The Crossword Century

by Alan Connor

  (Although any exhortation that you shut out the rest of your life while solving should come with a health warning . . .)

  THE SOUND OF WEBSTER’S, UP TO A POINT?

  ADDICTION

  When crosswords prove too much of a distraction

  In the wine-themed road trip movie Sideways, we see Miles Raymond solve—in pen—two real-word New York Times puzzles, set by Alan Arbesfeld and Craig Kasper. The viewer is taken aback by the incorrigible Miles’s drink-driving, but that pales into insignificance when we see him indulging in a spot of what might be termed solve-driving. Here is a man with some unusual priorities. Miles is not, though, cinema’s greatest exemplar of the Man Who Loves Puzzles Too Much.

  For that, we turn instead to the classic British weepie Brief Encounter, its screenplay written by Noël Coward and based on his one-act play Still Life. In the stage version, housewife Laura Jesson is tempted to enter into an extramarital affair with charming physician Alec Harvey and all the action takes place in the refreshment room of Milford Junction railway station.

  The screen adaptation shows us Laura’s home life. Crucially, her husband, Fred, is not portrayed as a monster; neither is Dr. Harvey a baddie. No, Fred is a kind and decent man: The villain in Brief Encounter is a crossword.

  Consider the first time we see the married couple together. Fred invites Laura to sit by the fire and help him with the Times crossword; she replies that he has the most peculiar ideas of relaxation.

  “Fred,” mutters the viewer, “can’t you see that your wife is forcing that smile? The last thing she wants is to listen to you calling out clues.” Yet, in the very next scene, he asks Laura to complete the Keats line “When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face, huge cloudy symbols of a high . . .”

  With an effort, Laura gives the answer, ROMANCE, and suggests that Fred check it in The Oxford Book of English Verse—he doesn’t: He’s satisfied because it fits with the entries DELIRIUM and BALUCHISTAN.

  “Romance!” barks the viewer. “Romance, Fred, you damned fool! Not the word ‘romance’; not the seven-letter string R-O -M-A-N-C-E: It’s the real thing your wife is crying out for!”

  Here the film declares that crosswords are a retreat from the world and from feeling—an abstraction perhaps not dangerous in itself but to be feared in that it ultimately sends respectable wives into the arms of strangers in railway refreshment rooms.

  “And is it any wonder?” yells the viewer, now distraught. “I’ll tell you who wouldn’t spend time with Laura working out which words fit with BALUCHISTAN. Dr. Alec Harvey, that’s who. The Dr. Alec Harvey who’s been making her faint, that’s who. Out-of-season rowing in astonishing scenes in a botanical garden is Alec’s idea of fun, being stranded in the water, helpless with laughter—not filling a monotone grid with the names of Pakistani provinces.”

  And it gets worse. One evening Laura blurts out that she had lunch earlier with a strange man, and that he took her to the movies. Concentrating on his puzzle, Fred replies, “Good for you,” and goes back to pondering who said, “My kingdom for a horse.”

  Such is the grip of the puzzle on Fred’s mind that he moves on to his next clue rather than addressing the reality of his marriage crumbling in front of him. Just as Scarface had cocaine and Trainspotting had heroin, so Brief Encounter shows the harrowing effects of crossword addiction.

  “For God’s sake, Fred!” the viewer is by now howling. “Put down that newspaper and hold her in your arms!”

  Happily, in the closing scene, he does. It is only as the picture ends that we see the villain—this scourge of respectable middle-class marriage, this divisive word game—vanquished. Laura’s anguish is so intense that Fred, finally, lets go of his copy of The Times, places it beside him on the sofa, and tells her, “You’ve been a long way away,” adding, unbearably, “Thank you for coming back to me.”

  What gives Brief Encounter its power is not what is said but what is not said: Fred’s declaration—unspoken, but no less unsentimental for that—that he is giving up the evil of crosswords. That his very English repression prevents him from saying this outright makes the denouement all the more moving.

  (Better, always, to let the one you love take part in the filling of the grid . . .)

  SOUNDS LIKE A FIGHT, FOR TWO PEOPLE?

  DUAL

  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 writin
g 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 . . . ?)

  AS SEEN ON TV—OR ON A LAPTOP?

  PROGRAM

  Can computers crack crosswords?

  Google Goggles is a tool that allows your smartphone to “see” what’s around you—a landmark, say, or a logo—and to search for that thing without the need for language. I vividly remember the first time I saw the software in action. I opened a newspaper on the sudoku page, pointed my cell phone at the page, and took a snapshot. In a matter of seconds, the screen showed a Google-generated image with the puzzle correctly completed. I stared at the image for a moment or two, utterly unflabbergasted.

  These moments of gob-unsmacked, wholly plussed non-wonder at Things Computers Can Now Do But Once Couldn’t are becoming more frequent as technology bounds along—almost part of everyday life. And sudoku is perhaps one of the least incongruous activities a computer might take a crack at.

