The Crossword and the Sword: Puzzling Modernism and War

The first crossword puzzle appeared December 21, 1913 in the FUN pages of The New York World, Pulitzer’s paper (fig. 1).[1] It was the creation of Liverpool-born journalist, Arthur Wynne, originally called a word-cross but misprinted shortly after to its familiar form, an early victim to its own imposition of anarchic plasticity onto language. With understated transatlantic modesty, Wynne claimed crosswords were as old as Pompei. Back home, old poet Housman would name these the “days when heaven was falling, / The hour when earth’s foundations fled.” The world would be at war half a year later.

The World’s headlines the next year: “French Lose Trenches Near Metz”; and, “Army In Command Of Italy’s King Rescue Thousands Buried Alive”; and, closer at hand “‘Subway Was Chamber Of Horrors’ Says Fire Chief Kenlon / Many Are Injured In Subway Panic; 700 Overcome.” Encircling, often covering entirely, these headlines was an increasingly desperate star-shaped invitation, pasted over the paper’s face, to flip to the FUN pages, to fill out the crossword and peruse the genteel jokes whose linguistic frivolity the puzzle quickly absorbed for its clues. Here are some examples of the pre-crossword word plays and puns, the standard fare it assimilated: “‘Congratulate me, old chap, I’m going to marry money.’ ‘What! A perfect stranger?’” or, “A FALSEHOOD–a wig. SEVEN UP–the Pleiades.”

The war was a great boon for newspapers, which propelled crosswords to a craze alongside them, soon making crosswords a staple of nearly all in circulation. New geographic discoveries lived on people’s breakfast tables alongside their biscuits and cream, around their screaming children, oozing blood from headlines; words as alien as Gallipoli, Togo, Lake Tanganyika were brought to the reader’s attention concurrent with news of disaster there. The famine of Mount Lebanon was narrated over months to World readers: mules so thin with hunger the white of their ribs was visible through their ragged hide. Who wouldn’t want to flip to the Fun pages then, to find the perfect antidote to these horrors, which were only words after all, to escape from these places that were only hearsay—and erode their capacity to carry meaning at all with the increasingly abstracted manipulation of their parts? The relief was not simply a diversion from the bad news, but a subversion of the medium of communication itself. A great detachment began then; or, really, we can see now that the supposed inherent cosmopolitanism of literacy was overstated, the attachment of language to the world highly contingent. Knowledge of that horror at the edge of war was surely useless until appeared this brilliant clue: “Beverage from Lebanon?” Answer: BEIRUTBEER.

The twenties were crossword mania. Libraries complained of their thesauri and dictionaries being held up by the hoarding of selfish crossword solvers.[2] Train companies stocked dictionaries in their cars for commuters. There was a fox trot sung by Al Plunkett titled “Since Ma’s Gone Crazy Over Crossword Puzzles,” a radio mainstay: “Ever since the daily papers printed up this game, / Life around our house is not the same.” The titular Ma’s kids are fed canned tomatoes every night. In 1924, a woman in Chicago sued her husband for overindulgence in crosswords which, she claimed, cut the family income in half. A judge ordered the man limit himself to three puzzles a day.

The New York Times, effete and superior newspaper positioning itself as opposed to everything yellow, was the notable holdout in supplying the public crosswords; it published repeated articles and op-eds lambasting the “madness” they represented. On November 17, 1924: “Latest of the problems presented for solution by psychologists interested in the mental peculiarities of mobs and crowds as distinguished from individuals is created by what is well called the craze over cross-word puzzles. . . . All ages, both sexes, highbrows and lowbrows, at all times and in all places, even in restaurants and in subways, pore over the diagrams.”[3] The article cited anecdotes from England, where the crossword’s introduction (and quick transformation into the even more arcane Cryptic) caused an epidemic of “idling workers,” leading to the impotent imposition of bans by factory managers and office bosses. The London Times, hysterical over the imported menace, ran the headline, “Cross-Word Puzzles. An Enslaved America” and claimed, furthermore, that crosswords had struck the deathblow to the already embattled art of conversation itself.[4] Underlying this panic was the radically democratic effect of the crossword: not only did it flatten the hierarchy of knowledge-types but it made anyone who worked on them de-facto (if temporary) members of the leisure class; the “idling workers” above demonstrating unsettling ownership over their time, scandalously disposed of unproductively. The next year, The Times advertised in its headpiece, “Strictly a Newspaper. Without Comics. Without Puzzles.”

