Finished We 8/23/17 before the meeting of the Contemporary Book Club.
This was one of my ancient paperbacks- I'm going to discard the book. My note on the flyleaf says that I bought the book at Book House, Rock Hill, Mo. on Fr 9/12/97 and I finished it that weekend. On that Sunday I drove my Pacific Coast motorcycle to Taylorville to see the film, 'Excess Baggage'. Last night I checked to see if I could get this movie, but it hasn't been released to Netflix.
From 'Fantasy and Science Fiction' about Tevis's life-
"Tevis was born February 28, 1928, in San Francisco. When he was ten, his family went off to live with the father's sister in Kentucky, leaving Walter, who had contracted rheumatic fever, behind in a hospital. He remained there, wholly alone, for a year before joining the family. He attended school, feeling always the outsider, in Kentucky, and, following service in World War II (two years as a carpenter's mate), went on to the University of Kentucky, where he earned his bachelor's and master's in English. He then embarked on a teaching career, first at various Kentucky high schools, later, from 1966 to 1978, at Ohio University.
Published to great acclaim in 1959, The Hustler became a film classic in 1961. The Man Who Fell to Earth, rejected by Harper's, was published as a paperback original by Gold Medal in 1963. In conversation with Daniel Keyes, Tevis claimed that this rejection led to his lengthy writing block; editor Pat LoBrutto, who worked with Tevis on Mockingbird and subsequent books, doesn't think Tevis made so much of it. At any rate, Tevis had become a confirmed drinker ("It's about my becoming an alcoholic. I sobered up to write it," he said of Man), and for the thirteen years he taught in Ohio, he wrote little or nothing.
Tevis also told Keyes that he'd always dreamed "of being a New York writer, of being in the center of the literary scene," and in 1978, three years after he quit drinking, Tevis moved to the city. Mockingbird came out in 1980, his story collection Far From Home the following year, both The Steps of the Sun and The Queen's Gambit in 1983. The Color of Money, a sequel to The Hustler written for quick money, also came out in these last years. Paul Newman bought the property, commissioning a screenplay from Tevis; for the 1986 film, however, both screenplay and novel were junked.
By his own admission, Tevis still had problems writing. He'd also begun confronting autobiographical materials more directly, in a kind of self-dredging that doesn't always imply salvage, and that can prove as wrenching to the reader as to writer. In stories of the period we often see Tevis peering out at us from within.
Whiskey had left him unable to answer the telephone or open the door, in Michigan. That had been two years ago. Whiskey had left him sitting behind closed suburban blinds at two in the afternoon, reading the J.C. Penny catalog and waiting for Gwen to come home from work. Well. He had been free of whiskey for a year and a half now. First the hospital, then A.A.; now New York and Janet.
He'd continue this transmutation of life in Mockingbird, his parable of coming out of alcoholism, and in The Steps of the Sun, whose early passages rehearse his own childhood of pain, illness, and alienation (and which is, overall, a parable of adolescence). The darkening cities and expended populations of the first, the impoverished, pre-ice age earth of the latter—these are the landscape of their author's own post-alcoholic mind: worlds to be retrieved, reconstructed, reinvented, reborn.
Though sales for Mockingbird were disappointing, in subsequent years the book has been much praised, taking its place alongside Man as a classic. Thus far Steps hasn't elicited as much attention as the others even though, as André- Francois Ruaud points out in a rare essay on Tevis for France's Bifrost magazine, it's among the most original and successful science fiction novels of the '80s. It is also Tevis' first wholly optimistic book. In its successor, The Queen's Gambit, he turned again from the fantastic to the realistic mode, offering in its stone-brilliant story of a driven, alcoholic female chess champion who achieves redemption (much as Mockingbird paired with Man) a positive retelling of The Hustler.
Walter Tevis died of cancer in 1984, the year after his last two, redemptive books were published, age 56. He had experienced, observed, brought to others and to himself great pain, terrible abjurations; his books gave it all up, took our hands to lead us through the backwash. And yet, like his protagonists, he had borne up under it all, survived, endured.
"It is very bad for people to find substitutes for living their lives," he said in what may have been his last interview, wondering if this might not be his abiding theme. Even if late in life, he said, he had found great joy in it: "I'm really pleased that the grass is green. I didn't used to be."
* * *
Through it all, out of it all, blows this dark, strangely comforting wind, this threnody of loss. It is, for many reasons, a small body of work, and one of rare unity.
Einstein remarked that in his life he'd had only one or two ideas. Many fine writers are like that, I believe, making a lifetime's agenda of drawing out the universe implicit in those ideas. So the strands that run and interweave in Tevis's work: alcoholism, the gamesman/artist (pool player, chess player) in whom ambition and wound pull like twin suns, the adolescent's eternal alienation, prisons of self and society, bleak futures, Christ figures, redemption.
Again and again Tevis mounted voyages to the alien, inhospitable planet of self, to bring back odd rocks, strange growths, colors not seen in our nature. Again and again he seized metaphors and wrung their necks, making them give up secrets others had not obtained, could not obtain. There he stood balanced, about to fall. He was, as Lethem writes, "a master manipulator of archetypes, an artist capable of delving into the zeitgeist while nevertheless remaining on his own pure search for himself." His work is unique, with that element of infinite rereadability Nabokov held the hallmark of great literature. Like his characters, though passed through perilous times, disregard and rejection, waking with the day-after, too-late taste of booze, stale smoke and failure upon them, Tevis's work will endure."
Thomas Newton is 'The Man Who Fell'. His home planet, Anthea, is completely devoid of resources, and he is sent to Earth to lay the groundwork for colonization of the planet. The Antheans are certain that Earth will destroy itself by nuclear war in just a few decades at most. The Antheans hope to emigrate a few key people to take over Earth's economic and political systems to avoid a holocaust. I guess the moral dilemma of the novel is should an alien force have the power to determine the fate of Earth, even if the outcome is positive.
The subtext of the novel demonstrates how an individual deals with alcoholism.
World Enterprises Corp- W.E. Corp
Thomas Jerome Newton
Nathan Bryce- Professor of chemical engineering that suspects that Newton is 'not of this earth'. He becomes a friend and confidant. Newton gives him a million dollars at the end of the novel.
Oliver Farnsworth- Newton's patent lawyer. Played by Buck Henry in the film.
Betty Jo Mosher- The alcoholic hillbilly from Kentucky who becomes Newton's maid/personal assistant. They're drinking partners and she turns him on to gin. She drinks it with three teaspoons of sugar.
Brinnarde- Newton's 'head of security'. This man is a government agent and leads to Newton's downfall.
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