The transmigration of souls seems a more reasonable doctrine after you have children and begin to see in them the charms or flaws of long-dead relatives. The Catholic Encyclopedia’s entry on “Metempsychosis” reports that those who believe in it often see “the return of long-departed ancestors” in the living, which “thus provides a simple explanation of the strange facts of heredity.” This observation comes under the heading Savage Races—a fair enough description of the Russos of Carroll County, most of whom are illiterate and backwards in every branch of human knowledge except the discovery and diagnosis of booboos. But the theory strains when you realize the closest correspondences are between yourself and your parents.
I am reminded of this theory because my oldest girl has decided she wants to learn to play chess. I began teaching her in the evenings over Christmas on the floor by the tree. I found myself sprawled out, head propped, holding a drink exactly as my father did thirty years ago in another family room. I had never really taught chess from scratch before, and I heard from my own mouth utterances I haven’t thought of in decades—“one-two-and-over,” “control the center,” “is that a good trade?”
When teaching something like this to a child, it’s hard not to rush in, trying to hustle her into the knowledge it took you years to acquire so that she has a chance at becoming more than a dilettante. You want the child to start where you are now, and so to go higher, farther, etc. We try to correct what we perceive—or think we perceive—our parents did wrong. I have always regretted that I was never compelled to become really good at something, which is, I suppose, a way of offloading responsibility for my own mediocrity and lack of discipline. Dilettantism is my character. I know enough Greek to get me into trouble, and enough Latin to get me out; a touch of chess, a touch of piano, a touch of baseball, but nothing particularly well. This has turned out basically all right for me. But I suspect I’ve missed out by not really knowing much of anything.
Still, you don’t want to push too hard on the kids; they won’t learn if they don’t want it. It’s a balance; it’s psychology; it’s an exercise in propaganda. So I am, I suppose, trying to be a good father.
It’s strange to remember now how chess was always in the background of my childhood. My father had played on the local competitive circuit through graduate school, until his business and his family did what businesses and families do to all men’s hobbies. It must have been a real pleasure when my brother and I got to the age where we could remember how the pieces moved and he could really play with us, if not as peers, at least on the same board. (This, too, is something I see only now.)
The 1990s were a strange time in chess, colored by the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the computer as the organizing principle of human life. Bobby Fischer, the great champion of the free world, went into hiding in 1992 after participating in a tournament in sanctioned Yugoslavia. In 1997, I.B.M.’s supercomputer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the reigning world champion at the time, and it cast a strange shadow of anxiety across my mind. Kasparov, whose short volume on the Queen’s Indian Defense sits on my bookshelf, has had an odd afterlife as a Russian dissident; this afterlife is yet odder in light of the fact that Kasparov subscribes to the “new chronology” of Anatoly Fomenko, which posits (among other things) that recorded history is about a thousand years shorter than generally accepted, with most of the events of the medieval and classical world happening in a condensed period starting around 1000 AD.
Chess attracts this sort of political and historical eccentricity. The late Boris Spassky described himself as a Russian nationalist and a monarchist, but also said he would have become a communist if he had known what would happen to the country after the dissolution of the Union. And worse: Fischer’s apparent mental illness and long flight from the law, which, until his capture in Japan in 2004, was a subject of vaguely messianic speculation among chess people (memorialized in Steven Zaillan’s 1993 movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, a favorite in the Russo household); or his friend, William Lombardy, tumbling from chess to the priesthood to chess to an ignominious old age of poverty and homelessness.
For a number of years, my father ran a student chess club out of our house, which was my main social outlet in middle school. I was a mediocre player. I did not spend much time on the scholastic competitive circuit before deciding to spend my attention elsewhere (mostly to feeling ambiently sad in the afternoon and reading books whose titles and contents I have now forgotten). I don’t know whether my inability was a disappointment to my father; he never indicated that it was. He was a good father.
Still, limited talent or no, I did internalize some fundamentals. As White, I usually play Italian or Spanish games (Ruy Lopez, Four Knights, Giuoco Piano); as Black, I supplement these with the Sicilian and French Defenses. As an adult, I briefly attempted to learn the Indian Game. (No luck: After the age of twenty-five, dilettantism becomes a way of life.) I am an unoriginal chess player; in adulthood, I have realized my sympathies are not with Fischer’s swashbuckling originality, but with Karpov’s joyless competency and Spassky’s tactical grinding. I cannot see deep into the future, and almost everything is improvisation.
I did try to become good. I read my father’s old chess books, starting with the most prosy and fundamental and working towards a daunting, exhaustive volume on White responses to the Sicilian Defense. (I do not know what became of these in my parents’ later changes of residence; my own chess books are only an ugly purple binding of Nunn’s Chess Openings and the Kasparov book.) This unsupervised reading program means that there is a real chance that I will be the last living person to have learned English descriptive notation before algebraic. I still feel a touch wistful at the vanished elegance and gentility of Queen’s Knight’s Pawns and the two overlaid coordinate systems, one for each color, which in the 1970s gave way for good to the unforgiving absolutism of the utilitarian (A–H)(1–8) grid. The Aristotelian conception of space (relational) has given way to the Cartesian (extensive), and that is a shame.
