Chess: The games people play

'The game of chess," wrote the American statesman Benjamin Franklin in 1779, "is not merely an idle amusement. Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened by it." Along with Foresight, Circumspection and Caution, he mentions "the habit of hoping for a favourable change, and that of persevering in the search of resources". Players of friendly games are advised to "moderate your desire of victory over your adversary, and be pleased with one over yourself".

Today, one can find similar advice in many self-help books. Franklin's claim that chess is character-building as well as good mental training has just been taken up by former World Champion Garry Kasparov in How Life Imitates Chess (Heinemann, £20). This is a typically trenchant guide to business and life, full of sharp anecdotes, suggestions about knowing oneself and overcoming weaknesses, and some notably generous tributes to his great predecessors and rivals.

Kasparov is charismatic, worldly and optimistic - his latest plan is to use what he has learned from chess to bring genuine democracy to Putin's Russia - yet it was his defeat by IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997 that marked the sad end of the battle for chess supremacy between man and machine. This has a long history. Way back in the 1770s, an Austro-Hungarian baron, Wolfgang von Kempelen, toured Europe with a chess-playing automaton called the Mechanical Turk - although it actually contained a dwarf hidden within a secret compartment. The German novelist Robert Löhr has used the basic facts to create a wonderful bestselling romp, just translated as The Secrets of the Chess Machine (Fig Tree, £16.99), full of intrigue, betrayal, violence, chases, sexual tensions and unexpected encounters. Löhr gives Kempelen a Jewish craftsman as his assistant, so the Turk becomes a unique phenomenon, "a Mohammedan with a Christian brain and a Jewish soul". Along with its exuberant plotting, the book captures well the fears, anxieties and theological doubts the Age of Enlightenment harboured about freaks, automata and the game of chess itself.

Despite its symbolic richness, at first sight chess seems to have little cinematic potential. Nothing important is at stake, few can understand the subtleties of grandmaster play, and it must be the world's dullest spectator sport. What could be less interesting than watching two dysfunctional guys staring at each other for hours? Games tend to take place in silent, cheerless surroundings, and lack both the tense gentility of bridge and the lawless frontier spirit of poker.

Yet despite chess's rarefied appeal, even the basic rules take one into a strange world. What kind of medieval matriarchy or infantile fantasy is evoked by a cast of nishops, knights and castles, where the queen is so much more powerful than the king? The knight returning from the Crusades in Ingmar Bergman's film The Seventh Seal (1957) gets challenged by Death to a game of chess. Despite the portentous, plague-ridden setting, he tries the old coffee-house trick of "accidentally" knocking over some of the pieces when he realises he's losing. All-seeing Death, of course, has no difficulty reconstructing the position and claiming the Knight's life.

Bergman exploited the obvious medievalism of chess, but the game has equally strong links with the central European café society destroyed by the Nazis, and with the Cold War. As James Bond was once warned: "These Russians are great chess players. When they want to execute a plot, they execute it brilliantly." What brought chess to real prominence, however, was Bobby Fischer's victory over Boris Spassky in the World Championship of 1972. (When the petulant Fischer tried to pull out, Kissinger stepped in to tell him to do his patriotic duty.) Yet the compelling image of the lone American pitted against the ruthlessly efficient "Soviet chess machine" was largely fantasy: Fischer was not a rugged individualist so much as a complete loony, while the "machine" was so bureaucratic that Spassky had great difficulty even with essential preparation like getting American chess magazines translated into Russian.

What about links between chess and sex? Over-the-board seductions may be rare in real life (unless I've just been unlucky), but have long been traditional in art and literature. There is a great bawdy story in Boccaccio's Decameron (mid-14th century), where a noblewoman called Beatrice falls in love during a chess game with her servant Ludovico, since, who "allowed her to beat him, which sent the lady into transports of joy". Six hundred years later, the first version of The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) includes a famous scene in which Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway caress the pieces suggestively.

