Books

“We talked about addiction and pathology in our family” — the nephew of Walter Tevis recalls his visits with the novelist while he was writing “Queen’s Gambit”

By Henry Balke
Published: Jan 18, 2021
Category: Fiction

“The Queen’s Gambit” is one of my favorite American novels. As I noted in my review, I optioned it for a movie and wrote a screenplay. The movie didn’t happen; 37 years later, it became the most successful scripted series in the history of Netflix. [If you’re a subscriber, click here to stream it.] The series spawned a chess craze. The novel has been on the Times’ paperback fiction bestseller list for 9 weeks. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

It’s always a treat to learn how a novelist lived while he was writing a masterpiece, and it’s a special treat to present his nephew’s exclusive account of the year when Walter Tevis was writing “The Queen’s Gambit.”

Henry Balke is a retired computer consultant and an avid birder. “I come from a family that read compulsively,” he says. “My mother and famous uncle and I read the ingredients on shampoo bottles while in the bathroom.” His mother, Walter’s only sibling, was the first female editor-in-chief at The Kentucky Kernel, the weekly student newspaper of the University of Kentucky, and worked in journalism in Cincinnati and New York. Henry went to Queens College in New York, majored in English, and wrote for The Phoenix, a student weekly. He was 27 when Walter moved to New York; when Walter died in 1984, he just turned 31.
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Walter and Eleanora lived in a narrow reddish brick townhouse in Kips Bay on East 30th Street, just west of Lexington Avenue. Their upstairs neighbor was Olivier Chandon de Brailles, scion of the family of Moet et Chandon, the champagne producers. Olivier was a racecar driver, very handsome and charming but also devil-may-care and a risk taker. His girlfriend for much of the time Walter lived there was Christie Brinkley, the leggy blond model. Olivier died in a racing accident in 1983. Christie married Billy Joel.

On daytime visits Walter would greet me in his rumpled heimische way, with mildly unkempt blond hair and beard, untucked Allen Solly shirts, and thin wale corduroy pants. He was always happy and talkative, glad for the company and an audience to update on the progress of his work. Sometimes he asked me if I knew some word or factoid. He had read the word ‘farrago’ but didn’t know it. A strange mixture or a hodgepodge, I answered proudly. It was a rare occasion when you’d be one who educated him on anything. Walter had a degree from the picky Iowa Writer’s Workshop, which currently admits about 2.5 % of applicants, half the acceptance rate of Harvard although he had no Ph.D. or even an all-but-dissertation status. He was hired by Ohio University on the strength of his writing prowess, and became not just a full professor but a University Professor.

Some in the English department groused about what appeared to be favoritism, the award of full professorship for someone with a master’s degree. The grousing dissipated when faculty members socialized with Walter and experienced his erudition. He had a remarkable memory for poetry and literature, and was an astute and encouraging writing mentor. One close friend on the English faculty was Daniel Keyes, best known for his novel “Flowers for Algernon.” They met often to play chess.

Walter told me that he often spent hours of a writing workday reading at random and rationalizing what appeared as lassitude. In fact, narrative ideas and stylistic nuance were forming in his brain much of the time. He tended to become bored, even with New York at his doorstep. This was a persistent temperamental trait, not dependent on the presence of diversions or interests. He spoke about it in interviews and conversations with me. When things coalesced, Walter wrote quickly and beautifully, scenes and characters emerging fully formed. He rarely produced work needing revision or a spot in his wastebasket.

When I visited during the creation of “The Queen’s Gambit,” Walter talked about Fischer, Spassky, Capablanca, Paul Morphy, the Ruy Lopez opening, middle and end games, and chess minutiae in general, while I sat half-listening and playing chess against his first-generation computerized chessboard.

Set to Beginner level, the cheap plastic contraption and its 8 bit, $1.98-or-so CPU would thrash me game after short-lived game until mercifully we left to eat. Round after round of ass kickings were meted out, none taking more than a dozen moves on the part of the pitiless gadget. Often when the computer played the White pieces it advanced the pawns of the King and his Bishop two squares. This opening is the Queen’s Gambit.

