No Bed-Wetting for the Grünfeld: On Chess and Biography
Where have all the good narratives gone?
Chess is, famously, an activity entirely unrelated to the rest of life: from this springs its fragile profundity. Biography theoretically links the private to the public in such a way that the former illuminates the latter. But in chess no such connection, or reductiveness, applies. Does grandmaster X prefer the French defence because his mother left his father when he was as yet a small child? Does bed-wetting lead to the Grunfeld? And so on.
One of the more abstruse symptoms of late capitalism is a phenomenon I like to call the “labyrinthinification of supermarkets”. You head into your local Tesco to pick up a solitary item, and eschewing the help of any member of staff expressly employed to overcome this problem, you decide the only reasonable course of action is to find the item yourself in what is essentially a warehouse full of similar items. In these instances, you invariably find yourself passing down the incongruous “books aisle”, sometimes on multiple occasions, before you eventually find your item in a place where you “swear it wasn’t there before”.
The “books aisle” is a part of the geography of the supermarket that will always remain a mystery to me. Perhaps its the idea that you head into town for some groceries and return with a copy of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine tucked under your arm that gets me. I don’t know. But the thing that strikes me most about the “book aisle” of your Tescos or your Sainsburys is the fact that sport seems to be obsessed with biography.
Not to denigrate the lived experiences of Shane Warne, David Beckham and Lawrence Dallaglio, but it’s hard to imagine that each new autobiography offers some morsel of insight into the human condition that justifies this market-garden industry of auto-literature. Of course, biography is not simply about learning about a life but being able to situate heroes (or anti-heroes) within the great chain of being that is human existence. We like to feel like these sports personalities are “like us” or, alternatively, “not like us” and (auto)biography allows us to do this in some sense.
But as time goes by, it becomes increasingly apparent that the life of the professional sports person is becoming ‘over-blandised’ (if you’ll permit another neologism). As sport gradually professionalises, potential talent is taken out of society earlier and earlier, and there is little space for anything like “lived experience” to creep into the spaces that remain. It was Alistair McGowan who condensed then-19-year-old Michael Owen’s second (?! - to borrow from chess notation) autobiography to the following precis:
I was born in Chester in 1980. Started to play football at the age of two; was quite good at it. Went to big school. Played some more football; was really good at it. Started playing football for Liverpool boys; was really, really good at it. Started playing football for Liverpool; was brilliant at it. Started playing football for England. That’ll be nineteen pounds ninety-five, please.
Standing at the brink of another World Chess Championship, it’s hard not to feel the same pangs of corporate death. It wouldn’t take too much to adapt McGowan’s precis of Michael Owen’s autobiography for Magnus Carlsen, for instance:
I was born in Tønsberg, Norway in 1990. Started to play chess at the age of five; was quite good at it. Went to big school. Played some more chess; was really good at it. Started playing chess competitively; was really, really good at it. Started playing chess professionally; was brilliant at it. Won the World Championships. That’ll be nineteen pounds ninety-five, please.
And when it comes to Carlsen’s challenger, Ian Nepomiachtchi, but for a few spatio-temporal tweaks, the only line that would need adding would be “Played a bit of Dota 2 as well; was really good at it”.
None of which is to say that the biographical context to each of these player’s lives is unimportant (and if you want good material on either, then Jonathan Tisdall’s profile of Carlsen and Savelij Tartakover’s profile of Nepomniachtchi are the places to start.) But it does raise the question why we are so infatuated with the lives of others. As Julian Barnes mused in his coverage of the Gary Kasparov-Nigel Short World Championship match, “Does grandmaster X prefer the French defence because his mother left his father when he was as yet a small child? Does bed-wetting lead to the Grunfeld? And so on.”
That Barnes seems to equate biography with trauma is revealing, perhaps. Chess does seem to be filled with a litany of individuals for whom biography and trauma seem to elide together. This week, I spent an enjoyable hour listening to Ben Johnson and John Fernandez discussing the life of Viktor Korchnoi on the Perpetual Chess Podcast. Even on a cursory reading of his biography, Chess is My Life, you cannot come away without a keen awareness the traumatic underpinnings of Korchnoi’s life. Cast your eye over the history of chess and you’ll find countless other stories of early life struggle within the chess world.
