A Flawed Hero

Last Saturday I went searching for Bobby Fischer. That is to say, I went, like Marcel Proust, in search of lost time. I belong to the generation of adolescents who were inspired by the 1972 Fischer-Spassky match in Reykjavik, but I gave up playing the game seriously more than 30 years ago.

I found what I was looking for in Bush Hall, an old music hall near where I live in West London. A chess tournament was taking place, played at lightning "blitz" speed — so fast that when each round began the racket of pieces and clocks being banged down sounded like a hailstorm. Not only the sights and sounds, but the smells and feel of a chess tournament were intensely nostalgic.

It was just the kind of occasion that, more than half a century ago, first drew the wunderkind from Brooklyn into the labyrinth of the 64 squares — the same magic number, as everybody noted, as the age at which he died last week.

Before the first round, I found myself standing next to an elderly gentleman reading Fischer's obituary in an American newspaper at the bar. This proved to be James Sherwin, a U.S. international master who had been a friend of the champion.

Clearly stricken by the death of a contemporary whom he had first come to know in his youth, Mr. Sherwin was glad to share his memories: "Bobby was just a nice kid." They would play blitz for hours on end, and occasionally Fischer would concede a game. In their tournament games, Fischer almost always won, but he had included one of their early encounters as the first of "My 60 Memorable Games" — the one and only book he ever wrote, and a classic of chess literature.

Mr. Sherwin was evidently proud of this distinction, conferring as it did a kind of immortality even on the loser. I later looked up the game, played at the New Jersey Open of 1957, when Fischer was just 14 but on the verge of becoming the U.S. champion, his first great triumph. One annotation gives a flavor of Fischer's waspish style: "Sherwin slid the Rook here with his pinky, as if to emphasize the cunning of this mysterious move."

When I asked Mr. Sherwin about Fischer's later life, after winning the world championship in 1972, his face clouded over. He had not seen Fischer during the last 30 years, he said, and he was not sorry, because the poor guy had obviously gone crazy. He preferred to remember him as a sane person.

The trouble with this view is that Fischer himself rejected it. He insisted that he was entirely sane and refused to plead diminished responsibility when he was imprisoned in Japan and faced extradition to America, where he would probably have spent the rest of his life in jail.

My own view, explained at greater length in my book "White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War was fought on the Chessboard" (published in America later this year by Houghton Mifflin) is that Fischer had been kept on the rails by two things that gave his life meaning and purpose: "If it was chess that had preserved his sanity, it was the Cold War that had given his genius the stage it required on which to perform and had channelled his destructiveness. In the absence of both chess and the Cold War, Fischer nursed a terrible rage against the world that would consume his reason, his reputation and ultimately his liberty."

Precisely why Fischer's lonely, brave, and ultimately successful struggle against the Soviet chess machine proved to be a Pyrrhic victory, at least for him, is a matter of psychiatry as much as politics. But there is evidence of anti-Semitism much earlier in his career. His friend Larry Evans recalled an occasion in the 1960s when Fischer expressed admiration for Hitler. "Baffled, I asked him why. 'Because he imposed his will on the world,' Fischer replied." That was the authentic voice of the megalomaniac.

Yet despite this dark, daemonic side to his character, Fischer could not have become world champion if he had already been mad. There is no more daunting feat of mental combat than a world chess championship match, but in order to defeat the combined forces of the Soviet Union Fischer required qualities over and above chess genius.

Fischer's anti-Communism was denounced at the time as paranoid, but this enemy was real: the communists really were determined to deny him the title that for them symbolized intellectual superiority over the West. Those who lost at Reykjavik were lucky not to be banished to the Gulag. Fischer was not mad to see the Soviet Union as an evil empire, and his triumph at the chessboard played a significant part in its downfall.

The Fischer who reemerged decades afterward had lost all touch with reality. For those like me who had admired him in our youth, sorrow over the waste of his talent was compounded by disbelief at the spectacle of this wild-eyed, foul-mouthed fanatic, ranting against his own country and gloating over September 11.

For the young people playing blitz chess last Saturday, Bobby Fischer was ancient history, but for the middle-aged he was an inescapable part of our own past. We stood for a minute's silence in his memory. It was a painful remembrance, but a flawed hero is still a hero. May he rest in peace.