Crosswords are a foil to the newspaper’s fundamental conceit, as they were put in the position of representing an increasingly nonsensical reality and depended more and more on the basic projection of certainty, the engine of the declarative sentence, the grammatical responsibility of the indicative. The crossword encourages precisely the opposite relation to language as that required for the civic function of the rest of the paper: one of absolute paranoia, where a word’s meaning is always ambiguous, vulnerable to reversal by the mocking mechanism of the pun, or simply an artificial combination of letters, like a frog dissected to its parts and incapable of being repaired, whatever is that indefinable thing called life, or meaning, obliterated by investigation. So the crossword lurks as an intruder in the backpages, an open sore spoiling the declarative triumphs of the headlines which, however horrific, are supposed to strut in the consolation of certainty. The crossword’s effect on language was mirrored by the war’s effect on the paper’s bourgeois confidence, the continual rebuke of progress, the projection of a reasonable world that made the mass press possible at all. Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother, “Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!”[5] He died a week before Armistice in 1918; and his mother received the news a week later, as war’s end was being announced by Shrewsbury’s ringing bells. In the crossword, newspapers have, as a kind of linguistic unconscious, achieved the pure reality of text, an achievement which gnaws at their purpose.

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This was also a project of inter-war literary modernism. In 1923, the height of crossword mania, James Joyce began Finnegans Wake, fragments of a Work In Progress. Samuel Beckett, in the defense of that work which he helped transcribe, said of Joyce, “His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.”[6] The literary scholar Derek Attridge, in a reflection on the Wake’s composition (made up of puns and portmanteaus, jammed word-by-word with near-infinite semantic range pointing, seemingly, to the whole of human myth and thought) writes, “The pun, however, is not just an ambiguity that has crept into an utterance unawares, to embarrass or amuse before being dismissed; it is ambiguity unashamed of itself and this is what makes it a scandal and not just an inconvenience.”[7] The scandal is amplified in their appearance at such a high level of achievement in a work of great literature by an established and respected author: but is clearly present in the quotidian crossword as evidenced by the virulence of the backlash. The connection between modernist poetics and the crossword was made immediately. The month after T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was published, Louis Untermeyer lampooned its “pompous parade of erudition” and claimed its admirers found in it the “same sort of gratification attained through having solved a puzzle, a form of self-congratulation.”[8] The “cross-word school of poetry” became a mainstay put-down of critics hostile to modernism’s allusive difficulty and lexical obscurity between the wars, and included Eliot as well as Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore and H.D. as its typical targets.[9] Life magazine published a parody called “Ballad of a Three-Letter Word Meaning ‘Lunatic’” which modernizes the narrator of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” narrator as a crossword puzzler marooned on a deserted island “Undictionaried and alone / on that barbaric sod” with a particularly difficult puzzle, imploring the reader for answers (fig. 4). The final turn is its false attribution to “H.D.”

Some defenses were made in the terms of this criticism, as when Malcolm Cowley wrote with meek wonder that reading Eliot was “a little like working over a crossword puzzle that will never be completely solved.”[10] The Waste Land came with notes, following the crossword compilation convention of the answers in the back. Joyce’s books bred volumes, dwarfing their original page count, of skeleton keys and explications to the most microscopic degrees. Pound painstakingly explained the web of reference in his Cantos, in reams of correspondence to friends and editors—as well as his ideas on politics and economics that undergird his “poem containing history.” For this, too, Gertrude Stein would call him, “the village explainer.”[11] Modernist difficulty has been primarily understood as a reader’s problem, an indulgence on the author’s part to exercise their virtuoso sophistication—Pound, here, is the counterexample. The references in The Cantos range from Acoetes to John Adams to Abd al Melik and it includes quotations from seventeen languages, hieroglyphics from Egypt’s middle period and the dialect of the Nahki people of southwestern Sichuan. His letters are filled with tirades such as this: “To Hell with the lillylivered aesthetes who can’t EVEN write because they are too piffling silly to SEE the bearing of econ / factor on every bloody human activity.”[12] The charges of obscurity enraged Pound, “Skip anything you don’t understand and go on till you pick it up again. All tosh about foreign languages making it difficult. . . . If reader don’t know what an elefant [sic] IS, then the word is obscure.”[13] But it was he whose writing was burdened with an attempt to understand every human activity as the honest condition for a linguistic depiction of the world, an easy path to derangement. In 1933, Ernest Hemingway responded unhappily to a letter explaining some finer points of Social Credit and Mussolini’s plan, including in his reply a check for twenty pounds: “Since when are you an economist, pal?” he wrote. “The last I knew you were a fuckin’ bassoon player” (Tytell, Solitary Volcano, 231).

