A Century of Chess: Janowski Matches 1916-18
In a last gasp of pre-war Utopianism - also, essentially, his dying wish - the chess Maecenas Isaac Rice sent out invitations to all the leading European masters to attend his planned tournament in New York in 1916. Needless to say, most of the invitations went unanswered, but they proved a life-changer for David Janowski.
Janowski had been interned in Switzerland since 1914 and had had an unpleasant war. He had been arrested in the wake of the Mannheim tournament when he had an argument with Berthold Lasker in a cafe and was intemperate enough that the cafe proprietor reported him to military authorities as “an enemy of Germany.” He was released to Switzerland, interned there, but, with the combination of the New York invitation, in addition to the score of his win over Alekhine at Mannheim, was able to convince a chess-playing consulate to allow him to travel to New York. He arrived in a somewhat sour mood - declaring that chess in Europe was dead “for at least twenty years to come” but saying also that he enjoyed the “free air” of New York and was planning an ambitious chess programme. He finished a highly respectable third at New York 1916 and was emboldened to challenge Capablanca to a match, but his American sojourn went in a different direction from what he was expecting.
Capablanca paid no attention to the challenge, and although a series of matches were arranged for Janowski, they had the unmistakable aspect of charity - the American chess community helping out a famous, and broke, master. And there is something heartbreaking about Janowski’s American matches - like Tolstoy in the train station or something - the veteran master unable to recognize that he was no longer himself. Janowski truly had been a great player in the period 1895-1905, able to combine classical precepts with an innovative dynamic style, and was a pioneer in play with the bishop pair, the exchange sacrifice, and the initiative. But he also had his demons - he was an inveterate gambler, a sore loser, had a constant tendency to overestimate himself, and by the late 1900s, he had lost all sense of proportion in his play, all sense of danger.
Janowski was first paired with Charles Jaffe, the ‘crown prince of the Lower East Side.’ This was supposed to be a mismatch - Janowski was a world-class player and Jaffe, essentially, a street bum - but the match turned out to be achingly close, and in some ways Janowski’s reputation never recovered from it. What’s poignant about the match is that it emerged relatively quickly that Janowski - always immaculately dressed, 'correctness personified,' always very concerned with his honor and grandeur - wasn’t, deep down, really so different from Jaffe. Jaffe won three of the first four games and from there the match was a knife fight - full of errors and with the battles continuing deep into the endgame. The chess press at the time was a bit appalled at what was happening. "Those who followed the contest were utterly disappointed in every respect, with Janowski missing win after win and Jaffe chance after chance," wrote The New York Sun. "It cannot be said that the match was instrumental in contributing to the theory of the game. It did not produce anything in the shape of originality, beauty, or soundness." But that assessment is redolent of the narrow-mindedness of the classical period. The match featured true fighting chess, with both players constantly able to find unlikely resources and in chaotic situations to tilt the balance of play in their favor. The match was tied through twelve games, and Janowski prevailed with an impressive strategic win in the thirteenth game.
After Jaffe, Janowski played his ‘ancient rival’ Marshall, and this was again a dose of harsh reality. Marshall and Janowski had already played four matches and would play 82 games in total - more (as far as I can tell) than any other grandmaster pair before Alekhine and Bogoljubow - but Marshall was aging better and defeated Janowski without too much trouble.
Next, Janowski had something of a reprieve, playing a match against the fossil Jackson Showalter and defeating him without difficulty. This must have been something of an amusing contrast, the chess-obsessed Janowski traveling to Kentucky, desperate to win and to restore his tarnished honor, the gentlemanly Showalter treating the match, held in his club and in his hometown, as just a perfectly pleasant pastime.
In late 1917, Janowski played Jaffe again. Janowski always took adversity with bad grace. Having defeated Jaffe by the slenderest of margins, he insisted on spotting him a four-point lead for the rematch - but, as it turned out, Janowski was as good as his word and won by six full points, and in several of the games seemed simply to be playing at a level above Jaffe.
If Jaffe had been thwarted and all order and justice restored in the world, Janowski, though, had one more humiliation to come. He agreed to a match with Oscar Chajes, a slightly tonier version of Jaffe both in demeanor and playing style, and in an epic 22 games Chajes, "covering himself with distinction," prevailed by a point.
For the American ‘b-team,’ the matches were a high-water market - the easily-dismissible Chajes and Jaffe showing that they could fully hold their own against a player who had played for the world championship only a few years earlier. For Janowski, the matches were in an important sense the end of his grandmaster career.
He would play at New York 1924 and finish in distant last place. As John Keeble wrote of his last years: "Janowski was absolutely without means and in a dying state. A lonely man (he had never married), no relatives near to him, no religion, no income and apparently no friends, for he was not really a sociable man to make them. What a sad end to a successful career devoted almost wholly to chess."
Sources: All the photos are from Edward Winter's 'Janowsky Jottings.' Chessgames.com has unusually good write-ups on all these matches.
