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 . . .)