  If you’re a human solving a sudoku, you’re essentially slowly working through algorithms colossally better suited to a central processing unit. It’s the cognitive equivalent of deciding that machines aren’t best placed to handle your e-mail and resolving instead to handwrite a message, walk it across to a Palo Alto server farm, then walk back, before placing it on the desk of your colleague and returning the six feet to your own workstation. Well done, you. Go, human!

  With crosswords, it feels different. Solving a crossword makes you feel something. You’ve combined feats of memory with some lateral thinking and teased out the hidden treasure. It feels creative, thoughtful. It’s a little humbling, then, when you see the strides that computers are making as crossword solvers.

  Artificial intelligence researchers have long been interested in the crossword as the kind of thing that computers might find challenging—but not necessarily impossible. The most prominent of the current crossword bots is called Dr. Fill (a pun on Phil McGraw’s psychology TV show Dr. Phil). Dr. Fill was created by former artificial intelligence researcher Matt Ginsberg, who runs algorithms for the US Air Force when he isn’t constructing New York Times puzzles.

  Ginsberg wanted his machine to be portable, so he loaded up a MacBook Pro laptop with the code he’d created. He added preexisting crossword answers dating back to 1990 and chunks of resources such as Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database, and took it along to the 2012 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

  Dr. Fill was not an official entrant: One of the requirements for entry to the tournament is that you be a person. If a person had performed the same as Dr. Fill, he or she would have come in 140th—not a bad placing, and one that can only improve as more time and human thought goes into the software.

  Ginsberg, though, doesn’t think that what Dr. Fill does counts as thinking. It is, he says, a serial business of summoning likely answers and seeing whether they fit with one another. “Thinking” or not, that’s a pretty good description of how most humans approach a puzzle. There is, though, something missing from Dr. Fill’s approach, something that should become more apparent as it learns from its mistakes—and that’s a discipline it’s certainly more serious about than many of its biped rivals.

  A hint as to what that missing element might be came when the 2012 tournament included an unexpected twist in one of the puzzles, whereby some answers had to be entered unconventionally. A human might wonder for a while what is going on when the answer MOONMISSIONS doesn’t seem to fit the squares for “Apollo 11 and 12 [180 degrees].” But once you twig what “180 degrees” is asking for and see that SNOISSIWNOOW fits with the crossing answers, you can enter it with the kind of confidence that a machine isn’t going to have unless it’s been given a line of code that explicitly says that Ws can be exchanged for Ms under certain conditions.

  And while adding such extra possibilities is not an insurmountable technical problem, that moment of realization is where automated solvers currently part company with their flesh-and-blood rivals. For Dr. Fill, this would be merely another device in the armory. For human solvers, there’s something endearingly daft about entering an answer the wrong way up, the words hanging upside down like a spaceman on a moon mission.

  Computers will make qualitative progress in tone, speed, range, and so on—but there’s something spooky about giving them clues whose whole purpose is a silliness and humor that they seem eternally unlikely to be able to enjoy.

  Perhaps there’s a better job for technology in creating puzzles rather than solving them. While the range of available grids was once determined by the lead blocks from which the squares were printed, that job is now done by the software used by the constructors, editors, and printers of crosswords.

  What about the clues? Some take comfort in the assumption that the architectural donkeywork—providing grids and even words to fill them—might be the extent of computers’ involvement. In 2003, the former crossword editor of the London Sunday Times Barbara Hall told the BBC that she thought a further impediment would be the size of the word bank the machine would require “because there are so many different meanings for one word.”

  However, in technical terms, there’s barely a difference between a “word bank” of a few thousand words and one of a couple of hundred thousand. It would require no ingeni
ous coding to program a computer to fill grids with answers from a list—of which there are plenty available—then clue each with a database of synonyms.

  The resulting puzzle would, technically speaking, be a crossword—indeed, some of the shoddier collections in book form give the impression of having been thus compiled. More interesting is the question: Would it satisfy the solver?

  The answer, I suspect, is: by no means all of them. As Stanley Newman has remarked, computer-generated puzzles tend to be full of “junk: foreign phrases, weird abbreviations and obscure words so unfamiliar they don’t even qualify as crosswordese.”

  A human constructor is better able to imagine the experience of answering the clues—where the starting points are likely to be and how each solver’s unique journey through the grid might unfold. More importantly, the solver of a decent puzzle in a decent paper does not think of the exercise as an abstract means of whiling away some minutes but as a contest between two people, where the solver knows that the constructor has conceived of the grid as a whole, balanced in terms of tone, subject matter, technique, and difficulty.

  More importantly, the constructor’s role is, in a phrase much beloved in the crosswording world, to “lose gracefully”: to guess correctly that the solver will, with enough application, find the wherewithal to topple every clue and fill every square.

  Each constructor’s idea of what the solver is likely to know differs, based on hunches and experience—and those differences are as good a way as any of defining the varying personalities among constructors. It’s with constructors’ personalities that solvers make the relationships that keep them coming back. “I beat Fred Piscop today” means something qualitatively different from “I beat Midweek-Bot v2.1.” And once a solver has found the newspaper that suits him, he’s made a relationship with a kind of gang—and a gang of highly characterful and diverse individuals who share an ethos and an editorial guiding hand.