In between these intellect-deflating defeats I would visit the cats that lazed about, displaying the same indolence Walter bemoaned. One cat in particular, Walter’s favorite, stayed curled up on the windowsill and looked out the small casement window upon their tiny messy backyard. Walter said the big tuxedo cat was the reincarnation of a smug small-town orthodontist — sit a patient in the chair, make a small adjustment to their ‘appliance,’ and remember to bill!

Walter grew up without money in an emotionally barren household with no value placed on sensory enjoyment. The Tevises abruptly left San Francisco, where the family had prospered pre-Depression, and moved cross-country to Lexington, and later Richmond, Kentucky, a town of about 15,000. Now poor, they lived in down market neighborhoods where Walter’s gangliness and precocity were uncommon traits and drew bullies. He felt the move to Kentucky was scarring, and would thereafter consider himself an uprooted San Franciscan.

The house in Richmond was a very small Cape Cod in an unincorporated section of the town that abutted a large, seldom-mowed field. His mother, largely the model for Mrs. Wheatley in “The Queen’s Gambit,” chain-smoked Kent cigarettes and had ill-fitting dentures that frequently clacked when she spoke. She was not ill willed so much as joyless and soured on the world, victim of the social and economic fall from grace when the family moved to Kentucky. I remember her treasuring a thinly padded sofa that had pride of place in the small living room. It was sheathed in plastic, and all were forbidden from sitting on it — not that you’d want to, given how uncomfortable it was. In her mind it was valuable, an antique worthy of preservation.

It was painful to see my grandmother’s world so drab and colorless, particularly juxtaposed with the world of her neighbor and friend, whose similarly small house was warmed by the wonderful harpsichord music she played. The neighbor, Ms. Jane Campbell, taught music at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond. Jane’s company mitigated my grandmother’s loneliness and buoyed her spirits somewhat. Even so, depression and sadness clouded her spirit and outlook, as they did to lesser degrees in Walter and his sister Betty. These have also plagued me, Betty’s son.

Walter’s relationship to money could not have been more different than that of his parents and sister. His prominent epicurean streak, thank goodness, ran counter to the penny-pinching of the others. This may have awakened during a magical, luxurious summer he spent in Manhattan in early adulthood with his wealthy eccentric aunt Myra, who owned an apartment building in Manhattan, and, like Walter, was quite unlike the Kentucky Tevises. Walter and Myra ate at fancy white-linen joints and took cabs and went to all manner of museums and shows.

Walter loved eating out at restaurants in the city, from fancy steakhouses like Smith & Wollensky to holes in the wall with Formica tables in Chinatown. Our eating out was not centered on any particular culinary region and was wide ranging and catholic, but skewed a bit towards fish and especially shellfish. Walter had taught at Southern Connecticut State College in New Haven in the early 1960s, and lived in Milford and West Haven, both towns of about 50,000 on Long Island Sound. Cheap fresh fish, clams and mussels were served in modest side-of-road cafes. There Walter acquired his love of shellfish, fried clams in particular. We ate at Grand Central’s Oyster Bar, where we chose chilled oysters of various provenance, and at Cockeyed Clam on the East Side, and several of its bygone and lamented sister restaurants. Walter ate fast, joyfully and unapologetically, and talk ceased when food came to the table. He tore through his food with the ardor of a timber wolf, and would invariably mention how deficient in pleasure meals were when he grew up and the joy he took in living in New York as a working writer.

After a meal we would slowly walk back to his place, talking about addiction and pathology in our family. Walter was a recovering alcoholic, me an active opioid addict months from his first 30-day rehab treatment. We were both bright and troubled youths who were suddenly moved to small-town Kentucky from large cities, New York in my case. We both learned our intra-psychic climates could be modulated chemically, and both did so religiously, Walter with booze, and me, years younger, with Percodan and whatever else I could find.

