Getting it Right

It’s a little unsettling, after a rewarding reread of Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword (1966), to take to Wikipedia and see the book’s author, pipe-puffing public-school housemaster Derrick S. Macnutt, described by a former pupil as ‘a bully and a brute’, ‘widely known for the pleasure he obtained from caning the boys in his charge’.

But then cruelty as well as cunning has always been a component of the crossword setter’s art. Not for nothing did the great pioneer of the cryptic clue Edward Powys Mathers assume the pseudonym ‘Torquemada’, and it was in the same spirit that Macnutt, on succeed­ing Mathers at the Observer in 1939, took the name ‘Ximenes’, after one of Torquemada’s successors as Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. The writers of cryptic crosswords are supposed to enter­tain, of course, after a fashion – but in the course of so doing they are free (indeed, expected) to confound, exasperate and torment. In the past, they have confounded a little too much. Macnutt – before he gets down to the brass tacks of grids and clues – begins his book with a fascinating historical sketch. The highlights include two puzzles set by the novelist Gilbert Frankau as a competition tie­breaker in 1925: the first ‘demanded a knowledge of French, Spanish, German, Italian and higher mathematics’, and was still solved by more than 300 puzzlers; the fourth (of ‘almost incredible tortuosity’) was solved by no one (sample clue: ‘By adding hydrogen here, help the British Dyestuffs Corporation’). The crossword was the invention of a Liverpudlian emigrant named Arthur Wynne, who compiled puzzles for the New York World from 1913, but it wasn’t until 1924 that a British newspaper latched on to the trend: the Sunday Express took one of Wynne’s crosswords from the syndicate Newspaper Features (but, as Macnutt notes, the crossword included an American spelling, and had to be revised by one of the syndicate’s editors, C. W. Shepherd: ‘This puzzle must be called the joint work of Mr Wynne and Mr Shepherd’). So the crossword must be seen as an American import – but the cryptic crossword was completely home-grown (and indeed has never really caught on across the Atlantic). It was E. P. Mathers (‘Torquemada’) who popularized the cryptic clue – Macnutt is a knowledgeable guide to the gradual evolution of the genre – and Ximenes and his contemporary Afrit (A. F. Ritchie of the Listener, named from the happy synthesis of his initials and a demon from Islamic folk­lore), who formalized and further developed the art (and it is an art: a literary art, as well as a craft, and a branch of logic). Few modern names shine as brightly as those three in the history of the cryptic, though a couple certainly stand out – the legendary John Graham, ‘Araucaria’ (named for the monkey-puzzle tree) or sometimes ‘Cinephile’ (an anagram of Chile pine, another name for the monkey-puzzle tree), and Jonathan Crowther (‘Azed’). Another deserves recognition if only for the sheer quantity of his output: Roger Squires, ‘Rufus’, or ‘Dante’, regarded as the most prolific crossword setter in history. Squires, who died in 2023, was the author of more than 70,000 published puzzles; his two-millionth clue (esti­mated) appeared in the Daily Telegraph in 2007. Squires is to blame for my own cryptic habit. I was probably about 15 when during a visit to my granny’s house I found a copy of an old paperback called How to Solve Cryptic Crosswords (I have long since forgotten the name of the author, but he should take a share of the responsibility too). A flip through it supplied me with the basics: how anagrams are indicated, what a charade is, how words can be hidden, and what various baffling initials represent. These last are often the biggest stumbling block for new solvers – the most com­mon provoker of the cry, ‘Well how in hell am I supposed to know that?’ – and indeed many of those still widely in use are colourfully representative of an art form that evolved in the mid-twentieth century: OR (Other Ranks, soldiers), RR (Right Reverend, bishop), DD (Doctor of Divinity, theologian), GR (King George); only recently has the modern world begun to intrude, with its URLs and ISPs, LOLs and WTFs. With these blunt tools I started work on the crossword in the back of my granny’s Yorkshire Post, set, under his own name, by Roger Squires. I have no idea how long it took me to finish it, but in any case I was very soon hooked. I moved on to Eddie James (‘Cyclops’) in Private Eye – slogging through heaps of old issues, working back from the solutions printed in the following issue, wondering how the hell Cyclops got