AND ANOTHER THING
Antagonism, fury, instant slaughter: a day in the chess player's life
PAUL JOHNSON
The end of the Cold War opens the age of the Chess Wars. There is something symbolic in the decision of Short and Kas- parov to break with the sinister World Chess Federation, whose dictatorship was sustained by East-West tension and which was overdue for discreditation. A Times leader thinks the breakaway of the leading players should make the game safe for 'free enterprise, meritocracy and democracy'. I would not be so sure. If chess becomes a world craze, as now seems likely, we shall be hearing from powerful, ancestral voices which have not yet spoken. What of the 800 million who inhabit India, where the game in its prehistoric form, chatarunga, was invented? Or the billion Chinese, who also claim to have fathered chess, and who have a distinctive variant, choke-choo-hong-kai? Then there are the Japanese, who have been playing their version, shogi, for a mil- lennium, and who will be taking a growing interest now that money has displaced poli- tics as its dynamic, and control of the game is up for grabs. Nor should we underesti- mate the Americans: what if Disneyland, for instance, should decide chess is worth taking over? I have a nightmare of millions of kids being introduced to the game by gigantic Mickey-kings and Minnie-queens, with Goofy-knights, Donald-Duck-bishops and Snow-White-and-the-Seven-Dwarf- pawns, while the world champions battle it out in plastic Wagnerian castles.
Strictly speaking, chess ought to be the most innocuous of human pastimes, a game not of chance but of pure ratiocination, since there is no luck in it whatever other than the tiny advantage of white over black — and even that is evened out in a series. It is a feast of cerebral skill in which there is no urge to gamble, the quintessential intel- lectual's game from which sensuality, cupidity and animal instincts are banished, and horn° sapiens, pure and undefiled, wins by brain power alone. Unfortunately, clever people are as prone to vanity, spitefulness and aggression as anyone else — more so, perhaps — and so chess is just as likely as any other pastime to end in tears and rage. If Mr Jorrocks could describe hunting as 'the image of war without its guilt, and only five-and-twenty per cent of its danger', then chess is entirely risk-free, but the bellicose imagery is ubiquitous. All chess games end in genocide or unconditional surrender, or after protracted trench-warfare attrition, peter out in an angry peace (or 'draw') which is mere preparation for further hos- tilities.
Great craftsmen from scores of races, working in ivory, silver, stone, porcelain, cast iron and wood, have exercised their inventiveness in chess sets, but the prevail- ing theme is confrontation and battle. It is true collectors can find sets of heavily glazed Doulton mice, or Meissen frogs, or foxes painted by the Nazarene Von Kaulbach, or locusts made in glass blown in the Venetian lagoon, or Chinese ivory rats with ruby and amber eyes. But no one ever played an actual game with these off- putting things. The set I would most like to possess was made in the late 18th century in ceramic by Wedgwood, with designs by the sculptor John Flaxman, who used Mrs Siddons as his model for the queens and her brother Charles Kemble for the kings. But such treasures are cabinet pieces. The vast majority of sets stress conflict and cer- emonious annihilation. Long before the West arrived, mandarins played with sets of Chinese and Mongolian soldiers. Brahmins used Hindu and Mussulman warriors, then, when the East India Company took over, switched to turbaned armies fighting an array of 'Johns' in top hats.
The theme of antagonism in chess has been explored in countless variations all over the world for many centuries. A thou- sand years ago, Dark Age intellectuals were bidding craftsmen make pawns like Viking invaders and Saxon house-carls, and only the other day I saw in a Baker Street shop a set of constables dominated by Sherlock Holmes, in white, and Professor Moriarty's gang in black. This dualism of crime and its prevention is not so different from the Flemish sets, made in the 16th century and after, featuring Virtue and Vice, with the white king and queen reverently clasping 'He's suffering from Ides.' bibles and the pawns as cherubs, while the black king is Mephistopheles, and his queen does a striptease to the delight of pawn imps. French and German craftsmen produced some memorable battle scenes in enamelled pieces: Gustavus Adolphus ver- sus the House of Habsburg, Catholics and Huguenots, Richelieu's red-crossed guards with His Eminence as king, against muske- teers led by Anne of Austria as queen. I believe there is an 18th-century set of Wolfe and Montcalm, and there are cer- tainly many different Waterloo sets, both French- and English-made, featuring Bona- parte and (quite anachronistically) Josephine as queen, Wellington, Ney, Massena, the Prince Regent and his much- hated Caroline. The old Russian Imperial Porcelain Factory, before it was nation- alised, even produced a set of Communists and Capitalists.
Antagonism, fury, instant slaughter, long- meditated revenge and the lust to annihi- late your opponent are thus natural to chess and may help to explain why grand- masters so often hate each other — their personal animosities, as in boxing, helping to increase the saturnine appeal of the game. The symbolic violence of chess may also explain why, until recently, the game had so little attraction for women, who tend by nature to be eirenic. My awareness that women were not keen on chess came at an early age, five or perhaps even less, when I watched my parents in the terminal stage of a game to which my mother had been reluctantly conscripted. Father (impa- tiently): 'No need to ponder any further. You have only two possible moves, this — and that.' Mother: I have only your word for it. Supposing I think of a third?' Father 'No. I have worked them all out. You have two moves only.' Mother 'You are wrong. There is a third.' Father (excitedly): 'I don't believe you — what is it?' Mother: 'This.' Kicks table over and scatters piece on the car- pet. That was the only time I heard my father swear, for which he was instantly rebuked, my mother thus ending with the moral advantage too.
However, things are changing. A 15-year- old Hungarian genius, Judit Polgar, has beaten Boris Spassky in a match and achieved grandmaster status (not, I notice, 'Grand Mistress' or even Grand Person — chess is a conservative game, as befits its antiquity). In addition to everything else, we are facing the rise of chess Amazons.
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