The Books: “Different Seasons” ‘Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption’ (Stephen King)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Different Seasons (Signet) by Stephen King

A book of four novellas, Different Seasons contains some of my favorite of all of Stephen King’s writing (and I’m a huge fan). Each novella represents a different season, and some of these stories pack such a huge punch. None of them are “horror” stories, although there is most certainly psychological horror at times. The first story in the collection comes under the heading “Hope Springs Eternal” – and that is, most definitely, the them of “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” – adapted into the film Shawshank Redemption, probably the most successful (in terms of long-lasting impact) of all of the adaptations of King’s work. Shawshank Redemption will be watched by generations to come, long after the rest of us are dust. It’s just that kind of movie. And not to be a snot, but whatever – wouldn’t be the first time – I prefer the written story. It’s just how King describes stuff … it’s the way he can rise goosebumps on my flesh without ever having a zombie emerge, or an evil dog, or monsters in the sewers. He’s great there as well – but in my opinion, he is at the top of his game (and anyone else’s game) with “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” – the now well-known (thanks for the movie) story of Andy Dufresne – wrongly accused murderer and accountant – who spends decades of his life in jail – decades – digging a secret tunnel out, using his Rita Hayworth poster as a cover-up. It’s not just the story of “hope springs eternal” that is so moving – it’s the characters King introduces to us … the way he describes prison life, not just from a phyical standpoint but – way more important – from the psychological standpoint. What happens to hope when a man becomes an “institutional man”. What happens to free will, and thinking for oneself? Andy Dufresne knows he cannot beat the system. It has already beaten him. But – unlike most of his counterparts – he never ever becomes “institutionalized” – and that, to me, is King’s main interest in the story. King, even with all the horror and dark imaginings, is – at his very core- an optimist. He loves people. He loves the human race, and what it is capable of at its very best. Ultimately, he sees the good. But we are only at our very best when faced with extraordinary obstacles. Andy Dufresne is not a Rambo-type guy. He’s an accountant. A quiet stealthy man, with a great poker face … who never ever stops thinking, thinking, thinking … and not just thinking … but saving the very part of himself, the uninstitutionalized part, the part that has dreams and plans for the future – to himself. Nobody can get in there with him, and nobody – for the most part – even knows that it is there. Everyone can sense, from the warden on down, that Andy Dufresne is an interesting character. But nobody could ever have guessed that all those long years – from the 50s to the 70s – when he was in his cell, with his chess pieces, that he was not just planning his escape in his mind – but working on it practically, inch by inch. When he breaks out, everyone is blown away. Andy? That guy?? But when you look back on it – as our beautiful narrator does – it all makes sense. Of course someone like that – methodical, anal, quiet, cards held close to his chest – would construct the perfect escape. And never ever let on what he was up to. The man had nerves of steel. Ice water in his veins. And THATS what interests Stephen King: who IS that? What kind of guy could endure in such silence? Taking such enormous risks? Dufresne could have lost all. Many many times. But – and here a little bit of luck comes into play – his cell was never searched unexpectedly – he was never busted … but besides the luck factor, Dufresne just kept going. And perhaps we will never know what it was like for him. Where his mind went, those long long nights, as he chipped away at the rock walls of the prison. Dufresne was in the zone. The practical zone. Not a pipe dream. No. But an actual plan. It’s an awesome story, and I never get sick of it.

One of the best parts of the story is that it is NOT told by an omniscent narrator – who can tell us: “And here’s how it REALLY went.” And it is NOT told by Dufresne, who can inform us, “Here is what it was like for me.” It’s told by his fellow inmate – Red. Who cannot give us the whole story – much of it is only speculation: “here is what it must have been like … I bet that THIS is how it happened …” and it adds such a goosebump factor to the entire novella, because, in the end, we really can’t know. All we know is: one day Andy Dufresne was in his cell, and the next day – he had vanished into thin air.

The uncertainty of Red’s voice here, the way it sounds as though he is working it out for himself, pondering Andy’s experience – without really knowing the answer … is part of the success of the book. It’s that tone – and if you’ve read it, you will know what I mean. Morgan Freeman embodied it perfectly (so much of the movie is in voiceover – and thank God. It’s just right for that particular film) … but here you can see how it is written. To my ear, it couldn’t be better.

Here’s an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Different Seasons (Signet) by Stephen King – ‘Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption

Then one day, very late in the spring – perhaps around October of 1987 – the long-time hobby suddenly turned into something else. One night while he was in the hole up to his waist with Raquel Welch hanging down over his ass, the pick end of his rock-hammer must have suddenly sunk into concrete past the hilt.

He would have dragged some chunks of concrete back, but maybe he heard others falling down into that shaft, bouncing back and forth, clinking off that standpipe. Did he know by then that he was going to come upon that shaft, or was he totally surprised? I don’t know. He might have seen the prison blueprints by then or he might not have. If not, you can be damned sure he found a way to look at them not long after.

All at once he must have realized that, instead of just playing a game, he was playing for high stakes … in terms of his own life and his own future, the highest. Even then he couldn’t have known for sure, but he must have had a pretty good idea because it was right around then that he talked to me about Zihuatenejo for the first time. All of a sudden, instead of just being a toy, that stupid hole in the wall became his master – if he knew about the sewer-pipe at the bottom, and that it led under the outer wall, it did, anyway.

