The Crossword Century Read online

  But in Britain? Oh yes. One of the most distinctive UK puzzles is in the magazine Private Eye, a mixture of investigations and satire. Its first crossword constructor was Tiresias, better known as the parliamentarian and security service asset Tom Driberg. The magazine’s official history describes his stint from 1969 until 1976 as “legendarily filthy.” Driberg had been receiving a retainer for providing parliamentary gossip; when this dried up because he was not in the Commons often enough to pick up much intelligence, he suggested that he instead set a prize crossword. His biographer Francis Wheen writes:

  Perhaps his finest moment was Crossword 98, in 1972, which had such clues as “Seamen mop up anal infusions (6)” (ENEMAS) and “Sounds as if you must look behind for this personal lubricant (5)” (SEBUM).

  Crossword 98 offered a prize of £2, which was claimed by a Mrs. Rosalind Runcie, whose husband was then bishop of St. Albans and went on to become the archbishop of Canterbury. Those clues, you might say, rather rub the solver’s face in the filth of the constructor; more frequently spotted is the clue that appears to be racy but of which the constructor can, with a straight face, insist perfect innocence. Here’s one from the London Times Crossword Championship:

  In which three couples get together for sex (5)

  Well, three couples equals three times two. That’s six, and the only context in which “six” is “sex” is the answer: LATIN. On other matters, both sides of the Atlantic are in general agreement.

  In December 2012, if you asked any cryptic addict for the name of the best-loved constructor, the answer would almost certainly be Araucaria (see the chapter CRYPTIC above). In a 2008 interview, the retired churchman recalled the advice given to him some decades earlier by the puzzle editor of the Manchester and London Guardian.

  “No diseases, no religion and no Bible” was the beginning, and the list ended, “No brand names and not too much by the way of politics.”

  Many of these sensibilities have since gone by the wayside: HOOVER is as likely to appear as a brand name as it is a politician, but the steer on diseases, at least serious ones, is generally heeded. Which made it all the more shocking when Araucaria himself published a puzzle in 2013 with a preamble that began with the news that the constructor had “18 down of the 19.” Eighteen down was easy enough:

  Sign of growth (6)

  The solver, expecting nothing unusual, runs through the six-letter signs of the zodiac to find one that can also be indicated by “growth.” Not PISCES, TAURUS, or GEMINI . . . but CANCER fits. And then, before even writing in the answer, the penny drops and the stomach lurches, with no way back: Araucaria has CANCER. Postsolve, the puzzle’s preamble could be fully decoded as follows:

  I have CANCER of the ESOPHAGUS; no CHEMOTHERAPY, just PALLIATIVE CARE; no NARCOTIC or STENT or MACMILLAN NURSE yet—plenty of MERRIMENT, though I wouldn’t have chosen the timing.

  Nobody would chastise John Graham for defying the expectation that solving won’t make you feel queasy: Unusually for an Araucaria, the experience wasn’t in the least fun, though there was surely pleasure in marveling at the enormous chutzpah of responding to such a diagnosis with a themed puzzle. Araucaria died a month before the centenary of the crossword, and among the many obituaries and eulogies, none failed to mention with approval “18 down of the 19.” In crosswords, all rules are eventually broken, and broken well.

  (And for a portrait in miniature of cruciverbal frustration, let’s look at one particular—very passionate and opinionated—solver . . .)

  HIGHLY DESIRABLE FRUIT?

  PLUM

  How P. G. Wodehouse fell in and out of love with crosswords

  P. G. Wodehouse knew his crosswords. We see that in his novel Summer Moonshine: Lady Abbott, shoeless on the settee, regretfully rejects IRVINGBERLIN as a nine-letter answer for an Italian composer beginning with a P “because, despite his other merits, too numerous to mention here, he had twelve letters, began with an i, and was not an Italian composer.”

  Her technique is familiar to any solver who has tried, against all the evidence provided by grid, clues, and crossing letters, to make a possible answer work. Luckily for Lady Abbott, her husband soon bursts in, scans the newspaper, and . . .

