EVANS ENVY

Edward Winter published an essay at ChessCafe
in 2001 that attacked the writing of GM Larry Evans. NMnot
Taylor Kingston, who will not answer whether he posted
here under fake names IN PRAISE OF HIMSELF, has
regurgitated Winter's attack which came up with
some 25 or so errors in an oeuvre of about 10 million
words written across more than a half century. That
was the technique behind this character assassination.

What follows is an essay that I penned -- it is
from a larger work -- in appreciation of Larry Evans' writing.

Readers can judge for themselves whether the
vicious junk from NMnot Taylor Kingston and his
"colleague," if that is quite the word, Edward
Winterian, has much value.

MR. WINTER ATTACKS HIS BETTER - III

By Larry Parr


"Larry Evans: Stylist, Essayist, Searcher"


By Larry Parr


"If we all thought Bobby had
deserted chess for two decades, he corrected us at the
press conference. Chess had deserted him. 'No one
has played ME for those 20 years,' he said. Reality
is in the 'I' of the Fischer beholder."- Larry Evans,
Chess Life, November 1992, p. 56

A fair specimen of Edward Winter's
heavy-potato irony:

"While 'Mother Teresa was ministering to the
Caribs, the Dictator (so the November Chess Life
suggested) was indulging in 'arm-twisting'. On a less
physical plain, Campomanes made only one notable
contribution to the Press (in the November CHESS -
sent out when everything was over). The British
Gentleman [GM Raymond Keene], however, was to be found
philanthropising in print almost everywhere. In the
May BCM he set the tone with a declaration of
unswerving principle: 'Honesty and openness is always
the best policy!'"-Edward Winter, Chess Explorations, p. 217

In "The Facts About Larry Evans," Edward Winter
attacked his better as a stylist, essayist and chess
searcher. The intent was to destroy an adversary's
reputation for lively, authoritative writing. The
ploy was to recycle about two dozen old errors, pad
them with hundreds of words of invective to suggest
heft, and treat them as representative of GM Evans' oeuvre.

That is the main line of the Winter Variation.
Repeat something, just anything - time and again.
Regurgitate errors long since acknowledged and
corrected - time and again. Rehearse feigned outrage
- time and again.

Fortunately, though, Mr. Winter's slings and
arrows boomerang. His targets remain whole, and he
somehow ends up looking more riddled than a piece of
well-aged Swiss cheese. "Envy," in the words of the
ancient Greek proverb, "slays itself by its own
arrows." Just as a derelict marooned on a desert
island waves his arms frantically to catch the
attention of a passing ship, Mr. Winter waves his
armaments frenetically at passing audiences hoping to
catch some attention. Even as he gets cancelled from
New in Chess for want of reader interest, writers such
as Raymond Keene and GM Evans continue to interest
large audiences. Indeed, as noted in an earlier essay
in this series, every Chess Life reader survey has
rated GM Evans at or near the top of contributors.

Evans interests. Winter bores.


EVANS AS STYLIST

Take the Evans prose style. It crackles with sass and
pizazz. At Evans' best, he bubbles. At Winter's
best, he foams. Glutinously. He is like a Staunton
without any of the edgy earth and energy. No
suet-pudding is more viscous than Mr. Winter's
sentences, written in the mannered cadences of
third-rate Victorianese.

Winter's wit is heavier than one of those Swiss
potato dishes. The man's irony? Few ingots of iron
are more leaden. Forum readers should consult his
eye-opening "Reviews/Commentary" chapter in Chess
Explorations which is, paradoxically, a real
eye-shutter. The work of a mouth in search of an ear.

The truth is that nothing ever written by Mr.
Winter has the insight, the liveliness and the human
involvement of a typical Evans feature. Here, for
example, is GM Evans' introduction to his wonderful
"Bobby's Back!" piece in the Chess Life of November
1992. Enjoy:


MAIN HEADLINE: BOBBY'S BACK!

By GM Larry Evans

BOBBY'S BACK

And non-chess people know it. They know it because
unlike the Loch Ness monster, so often sighted but
never seen, Bobby Fischer showed up on September 1 for
a press conference at the Maestral Hotel, the site of
Fischer-Spassky II. The hotel is on the tiny
peninsula of Sveti Stefan, an erstwhile playground of
the rich and famous, a mere 100 feet off the coast of
Montenegro and some 70 miles from a civil war raging
in Bosnia.

At his first press conference in 20 years, Bobby
fired the spit heard 'round the world. He took out a
letter from the U.S. Treasury Department warning of
severe penalties for violating U.N. sanctions by
playing Boris Spassky in the rump state of Yugoslavia
- and spat on it.

There's more. "Communism is Bolshevism is
Judaism," he declared. When asked about his reported
anti-Semitism, he said Semites included both Arabs and
Jews. "I'm definitely not anti-Arab, OK?" On the two
Super Ks, usurpers to his throne, he opined, "These
criminals Karpov and Kasparov have been ruining chess
with immoral, unethical, prearranged games, and are
the lowest dogs around."

