The Immortal Game Read online

  Franklin, who by this time was an accomplished publisher, scientist, entrepreneur, and postmaster, had also emerged as one of the colonies’ most effective diplomats. He had spent most of the previous twenty years, and all of the previous ten, in London and Paris and moved easily among European circles of power. Yet his true allegiance was never in question, and as the tension ramped up and he reinforced his loyalties to America, the British crown was moved to relieve him of his post as deputy postmaster general of the colonies (a position based in London). Franklin wore the dismissal with pride. “Intending to disgrace me,” he wrote to a friend, “they have done me honour….I am too much attached to the interests of America, and an opposer of the measures of Administration. The displacing me is therefore a testimony of my being uncorrupted.”

  By late 1774 the hostility toward America was so uncomfortable in London that Franklin realized it was time to return home to Philadelphia. War seemed imminent, at which point his physical safety would be in jeopardy. Franklin still hoped for reason and peace to prevail, but no longer believed he could help bring it about. His loyalty to America had caused his personal reputation in England to plummet; London papers labeled him an “old snake,” a “veteran of mischief,” and a “grand incendiary.” The invective made it virtually impossible for any influential British politicians to meet publicly with Franklin without risking serious damage to their own careers. Franklin wisely prepared to head home.

  Then chess intervened. Just as he was set to leave, Franklin received a surprise invitation to play a single game with the prominent socialite Lady Howe at her comfortable London home. He put his departure on hold.

  Political rhetoric had been exhausted between the two sides, but here was a symbolic contest in which colonists and Brits could still publicly engage without personal risk. The surprise chess invitation in London didn’t have any overt diplomatic connotations at the start—and it didn’t have to for Franklin to accept. He loved the game that much. Homesick after many years abroad, worn out from the public flagellation, and in considerable personal danger, Franklin nevertheless could not say no to a set chessboard. “The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement,” he would later declare. “Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened by it…. For Life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with.” Among other motives, this was Franklin’s way of admitting his outsized lust for the game. He played it whenever he could, traveling with his own miniature set (one of the very first known to exist in the colonies). Franklin wrote about chess; sermonized with it; used it to make new friends, flirt with women, and bully opponents. He scouted constantly for worthy adversaries in Philadelphia, London, and Paris, and studied all available books on strategy. Much as it had already been for so many in the past, the game became a sort of intellectual and moral whetstone for Franklin. He relied on it to continually sharpen his thinking and clarify his values. In his essay “The Morals of Chess,” published in 1786, he asserted that the game improved a person’s

  • Foresight—looking ahead to the long-term consequences of any action

  • Circumspection—surveying the entire scene, observing hidden dynamics and unseen possibilities

  • Caution—avoiding haste and unnecessary blunders

  • Perseverance—refusing to give up in dim circumstances, continually pushing to improve one’s position

  He was also captivated by chess’s metaphorical resonance—so taken, in fact, that he was willing to bend the rules if it suited some moral or mischievous purpose. During a game one day in France in the midst of the American struggle for independence, his French opponent maneuvered into an attack position and put Franklin in check. Franklin replied with a blatantly illegal move: he ignored the check and moved an unrelated piece.

  His astonished opponent naturally objected. Cannot you see, sir, that your King is in check?

  “I see he is in check,” Franklin impishly replied. “But I shall not defend him. If he was a good King, like yours, he would deserve the protection of his subjects; but he is a tyrant and has cost them already more than he is worth. Take him, if you please. I can do without him, and will fight out the rest of the battle en republicain.”*14

  In that one playful remark, Franklin brilliantly encapsulated the democratic revolution. America was breaking from a long tradition of autocratic rule, and no longer had any need for the king. Defending the American colonies by day and playing chess at night, it was impossible for Franklin not to look at the board and project onto it his nation’s own political circumstances. Democracy was itself an abstract concept. No one could see democracy, hold it in a hand, turn it around on a table to observe, share, and discuss. The most anyone could do was try to represent it in words and laws. With chess, democracy could (temporarily) take on a concrete, if much simplified, shape. One could lift the King off the board to make a point, or simply ignore his existence. In doing so, one would be giving life to an abstract notion—making it communicable. (Inspired by Franklin’s comment and more broadly by the democratic revolution, American chess designers subsequently produced various “democratic” sets, with a President in the place of a King, and so on. But the medieval European iconography continued as the universal standard.)