Much more common in serious fiction (and in many chess clubs) is the player who is socially and sexually inadequate. Vladimir Nabokov's The Defence, first published in Russian in 1930, tells the story of an "uncouth, unwashed, unkempt" grandmaster called Luzhin who lives out a passionate parallel existence on the board: "Real life, chess life, was orderly, clear-cut, and rich in adventure, and Luzhin noted with pride how easy it was for him to reign..." He is taken up by Natalia, a young woman who has a weakness for waifs and strays, an instinct "to feel across hundreds of miles that somewhere in Sicily a thin-legged donkey is being brutally beaten". She inevitably falls in love with Luzhin, yet enters the bedroom on their wedding night with a shudder, "as when you are leafing through last year's magazine, knowing that in a second, in just a second, the door will open and the dentist will appear on the threshold". Luzhin, meanwhile, has fallen asleep. Soon she has begun to "think vaguely that there were probably greater joys than the joys of compassion, but that these were no concern of hers". If you want a torrid sex life, don't marry a chess player.

That is also one of the lessons of Satyajit Ray's film The Chess Players (1977), set in India in 1856, where the two middle-aged heroes become so engrossed in their hobby that they don't notice the British troops about to take over their kingdom. Meer fails to spot that his wife is carrying on with his nephew and, when Mirza brushes off his beautiful wife's attempt to get him to come to bed, she takes her revenge by hiding his chess pieces. Nothing daunted, they get some vegetables, agree that limes represent knights, tomatoes are bishops, and embark on a new game.

Hollywood inevitably finds it harder to deal with sexually inadequate heroes. When Nabokov's novel was filmed as The Luzhin Defence in 2000, Luzhin (John Turturro) has acquired a kind of sexual charisma beneath his offputting exterior, vigorously thrusting a rook up an open file in a scene crosscut with him penetrating an ecstatic Natalia (Emily Watson) in bed.

Chess has long attracted the interest of psychoanalysts, for whom players such as Bobby Fischer were an absolute gift (he even had a mother called Regina and started his career with a spectacular queen sacrifice!). Ernest Jones, one of Freud's leading lieutenants, saw it as a game about "father-murder" where two men locked together in fierce hostility can gratify "both the homosexual and the antagonistic aspects of the father-son contest". Be that as it may, one of the greatest books about chess brings to the fore the violence, madness, murderous competition between individuals and attitudes to life that have often haunted the game.

This is The Royal Game (1941), a novella by the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig. It takes place on a liner sailing from New York to Buenos Aires, where the world chess champion Czentovic has offered to take on all comers. The orphaned son of a Yugoslav boatman, he is a graceless man, interested in nothing beyond chess and money.

Czentovic demolishes the combined chess-playing talent of his fellow passengers with contemptuous ease until a cultivated lawyer called Dr B intervenes and dramatically raises the level of their game. Questioned afterwards by the narrator, Dr B admits: "I have occupied myself with chess greatly. But that happened under quite special, I might say unique, circumstances."

These were when he was held by the Nazis in solitary confinement. Just as he is beginning to go slowly mad, he happens to find a book about chess in the pocket of one of his guards. Creating a set from his checkered bedspread and pieces of bread, he plays through the 150 master games until he knows them all by heart. For a while, these keep him sane, but eventually they become so familiar that he is reduced to playing himself in his head as the only outlet for his "long-accumulated rage": "As I had nothing else than this insane match with myself, that rage, that lust for revenge, channelled itself fanatically into the game." The story reaches its climax with Dr B battling it out with Czentovic, "two enemies sworn to destroy each other".

Until the recent rise of Judit Polgar, high-level chess was very much a male preserve. Yet the rule whereby pawns reaching the eighth rank are promoted into queens makes an obvious symbol of the transformation of girl into woman. In The Queen's Gambit (1983) by Walter Tevis - whose other novels, The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth, were made into well-known films - the orphaned heroine Beth Harmon has her first period just after winning a tense game in the Kentucky state championship. Much though Lewis Carroll would have hated the idea, the Alice books can also be seen as stories of a girl growing up. Through the Looking Glass is based entirely around Alice-the-pawn's journey to the promotion square. The uncomfortable prefatory poem is full of anxiety about what puberty means for girls:

Come, hearken then, ere voice of dread,

With bitter tidings laden,

Shall summon to unwelcome bed

A melancholy maiden...

Chess will no doubt long remain what Kasparov calls "a universal symbol of intellect and complexity", a familiar metaphor for the skills of diplomacy or strategic management. We can only hope that imaginative writers and directors will also continue to mine its deeper metaphors, to bring us compelling stories of war and history, madness and mortality, male bonding and female adolescence.

Matthew J Reisz is the editor of 'The Jewish Quarterly'

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