5/4/11
A Social Problem
I feel like such a nag but someone ought to be able to point
out a 300 lb gorilla in the room when it knuckle walks, glowers and pounds the
walls. I will be that very nag and shortly name the ape accordingly.
***
Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall—from
America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady. Crown, 416
pages, $25.99.
It was already obvious when he was a very young boy that he
suffered from a "social problem". He "couldn’t relate to other
children" — to the tune, for example, of getting kicked out of
kindergarten. His biographer, as is his wont, puts the matter more softly,
writing that Regina, the boy's mother, "was compelled to withdraw
him". He adds that the kid "invariably separated himself from other
children [and that] by the time he reached the fourth grade, he'd been in and
out of six schools—almost two a year—leaving each time because he couldn't
abide his teachers, classmates, or even the school's location."
It takes an inordinately touchy kind of little kid to throw a fit on account of a school's location. But this was an inordinately touchy kid, full of tantrums, primed for fits. This was a kid who fell to "ranting if he didn’t get his way" about food, bedtime, and other details of his regimen. Such behavior did not decrease as he matured. Details of light, sound and texture that most people would barely register weighed on him. Variations in routine could set him off.
Regina raised this boy,
and Joan, his older sister, on her own. The argument can be made that Regina’s
commitment to various and sundry leftwing causes got in the way of maternal
responsibility. It can just as plausibly be maintained that Regina was nothing
less than the stereotypically devoted Jewish mother. Having gleaned, or hoped
for, some spark of brilliance to set alongside her son's intractability, she
managed to enroll him in a school for gifted children. He lasted for a day,
making it clear he would never, on any account, go back.
The setting is Brooklyn in the 1950s — well before Oliver
Sacks, SSRIs, or, more to the point, any "Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM) that could even roughly describe this
boy's behaviors. There wasn't any appropriate understanding for his syndrome
and next to no remediation for it.
The one thing that seemed to settle the boy down and fully
absorb his stormy energies was puzzles. They could engage him for hours,
granting Regina and Joan respite. When her brother was seven, Joan happened to
bring back a cheap chess set: plastic pieces, cardboard checkerboard, the kind
of thing you'd get for a quarter at the candy store. Joan, reading the rules
that came with, taught her brother to play.
He mastered that puzzle system so well that people now
puzzle over him.
***
The kid is of course Bobby Fischer. The biographer is Frank
Brady, author of “Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - from
America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness." The gorilla in the
room is Asperger's Syndrome. Let us, for now, leave that ape on a tottering
Brooklyn kitchen table and focus first on several of the considerable virtues
of Brady's astoundingly gorilla-blind account.
Brady does a fine job portraying the New York City chess
scene as Fischer came to know it in his teens — Washington Square Park's
outdoor summer tournaments; the Manhattan Chess Club "decorated with
trophies [and] oil paintings of legendary players such as Lasker, Morphy, and
Capablanca"; the impressions and depressions left by Soviet champions who
passed through town from time to time to crush America's best talents like so
many dark lords, incidentally making the point that Communism built better
brains.
Brady is capacious, and leaves ample room for serendipity.
We learn, for example, that Marcel Duchamp, who lived across the street from
the Marshall Chess Club in Greenwich Village, "became a great fan of
Bobby’s". It is fascinating to think of what encounters between Duchamp,
an accomplished chess player in his own right (member of the French national
team in 1932, for example), and Bobby Fischer might have been like. A friend of
his once remarked that Duchamp often needed "a good chess game like a baby
needs a bottle." How sympathetic, then, Duchamp, in his sixties, would
have been to the teenaged Fischer's boundless appetite for chess — for
openings, endgames, tactics, strategy, lore, and above all, the matches
themselves.
Duchamp had once opined that to his mind, "all chess
players are artists." Perhaps, as Bobby compiled his wins — including one
when he was thirteen against an ex-US champion still celebrated and studied as
the "The Game of the Century" — Duchamp felt that he was witnessing
the likes of a young da Vinci, not on that shopworn medium, the canvas, slave
to the retina that it was, but in an arena better suited for conceptual
interplay and interaction, the chess board.
It is also to Brady's credit that he corrects an enduring
misconception about Fischer. Yes, in his youth Fischer only read about chess,
scrabbling up enough Russian, for example, to absorb Soviet chess journals.
Brady establishes that in his later years Fischer became a voracious autodidact.
He does not fail to point out that Fischer's consumption of history and
philosophy oddly did nothing to soften his rabid and ridiculous — Fischer
himself being Jewish — anti-Semitism, or counteract the grotesque
anti-Americanism that led him, after 9/11, to praise al Qaeda.
Though it does not excuse him, it needs to be said that
Fischer had a kernel of reason for anti-Americanism. The United States treated
him just as it does so many tyrants — Ferdinand Marcos, Saddam Hussein, Muammar
Qaddafi, to name a few. They are coddled when they are useful and obedient,
dismissed when they no longer serve. Fischer, a self-made autocrat of chess,
refused to heel.
In 1972, it wasn't clear that Fischer would show up in
Reykjavik to play Boris Spassky for the world championship, or fall prey,
instead, to the tantrums roiling within. Tantrums seemed to have the upper
hand. That was when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called and told Fischer
it mattered beyond chess; it mattered to the free world; Fischer must play.
Fischer flew to Iceland and famously demolished Spassky.
