Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (12 page)

'Does the new book signal the end of your hard-edge phase?'

'It probably signals the end of
everything,'
said Ballard contentedly. By now we were having a pub lunch on the riverbank, among the gulls, the launches, the cheerful middle-management of Shepperton. In a more recent novel,
The Unlimited Dream Company,
Ballard imagines the arrival of a sexual messiah who transforms Shepperton into an apocalyptic theme park, igniting all the fantasies of ordinary minds. Like everything he writes, the book is faintly ludicrous, bizarrely logical and deeply haunting. In summer, Ballard finds Shepperton 'lunar and abstract'. I don't see it — but I agree that Ballard has no reason to leave the place. He can look into its ordered streets, its 'airport architecture and consumer landscape', and see anything he likes.

'You seem to be in pretty good nick,' I said, 'considering what you went through.'

'Those were hard times. Don't be deceived by my friend here,' he said, patting his belly. 'By the end of the war the food had pretty well dried up. The Japs could hardly feed
themselves.
Why should they bother about an enclave of Allied detainees? Why? These are the realities. We ate cracked wheat, warehouse scrapings, weevils. You'd shift the weevils to the side and eat them last. I often had three rings of them on the edge of my plate.'

'What do they taste of?'

'They don't taste of anything, funnily enough. Absolutely nothing. We had to eat them for the protein. I remember those years in the camp as a time of high interest and activity. Some of the prisoners behaved with great steadfastness. Most were withdrawn and listless. A few were scrimshankers, petty thieves, or open collaborators with the Japanese. But you'd expect that. I was happy there. It was like having a huge slum family.'

Ballard didn't see as much of the war as his alter ego in the novel. He didn't see the sinking of the
Petrel
on the Shanghai Bund. He didn't see the light in the sky after Hiroshima and Nagasaki (as if God was taking photographs of the end of the world). But he saw every form of human extremity by the time he was thirteen. As a result, nothing can surprise or startle him - except his own fictions. It occurred to me that if I had turned up for the interview three days late with a carload of drunken hitch-hikers, Ballard would not have been displeased, far less disconcerted. He would have said, 'Scotch! Gin! Vodka!' He is a writer for whom anything is possible, as many new readers will soon discover. The way ahead now looks intriguingly unresolved; but we can safely say that J.G. Ballard will go too far - in all directions.

Observer, 1984

CHESS: KASPAROV
v.
KARPOV

The World Chess Championship opens tomorrow in the usual atmosphere of vendetta, scurrility, machination and counterploy. Unquestionably chess is 'the most beautiful game'. Why, then, does it always turn ugly? The principals have been in town for some time. They enjoy the trappings of movie-stars yet they live like ascetics. Hungrily the young Champion works out in the gym and on the football field — even his seconds have been off alcohol for weeks — and continues his campaign against 'the chess mafia'. Meanwhile the Challenger broods and meditates, rebuilding his game, his confidence, and his tattered image. On paper, or on smudged photoprint, it looks like Diego Maradona versus Alex Higgins. Grimly they square up for their strange board meeting. What, exactly, are these characters up to? What are they playing at?

To begin with, Kasparov and Karpov are playing the foremost game of pure skill yet devised by the human mind, a game that is in fact beyond the scope of the human mind, well beyond it, an unmasterable game. Monitored by millions, they are playing this game at a level that they alone can comprehend. Towards the end of some of the games in their last match, world-famous Grandmasters had no idea who was winning. Only in the slow motion of analysis do the lines become clear. To take an analogy from another sport (of which we will need plenty), it is as if Becker and Courier are hitting so hard that not even Connors, craning forward in the front row, can see the ball.

Let us take an average experience of chess. You master the moves, start to play frequently, buy a book or two, learn some ground-rules, some openings, develop a little 'vocabulary', a bit of 'pattern recognition' . .. After a while you notice that you have stopped improving. Your progress, so far, has felt like a slow ascent along rising ground; then you pause, look up, and see a cliff face almost beyond the dimensions of the globe, whose crest is merely a false summit, itself the first of many.

Quickly you relapse into the kind of player who knows one opening to a depth of three moves, who flounders into the middle game hoping for errors more egregious than his own. That is the amateur game: an uninterrupted exchange of howlers. You aren't any good. And the man who always beats you in the pub or the cafe isn't any good. And the man who always beats him in the clubhouse isn't any good. And the man who always beats the man who always beats the man who always beats
him
may just be starting to get somewhere.