from this to that – and from there to the Guardian, which for a very long time set the standard for everyday cryptics (and nuts to The Times). Now I set my own (sometimes I’m Chaliapin, sometimes I’m Trurl). Let this be a warning. Once you’re in, you may never get out. What comes across very clearly in Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword is an underpinning principle that will resonate, I think, with most keen solvers: the cryptic crossword is a lot of fun, but it is also a serious business. One word comes up again and again: fair. The setter is trying, at every turn, using every trick in the book, to deceive the solver – but must do so decently, reasonably, fairly. This is the meaning of the most widely quoted setter’s axiom (coined by Afrit): ‘I need not mean what I say, but I must say what I mean.’ Ximenes offers a translation of this Lewis Carroll-esque premise: ‘My words may appear, if taken literally, to mean something quite different to the meaning I really intend . . . I must, in however veiled a way, say [what I really intend].’ Ximenes was strict about this – so much so that ‘Ximenean’ is now common parlance in crossword circles (down the cryptic clubs, at the cruciverbalist parties) for a puzzle that – however devious it is – plays by the rules, takes no liberties and satisfies the purist (all well and good, as long as we remember that Ximenes himself makes allowance for genius: ‘Rules of cluemanship are for ordinary mortals’). The specifications set out by Ximenes cover such things as the symmetry of the grid and the number of unches per word (‘unches’: one of the all-time great jargon words, meaning those letters that aren’t crossed by another word, and are therefore ‘unchecked’). Within the clue itself, the definition of the solution must be precise, the cryptic element must be fair, the grammar and internal logic must be immaculate, and nothing extraneous must be allowed to interfere. Ximenes comes down hard on setters who don’t go by the book. ‘Weak’ rivals ‘unfair’ as his favourite word for an unsound clue. But in the latter half of Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword, Macnutt loosens his tie a little, and we get a sense of how much fun cryptic setting can be (in a quiet sort of way: we are still not quite swinging from the chandeliers). Macnutt and his co-author A. Robins (who followed Macnutt as an Everyman setter) take us jovially through the process of setting a crossword from scratch, beginning with grid design – a process made much less laborious, nowadays, by computer software – and moving on through word selection and clue composition. The aim is to show that cryptics need not be the preserve of ‘a slightly deranged specialist’, and the result is a hugely enjoyable stream of consciousness that covers not only the key crosswording tasks but also the necessary lunchbreaks, naps and knocking-off times (‘Your brain is in a whirl, and you won’t think straight if you go on; and if you do any work after supper, you won’t go to sleep till about a.m.’). It’s like being helped along an assault course by a brisk but not unfriendly drill sergeant. Personally – and this is not a confession I make lightly – I don’t consider myself a Ximenean, because I find very little enjoyment in obscure words, and would always rather have a hard clue for an easy word than an easy clue for a hard word (hard clues for hard words are in breach of Ximenean fairness rules). Among the words Macnutt deploys in his sample puzzle here are ‘leasures’, ‘sdrucciola’, ‘sdeignes’, ‘tenaces’ and ‘reast’ – to me it looks about as much fun as solving a puzzle in Aramaic or Klingon, or reading Finnegans Wake, but this is just a question of personal taste. I know at least that this is a Ximenes, so it will be clever and sound and won’t mess me about (‘Rules are good! Rules help control the fun,’ says Monica in Friends, and she’s right – Monica would be a Ximenean). ‘I am well aware that I am arbitrary, perhaps even fanatical . . . about some details,’ Macnutt writes in a modest afterword. He’s also aware that many will consider crosswords ‘a transient form of amuse­ment . . . not justifying the expenditure of so much powder and shot’. But he tells us that through studying chess problems – which he couldn’t really get on with (me neither) – he came to see ‘how much small things . . . matter’ to those who engage with puzzles, with problems, with, let’s say it again, art. The satisfactions of cryptic crosswords are small satisfactions, but they are worth paying proper attention to; they are worth getting right.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 84 © Richard Smyth 2024