  [bringing] to the problem the full force of his intellect, he took the pencil and in a firm hand wrote down the word “Pagliacci.” Each helping each, was the way Sir Buckstone looked at it.

  Never mind that PAGLIACCI is an opera, not a composer: This is a touching and true portrayal of the dual solve, husband and wife complementing each other in pursuit of a filled grid.

  It’s no surprise that Plum, as Wodehouse is fondly known, adored crosswords—like his stories, they consist of language pared down to an elegant minimum and assembled, jigsaw-like, to a symmetric whole, all to no higher purpose than whiling away some time and raising a few smiles.

  It’s a pity that Wodehouse never constructed a whole puzzle, but his stories abound in clues—and in real life, Wodehouse was, at least initially, no slouch as a solver. “When he got The [London] Times,” his grandson recalled, “he could do the crossword instantly, filling the answers in as if he was writing a letter.” But the crosswords Wodehouse preferred were the early puzzles, which consisted purely of definitions, rather than the more elaborate wordplay that was to emerge in Britain in the early thirties.

  In the twenties, when crosswords first took off, Wodehouse was living in the country of their creation. He later recalled a conversation about America and how “they’re getting pretty nutty in this adopted land of mine,” citing novelties such as loudspeakers on golf courses and commenting that:

  The crossword puzzle craze is now at such a pitch, my paper informs me, that a Pittsburgh pastor is handing out crossword slips which, when solved, give the text of his sermon. They’re all loony.

  Soon, however, Wodehouse was himself going nutty for crosswords. It may seem strange now, when crosswords are an unremarkable part of everyday life, but when the puzzles first appeared in fiction, they were a seriously contemporary detail. Wodehouse first mentions them, in passing, in The Strand Magazine in 1925. In the story “High Stakes” Bradbury Fisher annoys his rival J. Gladstone Bott by getting a place on the crossword team of Sing-Sing prison—which also boasts such nonpenitential activities as a glee club and a baseball nine.

  Soon enough, Wodehouse begins to use them to inform the plot. In 1926’s “The Truth About George,” nervous, stammering George Mulliner is always looking in at the vicarage to ask the lovely Susan Blake for help with crosswords . . .

  and Susan was just as constant a caller at George’s cozy little cottage—being frequently stumped, as girls will be, by words of eight letters signifying “largely used in the manufacture of poppet-valves.”

  Wodehouse is providing gentle observational humor about the specialist terminology demanded of solvers, but it’s also a plot device to bring together two shy individuals. It is not until Susan helps George “out of a tight place with the word ‘disestablishmentarianism’” that he realizes she is “precious, beloved, darling, much-loved, highly esteemed or valued” to him. The crossword as Cupid, and a happy corrective to Brief Encounter (see the chapter ADDICTION).

  By the thirties, the craze was less fervid, and crosswords were as commonplace and contemporary as Wodehouse’s slang. Puzzles became not merely something for his characters to do but also a way to tell us a little of their personalities. Take George’s first cousin once removed, Mervyn Mulliner in Hot Water. When he is at a loss for the name of a large Australian bird beginning with E and ending with U, he “places the matter in the hands of the editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica.”

  Mervyn’s habit of delegating later lands him in the hot water that gives the novel its title in a subplot involving out-of-season strawberries (of course). Meanwhile, in The Code of the Woosters, Madeline Bassett in a moment of apparent inspiration looks at Bertie “like someone who
has just solved the crossword puzzle with a shrewd ‘Emu’ in the top right-hand corner.” Crossword emus make many appearances in Wodehouse stories; indeed, part of the pleasure of early crosswords and Wodehouse stories is the variation on familiar subjects: in crosswords, those “crosswordese” words that occur time and again; in Wodehouse, aunts, wagers, and engagements.

  The thirties are the golden age for crosswords in Wodehouse. The puzzles had started appearing in all newspapers, and the cryptic form was in bloom. Wodehouse tried to keep up—indeed, in his letters, he seems more interested in the puzzle than in the news part of the newspaper, and was even prompted to join a lively debate on the London Times’s letters pages about one of them.

