The Death of Morphy's Father

I’m reading David Lawson’s biography of Paul Morphy, the nineteenth-century American chess master from New Orleans. I read a description of Morphy a few years ago in a chess handbook, and I have since wanted to know more about the tale of his rise in the chess world and the subsequent breakdown in the rest of his life. On a basic level, I was just curious—why wasn’t this famous figure from New Orleans history better known? Why, for instance, didn’t they teach this in Louisiana History when I was in junior high, instead of spending all of those hours talking about flags and making us learn the names of the parishes?

However, when I read non-fiction, a different kind of curiosity comes into play. I find myself diverted by strange details that seem meant for life in short stories or poems.

I haven’t been disappointed with this book in that regard. Early in the biography, Lawson describes the death of Morphy’s father:

“…about a month after Paul’s challenge to the American chess players, tragedy struck the Morphy household. One September day, while Judge Morphy was conversing near the courthouse, he turned suddenly in response to a friend, and the large brim of a Panama hat cut across his eye. Although in pain, the Judge paid little attention to it until the next day, when the eye became inflamed, and a physician was called who had him confined to a dark room for some time. His health became impaired, and he died on November 22, 1856, of apoplexy or congestion of the brain, leaving an estate of $146,162.54.”1

Death by Panama hat. Think of how absurd that must have felt, especially to someone accustomed to pursuing logic. Morphy was not only accomplished at the chessboard, he also completed college, a master’s degree, and a law degree when he was still too young to be able to practice law legally in Louisiana—he was more than a year from the designated age of twenty-one. If his father gave little initial thought to an encounter with a straw hat, think of how the rest of the family felt at the removal of the patriarch through haberdashery. Were they all sorrowful? Was anybody gleeful? Did anybody see it as some sort of morality tale about pride and privilege brought low by ridiculous means?

In his lecture “Reading,” Robertson Davies mentions telling students that they don’t have to go far to find correlatives to what must seem to them the both grandiose and absurd tales of literature: only to the daily papers, where “you will find the great themes of the Bible, of Homer, of Shakespeare, repeated again and again.”2 This little kernel about Paul Morphy’s father, a brief aside in the 400 pages of an already-unique life, fits well with Davies’s claim. The complications of actual life are often so random that they paradoxically appear planned.

1 Lawson, David. Paul Morphy: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess. New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1976. Page 45.
2 Davies, Robertson. Reading and Writing. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992. Page 7.