`A Testy, Choleric Game'

Almost daily since I taught him the game in June, my 7-year-old son and I have played chess, usually sprawled on the floor like boys waging war with toy soldiers. Michael joined the chess club at school, and last Thursday he won his first match. He also joined Cub Scouts recently and earned his first “loop” – in chess (next realm to conquer: geology). He’s monstrously competitive but to his credit he keeps playing even though I’ve lost to him only once.

Almost 400 years ago, in the section devoted to cures in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton recommended chess, along with hunting, fowling, fishing, hawking and other diversions as useful in dispelling the “settled humour” of melancholy. A caveat accompanies the cure:

“Chess-play is a good and witty exercise of the mind for some kind of men, and fit for such melancholy, Rhasis holds, as are idle, and have extravagant impertinent thoughts, or troubled with cares, nothing better to distract their mind and alter their meditations; invented (some say) by the general of an army in a famine, to keep soldiers from mutiny; but if it proceed from overmuch study, in such a case it may do more harm than good; it is a game too troublesome for some men’s brains, too full of anxiety, all out as bad as study; besides it is a testy, choleric game, and very offensive to him that loseth the mate.”

As such, Michael is easily offended, but then I remember my own early experience with chess. My brother and I learned the game from older boys in the neighborhood. Our parents didn’t play, so chess became another alternate, no-adults-admitted refuge. We were lucky: The John G. White Collection of Chess and Checkers, downtown in the Cleveland Public Library, was, and remains, the largest chess library in the world, with 32,568 volumes today. I spent days among the chess stacks, enjoying history as much as strategy, and I ordered chess reprints from Dover Books.

I was 12 and cocky when I learned my older cousin, Julie, enjoyed chess. We played, and she trounced me. Instantly, my ardor cooled, never to return with comparable adolescent ferocity. About the same time I stopped reading science fiction and began to find females oddly attractive. When Julie, who today works for Jane Goodall, beat me, I didn’t clear the board with the back of my hand but I was not gracious in defeat (“testy, choleric”). Burton anatomized another sore loser like this:

“William the Conqueror, in his younger years, playing at chess with the Prince of France
(Dauphiné was not annexed to that crown in those days), losing a mate, knocked the chess-board about his pate, which was the cause afterward of much enmity between them.”

By way of a Burtonian digression, the Rhasis mentioned by Burton was Abu Bakar Muhammad bin Zakaria al-Razi, a ninth-century Persian physician, chemist and alchemist. Known popularly as Al-Rhasis, he was born near Tehran and served as director of a Baghdad hospital. Many books on medicine, chemistry and philosophy are ascribed to him. “Razi Day,” or “Pharmacy Day” is celebrated in Iran on Aug. 27. I don’t know what Rhasis wrote about chess or how Burton got his hands on it, though he seems to have read everything.