Book 19: Endgame by Frank Brady

I'm not sure any biographer has ever had a less sympathetic subject than Frank Brady has in Bobby Fischer. And I'm including Hitler, because at least one can feel bad about his crappy childhood. It seems that Bobby Fischer was born an insufferable brat and only got worse from there. He spends the first half of the book crying when he loses chess games, and the second half engaged in bizarre, self-destructive behavior with frequent anti-Semitic rants. Then he moves to Iceland and dies. I think I have a particular impatience with men of Fischer's type--men who need to be saved, I call them. They always seem to be geniuses and Pisces. Like Townes Van Zandt and Kurt Cobain (okay, Kurt Cobain's on the cusp of Aquarius and Pisces, but the self-destructive streak is totally a Pisces thing). Perhaps I should avoid astrology in my book reviews, lest I seem stupid. But Brady mentions it himself: Bobby Fischer liked to swim, he tells us, like a true Pisces. But what Townes Van Zandt and Kurt Cobain had going for them is that they weren't assholes. Or if they were, they mostly kept it to themselves and didn't make frequent radio broadcasts advertising it. Also, Townes Van Zandt had a dog named Geraldine.

To keep up my "all Pisces men are just alike" theme: I remember watching a documentary about Townes Van Zandt and thinking, "how the hell can all these women stand him?" Even after they leave him, all the ex-wives speak fondly of him. Because apparently there is some sort of appeal that I cannot see in men who need to be saved. I kept wondering the same thing as I read Endgame: why do people put up with him? Why do they keep trying to get him to play chess for them? Brady recounts one experience, sitting in a restaurant with Fischer, listening to him talk about chess, and weeping because he realized he was in the presence of genius. There's a lot of talk like that; Brady is constantly comparing chess to music or to literature, and his intentions in doing so are clear: he wants the reader to think of chess as art and to think of Fischer as a Leni Riefenstahl or Ezra Pound. Personally, I found both Triumph of the Will and this book more tedious than anything else, though. I don't blame Brady; he did what he could to make the reader appreciate Fischer's genius without forgiving his actions...I just didn't find it particularly compelling.