  Franklin was a unique figure, but in his devotion to chess in the eighteenth century he was merely one of a crowd. Chess was, quite simply, the recreation of choice for key constituents of the scientific and cultural awakening now known as the Enlightenment. The game inspired and fascinated such thinkers as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the encyclopedist Denis Diderot, and the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, among others. “In the Age of Reason, the moves of the pieces were like the conclusions of syllogisms,” write expert players and chess authors Larry Parr and Lev Alburt. Perhaps more than in any previous age, the internal logic of the game itself became intertwined with the thinking of its leading proponents. The same spirit of thought guided these thinkers as they calculated chess moves and as they worked through philosophical problems: search, test, doubt, search again, test again, doubt, and on until the best course of action wiggled to the top.

  So it was, then, that chess games were often entangled within great meetings and important conversations. “He seldom goes to bed till day-break, drinking coffee almost every half hour, and playing at chess,” a close observer wrote of Voltaire in 1767. “Next day he is never visible till noon, and then disagreeably so…. His house is a receptacle for all foreigners; and, as every such visitor strains his genius to entertain him, no wonder, by such a quick succession of all the several inhabitants of the four quarters of the world, that Voltaire has such an universal knowledge of mankind.”

  The line was often indistinguishable between the game of chess and the ideas it helped fertilize. In 1754 the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and the Lutheran dramatist Gotthold Lessing met over a chessboard and quickly became regular opponents, good friends, and indispensable colleagues. Lessing later modeled the lead character in his play Nathan the Wise on Mendelssohn. The play itself includes much chess, which Lessing used both to facilitate and to drive the dialogue between the enlightened Muslim sultan Saladin and his sister Sittah. Lessing and his friends considered chess to be a useful metaphorical tool in their quest to promote social tolerance.

  Chess could help this cause in two substantial ways. First, the interaction of the actual pieces offered a sophisticated comment on social stratification and the true nature of power. While at first the different pieces appeared to be severely unequal, any seasoned player knew that each had strengths to be reckoned with. Pawns, particularly working together, could hold their own and even sometimes dominate a region of the board. The lesson from this was that each member of a society has particular virtues, regardless of social rank.

  Second, as a game won or lost purely on skill, chess offered as level a playing field as one could find in societ
y. Indeed, it was the epitome of meritocracy, an arena where advancement was procured solely on the basis of skill. Judging people on their contributions to society rather than their inherited wealth, race, or religion was at the root of the campaign for social tolerance. The mutual respect between the bourgeois Lessing and the impoverished Jew Mendelssohn served as a public example for all to follow. Mendelssohn’s last written work, in fact, was an intellectual defense of Lessing. The message of religious tolerance that spilled out of their friendship would reverberate for centuries.

  AS MUCH AS chess inspired Benjamin Franklin’s thinking, it also scratched some sort of personal itch. He seemed to need to play it. Though he didn’t become acquainted with chess until young adulthood—comparatively late—he made up for lost time by studying incessantly, continually working to improve his game and never missing an opportunity to play. His correspondence was riddled with references to casual games with friends. In Philadelphia in his middle years, he became more and more frustrated by the dearth of skilled opponents. Admirers frequently worked to pair him with good players, and though the game was popular among the American elite, including John Adams, John Quincy Adams, James Madison, James Monroe, and Thomas Jefferson,*15 accomplished chess players were a rare find. Perhaps the best player in all the colonies, Franklin was in some ways too strong for his own good. In 1752 he reported to a friend in Europe: “Honest David Martin, Rector of our Academy, my principal Antagonist at Chess, is dead, and the few remaining Players here are very indifferent, so that I have now no need of Stamma’s Pamphlet [an advanced chess guide], and am glad you did not send it.”