  On August 17, 1934, the member of parliament Austen Chamberlain wrote to boast of finishing that paper’s puzzle in forty-one minutes, adding that the provost of Eton College “measures the time required for boiling his breakfast egg by that needed for the solution of your daily crossword—and he hates a hard-boiled egg.”

  The implausible speed of that provost—better known today as the ghost story writer M. R. James—galled Wodehouse, who wrote his own letter five days later to convey the pleasurable frustration felt by solvers then and since. The solving times were, he protested, “g. and wormwood” to the “humble strivers” who had yet to finish a Times puzzle.

  In conclusion, may I commend your public spirit in putting the good old emu back into circulation again as you did a few days ago? We of the canaille, now that the Sun-God Ra has apparently retired from active work, are intensely grateful for an occasional emu.

  “Canaille,” by the way, means the “vile herd”—it’s a self-consciously French way of referring to the lower orders, which pretty much collapses if you try to use it to describe yourself. More crosswordese? You can’t deny it has its eminent fans.

  By common consent, greater problems than “beating his head against the wall for twenty minutes over a single anagram” awaited Wodehouse as the thirties turned into the forties. The start of the Second World War found the author in Le Touquet in France, and he spent much of the early forties in internment camps, and then in Berlin, where he made some radio broadcasts to reassure his fans that he was alive and well.

  The decision to broadcast on Nazi shortwave radio was not popular, however, and was regarded in England and America as at worst treasonous and at best what Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia would describe as the action of a congenital idiot who “wants a nurse to lead him by the hand and some strong attendant to kick him regularly at intervals of a quarter of an hour.”

  His wartime letters reveal a Wodehouse anxious less about world affairs than about how the Dulwich College cricket team is faring and how soon after publication he’s able to get The Times. “I have been able to resume my Times crossword puzzles,” he writes to the novelist Denis Mackail in February 1945. “What is ‘Exclaim when the twine gives out’ in ten letters?” (This is a clue for the musical instruction STRINGEDO, and one of the most baffling, dismaying efforts at wordplay I have ever encountered.)

  But even crosswords are offering less comfort as the war goes on. By May, he writes:

  I have finally and definitely given up the Times crossword puzzles. The humiliation of only being able to fill in about three words each day was too much for me. I am hoping that what has happened is that they have got much more difficult, but I have a gloomy feeling that it is my brain that has gone back.

  Given up? He had. It wasn’t the same in the post-war stories. No more firm hands writing PAGLIACCI, no poppet-valves acting as Valentines. Aunts lick their pencils in vain frustration, and in “Sticky Wicket at Blandings” Gally Threepwood lights a cigar and looks at The Times but finds that “these crossword puzzles had become so abstruse nowadays and he was basically a Sun-god-Ra and Large-Australian-bird-emu man.” For a while, a butler can be relied upon to shimmy into view and solve the more challenging clues, but in 1957’s Something Fishy, the clues are left unanswered. From an author whose stock in trade is the relief of tensions and solving of mysteries, the effect is eerie—and the experience, as when you can’t finish a real-world crossword, unusually frustrating.

  (Not all of crosswords’ more notable devotees are quite so critical . . .)

  A REGISTER OF PEOPLE—OR THE REGISTER OF THE PEOPLE?

  A-LIST

  Some of the more well-known among the puzzle’s devotees

  Any list of notable solvers is by definition partial and far from impartial. Were I, though, to assemble an All-Star Crossword Team of solvers past and present, I would choose:

  Frank Sinatra, who wrote a fan letter to the New York Times puzzle editor giving his solving times, remarking: “What a wonderful way to pass the time and also learn new answers every day”

  Christopher Robin, who would cosolve at the age of eighteen on the sofa with his father, A. A. Milne

  Indira Gandhi, whose participation in a bilateral economic cooperation agreement is attributed by diplomat and champion solver Roy Dean to an ice-breaking conversation about crosswords beforehand

  Norman Mailer, who told Newsweek in 2003 that “this is how I comb my brain every morning,” adding, “I’m hurt that I’m never in one of them. And I’ve got a last name with three vowels. You’d think I’d be hot cakes, but I’m not”

  Thomas Keneally, who, when the BBC asked what single item he would take to a desert island, chose a collection of puzzles from the London Times

  Queen Elizabeth II, who, in a 1992 profile in Vanity Fair, begins each morning with the Telegraph crossword accompanied by kippers or kidneys on toast . . .

