Reports From Our Fellows Archives

Bobby Fischer Goes to War
Fellowship Key to Book Project

By David Edmonds ’02

It’s 5 p.m. on Tuesday, July 11, 1972, and the seats filling the arena of the sports hall in Reykjavik’s featureless leisure complex are sold out. On the platform, the world chess champion, Boris Vasilievich Spassky, sits alone at the chessboard. He glances up at the other side of the board. The expensive low-slung, black-leather swivel chair, specially provided for his challenger, the American Bobby Fischer, is empty.

It was the beginning of a remarkable two months in which the hitherto unpublicized world chess championship competed for front-page headlines with Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Chile, Uganda, and the deepening Watergate scandal. Later, the match would become immortalized in film, on stage, and in song. But why?

Partly, what gripped popular imagination was the idea that this U.S.-Soviet clash was both microcosm and symbol of the cold war hostility between the superpowers. The lone American star’s success would do more than simply win him the title: It would dispose of the Soviets’ boast that their chess hegemony reflected the superiority of the socialist system. The American challenger was profoundly convinced of his epochal role. The match was, he said, “really the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical Russians... .”

In fact, the reclusive and mercurial Fischer made an incongruous U.S. hero. And it was also the American’s dysfunctional personality that ensured front-page column-inches for the match. An unquestioned genius at the board, he was consumed by chess to a degree that surprised even other grandmasters. This obsession was accompanied by a notorious lack of social grace, a pachydermic insensitivity to others, and a capacity to strike real fear in his opponents. He was also fixated on the conditions under which he played. Over the years, he had insisted upon, and secured, greater and greater control over arrangements, proving himself ready to risk all to have his way.

Though not much was known about him in the West, the genial, dapper, ever-courteous Spassky could not have presented a greater contrast. The London Sunday Times described him as ’the more benign type of Soviet bureaucrat.” However, behind the Soviet monolith, his peers saw him variously as artist, joker, nihilist–a free spirit. Most significantly, they regarded him as an un-Soviet man (an epithet he cheerfully accepted). A Russian nationalist, he was a headache for the authorities in his refusal to toe the party line and honor his political role as a Soviet world champion.

Those summer months of 1972 were part farce, part tragedy off the chess board, titanic struggles on it. At first Fischer refused to show up at all, demanding more money. Then, complaining about the presence of the TV cameras, he forfeited the second game. In our book Bobby Fischer Goes To War, John Eidinow and I describe how he eventually powered his way to an historic victory. En route, we meet a cast of colorful characters. The cameo roles include a millionaire British businessman, the KGB, Henry Kissinger, and a rock-dancing Icelandic bodyguard.

The book was conceived before my Fellowship in Ann Arbor, and completed after my return home, but without the spell in Michigan it would have been a lot less fun to write. When not fueling up on foul-tasting but strangely addictive sherry* in Wallace House, I was buried in the library grazing through the newspaper archive. I also spent many happy hours in the Donald Hall film library collection, watching scores of movies, all of which had one chess scene or another. Though it never made the final cut, we had planned a chapter on how chess is deployed as a highly affective literary signalling system–used to create atmosphere and tone, and to make instant narrative references to personality, temperament, and states of mind.

Typical is representation of chess players as malevolent and Machiavellian. In Rambo III (1988), for example, Rambo is sent on a mission in support of the embattled Mujahideen forces and to rescue his erstwhile boss from a region of Afghanistan governed by a Soviet commander, Colonel Zaysen. The Colonel is a chess player. Enough said. The western audience needs no more information to know that he is without feeling, cunning, and capable of brutal torture.

Sherry apart, the process of researching and writing the book was far from torture.

–David Edmonds is current affairs editor for the BBC. He and John Eidinow are the authors of Bobby Fischer Goes To War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time, published by HarperCollins.

*N.B. Against tradition and the wishes of top management, Wallace House sherry has been upgraded.