Critic's Gambit

By Stefan Kanfer

FIELDS OF FORCE by GEORGE STEINER 86 pages. Viking Press. $8.95.

"Chess," as George Steiner indicates in this little antidote to Reykjavik's hyperbolic summer of '72, "may well be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. Bobby Fischer's assertion that it is 'everything' is merely necessary monomania. As for the maniac: "A chess genius is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise. Almost inevitably, this focus produces pathological symptoms of nervous stress and unreality."

In Fields of Force the symptoms are recalled with an intelligence that, like the champion's, has little room for compassion. Fischer's unstable personality, a fusion of Garbo and Barnum, is examined in all its two dimensions. The aging Wunderkind remains a prodigy, perhaps the most powerful grand master the world has ever witnessed. But from the opening gambit it is obvious that the author's affections are with Boris Spassky.

To be sure, Steiner admits, Bobby inoculated the world with chess fever singlehanded. Piling demands upon tantrums, he elevated the first prize from $3,000 to $2 million and transformed a board game into a blood sport. But Steiner, a literary critic first and a chess patzer second, is appalled by Fischer's xenophobic rancor, his avarice and below all, his literary taste (Fu Manchu, Tarzan and Playboy).

On the far side of the board, matters are more elevated: Steiner's Reykjavik encounter with the Russian was "a privilege. He is an individual of great charm and impeccable courtesy. In contrast to Fischer, Spassky's literacy is wide and his political awareness is at once subtle and adult." Yet as the admirer acknowledges, that cultivation may have undone Spassky. Despite the Russian's domination of the game for a decade, the Boris of Iceland displayed a literal and philosophical resignation in the face of Fischer's predatory inventions. The result was less drama than ritual: civilization vanquished by barbarism. Or was it decadence defeated by energy? Or was it an unconscious harbinger of detente?

As Steiner comes to acknowledge, the event that Fischer called "this little thing between me and Spassky" was not so minor after all. "To an extraordinary number of human beings," he concludes, "the events of that summer communicated a rare sense of intensity... for several months, a totally esoteric, essentially trivial endeavor, associated with pimply, myopic youths and vaguely comical old men on park benches, held the world enthralled."

There is no proper way to re-create that intensity on the board; despite the book's schematics, the actual play at Reykjavik was not the stuff of legend. It is the text that manages to capture the historic and psychological undercurrents that made everyone believe for a moment that chess was indeed "everything." Steiner calls his own chess prowess "risible." His book, however, is deadly serious. The men he moves are real.

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