| Taylor Kingston 2005-04-28, 8:31 pm |
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Nick wrote:
quote:
> 2) Taylor Kingston expressed his objections to Charles
> Krauthammer's reciting of some popular journalistic myths
> about Paul Morphy and Wilhelm Steinitz.
Yes. In particular, I object to Krauthammer piling on additional
fictions. I refer to his statement that "The great Wilhelm
Steinitz claimed to have played against God, given him an extra pawn
and won."
I do not have the exact Steinitz quote at hand (I will try to find it
later), but if I remember correctly, it was something to the effect
that *if Steinitz were given pawn and move,* not even God could beat
him. In other words, it was a chess theoretical claim, and a
metaphorical expression of self-confidence, not some delusion of a
divine visitation.
But Krauthammer not only reverses the odds, he says Steinitz actually
claimed to have played chess with God, AND WON. The last detail goes
one step beyond what I've seen from even the most careless Internet
pseudo-historian.
This kind of gratuitous embellishment is seen repeatedly in chess
literature. Chess master Jones might have, say, lain down a book of
Tennyson's poems and taken off his shoe to scratch an itching foot at a
tournament in 1910. By the time the story finishes its "evolution," we
may read that Jones undressed completely and ran naked around the
playing hall reciting "The Charge of the Light Brigade" at the top of
his lungs.
This sort of thing is of course not confined to chess writing. I
recall a story reporting an alleged case of human spontaneous
combustion. A young woman supposedly burst into flame on a crowded
dance floor, writhed a while in fiery agony, and finally ended as a
pile of ashes.
The facts were quite different. Outside the dance hall, this woman's
dress caught fire, probably from a carelessly tossed match. She
suffered serious burns, from which she died several weeks later.
One hopes that Krauthammer, who normally writes on much weightier
matters than chess (national politics, foreign policy, etc.), is more
careful about his facts in those areas.
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