Confessions of a Cruciverbalist

©2016 by John LaTorre

Last year, Merl Reagle died. He wasn’t well known outside the circle of crossword aficionados, but he was to making crossword puzzles what Jerry Rice was to catching footballs or Vladimir Horowitz was to playing Chopin. When he was at the top of his game, he was the best. His puzzle took up half of the inside back page of the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle’s “Date Book” section, and it was nearly always the first thing I turned to. I have been a cruciverbalist – a devotee of crossword puzzles – since around 1970.

Merle had a prominent part in the movie documentary Wordplay, where he could be seen devising a crossword puzzle for the New York Times. You could see the puzzle being molded into shape as he worked, and listen in on the conversation he is having with Will Shortz, the paper’s crossword puzzle editor, about where it would fit into Shortz’s weekly line-up.

The climactic scene of the documentary Wordplay is a puzzle-solving competition, during which the hobby's most fervent puzzle solvers race each other to see who is the best of the best. It's a contest of speed and accuracy (with speed being the paramount criterion, since most of the puzzles are filled out correctly). Let me tell you: these people are serious players. They train like athletes. They drill themselves daily on speed and keep meticulous records of their fastest times. When they win, they rule the world, but when they come in second or worse, the disappointment is all too visible on their faces. I can't imagine a better way to run a contest, but I still think they're crazy.

I don’t speed through puzzles. I savor them. I could no more fill out a crossword puzzle at speed than I would wolf down a meal at a four-star restaurant just to see how fast I could do it. For me, the first square I fill out is not the starting block of a race. It’s the beginning of a leisurely stroll though a garden, a topography created by a master gardener who lays out paths for me with interesting surprises and captivating twists. To run a marathon through such a delightful place would be a shocking misuse of geography.

In my time as a puzzle solver, I've progressed from the simple ones circulated by the daily newspapers to the mind-challenging posers of the New York Times. I first started doing them as a way to pass the time on the bus, on my way home from my job as a health inspector in Baltimore. My mother welcomed my interest, since she herself had been doing them for as long as I could remember. Her tastes were simpler than mine, running to simple words in straightforward patterns. She liked the old-school crossword puzzles, with words like ANOA (Celebes ox) or AIT (island in a river). She knew all these obscure words by heart. She had a crossword puzzle dictionary, but she seldom used it, for she seldom worked a puzzle that didn't use the words she already knew. But a clue like "Eaten by Oz dog" for the answer IN TOTO would infuriate her. As my own skills and desire for challenges increased, I found her preferred style of puzzle to be boring, so I'd leave these for her while I went for the ones she detested.

The New York Times daily crossword puzzle has become part of my morning ritual ... a way of jump-starting the brain, like the first cup of coffee. They say that solving puzzles is good for you. It's claimed that a daily crossword puzzle will keep all your neurons firing properly and help delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease and dementia. I don't know about that, but if nothing else, it's done wonders in keeping Yoko ONO, Brian  ENO,  CLU Galager and the ALOU family in the public spotlight, long after their accomplishments have been forgotten. And the sleepy French town of ST. LÔ will forever live in the minds of the cruciverbalists, for no other reason than the name's utility to them.

Over the years, I've come to recognize some crossword puzzle creators by their individual styles and personalities – the riddles and atrocious puns of Frank Longo and the stunning ingenuity of Jeremiah Farrell. When I work their puzzles, it's like a dialogue with old friends, and they seldom fail to delight me with a clever turn of phrase or a thread of linked clues that form a puzzle's theme. (These theme-related answers are usually the longest ones, and I try to work around them, allowing them to be filled in without reference to their clues; part of the amusement for me is identifying their common thread once the answers become plain.) I've come to realize that this is exactly the opposite of how the puzzle was created, with the author filling in these theme-related answers first, and then summoning a supporting cast to fill up the remainder, but it's as close as I can come to appreciating, all at once, what had been in the author's mind from the beginning.

