(Welcome to the second half of an examination of talent, flow, and character in The Hustler on the page and screen. If you haven’t read Part 1, you can find it here.)
The film’s version of Bennington’s—where Minnesota Fats bestrides the world of pool like a colossus—is based on a pool hall in Chicago named Bensinger’s, captured in Helaine Garren’s photographs. Garren, like novelist Walter Tevis and director Robert Rossen, captures the seriousness of the players in their desire to use their talents to make the physical world obey their commands. Making an impossible shot is something like a miracle, and talent in The Hustler is a kind of sacrament. Making an impossible shot is an outward sign of an invisible grace that transports its owner to another plane of existence: the state of flow, This is why, in the world of The Hustler, Bennington’s pool room is a holy place.
The novel begins on a sunny morning and Bennington’s “could have been a large church, still, sun coming through the stained windows, wrapped into itself, the great tables’ timeless and massive mahogany, their green cloths discreetly hidden by gray oilcloth covers” (8). (This is also in the film: when Charlie complains that Bennington’s is “quiet,” Eddie whispers, “Yeah—like a church.”) One needs to take an elevator to the eighth floor to enter its heavenly gates. That afternoon, one of the regulars, a speed freak and hanger-on called the Preacher, tells his friend Big John the good news: Fast Eddie Felson is coming to Chicago. “They say he’s the best,” the Preacher states. “They say he’s got real talent” (12). The Preacher is a poolroom John the Baptist, feeding on the wild honey of cocaine, proclaiming that once Eddie reaches Chicago, the crooked shall be made straight and every mountain brought low—including that mountain of a man, Minnesota Fats. Won’t that be something to see? Big John, however, has ears but hears not: his own experience with talent has taught him that even though he smoked twenty-five cent cigars and “came to this great big goddamned city” with a “big reputation,” he got his “big fat ass beat. Just beat right off” (15). Talk is cheap: Big John asks the Preacher if he actually saw Fast Eddie play (he didn’t) and concludes “No-bo-dy ever comes in here and beats George the Fairy or Jackie French or Minnesota Fats” (16). The kind of out-of-town talent that could topple a Chicago legend simply doesn’t exist. It would be unnatural, even supernatural: Big John says they can play any game of pool that the “Holy Lord can name, guess, or invent” (16) but that the Chicago greats cannot be moved, regardless of how deeply one enters the flow state.
If Bennington’s is the Paradiso of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow, then Arthur’s, where Eddie tries to hustle after his initial loss to Fats, is the Inferno. Instead of Dante’s “Abandon all hope” warning at its entrance, Eddie sees a “smudged cardboard sign” suspended from light-bulb cords that reads “OPEN GAME,” under which some past victim had written, in pencil, “PLAY AT YOUR OWN RISK” (108). Bert, as Eddie’s Virgil, has warned him against playing here, but Eddie, thinking he can handle things alone, goes anyway and falls into an obvious trap: when his opponent tells him he had better not miss, Eddie pauses his shot and says to him, “I don’t rattle. And, just for trying, I think I’ll beat your ass flat” (112). Of course, this is a sign that he is rattled, which he confirms not by losing to this anonymous punk, but by smoking him:
It was simple. It was astonishingly simple. And fast. With the drop pockets and the little table and the quiet fury that he felt even in his cue stick he ran the next six games without even coming close to missing, making every shot perfectly. He slugged them in and eased them in and knifed them in, with deadball precision (113).
This is not playing in a state of flow: it’s using the gift of his talent only for money— what we usually call “selling out.” Eddie is like what their detractors accuse Grace Slick, Metallica, Neymar Jr., and Robert DeNiro of having become; we resent those whom we regard as bad stewards of a light which they have let shine before men but which has been paradoxically cheapened by stacks of money. Just before he runs the table, Eddie thinks, “I’d better remember to lose a couple” (112), but he is too immature to play as he should; he is like a teenager always having to have the last word while arguing with his parents and insisting that he knows what he’s doing even when he doesn’t. His thumbs are broken as what Henry James called “just punishment of that most fatal of human follies, our not having known when to stop.” Talent alone needs to be harnessed to prudence, what Bert calls “character,” and that prudence can be found externally, in another person, or, eventually, within oneself. That’s what Yoda teaches young Luke Skywalker and what Eddie finally learns at the end of the book.
Sarah, the “lush” mentioned on the cover, enters the exploration of talent and flow by eventually showing Eddie the ease with which the quest for flow can be abandoned.
In the novel, Eddie is attracted to her because she’s a challenge to his charm offense: the “long shot” (80) of sleeping with her is the attraction—it’s what Tom Sizemore means in Heat when he says, “The action is the juice”: the robbery is its own reward and the payoff isn’t measured in the take. We learn that she had polio, which accounts for her slight limp, and that she missed five years of grade school, making her a loner and pathetic in the literal sense of the word. We’re also told, more than once, about her complexion:
“The light in the room seemed gray and her arms were white. there was a delicate and fine line of a blue vein in her wrist, branching gently on the white skin of her inner forearm. The skin at the side of her knees was white, too, smooth as it stretched taut, as if it would be resilient to the touch. Above her knee, below the edge of her skirt, was a fine line of white lace” (79).