As usual, Bobby had the organizers hopping. The
playing table was built and rebuilt seven times; all
toilets in the playing hall were raised an inch to
accomodate [sic] his bulk; an extravagant birthday
bash was thrown for his 19-year-old Hungarian
girlfriend, Zita Rajcsanyi. A bemused Fischer looked
on as torch-bearers dressed in folk costumes lined the
isthmus leading to Sveti Stefan. Eerie - and
reminiscent of the scene in Frankenstein when peasants
with torches marched on the castle to destroy the
monster within.

In Yugoslavia, this $5 million duel is billed as
"The Return Match of the Century Between the
Never-Defeated Champion of the World, Bobby Fischer,
and His Challenger Boris Spassky." All his wishes are
fulfilled. He gets 10 wins with a 9 - 9 tie clause,
which FIDE had denied him in 1975. The patented Bobby
Fischer chess clock, which may revolutionize
tournament chess, is being used. The purse is for a
million more than Kasparov's next title bout.
Further, FIDE, despised by Fischer, the body of
amateurs that stripped Bobby of his title, is cut out
of the picture (something which Kasparov despite all
his efforts failed to accomplish).

But there's trouble in paradise. Before the
start of the third game, Bobby suddenly added an
ultimatum that journalists be barred from covering the
match unless they acknowledged it's for the world
championship. He relented - for now.

BOBBY'S BACK

And we chess people know it. We know it because at
3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, September 2, Bobby committed
an act stranger than any recorded above: he played a
game in public for the first time in 20 years. Many
pundits were convinced that it would never happen.

How shocked he must have been in 1990 when former
GMA chairman Bessel Kok balked at organizing a
comeback match because Bobby's demands "were too tough
to meet" and his extreme views espousing neo-Nazism
and denying the existence of the Holocaust "went
beyond the abhorrent." Bobby had barked, and for the
first time a chessman failed to jump.

In the October Chess Life, Arnold Denker and
Larry Parr wrote that all efforts to coax him from
retirement were "doomed from the start." They
continued, "His personal chess legend as an
incomparable and undefeated genius means everything to
him. It is his raison d'etre - the single support for
a very frail ego."

Elegantly written, closely reasoned and utterly
wrong! Bobby is back because even for him time does
not stand still. He's nearly 50, and he either makes
a pile now or dies broke. Perhaps Ms. Sweet 19, whose
own ambition is to become world champion someday,
prodded him ever so gently about the future.

But Denker, Parr and many of us ultimately got it
wrong about Bobby for a far more basic reason. We
forgot, as a French philosopher once put it, that
normal men do not know that everything is possible.
Normal men cannot imagine the solipsistic absorption
of a genius such as Fischer who has sunk, in the words
of Vladimir Nabokov, "into the abysmal depths of chess."

If we all thought Bobby had deserted chess for
two decades, he corrected us at the press conference.
Chess had deserted him. "No one has played ME for
those 20 years," he said. Reality is in the "I" of
the Fischer beholder.

No matter what happens in Yugoslavia, I have a
feeling we may be watching Bobby's last hurrah.
Instead of launching another assault on the citadel,
he'll probably take the money and run.

END OF ARTICLE

Great writing meant for the chess ages? Not at
all. A piece of provocative, insightful, brightly
written, and what Tartakower might have called "Sun
journalism"? Absolutely. Is it more interesting and
faster paced than Mr. Winter's chloral hydrates?

Instead of GM Evans' snappy headline and lead-in,
"Bobby's Back," Mr. Winter would have served up
something like the arch, "Return of Robert Fischer."
Instead of Evans' lead-in and first two sentences -
"BOBBY'S BACK ... And non-chess people know it. They
know it because unlike the Loch Ness monster, so often
sighted but never seen, Bobby Fischer showed up on
September 1 for a press conference at the Maestral
Hotel, the site of Fischer-Spassky II."- Mr. Winter's
work would have dispensed with Evans' snappy economy:


Robert James Fischer has returned to the
arena, and even non-chess playing people have heard
the news. They have heard because Fischer, who has
been caught only in glimpses like the Loch Ness
monster these last two decades, showed up on September
1, for a press conference at the Maestral Hotel, the
site of Fischer-Spassky II.

Not bad. Though not so good as energetic Evans copy.
Still, it is better than most of Mr. Winter's lather,
which brings to mind the Russian aphorism that paper
can stand anything.

EVANS AS ESSAYIST

As much as I admire Larry Evans' CL feature stories
and columns, I regard his newspaper work more highly.
The various versions of Evans' syndicated columns have
been appearing for over 30 years. His essays, so
elegant in their economy, range from 300 to 500 words.
They are minor miracles of compression. They tell
complete stories in literate though completely
accessible language, and they have kept tens of
millions of readers interested.

