Strange Boardfellows

By Brad Darrach

THE WORLD OF CHESS by ANTHONY SAIDY and NORMAN LESSING 247 pages. Ridge Press/Random House. $17.95.

HOW TO BEAT BOBBY FISCHER by EDMAR MEDNIS 282 pages. Quadrangle. $10.

IDLE PASSION by ALEXANDER COCKBURN 248 pages. Village Voice/Simon & Schuster. $7.95.

Remember Fischer fever? Mild nausea, mottled fury, odd sensations of Russophilia, night sweats about poisoned pawns. Get set for a new and more severe epidemic. In 1972 the delirium was nourished by a prize fund of $250,000, twelve times greater than any previous chess purse. In 1975 the provender is grotesquely more substantial. Bobby Fischer and Anatoly Karpov, the 23-year-old Russian challenger for the World Chess Championship, have been invited by the Philippine Islands to meet in Manila on June 1 and push little wooden soldiers round a checkered board for the second largest stakes in the history of sport--$5 million.

The mere possibility of the match has reinduced Fischer fever in the U.S. publishing industry, which is currently flogging 15 new books about chess. Most of them are strictly for the professionals, but a few can be warmly recommended.

Misspent Youth. The World of Chess, by International Master Anthony Saidy and Senior Master Norman Lessing, is the handsomest and most informative chess picture book ever produced. Its illustrations include Persian paintings, medieval manuscripts, 18th century court scenes, 20th century abstractions, a few sly cartoons and some arresting photographs of the strange cold men who become grand masters.

In the text, Saidy has provided some moving excerpts from his diary of a fumbled tournament that cost him a grand master's rating. Lessing has wittily recalled a misspent youth in one of Manhattan's less salubrious chess-and coffeehouses. The authors have also taken care to make the historical sections pert and amusing. "Can you forgive me this indiscretion?" Benjamin Franklin writes to a wealthy Frenchwoman. "Never hereafter shall I consent to begin a game [of chess] in your bathroom."

Senior Master Edmar Mednis' How to Beat Bobby Fischer is a detailed anatomical study of an Achilles' heel. The Achilles is Fischer, the winningest chess master in history; of the 576 games he has played since he became U.S. champion at the incredible age of 14, he has won 327 and drawn 188. But even Fischer occasionally loses; in the past 16 years he has booted 61 games. To whom? At what age? Was he playing white or black? Did he blunder? Was he outgeneraled? Do any patterns of weakness appear? In the most intriguing chess manual of the year, Mednis ransacks all 61 games for evidence as to how the great man might just possibly be beaten.

Idle Passion is an intelligent amateur's attempt to examine, with the wan headlamp of Freudian ideology, what Vladimir Nabokov calls "the full horror, the abysmal depths of chess." Author Alexander Cockburn is a graceful writer and reads plausibly enough when he says that chess is a "symbolic repetition" of the "family romance" in which the pieces "represent... the Oedipal situation." Meaning that the king is the father and the queen is the mother. But what's this about the king also being "the boy's penis in the phallic stage?" Cockburn explains gravely that the "tense etiquette" of chess, which forbids a player to touch his own pieces except to make a move and enforces a rigid "taboo against touching the opponent's pieces," is actually a way of guarding against "masturbation" or a possible "homosexual overture."

Warming to his subject, Cockburn further asserts that the game is a device for the release of still more "cruel instincts and vile desires." He recalls a fetching legend about a sadistic king of Babylon known as Evil Merodach, who "chopped up the body of his father Nebuchadnezzar into three hundred pieces and threw them to three hundred vultures." Chess, the legend continues, was invented to cure Merodach's madness.

Cockburn agrees. With supporting quotes from Freud's biographer, Ernest Jones, and from Reuben Fine, an American grand master who became a Freudian analyst, the author argues that the hidden aim of the game is to "murder" the father with the help of the mother and so recapture "a part of lost omnipotence." Chess, Cockburn concludes with intense distaste, is a paranoid, "anal-sadistic ... socially meaningless ... dance of death" that for the habitual player becomes "a process of suicide."

Seldom Sober. As for the supreme masters of the game, Cockburn describes at least half of them as deranged men. Paul Morphy, he reminds us, was a paranoid fetishist who lived in deathly fear of poisoners and liked to stand ecstatically in a circle of women's shoes. Wilhelm Steinitz had a recurrent delusion that he was playing chess with God. Alexander Alekhine served as a police informer in the Soviet Union, wrote anti-Semitic tracts hi Nazi Germany, was seldom seen sober and once urinated on the carpet in the middle of a well-attended chess exhibition.

Unfortunately, neither Cockburn nor the authors of The World of Chess have anything of interest to say about the greatest and weirdest grand master of them all. Cockburn has never met Fischer; his portrait is drawn largely from magazine clips. But Saidy is a lifelong friend of the champion's and in private speaks about him with rich insight. Regrettably, in his chapter on Fischer he has chosen to speak simperingly about how "great... worthy ... true to his principles... misunderstood" Fischer is. He also urges the world to be "thankful" that Fischer plays chess.

If Fischer plays in 1975, chess lovers will surely be thankful; if he does not, the game will nevertheless survive --for reasons well expressed in a passage Cockburn quotes from Stefan Zweig's last story, The Royal Game: "Is it not an offensively narrow construction to call chess a game? Is it not a science too, a technique, an art, that sways among these categories as Mahomet's coffin does between heaven and earth, at once a union of all contradictory concepts: primeval, yet ever new; mechanical in operation, yet effective only through the imagination; bounded in geometric space, though boundless in its combinations; ever-developing, yet sterile; thought that leads to nothing; mathematics that produces no result; art without works; architecture without substance, and nevertheless... more lasting in its being and presence than all books and achievements; the only game that belongs to all people and all ages ... to slay boredom, to sharpen the senses, to exhilarate the spirit."

Brad Darrach

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