From prodigy to pariah

Bobby Fischer: from prodigy to pariah

He played some of the most sublime chess ever seen. Then, as a new book and film illustrate, he disappeared from view. What made such a brilliant mind go into freefall?

• Andrew Anthony
• The Observer, Sunday 15 May 2011

In 1999, I spent three days sitting in a variety of thermal baths dotted around Budapest. As grand and attractive as the Hungarian capital’s spas are, I wasn’t stewing myself for therapeutic or leisure purposes. Instead, I was waiting for someone I’d been told frequented the baths, someone who was said to be a genius and a paranoid obsessive, the greatest chess player who ever lived and an obnoxious crackpot. I was looking for Bobby Fischer.

For the last four decades of his life, that’s what people did with Fischer – they looked for him. Fans, journalists, biographers, friends, they all tried to find this mythical creature, either in person or in that fabulous abstract realm that he continued to haunt: chess. He had ventured deep into the alternate world of this most intellectually demanding of games, a daunting contest of infinite possibilities, and succeeded in becoming world champion. Like some chequerboard version of Conrad’s Kurtz, the experience seemed to leave him in a state of dread. Then he vanished.

As with those other great disappearing acts, JD Salinger, Greta Garbo and Howard Hughes, Fischer was almost as well known for his withdrawal from public life as he was for the achievements that brought him fame in the first place. There was even a feature film made called Searching for Bobby Fischer. It wasn’t actually about Fischer, but based on the life of another chess prodigy, Joshua Waitzkin. Fischer’s name was employed as a metaphor for his total commitment, what Garry Kasparov, Fischer’s only rival for the title of best-ever player, has described as “pathological determination”. Fischer was apoplectic when he heard about the film, which he called a “monumental swindle” and even angrier when he discovered that he had no legal grounds on which to sue the film-makers.

Had I run into him, I wasn’t expecting him to be any happier. My intentions weren’t metaphorical. I’d been prompted to seek him out after he’d made one of his rare public statements. In a live interview on Hungarian radio, he said: “As Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, the Jews are not the victims, they are the victimisers!”, before launching into a Holocaust-denying rant. Over half-a-million Hungarian Jews are estimated to have been killed during the Holocaust. Fischer was born a Jew, and if Hitler had had anything to do with the matter, he would have died a Jew, too. I wanted to discover how or why Fischer’s obsessive character had taken such a self-destructive turn. The word was that he remained a peerless analyst of chess games. Would it not be possible to appeal to his rational side?

In the event, the bath-house stake-out was a failure. None of the bearded strangers I spent my time staring at through the saturated air turned out to be Fischer. He didn’t show up at any of the baths. I left Budapest with Fischer seeming even more elusive than before I arrived. With the exception of a former girlfriend, most of the people who knew him refused to speak to me. He was fiercely protective of his privacy, which was the reason the story of his progress from prodigy to pariah remained the subject of so much speculation and rumour.

Among the many perceived betrayals for which his friends and intimates were permanently expunged from his life, the gravest was speaking to the press or biographers. Only with Fischer’s death in 2008 did the atmosphere of omerta that surrounded the legend begin to dissipate and a more accurate testimony emerge. The fruits of this candour are a new biography, Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall, by Frank Brady, and the soon-to-be-released HBO film, Bobby Fischer Against the World. Brady knew Fischer in the 60s and is the author of Bobby Fischer: Profile of a Prodigy, perhaps the only other worthwhile biography on the subject. He is also credited as consultant for the documentary. Together, the film and the book give shape to a more complete picture of Fischer: brash, complex, troubled, bold, vulnerable, lonely, occasionally loving, but fundamentally enigmatic.

The tortured genius and the celebrity recluse are two archetypes by which the popular imagination appears incurably enthralled. They occupy extreme but ambiguous positions in the social firmament, simultaneously familiar and unknowable, often winning our sympathy even as they fail our understanding. Working as Mephistophelean morality tales, they reassuringly remind us that exceptional talent can be an affliction as well as a gift and that sometimes the price of success is one that we – the average, the normal, the unchosen – would not wish to pay. No one in recent times has combined these two roles with more tragedy or pathos than Fischer.

His descent into wild and irrational behaviour is far from a unique narrative, particularly in chess. The history of the game contains many similar trajectories. As GK Chesterton noted in arguing that reason bred insanity: “Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.” Akiba Rubinstein, the early 20th-century Polish grandmaster, would hide in the corner of the competition hall between moves, owing to his anthropophobia (fear of people), retiring from the game when schizophrenia got the better of him. William Steinitz, the Austrian who was the world’s first undisputed chess champion, died in an asylum. Then there was Paul Morphy, the American who was said to be the 19th-century’s finest player and to whom Fischer has frequently been compared: he quit the game, having beaten all his rivals, and began a decline into paranoid delusion. Aged 47, he was found dead in his bath, surrounded by women’s shoes.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell contends that genius is not an accident of birth but the combination of innate ability and intense application – typically 10,000 hours of practice. Nigel Short, the British grandmaster who was once ranked third in the world, agrees with Gladwell. “You will always find that the most naturally talented players have put in an incredible number of hours,” he says. “There are no exceptions.”

Fischer, who registered an IQ of 180, once said that he did not consider himself to be a genius at chess. “I consider myself to be a genius who happens to play chess.” He was not only furnishing his own myth when he made that statement, but also playing to our romantic notions of genius as a kind of destiny. The truth is that not even the exceptional Fischer was an exception.

Born in Chicago in 1943, Fischer moved around America during the war years with his mother, Regina, and his older sister, Joan. His mother worked as a welder, a riveter, farm worker, schoolteacher, stenographer and toxicologist’s assistant. The one-parent family eventually moved to New York, settling in a rundown area of Brooklyn. Having shown a precocious talent for kids’ puzzles, Fischer began playing chess at six when his sister bought him a $1 plastic set. By the age of nine, he was practising and studying the game to the exclusion of all else.

Full article here.