The Immortal Game (19 page)

A
T THE TAIL END
of his career, Marcel Duchamp was frequently asked why chess had become such an important part of his life. “I always loved complexity,” he said. “With chess one creates beautiful problems.”

That sentiment—
beautiful problems
—could serve as a motto for twentieth-century artists and intellectuals, all of whom had to extract truth and beauty from complexity in one way or another. Even as nations exploited chess for political gain, the ancient game lost no significance as a thought tool. A stream of modern artists, scholars, and scientists leaned on the game to work through problems of their age. “As metaphor, model and allegory, chess performs powerful cultural work,” offered Pennsylvania State University social theorist Martin Rosenberg. The world had changed substantially since
A
.
D
. 600, but chess still somehow had that fundamental ability to explain the unexplainable, make visible the abstract, and extract simple truths from complex worlds.

This was not the intellectually cohesive world of John Locke and Benjamin Franklin, where all available knowledge could still fit into a single library building and where adventurous thinkers could simultaneously engage in medicine, engineering, philosophy, and diplomacy. The twentieth century saw knowledge explode and all thought become hyperspecialized, with each specialty employing its own idiomatic terminology and belief system. Naturally, every discipline needed its own particular metaphors to help convey meaning. What’s striking about chess in this era is that it transcended the many narrow corridors of language and thought, finding equal utility in the behavioral labs of cognitive science (already discussed in Chapter 7), the silicon forests of artificial intelligence (to be discussed in Chapter 11), the notebooks of novelists, the whiteboards of physicists, the logical matrices of philosophers, and on and on. Three quick examples will demonstrate the game’s modern breadth:

• Austrian-born British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, regarded by many as the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, was utterly fascinated by chess, referring to the game nearly two hundred times in his writings. As a contained entity with simple, fixed rules and near-limitless possibility, chess served as a model through which he could study other abstract systems such as mathematics and language. Chess was his logic and systems abacus, always at the ready to work out a particular thought problem.

• The legendary American physicist and physics teacher Richard Feynman relied heavily on chess in his lectures at the California Institute of Technology (later published in the 1994 book
Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
) to help decode the scientific process for his students. Walking through detailed references to the game, Feynman conveyed the process of both devising and testing hypotheses.

• Italo Calvino, the whimsical and postmodern Italian author of
Cosmicomics, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
, and other influential fictions, was impressed by chess’s ability to transform limitless data into a simple impression. In his novel
Invisible Cities
, the vast empire of the aging Mongol warrior Kublai Khan has grown beyond his ability to govern and even beyond his comprehension. He sees his holdings only as “an endless, formless ruin.” Enter the young Venetian explorer Marco Polo, who surveys dozens of the Khan’s cities and reports in great detail back to him. When Polo relays his experience by shifting around symbolic objects on a large checkered tile floor, Kublai Khan becomes convinced chess is all they need to communicate. “Kublai was a keen chess player….He thought: ‘If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains.’” As with Wittgenstein and Feynman, chess for Calvino was a window into grasping complex systems. For anyone interested in language or mathematics or geography, what really mattered wasn’t the catalogue of individual words or numbers or alleyways so much as the system that bound them together. Rules, governed by logic, were the key to understanding and administering complex worlds.

Chess in the twentieth century was so pervasive, in fact, that it became a central part of the study of metaphor itself. In his essay “Chess Rhizome: Mapping Metaphor Theory in Hypertext,” Penn State professor Martin Rosenberg attempts to decode what he calls “the interdisciplinary dimensions of metaphor.” He also poses perhaps the most pressing question about its power: Does metaphor work by bringing language close to reality or by effectively—seductively—shaping reality? If the latter, the use of metaphor needs to be taken extremely seriously; its choice and precise deployment can shape cultures and nurture or destroy lives. This idea also suggests that even the best and most agreeable metaphors should be treated skeptically, monitored for cognitive trickery, and regularly reexamined in hindsight to ensure that their consequences are desired and beneficial.

S
OME IN
the twentieth century applied chess to difficult thought problems, and others were drawn to its aesthetics. Marcel Duchamp’s resonant phrase
beautiful problems
referred, of course, not to the physical beauty of the board or its pieces, but to the dynamic struggle of the game and its unpredictable outcomes. Chess was, to most serious players and observers, a highly ritualized aesthetic event. “All chess-players are artists,” Duchamp declared in 1952. Not surprisingly, an awful lot of serious artists were fascinated by the game.

For a brief time in the 1920s, chess and its dynamic energy had seemed imperiled. Over several decades, Wilhelm Steinitz’s Scientific revolution had generated such intensive analysis that many feared the game was nearing some sort of intellectual end point, its creative possibilities nearly exhausted. Cuban sensation José Raul Capablanca, world champion from 1921 to 1927, publicly expressed this sentiment.

To the rescue came the third great style of chess play, after the Romantic school and the Scientific school: the Hypermodern school, a paradigm-shattering gift to chess from Aron Nimzowitsch, Richard Reti, and other players in the 1920s and ’30s. In a sharp turn away from over four centuries of master-level play, the Hypermodernists sought (among other things) not to “overburden” the center of the board with Pawns early in the game. Instead, they first developed their Knights and Bishops to put pressure on the center, operating from the flanks. (Eventually a Hypermodern player might attack an opponent’s centerboard Pawns after those Pawns had become overextended or vulnerable in some other way.) Even more than this one radical idea, the Hypermodernists rejected the Scientific school’s proposition that only one set of principles could be applied to the game. In doing so, they reaffirmed chess’s limitlessness. The lesson of the Hypermodern revolution was that anything was still possible, that discovery of the game had only just begun.

Since the Hypermodern pioneers were Jewish, Nazi collaborator Alexander Alekhine later railed against the new style as “fear to struggle, doubts about one’s own spiritual force, a sad picture of intellectual self-destruction.” The truth, as Alekhine knew better than most, was precisely the opposite: Hypermodernism was not about fear, but about the love of intellectual adventure. It was, in fact, archetypal modernism—the spirit of breaking decisively with past styles in order to make a new aesthetic contribution to the world. Thus it was closely connected to the early twentieth-century intellectual ferment that spawned the fiction of Joyce, Proust, and Kafka, the theater of Brecht and Pirandello, the fabulist tales of Jorge Luis Borges, the slapstick of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, the experimental music of John Cage, and the conceptual art of Marcel Duchamp. These intellectual-aesthetic warriors and many others were part of an existential reach for something new and great; they willingly, even eagerly, tore down old conventions to get where they needed to be. As different as their works were from one another, there was a seamless spiritual connection running between them. Not surprisingly, many of these avant-gardists were also dedicated chess players, and several incorporated the game into their work.

Duchamp led the way. Having enjoyed chess since childhood, his passion for it escalated in his twenties until it apparently began to eclipse his interest in producing art. If his peers thought this intense phase would quickly pass, they miscalculated. In 1921 Duchamp informed the painter Francis Picabia that he wanted to be a professional chess player and started on an intensive course of training and competition. In the early 1930s he played for the French national chess team, which was then led by world champion Alexander Alekhine. (Records still exist of an Alekhine–Duchamp game during an Alekhine simultaneous display, which Duchamp won.)

Duchamp did not, of course, stop being an artist. Chess did not so much overshadow Duchamp’s aesthetic as merge with it, according to his biographer Calvin Tomkins. What to the outside world looked like Duchamp leaving his art behind was, in his own mind, a logical extension of where he had been heading all along. “Chess was much more than a retreat or a refuge,” writes Tomkins. “It was a near-perfect expression of the Cartesian side of his nature…. Duchamp’s working methods were marked by an almost mathematical precision, and one of the things he loved about chess was that its most brilliant innovations took place within a framework of strict and unbendable rules.”

Duchamp, in other words, was in love with logic and its consequences. His cheerful curiosity seemed to compel him to see beauty not just in colors and shapes but also in the very components of thought. “Chess is a marvelous piece of Cartesianism,” he told Tomkins, “and so imaginative that it doesn’t even look Cartesian at first. The beautiful combinations that chess players invent—you don’t see them coming, but afterward there is no mystery—it’s just pure logical conclusion.”

In the 1930s Duchamp struck up a friendship and chess camaraderie with the writer Samuel Beckett. They met through Duchamp’s close companion Mary Reynolds, a surrealist artist. Beckett had also been a lifelong addict of the game, playing on the chess team at Dublin’s Trinity College and often incorporating it into his work. “Assumption,” his first published short story, contained allusions to chess. As a player, Beckett had closely followed the chess column that Duchamp was writing at the time for the Paris daily newspaper
Ce Soir
.

The two were not evenly matched. Duchamp was one of the best players in France, and no doubt swept Beckett off the board in most of their encounters. But still they enjoyed each other’s company, and continued to play. The two came together again in the summer of 1940, converging on the Atlantic coastal town of Arcachon, southwest of Bordeaux, as they fled the Nazi onslaught. All summer they played lengthy chess games together in a seafront café. While their conversations were not recorded, we can imagine that they discussed their mutual interest in chess’s dialectic between total freedom and complete constriction, between choice and futility. Beckett, one of the most pessimistic writers of the century, was fascinated by the futility of human action and by human interdependence, among other matters. He also consistently worked to undermine every possible aspect of conventional narrative, and once remarked that the ideal chess game for him would end with the pieces back in their starting positions.

Endgame, the distinct and stark final phase of chess, particularly fascinated both Duchamp and Beckett. In the classic endgame scenario, only a handful of pieces are left on the board—often just a King and one or two other pieces on each side—and the thrilling, maddening complexity of middlegame has been supplanted by a barren geometric landscape where one simple blunder can easily cost either player the game. For some, endgame play is intuitive, for others, it must be studied intensively; many lopsided chess positions have been quickly reversed by crafty endgame players.

In 1932 Duchamp published his only chess book, the elegiacally titled
Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled
, which focused on one particular endgame scenario. In a domain where thousands of books are written about specific openings and very specific strategies,
Opposition
holds, even today, the strange distinction of being perhaps the most obscure chess book ever published. The book had a limited printing—which made sense, since its subject matter was limited to a particular board position that was very, very rare. “[It] would interest no chess player,” Duchamp bluntly remarked. “Even the chess champions don’t read the book, since the problem it poses only comes up once in a lifetime. They’re end-game problems of possible games but so rare as to be nearly Utopian.”