Tommy C's Blog

However painful it may be, we must not shrink from the truth: women cannot play chess. ... they cannot paint either, or write, or philosophize. ... the fact [is] that women are much more stupid than men.

Amongst chess players, JH Donner has a legendary reputation. Not especially for the games he played - although as a good but not great Grandmaster he had his moments - but as a writer. Outrageous, provocative, insulting, sardonic, ironic, superior - and above all else, hilarious.

His quotations abound in writings about the game:

After I resigned this game with perfect self-control and solemnly shook hands with my opponent in the best of Anglo-Saxon traditions, I rushed home, where I threw myself onto my bed, howling and screaming, and pulled the blankets over my face. For three days and three nights . . .

I love all positions. Give me a difficult positional game, I will play it. Give me a bad position, I will defend it. Openings, endgames, complicated positions, dull draws, I love them and I will do my very best. But totally won positions, I cannot stand them.

Love is: trying your whole life to teach your wife to play chess.

- chosen from amongst many.

And now, for the first time, Donner's long-fabled book, The King: Chess Pieces, has appeared fully in English translation - almost 20 years after its original publication in his homeland, Holland, a year before his death. Does it justify novelist Harry Mulisch's description that "this books is about chess only in appearance, and I hope that no one will allow himself to be scared off by the diagrams and annotations ... It is in fact a magnificent self-portrait of Hein Donner"? In other words, is it worth a read for the non-chess player?

Certainly the title amused my office mates. "The King? Chess Pieces? Is there a sequel - say, The Knight, Another Chess Piece?" But it amused them more to learn that the first part of the title appears to refer to Donner's view of himself, whilst the latter is also a pun: the book is Donner's selected journalism, from 1950 to 1983. Indeed, whilst Donner's focus is always chess-related, his range of passing subjects is wide: from the sociology of poker in the United States to the idiocies of sports writing to the nature of communism.

But he has a few favourites. One is women, as you might already guessed, and the comic mysteries they present Donner run throughout the book, and thus his career and life. At one point, he is mystified as to why - whilst men comprehensibly send him hate-mail threatening to beat him up in response to his latest outrage - women want to take care of the wayward creature they read him as, suggesting nursing in their letters. At another, he says watching women's chess is like seeing a "caricature [of chess], a distortion in a carnival mirror," - like, in fact, draughts. Draughts - "the retarded sibling of chess," as he memorably puts it.

This was the Donner I was expecting. But there is more. For instance, having written again and again that women are too stupid for chess, having detailed with deep mirth the blunders he finds in their play, in 1977 he asks again the question of why women can't play chess. Taking a swipe at the "rising mudslide of feminism" for not working out the correct answer, as he has, he rephrases the question: "what is so deeply objectionable in the game of chess that women, the crown of creation, are incapable of playing it well?" Simply that, he writes, "games are the opposite of human contact."

His elaboration of his answer then includes the following:

During their game, chess players are 'incommunicado'; they are imprisoned. What is going on in their heads is narcissistic self-gratification with a minimum of objective reality, a worldess sniffing and grabbing in a bottomless pit. Women do not like that, and who is to blame them?

Such apparently sincere, and almost slightly sad insights increase throughout the book - alongside his proclivity to polemicize - at times reaching an accute pitch:

The chess player rejects life with its painful lack of transparency and its hopeless insolubility, and chooses and has chosen what seems transparent and soluble. It was his first inspiration, but this innermost motive turns against him in the end, when playing his games has become his life.

That general statement is from an article about Bobby Fischer and later on, it is interesting to again see Donner blend observations of Fischer with those of Everyman: "The game of chess has a great attraction for lonely minds but its healing power is small. It engenders no viable 'expression' and will only enhance inner rigidity. No one is as lonely as the world champion."

Alongside such tragic characterisations, there are also some neat sociological observations, often made in passing or off the cuff. "Modern man is bombarded so intensely with such an enormous amount of contradictory information that he has lost any notion of objectivity or scientific discussion completely. For him, truth is only to be found with the loudest - but particularly: the most amusing - loudmouth, and his highest virtue is 'not to leat each other down'." This in the middle of a tightly-constructed piece whose subject matter roams adeptedly from the Dutch number one's latest results to (at the point of the quote) the mediocrity of sports journalism. Elsewhere the conscience hinted at here finds its fullest expression in the simplest of questions: "Are we in fact living in a world where it is all right to spend one's time playing chess?"

