Our 2020 in Books / Sam Cohen

Joan Didion

Our 2020 in Books: Sam Cohen

As a globally unusual year comes to an end and we enter into 2021, we consider the reading that defined each of our 2020s. In this piece, writer Sam Cohen talks about reading as refuge in 2020.

“But really, I read in order not to be in life. Reading is better than life. Without reading, you’re stuck with life.”

— FRAN LEBOWITZ: BY THE BOOK — NEW YORK TIMES, 2017

 In order not to be in life has always been the appeal of reading. Reading is my primary refuge. When nothing feels safe, or certain, I pick up a book and instantly, I am in control. I am shrouded in secrecy — the only ones who know what will happen next are me and the author, the characters on the page. If difficulty is encountered, it is conquered. If grief is experienced, it is ended. If loss occurs, it is finite. And if it becomes too much, I can simply put the book down and walk away. Listen to music. Watch television. Sit and gaze into the sky. It isn’t real, and thus, it does not need to be carried with me.

How The Queen's Gambit became Netflix's unlikeliest hit of the year

The glossy series on an orphaned girl’s inexorable rise to chess stardom is now the streamer’s most-watched scripted limited series of all time

Adrian Horton
Thu 26 November 2020

I

f you were to pick, at first glance, the television hit of fall 2020, it would probably not be The Queen’s Gambit. The lush seven-part Netflix miniseries from Godless creator Scott Frank and Allan Scott, released in October, doesn’t contain the obvious genre components or zaniness of a runaway Netflix hit. It’s the adaptation of a well-reviewed if not widely known 1983 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis, a cold war period piece about an orphaned girl who is adept at chess – a cerebral and certainly high-stakes game, but not an activity renowned for its visual drama.

And yet, as of this week The Queen’s Gambit is Netflix’s most-watched scripted limited series to date – a slightly convoluted and dubious record, given that Netflix measures a “view” as anything more than two minutes of content, but still, attracting 62 million account viewers during its first month is an impressive feat. (For comparison, Tiger King, the docuseries on America’s private exotic zoos that blew up at the outset of quarantine, drew 64 million account viewers in its first month.)

How to explain the surprising dominance of a period miniseries about one girl’s inexorable rise to the heights of international chess prestige? For anyone who’s fallen into it – and with the entire show released at once mere weeks before a bruising and protracted US election, The Queen’s Gambit was ripe binge material – the answer is in the immersion. The Queen’s Gambit is grade-A escapism: a classic sports underdog story injected with Netflix capital, an uncomplicated pleasure of sumptuous, meticulous styling, a soothing portal into another world which believes in talent as the one invincible currency.

The Queen’s Gambit plays, especially in its early episodes, as a matured rendition of classic, beloved Roald Dahl coming-of-age stories. Orphaned at age nine by a car crash, Beth Harmon (played in the first episode by Isla Johnston) is sent to the barren Methuen Home for Girls in Kentucky; lonely save for one fellow orphan, Jolene (Moses Ingraham), and plied with tranquilizers, Beth hides out in a dingy basement and befriends the gruff janitor Mr Shaibel (Bill Camp), who introduces her to chess. Her prodigious skill is undeniable, her consumption by chess whole – by day, she schools Mr Shaibel, inhaling lessons echoed throughout the rest of the series; by night, she envisions boards and maneuvers upside-down on the ceiling, her mind an endlessly capable expanse.

 

The family in 1960: wife Jamie Tevis, daughter Julia Tevis (McGory), author Walter Tevis, and son Will holding a friend. (All photos courtesy the Tevis Estate)

Another Look takes on Walter Tevis’s “Queen’s Gambit.” And the author’s son remembers playing chess with dad.

On January 29, Another Look will hold its winter event to discuss The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis. The event will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, January 29, in the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall on the Stanford campus. (Update: podcast of the event is here.)

Author Walter Tevis is best known for his three novels that were turned into major films: The Hustler, The Color of Money, and The Man Who Fell to Earth. Tevis was born in San Francisco and grew up in the Sunset District. While his parents relocated to Kentucky, he spent a year in the Stanford Children’s Convalescent Home (which later became Stanford’s Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital). Hence, Another Look’s winter event will be a homecoming for the author, who died in 1984. 

Walter Tevis / Book vs Movie / The Hustler

Book vs Movie: The Hustler

Jim Cherry

February 22, 2018

“The Hustler” was written by Walter Tevis and published in 1959 to a good critical response and with Tevis being compared favorably to Hemingway. “The Hustler” quickly made its way to Hollywood with a film version was released in September 1961.

The Real Hustler

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The Real Hustler

Gary P. West

October 1, 2019

No one in Carlisle knew when the new high school English teacher showed up in 1952 what that teacher's future might hold. In spite of an Ichabod Crane look and often ill-fitting clothes, Walter Tevis became popular in the community. Shortly after coming to the school, he met Jamie Griggs, a recent graduate of Eastern Kentucky University and home economics teacher who also was new there.

