King, Queen and Knight - Norman Knight, Will Guy, 1975.pdf

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King, Queen and Knight
A Chess Anthology
in
Prose and Verse
Compiled with Commentaries by
Norman Knight
and
Will Guy
With
a Foreword by
C. H.
O'D. Alexander,
CMG,
Decorations by Sydney Greenwood
CBE
B. T.
Batsford Ltd London
and
Sydney
First published 1975
Compilation© No
rman
Knight and Will Guy, 1975
ISBN o 7134 285.2
X
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Cox
&
Wyman Ltd, London, Fakenham and Reading
for the publishers
B.
T.
Batsford Ltd
4 Fitzhardinge Street, Portman Square, London W1H oAH
23 Cross Street, Brookvale, NSW 2100, Australia
Foreword
By
C. H.
O'D. Alexander,
CMG, CBE
When one
is
first gripped by chess, it becomes an obsession; all one
wants to do is endlessly to play- to
win if
possible but anyway to play.
As a passion, chess is far more enduring
than
most but even so its
fires
weaken a little with time; then one
can
begin to enjoy the game from
the outside as well as from the inside - to enjoy playing through other
people's games, watching games and reading, not just
books
on the
latest openings but for pleasure. For the last twenty years one of my
own favourite books for reading for pleasure has been
Chess Pieces.
So, naturally, I was pleased to
be
asked, and very happy to agree,
to write this Foreword for its sequel,
King, Queen and Knight,
com­
piled by Norman Knight and Willi am F. Guy. When they sent me
the manuscript, they enclosed a list of 'highlights' to save me the
bother of reading everything; but I well knew what would happen to
that.
As
I started to read, I gradually got drawn on; before I was fully
aware of it, I had read everything and made a list of highlights of my
own - quite different from those of the compilers and no doubt each
reader
will
have another different set of
his
own.
Perhaps what I find most interesting is to see which authors do and
which don't understand the game- and what their understandings and
misunderstandings are. Tolstoy, for example, puts a surprisingly inept
remark in the mouth of Prince Andrew in
War and Peace:
'the knight
is
always stronger than a pawn . . . ; while in war a battalion
is
some­
times stronger than a division.' Did Tolstoy (or Prince Andrew) never
make a sacrifice?
Vladimir Nabokov on the other hand - himself an excellent prob­
lemist - understands the game and its psychology very well when he
says of
Luzhin,
the chessmaster hero (or anti-hero) of
The De
fence:
'He's not just amusing himself with chess, he's performing a sacred
rite.' Ian Fleming, too - always remarkably accurate in technical
matters - gives a splendid,
if
overcoloured, picture of a needle cham­
pionship match in
From Russia with Love:
the game Kronsteen
v.
Makharov. And, for anyone who moves in chess circles, how true
Diderot's remark: 'For,
if
one
can
be
a wit and
a
great chessplayer like
vi
FOREWORD
Legal, one
can
as well be a great chessplayer and a fool like Foubert
and Mayot.' But most of all I like
E.
M. Forster on his attempts to
play the Evans:
'A
heavy current rapidly sets in from the South-West
and laps against the foundations of Black's King's Bishop's Pawn.
The whole surface of the board breaks into whirlpools. But sooner or
later out of this marine display there rises a familiar corpse: It is
mine.' One sees just why he lost and
is
filled with an unreasonable anti­
pathy to his unknown and victorious opponents.
I must not, however, try to reproduce the whole book in this
foreword. Before leaving readers to the much greater pleasure of the
book itself, I should like to add one remark addressed especially to the
stronger players. When we are soaked in chess, completely involved in
its technicalities, we lose something; we forget what it was like when
we first learnt this mysterious, inexhaustible, implacable art/game/
science. Seeing chess - both in itself and in its numerous usages as an
analogue of larger things - through the eyes of those who may be
inexpert players but are highly articulate and intelligent men and
women, we
can
perhaps regain some of the freshness of feeling
that
we once had.
Congratulations and thanks are due to the compilers for a book
which successfully achieves the difficult task of living up to its
pred
ecesso
r .

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