Twenty years later, Fischer came out of self-imposed
retirement to play Spassky again. Matters of state had no part in it; the then
penurious Fischer needed money. The match was set for Yugoslavia, in the midst
of a civil war that subjected it to U.N. sanctions. This time Fischer was
ordered by the State Department not to play — on pain of fines and imprisonment
on return to the United States. Where was Kissinger, now, when Bobby needed
him? Fischer did not like being a pawn in that political game. Chess was his
only game. At a press conference, he held up and literally spat on the order to
desist.
**
Why call that 300 lb gorilla by its proper name? If it needs
to be named at all, why not just call it Anonymous Gorilla and let it go at
that? The reason to name it Asperger's Syndrome is that it lends coherence to
Bobby Fischer: the root, childhood anti-sociability, the tantrums, the acute
susceptibility to sensory experience — the overwrought sensorium Temple
Grandin, among others, has so well described — as, for example, his violent
reaction to the whirring of cameras in his first match against Spassky.
Then, of course, there is, above all, his savant grasp of
chess.
It does not dehumanize Fischer to take seriously the
prospect that he had Asperger's Syndrome. On the contrary, it humanizes him; it
makes *him* less of a 300 lb gorilla. You don't have to have Asperger's
Syndrome to excel at chess. Lots of mentalities — of neurological styles, as it
were — compete on equal terms in that game. But it is somewhat absurd to not to
entertain the possibility that Fischer came to chess with the configuration of
gifts and deficits particular to the autistic spectrum.
No, Bobby Fischer is not to be confused with Raymond Babbitt, the low
functioning, sinstitutionalized autistic man played by Dustin Hoffman in
"Rain Man." Fischer occupies a very different place on the autistic
spectrum. He was independent, successful and renowned— already a celebrity
while attending Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. But it doesn't detract
from Fischer's achievement to think for a bit about Raymond Babbitt's uncanny
ability to count cards in a blackjack game, or to size up almost instantly how
many toothpicks spill to the floor from a full box.
Even the best of Fischer's peers would sometimes allow that
he seemed to have a privileged access to chess. That sense of Fischer as rather
more than the first among equals was palpable in the reaction to his victories
in the candidate matches leading up to the historic 1972 bout with Spassky. In
one, he beat Mark Taimanov, his wizened Soviet opponent 6-0. To win a match
without a single loss against world class opposition was unprecedented. Fischer
compounded that victory by shutting out the great grandmaster Brent Larsen
next.
The Soviets took their chess seriously, and regarded the
approach of the American chess comet with apprehension and astonishment. Brady
writes of Fischer v. Larsen that: "Television and radio networks
throughout the Soviet Union interrupted regular broadcasts to announce the
results. Millions of Soviets were avidly following the progress of the match,
fascinated by Fischer’s supernormal mastery. Sovietsky Sport declared, 'A
miracle has occurred.'"
To propose that Fischer had Asperger's Syndrome does not
imply the search for language to describe him can be aborted. It is hard to
improve on a comment by Garry Kasparov, who, after Fischer died in 2008, said
that he thought of Fischer "as a kind of centaur, a human player
mythologically combined with the very essence of chess itself." Chess has
always occasioned great literature — novels by Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Zweig,
and Walter Tevis, to name a few. But never has a living chess player spurred
writers on as Fischer did.
Robert Lowell wrote a poem, “The Winner”, consisting entirely of Fischer quotes. It opens with
these lines, all Fischer's:
I had the talent before I played the
game;
I made the black moves, then the white
moves,
I just muled through whole matches with
myself —
it wasn’t too social only mating
myself. . .
Arthur Koestler, in “The Glorious and Bloody Game”, his
dispatch from the Reykjavik match, was driven to conceive a whole new species
in order to properly characterize Fischer. He came up with the idea of the
mimophant — "a cross between a mimosa and an elephant." The
mimophant, he explained, was "like a mimosa where his own feelings are
concerned and thick skinned like an elephant trampling over the feelings of
others. . . . Bobby is the perfect representative of the species. His
vulnerability is genuine. The cameras do upset him. He cannot bear street
noises. The chair on which he sits while playing, the size of the board grate
on his mimosaesque sensitivities. At the same time his elephantine skin
prevents him from realizing what he does to others."
Koestler might have added that Fischer's elephantine skin
could not protect his mimosaesque sensitivities from the kinds of injuries he
inflicted upon himself.
***
The last photo known of Bobby Fischer shows him in a
Reykjavik coffeehouse, not long before he died of renal failure, having —
dictatorial as ever about his regimen — refused medical treatments that might
have helped. There is a penetrating intensity to his expression. This is not
the look of a man who feels defeated. Perhaps it is the look of a man who has
the courage to bear defeat. There is depth and ferocity to the expression. I
grew up in Brooklyn a few years after Fischer. I played some chess. He was
something of a hero to me then and despite the horrific flaws — the strident
destructiveness and self-destructiveness that manifest over time — he
still is. And as for these flaws, it puts things in perspective to note that
his anti-Americanism recruited no one to al Qaeda, nor did his anti-Semitism
reanimate any Nazi party. He was always the chief victim of his warped
worldview — and beside him, chess.
In that photo he is sitting in front of a wall hanging
portraying games — a miniature chess board and something that looks like
Icelandic scrabble. No one could have known when this picture was taken that it
would be the last. Luck plays its part in showing him peering out from the
games, puzzles, and chess boards that were his soil, his beginnings.
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