by Martin Amis
Obsessions and Curiosities
Chess Is Their Life
Searching for Bobby Fischer: The Adventures of a Father and his Brilliantly Gifted Son in the Obsessional World of International Chess by Fred Waitzkin
Earlier this summer I played Nigel Short, the world number three, at what chessers call a charity ‘simul’, or simultaneous display. And I lost. The game was one-sided, and the defeat severe; but I suppose my humiliation was quieter than it might have been against other world number threes – quieter than if, say, I had dared Boris Becker to present himself at Paddington Sports Club, on Castellain Road, there to face the fury of my rising backhand slice. Two other grandmasters were in the hall that day and I appealed to them for advice, which they gave freely, and at high speed. This was no help. It was like listening to the road directions of some hypermanic yokel: by the end of the third paragraph you just want to ask whether it’s right or left at the end of the street. Young Nigel (he was born in 1965) had about thirty other games to attend to, and at first his visits to my board were relaxingly infrequent; later on, though, as positions simplified, and opponents resigned, he seemed to be constantly presenting me with his round, bespectacled, full-lipped face. This face was not so much ageless as entirely unformed: you felt that it would still light up at the sight of a new chemistry set, or a choc-ice. But somehow his hands bestowed terrible powers on the white pieces. Those linked central pawns of his – oh, what they could do to me. They weren’t pawns in the normal sense; they had grown, fattened; they were more like bishops, or rooks. No, they were like queens, I thought, as they worked their way into the very crux of my defence.
Searching for Bobby Fischer is a vivid, passionate and disquieting book. Throughout, it runs a light fever of anxious pride and anxious love. As a ‘chess parent’, a journalist, and a sane man, Fred Waitzkin is articulately aware of what he is doing. And what he is doing isn’t always pretty. Full of bafflement, doubt, persistent self-reproach and comically vulgar ambition, he continues to preside over his son’s distorted boyhood. His wife Bonnie, a moderating influence, ‘frequently reminded us that there is life after chess’; but Fred Waitzkin never quite admits that, so far as little Josh Waitzkin is concerned, there has been no life before it. In every sport, in every exceptional endeavour, the coaching, caddying parent must gamble a compromised present against an uncertain future. But in no other activity is the gamble so discrepant and extreme. Every player in America is ‘searching for Bobby Fischer’ or his reincarnation, in a millennial quest for a Messiah, a deliverer, another world champ. But where is the old redeemer now, and what is he up to? He is, as Waitzkin will eventually reveal, a corny megalomaniac and flophouse miser, curled up on a bed somewhere in Los Angeles with The Myth of Six Million Dead and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The book hinges on this kind of contrast: the purity and otherworldliness of the game, and the human mess and wreckage that almost always surround it. The contrast happens to be at its wildest in the Waitzkins’ home town: ‘With its dense architecture and crafty manipulations, its subtle attacks, intensity and unexpected explosiveness, chess is like the city’ – and that city is New York. Little Josh discovered chess in Washington Square Park when he was six years old; he pestered his mother to take him there; ‘he said he liked the way the chess pieces looked’. But did he like the players, and the way they looked? Israel Zilber, an International Master ‘who reeked of urine and raged at the voices in his head’; Jerry, ‘a strong A player’, also an alcoholic who has gunfights with his wife; or the more typical Vinnie, a master-level player who is ‘often short of change for a subway token’? They are addicts, hustlers, inveterates, recidivists – geniuses, idiots. This is Hoffmann, who dropped out of Columbia twenty years ago:
The chess-hustling business is bad. It’s down with the economy, and O.T.B. [off-track betting] and Lotto have hurt. It’s not a good game for a gambler, because chess players are too rational and conservative. You have to find a true compulsive who happens to play chess – someone who’s essentially masochistic and enjoys being humiliated. One of my best customers was a rabbi … While I beat him, he cursed and screamed, begging me to have mercy on him. I’d tell him, ‘What a fish you are. I’m gonna crush you.’ I took a lot of money from him. Unfortunately, he’s dead now.