Walter Tevis / The Man Who Brought ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ to Life

The Man Who Brought ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ to Life

Walter Tevis, the author of the book upon which the Netflix hit is based, spent his life gambling and drinking in pool halls before turning to chess. But once you know his story, it’s stunning that the book ever came out at all.

By David Hill  Nov 9, 2020, 8:27am EST

“They“They say you’re the real thing,” says a reporter from Life magazine in Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel The Queen’s Gambit. The “real thing” she is addressing is the book’s protagonist, a 13-year-old chess prodigy named Beth Harmon who just won the Kentucky State chess championship—a remarkable feat not only because of her age but, at the time, her gender. The interviewer prods her to talk about chess as a sport: how she is competitive, how she “plays to win,” how she is “out for blood.”

Walter Tevis / The Queen's Gambit / Excerpt

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Walter Tevis (1928 - 1984)

 

Walter Tevis

Walter Tevis

(1928 - 1984)

Crime writer and literary critic James Sallis wrote in the Boston Globethat Walter Tevis’ The Man Who Fell to Earthwas “among the finest science fiction novels.” He labeled it as a Christian parable and a portrait of the artist, describing it as one of the most heartbreaking books he had encountered. He called it “a threnody on great ambition and terrible failure, and an evocation of man’s absolute, unabridgaeble [sic] aloneness.”

The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis

The Queen's Gambit

by Walter Tevis

 

The basis for the hit Netflix series! “What Walter Tevis did for pool in The Hustler, he does for chess in The Queen’s Gambit” (Playboy).

 

When eight-year-old Beth Harmon’s parents are killed in an automobile accident, she’s placed in an orphanage in Mount Sterling, Kentucky. Plain and shy, Beth learns to play chess from the janitor in the basement and discovers she is a prodigy. Though penniless, she is desperate to learn more—and steals a chess magazine and enough money to enter a tournament. Beth also steals some of her foster mother’s tranquilizers to which she is becoming addicted.

Walter Tevis

An Interview with Walter Tevis

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RICHARD WOLINSKY, LAWRENCE G. DAVIDSON, RICHARD A. LUPOFF

Walter Tevis straddled the science fiction and mainstream worlds. His acclaimed first novel, The Hustler, which delved into the world of pool sharks and was published in 1959, was turned into an even more acclaimed film two years later starring Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. His second novel, 1963’s science fiction gem The Man Who Fell to Earth, became a cult classic and a 1976 film by British auteur Nico­las Roeg (Don’t Look Now) featuring rock star David Bowie. In 1980, Tevis returned with his third novel, Mockingbird, another science fiction work, this one set in a dystopian future. But those who knew Tevis’s work had special regard for his small pool of short stories, published from the late 1950s through to the 1970s in such magazines as Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In 1981, these stories were collected, along with newer material, in Far From Home.

Walter Tevis / The Hustler / Review

 

WALTER TEVIS: THE HUSTLER

The Hustler / Cae Jumping

Penguin’s Modern Classics imprint has often delved into popular and genre fiction for its reissues, but rarely has it covered so many with one author. Walter Tevis’s first two books, The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth, are best remembered for the films they inspired. Both have been reissued this month, along with Tevis’s last novel The Queen’s Gambit, to submit to the test of literary longevity too. (An aside at this early stage. Which Tevis to read next? He wrote just five novels, three reissued here. A friend cites another, Mockingbird, as a favourite in her home. That leaves The Steps of the Sun, about which I know less than nothing.)

 

Anya Taylor-Joy
The Queen's Gambit

The Queen's Gambit review – from an orphanage basement to the top of the chess world

Anya Taylor-Joy plays a 64-square prodigy in Netflix’s gorgeous Walter Tevis adaptation, which – while heavy on rags-to-riches fantasy – proves great fun

Lucy Mangan

Friday 23 October 2020

A

s the tale of a woman who rises from discovering the game in an orphanage basement to the pinnacle of the chess world, Netflix’s new miniseries The Queen’s Gambit can’t really fail. When it’s based on the book of the same name by legendary short story writer and novelist Walter Tevis, upon whose work the films The Hustler, The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Color of Money were also based, the odds of success seem even higher.