Nowhere in sport, perhaps nowhere in human activity, is the gap between the tryer and the expert so astronomical. Oh, I have thrown 180 at darts - twice in a lifetime. On the snooker table I have brought off violent pots that would have jerked them to their feet in the Sheffield Crucible. As for tennis, I need hardly hype my crosscourt backhand 'dink', which is so widely feared in the parks of North Kensington. But my chances of a chess brilliancy are the 'chances' of a lab chimp and a typewriter producing
King Lear.
Even at the most rarefied level, though, chess has a robust universality. The two Ks start a tournament tomorrow, but they will also be starting something else: scores are to be settled, grudges are to be purged. Openly and avowedly, noisily and pridefully, they will be hunting each other's blood. That we
can
understand.

*

Until 1972 the triennial World Championships were quiet affairs — or at any rate Soviet affairs. Then Bobby Fischer emerged, and the fortress of Soviet supremacy felt the challenge of American 'brashness': the histrionic gamesmanship of the stand-off and stalk-out, the tantrum and the sulk. Fischer himself seemed to sense a decline, an air of
ubi sunt?
'When it was a game played by aristocrats it had more like you know dignity to it.' In retrospect, shaded from the glare of his chess, we can see Fischer as the classic
idiot savant;
he resembles the mental-home chronic who, by some twist of the circuitry, can do cube roots in his head. Fischer had the highest Elo rating — this is the chess computer - of all time. With his contempt for women, his glorification of expensive clothes and what he called 'class' (as in 'he doesn't have any class'), his antisemitism, and his cornball paranoia, Fischer shows that supreme chess genius can ally itself with the paltriest human material.

By 1975 Fischer had gone mad, or gone madder; he was, in any event, too mad to face the defence of his title. (It is said that he suffered a 'panic-fright' at his own achievement.) Anatoly Karpov was thus promoted by default; and the next two Championships took their tenor from the situation and temperament of the challenger, Viktor Korchnoi: Viktor the Terrible, the Leningrad Lip. Disciplined for unsoundness — i.e., near-pauperised for sins of candour - Korchnoi had defected in 1976. He was then boycotted by Soviet players, and his wife and son were refused permission to emigrate. Both these actions were designed not just to punish Korchnoi's treachery but to weaken his game. In his two Championship matches with Karpov — 1978 and 1981 — Korchnoi showed symptoms of what might be called
displaced
paranoia: he
was
being persecuted, but not by hexed swivel-chairs, colour-coded yoghurts, KGB hypnotists evil-eyeing him from the stalls. Karpov, the 'model Soviet', sat through it all, glazed and devout, like a Futurist poster. And after his victory he obediently cabled Brezhnev, as Botvinnik had cabled Stalin in 1936 ('Dear beloved teacher and leader .. .').

Just before the 1978 Championship I interviewed Korchnoi in London, at the Savoy. At one point, twisting powerfully in his chair, he fell silent, and then grew dreamy. With some wistfulness he confessed that he despaired of ever bringing home, to people in the West, the crawling sliminess, the full squidgy horror, of Anatoly Karpov. 'You know, in Russia we have a fish', he said, 'called a
karp.
A disgusting fish. You wouldn't eat it. That's what Karpov
is.'
I said, 'We've got that fish too. Called a
carp.'
Korchnoi looked startled. 'You have? .. . Good! Good!'

Already, and perhaps over-vividly, Korchnoi sensed that Karpov would not be allowed to lose. The 1978 match was painfully close. Karpov won 6-5; Korchnoi claimed illegal conditions (that hypnotist had returned for the last game) and started court proceedings in Amsterdam; by 1979 Korchnoi's son Igor was in a labour camp. When the players met again three years later,
Tass
was calling Korchnoi a 'calculating huckster', the deserter of his wife and child, whom he hoped never to see again. Korchnoi felt these vast animosities
at the table —
and saw Karpov as their instrument ('Stop squirming in your damn seat, you little worm'). Korchnoi was deflected, tipped over; and in the end he spooked himself.

Karpov wasn't taken to the edge in 1981. But he was taken there in 1984, by Gary Kasparov; and the outcome was the most drastic scandal in the history of the game. Fallout from that 'accident' still poisons the current encounter.

