The Chess Match of Life

Bergman's "Seventh Seal   :   Sir Antonius Block (white)-0     G. Reaper (black) +1

Among the many pleasures I anticipate for our forthcoming family Thanksgiving festival are a couple of chess games with our younger son, who is coming down from Montreal to spend a few days.  I am a halfway decent chess player and he a good one.  Neither of us is really good—meaning having achieved the official level of mastership; but we are fairly evenly matched—meaning that every now and then I am allowed to win.  We have been playing since he was a lad and have enjoyed our contests over many years.

Life is a trip, a journey into the unknown, a pilgrimage.  Life is a cabaret, my friend, also a bitch and more rarely a beach.   Sometimes our poets are more discouraging yet.  For Shakespeare, famously, we simply play out our lives.  “All the world’s a stage,” says Jacques in As Your Like It, “and all the men and women merely players.”  Macbeth is harsher yet: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / and then is heard no more: it is a tale / told by a idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing,”   Elsewhere it is not mere play acting but active playing.  For life, you see, is a chess match.

            Chaucer is our first major poet to whom was can assign a name, and his first major poem, usually called the “Book of the Duchess,” is an elegy for his great lady, Blanche of Lancaster, who died of the plague in 1368.  In it her sorrowing widower, John of Gaunt, is allegorized as a Black Knight.  Blanche, of course, is French for “white”; so you can see where this is going.  Fortune checkmates the Black Knight by capturing the knight’s queen, or fers, to use the word derived from Persian then in use by French-speakers.  This is all quite incoherent, of course, since the black and white pieces are adversaries.  But in none of the  several surviving medieval chess books does actual chess successfully compete with moral allegory.  Philidor, the father of modern chess theory in the middle of the eighteenth century, joked that his sons played chess as though it were a game of chance, the outcome of which is determined by caprice rather than by skill and strategy.  That seems to be the actual operating principle of the medieval chess moralists.

chess board, Paris, Bibliothèque National, MS fr. 9197

The biggest of the medieval chess poems known to me—and I do mean big—is a French work generally called Les Eschéz d’Amours—Cupid’s Chess, or Amatory Chess.  Its title has been assigned by modern scholars and should mislead no one into thinking it is an actual systematic chess manual.  In fact, it is a little hard to say succinctly exactly what it is about.  This late fourteenth-century work, one of several encyclopedic poems inspired by the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose, is even now in the course of publication by one of my former students, Gregory Heyworth of Rochester University, and Daniel O’Sullivan of Boston College, editor of the indispensable Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age.   While we await something like a truly comprehensive literary history of chess, O’Sullivan’s volume offers a good introduction to this fascinating subject.  Heyworth is the digitally adept creator of the brilliant “Lazarus Project”, which aims to recover with recently developed technological tools old manuscripts rendered illegible by time and abuse.  (The principal manuscript of Cupid’s Chess, in Dresden,  was fire-bombed with the support of your tax dollars in 1945.)  Though there remains much still to learn about this curious work, in its own day is was sufficiently important to attract a commentary nearly as vast as itself—a treatment generally reserved for authoritative Latin texts.  The commentator was one Evrart de Conty.  There is a knock-out gorgeous manuscript of this book in the national library of France, which you can view on-line.*

Among its many illustrations is an accurate diagram of a chessboard.  Many other medieval illustrations of the board gesture in the right direction but are inexact.   An actual chessboard has sixty-four small squares in the form of a large square.  The British Chancellor of the Exchequer is the officer who in the Middle Ages pursued his checkered career sitting before his spreadsheet made of color-coded wooden squares deployed in columns.  Exchequer was the vernacular for Latin scaccarium, “chess board.”

The real age of “literary chess” was the eighteenth century.  I have already mentioned Philidor (the musician  François-André Danican), whose brilliant Analyse du jeu des Echecs of 1749 was a literal game-changer.   After its publication one could hardly claim to be an intellectual without also being a serious chess player, and no serious chess player could be less than an intellectual.  One of Philidor’s profound maxims (“The pawn is the soul of chess”) was not without its political and revolutionary suggestions.  Diderot, Rousseau, every self-respecting philosophe sipped coffee over chess matches.  The Founding Fathers of our own nation might have perished from the terminal momentousness of the Constitutional Convention without the restorative recreation provided them by the little carved wooden pieces.  Jefferson was a keen but not particularly powerful player.

The greatest of early American chess moralists was Benjamin Franklin.  For a revolutionary, Franklin preached an awful lot of standard bourgeois morality of the “healthy, wealthy, and wise” sort that is so prominent in Poor Richard’s Almanack.  Among his minor works is a sententious short essay entitled “Morals of Chess”.  In it he writes thus: “The game of chess is not merely an idle amusement….For life is a kind of chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and evil events, that are in some degree the effects of prudence or the want of it.”  Specifically, chess has four special lessons to teach.  The first is foresight—anticipating the results of your moves.  The second is circumspection—keeping in mind the whole arena in which you are acting.  The third is being sure to play strictly by the rules, “as the game thereby becomes more the image of human life, and particularly of war.” But the fourth lesson is the most important: “We learn by chess the habit of not being discouraged by present appearances in the state of affairs, the habit of hoping for a favorable change, and that of persevering in the search for resources.”  This injunction must have been particularly useful to Franklin during the Revolution and his sometimes difficult assignments as our ambassador to France.  But I doubt that he ever had to try to honor it, as I had to,  while being mauled by his teen-aged son.

A happy Thanksgiving to all those esteemed readers who celebrate this holiday.
  

*in French, naturally, but lavishly illustrated