Paul Morphy: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess

by David Lawson

  COVER CREDITS: background courtesy iStockphoto.com; Morphy pho-tography (front cover) by Matthew Brady, courtesy Dale Brandreth and www.chessbookstore.com; Morphy engraving (rear cover) by D. J. Pound, courtesy Dale Brandreth and www.chessbookstore.com.

  All uncredited images within this volume are reproduced from the original edition of Paul Morphy: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess.

  University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press

  P.O. Box 40831

  Lafayette, LA 70504-0831

  http://ulpress.org

  © 2010 by University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press

  All rights reserved.

  Printed on acid-free paper

  ISBN 13: 978-1-887366-97-7

  ISBN 10: 1-887366-97-0

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lawson, David.

  Paul Morphy : the pride and sorrow of chess / David Lawson, edited by Thomas Aiello.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-887366-97-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 1-887366-97-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Morphy, Paul Charles, 1837-1884. 2. Chess players--Louisiana--Biogra-phy. I. Aiello, Thomas, 1977- II. Title.

  GV1439.M7L36 2010

  794.1092--dc22

  [B]

  2010023091

  AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It is with appreciation and pleasure that acknowledgment is made for helpfulness with material for this biography by Dale Brandreth, G. H. Diggle, Robert Sinnott, and Mrs. Alice N. Loranth, head of the John G. White Department of the Cleveland Public Library. I wish particularly to express gratitude for the suggestions and generous help of James J. Barrett, with special reference to the selection, preparation, and proofreading of the games.

  And to my wife, Rosalind, I owe much for help and patience in the preparation of the material for this biography of Paul Morphy. This is the culmination of some years of trial for her, what with the time I have spent engrossed with my Morphy material and in the search for more. I may add, her help in the reading and correcting of the manuscript has been invaluable.

  EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The editor would like to thank Dale Brandreth and Edward Winter for their help and advice. Both were incredibly kind and patient, answering a barrage of questions with timely grace. This project could not have come about without their help. The U. S. Copyright Office was also incredibly helpful, answering a landslide of repetitious, elementary questions without frustration or insults. (Or, perhaps, answerers dutifully kept their frustration and insults to themselves. That, in itself, deserves the questioner’s gratitude.) Karen Kukil of the Smith College Special Collections library was fundamentally helpful in the development of Lawson’s biographical material, as was noted Lola Ridge scholar Elaine Sproat. Both of them volunteered invaluable advice and information. Finally, Jennifer Ritter provided interest, advice, and support when the editor needed it most.

  EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

  In 1846, Paul Morphy became a legitimate child prodigy.

  In 1857, he became the United States chess champion.

  In 1875, he went crazy.

  Such are the plot points that common biographical sketches use to trace the portrait of an otherwise unassuming New Orleans lawyer. But the outlines of Morphy’s rise to fame and his descent into madness miss the marrow that provides the bulk and heft of such a skeletal presentation. He was a wealthy urbanite with an overbearing, overprotective mother. He was a prisoner to the expectations of a family name in a place, Louisiana, where family names still provided the scope of both initial possibility and later reputation. He was a southerner in an age of Civil War (and might very well have been a Confederate spy). He was a propitious, quiet loner who was thrust into the spotlight of fame, even as he fought it at every turn. And he was, finally, a global phenomenon who usually saw himself as nothing more than a Louisiana gentleman.

  Such are the plot points that any armchair psychologist could use to trace a crucible of frustration and discontent.

  There are places in Morphy’s biography that remain enigmatic, and most biographical treatments of the chess champion pick and choose from various elements of the dominant themes of his life. All treatments of Morphy published after 1976, however, have one commonality that binds each through varied arguments and emphases—David Lawson’s Paul Morphy: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess. As William Caverlee has noted, the book “remains the chief text for Morphy devotees.”1 The breadth of Lawson’s research and the care with which he applies his analysis present the fullest possible portrait of the nineteenth-century’s most celebrated chess player.

