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Idle Passion is an intelligent amateur's attempt to examine, with the wan headlamp of Freudian ideology, what Vladimir Nabokov calls "the full horror, the abysmal depths of chess." Author Alexander Cockburn is a graceful writer and reads plausibly enough when he says that chess is a "symbolic repetition" of the "family romance" in which the pieces "represent... the Oedipal situation." Meaning that the king is the father and the queen is the mother. But what's this about the king also being "the boy's penis in the phallic stage?" Cockburn explains gravely that the "tense etiquette" of chess, which forbids a player to touch his own pieces except to make a move and enforces a rigid "taboo against touching the opponent's pieces," is actually a way of guarding against "masturbation" or a possible "homosexual overture."
Warming to his subject, Cockburn further asserts that the game is a device for the release of still more "cruel instincts and vile desires." He recalls a fetching legend about a sadistic king of Babylon known as Evil Merodach, who "chopped up the body of his father Nebuchadnezzar into three hundred pieces and threw them to three hundred vultures." Chess, the legend continues, was invented to cure Merodach's madness.
Cockburn agrees. With supporting quotes from Freud's biographer, Ernest Jones, and from Reuben Fine, an American grand master who became a Freudian analyst, the author argues that the hidden aim of the game is to "murder" the father with the help of the mother and so recapture "a part of lost omnipotence." Chess, Cockburn concludes with intense distaste, is a paranoid, "anal-sadistic ... socially meaningless ... dance of death" that for the habitual player becomes "a process of suicide."
Seldom Sober. As for the supreme masters of the game, Cockburn describes at least half of them as deranged men. Paul Morphy, he reminds us, was a paranoid fetishist who lived in deathly fear of poisoners and liked to stand ecstatically in a circle of women's shoes. Wilhelm Steinitz had a recurrent delusion that he was playing chess with God. Alexander Alekhine served as a police informer in the Soviet Union, wrote anti-Semitic tracts hi Nazi Germany, was seldom seen sober and once urinated on the carpet in the middle of a well-attended chess exhibition.
Unfortunately, neither Cockburn nor the authors of The World of Chess have anything of interest to say about the greatest and weirdest grand master of them all. Cockburn has never met Fischer; his portrait is drawn largely from magazine clips. But Saidy is a lifelong friend of the champion's and in private speaks about him with rich insight. Regrettably, in his chapter on Fischer he has chosen to speak simperingly about how "great... worthy ... true to his principles... misunderstood" Fischer is. He also urges the world to be "thankful" that Fischer plays chess.