Paul Morphy: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess

by David Lawson

  But Lawson’s education didn’t stop with his qualifying exams. Through the late 1920s and early 1930s, he earned college credit by taking night courses after work. Again he studied diligently. Again he demonstrated a preternatural devotion to his efforts. It was this course of study, particularly in 1932 and 1933, which gave him the grasp of French required to carry on his Morphy research. “My French examination is only ten days off now,” he wrote his wife in August 1933, “but I feel pretty good about it.” He passed, forging the linguistic base for what would become his life’s work, whether he knew it at that point or not.7

  The feat seems all the more stunning considering the time and economic conditions. Ridge’s illnesses and need for the clear air of vacations kept the small family on the brink of poverty. The couple never seems to have hit extremely dire straights, but money remained a concern, particularly in the heart of the Depression.8

  Still, some French courses and a civil engineering job across the Hudson River do not at first glance seem to provide the seedbed for a sprawling narrative biography forty years in the making. The seedbed, however, was there.

  Lawson’s marriage put him in heady literary circles. He and Ridge were intensely close to novelist Evelyn Scott. Scott, née Elsie Dunn, was a Tennessee native who spent five formative years in Brazil, where she married and took her pseudonym. She traveled for much of her life, but used New York as her home base, relying on the friendship of Ridge and Lawson to help manage her affairs while away. Scott’s most prominent work was The Wave (1929), an experimental novel—the second in a trilogy—about the Civil War.9 The pair was also inordinately friendly with William Rose Benét and his older sister Laura. Laura was a poet and novelist, and in the late 1920s and 1930s she was also an assistant editor for book reviews at the New York Evening Post, the New York Evening Sun, and the New York Times. Bill Benét founded and edited the Saturday Review of Literature. A poet in his own right, Benét would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1942 for his poetry collection, The Dust Which Is God.10 Unlike most New Jersey state employees, Lawson moved in high literary circles. The author and critic Joseph Wood Krutch11 was a family friend, as were the editors Henry Seidel Canby and Amy Loveman, who along with Bill Benét helped found the Saturday Review of Literature. Author and critic Gerald Sykes.12 Harriet Monroe, founder and editor of Poetry magazine. The Chicago composer Henrietta Glick. New York artist and photographer Mary Marquis. Robinson Jeffers. Harry Hazlitt. Gaston Lachaise. Lenore Marshall.13 Idella Purnell, editor of Palms, an influential poetry magazine.14 In his dealings with the literary and artistic lights of the time, Lawson found himself with virtually unfettered access to the craft and business of authorship.

  Even without these friendships, however, Lawson’s literary education would still have made tremendous strides in his Broadway home. He acted as a de facto agent and editor for his wife. Amongst the couple’s vocal worries about the rise of Hitler, their infatuation with the 1932 solar eclipse, and their incessant reading schedule was an extended continuing discussion about the nature of poetry, and Ridge’s in particular. Lawson pushed his wife to complete her work, provided criticism of everything from theme to punctuation, and even occasionally served as her typist.15 This was literary education by any other name, and Lawson’s work with Ridge, his close relationships with the editors and artists of the twenties and thirties, his voracious reading, and his slow but steady mastery of French all made The Pride and Sorrow of Chess possible.

  He would begin his study of Paul Morphy in 1938. Ridge had recently returned from a Guggenheim fellowship in the American southwest, but her always tenuous health continued to fail her. By 1938, her best work was behind her. Ridge would die in May 1941 from pulmonary tuberculosis at age 67.16 The much younger Lawson was left with time and sadness and a void where his literary outlet and his obsessive devotion once resided. Paul Morphy, a study in sadness himself, would fill that void.

