Chess as Historical Fiction

In 1984 I discovered an amazing piece of musical theatre, Chess by Tim Rice (previously of JC Superstar and Evita) and music by Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson (yes, of ABBA). I had the good fortune to see the delightful mess in its West End production in London in 1988. I also saw the travelling US version (In Hawaii of all places but with a great cast) retooled for the US market. The original London production gleefully skewered the US as much as it did the Soviet Union. It was a little too much to bear even for New York Audiences. So how does this topic fit in "Living in the Past". Well there are young people who stare at me blankly when I talk about the USSR. It's now history and something to be dreaded - dates, impossible to spell names, battles, treaties all memorized for final exams. Gone (or at less urgent) is the spectre of the nuclear bomb which gave me nightmares through the fifties, sixties and seventies, until Gorbachev tried to save the Soviet economy with Perestroika and Glasnost and the whole soggy system collapsed. (Ha, ha, if we had to live through it, you can at least have to study it and maybe even learn to spell perestroika.)

The whole confrontation has a real world metaphor in the world championship of Chess match fought between the American, Bobby Fischer (If you want a hair-raising read try the wikipedia entry for Bobby Fischer) and the Soviet, Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1979. This was the age of the ugly American and no one personified that creature better than Bobby (even better than John McEnroe who gets a nod in last year's "official" newest version recorded at Royal Albert Hall with Edina Menzel, Josh Groban (who was evidently born to play Sergievsky- a sort of Borris Spassky/Anatoly Karpov admixture.) and Adam Pascal as Freddy Trumper (think Bobby Fischer).

Brief review: I love this version. It is intelligent, the singing is perfect - though the recording is acoustically far superior to the DVD. Edina Menzel is excellent as Florence and, as a bonus, gets to reprise a few bars of the show stopper "Anthem" at the end. Josh Groban's delivery of Anthem at the midpoint of the show is electifying (think defying gravity in Wicked). The plot is smoothed out -- less byzantine and more focused, certainly easier to follow. I actually liked the semi-acted concert version better than the full production I saw in Hawaii but I missed the full size chess pieces ballet of the London version - but not its length.

There hasn't been as intelligent a set of lyrics (chock full of forward momentum) since Lerner and Lowe's Camelot. (Remember how Lerner rhymed Guenivere's "prefer go" with "ergo"?) How about the embassy bureaucrat's lament from Chess when Sergievsky defects:
Far too many jokers cross the border
Not a single document in order
Russia must be empty
Though we're all for basic human rights it makes you wonder
What they built the Berlin wall for
Who do these foreign chappies think they are?

It's a patter song much like Gilbert and Sullivan wrote and lightens the mood at a particularly grim point in the storyline. There is no one without serious flaws in this libretto. I think that's why it has intrigued me all these years. It also may be why it never caught on with American audiences. We tend to want our musicals to have clearly defined heroes and certainly not Soviets - even if they defect. It's hard to root for any one character in Chess though I found a measure of sympathy for them all.

So, what is this thing called Chess? I maintain that it is historical fiction of the highest order.

Here is a link to youtube with a taste of Josh Groban singing Anthem.

Here is a link to the Audio recording at Amazon.com:

History Simulations

Well, I have a guilty pleasure. I like historical simulation games like Age of Empires II that I can play on the computer. Take a scruffy band of peasants and gradually build a world empire. I can hear it now: Loser! And, at his age, imagine playing computer games. Well, I don't care what you think. It's fun, completely involving and a little bit like those older gents you see sitting in the park and playing chess (which I also love). The purpose of bringing this up is that I just upgraded my computer to Snow Leopard (OS 10.6) and Age of Empires II didn't work anymore. Well, all those people out there with my same guilty pleasure there is an easy work around. When you click on your alias hold down the Apple (command) key and it takes you to the actual application. Keep the command key depressed when you double click on the application and you'll get a menu. Uncheck the first radio box (use 256 colors on Mac OS X) and also uncheck the last radio box (Display In-Game Cursor) then click play. Then you can go off and conquer the world. (He typed, while still feeling a trifle bit of embarrassment.)

What is history?

I recently had the opportunity to visit Grapevine Canyon at the southern end of Lake Mead National Recreation Area with an archaeologist. It was an amazing experience. The sheer number of petroglyphs are overwhelming. The one shown above is by photograper Marc Sanchez and you can see more of his excellent photographs at mjsimagez.com.

So, I'm standing in front of the petroglyph and I ask the archeologist to tell me about it. He replies: "Well, because there is no organic matter associated with petroglyphs we cannot carbon date it." I say: "Then you don't know how old it is?" He replies: "No, it could be prehistoric or it could have been done in the historic period after the coming of Europeans to this area." Well," I ask "Was it made by Paiutes or their ancestors?" "It's possible, but because we don't know how old it is we cannot say." I pause and look at the petroglyph then say, "Well at least it is easy to figure out what the artist was saying, don't you think?" He laughs, then replies, "We do not interpret petroglyphs because they were created by a culture that probably no longer exists. We have no written records that would explain their cultural context. The petroglyph maker could have had many intents, even just practicing his craft with no implicit story."

So, here I am thinking that this is so like non-fiction history meeting historical fiction. I clearly see that Untu-we had just returned from a successful hunt of a Bighorn Sheep. It was his first kill and he has provided for his entire clan. The next day Untu-we patiently chips at the desert varnish with concentration and patience. He needs to record the moment and in the deadly noon-day heat it is pleasant to sit in the shade of an overhanging rock and chip his story into stone.

