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Remembering Walter Tevis:
Finding the Stories that Must Be Told
An essay by June Langford Berkley
Reprinted from the Fall 2001 Ohioana Quarterly
The whole world can be divided into those who
write and
those who do not
write. These who write represent despair,
and those who read disapprove of
it and believe that they
have a superior wisdom - and yet, if they were
able to write,
they would write the same thing.
Søren Kierkegaard
Writing may represent despair, but not writing is the writer’s subterranean
chamber of torture. Somewhere between, we register the terrible pain of
having written that which is unworthy of reading. Painful as that realization
is, it must be learned. And sometimes it can be taught. I learned it under the
best of circumstances: Walter Tevis was my teacher - though he would deny
any guilt or credit in the matter.
As a first-year student in Ohio University’s graduate program in creative
writing, with carefully guarded confidence, I handed over to Walter Tevis
twelve pages of my fiction. As a teacher of literature and creative writing
myself, I knew the perils of being too close to the subject, of confusing what
happens in life with what can happen in fiction (Walter Tevis gave this
lesson early impact), but I felt confident in the long hours I had spent
revising, re-revising, and honing the piece. I convinced myself that I had
given him something worthy of his attention.
The manuscript came back with generous notes on the initial pages, in
fact, with strong words of unguarded praise. Then on page 7, I read in his
characteristically energetic scrawl, “About here I got bored and I stayed
bored until page 9.”
I still have those pages and the notation he included on the end page.
“On re-reading I see that pages 7-9 are excellent writing; they just don’t
belong in this story. They take the reader off in another direction. I don’t
want to be there. Save them. You can use them somewhere else - but not in
this story.”
In that gamut of hope-despair-and-hope-again, I learned, as always, so
much from a mentor who would deny that he ever taught any writer
anything of consequence. Of course when he made that claim he was
dealing - as he did in
varying degrees
throughout his life -
with the struggle to
recognize in language
and represent in action
his own peculiar sense
of hope and despair. It
was a struggle I
observed on the
periphery, but even so,
I felt it intensely, for in
his physical presence,
in his animated and
profoundly articulate
talk - which for many
years substituted for
writing - he was from
first impression the
embodiment of a
restless, deeply informed
and tortured
intellect.
Before he went off to
his office or to meet his
classes in English and
creative writing in Ohio University’s Ellis Hall, Walter Tevis - author in his
early years of The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth and later of
Mockingbird, Far from Home, The Queen’s Gambit, and Steps of the Sun -
surely knew some long dark mornings of despair, for he had invariably spent
the previous night, not writing but drinking, usually alone. And every
morning of those long fifteen years between these sets of books, during
which he wrote next to nothing but during which he became a Distinguished
Professor at Ohio University, he remembered - after he had gained
control over his disease and his despair - that he always promised himself
and his wife that he would never do it again. He promised himself, instead,
that he would write again.
And every night he would turn again, in thrall to his old ways. Buried
alive, as he came to see it, an alien body in a torture chamber he had known
for a long time. Far from the home he never stopped wanting - for himself
and his art. Far from any hope of peace or contentment, for in all his life he
seems to have been granted no mercy of forgetting.
“Where there is strength in my material, it almost invariably comes from
material dredged, consciously or not, from the first dozen years,” he told the
book editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1980 after he had sought
treatment for his alcoholism, divorced, resigned from the Ohio University
faculty, and moved to Manhattan where he was writing again.
Yet, Walter Tevis didn’t fully acknowledge the early wellsprings of his
fiction until near the end of his life - not until after he had written The
Queen’s Gambit. This novel, published in 1983, is the most autobiographical
of his novels - albeit the main character was a female chess player who came
out of an orphanage with a gift and an obsession for a game that placed her
perpetually in an alien universe, while Tevis, the honored university
professor, knew only too well the geography and identity of parents, who,
when they moved back to their native Kentucky, left him behind for a year
in a San Francisco hospital, under treatment for “a rheumatic heart and a
weak constitution” with daily doses of Phenobarbital and frequent encasement
in a coffin-like steel structure where he was, as he recalls it, “baked
and tortured.”
He never referred directly to those years - nor indeed did he, as some
professors of creative writing are wont to do, focus on or even to call up any
reference to his own sources or the elements of his own writing processes.
He also never discussed his literary achievements: the dozen short stories
published in prestigious magazines prior to the appearance of The Hustler
and the success of that first novel.
Before he came to Ohio University, Tevis had seen this novel, which he
had shaped out of his youthful preoccupation with pool and his penchant
for thoughtfully observing characters in the underbelly world, made into a
Hollywood film starring Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. (Later there was
also a screen version of The Man Who Fell to Earth, featuring David Bowie,
that became a cult classic.) During his classroom lectures and discussions,
and his intense at-the-desk sessions with students of creative writing, Tevis
focused intently and earnestly on established literature and on the student’s
work - the announced and clearly articulated twin center of Ohio
University’s graduate writing program.
He began to talk publicly about the sources of his highly autobiographical
writing only after he ended a long and painful hiatus in his writing career - a
fifteen-year period of great success as a university professor and simultaneously,
of intense torment as an alcoholic - by resigning from his post and
moving to Manhattan where, under extensive psychotherapy and in successful
combat against his chemical addictions, he spent the final six years of his
life producing three well recognized novels and a highly touted collection of
his old and new short stories.
It was a triumphant ending, in many ways, to a tortured life. But even
with his successful comeback as a writer, along with what he regarded as
some minor triumphs of understanding about his demons, he still wrestled,
in the end, with the havoc wreaked by those early years, when even on “the
train east,” as he told me in a rare reference to his childhood, he traveled
inside the unbearable weight of that monster metal tube that closed him off
from one world and
forced him, alone and
alien, into another.
