E X I L E
ss
number of moves, generally two or three.
It
is a beautiful, complex,
and sterile art related to the ordinary form of the game only insofar
as, say, the properties of a sphere are made use of both by a juggler
in weaving a new act and by a tennis player in winning a tourna–
ment. Most chess players, in fact, amateurs and masters alike, are only
mildly interested in these highly specialized, fanciful and elegant
riddles, and though appreciative of a catchy problem would be
utterly baffled if asked to compose one.
Inspiration of a quasi-musical, quasi-poetical, or to be quite
exact, poetico-mathematical type, attends the process of thinking up
a chess composition of that sort. Frequently, in the friendly middle
of the day, on the fringe of some trivial occupation, in the idle wake
of a passing thought, I would experience, without warning, a spasm
of acute mental pleasure as the bud of a chess problem burst open in
my brain, promising me a night of labor and felicity.
It
might be a
new way of blending an unusual strategic device with an unusual
line of defense; it might be a glimpse, curiously stylized and thus
incomplete, of the actual configuration of men that would render
at last, with humor and grace, a difficult theme that I had despaired
of expressing before; or it might be a mere gesture made in the mist
of my mind by the various units of force represented by chessmen–
a kind of swift dumb show, suggesting new harmonies and new con–
flicts; whatever it was, it belonged to an especially exhilarating order
of sensation, and my only quarrel with it today is that the maniacal
manipulation of carved figures, or of their mental counterparts,
during my most ebullient and prolific years engulfed so much of
the time I could have devoted to verbal adventure.
Experts distinguish several schools of the chess problem
art:
the
Anglo-American one that combines accurate construction with dazz–
ling thematic patterns and refuses to be bound by any conventional
rules; the rugged splendor of the Teutonic school; the highly finished
but unpleasantly slick and insipid products of the Czech style with
its strict adherence to certain artificial conditions; and the mechanical
Soviet problem of the so-called "task" type, which replaces artistic
strategy by the ponderous working of themes to their utmost capacity.
Themes in chess, it may be explained, are such devices as forelaying,
withdrawing, pinning, unpinning, and so forth; but it is only when
they are combined in a certain way that a problem is satisfying.
