Chess Play and Obsession

The success and popularity of the Netflix "limited series" The Queen's Gambit reminds me of the surge in interest in the game which took place when Bobby Fischer won the world championship in 1972.  I was a high school team player at that time, and the interest of others in the game was a subject of some fascination to me.  The match between Fischer and Spassky was, incredibly, broadcast live courtesy of public television, with commentary by Shelby Lyman.  I watched that broadcast and, more significantly, others did as well.  The popularity of the match and the game which resulted astonished me.

Chess players--serious chess players, in any case--have been and always are fascinated by the game; one might almost say addicted to it or obsessed with it.  It's necessary to devote a significant amount of time to it to play well, and the amount of time it's necessary to devote to it increases the more one plays and the better one gets, as does the quality of your opponent.  At the highest level, chess is life, as Fischer once said--for him it was in particular, it seems.  It's unclear he had any life apart from it.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I've never reached the highest or indeed the higher levels of play.  I played a great deal in high school, studied the game, and was successful particularly in the last year I participated in scholastic play.  Then I stopped playing, only to begin playing once more much later in life.  I'm now a club player, but haven't been in a tournament in many years.

The star of the Netflix series is addicted to drugs and alcohol, and the implication is her remarkable talent as a chess player is in some manner associated with those addictions and may itself be a kind of addiction.  I think there's something to that.  Chess has long been associated with intelligence.  One derives pleasure from being thought intelligent, and being thought more intelligent than those one defeats at chess.  Pleasure is also felt when winning, and winning at chess is thought to be the result of the fact the winner's intelligence is greater than that of the defeated.  The winner of a chess match is perceived as intellectually superior to his/her opponent.  Fischer used to say that he felt joy in crushing the will of his opponents, or something to that effect.  Such a feeling may well be sought eagerly and would be intense enough to give rise to something like addiction.  

Chess has also been associated with insanity.  Fischer, unfortunately, is a case in point.  The great 19th century player Paul Morphy apparently went mad.  G.K. Chesterton noted that reason, or excessive reasoning, can cause insanity, and pointed to chess players in support of this claim.   Chess has also been associated with evil geniuses.  Intellectual villains are sometime portrayed as being avid players of the game. There seems to be something of the game that attracts and repels us.  It's attractive as an exercise in skill, but we seem troubled by the display of great skill when it is confined to chess play.  We're moralists to an extent.  We think great ability of this kind should be applied to something more wholesome, and of greater benefit to people and the world.  There's something strange and dubious about great chess players.

I have no idea what it is about me that attracts me to the game.  But I think that to be a serious player one must at least have a fairly sizable ego, an ability to focus intensely and an ability to perceive combinations available in a position.  I have those characteristics, to a certain extent.  But a great player must have them to an extraordinary degree.  The ability to focus on the game alone, and nothing else, strikes me as especially important to success over the board.  Fischer, as I noted, said that chess is life, and the lead in the Netflix series says something similar.  I think it was that the chess board is itself a world, and most importantly one that she could control.  Being an orphan and subject to the whims of so many others, it's understandable she would seek out and master a world less cluttered and subject to strict rules. For a great chess player, chess is all-consuming.  Like an addiction to drugs and alcohol, I would think.

"A beautiful game, except for the players"  So says one of the characters in The Bishop Murder Case, one of the works of S.S. Van Dine involving the "detective" Philo Vance, when referring to chess.  The suspects in that book are a chess master and theoretical physicists, one of whom is disabled and fond of children's games.  Strange, unnatural, dangerous people, capable of atrocities. 

A beautiful game nonetheless, though. 

Paging Philo Vance

This will be another rather fluffy post to relieve the dreariness of these times, or at least the dreariness of my mind.

As some few of us may recall, Philo Vance was a fictional detective, of a sort, created by Willard Huntington Wright and featured in a series of quite popular books by that author under the pen name S.S. Van Dine.  They were popular in the 1920s and 1930s, though, and so may be forgotten now by most.  They were the subject, at least nominally, of popular films and a radio series.  I've listened to some of the radio broadcasts, and would think that Vance as portrayed in them would be hardly recognizable to readers of the books.