Still, Pound’s purpose was nevertheless sympathetically dire, which he stated most concisely in 1916 and would repeat as his lifelong poetic credo: “When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish”[14]—this was the same problem the front page of the newspaper tried to elide, trumpeting with its old surety, and that only the FUN page, implicitly, acknowledged. Pound’s own definition concedes this kinship, “Literature is news that STAYS news.”[15] The Faber and Faber promotional Christmas puzzle printed in The Times of London in 1933 included the clues, “We publish this and XXIX more by Ezra Pound.” Answer: CANTO. And, to fill in a tricky gap for the constructor, “Mr. Eliot’s initials.” TS.

Crosswords, too, were denounced for their obscure rules of decryption, the arcane and specialized vocabulary they required. A Washington Post article wondered whether anyone was even in the position to solve a crossword, being that they had gotten so obscure that the solver must be “equipped with a general knowledge of all trades and industries; a post-graduate course in law, medicine and theology; and at least a cursory familiarity with Egyptology, anthropology, pedagogy, and post office business.”[16]

The backlash reached its apotheosis in an unsigned Times article of March 23, 1941 titled “The Eclipse of the Highbrow” whose panic towards modern art is conducted along precisely the same lines as the crossword. Reflecting over the inter-war period, the author writes,

Arts were brought down to the level of esoteric parlour games. To be a poet needed much the same qualities as to be a maker of acrostics, and an admired stanza was scarcely distinguishable from an ingenious clue in a crossword puzzle. In prose there were experimenters in almost meaningless sound. . . . Meanwhile the public grew first bewildered and then bored . . . As for poetry—it would be interesting to know the drop in the publication and sale of contemporary verse between 1920 and 1940. The arts, even while sometimes declaring themselves communist, despised the common man, and he retaliated.

They then declare the modern derangement in art over and conclude by showing somewhat abruptly their hand as a wartime policer of Blitz morals. “It had its origin in a war whose burdens and sacrifices were unequally borne . . . What changes of taste this war, and the reactions follow it, may produce, no one can foresee. But at least it can hardly give rise to arts unintelligible outside a Bloomsbury drawing-room, and completely at variance with those stoic virtues which the whole nation is now called upon to practice.”

In some sense, these predictions were correct. The avant-garde failed to change the world: the arts of the common man would triumph after the war in the form of a mass media and a mass production that has aestheticized nearly every aspect of life, smuggled in to every corner of the world on transistor radios, Hollywood reels, reproducible print, the deluge of variegated consumer goods. But the difficulty of modernism’s language did survive, as well its reaction (sometimes as a challenge, sometimes as a celebration) to the breakage of world and word. Eliot was expressing his belief in tradition when he asserted that poetry “makes a difference to the speech, to the sensibility, to the lives of all the members of a society . . . whether they read and enjoy poetry or not: even, in fact, whether they know the names of their greatest poets or not.”[17] Crosswords are the mass product of the modernist poetic project. They achieved the success that Eliot could only claim by his turn to the mystical; they came hitched to the most prodigious, most quotidian accumulation of language, stacked on newsstands, tossed into lawns wrapped in protective plastics, columns of dense text supporting the ceiling of modernity.

***

In February of 1942, The New York Times would publish its first puzzle, having resisted so long the games it considered reserved for low papers peddling Yellow Journalism. It hired crossword editor Margaret Farrar, who had been handed crossword duty by its inventor Wynne at the World. The lead editor of the Times finally broke through to the publisher Sulzberger, demanding for his readers a good distraction for the “bleak blackout hours” he saw coming. Pearl Harbor was still smoking when, cautiously quarantined from the main paper in the inserted Sunday magazine, two pages after an ad for “Air-raid preparedness booklets” and just after an ode to wartime teachers’ delicate and patriotic explanations to their students of the graduation of diplomacy to war, the first puzzles appeared: penned by Farrar under the pseudonym Anna Gram. It was no full escape, a whiff of sulfur and cordite alongside the ink. 49-down, “Prime necessity for war production” SPEED. 117-down, “Nazi submarine base in Belgium” OSTEND. Originally, there were two puzzles, and only on Sunday. One referencing current events, then news from the front (whose solutions were seeded to attentive readers in the front pages and throughout the week) and a littler one below it, riddlier and more cryptic-like, “in a lighter vein,” punning like its cross-Atlantic sibling. When the crossword became daily, this doubling was scrapped: “current events” could not be so easily isolated from the pun. The “escape” that the crossword offered was not from the vocabulary of the war, as the first tenuous separation seemed to imply, but much more complete. Far from neutralizing now the fearful specters of Nazi submarine bases or mass mobilization, the crossword justified them. The democratic function of the mass press, for which the Times had been the most stringent evangelist, to educate the public so that it may exercise its opinions on the machineries of state and thereby give a people’s stamp to history, were strained by the necessities of a ballistic war that was insulated almost by definition from any bovine interventions of a polis attempting democracy on the long, armed, arm of the nation. The golden age of demagoguery, the agitation press of “jingoism, xenophobia, security scares and war fever” was over, pacified after the First World War by its own confusion and elite, specialist or bureaucratic withdrawals into obscurity or outright secrecy.[18] What replaced it was the reportage from a new statistical, pseudo-sociological vantage. Once proud policy hounding papers were unhappily forced to adopt a consumption-facing pose.

