Part 2 - June of 1958
Chapter 4 Ben Hanscom Takes a Fall
In spite of starting this section with Ben Hanscom in the modern period flying from Omaha to Chicago first class and thence from Chicago ultimately to Maine where he’s to meet up with his old friends, this section is firmly ensconced in 1958. We’re intimately attached to 11 year old Ben in a 3rd Person Limited POV and we start out the last day of school before summer vacation.
What I liked: There’s a lot to like in this chapter and the ones following which make up Part 2. This is, after all, where the meat of the “kids part of the story” starts.
We get to see some of the town. Important locations like the library and The Barrens. We get the lovely imagery of the glass walled connecting corridor that links the adult library and the children’s library. A simple concrete slab walkway with glass walls and ceiling that provides protection from Maine winter weather between the two buildings but which gives us varying degrees of fantastical descriptions throughout the book as it’s mentioned. I think the “glass tunnel” is my favorite way it was put. But it’s a lovely symbolism for the path between childhood and adulthood. Which is, on consideration, practically the theme of the entire novel.
We get to know Ben’s struggles as a fat boy, which is central to his identity at this point in his life. Who is Ben? He’s a fat boy. And I identified very strongly with this, though my personal experience is the other end of the scale: I was the skinny boy. Not just thin or slender but with pipe-stem arms and a pencil neck. A chest that was all collarbones and ribs. Legs that went straight from knobby knees to my feet without any sort of muscular calves or other shapes to detract from the unrelenting boniness of my appearance. I don’t know which is more traumatizing, growing up a fatboy or a skinny boy but both are pretty ****ty. So I could really identify with this part of Ben’s life and what he experienced and how he felt. King nailed this, perfectly.
We meet people in Ben’s life. Starting with the lovely Beverly Marsh who’s not only pretty and red-haired and fiery but also a rebel who doesn’t get along with the pretty blonde girls who have their hair permed twice a month and who wear perfectly fitting skirts and new sweaters. She doesn’t really notice Ben because, let’s face it, pretty red-heads don’t so much notice the fat boy (or the skinny one, Ben, trust me). Not like Ben notices her. And here I spent even more time dwelling on my vague memories of those years. For me it would be the summer between 5th and 6th grade and the summer between 6th and 7th grade. So, summer 1976 and summer 1977.
I was a boy growing up in rural gulf coast Texas. Went to school in the nearest town, a thriving metropolis of 7,000 where the school served the surrounding area. My life at a 11 or 12 year old boy in 1977 in Texas wasn’t significantly different from Ben’s as a 11 or 12 year old boy in 1958 Maine. It’s small towns, it’s pre-computers, pre-internet, pre-video games, pre-cell phones. Sure, I had a little Honda Trail 70 motorbike when I was that age where the boys in Ben’s group had bicycles, but otherwise there just isn’t that much difference in what our lives were like day to day. My little brother (two years younger) and I spent our entire summers running around on that motorcycle, swimming in the Trinity River, squirrel hunting with my 22 rifle, exploring old houses in the river bottoms which had been abandoned by their owners (and scaring the living daylights out of ourselves doing so!). Building dams in streams and tree houses for our clubs with our friends.
As I spent many hours going over what memories I could find and comparing and contrasting my life at that age with Ben’s I realized the biggest difference between Ben with the Losers Club and myself and the various blood brothers, fellow Boy Scouts, best friends and so forth was that the Losers Club had Beverly Marsh and we did not.
And it was Bev that was the real difference maker for the Losers Club. At this point in the novel, Chapter 4, she’s just Ben’s crush. But knowing her role later let me appreciate that it really is her who is the catalyst for making the Losers Club work. If not for her, if not for what she did later, dragging the boys along with her kicking and screaming, then those 6 phone calls would not have ever been made, much less actually worked.
People discount and underestimate Bev’s importance in the Losers Club. But she was the most important person there in many ways. If not for her, none of this would have been possible.
