Beaumont calls 'the freak people call the novel.'

Machine's Way was published in June of 1976 by the smallish Darwin Press

(Beaumont's 'real' self has been published by Dutton) and became that year's

surprise success, going to number one on best-seller lists coast to coast. It was also

made into a smash-hit movie.

'For a long time I waited for someone to discover I was George and George was

me,' Beaumont says. 'The copyright was registered in the name of George Stark, but

my agent knew, and his wife — she's his ex-wife now, but still a full partner in the

business — and, of course, the top execs and the comptroller at Darwin Press knew.

He had to know, because George could write novels in longhand, but he had this

little problem endorsing checks. And of course, the IRS had to know. So Liz and I

spent about a year and a half waiting for somebody to blow the gaff. It didn't

happen. I think it was just dumb luck, and all it proves is that, when you think