  Though his obsession with the chess master began in the late 1930s, the rigor of his investigation reached its full flower in the 1940s. Lawson became a member of the New York Academy of Chess and Checkers, drawing a simultaneous blindfold game with Newell W. Banks (Banks was the simultaneous blindfold player) in 1948. In February 1951, Lawson began an extended correspondence with the Jesuit Spring Hill College, Morphy’s Mobile, Alabama, alma mater. He worked closely with Alumni Secretary and Publicity Director Cliff Worsham and librarian Robert J. Zietz to get all of the pictures, documents, and related papers in Spring Hill’s collection. Officials provided suggestions and citations for possible newspaper sources. The school’s priests took an active interest, as well. In return, he shared with Worsham some of his work on Morphy. Spring Hill was in the process of developing an exhibition on the player for its museum.17

  The transaction was inherently complicated, as a massive fire in 1869 and another in 1909 devastated many of the school’s records, including much of its Morphy material, among them the player’s theses and grade reports. When other avenues proved futile, Lawson even tried to solicit the help of Spring Hill alumni in New Orleans to assist him with research. For their part, the Spring Hill staff worked diligently for Lawson, thrilled that someone was interested in the school’s most famous student. “We have never,” reported Zietz, “done this type of thing in the past.”

  Lawson’s correspondence with the university lapsed after 1953, only to revive again in 1956, then again briefly in 1957. After further research, spanning the course of another decade, Lawson again corresponded with the school’s public relations director. By that point, however, Alabama’s primary sources had run their course, and the relationship changed to the reciprocal trading of articles and other secondary material.18

  The Spring Hill letters, and Lawson’s other correspondence of the period, demonstrate a new drive in the engineer-turned-author. Gone was the loving, pliant doting he demonstrated to his wife, replaced with a fervent persistence, irascible and demanding both in his pursuit of Morphy and in his protection of his own reputation as the guardian of Morphy’s life and legacy. The changes in Lawson, however, were more than attitudinal.

  In place of his wife’s literary luminaries, Lawson began friendships with people such as Norman Tweed Whitaker, an eccentric chessplayer with a significant criminal record. While Lawson was dining with Evelyn Wood and Gaston Lachaise in the early 1930s, for example, Whitaker was serving eighteen months in prison for his role in the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby. Still, he was a master player who knew and competed with the best of his day.19 Lawson kept correspondence with George Koltanowski, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle’s chess column and a renowned blindfold player.20 His preparation for the book also put him in contact with William E. Napier at the very end of the master’s life, for information on Napier’s uncle, Harry Nelson Pillsbury.21 His time at the Manhattan Chess Club put him in close contact with Hermann Helms, Jacques Mieses, Nancy Roos, and the widow of Frank James Marshall.22

  His new connections and friendships paid off. By the 1950s, Lawson had clearly established himself as the principal authority on Morphy. In 1959, for example, Francis Parkinson Keyes wrote requesting clarification of several factual issues pertaining to her biographical novel The Chess Players, still in progress at the time. Keyes was publishing at the same time as Ridge and her contemporaries, but she never ran in those circles. This was not the rekindling of an old friendship. This was an author turning to an expert, an inherent acknowledgement of Lawson’s prowess in Morphy studies.23

  But though Lawson clearly had a new obsession, a new life, a new authority—and though Ridge had long since passed away—Lawson was not without a meaningful, close relationship with a talented, famous woman. In the early 1950s, he started a friendship with chess master Mary Bain. Like Ridge, she was an immigrant. She was a veritable celebrity in her field, the first woman to represent the United States in a national chess championship. She traveled extensively. There were, of course, differences, as well. Bain, born in 1902 in
Hungary, was younger than Lawson. She didn’t move in literary circles. The relationship appears to have been completely platonic. Lawson, however, doted on her in much the same way he did Ridge so many years before. He helped her prepare for her trips, asked her for copies of her work and offered to help annotate it. He attended to her affairs while she was away, sending parcels and packages and facilitating her other correspondence. Bain would die in 1972, as Lawson was in the last stages of his opus.24

  Again a woman close to him had died. Again Lawson was left with Morphy. At that point, however, Lawson had remarried, his wife Rosalind helping correct his drafts and patiently enduring the inevitable marital neglect that accompanies authorship. He would dedicate the book to her.25

