Tevis —May 1983
After Walter Tevis's "Queen's Gambit" was published, "Chess Life" jumped on the publication of a chess novel and devoted much of its May 1983 issue to the book. It occurred to me that some people might like to take a look at some of that issue:
First there was a book review by Dr. Gerry Dullea who "spent many years studying and teaching the art of fiction and the modern novel."
"The Queen's Gambit," a new novel by Walter Tevis, demonstrates that the American dream is alive and as well as it ever was. Best known as the author of The Hustler, Tevis has chosen another unlikely subject for his for readers' sympathy, this time a Kentucky orphan who is a chess prodigy. The novel follows her career from the basement of an orphanage to the very heights of world chess.
Despite the many differences large and small, Beth Harmon will recall Bobby Fischer to many readers. A natural player, she wins her state's championship in her first tournament, soon dominates American chess, and goes on to compete with the best players in the world before she is twenty, all as a principled loner. Along the way, she has several obstacles to overcome, not the least being her proclivities toward alcohol and tranquilizers.
Nit-picking readers will find a few deficiencies in the author's understanding of tournament procedures and so forth, but these are balanced by some fine insights on the same topics. Most of all, however, Tevis does a splendid job of capturing the gut-rending excitements, terrors, and elations of tournament chess. The realism is heightened with plenty of chessic jargon and some contemporary stars [such as Tigran Petrosian and Mikhail Tal] and the edges of the fictional drama.
"The Queen's Gambit" is thinner in most respects than Nabakov's "The Defense," a result to be expected when the focus is more on a romantic plot than on the psychopathy of a central character, who happens to be a chess master. But even placing second in this competition is high praise for a chess novel.
Next the issue included a several page (27-35) excerpt from the first chapter. Here's the first page only with an included illustration:
This was followed up with an article by the well known chess journalist, Marcy Soltis (married to GM Andy Soltis).
Ten years ago, writer Walter Tevis came up with this idea for the opening scene of a novel: a twenty-five-year-old alcoholic woman named Beth is living in a farm house in Ohio.
The house is littered with paper chessboards, and there are empty liquor bottles all over the kitchen. Beth rents this house during the summer to be alone
and study Rook-and-pawn endgames, but most of the time she uses the house as a place to drink. Despite the fact she is about to defend her U.S. Championship title, she has just gone on a weekend-long drinking binge. Beth pours herself a cup of instant coffee, then spikes it with a few slugs of gin before going to the dining room table to analyze chess positions....
Tevis wrote one chapter, then - abandoned the book while he pursued other writing projects, until he thought it was time to tackle the chess idea again.
"I had just finished a science fiction novel. I was tired of inventing the whole universe and wanted to get back to writing about the real world."
He returned to his chess novel just a little over a year ago and made 'a few changes.
Beth is now an eight-year-old girl living in an orphanage; she is addicted to tranquilizers and is taught how the chessmen move by a janitor in the orphanage's basement. With all the revisions, some key things remained constant; the book was still about a female character and still about chess.
Tevis, fifty-five, whose novel The Queen's Gambit was named as an alternate by the Book-of-the-Month club, is better known for his science fiction and some of his earlier novels. Most notable is-The Hustler, a book about a pool shark that was subsequently turned into a successful screenplay starring Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. And it was Tevis who, in The Hustler, coined the phrase "born loser."
Among his science-fiction novels is The Man Who Fell to Earth, which was also turned into a movie, starring rock-star David Bowie.
But it is fitting that Tevis should write about chess, because he has always been a big fan of the game and its players. He wrote a short story about chess several years ago for Playboy called "The King is Dead," and he once did an article for Atlantic Monthly about the National Open.
"People who say that chess is trivial and just a game aren't looking very hard at what they are doing in their lives that they claim to be important," he says.
Tevis learned to play chess when he was eight, but it wasn't until he got older that his interest increased. He once owned a chess library of forty to fifty books and has played in close to twenty tournaments over the years. "Tournament chess makes me too nervous, though," says Tevis, whose rating is1423. He enjoys speed chess and playing with his chess computer, but he says he was never able to study the game systematically.
Tevis found that he enjoyed writing about competition more than being a part of it. "I've done a lot more losing than winning," he says. He claims he's
better at pool than chess, but finds similarities in the players of both games.