Even when you begin to move up the professional scale, the contrast remains sharp. Josh’s chess tutor, Bruce Pandolfini, is Manager of the Manhattan Chess Club, which sounds quite grand until you glimpse him scrubbing its toilet. Major congregations of chess talent take place in sorrowful front rooms over pizza parlours, with stained walls, torn rugs and ‘electrical wires dangling from holes in the ceiling’. Even at the best tournaments ‘the players are a ragtag group, sweaty, gloomy, badly dressed, gulping down fast food, defeated in some fundamental way’. And there is no companionship; there is no human curiosity. The chess freaks will occasionally mutter a few words about giving up the game and doing something different with their lives, ‘which is reasonable, considering that even the most brilliant are impoverished’. Apart from that, it’s just the wooden pieces, and the sixty-four squares.
This is the American way: chess on the free market, with the genius as bum. Early on in the book Fred takes Josh to Moscow for the Karpov/Kasparov World Championship. Before they go, Waitzkin talks to a Soviet defector who is keen to locate the dissident chess champion Boris Gulko:
You’ll need to contact a man I know who is a well-known grandmaster, an expert in the endgame. He is also a KGB agent, but don’t worry, he is totally corrupt. The first day you meet him, give him a present worth fifteen or twenty dollars – a digital watch, maybe … He will suggest dinner. During this meal present him with pornographic books and magazines; then the chances are he will arrange for you to meet Gulko.
And we duly experience the Soviet version: politicking, match-fixing, drug-taking and institutionalized anti-Semitism – chess on steroids, with a gun at the player’s temple. In the United States, a former national champion may be jobless and sleeping rough; in the Soviet Union you can watch him being singled out in the street and beaten up by the police. Normally one’s instinct would be to blame the society for these characteristic injustices. After Searching for Bobby Fischer, though, one is more inclined to blame the game. Why is it that nearly every major chess event is a havoc of scandal, venality and hysteria? As David Spanier pointed out in Total Chess, only outsiders are surprised by such tawdriness. Real players know that this is the way chess is.
Dutifully, without the least hope of success, Waitzkin finally undertakes a literal search for Bobby Fischer, the man who brought chess to America and then, it seemed, ‘took it away’. He doesn’t find him but he brings back a haunting silhouette of the ‘strongest’ player who ever lived. For a while Fischer looks like the classic idiot savant. This is from Brad Darrach’s biography:
When he loses interest in a line of thought, his legs may simply give out, and he will shuffle off to bed like an old man. Once, when I asked him a question while he was eating, his circuits got so befuddled that he jabbed his fork into his cheek.
In a variety of disguises Fischer moves through LA’s Skid Row, ‘from one grungy hotel to the next’, usually registering as ‘Mr James’. He gets a discount at the local anti-Semitic bookstore, so valued is his custom there. Not long ago he had all his fillings removed; he didn’t want anything artificial in his head, in case he picked up radio transmissions. We only need a figure like Mick Jagger in here to complete the miserable pentagram of modern schizophrenia, with its fantasy electronics, media flotsam and sniggering blood libels.
It is quite a road that young Josh is walking; and Josh is the book’s hero, a humorous, endearing and honourable little boy. When he plays, his face ‘becomes serene’ and ‘he doesn’t look like a seven-year-old’. He calls out chess moves in his sleep, and plucks at his hair, developing a small bald patch. But he conducts himself with certainty among the ragged putzes and patzers, the blitzers
and kibitzers. When Josh loses, Fred confesses that he finds it difficult to embrace his son, and notices an extra distance between them as they walk down the street. And yet their shared intensity is in some way enviable. You feel the poeticism is earned when Waitzkin recalls his fishing trips with his brother and father:
While we pulled in our fish, he stood behind us and rooted like any Little League father, as if we were accomplishing life’s great deeds. Sometimes I felt as if I were reeling in his love.
The matter of anti-Semitism runs through the book like a recurrent illness. As I read Searching for Bobby Fischer my own little boys were, as usual, marching or creeping round the house, both armed to the teeth. It has often occurred to me that I could very easily turn them into anti-Semites, into stout little Nazis. Of course, I have little heart for the project. Certainly it would be far more time-consuming to turn them into chess prodigies. One’s reluctance, in the latter case, is not equivalent but it is comparable. Chess genius lives, or windmills its arms, on the outer rim of sanity, as Nabokov knew; but Luzhin’s confusions in The Defence (1929) already seem romantically antique. In More Die of Heartbreak, another book about a ‘pure’ scientist, Saul Bellow writes: ‘Crazies are always contemporary, as sandpipers always run ahead of the foam line on beaches.’ This is one chess combination – mental imbalance, in the contemporary setting – that can only become more and more unlovely. It has taken an exceptionally candid book to remind us that chess is beautiful, and to confirm the hidden or buried suspicion that it is also, somehow, unclean.