  In 1976, he published Paul Morphy: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess with David McKay, when he was 89 years old. Two years after the publication of his masterpiece, he sold his Morphy collection to chess publisher Dale Brandreth. The decades of collecting, writing, haggling, traveling, and purchasing had reached their crescendo. Ridge was gone. Bain was gone. Now Morphy, too, had run his course. Lawson was soon to follow. He died in 1980.26

  Much of the minutia of Lawson’s biography remains unknown, but the single-minded passion with which Lawson pursued his subject indicates that he would want the focus of such an introduction on Morphy, anyway. And, most certainly, his biography traces a “satisfactory outline of the man.”27 Or, at least, the most satisfactory outline possible. His passion for his subject does not lead to blind hagiography. It gives us a nuanced account of a talented and troubled figure—a gifted man who remained haunted by his gift. Morphy is an important figure to chess history, to Sport History, to Louisiana History, to American History. His friend Oliver Wendell Holmes found perhaps the best brief summation of the argument for his necessity in 1859:

  His career is known to you all. There are many corners of our land which the truly royal game of kings and conquerors has not yet reached, where if an hour is given to pastime, it is only in an honest match of checquers played with red and white kernels of corn, probably enough upon the top of the housewife’s bellows. But there is no gap in the forest, there is no fresh trodden waste in the prairie, which has not heard the name of the New Orleans boy, who left the nursery of his youth, like one of those fabulous heroes of whom our childhood loved to read, and came back bearing with him the spoils of giants whom he had slain, after overthrowing their castles and appropriating the allegiance of their queens.

  I need not therefore tell his story; it is so long that it takes a volume to tell it. It is so brief that one sentence may embrace it all. Honor went before him, and Victory followed after.

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  Lawson’s biography develops its narrative in a unique style, particularly for someone with the author’s literary background. While Lawson has much to say about the chess champion and his biography, he repeatedly employs the voices of correspondents and letters to tell Morphy’s tale. Writers generally cringe at such amateur tactics. I did, as well. But as I spent more time with the manuscript, I realized that the talent and insight of the correspondents would have made omission of their language a robbery to us all. I have therefore made no effort to reduce the number of block quotations in the text. I have embraced them as integral to Lawson’s story and his presentation. They are backed by an appendix that includes even more primary source material. I have at many points fixed grammatical mistakes and awkward word choice to make the book easier to read. I have added explanatory notes where appropriate. I have also added an annotated bibliography of selected biographical works on Morphy since the publication of Lawson’s original manuscript.

  But though I haven’t omitted the block quotes, I have omitted and altered other of the book’s original components. Lawson included myriad pictures throughout the text of his original manuscript. Some of those pictures have been retained, others have been omitted or replaced with new images. All have been moved to two distinct picture sections. Also included in Lawson’s original publication was a Part II, a collection of sixty Morphy chess games. I have removed it from this volume. With the continual publication and analysis of Morphy games, Lawson’s Part II provides nothing that cannot be just as conveniently (and in algebraic notation) found in myriad other Morphy books or outlets. Internet chess databases such as www.chessgames.com, for example, carry all of the games cited by Lawson and more, each with running contemporary commentary to make them far more understandable to modern players and enthusiasts.

  Finally, some copies of Paul Morphy: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess included an errata list. Others did not. In a 1979 letter to Edward Winter, Lawson included a copy of the errata, concerned that many of the published copies did not include it.28 Where appropriate, I have included Lawson’s desired changes in the body of the text.

