Tuesday, April 10, 2007

The Writer Who Didn’t Live Forever

Stephen King has a lot to answer for. Back in the 1980s, I fell under the thrall of horror and thriller fiction, reading anything and everything I could lay my hands on. It was thanks to King’s tome on horror fiction, Danse Macabre (1980), that I discovered a number of great works I would have otherwise missed. One of those was a debut novel entitled The Mephisto Waltz (1968), by Fred Mustard Stewart.

The book tells the story of an elderly pianist who, in order to prolong his life, slowly possesses a young freelance writer. Stewart’s tale was brought to film in 1971 with Alan Alda, Barbara Parkins, and Jacqueline Bissett. I remember it fondly, so I was saddened to learn this morning that Stewart died in February, at age 74.

Better late than never, right?

Britain’s Guardian newspaper today carries a fine look back at Stewart’s life and career, which begins:

Death, according to Dr. Herbert Mentius, proprietor of a medical research institute “is not natural at all. It’s really an avoidable mistake.” Mentius is a character in The Methuselah Enzyme (1970), one of a score of novels by Fred Mustard Stewart who, dead at 75 [sic], did not avail himself of the DNA modifications plausibly set out in that brisk shocker.

Stewart came to be best known for his
intercontinental sagas. Year in, year out, the 600-page mark did not daunt him, a far cry as this was from early hopes as life as a concert pianist, something which had inspired his first novel The Mephisto Waltz (1968) which also began his lucrative connection with the film industry. Born in Anderson, Indiana, he was the son of a banker and, after the Lawrenceville school, near Princeton, New Jersey, he studied history at Princeton University and later piano at the Juilliard School in Manhattan. By the 1960s, he realised that he was not going to succeed as a pianist and with marriage to a literary agent, Joan Richardson, in 1967, he began to write, and found immediate success with The Mephisto Waltz.

Read more from The Guardian here. And you’ll find The New York Times’ February 12 obituary of Stewart here.

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