The usual place for most puzzle solvers to begin is at Clue #1-Across. Not for me, though. Instead, I scan the list of clues, both across and down, and pick one that I know the answer to (or, at least, that I think I know the answer to), preferably somewhere in the middle. As I fill this one in, I imagine being parachuted into a virgin forest. Here I am, in the middle of terra incognita, wondering what path will lead me out, and which of my skills will get me there. Sometimes, it's a sprint to the border, trying to arrive at the edges with as few words as possible. Other times, I go from one corner to its opposite. If my first identifiable clue happens to be for a word on the perimeter, I'll try to go around the circumference of the puzzle while leaving the center pristine. And as I explained earlier, I shun the longer clues, not because I couldn't figure out what the answers are, but because I want them to be a surprise. (If you think this is strange, you should watch me eat corn on the cob.)

I place great store in working a puzzle in such a way that every answer builds on another one that has been already inserted. If I have hit a part of a puzzle that leads to dead ends, where no answer suggests itself and where I have to start anew at another portion of the puzzle, I somehow feel that I have come up short. The continuity has been broken, you see. This happens frequently enough that I have given myself permission to relocate under certain special conditions. For example, if a clue like "With 38-down, a constellation" presents itself, and I've found that the word is "Major," I grant myself leave to go to 38-down and see if "Canis" or "Ursa" might fill the bill. Now 38-Down is in a different part of the puzzle, nothing but blank spaces around it, but the fact that I've been invited there justifies my starting anew without taking a penalty. Another example is when I have enough of a theme-related clue to hazard a guess at what the answer might be. In that case, I'll put the answer there, but – and here's the important thing – I won't look at the answer's clue until the entire puzzle has been filled out. That would be cheating.

For the "easier" New York Times puzzles, published from Monday to Thursday, I pride myself in not taking recourse to any references except my own memory. But the weekend puzzles usually require a trip or two (or three) of my standard crib sheets: the almanac, a movie guide, an atlas, or perhaps a cookbook. Only when I am totally lost do I reach for my tablet and visit the Internet. Even though its resources almost always help me over the hump, there's always a lingering sense of having failed. I'm sure it's just an indication of my membership in a generation that had to go it alone, and I'll bet that young users have no such qualms. This does not bode well for future times when puzzle authors assume that their victims are already logged on to their favorite browser, and shape their puzzles accordingly, leaving my own feeble memory resources almost useless.

Even when I have no recourse but the Internet, there are still rules. Rule 1: Don't use Wikipedia unless absolutely necessary. Rule 2: Don't use any search engine. Rule 3: if the answer involves movies or television, it's entirely permissible to go to the Internet Movie Data Base, since there will be references to movies or television shows that I have been blissfully unaware of, but points may be subtracted if it turns out to be something I should have known about. Rule 4: if it's sports or geography, there are websites that may help, but if I have to use Google to find them, I always feel a twinge of disappointment. Maybe there are people in this world who remember who the Most Valuable Player of Super Bowl XII is, but I’m not one of them.

One of the more fascinating puzzles displayed in the Wordplay was Jeremiah Farrell's famous "Election Day," published on November 5, 1996, which predicted the winner of the next day's presidential election. As it turned out, either BOBDOLE or CLINTON would have solved the puzzle correctly. It occurred to me then that the Holy Grail of cruciverbalists would be a puzzle in which every single clue could lead to an alternate answer, and one could correctly fill out the puzzle with a completely different set of answers to the same set of clues. Maybe the day will come when some puzzle creator will do it, and I hope to live to see that day. In the meantime, most of them seem to content themselves with using the least number of black squares, or the most misleading (but accurate!) clues, or puzzles which, when filled out, reveal a new pattern entirely... all admirable goals, to be sure. As long as they can do that, I'll stay hooked.

One more thing about Merl Reagle: instead of putting a new puzzle in its Sunday Datebook section, the San Francisco Chronicle has elected to fill the space with more of its usual announcements about goings-on about town. It’s still a shock to open their puzzle section and not see Merl’s puzzle in its usual place. I feel unnecessarily rushed into doing the rest of the puzzles. Instead of four major puzzles, now there are three; it’s sort of like a football game skipping the entire first quarter. At first, I hoped that they would fill the space with a puzzle from another gifted puzzle-maker, but that hasn’t happened. Maybe it’s appropriate that the spot be left open for a while, since it’s a memorial to how much we lost when Mr. Reagle died. Will there ever be a person whose puzzles were as witty, as challenging, and as surprising? I don’t know, but if you’re out there, the space is ready for you. You’ve just got to earn it.