  Paul Morphy was born in June 1837 to a prominent New Orleans family. He learned to play chess by watching his relatives, all chess enthusiasts, play recreationally. It was in these formative stages that Morphy began practicing what would become his trademark strategy, early and rapid development. As a child, he played and defeated the American general and chess player Winfield Scott, providing him with his first measure of celebrity. He also defeated European chess master Eugène Rousseau, as well as Johann Lowenthal. But his years at Spring Hill College provide Lawson and his readers the first real inkling that Morphy’s uniqueness went beyond his preternatural chess ability. Morphy abandoned chess during his college days, just as he would abandon it after his European conquest. As his friend Charles Maurian noted,

  Morphy was never so passionately fond, so inordinately devoted to chess as is generally believed. An intimate acquaintance and long observation enables us to state this positively. His only devotion to the game, if it may be so termed, lay in his ambition to meet and to defeat the best players and great masters of this country and of Europe. He felt his enormous strength, and never for a moment doubted the outcome. Indeed, before his first departure for Europe he privately and modestly, yet with perfect confidence, predicted to us his certain success, and when he returned he expressed the conviction that he had played poorly, rashly; that none of his opponents should have done so well as they did against him. But, this one ambition satisfied, he appeared to have lost nearly all interest in the game.

  He was pushed in his early days by his Uncle Ernest Morphy, who rushed his young nephew into matches and publicized his successes. At the same time, his parents seemed reticent to allow him to play in stakes matches or other forms of professional play. Lawson notes that his closeness to his family and willingness to accede to their wishes dominated Morphy’s life, and the contradictory messages he received from them would remain an overriding existential crisis.

  Still, after college (and with a surely reticent family), Morphy embarked for New York to make his name in chess. He challenged all at the New York Chess Club at the odds of pawn and move. He began sending letters to Howard Staunton, England’s acknowledged champion, requesting a match either in the U. S. or abroad. He also engaged in stakes matches (with or without his family’s consent).

  But when Morphy traveled to London to hunt Staunton (“I visited your country,” he told an Englishman, “for the purpose of challenging Mr.Staunton.”) his family disapproved of the stakes required to make such a match come about. Lawson quotes Maurian that “after consulting with the rest of the family [about the Staunton match], they had resolved not only not to help raising the amount wanted, but that moreover they should not allow him to play a money match either with his own money or anybody else’s. That in the event of his being in anyway aided they were ready to send some responsible agent to London whose duty it would be to let Mr.Morphy know that he must either decline playing or continuing the match or that he will be b
rought home by force if necessary; that they were determined to prevent a money match by all means.” But Lawson reminds us that “there had been no inkling of family disapproval when Morphy wanted to engage Staunton in the $5,000-a-side match in New Orleans. Surely the family knew all about it, for the letter and terms had been printed in New Orleans papers. It would seem that Paul’s father had not previously taken the same severe position on money matches, for Ernest Morphy, Alonzo’s brother, would not have endeavored to get Paul a match for $300 a side in 1856 if his brother had objected.”

  Lawson is also careful to note that family problems were ancillary to Morphy’s broader chess life. He credits Morphy’s depression after his return from his successful European trip to the continued attacks of Staunton and his followers after their proposed match fell through. It was at this time that Morphy demonstrated an antipathy towards chess that hadn’t surfaced since his college days. On his tour of American cities after his voyage home, Morphy gave several variations on a stump speech that included a warning for those who might take the game too seriously:

  A word now on the game itself. Chess never has been and never can be aught but a recreation. It should not be indulged in to the detriment of other and more serious avocations—should not absorb the mind or engross the thoughts of those who worship at its shrine; but should be kept in the background and restrained within its proper province. As a mere game, a relaxation from the severer pursuits of life, it is deserving of high commendation. It is not only the most delightful and scientific, but the most moral of amusements. Unlike other games in which lucre is the end and aim of the contestants, it recommends itself to the wise by the fact that its mimic battles are fought for no prize but honor. It is eminently and emphatically the philosopher’s game. Let the chess board supercede the card-table, and a great improvement will be visible in the morals of the community.

