The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  Now we move to the Savoy Theatre, where the combatants sit centre-stage. In the background the two arbiters lurk like resentful porters in a gentlemen’s club, occasionally brandishing a sign marked ‘Silence’. The audience follows the game on the giant screens, coached over their headphones by the invisible commentary team. In their perch the rotating GMs are rather more disciplined than in the Analysis Room, but just as unstoppably jokey, catty, sarky and cliquey. What you get here is the same blizzard of notation plus much empathetic squirming as the positions solidify and sharpen. During the speed games, the previous week, the GMs gave up all pretence at mediation and simply jabbered and gloated and cheered among themselves. They are very excited, and excitement is pretty well all they can communicate. The analysis is conducted at a speed and with a second-nature familiarity that put it well beyond the civilian’s grasp. Still, as one sits there not understanding the GMs, it’s at least nice to think that the GMs are understanding Short and Kasparov. But they aren’t.

  Take Game 19. Kasparov opened with the Ruy Lopez and Short defended with the Deferred Steinitz (4 … d6). By move twelve, Short, typically, had wrecked his own pawn structure in the daring hope of greater activity for his bishops and open files for his rooks. At move twenty the Savoy GMs were all in agreement that the game was level. After White’s twenty-second move they were all in agreement that Black was losing. After Black’s twenty-second move they were all in agreement that Black had lost.

  ‘What’s Nigel got that we haven’t seen?’ Nothing!’ ‘It’s over.’ ‘Finished.’ ‘Goodnight, Charlie!’ The game ended after White’s twenty-sixth move, at which point the GMs all assumed that Short had resigned. Not so: down on stage the players were coolly shrugging and leering over the pieces, having settled on a draw. Subsequent analysis seemed to confirm that the position was unwinnable. But who knew? ‘Let’s face it,’ said Short (according to Raymond Keene’s quickie, Kasparov–Short: 1993), ‘we don’t have a clue what’s happening.’ The final position is a mess,’ said Kasparov. ‘It’s extremely complicated.’

  The ladder of incomprehension, at any rate, is clear enough. I don’t understand the arcana of the GMs; the GMs don’t understand the arcana of Short and Kasparov; and Short and Kasparov don’t understand the arcana of their own positions. None of us understands. How cheering. Chess-promoters shouldn’t try to meddle with or minimize the near-infinite difficulty of the game: they are absolutely stuck with it. It is what surrounds the board with holy dread – the exponential, the astronomical. So what are they up to out there, approximately? Because no one really knows. It would seem that comparatively little time is spent doing what you and I do at the chess board: hectically responding to local and immediate emergencies (all these bolts out of the blue). We are tactical, at best; they are deeply strategic. They are trying to hold on to, to brighten and to bring to blossom, a coherent vision which the arrangement of the pieces may or may not contain. And of course they are never left alone to pursue this search. Chess is savagely and remorselessly interactive: it is both mental game and contact sport. What’s it like? All-in wrestling between octopuses? Centipedal kickboxing? In its apparent languor, its stealthy equipoise, as each player wallows in horrified fascination, waiting to see what his opponent has seen, or has not seen, one may call to mind a certain punitive ritual of the Yanomani. Only one blow at a time is delivered by the long stave. The deliverer of the blow spends many minutes aiming; the receiver of the blow spends many minutes waiting. Garry Kasparov is the best there’s ever been at it, and he knows what chess is. ‘The public must come to see that chess is a violent sport,’ he says. ‘Chess is mental torture.’

  Independent on Sunday November 1993

  The Sporting Scene: White Knights of Reykjavik by George Steiner

  Chess, with its combination of the profound and the banal, the cerebral and the spurious, its autodynamic symmetries and nebulous structures, has obvious affinities with George Steiner’s criticism and thought. It has obvious attractions for him too; in common with music and mathematics, chess produces prodigies, many of them Jewish; although the game is clearly ‘finite’, computers, flatteringly, are less good at it than we are (our fastest calculator would need many thousand times the age of the earth to compute the opening twenty-five moves); it concentrates the nervous system with such an intensity that the board’s sixty-four squares become subject (in Steiner’s phrase) to ‘the unbounded exactitudes of art’. What’s more, the resonances of the 1972 Fischer–Spassky world championship – political tension, unprecedented publicity, the clash of old and new chess values – must have further flared the nostrils of the panoptic, polymathic, polysyllabic Doctor as he stepped out on to the Reykjavik tarmac.

