Crossword Mania Breaks Up Homes
A short history of that infamous home-wrecker, the crossword puzzle
If Wardle is the Wardle of the Wordle, then Wynne was the Wardle of The World. Put less stupidly, Arthur Wynne's 1913 "Word-Cross" puzzle for Joseph Pulitzer's World newspaper was not the first such puzzle, but it was the first to be laid out in a recognizable proto-crossword format, and the first to be called "crossword" (the title would be reversed and the hyphen removed in later editions). And like the Wordle, a central feature of Wynne's crossword puzzles from the very beginning seems to have been a social one. There was a viral element to these early newspaper word games, such that readers began quickly to compile their own crosswords and send them in, with some eventually appearing in print under a byline from the growing crossword community. "The puzzle editor has kindly figured out that the present supply will last until the second week in December, 2100," Wynne bemusedly announced to his submitters in 1915.1
Like many things that satisfy the morally dangerous trifecta of “fun,” “new,” and “popular,” crosswords were treated with immediate and prolonged suspicion in the media, which regarded them as a perilously addictive habit that would fry everybody's brains and bring human industry to a grinding halt if they weren't replaced at once with something productive like Latin poetry or pompous op-eds about political correctness. A 1924 article in The Tamworth Herald, with the restrained headline “CROSS-WORD PUZZLES. AN ENSLAVED AMERICA” worried that crosswords have "dealt the final blow to the art of conversation, and have been known to break up homes," going on to give an account of crossword addicts forced to curtail their home-wrecking puzzle mania by local police. Booksellers reported a sudden decline of interest in great novels as the frothing, crossword-addled throngs gave up buying books in favor of thesauruses for their deranged pastime. And The New York Times lamented the “sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex,” calling crosswords nothing but “a primitive form of mental exercise” wherein “success or failure in any given attempt is equally irrelevant to mental development.”2
All of which is to say that crosswords were a hit. Crossword books became bestsellers, and compilers grew more careful, clever, and systematic in constructing their clues and grids (Wynne's Word-Cross puzzles, innovative as they may have been, were sloppy as hell). The Times eventually caved and welcomed the “sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words” into its long, grey arms as a comfort and distraction to readers following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. As Margaret Farrar, the woman who was to become The Times' first crossword editor, wrote to Arthur Sulzberger, the newspaper's publisher, “I don't think I have to sell you on the increased demand for this type of pastime in an increasingly worried world. You can't think of your troubles while solving a crossword.”3
But even as they became more sophisticated and professional, most popular crossword puzzles retained a common feature: The clue, however difficult, pointed more or less directly at its answer. “Capital of Bulgaria” would be “Sofia.” “Baltic Country” might be “Estonia.” And even clues with a little bit of misdirection (like "Whistler's forte" = "Art") seemed fair and obvious in retrospect. At Britain's The Observer, however, the clues were vastly more fiendish — full of classical allusions, anagrams, and wordplay that required solvers to enter into a diabolical battle of wits with the crossword's setter. The evil genius behind it all is generally acknowledged to be the originator of the cryptic crossword: Edward Powys Mathers, a poet, translator, and lover of detective stories, set his devious puzzles as “Torquemada” (after the grandfather of the Spanish Inquisition) for The Observer from 1925 until his death in 1939.
Torquemada's cryptic puzzles were a striptease, where delayed gratification was the point of the exercise. Or, as he put it, where — through playful misdirection — you could “for a little, postpone the inevitable end.” Torquemada’s clues ranged from arcane riddles arranged into rhyming couplets, like this one:
As hours in days, so many merulae
Found living tombs in me, but did not die.
… to cleverly concealed anagrams that would be more recognizable to a modern solver of cryptics, such as the rather elegant:
Product of a noise many associated with lobster
As clever as it is, the first clue above requires its solver to know the Latin for “blackbirds” (merulae) in order to deduce the answer that completes the rhyme (“pie”) after remembering how many blackbirds (24, as hours in days) were baked (found living tombs) in one, according to the nursery rhyme.