Yet the Times readership, the middle classes at which it was aimed, the Upper West Side of anywhere, still expected the privilege of employing this information. But for citizens reduced then to patriots, wartime news could only be propaganda; the content of atrocities, the menace of unclear maneuvers and irrational irruptions, all would have to be fit into the logic of a mass mobilization that included opinion at home. There was only one way available to the Times to justify anything they could still publish under the already antique ideal of journalism, to save the interesting errata or enlightening curios, the ambiguous representations of the real which had been the pride of their heroic ethos; news, in other words, that could now only be put to use in a crossword puzzle. When a reader penciled in OSTEND, the Nazi submarine base in Belgium, an answer they had gathered—where else?—from last week’s paper, the outrage, the dread, the fascination, was arrested in an instant: tamed, ordered, six letters precisely in their place.

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Crossword mania largely ended after the Second World War, it survives as a pseudo-literary pastime, a leisure-class intellectual marker, on the specialized competition circuit, in airport books and phone apps, as a niche cultural phenomenon somewhat overrepresented by its inherited prestige. And yet it can truly be said to have changed the language, as Eliot fantasized of poetry. It popularized a new way of relating to knowledge, as trivia, and it still has the power to render the ordinary exciting: another kinship with the avant-garde.

While the crossword tends towards the absolute materialization of language, a mythic gridded visual order against the undulations and auras of words born and used in the world, and a self-referential propagation inside the vehicle of the news or in regurgitating those antique, harmless or deflated discourses whose repertoire populates trivia of all types; its clues and the form of the clue itself, popular survivors of the modernist project, of abstraction, have changed our relationship to language everywhere. In this sense, crossword mania survives. We experience language, in its broadest definition, suspiciously, tensed, bearing ourselves against its onslaught as if it is grit blowing in our eye. Think of “fake news,” fears of illicit Tik Tokery, panics over adolescent subliminal influences, “woke brain washing,” the whole menu of advertisement’s advanced algorithmic exploitation of desire or, simply, as I remember from the salad days of my education, what we used to call “bias.” Speech, text and gesture are scoured for a betrayal of the hidden truth we, by custom or rhythm, anticipate, with the ever-deflated expectation of an ordered answer, in the conspiratorial thinking that has become the default mode of consumption. Credulousness is idiocy, and still we have become accustomed to choosing it, exhausted by our continual resistance or simply to access the most basic pleasures of comprehension. Submitting to the raw indulgence of media’s “manipulation,” entering the stream of its narcotic logic, is a common experience, less-and-less even tinged by shame. Suspension of disbelief, once reserved for the special artifice of theater, is required for anything from perusing the back of a jug of laundry detergent, claiming, perhaps, its chemicals are green, to processing the rhetoric of a highway billboard, the press conference of a politician, the promises of a TV drug. Permitting the crossword in the paper, it seeded its own ruin. Listen to these clues in The Washington Post and The New York Times from late last year, of incredible complexity and hidden allusion to knowledge we may never fully absorb, in convolutions that shame simpler riddles: “Which is Worse: Biden’s Age or Trump Handing NATO to Putin?” Or, in the brand new language The Times invented for just this purpose, “How Many of Gaza’s Dead Are Women and Children? For 10,000, It’s Unclear.” What could it mean? How else are we to approach questions like these except in the absolutely plastic, paranoid mindset that we approach the crossword? But these are from the front page, they are clues to reality. There are no answers here, not in this language.