The best "modern" chess anthology, Jerome Salzmann's The Chess Reader, was published way back in 1949; Salzmann can hardly be blamed for not including what was yet to be written. But despite his book's considerable virtues, it is burdened by numbing stretches of ancient poetry and too many snippets of little or no significance. Marcello Truzzi's excellent 1975 anthology Chess in Literature, though more contemporary, is limited to short stories.
The compilers of two collections published in England -- Chess Pieces by Norman Knight (1949, second edition 1968), and King, Queen and Knight by Norman Knight and Will Guy -- scratched tentatively at the jewels buried in full-length works of literature, but they relied too heavily on very short excerpts and second-rate writers and not at all on the services of a competent editor. (While scouring these books for leads, I was elated to discover in King, Queen and Knight a terrific chess scene in one of the major works of Russian literature, Gogol's Dead Souls. But why didn't I remember it? Checking my copy of Dead Souls I found out why: the scene is about checkers!) The much more recent 1991 collection by the Englishman Richard Peyton, Sinister Gambits, contains only short stories that deal with murder or mystery, all of which, I believe, have been anthologized before.
So to my knowledge, there has never been a collection of chess literature consisting of stories and entire scenes drawn from the work of the best modern writers. And while preparing a new anthology of chess belles lettres, The 64-Square Looking Glass (published earlier this year by Times Books), I found out why: money. My publisher and I had agreed that The 64-Square Looking Glass would be a serious effort to do justice to the literature, and I was paid a relatively serious advance. But by the time I knew what I wanted in my book, I knew also that I would have to dig deep into my own pockets to pay for it.
Currently, copyright law protects works published in the previous 75 years, and places anything older in the public domain. Excerpts from more recent works may generally be freely reprinted if they do not exceed 250 words, though there are significant exceptions. For everything else you have to pay. The fees that writers and their publishers and agents ask for permission to reprint their work are often substantial. I'm not complaining -- most of them deserve every penny of it -- but when you add up all those fees it's easy to see why previous anthologists filled their books with musty old poetry and one-paragraph bites.
But books like this aren't expected to make money, I told myself. What's really important is to create something good, something to be proud of. But pride is a very expensive commodity. In the end, the rights to all the material in my book, plus various incidental fees, travel expenses, phone bills, etc., came to almost fifty percent more than my advance. And in many cases I was given permission to use the material only in a single edition of my book, which means that for a second edition or a paperback reprint, I'll have to repeat the whole process and reach into my pockets again.
Money was only one of several hurdles. Although I am pleased with the way my book turned out, its creation was an ordeal I don't think I would ever undertake again. (Well, hardly ever.) Maybe my experiences as detailed here will save another chess-loving fool from spending pots of his own money and a year and a half of his life dealing with literary agents and other disagreeable and/or incompetent people in order to create a book that pitifully few people will buy, that may never see a reprint or paperback edition, and that places itself and its editor at the mercy of reviewers who know little about chess and nothing at all about its great literature.
Theoretically, an anthology reflects the personal taste of its compiler, since it is he who decides what to include and what to leave out. I say "theoretically" because, in the event, some decisions are taken out of his hands. I wanted to include Agatha Christie's story "A Chess Problem," starring Hercule Poirot. But although it had already appeared in at least two anthologies (Truzzi and Peyton), Christie's daughter (and literary executor) refused permission to reprint it. I was told that all of Christie's Poirot material had been placed under a print embargo. No reason was given, but I suspect her literary heirs want to avoid diluting the Poirot franchise, which has much greater commercial potential in film and television.
I wanted to end my book with that final scene. I asked the American publisher of the screenplay for the usual world English-language reprint rights to a couple of excerpts, but I was granted only U.S. rights; those for the rest of the world were held by Svensk Filmindustri in Stockholm. This is a common situation -- to obtain world rights it is often necessary to get permission from publishers or agents in several countries. I duly wrote to Stockholm expecting a contract in return.
Instead I was told that Bergman had denied my request. Assuming some misunderstanding, I called his agent. If I knew the reasons for Bergman's decision, I coaxed, maybe I could persuade him to change his mind. I asked to speak with him personally. I was told that Mr. Bergman lives on a remote Scandinavian island and communicates only through his representatives; that his birthday was coming up that week, he hates his birthdays, he is being visited by all his children, he is quite depressed about the whole thing, it would a very bad time to ask for anything; and that he is weary of seeing The Seventh Seal always associated with chess.
I wanted to appeal to Bergman in my own words. If I faxed a letter to his Swedish representative, would she be good enough to see that Bergman himself read it? She agreed, and I spent an entire evening composing an impassioned plea.
