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.