Endgame

Last Thursday I gave my six-year-old his first lesson in chess and since then we’ve played at least three games daily. He’s no nascent Bobby Fischer. He hasn’t come close to winning and I’m only a middling player, but his enthusiastic optimism is touching and very alien to me. At the conclusion of each losing game he shouts “Rematch!” and we set up the pieces again. We’ve played as many as five games in a row.

It’s an awful fault for a father to admit, and I probably ought to feel guilty, but I find games tedious and I’ve never had the killer instinct needed to excel at them. At some point, whether in chess or baseball, I’ve always concluded, “This is pointless. I don’t care if I hit the ball. I don’t care if I capture the queen.” I’m reminded of Joseph Epstein’s description of juggling – “No self-improvement, no end other than itself, sheer play, exquisitely useless.” – except he enjoys juggling.

I’ve never felt this way about about reading or writing, and the only competition I’ve ever felt is against myself. If not for Michael, I probably would never play chess again, though I enjoy reading about it. Nabokov is the great poet of the game, of course, especially in The Defense, but my favorite literary depiction of chess is hardly a game at all but a metaphor or evocative setting. Perhaps I’m fond of it because of the father-and-child theme, which comes in Act V, Scene 1, of The Tempest, from which Aldous Huxley cribbed the title of his most famous novel. Ferdinand and Miranda are playing. She says:

“O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in it!”

Prospero, her father, with infinite gentleness for her naiveté, says, “’Tis new to thee.” Those four monosyllables never fail to move me. The game is almost beside the point, as it isn’t in Nabokov, Beckett and Stefan Zweig. In 1970, in an interview with Alfred Appel Jr., Nabokov came close to explaining the allure of the game. He explains why he wanted to print his chess problems alongside his Russian and English poems in Poems and Problems:

“Because problems are the poetry of chess. They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity.”

Those are some of the qualities I prize most in prose, but never in chess. When I asked Michael why he enjoys playing chess he answered without hesitation, “It’s fun.” I can barely remember feeling that way.