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The Madness of Chess Champions

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There is a curious parallelism in the lives of America’s two world chess champions. Both Paul Morphy (1837-1884) and Bobby Fischer had reached the pinnacle of chess and seem to have frittered the rest of their lives away. In Morphy’s case, there was no official championship, but he was universally acknowledged to have beaten the best chess players of his day during an extended European trip in 1857-1858. The only major player he did not beat was the British champ, Howard Staunton, mostly because Staunton, who was past his prime, was too chicken-hearted to play him.

After his European trip, Morphy stopped playing chess altogether—much like Bobby Fischer over a hundred years later. In Morphy’s case, the Civil War happened; and, being a Southerner from New Orleans, his sympathies were with the Confederacy. But things only got worse after the war. His friend Charles Maurian wrote about what appeared to be his madness:

It is unfortunately true that Mr. Morphy’s mind has been deranged of late but not to the extent that the New York Sun would have us believe.

I noticed some time ago some extraordinary statements he made of petty persecutions directed against him by unknown persons, that there was something wrong about him, but after a while he openly accused some well known persons of being the authors of the persecutions, and insisted upon their giving him proper satisfaction by arms.

You beg me to inform you if it is true that certain rumours about Paul Morphy are true that he may not be right mentally. I am sorry to have to reply to you that these rumours are only too well founded.

The subject is discussed at some length in a Chess.Com discussion board. Whether or not Morphy went batshit crazy, he was a great chess player. No less a champion than Bobby Fischer called him the greatest player who ever lived. If you can follow chess notation, you should look up some of his greatest games.

Vastness Breeds Craziness

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America Divided? Look to the Land and Its Myths

This evening, two thoughts came together in my mind with a kind of grim ferocity. On one hand, I am troubled by the 74 million voters who backed Trump in 2020. Where did they come from? And why?

On the other hand, I read a wonderful essay by Geoff Dyer entitled “Ranging Across Texas” in the July 17, 2020 issue of The Times Literary Supplement. Dyer is one of those writers whose words set me to thinking. Ostensibly, his essay is about his experience reading Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. In it he quotes V. S. Naipaul who, in writing about John Steinbeck, says, “A writer is in the end, not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.”

My ideas on this are still not well formed, but I am thinking that there is something about the American landscape and its vastness that gives rise to the crazies who belong to the Oath Keepers, QAnon, the Proud Boys, and others. In the narrowness of the European continent, people have to work together at the risk of repeated mutual slaughters. Americans, however, can hole up in a small town in the middle of nowhere and be as crazy as loons.

America is vast, particularly the West and the Great Plains, where much of Trump’s support is concentrated. (The rest is in the South, where the Civil War is still being contested in slow motion.)

In one of his essays, McMurtry writes:

In time I came to feel that there ought to be some congruity between prose and landscape. You wouldn’t adopt a Faulknerian baroque if your story was to be set on the flat unbaroque plains of west Texas.

I remember my visits to Patagonia where, in the rain shadow of the Andes, where there is almost always a howling wind, there is a similar history of crime and even anarchy.

We don’t much celebrate Columbus Day any more, because we are becoming more acutely conscious of the fact that we massacred millions of Indians for their land. In Patagonia, that was even more of a crime: There are relatively few aborigines in Argentina after the “Conquest of the Desert” of General Julio Argentino Roca in the 1870s.

I guess we have always tried to paper over our crimes with fine thoughts. We just have to recognize, in the words of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, “Hieronymo is mad agayne!”