Vance was an odd sort of detective.  He wore a monocle (some stills of the movies show him with a monocle, so perhaps the films are more accurate).  Independently wealthy, educated in Europe, possessing an Oxford accent (he even uses "old boy"), knowledgeable about most everything, expert in most everything, an artiste, a gourmet, a dog show enthusiast; effete, cynical, pretentious, a fop, dandy and a dilettante according to critics.  Ogden Nash was moved to say that Vance needed a kick in the pants.  Writers of the hard-boiled detective fiction who succeeded him, like Raymond Chandler, thought him a contemptible character.  But even so, he displayed on a few occasions a knowledge of martial arts, something which would have been rare at the time, which allowed him to subdue those who underestimated his physical prowess.

The Vance of the radio broadcasts has none of the foregoing characteristics, and in the last episode I heard was beating a suspected killer to make him talk. 

His creator was an unusual fellow himself.  He was an art critic and friend, perhaps even a protégé, of H.L. Mencken, author of books on Nietzsche and art, a proponent of unusual, "modern" writers of the time and of fiction then considered sexually explicit (which got him fired from the magazine The Smart Set).  He also wrote a very odd book I'm currently reading in which he rants against the Encyclopedia Britannica, entitled Misinforming a Nation.  He was infuriated by the editors and writers involved in that encyclopedia, and what he considered to be their irrational and unfair prejudice in favor of English authors and artists they considered representative of the morals of the English middle class.

He was also incensed by the fact the encyclopedia sold so well in the United States although to him it denigrated American and neglected American writers and artists.  It's an interesting if sometimes peculiar read, full of references to authors I've never heard of in addition to those I have read, and if the descriptions of entries in the encyclopedia are accurate it was indeed prejudiced, but I find it odd that someone published a book saying so.

I read these books while a teenager, and was impressed by them.  Now, I'm not so much impressed as amused, entertained.  While in some respects the continuing characters are stock, and duly stupid in the manner Watson is to highlight the cleverness of Sherlock Holmes, Vance and some of the villains are interesting in a weird way, and some of the plots, though contrived, are interesting, and involve such things as classical music and one in particular somehow combines chess, nursery rhymes and the higher mathematics and theoretical physics into motives for murders.

A perpetually perplexed District Attorney who has long been a friend of Vance comes to him with murders and they are presently solved by Vance, who determines the killer primarily by consideration of psychological factors.  Investigations are interrupted by afternoon teas, attendance at concerts, perusal of displays of art, and lunches, dinners and sometimes even breakfasts made up of delectables lovingly described.

It seems to me that some clever person should resurrect Vance as a detective for the times.  Surely we're all weary unto death of the various Law & Order and NCIS spin offs and their copy cats.  The British "mystery" series which we see now and then on PBS are interesting, but we see them only when the local PBS channel is not otherwise involved in soliciting money or broadcasting episodes of such as This Old House.  There are also the Sherlock Holmes derivatives, one of which features Holmes as a smirking know-it-all accompanied by a female Watson, the other of which is much better but still involves the fantasy of Holmes living and investigating in our time, and so necessarily anachronistic.

The TV or movie Vance of today should, I think, remain in his own time.  His rather androgynous character and ambiguous sexuality would have broad appeal in a time where sexuality is of such importance; one can think of him as most anything one cares to, in that respect.  Psychology being something we've all been taught to "practice" in one way or another, his criminal theories would be entertaining.  His erudition would be enlightening, and his stories a welcome relief from the bang-bang, kiss-kiss that characterizes so much of our visual media.  It's true that all the characters in the Vance stories are white, though there are a few Chinese now and then in one or two books, and I suppose that would create some problems, but it would, after all, be a period piece.

If some clever media type really does take this idea and run with it, though, I would hope that at the least some credit for the idea be given to me, Ciceronianus the lawyer and sometimes whimsical blogger.