by Anne Marie Jakubowski
a review of an exhibit at the World Chess Hall of Fame St. Louis, Missouri curated by Frances Dickey
The Waste Land is a poem littered with kings, queens, knights, and pawns, but it took a visit to the exhibit “T. S. Eliot: A Game of Chess” at the World Chess Hall of Fame for me to realize the full significance of the game in the poem. The exhibit, curated by Frances Dickey, with Emily Allred as project manager, opened May 17, 2023, and will be on view until March 24, 2024; it explores how chess offers both a metaphor for conflict and a concrete link to Eliot’s own life. Taking as its anchor the title of The Waste Land’s second section, “A Game of Chess,” the exhibit presents a thought-provoking way to approach the poem for both fans of Eliot and of the game.
The exhibit’s setting within the World Chess Hall of Fame, located in St. Louis’s Central West End neighborhood and marked by a 20-foot-tall chess piece at the front of the property, proves uniquely capable of drawing out the two major focuses of the exhibit: Eliot’s St. Louis origins, and (naturally) the significance of chess to the poem. Those who know The Waste Land well will find their perspectives refreshed by the careful attention to chess’s symbolic and personal importance to Eliot. And those who are new to the poem and daunted by its famed difficulty will find chess to be a tangible and accessible point of entry for exploring it.
The exhibit is divided into sections that correspond to the five sections of The Waste Land. At each station, an audio reading of the section at hand is available, and printed copies of the entire poem are also available for patrons to reference. Display cases contain a wide array of material that illuminates aspects of the poem, such as rare or contemporaneous editions of the texts the poem alludes to, or a period-appropriate reconstruction of the dressing room described in “A Game of Chess.” It also gathers artifacts related to Eliot’s time growing up in St. Louis, such as images of his 1904 World’s Fair ticket book, an annotated map of Eliot’s St. Louis that marks significant locations from his early life, and letters from his mother Charlotte discussing family business affairs.
I was surprised by how striking I found the inclusion of several bricks from Hydraulic Press Brick Company, of which Henry Ware Eliot, Sr., was president. The bricks, on loan from the National Building Arts Center, made the Eliot family’s influential role in the making of turn-of-the-century St. Louis real to me for the first time. As the exhibit shows, chess was a salient feature of Eliot’s personal life, a passion he shared with his father. Scanned images of Eliot, Sr.’s scrapbook show his more-than-casual interest in the game, with pages containing cut-out and pasted chess puzzles accompanied by handwritten solutions. And an image of the poet’s own pocket chess set suggests that his family’s interest in the game accompanied him abroad, with a set ready to be unpacked and played at a moment’s notice.
As Dickey’s accompanying essay in the exhibit program notes, Eliot uses chess in The Waste Land “as a metaphor for marriage and sexual intrigue,” creating the impression of “a loveless relationship in which both partners feel trapped and watch each other warily for the next move.” Dickey points out that Eliot’s wife Vivien’s infidelity and its effect on their marriage meant that his own “home life had come to resemble the formalized conflict of a chess game.” Chess appears explicitly in part II of the poem as part of the speaker’s response to his neurotic wife’s questioning, “What shall we do tomorrow? / What shall we ever do?” In contrast to her semi-panicked energy, his solemn replies describing a banal routine are all the more chilling and depressing: “The hot water at ten. / And if it rains, a closed car at four. / And we shall play a game of chess, / Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.” In Dickey’s reading, inflected by the spectral presence of the eventually excised draft line “the ivory men make company between us,” this scene suggests that “romance no longer interests this couple; they cannot engage directly with each other, only through the mediation of chessmen.”
By bringing chess into the foreground of the poem, the exhibit helped me glimpse new dimensions in familiar passages. Looking at the re-created dressing room scene from Part II, with a chessboard set up on one side, I grasped for the first time that the woman seated in a “Chair… like a burnished throne” might be simultaneously functioning as a chess player and chess piece. She could be a queen herself, a formidable opponent parrying her romantic partner’s advances, or else she could be an embodiment of the game’s queen piece, a crucial token in someone else’s match. The exhibit’s tight focus on chess enabled me to gain a much greater sense of the metaphor’s depth than I’d previously appreciated.
I visited on a Wednesday afternoon, and while I was there, a steady stream of visitors flowed in and out. Many seemed to be chess aficionados unfamiliar with the poem, which testifies to the success of the exhibit’s framing and its ability to bring new audiences to Eliot’s work. A small group of schoolchildren came in near the end of my visit, and even if the poem may have gone somewhat over their heads, they fully grasped the flair of high-stakes competition that the game of chess lends to the poem. “Who won?” one insistent member of the group kept asking their guide at various points in their tour. Who, indeed, I wondered.