As such, there is plenty to like and to admire in this new, seven-part drama (starring first Isla Johnston then Anya Taylor-Joy as the prodigy Beth Harmon). We watch her become addicted both to the pills handed out – legally, apparently, in the 1950s when her story begins – to the children every day to keep them calm and compliant and, gradually, to the chess board and the control and solace it offers. Mr Shaibel (Bill Camp) introduces her to the coach of the local high school’s chess team and from thereon she is away, powering through the ranks until she becomes a giant-slaying grandmaster. Adoption by a local couple does not turn out to be the hoped-for domestic idyll, but when the husband abandons his alcoholic wife, Alma (a heartbreaking performance by Marielle Heller, more usually found directing the likes of A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood and Can You Ever Forgive Me?), she and Beth form a fragile connection that is strengthened when Alma discovers that winning chess tournaments can be quite the money-spinner. Soon they are travelling the country and then the world together, with Alma turning Beth into her drinking buddy as they go. She’s a pill-popper, too, and refilling her prescriptions provides Beth with a nice little supply of tablets of her own.

The Hustler / Cue jumping

THE HUSTLER

Cue jumping

The readers' editor on... the hunt for the real Fast Eddie - if there was one

Ian Mayes

Sat 17 Mar 2001 01.25 GMT

Early last month we carried an obituary of an American pool player who called himself "Fast Eddie" Parker, describing him, with no beating about the bush, as "the man who inspired the film, The Hustler". Just to remind you, The Hustler, released in 1961, was directed by Robert Rossen, and starred Paul Newman as the hustler of the title, Fast Eddie Felson.

A hustler in pool parlance is a gambling player prepared to lose a few games to increase the odds before he and his backers make their killing. We explained that while Fast Eddie Parker claimed to be the model for Fast Eddie Felson, he was not a hustler but a straight player who played his best in all circumstances.We left no doubt, however, that he regarded himself as the main, or even the only, real contributor to the character of Fast Eddie Felson. A heading on his obituary read: "Professional pool player who was the inspiration for Paul Newman's role in The Hustler."

We said he had met Walter Tevis, the writer of the novel, The Hustler (1959), when the latter "was working his way through college" and that "Tevis borrowed one of Parker's aliases to create Fast Eddie Felson" - he claimed on other occasions that he had inspired Tevis to create first the character and hence the novel that was then adapted for the film.

Finally, we said that Parker had produced instructional books and videos that Paul Newman had used when preparing to revive the character of Fast Eddie Felson in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money, 1986 (the screenplay written by Richard Price after the novel, The Color of Money, 1984, by Walter Tevis).

A few days after this obituary appeared I had a call from Eleanora Tevis, the widow of Walter Tevis (he died of lung cancer in August 1984), the first of a number of exchanges by phone and fax, essentially making the same point: "Since The Hustler's publication in 1959 and the film's release in 1961, many pool players have claimed to be Fast Eddie Felson. Walter consistently stated that The Hustler was a work of fiction and the characters therein were fictitious."

The exasperation Tevis felt is very well expressed in an article by Roy McHugh that appeared in a newspaper in Pittsburgh in 1983. McHugh said that people kept asking Tevis, in relation to another character in The Hustler, "When did you first meet Minnesota Fats?" McHugh said Tevis cringed and wondered whether they would have asked Walt Disney, "When did you meet Donald Duck?" (The person referred to here was Rudolf Walter Wanderone Jr. He had been playing under the name of New York Fats, in tribute to his birthplace, but changed his name to Minnesota Fats after Jackie Gleason created the part in The Hustler - see Britannica.com.)

This article was headed: "All 'Fast Eddies' say they're Hustler." The piece was prompted by the death of a pool player called Edward "Fast Eddie" Pelkey, and the agency wire at the time began: "Edward 'Fast Eddie' Pelkey, the famed pool shark portrayed by Paul Newman in the movie The Hustler, has died . . ." Tevis told Roy McHugh: "I'm weary of explaining this. Nobody believes you when you keep telling them you invent your own characters."

In 1987, after Eddie Parker had returned to live in his home territory of the Missouri Ozarks, he was interviewed by Bill Maurer from the local newspaper, the News-Leader. His report contains this sentence: "Parker said he's been reluctant to acknowledge his role [the role he claimed as the model for Tevis's Fast Eddie] until recent years."

Even more to the point, Maurer contacted four important people: the editor of a leading billiards magazine, the vice-president of the Professional Billiards Association, a professional pool player who had been active in the area where Parker said he met Tevis, and finally Tevis's boyhood friend who taught him to shoot pool. Maurer wrote: "All four said they've never heard of Parker and questioned his role, if any, in influencing Tevis."

To return to the instructional manuals and videos by Parker that Paul Newman is supposed to have used when preparing for The Color of Money. Mrs Tevis corresponded with Newman. She says he told her: "Regardless of anything you've seen in the press, I didn't use any instructional books or tapes. Willie Mosconi taught me everything I knew and was my instructor during the entire film, as well as the technical director." Willie Mosconi (see Britannica.com again), an American pocket billiards player, was world champion 15 times between 1941 and 1957. He died in 1993.

We carried the obituary because of the connection with the character of Fast Eddie Felson, a connection, wouldn't you agree, that the most generous person would describe as extremely tenuous?

THE GUARDIAN