Obituaries of the late Shelley Duvall have mentioned her chess games with Stanley Kubrick on the set of The Shining. The director was a chess obsessive, constantly looking for adversaries on set, and the game features prominently in his films, including The Killing and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Chess also appears in Kubrick’s 1962 Lolita, in a scene where James Mason’s Humbert Humbert teaches the game to Lolita’s mother (Shelley Winters).
Curiously, James Mason was also the name of one of the greatest chess players of the late 19th century. However, it was not the name given to him at birth.
While most chess writers agree that Mason was an Irishman born in Co Kilkenny during the Great Famine – the consequences of which may have claimed the lives of his birth parents – his birth name is still a matter of speculation. However, an article by Jim Hayes on the Irish Chess Union’s website suggests that Mason was born Patrick Dwyer to John and Mary Dwyer of Barrack Street, Kilkenny, and was baptised on November 20th, 1849.
Mason claimed that his adoptive father gave him his new name when the family arrived in the United States in order to counter the strong prejudice against the throngs of Catholic Irish arriving in the country. In an interview with the Birmingham Weekly Mercury, Mason revealed that his father believed his birth name “so infernally Milesian” that it would infer he possessed “all the faults of the race went with it, particularly love of drink and laziness”. While there is no evidence that he was guilty of the latter vice, he was certainly given to spending much of his time between matches in taverns.
Bold moves – James Mason and William Pollock, two Irish chess masters
Big Benn – Brian Maye on Belfast philanthropist and antiquarian Edward Benn
All fired up – Frank McNally on the questionable wisdom of Dublin’s logo
Out and proud – Frank McNally on being “horrid happy” and other Hiberno-English states of mind
It seems that the young Mason’s first port of call in the US was New Orleans, the birthplace of one of the game’s greatest players, Paul Morphy, himself of Hispano-Irish extraction. The family then moved to New York where Mason polished shoes and boots before finding work as a newsboy, selling copies of the New York Herald aboard the Fulton Ferry connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn across the East River.
It was during this period that Mason learned the rudiments of the game in New York’s numerous chess cafés, becoming one of the strongest players in the city, if not the country, and earning a reputation that would bring him to the attention of his employer, the Herald’s proprietor, James Gordon Bennett.
Bennett offered him a job in the newspaper offices, allowing Mason more time to hone his game. By the 1880s, having initially returned to Europe to play in some tournaments, Mason was living in London and regarded as one of the top half-dozen players in the world. Not a few chess writers of the period compared Mason favourably with the first world champion Wilhelm Steinitz. In the 1920s, the chess writer WH Watts wrote that in terms of “sheer chess genius”, Mason was “probably the finest player who has ever lived”.
Unfortunately, the Irishman’s predilection for strong drink seems to have hindered his realising his full potential. A New York Times report in 1889 claimed that Mason had “been imprudent enough” to visit a barroom with some friends before his match against David Graham Baird. “Nevertheless, he insisted on playing, but after making eight moves he had to retire, giving up his game to his opponent.” Similar accounts appear in other newspaper reports and the published reminiscences of his contemporaries.
Among Mason’s drinking companions was another chess master, William HR Pollock, who, although born in England, had studied medicine at Trinity College Dublin, and was a licientiate of the Royal College of Surgeons. Pollock won the Irish championship in 1885 and 1886 and played exhibition matches across the country before also emigrating to North America. In 1889, he appeared at the sixth American chess congress in New York as the Irish champion, drawing his game against Mason.
Although little known to those outside the world of chess, Pollock found a degree of posthumous fame when he appeared in the pages of Cormac McCarthy’s 1992 novel All the Pretty Horses. When the protagonist John Grady Cole visits the grand-aunt of his lover, she invites him to play chess, employing an opening he has never before seen. “It was invented by the Irish champion Pollock,” she tells him. “I was afraid you might know it.” The opening was called the King’s Own and Pollock did indeed claim to have invented it, “on the street”.
While in Canada, Pollock contracted tuberculosis and returned home to England. He died, aged 37, in Bristol in 1896.
Nine years later, his friend and collaborator Mason also passed away, in Rochford, Essex, aged 55, having never quite reached the apex of the game and perhaps still haunted by the miseries of his childhood.