  ...her sister, Princess Margaret, who once won a book as a prize in the Country Life crossword competition . . .

  ...and their father, King George VI, whose last act before dying of a heart attack in his sleep was a late-evening crossword solve.

  (Who would be on yours? You can’t have Ol’ Clue Eyes—I’ve nabbed him . . .)

  TOMORROW MAKES YOU TENSE?

  FUTURE

  What will the crossword of the twenty-first century look like?

  We have declared that the first crossword was printed on December 21, 1913, in the New York World newspaper. Arthur Wynne’s “Word-Cross” was the rudimentary grid-plus-clues, definitions-lead-to-answers puzzle from which all others—Swedish and Japanese, straight and cryptic—have developed.

  But is that definitely, indubitably true? The years following the American Civil War saw a flourishing of periodicals for veterans, keeping alive the camaraderie of the Union and Confederacy groupings, sprinkling in some reportage . . . and the odd puzzle.

  The Neighbor’s Home Mail described itself as the “most intensely interesting Soldier paper published in this or any other country.” Also part temperance journal, the Mail urged former Union soldiers to subscribe in order to preserve “the little incidents and precious memories which fill the bosom of every honored veteran,” adding, “Every Soldier should write jokes for it!”

  In the edition for October 1874, the section of puzzles headed ENIGMATICAL PROPOSITIONS contained this challenge:

  Is this crossword a crossword? Well, yes and no. Surely, goes the case for yes, a puzzle called a crossword that asks the solver to manipulate interlocking words is a crossword puzzle. But, counters the case for no, where is the grid? Ah, remarks the yes, but Arthur Wynne’s grid was different from those we see today. It was a diamond rather than a square, and had a strange system of numbering the clues, proving that a crossword can look quite unlike today’s puzzles and still count as a crossword . . .

  To answer this question is not merely to split hairs; it helps us understand what the future of the crossword might be.

  The chief current method of distributing a puzzle is to squish a bunch of trees until they become thin sheets of paper, then spray them with ink derived from soy juice in the shape of a grid and clues, and surround them with all manne
r of investigations, opinions, and advertisements. Good luck persuading a deep-pocketed entrepreneur of the sustainability of that business model.

  In 1874 periodicals crammed the maximum content into the paper available, setting the type small and close together, and the nineteenth-century solver completed the puzzles on a separate sheet or in his or her head. By 1913, there was more space and more scope for diagrams, pictures . . . and grids.

  The Neighbor’s Home Mail “crossword” and Wynne’s diamond each took a form appropriate to the workable technology of the day. As the lead blocks of hot metal gave way to digital type, the number of possible grids expanded. Crosswords have shifted with technology, and they’re about to do so again.

  We can understand the crossword in its current form as a result not just of the brains of the pioneering constructors but also of the possibilities of World War I–era printing.

  As such, the crossword comes with a set of loose assumptions that are entirely dependent on its physical form. If a crossword comes into your consciousness by means of a newspaper, it means that certain things are expected of you, the solver:

  •you will need to furnish yourself with extra kit, i.e., pencil or pen

  •said crossword will be two-dimensional

  •you will be expected to complete or abandon said crossword on the day of its publication, in order to make “room” for the next one

  •you need not by default time the solve; the constructor cannot directly invite solvers to go into competition with one another

  •the constructor must use the printed word, always in black, as the basis for clues and answers

  None of these, in terms of crossword pleasure, is a shortcoming, but they all begin to seem a little arbitrary when you consider what’s happened to the medium the puzzle originated in. The decline in print readership is not going away. This is explainable in part by the fact that there’s nothing about a newspaper’s content that demands physical form—except perhaps the crossword in its current form: the final reason for newsprint to be printed. In newsrooms and editors’ offices, crosswords are considered important for loyalty and newsstand sales. This is largely based on anecdote and hunch, so I decided to commission some research to see what the numbers look like in the UK.