Stuart Flynn recently drew the list's attention to a factual inaccuracy in
a poem on the Internet, at
http://www.asauthors.org/web_of_poets/Tranter/poems/elegy.html,
for which I'm grateful. It's my poem, an elegy for my friend Martin
Johnston who died in 1990. In the fourth stanza I recalled a remark of
Martin's I had overheard very late one night at a party twenty years earlier:
... a tricky ploy with a bishop in the final moves
of a game that seems to have fallen into a pattern
remarkably similar to Botvinnik's closing tactics
in the 1949 Moscow Chess Olympiad - don't you
think? - the party still going at 4 a.m.,
an old Miles Davis record on the gramophone,
the ashtray spilling over - your move -
There was no Chess Olympiad in Moscow in 1949.
Martin may have been drunk at the time - the party had been going for a
while - and he may well have misremembered the match, though Martin's
memory and his knowledge of chess were both so extraordinary that this is
unlikely. Far more likely is my own faulty memory, or perhaps faulty hearing.
My knowledge of chess is scant, and when I wrote the poem the Internet was
not the wonderful research tool it is today. I've now looked up Botvinnik's
games on the Net, and it seems that the one I thought Martin mentioned may
have been the only game for which I can find evidence of Botvinnik playing
in 1949: a radio match with Alexander, though this seems unlikely.
It may have been a game in the USSR championship, which he held in 1931,
1933, 1939, 1941, 1944, 1949 and 1952.
Or it may have been the World Championship held at The Hague and Moscow in
1948, which Botvinnik won.
Or it may have been the World Chess Championship, 1951: Botvinnik -
Bronstein Title Match, Moscow, III-V, 1951 (part of the World Chess
Championship 1949 to 1951 cycle).
There are many other possibilities, but sadly Martin is not here to tell
us. I'll just have to choose one, and rewrite the poem. I know Martin
wouldn't have minded much. Some months before his novel "Cicada Gambit" was
published in 1983 Martin had shown me a page of the proofs with patent
delight. The publishers, Hale & Iremonger, had a computerised typesetting
machine that used punched-paper-tape. In the middle of printing out the
proofs for the novel, something went wrong with the computer, and it spewed
out a page of gibberish - asterisks, colons, umlauts and random letters.
'Isn't it wonderful?' Martin exclaimed. 'I've asked them to leave it in.'
But, sadly, the typesetter operator was unable to make the computer
produce the gibberish a second time - or perhaps the publisher was
unwilling to allow the gibberish to appear under its imprint - and the
novel was published without it.
John Tranter, Editor, Jacket magazine
|