Also in what I liked was the encounter Ben has with Pennywise/IT in a flashback (
within a flashback, since the entire chapter is Ben flashing back to 1958 while on that airplane flight to Chicago) to the previous winter. He ends up walking in the bitter Maine winter weather home after school and spots Pennywise there on the frozen over canal, holding his balloons.
***
A figure was standing on the ice down there.
Ben stared at it and thought: There may be a man down there, but can he be wearing what it looks like he's wearing? It's impossible, isn't it?
The figure was dressed in what appeared to be a white-silver clown suit. It rippled around him in the polar wind. There were oversized orange shoes on his feet. They matched the pompom buttons which ran down the front of his suit. One hand grasped a bundle of strings which rose to a bright bunch of balloons...
***
Then there are many many balloons, floating… against the heavy cold wind… towards Ben.
Yeah. When did the word “floating” start triggering terror in me???? This just started recently.
***
“Want a balloon, Ben? They float, Ben! They all float! Try one and see!”
***
Then It turned into the Mummy (starting the trend of us seeing kitschy 50’s horror movie monsters as personifications of It) and it damn near got Ben. It really really did.
***
See the sights, have a balloon, feed the elephants, ride the Chute-the-Chutes! Ben, oh, Ben, how you'll float —
***
That whole section is awesome. With Ben almost getting caught the previous winter.
There is a LOT to like in this chapter.
What I didn’t like: Not much, I thought this chapter was pretty much perfect. Hated Henry the Psychopath but you’re supposed to. I didn’t like that the 1990 movie fell so very very short on portraying Henry Bowers. In the book he’s a psycho, 100% pure lunatic. In the movie he was a 50’s greaser punk who was a bully. Meh.
One thing that wasn’t very clear was why Ben is so completely friendless at this point in his life. He’s never had any friends at all. And yet that’s a fact that is easily corrected by the end of the next chapter. He soon has several friends. He soon has several very good friends. Without making any real changes in himself. So why didn’t he have even a single friend to this point? Well, King sort of handwaves that question off, doesn’t he? I’ve noticed that happens a lot in the horror genre, more so than in the genre’s I’m used to reading in.
What intrigued me: Well, the comparisons with my own life, similar as it was to what Ben and the Losers Club had. Social outcasts, kids on the outside who weren’t popular or socially well adjusted. With easily mockable features like being fat (or skinny) or having a stutter. So I spent a lot of time dwelling on this and pulling my own memories to the fore and dusting them off.
As I did so I came to realize that Stephen King nailed this part of the book perfectly. There was nothing that came across as a false note in any of the 1958 material (except as I pointed out in Chapter 3 how he tends to exaggerate the characters situations to the point of caricature in order to more firmly establish their characters). Everything he wrote, from the nature of Ben’s prepubescent crush on Bev to the fear and hatred of how the bullies made him feel… it’s all correct, right, accurate. He did such an excellent job on this section with establishing these characters. Which makes the horror elements, such as when Ben encountered It as Pennywise and the Mummy and was almost caught the previous winter, just that much more effective!
Anyone whose personal life experience does not allow them to judge how well King did at capturing what life was like for a boy at that age living in that situation should take my word for it: he got it perfectly.
Except for everything to do with Bev and the Losers Club. I can’t speak to how well he portrayed what having a girl in the club would be like since in my experience there were no girls outside of school. There were a few little sisters who were to be avoided. There were mothers to be avoided. But girls? Of our age? No. As far as we could tell they were locked up come summer and not released back into the wild until school started again in September!
Oh, and it might amuse that I read this chapter in the middle of the night, like 3am middle of the night. Laying in bed, my wife asleep for hours already and me just laying there under the blanket with my tablet, reading. Then out of nowhere, in her sleep, my wife lets out a bark of a laugh. Just sudden "Hah!" while I'm reading the section in this chapter about Pennywise and the Mummy coming after Ben. I almost crapped myself leaping out of bed screaming.
Okay, on to Chapter 5!
Glad I could help!