  And so there was the strain of professionalism in chess. There was the strain of a demanding family. And then there was the strain of being a southerner in the mid-nineteenth century. “Without doubt,” writes Lawson, Morphy “was torn between his loyalty to the Union and to the state of Louisiana.” In his senior thesis at Spring Hill College, Morphy proscribed very narrow limits for possible justifications for war. His brother joined a New Orleans regiment, but Paul did not. But his sense of loyalty was still there, and in October 1861, he traveled to Richmond, where he kept the company of P. G. T. Beauregard and played chess with Richmond’s high society.

  “Undoubtedly,” notes Lawson, “Morphy went to Richmond with some thought of being useful, perhaps influenced by other Southern youths who were responding to the call of the South. And it may be that he was on Beauregard’s staff for a short while and that he had been seen at Manassas, as had been reported. It would seem that Beauregard sensed that Morphy had little or no enthusiasm for secession and that the general brought it home to Morphy that he was not war material, on or off the battlefield.”

  Soon Morphy decided to leave New Orleans and the South. In October 1862, he traveled to Paris to meet his family.

  We are all following with intense anxiety the fortunes of the tremendous conflict now raging beyond the Atlantic, for upon the issue depends our all in life. Under such circumstances you will readily understand that I should feel little disposed to engage in the objectless strife of the chess board. Besides you will remember that as far back as two years ago I stated to you in New York my firm determination to abandon chess altogether. I am more strongly confirmed than ever in the belief that the time devoted to chess is literally frittered away. It is, to be sure, a most exhilarating sport, but it is only a sport; and it is not to be wondered at that such as have been passionately addicted to the charming pastime, should one day ask themselves whether sober reason does not advise its utter dereliction. I have, for my own part, resolved not to be moved from my purpose of not engaging in chess hereafter.

  His Civil War anxiety and his unwillingness to engage in his true talent were not cause and consequence, but the two were definitely entwined in his thinking. His contradictory feelings about war and the South’s place in it continued to haunt him until the conflict’s end.

  But if family and chess and war weren’t enough, there was also Morphy’s failure at his chosen vocation. Morphy received his law degree after his bachelor’s, and after his chess triumphs attempted to settle into his profession. One failure prior to the Civil War was matched by another at its conclusion. Lawson provides some interesting speculative analysis as to why this might be: Morphy was lazy, he was unpracticed, he was unwilling to talk about chess in a city that only wanted to talk to him about chess. But whatever the reasons for this most recent failure, it was failure none-theless.

  “It was in 1875,” writes Lawson, “that Maurian first began to notice some strange talk by Morphy . . .”

  Soon after, Morphy’s imbalance reached a climax when he suspected a barber of being in collusion with one of his friends, Mr. Binder, whom he attacked, actually trying to provoke a duel (Maurian said he was a good swordsman), believing the friend had wronged him. This raised the question of mental competence. As a consequence of the attack, thinking it might be the prelude to further violence against himself or others, his family considered putting him in an institution for care and treatment, the ‘Louisiana Retreat,’ run by an order of the Catholic Church. So one day all the family took a ride, and he was brought in. Upon realizing the situation, Morphy so expounded the law applying to his case that the nuns refused to accept him, and his mother and the others realized he needed no such constraint.

  It was this attack upon Mr. Binder that brought public attention to his condition and North, South and all of Europe took it up, of course exaggerating the whole incident. There were inquiries about Morphy’s condition and Maurian answered some of them. It was frequently questioned whether the condition might not have resulted from Morphy’s extraordinary (as it was thought) mental strain induced by his chess playing.