She may not be Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci, but she still threatens our knight-at-arms with the death of his talent. She would be fine with living a life moving from bar to bar and finding her heightened sense of meaning in what flows from a bottle. “By trade, I drink” (73), she tells Eddie, and she’s right. Part of Eddie’s growing maturity is his realization that he has to forsake her because she wants to excel at not excelling: she’s the Minnesota Fats of self-destructive self-pity and creating excuses, “one of the best indoor sports” (149). Eddie indulged in excuses after being beaten by Fats and rationalizing what happened as the result of too much booze; when Charlie told him he was beaten by “character” (94), Eddie laughs it off. (Bert drinks milk while he gambles so he can’t have a built-in excuse if he loses.) But by the end of the book, after he has been brought low, wounded, and regained the use of his thumbs and talent, Eddie doesn’t want to be tempted by self-pity. This is another obstacle he must surmount: even when he wants to feel betrayed and view Charlie as “his Judas,” he realizes he was “playing the loser’s game with himself” (212) and shakes it off. “It’s no trouble at all, losing,” Bert had told him, “when you got a good excuse” (91). The degree to which someone can forsake all possible excuses, especially those generated by oneself since they are the most pernicious, is how Bert (and Tevis) measure character and the judicious use of one’s talent, which is not to be buried but put to use.
The treatment of Sarah is the film’s only crucial divergence from the novel. On screen, she accompanies Eddie and Bert to Kentucky; if Rossen’s The Hustler were grafted onto Pinocchio, Sarah would be something like Jiminy Cricket (with Charlie as Gepetto, Bert as Lampwick and Lexington as Pleasure Island). The viewer is led to believe that if Eddie would only “say the words” and forsake his life with Bert that Sarah would pour her Scotch down the drain and keep house; her suicide is meant to be regarded as the result of being ignored in favor of the next game, a desire to be noticed, to be loved. But on the page, Sarah is an impediment toward Eddie’s self-actualization, not a component of it. Flow doesn’t flow from a bottle.
The final scene with the rematch against Fats is a celebration of flow and the culmination of the novel’s ideas about the use of talent; it’s Eddie’s final exam and shows the reader what he has learned. Not that performing at this level has become easy: playing with his own money, Eddie is almost rattled when Fats wants a thousand dollars a game instead of Eddie’s initially-offered two hundred. Eddie loses three times in a row and is ready to leave, humiliated, when he sees Charlie—Tevis’s pecunia ex machina—who has returned to give him five thousand dollars he has been holding in reserve. Eddie offers to play another game for five thousand and, as seen throughout The Hustler, the financial stakes reflect the emotional ones. When Eddie tells Fats, “It’s my whole bankroll, my life’s savings” (214), he is proposing the ultimate test of his theory to see if he can control his own fate. As Csikszentmihalyi puts it when discussing how transforming chaos into order increases the odds of reaching the state of flow, “The integrity of the self depends on the ability to take neutral or destructive events and turn them into positive ones … It is for this reason that courage, resilience, perseverance, mature defense, or transformational coping—the dissipative structures of the mind—are so essential” (202). And Eddie can, in his state of optimal experience, control the universe: the cue ball becomes “an extension of his own will and consciousness” (215) and like “his own little white marionette, darting here and there in the green baize as he instructed it by the gentle prodding of his cue” (215). He feels “a voluptuous, sensitive pleasure” and “a sense of power and strength” (216) and makes 125 balls without missing; this is like pitching a perfect game, which only 24 players have done since 1880. (The list of people who have beaten Minnesota Fats for these stakes has to be even shorter.) Eddie is “in a place now where he could not be affected, where he felt that nothing Fats could do could touch him” (217). And when Fats, on the page and on the screen, says, “I can’t beat you” (217), Eddie knows that he has reached the heights of flow in that upper-right quadrant.
Both novel and film, however, end with the surprise of the well-connected Bert threatening violence if Eddie doesn’t pay him a cut. In the film, Eddie refuses and says, “I loved her, Bert. I traded her in on a pool game. But that wouldn’t mean anything to you because who did you ever care about? Just win, win you said, win, that’s the important thing. But you don’t know what winning is, Bert, You’re a loser. Cause you’re dead inside. And you can’t live unless you make everything else die around you. But who did you ever care about?” The film’s Eddie thinks the price of winning is “too high” and that if he doesn’t walk away from a life with Bert, then “she never lived. She never died. And we both know that’s not true.” This is out-of-step with Tevis’s vision and a cheat, allowing the viewer to take the high road with Eddie, who gets to have his cake (beating Fats) and eat it, too (keeping the money and lecturing Bert). That Bert, with his granite face and heart which are reflected so well by George C. Scott, would call off his goons because he is so moved by Eddie’s rant about the need for a life that balances winning and one’s humanity is preposterous.
The novel ends with Bert insisting that if Eddie doesn’t pay him thirty percent of his winnings, he’ll find himself in worse shape than when he had only broken thumbs. Eddie tries to play it cool, asking Bert if he’s “the Syndicate Man, like in the movies” (220), but he asks someone at Bennington’s to put his cue in a locker and ends the novel not with a victory, but a stalemate:
“Remember, Eddie, you can’t win them all.”
Eddie looked at him and grinned, very broadly and easily. “No,” he said, “but neither can you, Bert.”
Bert continued looking at him for a minute. Then, saying nothing, he turned and left, walking purposefully and slowly past the big oaken door. (222)
Eddie’s future is uncertain: has he forsaken the game? Has Bert scared him off? Will he come around to Bert’s way of thinking, knowing Bert is right about whether or not Eddie will be able to play the big names from now on? Thirty percent of something is better than a hundred percent of nothing, especially if Bert can get Eddie into the biggest games. Regardless, the novel ends here because Eddie is finally in control of his talent, even if he will have to pay a tax on it. Again, Csikszentmihalyi helps us understand what was at stake the whole time:
We have all experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like (3).
A landmark in memory for what life should be like. Eddie has passed two such landmarks that open and close his story and understands at its end that if he wants life to be one filled with moments of flow, he needs more than his raw talent to make this happen. He eventually becomes something of a Csikszentmihalyi himself—but that is another story.