  In London and Paris, accomplished players abounded, and Franklin happily found himself just one of the crowd of chess aficionados. (The vastly superior chess scene there was probably not inconsequential in Franklin’s spending so many years of his later life abroad.) But even in London, Franklin was always pleased to find someone new to play with. Bad timing notwithstanding, he was enthusiastic about Lady Howe’s invitation.

  On his first visit to her home, in late 1774, the two played several games together and enjoyed each other’s company. They quickly arranged for a return visit, which featured more good chess, along with some stimulating talk. At first Lady Howe steered Franklin into a discussion of mathematics; then, abruptly, she switched to politics.

  “What is to be done with this dispute between Britain and the colonies?” she blurted out. “I hope we are not to have civil war. They should kiss and be friends.” Going further, she then asked Franklin bluntly if he was still willing to play a part in some sort of reconciliation.

  Franklin replied that he was willing, and added that he still thought it achievable with the right interlocutors. “The two countries have really no clashing interests to differ about,” said Franklin, with a diplomat’s optimism. “It is rather a matter of punctilio, which two or three reasonable people might settle in half an hour.”

  Two cerebral individuals sat together over a symbolic game of war imagining alternative ways to settle a red-hot conflict. The scene called to mind the ancient notions that chess could assist warriors in understanding combat, and perhaps replace it. It also spoke to the psychological compulsion that many players felt. “Viewed in terms of psychoanalytic theory,” psychologist Norman Reider writes, “the invention of chess expressed the triumph of secondary process thinking over the primary process. Actual warfare [is replaced by] a struggle which is organized, controlled, circumscribed and regulated.”

  The irony was probably not lost on Franklin at the time. But his notes reflect that he still didn’t understand that his casual banter during that second meeting with Lady Howe was any more consequential than their symbolic moves on the board.

  The shift occurred when Franklin entered Lady Howe’s home for the third time, on Christmas Day, 1774. This time Franklin was surprised to find Lord Howe, Lady Howe’s influential brother, waiting to meet him. Lord Howe represented a collection of moderates who, like Franklin, hoped to avert a collision between the crown and the colonies. He put it to Franklin directly: Would Franklin be willing to enter one final secret negotiation to avert war? Franklin agreed to take part—and now likely realized that chess had been a diplomatic tool all along. It would continue to play an important role: under cover of social chess games, Lord Howe and Franklin embarked on a secret two-month project. Publicly, Franklin kept visiting Lady Howe’s home to play chess. Once inside, however, they schemed on how to prevent a real war.

  The chess intrigue worked perfectly; the diplomacy failed miserably. After much discussion, it became apparent that Lord Howe and his group could not win enough government support to stop the momentum toward war. Franklin was finally forced to give up. He left for America on March 20, 1775.

  His boat trip lasted six weeks; the spark of war did not take even that long. Two weeks before he landed, in the early morning of April 19, the Revolutionary War began with Paul Revere’s midnight ride and the battles of Lexington and Concord.

  A year later, after helping to draft the Declaration of Independence, Franklin, now aged seventy, traveled to Paris to negotiate treaties and secure a critical military alliance. There, he was thrilled to be surrounded by an overwhelming abundance of top-quality chess players. “I rarely go to the operas at Paris,” Franklin said in designating chess as his cultural priority. “I call this my opera.” He played whenever he could with colleagues and admirers, including games in the boudoir of his friend Anne-Louise Boivin d’Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy as she took exceptionally long baths.

