Stephen Sondheim, British crosswording ambassador
During the writing of West Side Story in the midfifties, there was a predictable weekly drop in the productivity of lyricist Stephen Sondheim and composer Leonard Bernstein.
Sondheim had a habit of picking up a copy of a British weekly magazine called The Listener every Thursday on his way to meet his colleague. He bought it for the crossword. “I got Leonard Bernstein hooked,” he remembered. “Thursday afternoons, no work got done on West Side Story. We were doing the puzzle.”
The pair would also race each other to do anagrams—and the winner was always the lyricist, a man so enamored of wordplay that, one biographer claims, he submitted a crossword puzzle to The New York Times at the age of fourteen. Sadly for the crossover between musical theater and wordplay, the puzzle was unpublished and no copy is known to exist now.
The injustice was rectified in 1968, when New York magazine published a series of cryptic puzzles constructed by Sondheim. He introduced the first with an essay provocatively titled “How to Do a Real Crossword Puzzle, Or What’s a Four-letter Word for ‘East Indian Betel Nut’ and Who Cares?”
Sondheim makes the case that cryptic crosswords are more satisfying than those with a higher proportion of definitional clues, writing fondly of the cryptic’s demand that the solver follow the train of thought of a “devious mind,” invidiously compared to the encyclopedic memory demanded by regular puzzles. Sondheim grants that the conventions of the British puzzle take a little getting used to; all it takes, he reassures, “is inexhaustible patience.”
And then there are his puzzles, modeled on those he and Bernstein had enjoyed so much in The Listener. These are as enjoyable examples as any of the eye-wateringly arcane “advanced cryptic.”
Arcane? Advanced? Indeed. The Listener was a magazine founded by the BBC in 1929: No mere listings rag, it had the mission of providing easy access to highbrow, often modernist, ideas. Contributors were to include Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and an eighteen-year-old Philip Larkin.
Its first puzzle appeared on April 2, 1930, offering as a prize “an invitation to visit the B.B.C. Studios on certain afternoons.” Only one correct solution was received, from a Mr. I. Cresswell of Colchester; some later puzzles would receive none. But it is much loved: The puzzle moved to the London Times when The Listener folded in 1991; six years later, when The Times wondered about devoting valuable space to a relatively niche feature, its future was discussed in Parliament and, happily, the strange crossword survives into the millennium.
Not only is its language abstruse—solvers are recommended to have at hand a copy of the capacious Chambers Dictionary, which contains many words once used by some poet or other and since forgotten—but the solving of the clues is only the beginning. It is the only crossword that has required solvers to cut the completed grid into an origami wren, an advent calendar, or a snowflake—and those are just three examples from its Christmassy themes. Other themes are less physical but no less involving.
“Be prepared,” warned Sondheim, “for odd shapes, sizes and problems.” And while his own Listener-style puzzles cannot be faulted on the grounds of wit, ingenuity, or addictiveness, they were a big ask.
To introduce newcomers to the delights of the British cryptic with Listener-style puzzles is a little like persuading people to take a pleasurable healthy stroll on the weekends by dropping them blindfolded into the Borneo jungle equipped with a butter knife for hacking through the undergrowth. But you can’t blame Sondheim for trying.
(If you remain tempted, the nuts and bolts of the more straightforward British cryptic follow. Soon, “Poetical scene with surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating [3, 3, 8, 12]” will yield its secret . . .)