{"id":13325,"date":"2022-07-12T07:00:35","date_gmt":"2022-07-12T07:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/ja\/?post_type=product&p=13325"},"modified":"2022-07-12T07:02:10","modified_gmt":"2022-07-12T07:02:10","slug":"beastly-clues-t-s-eliot-torquemada-and-the-modernist-crossword","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/ja\/beastly-clues-t-s-eliot-torquemada-and-the-modernist-crossword\/","title":{"rendered":"Beastly Clues T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just a few years after\u00a0The Waste Land<\/em>\u00a0appeared \u2014 a poem whose difficulty critics compared to some \u201cpompous cross-word puzzle\u201d \u2014 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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London Zoo<\/a> was having a bad month. On January 4, 1925, the acquisition of a thirteenth ostrich had led to public pressure \u201cto train one of them for police purposes\u201d, a feat supposedly \u201caccomplished some years ago on an ostrich farm in Florida\u201d, reported the\u00a0Evening Post<\/i>.\u00a0A fortnight later, a \u201cfugitive monkey\u201d<\/a> named George escaped from the zoo, bruising a naturalist\u2019s knee on his way out.\u00a0To add insult to (genicular) injury, the zoo was under siege by \u201crequests for aid in solving \u2018cross-word\u2019 puzzles\u2019\u201d: \u201cWhat 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?\u201d London Zoo, as one reporter suggested, \u201chas enough to do with the care of its own animals, and cannot act as consultant to the world at large\u201d.\u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The \u201ccrossword craze\u201d of the 1920s had hit Britain like a \u201cmeteorological depression\u201d,<\/a> and, as was traditional, Americans were to blame.\u00a0Following the publication of the first crossword in\u00a0New York World<\/i>\u00a0by Arthur Wynne in 1913, the\u00a0Tamworth Herald<\/i>\u00a0lamented the misfortune of a nation where \u201c10,000,000 people have caught the infection of unprofitable trifling\u201d, estimating the loss of productive American labour to crosswords at roughly five million hours per day.\u00a0In 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.\u00a0Thesaurus sales skyrocketed while library use crashed.\u00a0By the time Vladimir Nabokov published the first Russian\u00a0krossword<\/i>\u00a0in 1924, the\u00a0Nottingham Evening Post<\/i>\u2019s \u201cworld at large\u201d estimation was quite right: the grid truly had run a girdle around the earth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Commentators on both sides of the Atlantic were aghast at the forfeiture of intellectual capital to a game that seemingly traded on automatic, transactional thinking. To the\u00a0New York Times<\/i>\u00a0in 1925, crosswords were little more than \u201ca sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex\u201d.\u00a0(During 2018, the\u00a0New York Times<\/i> netted roughly $33 million from crossword products alone). In 1920s London,\u00a0The Times<\/i>, likewise, sneered that \u201ceverywhere, at any hour of the day, people can be seen quite shamelessly poring over the checkerboard diagrams, cudgelling their brains for a word meaning idler, or whatnot\u201d.<\/p>\n

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As newspapers were lamenting the labour frittered away on crossword puzzles, they also had cross words to say about another form of cryptic writing and time-consuming interpretation: modernist literature. With London Zoo barely recovered from the alphabetic siege, a journalist for the\u00a0Aberdeen Press and Journal<\/i>\u00a0remarked, in a review published on November 8, 1926 about Gertrude Stein\u2019s \u201cThe Fifteenth of November\u201d: \u201cCross-word puzzles are like eating toffee to this stuff\u201d.\u00a0Stein\u2019s story, glossed as \u201ca portrait of T. S. Eliot\u201d, reads, through squinted eyes, like someone shuttling over the rows and columns of a weekly crossword\u2019s clues: \u201cIn this case a description. Forward and back weekly. In this case absolutely a question in question. Furnished as meaning supplied.\u201d\u00a0Another humorous critic writing for the\u00a0Daily Mirror<\/i>\u00a0on \u201cRhymes to Cure the Cold\u201d, that is, on literature as medicine \u2014 Longfellow, for instance, gets prescribed to insomniacs \u2014 disagrees with the toffee analogy: \u201cMuch more modern [medically] and infinitely more powerful in its effects is Gertrude Stein. Up to date disease like cross-word mania can be banished in one dose.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Whether an analogue\u00a0to<\/i>\u00a0or cure\u00a0for<\/i>\u00a0the crossword frenzy, Stein\u2019s portrait of Eliot failed to inoculate his work from similar diagnoses. In 1939, a poetry critic at the\u00a0Birmingham Daily Gazette<\/i>\u00a0could not decide if Eliot\u2019s masterpiece was cryptically brilliant or merely an overwrought cryptic: \u201c\u2018The Wasteland\u2019\u00a0may<\/i>\u00a0be a great poem; on the other hand it may be just a rather pompous cross-word puzzle\u201d.\u00a0Here again we find a question asked about labour and idleness in this period: are crosswords and difficult poems worth the efforts required to elicit literary pleasure and linguistic revitalisation? Or merely a waste of time?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"