Solving need not be solitary
The crossword has long been allied to its cousin in modernity, public transport. When the 1920s craze was at its most frenzied, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad furnished its mainline trains with dictionaries. And the Pennsylvania Railroad went one better than the B&O, printing crosswords on the menus in the dining car.
The commuter has a period of forced inactivity, but he also has the newspaper, which contains within it as good a way as any of whiling away the journey. A quiet time of contemplation. Indeed, the commuter or traveler, locked into solitary battle with a constructor, is one of the most enduring images of crosswording. As puzzle addict Marc Romano wrote in his book Crossworld, a journey . . .
is made immeasurably better if you have a collection of Brendan Emmett Quigley crosswords to battle your way through while you’re in tedious transit; the hours literally pass like minutes.
Need the battle, though, be solitary? Surely those 1920s dictionaries led to conversations—and perhaps more? In the 1925 comic film The Freshman Harold Lloyd is introduced to love interest Peggy in a scene where they peer at “number nineteen vertical—a name for the one you love,” and the two are soon billing SWEETHEART and cooing HONEYBUNCH to each other as they attempt to solve the clue, and so true love is born.
Even in the more formal environment of the British commuter train, the clue could provide social glue. A gentleman who identified himself as “8.4 AM” wrote to the London Times in 1934 to describe how he and his fellow passengers attempted to complete the puzzle between Shenfield and Romford. “Team spirit is essential,” he explains, and his team is structured around the analogy of a soccer side. The “center-forward” is a clerk “unerring in his spelling”; the “outside-right,” an expert in anagrams and farming terms, and the “outside-left” is “only included for the ‘remains of a classical education,’ and because he buys the paper.”
And outside of the first-class rail compartment, the image of the solitary solver just doesn’t hold up. Consider this: Crosswords are not published with a how-to manual. Guides are available, but when you’re tackling your first puzzle, it’s unlikely you’ll be in a bookshop and instantly drawn to buy one.
Crosswording is most often learned from another person, under the guidance of someone who happens to be around: It’s intimate, collaborative, and fun. This is the best way to get to grips with the conventions and quirks of solving: Engage somebody you trust to dispel the fog of intimidation.
Take constructors. When they are asked how they got into puzzles, more often than not the answer goes along the lines of watching a mother or father (or both) solving, from afar; being invited to help with the odd clue; superseding the parent and becoming the family’s super-solver; and going on to make some sort of a living out of it. Without the last two steps, it’s a similar story for many solvers.
Crosswords bind families: for example the rhythmic exchange of text messages between geographically distant siblings that accompanies their regular appointment with a weekend puzzle, or the extended clan attempting a group solve of a Christmas special over those postholiday days.
The crossword fits well in any environment in which, like Christmas, people find themselves in the same space for longish periods with little to do. In the Wordplay documentary, New York Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina explains that he solves solo from October to March but puzzles are for him really a ball season thing:
Sometimes we’ll sit down as a group and try to plow through it as fast as we can. Whoever’s doing the writing doesn’t even get to look at the clues. They’re writing so fast because of the people leaning over their shoulder firing out answers.
So it is with musicians, actors, and anyone else whose working life involves as much waiting around as it does actual working. Still the image persists of the solver as isolated—even, sometimes, eccentric.
In the 2009 romcom All About Steve the audience learns quickly that Sandra Bullock’s awkward lead character is socially maladjusted through the giveaway details of her (a) being a constructor of puzzles and (b)—the clincher—believing that crosswords are “better than life.” Her best friend is a hamster. That says it all: Some writers of fiction can have a tendency to use “crosswords” as shorthand for “oddball” or “loner.”
Happily, flesh-and-blood solvers are closer to Harold Lloyd and his sweetheart than they are to Bullock’s character, who spends the ninety-eight minutes of the movie stalking Bradley Cooper across the country
In 2007 Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, the married couple who set for The Boston Globe, were approached by solver Aric Egmont. He had got to know his girlfriend, Jennie Bass, over the course of weekly Sunday solving sessions in a local café. This had begun on their fourth date and, for Alec, it was proof that the couple did not need a big event to enjoy each other’s company: It was “a first tiny step toward normalcy.” He asked whether a forthcoming Globe puzzle might contain some hidden messages meant for Jennie.
Cox and Rathvon were feeling in a romantic mood—and there is surely no more exacting test of a marriage than coconstructing—and the puzzle appeared on September 23. They took care to include themed entries that would not appear too odd to most solvers but that would have a special meaning for Jennie Bass.
That Sunday in the local café Jennie was tickled to find in the grid her boyfriend’s surname, and the names of her best friend and sister, but considered it a coincidence until the clue “Macramé artist’s proposal” (LETSTIETHEKNOT).
This was just a hint of what was to come. One hundred and eleven across was “Generic proposal,” and as they wrote in the answer (WILLYOUMARRYME), Alec went down on one knee. “There was no reason for me to suspect it,” recalled Jennie. “Then he got up and came back with a box, and it was pure elation.”
That answer was YES. Pay attention, the team behind All About Steve: That’s a romcom. Lest you think this was a one-off, so many solvers and constructors have published proposal puzzles that Ben Tausig, puzzle editor for the Onion spin-off A.V. Club wrote in his Curious History of the Crossword that his greatest dream “is to construct a breakup puzzle for someone in need of an innovative way to tell their soon-to-be ex that things are over.”
(Ah, the crossword. Making connections between solver and constructor, or between solver and solver. What could be more human . . . ?)