"You don't get the girls in high school by being a pool player or chessplayer," Tevis says. Neither game is a team sport, both are male dominated, and many players are loners who are trying to escape from personal problems.
"I like writing about people who are somewhat outcasts from society," says Tevis, "Highly intelligent, out of place characters. I like to write about alienation."
Tevis admits a good part of The Queen's Gambit is autobiographical. "I'm using chess [in The Queen's Gambit] as a way of depicting a somewhat neurotic
personality — somewhat like myself in my twenties."
For instance, in the orphanage Beth is routinely given "little green pills" that she becomes addicted to. Tevis drew from his own experience, having spent two years in a children's hospital between the ages of nine and eleven, where he says he was regularly given phenobarbital, a sedative. He is also a recovered alcoholic.
"Beth's addiction to pills reflects that," he says. "I was a very inward child ... scared of sex — all of this is characterized in Beth.
"I was a smart kid who spent a lot of time in an institution.
Beth is a smarter kid in a different kind of institution....
"I felt I was talented as a writer. I learned very early in life that I could write fairly well. Beth is talented at chess and found that out very early.... To Beth, chess was an arcane mystery that could be explicated." Tevis even has his chess champion share his hatred of studying endgames.
"I love Beth. I'm touched by her ability to find what she can do best — stay with it — and be able to survive and deliver..
"You can't get by in chess on bull—. You have to be able to do it without luck or Uncle Joe's money."
The idea of writing about a male character never occurred to him. "I like smart women. I never even thought of writing about a man.... The male characters I was writing about were starting to sound too similar. I wanted to write about what it would be like to be a woman from a man's point of view."
While Beth works her way to the top of the chess world, Tevis made a conscious effort not to have her do so by playing in women's tournaments. He says he doesn't know if there will ever be a woman champion as strong as the character he created, but he doesn't think there is any physical or biological reason why a woman couldn't become as strong as the top male grandmasters.
"I think it would be good if women didn't play in women's tournaments at all," he says. "Doing so only reinforces the notion of women's inferiority. I would like to see chess be a sexless game."
Tevis says he took ideas for characters and places from his own experiences — and when that didn't work, he invented them. (He says that Grandmaster Borgov somewhat resembles, physically, a younger version of Leonid Brezhnev at least as far as his bushy eyebrows.) But he emphasizes that he made no effort to portray any real chess personalities in his novel. In fact, he did not speak to any female chessplayers as part of his research.
Tevis was very upset that a pool player he says he never heard of before started calling himself "Minnesota Fats" after he created a character by that name in "The Hustler". Because he was burned by that experience, he went out of his way in "The Queen's Gambit" to avoid having any man or woman in the chess world thinking that he or she was being used as any of the lead characters.
"I'm very proud of my characterizations and don't like to hear anyone say they aren't original," says Tevis. "I don't like it to be thought that I'm just reporting on something that I've seen.
The games Beth plays were constructed around the actual moves from nineteenth-century tournaments. "When I was writing up Beth's games, I found myself really getting into the imagined competition."
The U.S. Championship described in the novel was partly modeled after the 1975 Championship in Oberlin, Ohio, which Tevis attended.
I was surprised by the somewhat depressing playing conditions — somewhat austere and unexciting," Tevis says. "It occurred to me that here were the best chessplayers in the country playing for the national championship that didn't have the class look of a first-rate highschool basketball game.
"I'd like to see chess taken more seriously," he says. "I don't like seeing golf get all the money and attention that it does while chess gets none."
Tevis says a few film producers are considering The Queen's Gambit for a screenplay. He might also be interested in doing a sequel someday. "I'd still like to use that scene of Beth in her twenties in that farmhouse," he says. "You usually reach a peak in chess at a very young age — unlike brain surgeons [whose skill increases with age]," he says. "What happens then?"
At the end of the book, Beth is nineteen. In the final scene, after she's finished a prestigious Soviet tournament, Beth is at a loss for what to do all alone in this foreign country. She goes to a nearby park, sees an old man sitting alone in front of a chess set, and challenges him to a game. "The message here is," says Tevis, "when in doubt -- Play chess."
Soltis is a writer and chessplayer based in New York City
A pair of ads for the book:
