The Immortal Game

Caliph Ar-Radi was walking in the country, and stopped in a lovely garden, replete with lawns and flowers. His courtiers immediately began to dilate on the wonders of the garden, to extol its beauty, and to place it above all the wonders of the world.

“Stop,” cried the Caliph. “As-Suli’s skill at chess charms me more.”

—al-Masudi, tenth century

PROLOGUE

T
HINK OF A VIRUS
so advanced, it infects not the blood but the thoughts of its human host. Liver and spleen are spared; instead, this bug infiltrates the frontal lobes of the brain, dominating such prime cognitive functions as problem solving, abstract reasoning, fine motor skills, and, most notably, agenda setting. It directs thoughts, actions, and even dreams. This virus comes to dominate not the body, but the mind.

When eleven-year-old Marcel Duchamp first played chess with his older brothers Gaston and Raymond in their home in the French village of Blainville-Crevon in 1898, the game seemed like a harmless distraction, an interesting way of passing the quiet nights in the Normandy countryside. A quick thinker brimming with charm and confidence, Marcel excelled at most things and was well liked wherever he went. Nurtured by his family’s deep artistic roots and following in the path set by his older brothers, he emerged in his late teens as an ambitious cartoonist and painter in Paris.

In just a few years, Duchamp’s intense and unusual work began to catch the public eye—mainly for its refusal to settle into a neat classification. He experimented with and quickly passed through the well-established painting styles of Postimpressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism. By his mid-twenties, in fact, he was moving past painting altogether, into an intellectual-aesthetic realm that would come to be known as conceptual art. With his landmark works
Nude Descending a Staircase, The Large Glass
,
Fountain
(a “ready-made” urinal), and
LHOOQ
(a postcard reproduction of the
Mona Lisa
doctored with a mustache and goatee), Duchamp gave a jump-start to the sedate art world and helped inspire the Dada, Surrealist, and Abstractionist movements. Further, his art and ideas anticipated the emergence of Pop Art, minimal art, performance art, process art, and, says biographer Calvin Tomkins, “virtually every postmodern tendency.” By age thirty, Duchamp had produced a body of work that would make him perhaps the most influential artist of the twentieth century.

And then chess took over.

“Chess holds its master in its own bonds,” Albert Einstein once said, “shackling the mind and brain so that the inner freedom of the very strongest must suffer.”

For more than a decade, the checker-square board game with four-inch medieval war figurines had been merely a happy diversion in Duchamp’s life. In his teens and early twenties, he had played vigorously with family and friends. He also worked it into a few early paintings. But in his late twenties something happened between Duchamp and chess that transformed the relationship into an addiction, and eventually an obsession. Slowly, over a few years’ time, chess moved to the very front of his brain, somehow forcing fundamentals like art, ideas, friendships, and romance to the rear. It was as if these thirty-two inanimate pieces of wood emitted some sort of unseen magnetic or hypnotic power, bending Duchamp’s formidable mind to its own will.

Strangest of all, perhaps, was the fact that this transition happened in the midst of career glory. Imagine John F. Kennedy chucking politics in June 1960 in favor of billiards. Popular and intriguing, Duchamp was the toast of art patrons in Paris, New York, and beyond. Now, at his peak, he was turning away from all this. Days that would ordinarily have been filled receiving admiring gallery owners and customers, and late nights that would have included dinner parties and more studio work, instead became packed with one chess game after another (after another, after another). Between games, Duchamp engaged in the silent, monastic study of chess problems—thousands of tricky endgame scenarios labored over by most serious players. In New York, Duchamp joined the Marshall Chess Club near Washington Square Park, playing until all hours of the night. During a two-year stint in Buenos Aires, he constantly sought opponents, studied chess books, and commissioned a set of custom rubber stamps in order to play through the mail with his New York patron and friend Walter Arensberg.

By his early thirties, the transition was complete. Apart from the design of some chess sets, Duchamp was producing virtually no art. He shocked friends by bluntly declaring that he was giving up his old career to become a full-time chess player. “I play day and night,” he declared in 1919 (at age thirty-two), “and nothing interests me more than to find the right move.”

For hours at a stretch, taking just enough time for meals in between, Duchamp played alone in his apartment, with friends and strangers at cafés, and even in the midst of loud art-world parties. This new life involved not just a reordering of his work and social priorities, he explained to friends, but also his very consciousness. “Everything around me takes the shape of the Knight or the Queen,” he said, “and the exterior world has no other interest for me other than its transformation to winning or losing positions.”

In 1923 he moved to Brussels to further his studies of the game, and then returned to Paris. There he would work on chess problems all evening long, take a short break at midnight for scrambled eggs at the Café Dome, and then return to his room to work on chess again until about four
A.M
.

Even true love could not moderate his fixation. In 1927 Duchamp married Lydia Sarazin-Lavassor, a young heiress. On their honeymoon he spent the entire week studying chess problems. Infuriated, his bride plotted her revenge. When Duchamp finally drifted off to sleep late one night, Lydia glued all of the pieces to the board.

They were divorced three months later.

Illustration by John Tenniel, from Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There

INTRODUCTION

L
ARGE ROCKS, SEVERED HEADS,
and flaming pots of oil rained down on Baghdad, capital of the vast Islamic Empire, as its weary defenders scrambled to reinforce gates, ditches, and the massive stone walls surrounding the fortress city’s many brick and teak palaces. Giant wooden
manjaniq
catapults bombarded distant structures while the smaller, more precise
arradah
catapult guns pelted individuals with grapefruit-sized rocks. Arrows flew thickly and elite horsemen assaulted footmen with swords and spears. “The horses…trample the livers of courageous young men,” lamented the poet al-Khuraymi, “and their hooves split their skulls.” Outside the circular city’s main wall—100 feet high, 145 feet thick, and six miles in circumference—soldiers pressed forward with battering rams while other squads choked off supply lines of food and reinforcements. Amid sinking boats and burning rafts, bodies drifted down the Tigris River.

The impenetrable “City of Peace” was crumbling. In the fifty years since its creation in
A
.
D
. 762, young Baghdad had rivaled Constantinople and Rome in its prestige and influence. It was a wildly fertile axis of art, science, and religion, and a bustling commercial hub for trade routes reaching deep into Central Asia, Africa, and Europe. But by the late summer of
A
.
D
. 813, after nearly two years of civil war (between brothers, no less), the enlightened Islamic capital was a smoldering, starving, bloody heap.

In the face of disorder, any human being desperately needs order—some way to manage, if not the material world, at least one’s
understanding
of the world. In that light, perhaps it’s no real surprise that, as the stones and arrows and horses’ hooves thundered down on Baghdad, the protected core of the city hosted a different sort of battle. Within the round city’s imperial inner sanctum, secure behind three thick, circular walls and many layers of gate and guard, under the luminescent green dome of the Golden Gate Palace, Muhammad al-Amin, the sixth caliph of the Abbasid Empire, spiritual descendant of (and distant blood relation to) the Prophet Muhammad, sovereign of one of the largest dominions in the history of the world, was playing chess against his favorite eunuch Kauthar.

A trusted messenger burst into the royal apartment with urgently bad news. More inglorious defeats in and around the city were to be reported to the caliph. In fact, his own safety was now in jeopardy.

But al-Amin would not hear of it. He waved off his panicked emissary.

“O Commander of the faithful,” implored the messenger, according to the medieval Islamic historian Jirjis al-Makin. “This is not the time to play. Pray arise and attend to matters of more serious moment.”

It was no use. The caliph was absorbed in the board. A chess game in progress is—as every chess spouse quickly learns—a cosmos unto itself, fully insulated from an infant’s cry, an erotic invitation, or war. The board may have only thirty-two pieces and sixty-four squares, but within that confined space the game has near-infinite depth and possibility. An outsider looking on casually might find the intensity incomprehensible. But anyone who has played the game a few times understands how it can be engrossing in the extreme. Quite often, in the middle of an interesting game, it’s almost as if reality has been flipped inside out: the chess game in motion seems to be the only matter of substance, while any hint of the outside world feels like an annoying irrelevance.

The messier the external world, the more powerful this inverted dynamic can be. Perhaps that is why Caliph al-Amin, who sensed that his hours were numbered, preferred to soak in the details of his chess battlefield rather than reports of the calamitous siege of his city. On the board he could see the whole action. On the board he could neatly make sense of significant past events and carefully plan his future. On the board he still might win.

“Patience my friend,” the caliph calmly replied to his messenger standing only a few feet away and yet a world apart. “I see that in a few moves I shall give Kauthar checkmate.”

Not long after this, al-Amin and his men were captured. The sixth Abbasid caliph, victor in his final chess game, was swiftly beheaded.

C
HESS LIVED ON.
The game had been a prominent court fixture of Caliph al-Amin’s predecessor, and would voraciously consume the attention of his successor—and the caliph after that, and the caliph after that. Several centuries before it infected feudal Christian Europe, chess was already an indelible part of the landscape adjoining the Tigris and Euphrates. This simple game, imbued with a universe of complexity and character, demanded from peasants, soldiers, philosophers, and sovereigns an endless amount of time and energy. In return it offered unique insights into the human endeavor.

And so, against all odds, it lasted. Games, as a general rule, do not last. They come and go. In the eighth century, the Irish loved a board game called
fidchell
. Long before that, in the third millennium
B
.
C
., the Egyptians played a backgammonlike race game called
senet
. The Romans were drawn to
duodecim scripta
, played with three knucklebone dice and stacks of discs. The Vikings were obsessed with a game called
hnefatafl
in the tenth century, in which a protagonist King attempted to escape through a ring of enemies to any edge of the board. The ancient Greeks had
petteia
and
kubeia
. These and hundreds of other once-popular games are all now long gone. They caught the public imagination of their time and place, and then for whatever reason lost steam. Generations died off, taking their habits with them; or conquering cultures imposed new ideas and pastimes; or people just got bored and wanted something new. Many of the games fell into such total oblivion that they couldn’t even make a coherent mark in the historical record. Try as they might, determined historians still cannot uncover the basic rules of play for a large graveyard of yesterday’s games.

Contrast this with chess, a game that could not be contained by religious edict, nor ocean, nor war, nor language barrier. Not even the merciless accumulation of time, which eventually washes over and dissolves most everything, could so much as tug lightly at chess’s ferocious momentum. “It has, for numberless ages,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1786, “been the amusement of all the civilized nations of Asia, the Persians, the Indians, and the Chinese. Europe has had it above 1000 years; the Spaniards have spread it over their part of America, and it begins lately to make its appearance in these States.”

The game would eventually pass into every city in the world and along more than 1,500 years of continuous history—a common thread of Pawn chains, Knight forks, and humiliating checkmates that would run through the lives of Karl Marx, Pope Leo XIII, Arnold Schwarzenegger, King Edward I, George Bernard Shaw, Abraham Lincoln, Ivan the Terrible, Voltaire, King Montezuma, Rabbi Ibn Ezra, William the Conqueror, Jorge Luis Borges, Willie Nelson, Napoleon, Samuel Beckett, Woody Allen, and Norman Schwarzkopf. From Baghdad’s Golden Gate Palace to London’s Windsor Castle to today’s lakeside tables at Chicago’s North Avenue Beach, chess would tie history together in a surprising and compelling way.

How could a game last so long, and appeal so broadly across vast spans of time, geography, language, and culture? Endurance is not, of course, a magnificent accomplishment in itself, but a compelling sign that something profound is going on, a catalytic connection between this “game” and the human brain. Another sign is that chess was not just played but also integrated into the creative and professional lives of artists, linguists, psychologists, economists, mathematicians, politicians, theologians, computer scientists, and generals. It became a popular and pliable metaphor for abstract ideas and complex systems, and an effective tool through which scientists could better understand the human mind.

The remarkable scope of this game began to infect my own brain after a visit from an old family ghost in the fall of 2002. My mother had sent on some faded newspaper clippings about her great-grandfather, my great-great-grandfather, a diminutive Polish Jew named Samuel Rosenthal who immigrated to France in 1864 and became one of its legendary chess masters. Family lore had it that Rosenthal had impressed and/or somehow secured the gratitude of one of the Napoleons, and had been awarded a magnificent, jewel-encrusted pocket watch. No one in the family seemed to have actually seen this watch, but they’d all heard about it. Four generations down the line, this story, retold to a boy from the Ohio suburbs, was just exotic enough, and just hazy enough, to set the mind racing. I had begged Mom for years to tell me more about the great S. Rosenthal and his lost watch.

As I combed through the records on my mother’s mother’s father’s father’s achievements, wondering what spectacular (if still hidden) intelligences had filtered down through the generations, I also became reacquainted with the game itself, which I had not played since high school (and then only a handful of times). Stumbling through a few dozen games with friends at home and with strangers over the Internet, I found that I was just as ambivalent about chess as I’d been twenty years earlier—charmed by its elegance and intrigued by its depth, but also put off by the high gates of entry to even moderately serious play. Graduating from patzer to mere competence would require untold hundreds of hours of not just playing but studying volumes of opening theory, endgame problems, and strategy. Years of obsessive attention to the game might—
might
—eventually gain me entry into reasonably serious tournaments, where I would no doubt be quickly dispatched by an acid-tongued, self-assured ten-year-old. Chess is an ultimately indomitable peak that gets steeper and steeper with every step.

I was also repelled, frankly, by the forbidding atmosphere of unforgiving rules, insider jargon, and the general aggressiveness and unpleasantness that seemed to accompany even reasonably casual play. I recalled one of Bobby Fischer’s declarations: “Chess is war over the board,” he proclaimed. “The object is to crush the opponent’s mind.” Fischer was not alone in his lusty embrace of chess’s brutality. The game is often as much about demolishing your opponent’s will and self-esteem as it is about implementing a superior strategy. No blood is drawn (ordinarily), but the injury can be real. The historical link between top chess play and mental instability stands as yet another intriguing feature about the game and its power. “Here is nothing less,” writes recovering chess master Alfred Kreymborg, “than a silent duel between two human engines using and abusing all the faculties of the mind…. It is warfare in the most mysterious jungles of the human character.”

Still, much to my wife’s dismay, I got hooked. It is an intoxicating game that, though often grueling, never grows tiresome. The exquisite interplay of the simple and the complex is hypnotic: the pieces and moves are elementary enough for any five-year-old to quickly soak up, but the board combinations are so vast that all the possible chess games could never be played—or even known—by a single person. Other parlor games sufficiently amuse, entertain, challenge, distract; chess
seizes
. It does not merely engage the mind; it takes hold of the mind in a way that suggests a primal, hardwired connection.

Even more powerfully, though, I became transported by chess’s rich history. It seemed to have been present in every place and time, and to have been utilized in every sort of activity. Kings cajoled and threatened with it; philosophers told stories with it; poets analogized with it; moralists preached with it. Its origins are wrapped up in some of the earliest discussions of fate versus free will. It sparked and settled feuds, facilitated and sabotaged romances, and fertilized literature from Dante to Nabokov. A thirteenth-century book using chess as a guide to social morality may have been the second-most popular text in the Middle Ages, after the Bible. In the twentieth century, chess enabled computer scientists to create intelligent machines. Chess has also, in modern times, been used to study memory, language, math, and logic, and has recently emerged as a powerful learning tool in elementary and secondary schools.

The more I learned about chess’s peculiarly strong cultural relevance in century after century, the more it seemed that chess’s endurance was no historical accident. As with the Bible and Shakespeare, there was something particular about the game that made it continually accessible to generation after generation. It served a genuine function—perhaps not vital, but often far more than merely useful. I often found myself wondering how particular events or lives would have unfolded in chess’s absence—a condition, I learned, that many chess haters had ardently sought. Perhaps the most vivid measure of chess’s potency, in fact, is the determination of its orthodox enemies to stamp it out—as long ago as a ruling in 655 by Caliph Ali Ben Abu-Talib (the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law), and as recently as decrees by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1981, the Taliban in 1996, and the Iraqi clergy in post-Saddam Iraq. In between, chess was tamped down:

in 780 by Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdi ibn al-Mansur

in 1005 by Egypt’s al-Hakim Bi-Amr Allah

in 1061 by Cardinal Damiani of Ostia

in 1093 by the Eastern Orthodox Church

in 1128 by St. Bernard

in 1195 by Rabbi Maimonides

in 1197 by the Abbot of Persigny

in 1208 by the Bishop of Paris

in 1240 by religious leaders of Worcester, England

in 1254 by King Louis IX of France (St. Louis)

in 1291 by the Archbishop of Canterbury

in 1310 by the Council of Trier (Germany)