From my own research I know that most preliterate cultures had little sense of perspective in their created imagery. In this petroglyph the arrow killing the Desert Bighorn Sheep was the most important image so it became the largest. I have an entire story in my head about Untu-we but it is imagination based on assumptions the archaeologist or historian will not make.

I'm currently reading Karen Essex's Kleopatra. In the novel she brings to life Kleopatra's early years. However, almost nothing is known about those years but Ms. Essex creates a vivid world, a good, in my opinion, approximation of Alexandria under the Ptolomies. It's a compelling read, the best yet of the many Kleopatras I have read. Historians only have the Roman account of her life and it is good to see Ms. Essex carefully stripping away the Roman biases and presenting this last Macedonian Queen in the light she deserves. Like the Petroglyph, imagination has to fill in the story.

Historical fiction versus non-fiction history.

One of my favorite blogs is Christopher Gortner's "Historical Boys". His recent post concerns the continuing debate over the value of historical fiction versus non-fiction history.

One of the bemoaners, Mr Beevor, argues that the trend of fictionalizing actual events in film and, to a lesser degree, books corrupts history and misleads us as a culture. We are losing a sense of our historical past and giving conspiracy theorists the upper hand, as these thrive in a fact-deprived environment.

There is a lot of humor in Christopher's response, but he takes the notion seriously. And so do I. I have read a great deal of non-fiction history both for research and for pleasure. It is hard to find a historian who can write clearly, cleverly and keep his topic moving along to the end. I've read Toynbee and Durant, they are both amazing and thoughtful when read in small dollops. But the reason I read history is because I'm interested in a specific period, person or story (usually from a historical fiction book which has left me wanting more). I have found excellent writers of non-fiction history in the most amazing places. George Grote was a victorian scholar who wrote a multi-volume history of Greece. I envy his clarity of purpose. His ability to juggle events going on simultaneously around the Mediterranean with out confusing the reader is amazing. The reverse is also true for there is W. Miller. His odious history of the Empire of Trebizond has been the only history in English since 1926. Not only is he a bad writer on a craftsmanship level but he makes a fascinating topic, briming with blood and treachery, religious wars, deus ex machina interventions so boring you want to scream. Zoe Oldenberg's History of the Crusades is a tome and a half but it is a wonderful read, and Adrian Goldsworthy's history of the Punic wars is likewise readable (Though I think he is considered a popularizer.)

So, in my rambling I think I see a pattern emerging. To enjoy non-fiction history you have to be interested in the subject first. I've been taught to think of history books as reference. You don't read the whole thing, you use the index to find the information for which you are searching. By paragraphs almost any writing (except for Miller's) is sufficient. But a historical fiction writer not only has to keep reasonably close to the historical record for obvious reasons (hateful spam comes to mind) but the writer also has to produce an engaging story that holds attention until the end, well crafted writing, and do it with style or it's to the $1 bargain bin at Border's and an agent who won't return calls. Wait! Maybe this is the old comparing apples to oranges paradox!

Mary Renault lived in the past too.

As I was writing out my list of favorite books (ont the right), Mary Renault’s six historical Greek novels just flew off my keyboard first. I had never really listed favorite books before, at least not in print or rather virtual print. Odd, I thought. All about Ancient Greece. I thought back, the first book I remember reading was the child’s version of the Trojan War. The Iliad minus the rivers of blood and babies bashed against the walls of Troy. When I was 13 my uncle gave me the annotated History of Greece by J.B. Bury. I have it still. So, when I got a few years older I found the Last of the Wine. It was a story about a young man about the same age as I, living in the shadow of war. I was registered for the draft, It was during the Vietnam conflict, so there were some similarities. I read the book. I loved it. I trusted Mary Renault as a writer so I read another and loved it too. Each one chronicles an actual person of substance during the classical period. In the Praise Singer it is Simonides, the Greek poet who lived into his eighties and gave us an astonishing sense of ancient Greek life in moments of transition: "Stranger, tell the Spartans that we lie here, obedient to our laws". The Last of the Wine, is the story of Alexias of Athens, a young man caught up in the great war between Sparta and Athens. In the background of his story we meet Alkibiades, Sokrates, and the young Plato. The Mask of Apollo chronicles the life of the older Plato from the viewpoint of an Athenian Actor. It is also a wonderful imagining of life on the ancient Greek theatre circuit. Fire from Heaven tells the story of Alexander of Macedon’s youth, well imagined and told with authority even though we know little about Alexander’s early years. It is also the first of her Greek historical novels told in the third person. The Persian Boy is perhaps her most famous novel. It tells the story of Alexander’s campaigns against Persia, Bactria, and India from the viewpoint of a beautiful young eunuch of the Persian court captured by Alexander. Funeral Games was Mary Renault’s last novel. Ironic title – she was to die less than two years later. Here she returned to third person narrative with an impossible task of how to make sense of the confusion following Alexander’s death. She comes remarkably close to succeeding. Her portrayal of Arrhidaeus, Alexander’s half-brother, and his full sister Kleopatra are genuinely moving.
Another reason I love these books is the economy, consistency, and excellence of writing – the craftsmanship. There is no evidence she belonged to a writers group (I need a writer’s group!) nor is there evidence that she required copious editing after the novels were complete (I need humongous editing, being a prolific over-writer). Yet, despite her success, her writing never became bloated. Her discipline is as obvious in her last novel as it is in her first of the list - and that covers a time span of twenty-five years. Gore Vidal called her writing sentimental. I’ve thought long and hard about that and I think he is right. (But, not until I read Vidal’s Julian for the second time) I think, it adds humanity to her storytelling, characters come to life. My brain appreciates Vidal’s ability to produce such a crystalline neutral viewpoint. My heart loves Mary Renault’s stories.