Stressful tales of venue-fixing, spy-planting, rule-bending -or cheating, if you prefer. The outsider, who thinks that chess is pure and cerebral, tends to be shocked by such suggestions. But the insider is not shocked, because he knows that chess, like the human brain, is partly reptilian. This is the game of pins and pincers, of forks and skewers; this is the game of the
spite check
and the
shame mate.
Clearly these psychodramas wouldn't keep happening unless something about the game encouraged them. If, tomorrow afternoon, the World Champion were playing his twin brother, his mirror image, the air between them would still be crackling.

How do you cheat at chess? It strikes one as a contradiction, like cheating at the violin. One of the excruciations of chess is its autonomy; there are no variables; there is no one and nothing to
blame.
Snooker is whisperingly called 'chess with balls' but in chess there is no run of the green ('Dear oh dear, things just aren't going Anatoly Yevgenyevich's way out there'). In tennis you can blame the bounce, the tape, the wind, the glare, the racket, the shoelaces. Even the lumpen simplicity of darts features the loathed 'bounce-outs'. An Argy fullback may break your legs, help you up by tugging on the hairs of your arms, and then, as you start to protest, hawk in your mouth. Now that's cheating. But how do you cheat at chess?

'Sit your opponent with the sun in his eyes,' said Ruy Lopez, who flourished in the sixteenth century. It would seem that cheating at chess is as old as the game; no doubt the languid nawabs and caliphs of sixth-century Asia were kicking each other's shins beneath the table. Alekhine used to cosset his Siamese cats on the board before big games, on the off-chance that his opponent might harbour an allergy. During lightning play, 'chessers' who find themselves a rook down have been known to castle with a piece from the neighbouring board. Nimzowitsch used to smoke an especially noxious cigar. There are further stories of squashed tomatoes, doctor's bleep-gadgets, and eye-contact techniques in the sexual-harassment line.

In his 1977 qualifying match with Korchnoi, Boris Spassky arranged for his 'box' - a curtained booth on the stage, to which the player occasionally retreats — to be positioned
behind
his opponent's chair; and there he lurked, emerging only to make his moves. When he did appear he sported a dazzling sun-visor. It doesn't sound particularly outrageous, but it worked. Korchnoi was on the verge of emotional collapse and threw away four games in a row. He recovered, and won. The intriguing fact is that Spassky, the white knight of Reykjavik, Fischer's courtly and long-suffering victim, had switched colours. Integrity, it appeared, was an anachronism, or an aberration. Fischer was an innovator on the board, but perhaps his main gift to the game was the institutionalising of bad behaviour. This was 'professionalism'. From then on, everyone was playing black.

The Moscow fiasco of 1984 was of a new order of irregularity. Probably domestic Soviet chess has seen greater and more humourless injustices (the reversal of results because of 'faulty' clocks, and so on); but you can't do this sort of thing when the world is watching. Chess insiders
were
shocked by Moscow. Even Bobby Fischer must have raised a hand to check that his wallet was still in place.

During the early games Kasparov showed his only temperamental weakness as a player: hunger. He played with arrogant greed and was soon trailing 0-4 (the winner being the first man to six, with draws not counting). A little later he was trailing 0-5: an abysmal margin. No breather or pep-talk, no pint of lager is going to bring a chess-player back from that kind of deficit, that kind of demonstration. But now Kasparov formulated a remarkable and ruthless strategy. He started to draw, game after game, dull, spoiling, inexorable. His first idea was, simply, to exhaust Karpov, to break Karpov's health. His second idea was to learn how to play him. This was a task that he had skimped in preparation; he was now doing his revision on the board. At twenty-one Kasparov was already a great player. But he was becoming a greater one, in front of Karpov's eyes.

And Kasparov had something else. 'Playing a game against Kasparov is like playing three games against anybody else,' said the British GM Tony Miles, fresh from a
5½—½
drubbing by Kasparov in Basel. 'It's
very
hard to put into words. There are no quiet moves, no simple positions. Everything is
sharp.
But mainly it's his presence. You're constantly aware of his strength, his impatience. He drains you.' Playing a game of high-level chess has been compared to sitting a two-day exam. For Karpov in Moscow, it was five months of Finals.