“The joke is that I did it by mathematics. I calculated what ought to sound like joy, grief, hope, triumph, and all the rest, and—it was just after I had studied harmony; you know how mathematical that is.”
Speechless, Welles nodded.
“I worked out the rhythms from different metabolisms—the way you function when under the influences of these emotions; the way your metabolic rate varies, your heartbeats and respiration and things. I sent it to the director of that orchestra, and he didn’t get the idea that it was a joke—of course I didn’t explain—he produced the music. I get nice royalties from it, too.”
“You’ll be the death of me yet,” said Welles in deep sincerity. “Don’t tell me anything more today; I couldn’t take it. I’m going home. Maybe by tomorrow I’ll see the joke and come back to laugh. Tim, did you ever fail at anything?”
“There are two cabinets full of articles and stories that didn’t sell. Some of them I feel bad about. There was the chess story. You know, in ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ it wasn’t a very good game, and you couldn’t see the relation of the moves to the story very well.”
“I never could see it at all.”
“I thought it would be fun to take a championship game and write a fantasy about it, as if it were a war between two little old countries, with knights and foot-soldiers, and fortified walls in charge of captains, and the bishops couldn’t fight like warriors, and, of course, the queens were women—people don’t kill them, not in hand-to-hand fighting and… well, you see? I wanted to make up the attacks and captures, and keep the people alive, a fairytale war you see, and make the strategy of the game and the strategy of the war coincide, and have everything fit. It took me ever so long to work it out and write it. To understand the game as a chess game and then to translate it into human actions and motives, and put speeches to it to fit different kinds of people. I’ll show it to you. I loved it. But nobody would print it. Chess players don’t like fantasy, and nobody else likes chess. You have to have a very special kind of mind to like both. But it was a disappointment. I hoped it would be published, because the few people who like that sort of thing would like it very much.”
“I’m sure I’ll like it.”
“Well, if you do like that sort of thing, it’s what you’ve been waiting all your life in vain for. Nobody else has done it.” Tim stopped, and blushed as red as a beet. “I see what grandmother means. Once you get started bragging, there’s no end to it. I’m sorry, Peter.”
“Give me the story. I don’t mind, Tim—brag all you like to me; I understand. You might blow up if you never expressed any of your legitimate pride and pleasure in such achievements. What I don’t understand is how you have kept it all under for so long.”