56
PARTISAN REVIEW
Deceit, to the point of diabolism, and originality, grading into the
grotesque, were my notions of strategy, and although in matters of
construction I tried to conform, whenever possible, to classical rules,
such as economy of force, unity, weeding out of loose ends, I was
always ready to sacrifice purity of form to the exigencies of fantastic
content, causing form to bulge and burst like a sponge bag containing
a small furious devil.
It is one thing to conceive the main play of a composition and
another to construct it. The strain on the mind is formidable: the
element of time drops out of one's consciousness altogether: the build–
ing hand gropes for a pawn in the box, holds it, while the mind
still ponders the need for a foil or a stop-gap, and when the fist opens
a whole hour, perhaps, has gone by, has burned to ashes in the
incandescent cerebration of the schemer. The chessboard before him
is a magnetic field, a system of stresses and abysses, a starry firma–
ment. The Bishops move over it like searchlights. This or that Knight
is a lever adjusted and tried, and readjusted and tried again, till the
problem is tuned up to the necessary level of beauty and surprise.
How often have I struggled to bind the terrible force of White':;
Queen so as to avoid a dual solution! It should be understood that
competition in chess problems is not really between White and Black
but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a
first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters
but between the author and the world), so that a great part of a
problem's value is due to the number of "tries"-delusive opening
moves, false scents, specious lines of play, astutely and lovingly pre–
pared to lead the would-be solver astray. But whatever I can say
about this matter of problem composing, I do not seem to convey
sufficiently the ecstatic core of the process and its points of connection
with various other, more overt and fruitful, operations of the creative
mind, from the charting of dangerous seas to the writing of one of
those incredible novels where the author, in a fit of lucid madness,
has set himself certain unique rules that he observes, certain night–
mare obstacles that he surmounts, with the zest of a deity building
a live world from the most unlikely ingredients-rocks, and carbon,
and blind throbbings. In the case of problem composition, the event
is accompanied by a mellow physical satisfaction, especially when the
chessmen are beginning to enact adequately, in a penultimate re-