He’d had the key under the rock in Buxton to worry about for years. Bow he had to worry that some eager-beaver new guard would look behind his poster and expose the whole thing, or that he would get another cellmate, or that he would, after all those years, suddenly be transferred. He had all those things on his mind for the next eight years. All I can say is that he must have been one of the coolest men who ever lived. I would have gone completely nuts after a while, living with all that uncertainty. But Andy just went on playing the game.

He had to carry the probability of discovery for another eight years – the probability of it, you might say, because no matter how carefully he stacked the cards in his favor, as an inmate of a state prison, he just didn’t have that many to stack … and the gods had been kind of him for a very long time; some nineteen years.

The most ghostly irony I can think of would have been if he had been offered a parole. Can you imagine it? Three days before the parolee is actually released, he is transferred into the light security wing to undergo a complete physical and a battery of vocational tests. While he’s there, his old cell is completely cleaned out. Instead of getting his parole, Andy would have gotten a long turn downstairs in solitary, followed by some more time upstairs … but in a different cell.

If he broke into the shaft in 1967, how come he didn’t escape until 1975?

I don’t know for sure – but I can advance some pretty good guesses.

First, he would have become more careful than ever. He was too smart to just push ahead at flank speed and try to get out in eight months, or even in eighteen. He must have gone on widening the opening on the crawlspace a little at a time. A hole as big as a teacup by the time he took his New Year’s Eve drink that year. A hole as big as a dinner-plate by the time he took his birthday drink in 1968. As big as a serving-tray by the time the 1969 baseball season opened.

For a time I thought it should have gone much faster than it apparently did – after he broke through, I mean. It seemed to me that, instead of having to pulverize the crap and take it out of his cell in the cheater gadgets I have described, he could simply let it drop down the shaft. The length of time he took makes me believe that he didn’t dare do that. He might have decided that the noise would arouse someone’s suspicions. Or, if he knew about the sewer-pipe, as I believe he must have, he would have been afraid that a falling chunk of concrete would break it before he was ready, screwing up the cellblock sewage system and leading to an investigation. And an investigation, needless to say, would lead to ruin.

Still and all, I’d guess that, by the time Nixon was sworn in for his second term, the hole would have been wide enough for him to wriggle through … and probably sooner than that. Andy was a small guy.

Why didn’t he go then?

That’s where my educated guesses run out, folks; from this point they become progressively wilder. One possibility is that the crawlspace itself was clogged with crap and he had to clear it out. But that wouldn’t account for all the time. So what was it?

I think that maybe Andy got scared.

I’ve told you as well as I can how it is to be an institutional man. At first you can’t stand those four walls, then you get so you can abide them, then you get so you accept them … and then, as your body and your mind and your spirit adjust to life on an HO scale, you get to love them. You are told when to eat, when you can write letters, when you can smoke. If you’re at work in the laundry or the plate-shop, you’re assigned five minutes of each hour when you can go to the bathroom. For thirty-five years, my time was twenty-five minutes after the hour, and after thirty-five years, that’s the only time I ever felt the need to take a piss or have a crap: twenty-five minutes past the hour. And if for some reason I couldn’t go, the need would pass at thirty after, and come back at twenty-five past the next hour.

I think Andy may have been wrestling with that tiger – that institutional syndrome – and also with the bulking fears that all of it might have been for nothing.

How many nights must he have lain awake under his poster, thinking about that sewer line, knowing that the one chance was all he’d ever get? The blueprints might have told him how big the pipe’s bore was, but a blueprint couldn’t tell him what it would be like inside that pipe – if he would be able to breathe without choking, if the rats were big enough and mean enough to fight instead of retreating … and a blueprint couldn’t’ve told him what he’d find at the end of the pipe, when and if he got there. Here’s a joke even funnier than the parole would have been: Andy breaks into the sewer-line, crawls through five hundred yards of choking, shit-smelling darkness, and comes up against a heavy-gauge mesh screen at the end of it all. Ha, ha, very funny.

That would have been on his mind. And if the long shot actually came in and he was able to get out, would he be able to get some civilian clothes and get away from the vicinity of the prison undetected? Last of all, suppose he got out of the pipe, got away from Shawshank before the alarm was raised, got to Buxton, overturned the right rock … and found nothing beneath? Not necessarily something so dramatic as arriving at the right field and discovering that a highrise apartment building had been erected on the spot, or that it had been turned into a supermarket parking lot. It could have been that some little kid who liked rocks noticed that piece of volcanic glass, turned it over, saw the deposit-box key, and took both it and the rock back to his room as souvenirs. Maybe a November hunter kicked the rock, left the key exposed, and a squirrel or a crow with a liking for bright shiny things had taken it away. Maybe there had been spring floods one year, breaching the wall, washing the key away. Maybe anything.

So I think – wild guess or not – that Andy just froze in place for a while. After all, you can’t lose if you don’t bet. What did he have to lose, you ask? His library, for one thing. The poison peace of institutional life, for another. Any future chance to grab his safe identity.

But he finally did it, just as I have told you. He tried … and, my! Didn’t he succeed in spectacular fashion? You tell me.

But did he get away, you ask? What happened after? What happened when he got to that meadow and turned over that rock … always assuming the rock was still there?

I can’t describe that scene for you, because this institutional man is still in this institution, and expects to be for years to come.

But I’ll tell you this. Very late in the summer of 1975, on September 15th, to be exact, I got a postcard which had been mailed from the tiny town of McNary, texas. That town is on the American side of the border, directly across from El Porvenir. The message side of the card was totally blank. But I know. I know it in my heart as surely as I know that we’re all going to die somebody.

McNary was where he crossed. McNary, Texas.