Inside The Queen’s Gambit: Exploring the unknown Bay Area origins of the Netflix hit
By: Charles Russo
Tags: Chess, San Francisco, Authors, Stanford, Bay Area

The end game (as middle)

In late March of 1981, Tevis gave a lively interview to the San Francisco Examiner while promoting Mockingbird, his first new novel in the 17 years since he published The Man Who Fell to Earth. The candid insights and dark humor that he brings to the interview are immediately apparent via a pull quote beneath his photo, that reads, “The thing is to go ahead and change. If it doesn’t work, you can always kill yourself later.” On the topic of change, Tevis was referring to what would ultimately be the last chapter of his life, but also his most prolific and successful as a writer.

By relocating to New York during the late 1970s, Tevis had re-committed to his writing career via a sweeping reconfiguration of every aspect of his life: he left his established post teaching English literature and creative writing at Ohio University, divorced his wife of 20 years and finally got sober after years of alcoholism. Despite only producing three short stories in the previous 15 years, Tevis’ all-in (“go ahead and change”) move to New York resulted in him publishing four novels in just four years (including The Queen’s Gambit), before passing away at the age of 56 from lung cancer mere days after the final one—The Color of Money—arrived in bookstores.

Walter Tevis (right) with David Bowie on the set of The Man Who Fell to Earth, in New Mexico, circa 1975. “My dad said he was a super polite young man who was just a nice guy to be around,” explains Tevis’ son Will. One of Bowie’s final projects before he died was Lazarus, a musical which served as a sequel to Tevis’ novel. (Photo courtesy of Julia McGory)

The output of his New York years bookends with a similarly prolific period earlier in his career, during the late 1950s and early 60s, in which he published a wide range of short stories for the likes of Esquire, Playboy and Redbook. More notably, he had written two well-received novels during this era—The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth—which were adapted into films and appeared to set him on a trajectory as one of America’s most promising young writers. Yet, Tevis published fairly little in the years that followed: his opening moves as a literary star had become bogged down in a protracted middle game that involved raising a family, keeping up with his career as a professor and, above all else, grappling with deep bouts of alcoholism.

“He was bright and had a capacious mind,” explains KQED’s Michael Krasny, who studied under Tevis at Ohio University. “He was a very generous, kind man and was someone who had talent, but I think he was somewhat of a tormented soul.”

Krasny’s sentiments are shared with many of Tevis’ others students from his tenure at Ohio University, who typically describe him not only as funny and brilliant, but as a profound influence on their careers. (In fact, while recently on vacation, Krasny called in to his own radio show to pay homage to Tevis’ memory during an episode of Forum on the topic of The Queen’s Gambit and the current popularity of chess.)

Although his students never directly encountered Tevis’ struggles with alcoholism, they weren’t entirely oblivious to them either. “He just had a great heart and was a wonderful human being,” says Jim Gorman, another of Tevis’ students, “but he had all sort of demons.”

In that 1981 Examiner interview, Tevis didn’t shy away from acknowledging his protracted issues with alcoholism. In fact, he not only explained that his latest book was attempt to address them head on (“I wanted to write about the experience of waking up after years of diddling my head with alcohol”), but also that the source of those demons originated during his childhood in the Bay Area.

And although it is true that Tevis wasn’t writing much fiction during his time as a college professor, it’s not to say that he wasn’t writing at all. Oddly enough, Tevis occasionally worked as a sort of chess correspondent in his free time during those years, traveling to cover a variety of different competitions (including a national tournament in Las Vegas, which is re-created in The Queen’s Gambit). Much in the same way that he had observed the character and characters of pool hall culture to create The Hustler, Tevis soon had a similar sense for the finer points of formal chess competitions.

“My feeling was that chess tournaments,” Tevis said in a 1983 WCBS radio interview, “have more competitive excitement, more aggressiveness crackling around that dumb little high school gymnasium or third rate hotel ballroom…than I have seen in any other kind of activity.”

Jim Gorman, a student of Tevis’ at Ohio University, remembers his teacher’s obsession with chess: “He was very much a student of the game….he was a voracious reader of everything. He was always talking about chess players and authors and books.” (Image of The Queen’s Gambit via Netflix)

This field observation combined with his obsessive history of the game and his deep love of playing had presented him a new and unique template to explore very personal issues of talent and addiction.

“He is the character in all of his books,” says Will Tevis, “so, he is Beth Harmon.”

It is a common assessment for those who know Tevis’ biography and his books, but still one that poses the question—how did he settle on a female protagonist?

“I tried to take the best thing about chess players,” Tevis explained, “a sort of high speed aggressive intelligence, and I tried to present that in the body of a young girl, which meant a lot to me. I think sometimes while doing this book I was wrapped up in the intelligence of women, for which I have a tremendous respect and kind of awe.”

Even as this was a departure from Tevis’ previous all-male lineup of main characters, Beth Harmon was in many ways a logical choice for protagonist when considering the subject matter.

“First of all, Tevis is always interested in the underdog,” says Gorman. “So how do you create a chess player that is brilliant…but also an underdog? The world of chess did not embrace women for a long time. So he changed himself into a woman.”

After the book was first published in 1983, Tevis was confident that it could be effectively adapted to screen. Better yet, he already had plans for a sequel, which would—appropriately enough—ponder Beth’s life as an adult, many years after her successes at a younger age.