Walter and Eleanora agreed that he must not drink, and he continued to attend the AA meetings he began years before his move to Manhattan. I often met Walter on Tuesday nights for dinner before going to his favorite AA meeting. It was a men’s meeting, and had a literate, largely gay membership. Walter wasn’t gay but felt an intellectual affinity with many group members. Also, many of the gay alcoholics had lived or intended to live in San Francisco, and Walter enjoyed sharing about his birthplace. Walter would every so often raise his hand, identify as an alcoholic, and offer some trenchant comments.

Eleanora Walker came to America from a smallish Scottish town 20 miles west of Glasgow. She had a degree from the University of Glasgow, and while working as his agent married writer Loring Eutemey. She later divorced him. Eleanora was fragile upon arriving in New York and began a long therapy with Herry Teltscher, an avuncular Viennese psychologist who claimed an ability to discern emotional states of clients by reading and analyzing handwriting. She was an ardent member of a group of clients who attached cultishly to Herry, undergoing biweekly individual sessions and therapy groups. Walter was also a client, albeit less slavishly devoted to Herry. He profited immensely, he claimed, from the therapy. But he abashedly admitted that the claims of revealing handwriting analysis proffered by Teltscher seemed the claims of a charlatan.

Eleanora was infatuated with various therapies, particularly a course called Actualizations. She and Walter invited me to join them at an “informational” session in Manhattan —— no doubt at the urging of the organizers, eager to have another potential participant. Attendees were paired with graduates of the course looking to finance more, uhm, Actualizing. They tried to rope you in with their sales pitch: our course fee is cheap given the salutary effect the course will produce in your daily life. I objected — I had to pay rent first. My partner countered that if instead I took this transformational course the rental money would materialize, or some unfathomable, far more important event than rental payments would ensue. I snapped to the fact the tout didn’t exactly have my best interest at heart. I left Walter and Eleanora to experience their “life changing” weekend, locked in a room, with little food and few water breaks. The effect can feel like an earth moving experience. Con artists and preachers know and use these tactics. In Walter’s case the weekend affected little besides his bank balance, a fact he never uttered in Eleanora’s presence.

Early in 1984, the one-time smoker of two packs a day was at his gym exercising on Nautilus machines, proud to feel muscular and robust, sober, and generally treating himself lovingly. He noticed a pain in the upper quadrant of his left lung. Exploratory surgery discovered advanced lung cancer with lymphatic system involvement. He was operated on at NYU Medical Center. When he awoke from anesthesia, he noticed he had no bandages where expected. This, sadly, was because his cancer had spread so widely that surgery would have proved futile. He died on August 11, 1984.

I was not fond of Eleanora. She seemed cold, self-centered, eager to impress Manhattanites with her importance. Eleanora acted as though she was Walter’s equal in the creation of “The Queen’s Gambit,” Mockingbird, and The Color of Money. She wrung every last dime from the Walter Tevis Literary Trust, though in fairness she was responsible for some of the income the Trust produces to this day.

The Trust income and the townhouse reverted to Walter’s two children, my cousins Will and Julie, upon Eleanora’s death. Herry Teltscher, her shield from the pain and loneliness of her life, died in 2000 at 89 years old. Eleanora’s emotional and mental frailty increased as she got older, and in her 80th year she jumped from the roof of the church next to her townhouse.

My uncle was a brilliant man, the smartest person I’ve ever been around for any length of time. As a writer of fiction, narrative and plot and character development came to him unbidden. He was also profligate and alcoholic and beset with the effects of a severe childhood illness and an ensuing abandonment by his family. He published his first novel, The Hustler, in his early twenties, and The Man Who Fell to Earth soon after. A multi-decade slide into alcoholism followed, with several suicide attempts and the inability to write. Sobriety was a precondition of his return to writing, and his years as a sober, working novelist in New York City brought him great satisfaction. And now the popularity of the Netflix treatment of “The Queen’s Gambit” is leading to a justly deserved rediscovery of his work.