  Thomas Aiello, 2010

  NOTES

  TO EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

  1. William Caverlee, “The Unenthusiastic Chess Champion of the World,” Oxford American (The Sports Issue 2007): 70–71.

  2. According to the 1930 United States Census, a David Lawson originally from Scotland was working as a ship fitter in a New York shipyard. This may or may not be Morphy’s eventual biographer. As of September 1929, Lawson was working for the New Jersey State Highway Commission. Source material for Lawson’s biography is scarce. He was a lifelong New York resident after moving to the United States. His Social Security Number was 113-20-0282. He was a nonsmoker. See “John Whipple or Charles M. Howie or Charles Whipple or David Lawson,” http://gen-web.whipple.org/d0220/I47887.html; Department of Commerce—Bureau of the Census, “Population Schedule,” Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, sheet 77 B; and Lola Ridge Papers, 1900–1941, MS 131, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts (hereinafter cited as Ridge Papers). Still, even after work with these sources, some of the best source material for this brief biographical sketch came from email correspondence with Dale Brandreth, in the possession of the author.

  3. Ridge Papers; and Donna M. Allego, “Lola Ridge: Biography,” Modern American Poetry, http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/ridge/bio.htm. For more on the Francisco Ferrer Association, see Modern School Collection, MC 1055, Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; and Paul Avrich, The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006).

  4. Allego, “Lola Ridge.”

  5. Allego, “Lola Ridge;” and Ridge Papers.

  6. Ridge Papers.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ridge Papers; and Robert C. Peterson, “Evelyn Scott, 1893–1963,” The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture (Nashville: Tennessee Historical Society, 1998), http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=S014. For more on Evelyn Scott, see The Evelyn Scott Collection, MS 2015, Hoskins Library, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee.

  10. Ridge Papers. For more on the Bénets, see The Benet Family Papers, 1918–1960, Collection Number 4667, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

  11. Ridge Papers. For more on Krutch, see Joseph Wood Krutch Papers, 1920–1971, mm74029009, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  12. Ridge Papers; and “Gerald Sykes, 80, Dies; Was Author and Critic,” New York Times, 16 July 1984, B11.

  13. Ridge Papers. For more on Marshall, see Lenore Marshall Papers, 1887–1980, MS Coll/Marshall, Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, New York.

  14. Ridge Papers. For more on Purnell, see Idella Purnell Stone and Palms, TCRC98-A24, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

  15. Ridge Papers.

  16. Michele Leggott, “The First Life: A Chronology of Lola Ridge’s Australasian Years,” Bluff ’06: A Poetry Symposium in Southland, 21–23 April 2006, transcript provided at New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre, http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/fea-tures/blu
ff06/leggott.asp.

  17. “Banks Wins 27 of 34 Games,” New York Times, 1 December 1948, 39; “Chess Letters and Documentation,” David Lawson Collection, CPL Collection Development B802N, Cleveland Public Library, Cleveland, Ohio (hereinafter cited as Lawson Letters); and email correspondence with Dale Brandeth, in possession of the author.

  18. Lawson Letters.

  19. His correspondence with Whitaker, like most in this era, began with chess requests relating to Morphy. It began in 1950 and seems to have dwindled by 1951. “The Papers of Norman Tweed Whitaker,” John G. White Collection, Cleveland Public Library, Cleveland, Ohio; Sam Sloan, “The Most Notorious International Chess Master in Chess History Was Probably Norman Tweed Whitaker,” www.anusha.com/norman.htm, accessed 10 May 2009; Federal Bureau of Investigation, “FBI History: Famous Cases: The Lindbergh Kidnapping,” www.f bi.gov/libref/histor-ic/famcases/lindber/lindbernew.htm, accessed 10 May 2009; and Lawson Letters. See also, John Samuel Hilbert, Shady Side: The Life and Crimes of Norman Tweed Whitaker (New York: Cassia, 2000); and A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh (New York: G. P.Putnam’s Sons, 1998).

  20. “Koltanowski Letters,” David Lawson Collection, CPL Collection Development B802N, Cleveland Public Library, Cleveland, Ohio; and “George Kotanowski, 1903–2000,” The Week In Chess Magazine, The London Chess Center, www.chess-center.com/twic/kolt.html, accessed 10 May 2009.