What has for me always been attractive about chess is, I think, not whatever obscure quantitative-spatial itch it scratches among those who are actually good players; it is the symbolic splendor, the beautiful typographic glyphs ♝, ♛, ♞, the diagrams showing board states, the extremely condensed comments of approbation or puzzlement, !, !!, and !?. (I spent much time puzzling over why an apparently pedestrian move earned a ! from a chess writer.) The regionalized families of openings—from Spain, from Scandinavia, from India—are redolent of a world that was once much larger and more variegated. The terminology is ancient, fossilized, exotic; “check” is from the Middle Persian shah, “king,” “checkmate” shah mata, “the king is dead.” The pieces’ names are arcane (I remain unsure what a “rook” is) or relics from the age of chivalry. The players are madmen, often useless outside the rarefied air of the tournament hall. This is heady stuff, especially for the early adolescent who cannot escape the feeling that he was born into a duller world than his forebears.
Other writers have felt the same way. Nabokov was devoted throughout his life to creating chess puzzles or problems, those entertainments that used to fill three inches of column on the comics pages of the newspapers, next to the bridge problem and over the horoscopes. One of his early novels, The Defense, follows a prodigy’s descent into madness. And one of his late works is a collation of poems and chess problems; it is titled, with honestly not much panache, Poems and Problems. The parallel between these “highly specialized, fanciful, stylish riddles,” as he describes them in Speak, Memory, and his intricate and playful fiction-writing is obvious. “Inspiration of a quasi-musical, quasi-poetical, or to be quite exact, poetico mathematical type, attends the process of thinking up a chess composition of that sort”—this comment could just as easily apply to the creation of Pale Fire. “It is a beautiful, complex and sterile art related to the ordinary form of the game only insofar as, say, the properties of a sphere are made use of both by the juggler in weaving a new act and by a tennis player in winning a tournament”—this, too, could apply to the writing of fiction.
Nabokov’s mention of tennis is interesting. Brad Leithauser, poet, fictionist, and a contributor to the New Yorker, wrote a novel in 1989 about a burnt-out chess prodigy playing a high-profile tournament against a supercomputer in Boston. Hence is out of print these days, and perhaps with good reason; it is forbidding work, with a strange frame structure and rather a lot more going on architecturally than the narrative can bear. (The subtitle of the frame narrative novel, confusingly also titled Hence, is “A Meditation in Voices,” a reference to the original title of The Waste Land—it’s that kind of book.) But Leithauser’s greater claim to prominence is that he was David Foster Wallace’s undergraduate advisor at Amherst. Infinite Jest is another complicated study in voices and structure, and also about fraying prodigies in the greater Boston area—but, in the transposition suggested by Nabokov’s offhand comment, tennis is the game of focus, and, while the novel’s subtitle promises “A Failed Entertainment,” Wallace’s masterpiece is nothing if not entertaining.
Like most males of the literary species in my generation, I became a huge and evangelical Wallacehead. My father, who was not much of a fiction-reader, politely read the first few pages of Infinite Jest, but did not see the charm. We rarely played chess in later years. When I tried to revive the habit, it was no good; he tired easily, he lived in Florida, his eyes were too bad to play internet chess. At some point, I had taken my own way, and by time I tried to return to the point where our paths had touched, it was too late, he had traveled on, and there was little enough road left ahead of him. I regret it.
Down my own path, in my own chosen pursuit, the human being may be just as doomed as in chess. Near the end of Hence, less than a decade before Kasparov’s loss to Deep Blue, Leithauser writes about his hero’s strife with the machine that “human victory is not the fitting conclusion to this particular story.” We are regularly bombarded with the assertion—utopian or apocalyptic, or both—that artificial intelligence will replace humans, not just in manipulating spreadsheets or building annotated bibliographies, but in producing the entertainments that pass under the grandiose label of art. Painting and writing will become quaint pastimes in the shadow of a Something that can produce works just as pleasing to audiences. The possible future coming into view is that people become basically uninteresting to each other—that pieces like the one I am now nearing the end of, these efforts to communicate, these gobbets of the marrow of consciousness dug out of the recesses of the personality and presented to someone else, can no longer compete with whatever personalized, scintillating products can be confected in a data center. It seems very lonely. It also seems possible.
On the other hand, people still play chess, and for now fathers still have children. So again, tonight, in a messy living room in a Maryland suburb, after a long day of mining the details of a little life, weaknesses and failures, a man will shake out the plastic pieces (they make a particular high-pitched click as they come out, an unmistakable sound, he would recognize it anywhere even if blindfolded), and, sprawled and propped, iced tea clinking in hand, he will say, as was once said to him, quietly, to the small, expectant face across the vinyl board, “Make your side of the board like mine”—and, for now, she will.