  Yet one of the most attractive things about Steiner’s new book is how refreshingly unSteineresque it is. There’s not one detailed comparison between a middle game and Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge. Page after page goes by without any reference to Auschwitz. Nor, with a couple of exceptions, is he reduced to slinky aperçus on, say, the entropic tendencies of chess praxis. Originally a series of articles for the New Yorker, the book is literary reportage rather than a specialist monograph. It is the human drama and intellectual excitement that catch Steiner’s imagination – and no one who enjoys either can afford to miss The Sporting Scene.

  Although the subtitle refers to the contestants as the ‘White’ knights of Reykjavik, Fischer, in Steiner’s eyes, is morally always playing Black. True, Spassky was under pressure from Moscow, was repeatedly humiliated by Fischer’s antics, behaved throughout with a courtly pathos and dignity, and had everything to lose; Fischer, on the other hand, with everything to gain, seemed an ignorant, avaricious, Playboy-reading, commie-bashing exhibitionist. Steiner accordingly gives a touching portrait of Spassky, but sympathy is often absent from his treatment of Fischer. For instance, we are nagged about Fischer’s ‘infantile greed’ – an obvious simplification, since Fischer’s cavortings and bust-ups regularly ran counter to his material interests. Similarly, ‘when matters were not going well’, clucks Steiner, ‘Fischer would instantly revert to irascible histrionics’. Not so: Fischer reverted to these as late as the eighteenth game, threatening to ‘terminate summarily’ a match he was by then in no danger of losing. Svetozar Gligoric points out that Fischer had little real sense of what was at stake, in terms either of money or self-aggrandizement; just as Fischer is rumoured to sit in hotel rooms shrieking ‘Zap!’, ‘Chop!’ and ‘Crunch!’ when playing chess with himself, his demands and tantrums are expressions purely of surplus combative will – a quality Spassky was eventually shown to lack, perhaps to his credit. It may seem inadequate to observe that Fischer, like many other grandmasters, is merely insane, but it needs to be said that for all his predatory genius he remains something of an innocent.

  As Steiner moves from psychological to philosophical conjectures the fit reader begins to regard the book askance. Some grand-sounding, though plausible, links are forged between chess and the other autonomous non-verbal constructs of music and maths before Steiner (riskily) attempts to evoke what Nabokov calls ‘the full horror of the abysmal depths of chess’. In several respects these are thrilling pages; but when unleashed on the abstract Steiner is never very far from the old apocalyptic beefcake:

  Even before the start of play, the pieces, with their subtle insinuation of near-human malevolence, confront each other across an electric silence. At the first move, that silence seems to shred like stretched silk [on 1 N-QR3, maybe, as your opponent splits his sides, but hardly on 1 P-K4] … all mass and energy interact in a lattice so finespun, so multidimensional that we cannot even conceive of a model. The dynamic dovetailing of the whole game, the unfolding ramifications of its crystalline armature are implosive in the very first move … As one breathes the first scent of victory – a musky, heady, faintly metallic aura, totally indescribable to a non-player – the skin tautens at one’s temples, and one’s fingers throb. The poets lie about orgasm.

 
Now wait: if it is indescribable, don’t describe it. Characteristically, there is a spark of meaning somewhere in this gaudy bonfire – but such apprehensions must be evoked with hesitance, irony, self-effacement, everything, in short, that Steiner lacks, here as elsewhere. It may be invidious to quote so many bad sentences from a book containing so many good ones; however, it is time Steiner ceased to be blinded by his own immense gifts, and time he noticed the important distinctions between brilliance and dazzle.

