Born losers (3)

A couple of years ago, the premiere of the series Queen's Gambit (Netflix) sparked an unexpected trend: a chess craze (even writing it doesn't sound more credible to me). Board sales soared, parents enrolled their children in the Gracienca Chess Union, and heated debates about the Scandinavian Defense erupted in schoolyards. However, no one talked about the original book. Walter Tevis (1928-1984); not even when the NY Times published the article "Walter Tevis was a novelist. You probably know his books (much) more as movies."

Indeed, the writer had seen (during his lifetime) two of his best works, The hustler (1959) and The man who fell to earth (1963) were adapted into famous films, which should exclude him from our series of articles on loser writers. In reality, this success was a Faustian curse, and starting to collect from Hollywood definitively closed the doors of "high literature" to him.

It wasn't the first time he'd been dealt a dirty trick. Tevis wrote action-packed, character-driven novels when the intellectual conclave was rewarding postmodern confusion; he spoke of outcasts and borne losers (he invented the term), not from adulterous college professors; he wrote science fiction at a time when—according to trash-ass critics—the genre was cheap shit for the masses; on top of that, it had a certain success.

An alienated childhood marked him for life. Born in San Francisco, he was admitted to the hospital with rheumatic heart disease at the age of eleven; while the boy was still in bed, his parents moved to a farm in Appalachia (without him, of course). At twelve, a convalescing Tevis made a solo trip to the far side of the earth. As a welcome, his parents enrolled him in a white-scumbag school, where he would regularly get beaten up. Years later, he would say that his life was saved by pool halls (see The hustler).

In fact, it didn't save her entirely. For half his life, Tevis was a "homegrown" alcoholic (the experience of otherness helped him write about rootless aliens and depressed robots); he stayed in Kentucky, far from the letter-wounded elite, which would end up burying his name, and, perhaps worst of all, he chose to dedicate himself to teaching. It would be seventeen years before his next work was published (Mockingbird, 1980).

The ending is half happy: the writer overcame his alcoholism in 1980, moved to New York, and at the end of his life he was seized by a literary frenzy: three novels in two years: The traces of the sun (1983), the aforementioned Queen's Gambit (1983) and The color of money (1984), sequel toThe hustlerAll three, like all the previous ones, are amazing.

Kiko Amat