There is much else besides. A sweet portrait of an elderly player that could be a short story in itself. A description of a player munching gob-stoppers so funny it might have been written by Kingsley Amis. Interviews with Che Guevara and Fidel Castro (the latter not a good chess player: "'Too many rules,' he said '... The less rules there are in a game, the more chance I have of winning.'") A marginally homoerotic ode to an a-pawn ("Sweet little thing ... you naughty boy ... I love you ...") Debates over sporting boycotts of countries under various regimes. And details of what happens in them - for instance, the torturing of tournament organisers in Argentina. Historical insights into the Soviets. Decade-spanning mockery of his number one enemy in the Dutch chess world, Lod Prins ("couldn't tell a bishop from a knight.") And much much more and of course abounding aphorisms and much quotable hilarity on the subject of chess and chess players.


Donner's journalism clearly benefits from being collected: one can see how strands of thought stretched out across the years. For instance, 1972's psychological "chess itself is an expression of the unwillingness to live, a refusal to exist" links to 1975's sociological/philosophical "life no longer has a purpose other than itself - as the hereafter appears to have lost its appeal and it is not so certain any longer whether there will be a 22nd century - modern man is more familiar with unwillingness than with old-fashioned, purposeful will." We are very far from the quote about women at the top of this post.

Did Donner refuse to exist, take refuge from reality in chess? The above two quotes are again from articles about Fischer - another of Donner's pet subjects, incidentally, for Fischer is used in Donner's writing as the extreme example of the chess playing type, right at the other end of the spectrum to women whom have no interest in the game. But the comments do not seem to describe Donner himself. Or if they do, perhaps only a young Donner. One lucky to then discover that he had more talent for writing than for chess.

But such second-guessing is risky. "Lack of understanding from other people has always accompanied me on my path through life and the inane laughter of the masses has been the echo of my footsteps on earth," Donner wrote. He also wrote about chess-writing: as literature. Is it? Whilst I can say that Donner's intriguing personal stylings do not quite transcend journalism to make this a completed self-portrait, that harder question I cannot answer: when it comes to chess, I know too much of what he's talking about. A non-chess-player ought judge; preferably a woman, of course.

But, if you are still reading here, then Donner has proved to be worth at least some of your time. Just as reading the whole book was worth some of mine. We are lucky that after the games, after the losses at the board, in particular, and after whatever injustice of the world came his way, Donner did more than just howl and scream - that he wrote. Whilst the dominant tone of this book is comedic outrage, there was more, much more, than bare laughter and relentless chess to the writings of JH Donner.

Argh. My computer broke. It turns on for fractions of seconds before turning off again, and that's it. They're taking it away for fixing (or, possibly, replacement) on Wednesday. It should take under two weeks, but may take up to six . . .

Why am I telling you this? On that computer I had 22 emails downloaded but unread. I was planning to catch up with them this weekend, but obviously couldn't. If one of them is yours - just to let you know sorry, the wait will be longer . . .

Scottish poet and novelist Frank Kuppner has the knack of giving his books funny and original titles: A Concussed History of Scotland - perhaps corresponding to the mental state of most of that nation's inhabitants, one may be tempted to add; Second Best Moments in Chinese History - part one of which is named A Moral Victory for the Barbarians, a line I sometimes use to describe getting hacked to pieces over a chess-board; In the Beginning There Was Physics...; and (my favourite) The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women. And now we have A God's Breakfast, which I discovered yesterday in a bookshop, although apparently it has been around for over a year. The book is really three unconnected books in one - presumably on account of low sales figures for Kuppner's previous work, some of which is now out-of-print - two of which might have easily been omitted.

By far and away the worst of the books is Kuppner's crass, almost-50-pages-long parody of TS Eliot - West Åland, or Five Tombeaux for Mr Testoil - which at best might amuse undergraduates struggling with Four Quartets whom also find flatulence *hilarious*. Beyond that, its bitter excess is probably well-explained by William Wootten's observation in his good Guardian newspaper review that: '"West Åland" is the sound of someone shouting abuse to stop themselves falling back under the mesmerist's trance,' given that Eliot was a strong influence for Kuppner in some of his previous work.

Of more ambiguous value is the final section of 120 poems, What Else Is There? Alongside some surprisingly tender autobiographical reflections on family and death, there are glimpses of the lightly-witty, neat, happily-paradoxical intelligence I like most of all about Kuppner's best work, such as the three-liner "A Cosmic Footnote":

Alas, a copyist has introduced a few errors
into this classic text about the unity of opposites;
making it seem to mean something else entirely.