  New Statesman April 1973

  Football Mad

  The Soccer Tribe by Desmond Morris

  Readers of the London Review of Books who like football probably like football so much that, having begun the present article, they will be obliged to finish it. This suits me down to the ground. Pointy-headed football-lovers are a beleaguered crew, despised by pointy-heads and football-lovers alike, who regard our addiction as affected, pseudo-proletarian, even faintly homosexual. We have adapted to this; we keep ourselves to ourselves – oh, how we have to cringe and hide! If I still have your attention, then I assume you must be one of us, pining for social acceptance and for enlightened discussion of the noble game. This puts me in the happy position of not really caring what I write. You will read me anyway. Ho-hum. If I could render a whistle on the page (a strolling, nonchalant whistle, hands in pockets, head held high), then that is what I would render … But let’s talk football for a while.

  I am writing this piece, by the way, several days before the England v. Hungary encounter on 18 November 1981. By the time you read me, anything might be happening. Brian Clough or Bob Stokoe or Elton John could be the new England manager, nursing bruised dreams for the World Cup in 1986. On the other hand, Sir Ron Greenwood might even now be contentedly inspecting the hotels in Bilbao, hoping to find a likely venue for the lads next summer. Thanks to a series of hilarious flukes, England need only a draw against Hungary to qualify, and so it’s a fair bet that the team will be gouged through into the Finals. However, this would be no vindication of anything or anybody. English honour has already been lost, on the playing fields of Norway and Switzerland. The predicament is unaltered. What are our realistic prospects? Where can we look for solace, for succour, in Spain?

  Did you notice, during the Norway game, how the faces of our stars degenerated as the match went on? Kevin Keegan, a cross between Marc Bolan and Donny Osmond when he spun the coin in the centre circle, resembled a grimacing Magwitch by half-time. Paul Mariner, a picture of pampered, hammy self-love at club level, reminded me, as he trudged from the park, of the standard, traumatically chinless mod who puts in depressingly regular appearances at south-coast magistrates’ courts after Bank Holiday weekends. Trevor Francis, usually the identikit poet, dreamer and heart-throb of the lower sixth, looked like a mean and frazzled brawler when he missed that easy header in the second half. As for Terry McDermott, who cuts a pretty unreliable figure at the best of times … By the final whistle, England looked like a scratch team from a remedial borstal, whereas the Norwegians, their blond locks bouncing in the air, were romping about like cosseted college boys.

  It is curious that many of the automatic metaphors of football commentary, written and spoken, are connected with the idea of education. A thoughtful pass, a cultured back-heel. A football brain. Indeed, an educated right foot. You didn’t need to watch, as I did, all the episodes of the recent inside-football series on BBC2 to satisfy yourself that these concepts aren’t much in use on the training field. ‘Magic’, ‘class’, ‘great’, ‘nice’, ‘terrific’ and ‘unlucky’ seem to be the main epithets on offer there. In the post-goal frenzy, when the players roll and cuddle and leap in that delightful way, what are they saying to each other? ‘Sapient!’? ‘Profound!’? ‘Erudite!’? ‘Perspicacious!’? Unlikely, on the whole. I am trying to suggest that, conceivably, our football suffers from the dominance of its working-class ethos. They don’t seem to have this trouble in the rest of Northern Europe –where, in fact, they appear to have dispensed with the working classes altogether. It has been said that our footballers are paid too much money. Perhaps they should be paid in something else: book-tokens, lecture coupons, night-class dockets, culture vouchers.

  A slight digression. One Sunday lunchtime, some years ago, I found myself in a high-priced restaurant on the Embankment – an expense-account, no-account gin palace, with tuxed pianist, brawny escort girls and many a spendthrift loudmouth yelling in the padded gloom. Who should be at the bar but Malcolm Allison (then manager of Crystal Palace) and Martin Chivers (then centre-forward for Spurs and England). Perched on stools, these big modern princes were talking intimately and earnestly, their heavy shoulders tensed over their drinks. Naturally I edged up close to Chiv and Big Mal, hoping to hear – what? Fluent, allusive talk of set-pieces, short corners, long throw-ins, one-against-one situations, professional fouls, banana kicks. What I heard went something like this.

