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Just a few years after The Waste Land appeared — a poem whose difficulty critics compared to some “pompous cross-word puzzle” — Edward Powys Mathers (alias: Torquemada) pioneered the cryptic: a puzzle form that, like modernist poetry, unwove language and rewove it anew. Roddy Howland Jackson reveals the pleasures and imaginative creatures lurking in Torquemada's lively grids.
An Ernie Bushmiller “Cross Word Cal” cartoon, from Sunday New York World, 1925. Note how the animals are caged by letter length and genus — Source.
Nottingham Zoo was having a bad month. On January 4, 1925, the acquisition of a thirteenth ostrich had led to public pressure “to train one of them for police purposes”, a feat supposedly “accomplished some years ago on an ostrich farm in Florida”, reported the Evening Post.1 A fortnight later, a “fugitive monkey” named George escaped from the zoo, bruising a naturalist’s knee on his way out.2 To add insult to (genicular) injury, the zoo was under siege by “requests for aid in solving ‘cross-word’ puzzles’”: “What is a word in three letters meaning a female swan? What is a female kangaroo, or a fragile creature in six letters ending in TO?” Nottingham Zoo, as one reporter suggested, “has enough to do with the care of its own animals, and cannot act as consultant to the world at large”.3 The poor zookeepers were at the thin end of a puzzle wedge; fated, as Ernie Bushmiller joked in his popular comic strip, to serve buckets of alphabet soup to animals prized and poached for their phonemes alone.4
The “crossword craze” of the 1920s had hit Britain like a “meteorological depression”, and, as was traditional, Americans were to blame.5 Following the publication of the first crossword in New York World by Arthur Wynne in 1913, the Tamworth Herald lamented the misfortune of a nation where “10,000,000 people have caught the infection of unprofitable trifling”, estimating the loss of productive American labour to crosswords at roughly five million hours per day.6 In the UK, so much damage had been inflicted by ham-thumbed solvers on the dictionaries of Wimbledon that all such reference works were withdrawn from public access.7 Thesaurus sales skyrocketed while library use crashed.8 By the time Vladimir Nabokov published the first Russian krossword in 1924, the Nottingham Evening Post’s “world at large” estimation was quite right: the grid truly had run a girdle around the earth.
