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1994-06-13
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Evans on Chess. April 15, 1994. Copyright by GM Larry Evans.
UNIQUE CHESS MEMOIR
More books have been written about chess than any other game. Yet there are
hardly any good chess memoirs.
"It's not the moves of the pieces but of the people that interest me," said
Tim Rice, author of the musical CHESS. So it was a real pleasure to find an
unusual cover story in the May 1994 CHESS LIFE about Albert Pinkus (1903-84)
a mild-mannered expert I once knew whose hobby was collecting chess books.
But until now I never suspected:
"Pinkus was an intrepid jungle explorer better remembered at New
York's Museum of Natural History than by the chess world, and the
man whom I call the Indiana Jones of chess," recalls former USA
champion Arnold Denker, now 80.
"The year was 1932. And Al was out to win fame and glory in the
darkest regions of South America -- places with lazy, muddy
rivers and ill-shaven soldiers of fortune who wear white suits
and Panama hats, and who travel on tramp steamers into desolate
green hells. Al's mission was to Bring 'Em Back Alive, as in the
title of Frank Buck's hit movie of the same year."
Sure enough, there is a photo of Pinkus, rifle in hand, leading an expedition
into Guyana; and a quote from his book A LOST WORLD BECKONS with a chilling
account of his first night in the tropics:
"I was up in panic, heart pounding, eyes staring fearfully into
the blackness around. Something was in the hammock with me:
something that crawled. Any second I expected the strike -- it
was as if I could feel the creeping numbness, the pain and writhings.
I waited...."
The Great White Hunter "was a fish out of water selling securities and
playing chess spare-time in New York," writes Denker, who for the last few
years has serialized several chapters of his unique chess memoirs aided by
former Chess Life editor Larry Parr.
There is nothing quite like these pen portraits in the vast literature of
chess. I knew many of the players and often catch myself saying, "Yes, they
got it just right!" There is George Treysman's face "like the death mask of a
Mongol warrior." Or young Bobby Fischer's habit of never looking up from the
board as if "he had perhaps dropped something and was still looking for it."
Denker's work recalls a world now lost. Leisurely dinner parties at the Savoy
with Max Euwe; elegant evenings at the penthouse of chess patron Maurice
Wertheim; carousing at bistros with Alexander Alekhine and Herman Steiner;
long, lazy afternoons at the old Manhattan Chess Club with Oscar Tenner, Al
Simonson, and so many others.
Denker appears to be genuinely fascinated by people; he renders their foibles
and features with a Dickensian precision. No chess writer ever had a sharper
eye for compelling detail.
Unlike so many of his fellow grandmasters, Denker could see beyond the end of
his own nose. How fortunate for American chess that he and his collaborator
Parr have the rare gift to tell it like it was.