Six days later my fax machine dispensed the bad news: "Apart from his [Bergman's] personal wish not to include the requested passages, he also feels his publishers might react. So I am afraid that there is nothing more to be done." Since I had already received U.S. rights, which Bergman did not control, his concern for his publishers was baffling. But when the game is clearly lost, you have to resign. Since my book was to be distributed throughout the English-speaking world, it would have to do without Bergman. I was profoundly disappointed.
His story concerns a young grandmaster who, recognized by a stranger on a train, is persuaded to play a game of chess with him, which he intentionally loses. Originally published in the Soviet Union in 1965, it subsequently appeared in two different English translations. The first translator was unfamiliar with English idiom, the second was unfamiliar with chess, and neither appreciated the irony of the story, which the author had loudly proclaimed with his use of quotation marks around the second word of the title: "The 'Victory' -- A Story With Exaggerations." The first translator omitted the quotation marks; the second changed the title to the insipid "The Grand Master."
Despite its inadequate translations, the story intrigued me, and I resolved to use it. But I would need a truer translation and, need I mention it, the permission of the author.
Aksyonov teaches at an American university, and I eventually managed to obtain his home phone number. He was delighted with the prospect of reaching a new audience and promised to send me the Russian original of his story at once. He gave me the number of his agent and asked me to contact her to take care of the formal arrangements.
His agent and I agreed on a fee, and I awaited the contract. When Aksyonov's Russian manuscript arrived a day or two later, I decided to have a go at translating it myself. My knowledge of Russian is limited, but with the aid of three Russian/English dictionaries, the two previous translations, and Russian-language experts Hanon W. Russell and Emanuel Sztein, I succeeded after many hours of enjoyable labor in producing a good version. I submitted it to Aksyonov and later called him to clear up a couple of small points.
Weeks passed and still no contract from Aksyonov's agent. My increasingly urgent phone calls to her had no effect except to raise my blood pressure. Feeling the hot breath of my deadline, I called her to plead for the contract right away: the book could not be published until all contracts were signed.
"Mr. Aksyonov is unavailable," she blithely replied. "He's in Moscow for the summer and I can't get him to approve the contract until he gets back."
I could feel the ulcers forming, and I did not maintain a professional calm. "I've got a goddam deadline coming up!" I shouted. "There's no time to revise the whole book. What the hell am I supposed to do now?"
"Maybe you should drop the story," she suggested.
It seemed to me that a literary agent's job does not include sabotaging the client. I imagined putting my hands around her neck and squeezing; instead, I called Aksyonov's home and spoke to his son, who gave me his father's number in Moscow. When I reached him and told him the story, he was silent for a moment. "She said 'drop it'?" he asked, incredulous. I said I could no longer work with his agent and now needed his personal permission. A few days later he cabled his assent.
And a few days after that, mirabile dictu, with Aksyonov still "unavailable" in Moscow, I received the contract from his agent.
Although publishers receive thousands of permission requests every year, their rights and permissions departments are often inadequately staffed to handle the volume. One harried young woman at a major publisher complained to me: "They make an incredible amount of money from selling rights, but they don't give a damn about us."
It can take six to eight weeks, even longer, to get a response to a permission request. The long delays are bad enough, but what can you say when you've waited a couple of months only to be told that foreign rights are held by some other publisher and you realize you have another two-month delay in store? Or that the rights to the work you are interested in have reverted to the author, present address unknown?
Or when finally a contract arrives and it's for something you didn't request? I wrote to Faber and Faber in London for permission to use a poem by Ezra Pound that had appeared in his Collected Shorter Poems. They sent me a contract for a poem by W.H. Auden, whose own collection of poems had the same title and was also published by Faber. A careless but understandable mistake. I wrote back to ask for a corrected contract, which I soon received along with a humble apology. More than a year has now passed, and every few months I get a dunning letter from Faber insisting that I pay for the Auden poem even though the mistaken contract had been voided long ago.
After a particularly galling experience with an incompetent clerk, I aired my frustrations in a letter to Howard Watson, a friendly and particularly helpful permissions director for a publishing group in England. Mr. Watson replied, in part: "You think you have a bad time. I have to do this for a living! Yes, it is indeed a bit of a bummer, this permissions lark. However, it does sort the men out from the boys."
As I said before, I wouldn't want to go through it all again. But when I look at my book sitting so handsomely on my shelf, I'm glad I didn't know what I was getting into.
This article appears in ACJ 2 (1993), pp. 99-104.
Burt Hochberg is a Senior Editor of Games magazine. From 1966 to 1979 he was Editor in Chief of Chess Life, and he has written and edited several books, including Winning with Chess Psychology (with Pal Benko). He lives in New York City.
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