  CHESS PLAY was exploding. Throughout Europe and Russia, crowds packed chess cafés to play friends and strangers. Men and women of means, leisure, and intellectual ambition played chess just as princes and knights had centuries earlier, but now many aspired to excel at it. Much of the surging popularity and higher quality of play was due directly to the Italian master Gioacchino Greco’s new popular style of chess guide. In the early seventeenth century, Greco had become the first chess instructor to chart out entire games in order to demonstrate the trajectory of various openings. That led to a dramatic public breakthrough. In the same way that National Geographic magazine made anthropology more accessible to a wider public in the twentieth century, Greco’s full-game illustrations gave the seventeenth-century public a tangible hold on what a strategic chess game could look and feel like. The English poet Richard Lovelace later paid tribute to Greco’s games (as published by the Englishman Francis Beale in 1656):

  Men that could only fool at fox and geese

  Are new made polititians [sic] by thy book*16

  With Greco’s chess guides, the restless energy of the Enlightenment, and an increase in available leisure time, all of Europe now had a growing chess culture. In France, the mix was particularly combustible. Greco’s games were published there in forty-one separate editions, and chess became a vital part of the Parisian landscape, played avidly in just about every café in the city.

  Around 1740, the most ambitious players in Paris began to gather daily at Café de la Régence, a dingy bistro on the rue Saint-Honoré near the Louvre. Chessboards there were rented by the hour, with a higher fee at night to pay for the candlelight. The Régence quickly became not just the most popular chess café in France, but the undisputed center of the chess universe. Improbably, it stayed that way for a long time. “The Régence represents the sun, round which the lesser spheres of light revolve,” reported the English chess author and collector George Walker a century later, in 1840. “It is the centre of civilised Europe, considered with regard to chess. As Flanders in days of yore was the great battle-ground…at which nations engaged in the duello, so for above a hundred years has this café served as the grand gladiatorial arena for chess-players of every country and colour.”

  Part of the electric quality of the Régence in its early years was conferred by the presence of M. de Kermur Sire de Légal, a superb chess instructor and without question the best player in Paris. His standing was such that the Ré
gence’s management put him on the payroll in order to keep him there. Then, in 1743, a teenaged musician named François-André Danican Philidor, who had been taking lessons from Légal, began beating him. Word quickly spread of a genuine new chess phenomenon.

  In Paris, Holland, and London, Philidor dazzled opponents and onlookers. He had an extraordinary memory, and in 1744 (at age eighteen) shocked the world by playing two games simultaneously while blindfolded. This was not nearly a historical first. Dating all the way back to Sa’id Bin Jubair in 665, a small number of players had played blind throughout the centuries. But for citizens of the eighteenth century, who had little knowledge of previous blind play, it was new and astounding—such an astonishing combination of memory and mental acrobatics that even Philidor’s mentor Légal refused to attempt it in public. In response to Philidor’s reality-defying display, which he repeated seven years later with three players, and many times after that, the public didn’t know whether to be impressed or horrified. Philidor, it was said, was “risking his sanity in such a dangerous pursuit.”

  In another dramatic episode, young Philidor managed to humiliate perhaps the world’s most famous chess authority. Phillip Stamma was a Syrian-born player who had tantalized Europe with promises of unearthing ancient chess secrets from the Islamic world. His books of 1737 and 1745 were highly sought after by serious players of the day—including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. But when Stamma met Philidor in London in 1747, the Syrian fell short. Philidor beat him eight games to one, with one draw.*17

  Ironically, it was Philidor’s style of play—not Stamma’s—that truly hearkened back to the ancient days of the slower, more strategic shatranj. It turned out that his remarkable memory was not his most important asset. Philidor’s real secret weapon was his fundamentally different way of looking at the board. “Pawns,” Philidor declared, “are the very soul of the game.” It was a brilliant piece of counterintuition. Philidor suggested that the Pawns, which at first glance seemed so powerless as to be expendable, could, working in concert with one another, actually exert more influence than any single piece on the board. He made Pawn structure a priority above all else, putting Pawns into diagonal arrangements to defend one another and supporting them from behind with the more prominent pieces. Slowly, his formidable Pawn fence would then creep up the board, squeezing the opponent’s pieces on the other side and placing some Pawns in strong contention for promotion at the back row. Implemented correctly, this flexible strategy could defuse virtually any brilliant tactical combination wielded by an opponent.