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hearsal, the composer's dream. There is a feeling of snugness (which
goes back to one's childhood, to play-planning in bed, with parts of
toys fitting into corners of one's brain); there is the nice way one
piece is ambushed behind another, within the comfort and warmth
of an out of the way square; and there is the smooth motion of a
well-oiled and polished machine that runs sweetly at the touch of two
forked fingers lightly lifting and lightly lowering a piece.
I remember one particular problem I had been trying to com–
pose for months. There came a night when I managed at last to
express that particular theme.
It
was meant for the delectation of
the very expert solver. The unsophisticated might miss the point
of the problem entirely, and discover its fairly simple, "thetic" solu–
tion without having passed through the pleasurable torments prepared
for the sophisticated one. The latter would start by faIling for an illu–
sory pattern of play based on a fashionable avant-garde theme (expos–
ing White's King to checks), which the composer had taken the great–
est pains to "plant" (with only one obscure little move by an incon–
spicuous pawn to upset it) . Having passed through this "antithetic"
inferno the, by now ultra-sophisticated, solver would reach the simple
key-move as somebody on a wild goose chase might go from Albany
to New York by way of Vancouver, Eurasia, and the Azores. The
pleasant experience of the roundabout route (strange landscapes,
gongs, tigers, exotic customs, the thrice-repeated circuit of a newly
married couple around the sacred fire of an earthen brazier) would
amply reward him for the misery of the deceit, and after that, his
arrival at the simple key-move would provide him with a synthesis of
poignant artistic delight.
I remember slowly emerging from a swoon of concentrated chess
thought, and there, on a great English board of cream and cardinal
leather, the flawless position was at last balanced like a constellation.
It worked. It lived. My Staunton chessmen (a twenty-year-old set
given to me by my father's Englished brother, Konstantin), splen–
didly massive pieces of tawny or black wood, up to four and a quarter
inches tall, displayed their shiny contours as if conscious of the part
they played. Alas, if examined closely, some of the men were seen
to be chipped (after traveling in their box through the fifty or sixty
lodgings I had changed during those years); but the top of the
King's Rook and the brow of the King's Knight still showed a small