The Times Literary Supplement July 1989
Mortal Games by Fred Waitzkin; Chess Is My Life by Viktor Korchnoi; Kasparov–Short: 1993 by Raymond Keene
The face of chess is changing. For one thing, it is getting handsomer. Gone, it seems, are the bespectacled eccentrics, the mumbling autists and reeking regressives of yesteryear. The Grand Master Analysis Room no longer resembles the soundstage of Revenge of the Nerds. And look at the TV team: Daniel King could be a stand-in for Daniel Day-Lewis; John Speelman is the romantic image of the struggling artist, hard-up but head-in-air – the young Courbet, perhaps; once a GM and now a busy chess middleman, Raymond Keene has evolved from cautious pedagogue to broad-handed entrepreneur, to white-suited impresario. Until very recently chess players tended to look like Nigel Short, i.e., like child prodigies catapulted into adulthood. Now they tend to look like Garry Kasparov. Short, with his ripe and inconvenienced stare, is still fascinating to watch, perhaps because he more faithfully conforms to the outsider’s ideas about the game. He expresses its ponderous anguish: the low blink-rate, the dreamlike retardation of gesture and reaction time. Whereas Kasparov, for all his famous intensity, now looks thoroughly secular. He looks as though he is at another kind of board meeting – at the IMF, say, okaying that fifty billion for the Brazilians.
Himself a considerable chess problemist, Vladimir Nabokov wrote two novels about chess, or around chess. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) the interest is structural and metaphorical: the elusive Sebastian moves like a chessman, the knight, the only piece (other than the rook as it castles) capable of leaving the board and then returning to it. He is a figure for the ethereality of the game. The earlier novel, The Defence, is much more solidly, even grossly naturalistic. Here we encounter the slow-moving body and racing mind of a chess master, Luzhin, whose obsessive and tragic quest is for the impregnable ‘defence’ – against the white pieces, and against life. Luzhin will do as the archetypal GM of the pre-modern era. Pure scientist, crazy professor, arrested adolescent. The moment she sets eyes on him, his shadowy sweetheart knows that here is a man who will have to be inspected on his way out of the door every morning: odd socks, unbuttoned fly, a gout of shaving-cream in either ear. Such erotic feelings as he awakens in her are almost exclusively maternal. His besetting vulnerability will lead to breakdown, and then to suicide. Seedy, solipsistic, gullible, pitiable, abstracted, tormented and doomed: this, surely, is our platonic ideal of the chess genius.
No longer. The days of slobs and inverts, of fag ash and crumbs-in-the-beard, are all behind us. Modern chess has become professionalized, technicized – and glamorized. With its ranks of VDUs, its laptops, its display screens and mimic boards, the press room has submitted to the TV burnish: the burnish of the modern. All is fingertip and button-punch. The GMs are practically in lab coats. Information flashes and whirrs like the figures on the computer database. ‘We’re out of the book!’ shouts one analyst to another, around move twelve, when one player unveils (as chess machismo dictates) his latest ‘novelty’: that novelty, he hopes, is on its way to becoming an innovation. Attacks and defences, we notice, are no longer called ‘openings’: they are now called systems. The backstage scene feels like a dramatization of the switch from the old notation to the new. ‘1 … P-QB4’, for instance, has become the brisk, the ruthless, the digitalized ‘1 … c5’.
Garry Kasparov became world champion in 1985. Unquestionably, his has been a style-setting administration, like that of a two-term President. You see the role-model trickledown everywhere, from the Analysis Room to the chess pub or coffee house; maybe even to Washington Square Park, the world of hustlers and misfits (where every bum and babbler is a jinxed GM), so beautifully caught by Fred Waitzkin in Searching for Bobby Fischer. During these years Kasparov has refused to be straitened and caricatured by his own eminence. His self-esteem is still wonderfully sincere (it is without blindspots); he still twists and bounces around while he talks; his laughter is till dismayingly anarchical. Yet he has found amplitude; chess is his energy, but not his trap.
