Even Horace, himself a poet, admitted that he preferred to let many issues slide rather than risk the enmity of the irritable tribe of poets; and poets, or, more generally, writers, remain irritable today. We need only turn our thoughts to the dramas surrounding literary prizes, or the visceral hatred that poets nurture toward critics if a review contains even the slightest hint of doubt. Now we read, as Karpov and Korchnoi silently rip one another limb from limb in Merano, about the irritability of chess players.1 Why is this quality shared by chess players and poets? Do chess and poetry have something in common?
Lovers of the noble game insist that they do: a chess match, even if it is played by amateurs, is an austere metaphor for life and the struggle for life, and the virtues of a chess player, reason, memory, and inventiveness, are the virtues of any thinking man. The stern rules of chess—which demand that a piece, once touched, must move, and that one is forbidden to take back a move one has thought better of—reproduce the inexorable nature of the choices one makes in life. When your king, owing to your lack of skill or attention or your recklessness or your opponent’s superiority, is ever more closely pursued, threatened (though the threat must be clearly announced: it’s never a pitfall), cornered, and finally run through, you never fail to glimpse, hovering over the chessboard, a symbolic shade. What you are experiencing is a death; it is your death, and at the same time it is a death for which you bear the guilt. By experiencing it, you exorcise it and strengthen yourself.
This fierce and chivalrous game, then, is also poetic: and so it is perceived by everyone who has ever played it, at whatever level, but I doubt that the source of the irritability of poets and chess players lies here. Poets, and anyone who plies a creative and individual trade, have this in common with chess players: total responsibility for their actions. This is rarely, or never, the case in other human endeavors, whether well paid and serious or unpaid and playful. Perhaps it’s no accident that tennis players, for example, who play alone or at most in pairs, are more irascible and neurotic than soccer players or bicyclists, who compete in teams.
Those who do for themselves, without allies or middlemen between themselves and their work, are stripped of excuses in the face of failure, and excuses are an invaluable analgesic. An actor can put the blame for his failure on the director, or vice versa; someone who works for a manufacturer can feel that his own responsibility is diluted by that of his many colleagues, superiors, and underlings, and further contaminated by “circumstances,” by the competition, by the whims of the market, and by unpredictable events. A teacher can blame the curriculum, the principal, and of course the students.
The politician, at least in a pluralistic regime, makes his way through a jungle of tensions, collusions, open or hidden hostilities, traps, and favors, and when he fails he has a thousand opportunities to justify himself to others and to himself. But even the despot, the possessor of absolute power, sole arbiter of his open and avowed decisions, when faced with collapse will look for someone to blame in his place—he, too, reaches for an analgesic. Hitler himself, under siege in the Reich Chancellery, an hour before committing suicide, angrily unloaded all blame on the German people, who had been unworthy of him. But someone who moves his bishop to attack what he believes to be the weak point in his opponent’s line stands alone, has no fellow culprits even in theory, and must answer fully and individually for his decision, like a poet at his writing table before his “petty, paltry rhymes.” Even if it is only in the context of a game, he is a grown man, an adult.
We should add that poets and chess players work only with their brains, and that we are all quick to take offense concerning the quality of our brains. To accuse one’s fellow man of having defective kidneys, or lungs, or heart is no crime; saying that he has a defective brain, on the other hand, certainly is. To be considered stupid, and to have someone tell you so, is more unpleasant than being called a glutton, a liar, wrathful, lustful, slothful, or a coward: every weakness, every vice has found its defenders, its own rhetoric, those who ennoble and exalt it, except for stupidity.
“Stupid” is a strong word and a stinging insult: perhaps that is why the term possesses, in every language and especially in dialects, a myriad of synonyms, all of them euphemistic to a greater or lesser degree, as is the case for words relating to sex or death. If Christ, according to St. Matthew the Evangelist (5:22), felt it necessary to warn that whosoever shall say to his brother “Raca” shall be in danger of the council, but whosoever shall say “Thou fool” shall be in danger of hellfire, that is a sign that he had recognized the wounding nature of such judgments.
In the face of them, both chess player and poet stand defenseless: they have been stripped naked. Every verse they write, every move they make, bears their signature. They have no coworkers, no accomplices: they have learned from masters, in flesh and blood or at a distance of centuries and continents, but they know that it is cowardly to place the blame for their shortcomings on their teachers, or in any case on others. Now, someone who is naked, his flesh open to the world and densely covered with nerve endings, with no armor to protect him, no clothing to screen and mask him, is both vulnerable and irritable. This is a condition to which, in our complicated society, we rarely find ourselves exposed, and yet few are the lives into which the moment of being denuded never comes. And so we suffer for the nudity to which we are ill suited: even our actual, nonmetaphorical skin becomes irritated if exposed to sunlight.
For that reason, terrible chess player though I am, I believe that it would be a good thing if the game of chess were more widely played, and perhaps taught and practiced in our schools, the way it has been for many years in the Soviet Union. It would be good, in other words, for everyone, especially those who aspire to positions of authority or a political career, to learn from an early age to live like chess players, that is to say, thinking before making a move, even in the awareness that the time allowed for each move is limited; remembering that every move we make prompts another from our opponent, difficult but not impossible to predict; and paying for wrong moves.
The exercise of these virtues is surely advantageous over the long term, both for the individual and for the community. Over the short term, it has its price, which is to make us slightly irritable.
1. Anatoly Karpov played Viktor Korchnoi for the world chess championship in Merano, Italy, in the autumn of 1981.