But, really, I wish to dismiss this third book along with the second, in order to get to the first, best and most interesting part of A God's Breakfast: The Uninvited Guest. Here, around 800 supposedly found fragments of works from Greek and Roman civilisations are presented to us by a present-day fictional scholar, whose irritation and annotational interventions both increase as the book progresses. Here, epigrams, epitaths, insults, jokes, and philosophical play mingle along their themes of death, the lies of religion, the classical, uncertainty and incompleteness, writing and the fate of the cosmos. Some examples, to give you a sense of the work, to help see if you like it, or not:

56

The Temple of Jove destroyed by a bolt of his own lightning?
Hmm. Perhaps he has strong views on modern architecture?

106

Zeno held there was no real difference between a short life and a long one.
I wonder, Caesar, if the same might not hold true for penises?

214

Would we call the subtlest music 'non-musical'?
Yet the subtlest parts of the material world are called immaterial.

371

Everything is always changing, and we throw words after it.
A few of them stick; mostly in the wrong place.

463

If applause and philosophy do not mix, Lucillius,
Then perhaps you truly are a philosopher.

599

More happiness at one friendly breakfast than in the whole of Homer.
[Not by any means the conventional view of Homer, certainly.]

686

A billion ---- later, are we any happier?
[If I had the courage of my convictions, I would just cut this pieces of nothing out too. But, alas, scholarship has its mindless yet unshakeable conventions, like so much else.]

718

Someone is standing outside my house, shouting things.
[Not 'Someone is standing outside my house, shouting "Things!"', whatever stale jokes Occamb might prefer to make on such matters. But I suppose we all have to earn our professional reputations as best we can, each playing to our own particular stregnths.]

So, what's going on here? Very few of the lines are remarkable turns of phrases in themselves, and the rhythms that justify making line breaks are basic: just about poetry, very plainly so. Story? The fragments hint at many stories, in one big, ambiguous tangle, and whilst the editorial revelations accrue, there is no over-arching narrative relating to the skeptical, often-bored, critical, prudish and quite amusing observer. In fact, there is very little that is compelling about this mediocre character at all, and I suspect he was written lazily, too; in every way he is a poor cousin to Nabokov's creation of Charles Kinbote in the poem-centred novel Pale Fire.

Perhaps somewhat disappointing overall, nonetheless, parts of the sum are greater than some of the parts: the frustrated editorial annotations at the end of the book throw the reader back again into innocent early passages, nicely forcing us to experience anew but not afresh fragments that thus now have later light and mud poured over them. And the lines in the early 200's where it's revealed that the '----'s are intended to stand for the word 'anus' (or similar) are particularly hilarious. The effect of such moments is cummulative - like little doodles drawn in the corners of book pages, that when flicked through, dance themselves into moving picture; that is the best way that Frank Kuppner's sequences of plain statements work. So is this one whole poem, or 800 or so short poems? Neither; it doesn't fully add up, I would put it as about 3/4s of one whole poem, made up of 800 or so bits of sort-of poetry, with an alright title.

I wonder why it doesn't add up: why the character of the scholar is lazily padded out, why too many one liners are no more than flippant mentions of farting, why the The Uninvited Guest seems aware of its overall failure, inspite of its several greatly enjoyable successes? Possibly because Kuppner has done this kind of thing twice before and much better (see below) and that the party trick that's always requested and cheered creates a love-hate relationship in its performer: How the juggler dreams of smashing the plates upon his host's gaping head... (And certainly, with a dismissive poem about critics at the back, and a commentary on the faux-classical fragments from a contemporary, Kuppner would seem to be alert to the reception of his work nowadays, mediating that mediational event in advance. I think he's also teaching Creative Writing, or something, at a university somewhere, the extroverted self-consciousness of which I doubt suits him.)

Anyway, let's be honest. Chances are you're not going to buy this book, and you may be wondering, as a result, why I have bothered to review it, as indeed am I. I guess to recommend to you, and for me to think over anew, the two books where Kuppner employs a similar structure to The Uninvited Guest, but with much finer results: A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty (now out of print) and its sequel/replacement Second Best Moments in Chinese History. These books consist of 500 or so 4 line poems, creating one whole poem each, too, written in, it seems, a Glasgow library as Kuppner leafed through a book of ancient Chinese prints. Symmetrically perhaps, hungover and signalling to a wine-girl, delegated to decide which poems should be kept, a scholar in A Bad Day tries to decipher the squiggly lines of some old parchment:

249.

Something something something something something;
Something something something smiling something;
Something smiling something something something;
The old scholar finds himself involuntarily smiling.

At his worst, Frank Kuppner is capable of suggesting something interesting and raising a smile. At his best, his books of distant, long-lost somethings are to be savoured, kept and reread; they create from flicked-doodles a universe of effects - if not great literature - written by a man twice able to lose himself thoroughly in a certain section of a Scottish library.