‘I lost my childhood. I never really had it,’ he tells Fred Waitzkin in Mortal Games. ‘For some, chess is stronger than the sense of childhood.’ Viktor Korchnoi gave his autobiography the generically blinkered title, Chess Is My life. What kind of statement is this? A boast, a confession, a helpless confirmation of the obvious? Like most fields of contemporary endeavour, chess obeys the law of ever-increasing specialization. In 1985, aged twenty-two, Kasparov already looked specialized to the point of inanity. And then something happened. Chess might have taken his childhood; but he seems to be hanging on to his maturity.
Clearly the expansion has been partly political. I do not refer here to the bold clash of interests and personalities which saw Kasparov and Short break away from Fide to form their alternative body (the wobbly PCA). Nor yet to the largely symbolic opposition between Kasparov and Karpov, in which Karpov played White, or White-Russian (standing for the apparat and the empire), and Kasparov played Black (standing for ethnicity, decentralization and democracy). In the winter of 1989–90, Kasparov’s home city of Baku in Azerbaijan became a kind of control experiment – conducted by Gorbachev, Kasparov believes – in hardline federal policing, or in brutalist race-management. As in Bosnia, a successful multicultural society was forcibly reinfected with racial atavisms. The bloodbath that followed was Gorbachev’s signal to his restless republics. Kasparov was there; he was involved, he was endangered, he helped the people he could help. And he was never the same. These events not only destroyed his past – they contaminated it. He really had no choice but to reinvent himself.
All Russian chessplayers are prominent political beings, whether they like it or not. Korchnoi and Karpov seemed to form the two ends of the visible spectrum: Korchnoi was conscientiously persecuted before and after his defection, whereas Karpov (to say the least of it) became a consummate placeman, an air-sniffer, a seat-warmer. Such were the traditional options of the intellectual, and the artist, and the sportsman. It was Solzhenitsyn who, in far harder times and for far higher stakes, showed that there was a third way: he showed how you could leap right off the board. If you were a figure of sufficient size, you could confront the state directly, and as an equal, because world opinion was ready and waiting to redress the disparity.
Kasparov has shown that the chess player can also be a political player. He isn’t just a pawn; and he isn’t just a database either, a
n inflated cerebellum, a throbbing maniac in the closed system of the sixty-four squares. The effect has been roundly liberating. It has brought air to the cave of chess, and given colour to the etiolated faces of the players. You could warily argue that the chess genius, whose thoughts are about nothing else but the disposition of power, is in crucial need of the other dimension, to stay steady. Fischer was not coerced into a political life, so his paranoia invented one; and it was a mess. So here’s the simple message that Kasparov sends: diversify if you dare. Play sublime chess while staying active in the world we know. Many of his rivals hate him for this – for his betrayal of the collegiate monomania. Many others see the force of Kasparov’s move, and will emulate him.
Handsomely figureheaded, freshly configured, and at least partly humanized, chess waits in the wings, taking deep breaths, ready to burst on to the stage as a planetary spectator sport. This is the idea. This is certainly Kasparov’s idea. Chess offers its audience the soap opera of opposed personalities in genuinely bitter combat, deploying an unbounded repertoire of feint, bluff, trap, poeticism, profundity, brilliancy, together with a complementary array of blunders, howlers, squanderings, bottlings, clawbacks, pratfalls, chokejobs … What stands in its way? Not the epic slowness of the game, nor its frieze-like immobility. What stands in its way is the gap, the chasm, the abyss that lies between the watcher and the watched. The difficulty is the thing separating the ordinary player from Garry Kasparov. The difficulty is the difficulty.
Here is an average chat in the Analysis Room, with the personable purists lounging over the chess boards, the chess computers, the chess mags and chess printouts, following the game on the closed-circuit TV. ‘Then you hang me on e7.’ ‘We’re trying to get Nd1.’ ‘You were going Bf4, e5, Be3, then d5.’ ‘Nf2!’ ‘Are we winning the piece? Qd7?’ ‘I always think with f3 it’s nothing.’ ‘This is all right. No. It looks horrible.’ ‘Give me that line again? Quickly?’ ‘Kh8.’ ‘Kh8?’ ‘Kh8.’ ‘E3.’ ‘Not f4.’ (Loud sneering.) ‘Bg5.’ ‘Aren’t we meant to have a swinging rook?’ ‘Nigel’s taken it.’ ‘What about Nc7?’ ‘No way was he going e7.’ ‘Nd4, Qc4, Qd2, E5?’ ‘D5?’ ‘I’d consider going a5.’ ‘What about Nd7 again?’ ‘F4!’ (Loud laughter.)
