Bobby was fast gaining a reputation as a constant complainer, the Petulant American, a role most of the players found distasteful. They believed he’d invariably blame tournament conditions or the behavior of the other players for a loss.
Whether or not Bobby was hypersensitive, he did suffer from hyperacusis—an acute senstivity to noise and even distant sounds—and it was clear that Tal, in particular, knew just how to rattle him. The Russian would look at Bobby from near or far, and begin laughing, and once in the communal dining room he pointed to Bobby and said out loud, “Fischer: cuckoo!” Bobby almost burst into tears. “Why did Tal say ‘cuckoo’ to me?” he asked, and for the first and perhaps only time during the tournament, Larsen tried to console him: “Don’t let him bother you.” He told Bobby he’d have an opportunity to seek revenge … on the board. After that, a local Bled newspaper published a group of caricatures of all eight players, and a souvenir postcard was made of the drawings. Bobby’s portrait was particularly severe, with his ears akimbo and his mouth open, making him look as if he were … well, cuckoo.
Sure enough, in the drawing, next to the portrait of Bobby was a little bird perched on his board. It was a cuckoo.
Spectators, players, and journalists began asking Bobby how he could take two months off, September and October, during the school year to play in a tournament. Finally it was revealed: He’d dropped out of Erasmus Hall. It had been crushing for Regina to have to sign the authorization releasing the sixteen-year-old from the school. She hoped she could talk him back into classes somewhere, someday, after he finished playing in the Candidates tournament. As an inducement to get him to change his mind about dropping out, the assistant principal of Erasmus, Grace Corey, wrote to Bobby in Yugoslavia, telling him how well he’d done on the New York State Regents examinations. He’d earned a grade of 90 percent in Spanish and 97 percent in geometry, making for “a really good year.”
Good grades or not, an image began to attach itself to Bobby. As a result of the publicity about his schooling, or lack thereof, Fischer was beginning to be thought of as a nyeculturni by the Russians, unschooled and uncultured, and they began to tease him. “What do you think of Dostoyevsky, Bobby?” someone queried. “Are you a Benthamite?’ another asked. “Would you like to meet Goethe?” They were unaware that Bobby had read literature in high school, and for his own enjoyment. He liked George Orwell’s work, and for years held on to his copies of Animal Farm and 1984; he also read and admired Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Voltaire’s Candide was a favorite, and he’d often talk about the comic parts. Tal asked Bobby if he’d ever gone to the opera, and when Bobby burst into the refrain from “The March of the Smugglers,” from Bizet’s Carmen, the Russian was temporarily silenced. Bobby had attended a performance of the French opera with his mother and sister at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York shortly before going to Europe. He also owned a book that told the stories of all the great operas, which he’d dip into from time to time.
Unfortunately, cultured or not, Bobby played poorly in the tournament at first. He was frustrated at being down two games to none against Tal, who never passed up a chance to annoy his younger opponent. Just before Bobby and Tal were to play a third time, Bobby approached Alexander Koblentz, one of Tal’s trainers, and said sotto voce, as menacingly as he could: “If Tal doesn’t behave himself, I am going to smash out all of his front teeth.” Tal persisted in his provocation, though, and Fischer lost their third game as well.
It was a situation where a youthful player like Bobby could spiral down irretrievably, playing himself into an abyss. But he took momentary charge of his psyche, despite his losses, and began to feel optimistic. After defeating a cold, he placed himself in the abstract world of Lewis Carroll and the universe of reversal and wrote: “I am now in quite a good mood, and eating well. [Like] in Alice in Wonderland. Remember? The Red Queen cried before she got a piece of dirt in her eye. I am in a good mood before I win all of my games.”
“Let’s go to a movie,” Dimitrije Bjelica said to Bobby the night before he was to play Vasily Smyslov. Bjelica was a Yugoslavian chess journalist; he was also nationally known as a television commentator on soccer. He’d befriended Bobby in Portorož and was sympathetic to his complaints, and he thought a movie might take Bobby’s mind off his problems. As luck would have it, though, the only English-language film being shown in Belgrade was Lust for Life, the lush biopic of the mad nineteenth-century Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh.
Bobby agreed to the outing, and right after the scene when Van Gogh cuts off his ear in despair following a foolish quarrel with Paul Gauguin, Bobby turned to his companion and whispered: “If I don’t win against Smyslov tomorrow, I’ll cut off my ear.” Fischer, playing brilliantly with the black pieces the next day, won his first game ever against the Russian, a former World Champion. The parallels of Bobby’s life to Van Gogh’s go only so far, however. Bobby’s ear remained intact.
For Bobby, an unfortunate pattern emerged after that. If he managed to win a game from an opponent, on the next day he’d often lose to someone else. He defeated Benko then lost to Gligoric. After a win against Fridrik Olafsson, he lost to Tal again. Bobby saw his chance at a title shot fading away, and he didn’t want to end up like Terry Malloy—the character played by Marlon Brando in one of Bobby’s favorite movies, On the Waterfront—with “a one-way ticket to Palookaville.”
Bobby lost games he should have drawn and drew contests he should have won. He dropped ten pounds, and not because he wasn’t eating. The hotel doctor prescribed a tonic that did nothing to improve his condition. His pocket money was running low after he lost seven traveler’s checks, and he was having trouble extracting more from his mother, at one point calling her a “louse” because she wouldn’t make up the shortfalclass="underline" “You know I am very good with money,” he complained. Larsen, whom Bobby described as “sulky and unhelpful,” kept discouraging him, telling him that he shouldn’t expect to place higher than the bottom rank of those competing. When Larsen repeated this line publicly and it was published in the Belgrade newspaper Borba, Bobby was enraged and humiliated. Larsen was his second, he was being paid $700—equivalent to about $5,000 today—and Bobby expected him to be something of a cheering squad, or at least not a public Cassandra.
He was losing to Tal, but some of his other games won accolades. Harry Golombek, the chief arbiter, said that Fischer was improving as the event progressed, and he surmised that “were the tournament [to go] 56 rounds instead of the ‘mere’ 28,” Bobby’s best days would lie ahead. “He is no match for Tal but his two victories over Keres and his equal score with Smyslov are sufficient in themselves to prove his real Grandmaster class.”
World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik misdiagnosed the young American’s struggles when he wrote, “Fischer’s strong and weak points lie in that he is always true to himself and plays the same way regardless of his opponents or an external factor.” It’s true that Bobby rarely altered his style, which gave his opponents an advantage because they knew in advance what kinds of openings he’d play, but Botvinnik didn’t know of the rage that Bobby was experiencing because of the disruptive atmosphere being created by Tal.