Chess—and Other Things

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 422, 25 July 1947, Page 12

Chess—and Other Things

MY ONE CONTRIBUTION TO CHESS. -By F. V. Morley. Faber & Faber, London. HIS is a very odd book. Under the guise of seeking a philosophy of chess, Mr. Morley reaches what must surely be an all-time high in irrelevance. Reminiscences, anecdotes, and frequently only vaguely relevant comment and cases in point crowd one another from the first page to the last, almost to the exclusion of what the reader is probably looking for-Mr. Morley’s contribution to chess. In spite of his casual literary style, the author has indeed a serious message for chess-players. To Mr. Morley, chess is a dromenon--"a pattern of ‘dynamic expression in which the performers express something larger. than themselves ... and a therapeutic rhythm in which they find release and fulfilment." The players in chess play not merely against a human opponent, but also to make the best abstract use of the position of the pieces. Chess is a combination of concrete struggle and abstract calculation. It is thus impossible, says the author, for players of different classes to mutually enjoy a friendly game. The stronger player finds it impossible to "play down" to the weaker. Thus friends who have had different knowledge of the game are deprived of the pleasure of mutu-ally-shared experience. Is there no way to sweep away a player’s previously acquired knowledge and experience so that in a friendly game the players "would start, as it were, on the same handicap? Mr. Morley suggests that there is a way. His idea is to alter the board (and with it the powers of pieces) slightly, by adding a column of six squares on each side of the board. This would indeed do the trick. The standard openings would lose most of their significance and an entirely new vista of positional and combinative possibilities would be opened, thus severely limiting the application of experience gained on the 64 square board. The idea has considerable merit for adoption in occasional friendly games, but not for general use, since soon the possibilities of the new board would be explored as rigorously as the old has been. Here is new hope for’ those who feel fated always to remain rabbits at the game. But for the weaker player who is trying to improve, Mr. Morley has no advice to offer. He is a self-con-fessed third-class player, who ‘cannot spare the time to become a good one, speaking for and to his fellows. If Mr. Morley had written this book solely as a treatise on chess, he could have compressed his message into less than half its 110 pages. The rest of the book could have been added in an appendix as the biography of the Morley (continued on next page) .

(continued from previous page) ~~. family. The author’s style is conversa- | tional and frequently witty. For those readers who are in no hurry to reach ~ the end of the book and do not mind frequent digressions the book will provide pleasant reading. But those who read the book to find out what Mr. Morley’s contribution to chess really is are advised to bear with him, curb their impatience, end read on until he decides to come

back to the point,

J. D.

Steele