Searching for Bobby Fischer, Catholic?

It was a strange blast from the past when I read the news that Bobby Fischer had died last Thursday in Iceland. I first read about and became fascinated with Bobby Fischer in 1977, when I was in the fourth grade. I had discovered the game of chess and soon decided that I wanted to be a world chess champion when I grew up. And, of course, who better to look to in pursuing that goal than the lone American world chess champion? I read several books on chess, including Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess, which was assuredly not written by Fischer, but, hey, what do eight year olds know?

A few things held me back from becoming the next American chess champion of the world, most notably a lack of chess genius. In addition, while I was fairly obsessive about the game for a year or two, I was not, like the young Fischer, a chess addict. The mythology of Fischer is based in some astounding facts, namely his stupendous genius at chess and stupendous rottenness at nearly everything else. He was a National Master at the age of twelve, U.S. Champion at fourteen, and a Grand Master at fifteen. His devotion to chess, especially as a child, was remarkable and not altogether healthy, a foreshadowing of the sort of unbalanced approach to life that would lead to paranoia, anti-Semitism, and lengthy silences, including walking away from competitive chess after winning the world title in 1972. A September 7, 1957 piece in The New Yorker depicts a young man whose dazzling play almost made his single-mindedness seem like a virtue of sorts:

Though school tests have shown him to have generally superior intelligence, he does no better than average in his studies, displaying little interest in most of the subjects taught and being restless in class. His teachers are amazed when they hear of his chess victories—not so much at his revealing mental powers that they hadn’t suspected as at his being able to sit still for the five hours a tournament game may last. “In my class, Bobby couldn’t sit still for five minutes,” one of them says. A chessboard, with pieces set up on it, is always beside his bed. From the moment he wakes up, he works at chess problems—even during meals and while watching television.

Likewise, a fascinating December 2002 piece in The Atlantic, written by Rene Chun, depicts the young Fischer as a man who had little interest in the world outside of chess—since chess was his entire world:

Those close to Fischer knew that when it came to art, politics, or anything else the cosmopolitan set talked about, he was at a total loss. "If you were out to dinner with Bobby in the sixties, he wouldn't be able to follow the conversation," says Don Schultz, a former friend. "He would have his little pocket set out and he'd play chess at the table. He had a one-dimensional outlook on life."

During the 1960s Fischer became involved in The Worldwide Church of God, an apocalyptic-oriented and cult-like "church" founded in California in 1933 by Herbert Armstrong. He began to display the sort of paranoia (focused on the Soviets, who dominated chess until Fischer's brilliant stretch from 1967-1972),  bigotry (aimed at Jews, despite his mother being Jewish), and general crankiness that would spiral out of control in the 1970s and beyond. In a January 22nd piece for The Wall Street Journal, Brian Carney offered this analysis of Fischer's difficult and often disturbing personality:

The French philosopher Alexander Kojeve once wrote that the only defense against madness is the accord of your peers. That is, if you can convince no one that your beliefs are well-founded, then it's probably you who are crazy, and not the herd. Fischer's problem was that he had no peers, at least not in chess, so he had no one to check his worst tendencies. The world championship he won in 1972 validated his view of himself as a chess player, but it also insulated him from the humanizing influences of the world around him. He descended into what can only be considered a kind of madness.

In high school and college I would occasionally read or hear that Fischer was living on the streets in California or moving from one seedy hotel to another and I wondered, "Does chess bring such madness, or does such madness find solace in chess?" I think that both are true; the history of chess is littered with men whose brilliance at the board was matched by a mixture of bizarre behavior, vulgarity, and nearly complete absence of common sense and decency. To most people, chess is a game; to those men it was not just life—it was reality. (A couple of exceptions, happily, do stand out: Boris Spassky, who Fischer beat in Iceland in 1972 for the world championship, and Garry Kasparov (b. 1963), who became the youngest world champion at the age of 22 and who retired in 2005 in order to focus on writing and his work in politics.)

Of course, the most surprising thing about Fischer's death (at least to me) was that he was given a Catholic burial. And in a country in which Catholics only comprise about one percent of the population (see this article). Catholic News Service reported:

The former champion “had expressed his desire to have a catholic burial and we honored that” with a ceremony that took place in Laugardaela, a small city 50 kilometers south of the capital,” Father Rolland said.

Only five people attended the ceremony, including his Japanese friend Miyoko Watai, who traveled from Japan to attend to the funeral.  Father Rolland said she organized the funeral together with a group of Fischer’s friends in Iceland.

“I don’t know if he converted to the Catholic faith, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t,” said Father Rolland, in reference to the reserved manner in which Fischer discussed his private life and his personal decisions.

From what I know from reading occasional articles about Fischer over the years, there was little or no hint of an interest in Catholicism. Then again, his personal life, not surprisingly, was both mysterious and strange. He apparently had a Filipino wife/longtime girlfriend (and perhaps a child by her) and had lived with a Japanese chess player since about 2000. His anti-Semitic rants continued (he claimed that Jews had invented the Holocaust) and he applauded the 9/11 attacks. And it seems that Iceland became home for him because the country offered him political asylum and because his extreme views are popular among some folks there. In a January 1999 interview Fischer did claim that the Catholic Church "taught for a long time about that they're [Jews] guilty of the murder of Christ, right?" Otherwise, it's difficult to find much about Fischer's interest in the Catholic Church. God alone knows, I suppose.

Chun writes, in her 2002 Atlantic piece, that Fischer, having stopped playing chess many years ago, referred to the game as "mental masturbation." That description is, I think, stunning in both its expressed disgust and its startling honesty. Decades ago, Fischer gave himself entirely to a cruel mistress whose 64 squares and 32 pieces demanded complete and total loyalty, submission, and sacrifice. One wonders if he spent the second half of his life fleeing from her clutches, seeking the sort of life-giving relationships that the cold confines of the chess board could never offer, for all of its logical clarity and strategic seduction. Fischer's final words, reportedly, were: "Nothing eases suffering like human touch.” R.I.P.

Comments

[Ed Peters]

Very thoughtful. Thx.

[Mark Brumley]

Well said.

[J.B. Mulder]

Nice article.

[Carl E. Olson]

Thanks, gentlemen.

[Phil Lawler]

As an enthusiastic (if not particularly skilled) player, I too was fascinated by Fischer, whose brilliance on the board had its own distinctive beauty.

He's not the first grandmaster to flirt with insanity, of course. Your closing lines reminded me of Nabakov's novel, The Defense, the story of a chess fanatic marching down that road to obsession.

[Maureen]

Here's a picture of the poor man's grave, from an Icelandic site.

http://www.stokkseyri.is/web/news.php?view=one&nid=4136

[Maureen]

Oh, and here's the church itself. Looks pretty stark. Sorry I can't figure out who the saint of the parish is.

http://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laugard%C3%A6lakirkja

[Maureen]

I read the Wikipedia article a bit more, and I've puzzled out that it's apparently the church of God, Mary, and St. Agatha? Multiple dedications... very old-fashioned.

[Carl Olson]

Yesterday I came across a book in my library that I had forgotten: Bobby Fischer Goes To War: How a Lone American Star Defeated the Soviet Chess Machine (Harper, 2004), by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. It is a fascinating and well-researched account of the lives of Fischer and Spassky and their famous 1972 match. Well worth checking out to get a better sense of why Fischer continues to fascinate, and how differently he and Spassky approached the game of chess—and the game of life.