  ‘The more you learn, the more you know.’

  ‘This is it.’

  ‘This is it.’

  ‘The more you know, the more you learn.’

  ‘This is it.’

  ‘In this life, if you learn something, you –’

  ‘You don’t forget it.’

  ‘This is it.’

  ‘So that –’

  ‘As you go on –’

  ‘In this life –’

  ‘You’re always –’

  ‘Learning things.’

  ‘This is it.’

  But Mal and Big Chiv weren’t talking football. They were talking philosophy.

  What went wrong for England, on the night, on the park, during those two vital qualifiers in Norway and Switzerland? ‘Five minutes of madness’ was how Ron Greenwood explained the Norway debacle, whereas it had previously taken only ‘two minutes of madness’ to cost us the game in Switzerland. In these seven mad minutes, England conceded four goals to teams made up partly of amateurs – teams, we were sternly reminded by the press, that would ‘struggle in our Second Division’. In both cases, the hysteria produced in the England team by conceding one goal led instantly to the concession of a second. ‘And it’s gone in! It’s a goal!’ said commentator Brian Moore, in a tender, incredulous moan; and before the great man could even clear his throat he was required to add: ‘And … another goal! Disaster for England.’ God, what a croak it was. Any team might have let this happen once (and the Swiss goals, at least, were beautifully set up). But twice?

  Of course, it is all too easy to blame Ron Greenwood. Yet I think we should blame Ron Greenwood, whether it is all too easy or not. The selection of Ray Clemence in Norway cost us the first goal, and the first goal cost us the second (thanks also to a skilful ‘tap-on’ from Terry McDermott to the lone Norwegian in the England penalty area). Big Ray was plainly in a terrible state after his nightmare inauguration at Tottenham. He came cartwheeling off his line to flail at innocuous crosses; all night he looked capable of being nutmegged by a beachball. It was very typical of Greenwood to fly in the face of popular counsel and ‘show faith’ in his man. But this display of purposeful calm clearly spooked the rest of the team. Much has been written to the effect that our players lack skills. Perhaps they do. The other thing they lack is the confidence to show the talents they do have. At the moment the team is quite without psychological cohesion. Greenwood doesn’t give players confidence: he gives them the horrors.

  It is convenient, for the purposes of analysis, to look at the history of England managership since 1970 as a drama, or tragedy, in three parts or phases. Part One could be entitled The Nervous Breakdown of Alf Ramsey, Part Two The Nervous Breakdown of Don Revie and Part Three, which is still running, The Nervous Breakdown of Ron Greenwood. Each part culminates in or leads towards the same crisis or ‘recognition’: failure to qualify for the World Cup.

  All three tragic heroes played their parts in a distinct style. Alf Ramsey was mild, defensive, strenuously elocuted, buoyed up by past glories and a secure knighthood. The visage of Don Revie, a
fter his first few matches, became a disturbingly familiar sight: a mask of tanned and glittering desperation. Revie,* of course, resigned halfway through the fifth act, having leaked the news to his pal Jeff Powell on the Mail, and split for Dubai, thereby embracing a wonderful opportunity to safeguard the financial security of his family.

  Greenwood’s style is something else again. The Nervous Breakdown of Ron Greenwood might even now develop an epilogue or sequel, one very tentatively entitled The Remarkable Recovery of Ron Greenwood; but the lineaments of Ron’s tragedy are already clear. In this case, the grim psychodrama is bodied forth in terms of unpierceable serenity. The serenity is cultivated, precarious and, in fact, non-existent; yet serenity is the keynote of the performance. Do you remember the smile of beatific repose that Greenwood found himself sporting throughout the defeat by Scotland at Wembley in the Home Internationals this year? A ghastly spectacle, much lingered on by the television cameras. The smile suggested that this defeat, like all the others, was yet another feint or shimmy in a vast and inscrutable battle-plan which only Ron knew about. I need hardly add that the whole veneer has subsequently deteriorated and is barely visible behind the hot mists of paranoia which Greenwood now candidly exudes. Poor guy! But he has done nothing in the England job, except to distance the memory of Don Revie.