Then there was his ineffective signature disguise: blue denim work shirt and pants, a black leather fingertip coat with a leather baseball cap to match, and the obligatory blue fleece sweater, all carefully selected so that he’d appear to fit in, to be seen as just one of the Norse folk who were his new countrymen.
Gone were the elegant handmade suits and carefully knotted ties. The man who’d proudly owned eighteen suits as a teenager, and who’d aspired to own a hundred more, now dressed the same way every day. People, even his friends, thought Bobby only owned one outfit, because his appearance was unvarying, but he owned several copies of the same denim pants and shirt, and he laundered and ironed them himself, often daily, usually late at night, singing as he pressed for perfect creases. As for what people thought about his dress, he was cynical and terse: “That’s their problem.”
Downtown Reykjavik, a charming city of almost 120,000 people, has the atmosphere of a typical Scandinavian village, although it’s somewhat larger. A visitor sees twisting streets, tidy clapboard houses with colored roofs, shops for tourists and locals, and people dressed in boots, parkas, scarves, and woolen hats pulled over their ears. It’s not quite Gstaad or Aspen, but the weather is cold enough to ski on the snow-covered mountains looming to the north.
Often, Bobby walked barely two blocks from his apartment to one of his favorite restaurants, Anestu Grösum—“The First Vegetarian”—and climbed the stairway to the pumpkin-painted second-floor eatery. The food was spread out behind a counter, cafeteria style, and he simply pointed to what he wanted. The server behind the counter, who looked something like the actress Shelley Duvall, smiled and handed him a tray with his selected food. The portions were huge.
When Bobby, as was typical, arrived past two o’clock, the restaurant would be sparsely filled: perhaps a Danish hippie, two American tourists, and three young local girls preoccupied with what they thought was important gossip. Ever a creature of habit, Bobby moved to his favorite table—one by the window looking out onto a side street, with a few birch and juniper trees not yet in bloom. Before he sat, he’d go to the cooler and help himself to a bottle of organic beer, Oxford Gold, and as he confronted his food, he’d open his latest reading matter. He was particularly taken with a book entitled The Myth of Progress, by Georg Henrik von Wright, a Finnish philosopher and successor to Ludwig Wittgenstein at the University of Cambridge. A moral pessimist, von Wright questioned whether the material and technological advances of modern society could really be considered “progress” at all. Bobby had found an English-language copy of the book at the local bookstore, Bókin (“Book”), and it seemed to mesh with his own philosophy. He was so taken by von Wright’s ideas that when he discovered an Icelandic edition of the book at Bókin, he gave it as a gift to his new friend Gardar Sverrisson.
Was this the same Bobby Fischer who supposedly knew only chess, the sullen high school dropout from Brooklyn? He looked something like the Bobby Fischer of decades past, the intelligent eyes, the slight bumpish imperfection on the right side of the nose, the broad shoulders, the loping gait, but this Bobby Fischer was harder, a balding man with a slight paunch, a man at the far end of middle age who looked as if he’d known if not tragedy then at least major reversals. Something about his aura reminded an observer of an ill-treated dog just escaped from his captors. There was a lump the size of a large fingertip above his right eyebrow. He rarely smiled, perhaps because of embarrassment over his broken and missing teeth; he never looked at himself in a mirror because he disapproved of what his appearance had become. The real inconsistency, however, was that this Bobby Fischer—the great chess player who some thought was a cultural dolt, a man who supposedly knew nothing of life except a game (“Fischer came close to being a moron,” Martin Gardner, a writer for Scientific American, seriously opined)—was reading a philosophical treatise!
Many people who haven’t been formally educated awaken later in life with a desire to progress and deepen their view of the world, to go back to school or self-educate themselves. Bobby joined their ranks out of an essential self-awareness. “Larry Evans once said,” Bobby commented, “that I didn’t know anything about life; all I knew was chess, and he was right!” In a somewhat different mood, Bobby also said at one point that he felt like giving up chess from time to time, “but what else would I do?”
Bobby’s lack of traditional institutional education was well known and continually reported in the press, but what wasn’t common knowledge was that after he won the World Championship at age twenty-nine, he began a systemized regimen of study outside chess. History, government, religion, politics, and current events became his greatest interests, and during the thirty-three-year interval from his first Reykjavik stay to his second he spent most of his spare time reading and amassing knowledge.
Several Icelanders indicated that there was nothing he couldn’t discuss in depth. He could talk about such subjects as the French Revolution and the Siberian gulags, the philosophy of Nietzsche, and the discourses of Disraeli.
After spending close to two hours eating and reading at Anestu Grösum, and finishing off two helpings of skyr with redundant whipped cream, Bobby would invariably walk to Bókin. It was a book lover’s dream and delightfully eccentric: A stuffed monkey doll with spectacles sat outside the store with a book in its lap; there were thousands of used books, mainly in Icelandic but a great portion in English, German, and Danish, some on subjects so arcane that only a few could understand or appreciate them, such as the mating habits of the puffin—the national bird—or an analysis of the inscriptions on the churches of Heidelberg. The aisles of bookshelves meandered all over the store, and in the center of the room there was a huge hillock of books more than five feet tall, haphazardly thrown there and cascading to the floor because there was simply no room to put them anywhere else. There were fewer than a dozen chess books for sale.
Each day Bobby collected his mail at the store, kept for him behind the counter. He’d say a few words to the store’s owner, Bragi Kristjonsson, and head to his spot at the store’s farthest reaches, at the end of one of the not quite three-foot-wide corridors, with low stacks of books and old copies of National Geographic lining the edges of the aisle. Perhaps as a gesture of respect toward his famous customer, Bragi placed a battered chair at the end of the corridor, and Bobby sat there next to a small window that looked out at a tattoo parlor (which he disapproved of) across the street, reading and dreaming—and sometimes even falling asleep—often to closing time. It was his home. “It’s good to be free,” he wrote to a friend.
The greatest portion of Bobby’s reading was devoted to history, everything from The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; he pored over books on battles from ancient Greece to World War II and conspiracy theories such as Hitler’s Secret Bankers: How Switzerland Profited from Nazi Germany, as well as anti-Semitic tracts such as Jewish Ritual Murder. It’s possible that he was trying to find his own place in history through his voracious reading, but it was more likely a search for understanding, an attempt to comprehend his complicated gestalt—“the whole catastrophe,” as the fictional Zorba the Greek perceptively described himself.