  But Lawson’s treatment of Morphy’s paranoia, hallucinations, and persecution complex is far more nuanced than that of his friend Charles Maurian. Of course, Morphy’s mental illness has been a subject of conversation equal to that of his chess ability, and Lawson not only describes the events of his mental devolution, but also provides analysis of the psychoanalytic speculations on Morphy’s condition. As do many later twentieth-century analysts, Lawson finds the Oedipal, Freudian context for Morphy discussions to be overly simplistic and unhelpful.

  When examining Lawson’s life’s work, however, (and this book was most certainly his life’s work) one is drawn from the enigma of Morphy to the enigma that is his biographer. Lawson’s author biography in his original publication states that he “has been interested in Paul Morphy for over thirty years. He has visited Morphy’s home in New Orleans and has followed Morphy’s trail to Paris and London, always in search of additional information. He has published many articles on Morphy and is considered to be the world’s foremost authority on him as well as the greatest collector of Morphiana. Mr. Lawson is a consulting civil and industrial engineer.” He was born Charles Whipple in Glasgow, Scotland, in April 1886, to parents Hyson Paine Whipple and Helen Robertson Howie. He apparently moved to the United States in 1893. Whether he lived with a family named Lawson after moving to the United States or changed it on his own is unknown. But as of the early 1930s, his parents were living comfortably in Ware, Massachusetts.2

  Lawson, for his part, settled in New York, and like many immigrants of the time became active in radical political causes. Among them was the Ferrer Association, an anarchist educational society created in 1910 by Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. The association was named for the Spanish anarchist and educational reformer Francisco Ferrer, who had been executed the previous year for his role in a massive anti-clerical workers’ rebellion. His American namesake worked to publish his writings in English and create schools modeled on Ferrer’s Escuela Moderna. Lawson’s leftist politics and his devo
tion to research and learning made Ferrer a natural fit, but his membership in the association would soon lead to a different kind of education. Milling about amongst the utopian radicals, all eager for educational reform on Ferrer’s anarchist model, was the poet Lola Ridge.3

  Lola, born Rose Emily Ridge, was a native of Dublin, thirteen years Lawson’s senior, and spent her formative years in New Zealand and Australia. In New Zealand, she met the manager of a local gold mine. In 1895, the two began an ill-fated marriage that ran its course by the early 1900s. After its dissolution, Ridge moved to New York at age thirty-four, hoping to become the poetic success she could never be on the islands. Like Lawson she was an immigrant. Like Lawson she was active in radical politics. And like Lawson, she drifted toward the anarchist utopian Ferrer Association, where she met her fellow immigrant, far younger but full of the same strident zeal. On October 22, 1919, she married him.4

  Ridge was an activist and a feminist, and she emphasized both of these identities in her work. At the time of her marriage to Lawson, she had already published “The Ghetto,” the poem that would make her name through the 1920s and 1930s. Meanwhile, Lawson, flush with the bloom of May, was preternaturally devoted to his December bride. As the late teens became the late twenties, that devotion hadn’t swayed. Ridge was a sickly woman, constantly prone to illness. She often spent summers in Mastic or Yaddo, New York to recuperate and escape the brutal city summer. But wherever her travels took her, her husband continually looked after her needs, sending clothes and medicine and food when she was away.5

  As Ridge fretted over her persistent illnesses and worked on her poetry, Lawson worked as an engineer for both New York and Jersey City. But he wasn’t doing what he wanted. He hoped desperately to work on bridge and building projects, and worked diligently through the late 1920s and early 1930s to reach his goals. It was an age of increasing specialization and civil service exams, and the accreditation process could be grueling. In his time away from work, Lawson continued to take a variety of qualifying examinations to place him in a higher position. In 1929, he took exams to qualify as assistant engineer for structured steel design and civil engineering, as well as one for structural steel designer. As he worked, however, New York passed an ordinance requiring engineers to be licensed by the state, which required not only a twenty-five dollar fee, but yet another in a long line of exams. It was an intense, seemingly endless process, but Lawson remained diligent. He found a job with the New Jersey State Highway Commission and appears to have kept it through at least the bulk of the Depressionera 1930s.6