He discussed then the
effect of his “other” life
as a child - a life of the
mind in books from the
San Francisco library:
whatever he could find
to escape from or to
cope with loneliness, the
prison of hospital life,
the loss of human love.
Then in grade school
back in Kentucky, a lanky frail kid, painfully shy and inept, he found himself
the object of ridicule, comfortable only in retreat: first, books - fantasy,
science fiction, myth, and eventually poetry - then pool halls and alcohol.
He remarked during our last visit in Boston, where he was a featured author
at a national conference, that he was still in therapy, still working through
the agony of certain experiences from the misery of a childhood colored by
ridicule and rejection. He was wearing braces in the last decade of his life,
correcting a prominent overbite that had caused even his own students
during the years he taught high school English in Kentucky (so one wrote
in “Our Ichabod Crane” after Tevis’ death in 1985) to make fun of his
appearance and “strange ways.” I found a deep poignancy in Tevis’ assertion
only a few months prior that he had loved those days and found great
comfort in those years of public school teaching.
Before I became his student, I was introduced to Walter Tevis at a
professional conference in Athens (I was serving my own time as a high
school English teacher in that era). Because I had recently applied to Ohio
University’s graduate program in creative writing, I leaped impetuously at
the chance to inquire about the status of my application. Before I could
review the audacity and boldness of such a request - my application was
one among hundreds - Tevis had begun to speak, to quote out of mid-air
certain passages of the writing I had submitted and simultaneously with
his left hand to rake back and forth through what could only be described
as a thoroughly unruly crop of dark blonde hair. All the while he was
reading my prose out of the middle distance, his hand continued to work
its way around the top of his head. This intellectual attention to text and
tactile attention to the head - as if to confirm the head as the seat of his
thought - became a richly evocative and defining characteristic action I
would soon come to know and need to explain to myself: there was too
much going on inside his skull for his hair to lie flat - or in any order. One
could never know when his hand would fly up mid-sentence and -
whether he was speaking or composing
- comb through, lift up, press
down, rifle through again as if the
motion of his hand were governed by
some connection to his evolving
thought - as though to both order and
contain the waves of turmoil and the
pulsing process of his brain, as though
he could feel the language taking its
shape in there.
“You can write,” he pronounced at
that first meeting. “You can write damn
well. But whether you can write a
novel is another question. That we can
figure out.”
During one of our early conferences
after I had been assigned to him as an
advisee, we considered the origins of
our need to write, the various sources
from which we drew our stories. He
made one of those statements that register - for various personal reasons -
so profoundly that one cannot even stop to write them down. “We write
about. . . . ” he said, moving his left hand - the one that was not holding a
cigarette - up into the cap of his hair, “We write about the things that will
not let us alone.” I thought about this years later when I read about his
struggle with his feelings of displacement, his consideration of himself from
childhood as one who had “fallen to earth,” as one who lived as an alien
among Others, as one who lived in the fantasy world of books, imprisoned
in a “treatment” tank, drugged out of struggle into silence.
Like Márquez, who felt that anyone who had lived nine years had material
for a lifetime, Walter Tevis continued to draw on the drama of his early
inward life as he constructed what critics have called “fantastic events made
plausible.” But he was able to do this only by making dramatic changes in
his life, by undergoing extensive therapy and by leaving the confines and
responsibilities of his teaching life.
The pain of confronting what he considered his best material paralyzed
Walter Tevis for nearly two decades; during that time he lived - at least as he
paced the classroom floor or leaned forward over his desk toward his
students - in the boundless realm of great literature, sharing his understanding
and his insights about discovering, transforming, and creating new
worlds in language. His prodigious memory - his ability to see in the
middle distance the text of what seemed to me everything he had ever
encountered on a page - compelled us to join him well beyond the bounds
of any steel-chambered life.
Walter Tevis surely knew that the gift and impact of mentors can scarcely
be measured by public recognition, for that is too rarely granted, even to the
worthy. Like his students, Tevis had from time to time - and I particularly
noted it in our last interview several months before his death - a deep
awareness that, as one critic predicted, his own work would have its hour
and would continue to be rediscovered by subsequent generations of readers.
By his own struggle and ultimate triumph - writing and writing well
again - Walter Tevis continued by his example to teach long after he had left
the university. During the New York era, he said he was in touch with what it
was that needed to be said. And his enduring gift for re-inventing the world,
for, as he put it, “disguising it in such a way as to make certain things about it
more real,” enabled him to reconfigure his own times and places in what the
critics called “the same swift, wanton, off-beat way that had characterized The
Hustler.” He never wrote for very long at a sitting, and he battled with himself
to render his “excitement, stillness and silence” on the page.
Finally, the New York Times praised him for his prose in terms that might
well be applied to his life, lauded him for his “pure and emphatic prose,” for
creating “strange, unhappy gifted characters, loners up against formidable
odds, obsessed with the struggle between winning and losing.”
The agony of composing these thoughts - the writing and not writing,
the fear of boring my readers, the decisions about inclusion and omission -
recall for me all of Walter Tevis’ advice and examples, the almost kinesthetic
movements of his mind, his supremely articulate voice telling the writer to
go back and read again, to honor every reader with language that is pure
and emphatic. And to go wherever it is we need to go to find the stories
that must be told.
 June Langford Berkley
is a writer who imagines her family saga in storytelling performances and fiction.
Her multi-faceted career in education includes public school and university teaching and nationwide consulting.
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