Tracing the divine obsession
CHECK MATES | Also known as `the game of games,' chess has seduced kings and queens, beggars and madmen for 1,500 years. An acclaimed new book explores its evolution. By Kenneth Kidd

Nov. 19, 2006. 07:53 AM
KENNETH KIDD

There was no isolated force that propelled chess back into the life of a then-thirty-something writer named David Shenk. It was more of a coalescing, really.

Chance naturally played its part. He just happened to end up meeting an old friend and deciding to play a game. But by then Shenk had already become a huge fan of The West Wing, a television show laced with allusions to chess.

And lurking in the background was the fuzzy knowledge that one of his ancestors had been a very big wheel in Victorian chess circles.

Shenk, now 40, was soon traipsing through the rich history and lessons of a game that has fascinated everyone from William the Conqueror and Benjamin Franklin to Karl Marx and Samuel Beckett.

A New Yorker, Shenk was in Toronto last week to discuss his resulting book, The Immortal Game. Here is an edited version of the conversation.

Chess has a number of creation myths. Do you have a favourite?

The game, as we understand it, goes back to ancient Persia, and it's 1,400 or 1,500 years old. It was in the Silk Road region, and I like the idea that this was not a game someone came up with one morning to please a king or something. I like the idea that it was a game that evolved. Probably what happened was that there were these merchants, travelling from town to town, who would take a certain version of the game and introduce it to some people and they'd say, "That's great. That reminds me of this other game we have and it has a horse, where you move this way." I can imagine that, at a certain point, it had enough elements and it just sort of clicked, it made sense to all these different cultures.

If the game's central model is war, why do you think so many great military leaders, like Napoleon, were relatively poor chess players?

I think [Napoleon] could beat us pretty easily, but he couldn't beat the best chess players. He swore that chess gave him a leg-up on the battlefield. He really thought it helped him think strategically, and that's entirely possible. It's helpful in many walks of life. If I'm going to do this, how is my opponent going to respond? Is that going to lead to a good place for me, or is that going to lead us down a dead end? Maybe if I started this other way? It's the basis for a lot of intelligent decisions.

You also need to lose well. It's okay to feel that brief period of humiliation and even anger when you lose a big game, but then you need to be able to take a step back and say, "Well, why did that happen? Can I learn from that loss?"

In the book, you give a blow-by-blow account of this 1851 match in London that had just 21 moves, the one they still call "the immortal game." Why does this contest still resonate?

First of all, it's very approachable. It's a game that a novice, like me, can understand. It's this Romantic style of play, which is very much how novices want to play. They just want to outfox each other move to move.

It's also a great human story. You have these two great champions in the middle of this tournament, and playing these 15-, 20-hour games. They take this side game, just to feel each other out and have a cup of coffee and maybe smoke a cigar, and just by surprise, it turns out to be this incredibly interesting game, which I liken to a jazz concert.

In the Freudian interpretation of chess, the game is all about rendering the King helpless — with checkmate standing in for castration — and doing so with the help of a powerful mother figure, the Queen. Is that going too far?

There are things that go on that we're not connected to consciously. There are all sorts of motivations in our movements, our facial expressions or the words we use, that have to do with unspoken and unacknowledged desires.

What they do with this Freudian stuff, is make it all about defeating the father. Probably some of it is true, but I think the essence of the idea underneath — that there are layers to why we do what we do — is kind of a neat way to think. I'd go that far.

How do you connect the dots between chess as a feudal game — where every piece has its place — and one whose endless possibilities, and pawns moving like an army, end up being this kind of metaphor for democracy?

The idea that the pawns were more powerful than people once thought, that comes from [Francois-Andre] Philidor, who played in the 1700s, about the same time that some of these ideas were coming into play and influencing democracy. Philidor's iconic statement was, "Pawns are the soul of chess."

More at: http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1163852289325&call_pageid=1105528093962