In the present day, though, the childhood trauma of the up-and-comers is more likely to take a different form. Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on ‘The Youngest Grandmaster Ever’, Abhimanyu Mishra. On the road to Grandmaster, Mishra’s father took him to Hungary to grind for the norm. In the course of a 77-day stretch, “Abhi played 70 games in 77 days. He would dispatch his opponent during the day and then spend the evening studying the next one.” Far be it from me to criticise the parental MO of others. My point here is simply this: the biography of the chess elite in 2021 is far more likely to contain copious cans of coke than copious lines of coke.
Where does this leave us? What if anything is lost to us by bringing the game to a point where success becomes equated to 100% commitment to the detriment of “Other Things”? What happens if there isn’t even any bed-wetting to lead to the Grünfeld in the first place?
Narratives are important. They exist as a scaffold upon which we can hang our facts, giving some kind of meaning to an array of otherwise arbitrary details. As psychologist Steven Pinker has explained: “Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.”
How materially important is the fact that Ian Nepomniachtchi has a winning record against Magnus Carlsen in classical format? When you take into account the fact that this is only a sample size of nine, of which three were played when the two were very young, it starts to look like scant bolstering for any sort of prediction. On top of this, in their 2017 London game, Carlsen was completely winning but blundered a piece and lost. In another not so unrealistic timeline, we would have 1–1 score with four draws between them. Read almost any profile of the World Chess Championship 2021, however, and you will come across some sort of allusion to this winning record of Nepomniachtchi’s. Why? Because it gives us some sort of narrative framework upon which to overlay our discussion of the match.
But here’s the thing: the scope for narratives has changed. Back in 1972, ahead of the Spassky-Fischer World Chess Championship match, there was a glut of narratives to hang your ideas off. Would Fischer even turn up? When he did, were the odds tilted in his favour by everyone bending over backward to accommodate him? Something something Cold War something. And then there was the mystique of chess in the ‘70s. There was just something about Spassky-Fischer that attracted people to chess at that point in time in a way that has barely been reproduced since.
When The Queen’s Gambit Netflixed its way into our lives in the midst of pandemic-stricken 2020, it caught the imagination of plenty of non-chess fans the world over. Interestingly enough, the story is riven with the sorts of narrative pegs that we have touched on here: childhood trauma, dramatic rivalries, drugs, Cold War. Beyond this, there is another interesting facet to the series that we’ve left untapped to this point. When it comes to the chess itself, although the producers have done a good job of respecting the game in the filming, Beth Harmon is seen as a savant who conjures up chess boards on the ceiling and just ‘gets the game’. There isn’t a huge amount of grind. And why shouldn’t it be that way? Who amongst the chess uncurious wants to watch a show where the protagonist spend their life studying to be even in with a chance of breaking into the top 100? Who amongst the chess curious, when it comes to it?
Which brings us back to the World Chess Championship 2021 in Dubai. Because what remains? Where are the narratives we hang our ideas from? They are almost exclusively chess-related. What do we make of the Carlsen-Nepomniachtchi record? How will Carlsen benefit from being a long-time incumbent? How will Nepomniachtchi’s more attacking style fare against Carlsen? What else is there?
Of course, none of this is problematic. As chess fans, we relish this matchup. But chess does find itself caught in a tricky conundrum between biography and professionalism. The fact of the matter is: the more professional the game becomes, the less appealing the World Chess Championship becomes for an ingenue audience. The less the biography is littered with tidbits of intrigue, the less the non-playing public will care.
It’s a hard fence to balance on. Would we encourage the drama that arises through personal trauma simply for the betterment of the spectacle? Obviously not! But does this not signal the hastening decline of chess as a public phenomenon? It would be hard to argue that we aren’t already at the forefront of this decline. The question is: how do we respond?
In my next piece, I’ll offer some thoughts on how chess can present itself as a legitimate form of entertainment in the 21st Century. Until then, do check out our Big Preview Episode over on The Chess Pit Podcast, particularly if you’re new to chess. It’ll be up on Monday morning to get you in the mood for the first game of the World Chess Championship which is starting on Friday. We’ll also be running daily digests to cover each game after it happens on YouTube and in audio form.