Nothing - or, perhaps, just one thing - was
more unjust in Mr. Winter's ChessCafe attack than the
man's attempt to tar GM Evans' enormous oeuvre with
the brush of his oft-repeated litany of Evans errors.
Not only were most of these errors acknowledged and
corrected by GM Evans, but they comprise less than a
hundredth of one percent of his total work.

Over the past half century, GM Evans has written
quite literally thousands of pithy and eloquent essays
for his newspapers and magazines. Such as this story
that he titled ....

A POINT OF LIGHT

By GM Larry Evans


Kids call her The Chess Lady. Here name is Irene
Darnell. Her motto: "Push Pawns, Not Drugs."

She retired after 30 years as a cashier and
enrolled in the Foster Grandparent Program. "All
those seniors sitting on their duffs doing nothing,"
she says. "It's a crime."

One day she brought a chess set along to
entertain latchkey kids, who were only five. "They
had to kneel on chairs to reach the board, but they
took to it real fast. Chess fascinated them."

It was a revelation. She asked a school to give
her 45 minutes on Thursday morning to teach chess.
"Wow! Kids soon began beating me. Suddenly I
realized there was a brain in those heads that we
hadn't begun to tap into."

Irene embarked on a crusade. A high-risk school
invited her to teach chess to 300 problem kids ranging
from 8 to 12. "In my 17 years of education I never
ever saw something grab hold of so many kids and just
soar," said the astonished principal.

In 1992 President Bush flew to Reno to present
her with a medal as A Point of Light. Today a $40,000
BADA grant enables Irene, 82, and two aides to expand
their pilot program to four schools. "But we have to
sweat out the funding each year," she says.

"We reach 1,500 kids - half are Hispanic, Black
or Indian. It's a voluntary program but nobody has
ever turned down the opportunity to learn chess. Some
schools give them 10 hours of credit for math. They
have to follow rules but learn they can still have
fun. Like real life. Now they settle disputes with
chess instead of fists. Parents simply can't believe
what chess does for their kids."

A few years ago the mayor proclaimed May 9 as
Reno Chess Day. "Next year I hope it falls on a
weekday so we don't have to go to school," said a kid
who beat Hizzoner in a game.

END OF ARTICLE

So economical. Yet the story is all there. Mr.
Winter and his ratpackers do not write like this
because they cannot. They don't know where to begin
and don't much care. Readers will note that except
for the penultimate paragraph in which Evans gives his
subject a chance to speak at length for herself, every
paragraph begins with a piece of Evans narrative and
ends with the subject speaking in her own words.
That's deliberate. It provides rhythm and permits
newspaper editors to cut portions of paragraphs
easily. The overall essay, a classic news agency
pyramid, has seven paragraphs that are themselves
mini-pyramids. Lovely work.

Mr. Winter and his ratpackers are unconcerned
with the thousands of such essays written by GM Evans
in which he illumined so many corners of our great
chess globe. The Winter technique is to look for
inevitable gaffes or even mistakes unconnected to the
author - such as a publisher's "aviod" on the spine of
a book rather than "avoid" or for an absence of
umlauts over the last name of Eero Book because such
diacritical diereses are not in the CL stylebook - in
order to reach what IM John Watson has called
"one-sided and pre-ordained" conclusions.

"Pre-ordained"? Even the ratpackers know in
the foul recesses of their minds that Mr. Winter digs
for evidence to support prior conclusions rather than
delving for conclusions (explanations) to explain
prior evidence.


EVANS AS SEARCHER

For nearly 35 years, GM Evans has been conducting a
grand dialectic rather than a Winterian Grand Guignol
in the pages of Chess Life. Working in partnership
with his readers, he has reestablished old chess
knowledge and sought new knowledge.

In my view the nastiest ploy in Mr. Winter's
ChessCafe assault is neither the "shameless" character
assassination nor the mischaracterization of GM Evans'
oeuvre by regurgitating the same two dozen or so
errors over and over - errors, moreover, that were
earlier acknowledged and often corrected. To my mind,
Mr. Winter's lowest, in fact subterranean, device is
to argue that GM Evans is loath to admit mistakes.

Mr. Winter is betting that most of you are
without historical memory or, at least, bound annuals
of Chess Life. He is betting that you do not recall
or have never read the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of
columns in which he gladly conceded errors in his own
analyses or statements. No matter whether these
errors occurred in his famous MCO-10 edition, in his
many feature articles, in his numerous books or in his
hundreds of CL columns! "No matter," I say, because
GM Evans was and is hungry, indeed ravenous, for such
corrections because they are the vital viands that
keep a column such as his alive - just as a shortage
of audience participation recently led to the demise
of Mr. Winter's column.

Evans interests. Winter persists.



Taylor Kingston wrote:
On Nov 11, 1:21 pm, artichoke wrote:

Now I see it's just about a critique of Larry Evans' writing style,
something I am not interested in spending time on.

No, the critique is about substance, not style. But feel free to
tune out.