94
WILLIAM LOGAN
a computer. (I believe he thought the machine slightly demonic, though he claimed his eye doctor said the screen would ruin his eyes.) His IBM daisywheel, a relic of the 1980s, lasted for nearly thirty years; but when it stopped working the local repairmen had all retired, and those in the next town, and the next. I finally found a man in London—the last surviving repairman in southern England—who could recondition the machine. As I was back in the States, I arranged for the typewriter to be freighted down—it was all a little expensive. To ensure that George would have his favorite machine for another decade, I ordered a load of cartridges and correction tapes, which were no longer manufactured. Alas, his writing days were nearing their end. The large lawn behind the Steiner house was laid with beds of roses and other flowers visited by deer agile enough to leap the waist-high fence. After he lost his college office, George and Zara had what was called the Library built in a corner—his new office, every wall covered with bookshelves. When he moved in, the shelves were empty; by the time we suspended our games during his long last illness, they were overflowing, and piles of books filled much of the carpet. Inside the house, he once had a small office off the master bedroom, but that had long silted up past reclamation. I can’t say I don’t know how that happens, and how rapidly. The mock battles of chess conceal real ones—chess is pathology masquerading as psychology. Bishops have long replaced battle elephants in the original ranks, and rooks the chariots. (The armies Alexander faced may have provided the original portrait, though the game evolved later.) Even between friends, such games rely, whatever the open-faced look of the board, on Machiavellian cunning more than accident, though the fog of battle has its place. Most blunders come from a curious blindness rather than defects of logic, the failure to see as well as the failure to foresee. Blunders in poetry require a similar sort of seeing without seeing. The tender diplomacy of those skirmishes on Barrow Road was conducted despite the rough-and-tumble, no holds-barred nature of chess. When the games ran against him, George would say, “Not my day.” Then all was forgotten, even forgiven, over tea. Whenever I returned to the States, I’d receive a letter from George every few weeks. The letters stopped during the last decade of our friendship, replaced by surprise overseas calls. They were never long,