The second clue would be considered fair game for a modern cryptic — “product of” is enough of a signal that an anagram is heaving into view, and the letters of “a noise many” make “mayonnaise,” which even I’m aware is “associated with lobster” despite 20 odd years of veganism.4
But what is and isn’t considered “fair” for cryptics would be left up to Torquemada’s successors, specifically Afrit (the pseudonym of Alistair Ferguson Ritchie, who compiled his crosswords for The Listener from 1932 to 1948), Ximenes (the name of another Spanish Inquisitor, adopted by Torquemada’s successor at The Observer, Derrick Somerset Macnutt), and Azed (Jonathan Crowther, who set for The London Times for 45 years). Afrit’s contribution to the rules of cryptics was the doctrine of “fair play,” explained as follows in his book Armchair Crosswords:
We must expect the composer to play tricks, but we shall insist that he play fair. The Book of the Crossword lays this injunction upon him: “You need not mean what you say, but you must say what you mean.” This is a superior way of saying that he can't have it both ways. He may attempt to mislead by employing a form of words which can be taken in more than one way, and it is your fault if you take it the wrong way, but it is his fault if you can't logically take it the right way.
For his part, Ximenes helped to formalize the best practices for grid construction, encouraging a symmetrical grid and a maximum number of “unchecked letters” (cryptic crosswords can be confounding to newcomers because not all of the letters in a given clue can be cross-checked by another clue — the “Ximenean principles” put a limit on the practice), as well as his own guidelines for fairness. As Azed explains in his essential book A-Z of Crosswords:5
As a crossword setter, you are … free to exploit the many ambiguities offered by the language (words which have multiple meanings, which can be two or more different parts of speech, etc.) in order to hoodwink the solver into thinking you mean one thing when you actually mean another. But, when the penny drops, the clue must be seen to work and lead unmistakably to the answer, even if not via the route originally explored by the solver.
But even as they emerged from their wild period under Torquemada and agreed to be bound by the “rules of play” imposed by Ximenes and Afrit, Britain’s cryptic variations on the crossword puzzle never managed to gain a real foothold in the U.S. This despite valiant efforts by (somewhat surprisingly) Stephen Sondheim, whose love of wordplay made him an ardent evangelist for the British cryptic. A 1968 piece for New York Magazine by Sondheim is a love letter to the cryptic puzzle and a very useful primer for newcomers.6 It begins with a polemic against the American form of the puzzle, which probably didn’t help its cause very much:
There are crossword puzzles and crossword puzzles. The kind familiar to most New Yorkers is a mechanical test of tirelessly esoteric knowledge: “Brazilian potter’s wheel,” “East Indian betel nut” and the like are typical definitions, sending you either to Webster’s New International or to sleep. The other kind, prevalent in Great Britain but inexplicably nonexistent in the United States apart from The Nation and an occasional Sunday edition of The New York Times, is a test of wits. This kind of puzzle offers cryptic clues instead of bald definitions, and the pleasures involved in solving it are the deeply satisfactory ones of following and matching a devious mind (that of the puzzle’s author) rather than the transitory ones of an encyclopedic memory.
Sondheim’s advocacy notwithstanding, the British cryptic remains (for the most part) “inexplicably nonexistent in the United States” to this day, even as the puzzles that “dealt the final blow to the art of conversation” (according to The Tamworth Herald) in 1924 reach new heights of popularity. But as Wordle has quite dramatically shown us, there’s plenty of room in American hearts for new kinds of word game, and there may yet be a few more chapters in the history of the crossword puzzle.
For more on the early hysteria about crosswords, see “Crosswords: the meow meow of the 1920s,” by Alan Connor for The Guardian
More of these lovely Torquemada clues can be found in “Beastly Clues: T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword,” by Roddy Howland Jackson for Public Domain Review
A-Z of Crosswords: Insights into the Top Setters and their Puzzles, by Jonathan Crowther
“How to do a Real Crossword Puzzle,” by Stephen Sondheim for New York Magazine