"Thinking Inside the Box" by Adrienne Raphel

When crossword puzzles first became a fad in America in the 1920s, moral panic ensued. Editorialists in England cried that America was "enslaved" to crosswords; but soon, the English were addicted. We learn this from Adrienne Raphel's Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who can't live without them (p.78).  The book was a gift to me from dear friend Kitty Drew and her late husband Terry Strecker.

Raphel pushes back on those who regard puzzle-solving as a shameful waste of time and effort. She almost convinces.

In favor of crosswords, Raphel offers these facts:

• People at the tops of their fields regularly work(ed) crosswords: Nabokov, Eliot, Auden, Sondheim, Pelosi, President Clinton, Bret Favre, and Yo-Yo Ma (xiv).
• A puzzle saved civilization when it was planted in the London Times as bait to draw puzzle-solvers to Bletchley Park, where they broke the Nazis' enigma code (91).
• Studies show that doing crosswords delays the onset of dementia (ch. 13). (I wish to forget that dementia, when it does hit, hits puzzlers harder.)

Then there's the beneficence of Will Shortz, puzzle editor of the New York Times, "puzzle master" of NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, and "everyone's uncle":

He carries himself with the formal politeness of a foreign affairs diplomat and the wholesomeness of a Midwestern tennis coach. He has a sheepish grin, boyish cheeks, and a trimmed mustache that defies trendiness; his eyes flicker on each blink between anxious to please and slyly ready to deceive. (65)

Raphel meets with Shortz and his assistants at the puzzle-master's home, a "Juilliard of puzzling" for his interns, where they sift through hundreds of submissions from hopeful puzzle-writers nation-wide. Raphel herself writes a puzzle, giving us insight to the tricks, tools, and demands of the craft. Like most of the others she saw at Shortz's home, hers comes back with the notation TDEME. The letters stand for "Theme Didn't Excite Me Enough" (69), but I notice that the pronunciation of the letters could be "tedium."

Is joy a good enough reason to spend a lot of your life doing crosswords? What makes crosswords enjoyable has changed over the decades. During the Shortz tenure at the Times, the puzzles have tilted away from puzzles that rewarded arcane knowledge towards word-play. Unlike his predecessor Eugene T. Maleska, Shortz allows phrases, brand names (ZZZQUIL was one answer), and pop cultural references. Shortz and his team look for "the kind of pattern that puts an involuntary smile on the editors' faces" (70).

In other chapters, Raphel takes us to a crossword-solving competition, she reviews some faux pas that prompted Shortz and his staff to remove their white-male blinders, and she surveys puzzles in fiction.

Still, what good is a puzzle when you've done it? I've a pile of puzzle books going back 15 years. With my notations beside the hardest-won and cleverest answers -- mostly, HA! and AH-HA! -- the books are trophies, stacked and annually dusted with reverence. But I've never reopened one.

Despite Raphel's book, there's an accusing angel inside me charging that I've wasted time solving puzzles that could have gone into studying great literature or creating literature of my own.

The devil's advocate argues that working a crossword, reading a poem, and writing a poem are equally creative. Sure, someone else shaped the piece, leaving us the clues. Still, our imaginations and memories are also struggling to find the perfect word, the interconnection, the shape, the meaning. Coming to puzzles from the other side, we mirror what their creators do.

When I'm writing a poem, closing in on the draft that I will eventually decide is the final one, I feel like I'm uncovering something that I should have seen all along. Like the solution to a crossword, the right words were there -- somewhere in the back of my mind -- the whole time. So, whether I'm creating something myself or re-creating what someone else composed, the sensation is the same.

There's a quasi-religious side to crosswords, too:

• Stephen Sondheim, famous composer-lyricist and the man whose British-styled "cryptic crosswords" introduced the genre to American audiences*, said that's the thing about crosswords: you know there IS a solution.  Sondheim never believed in the Creator of the universe; but he liked believing in the creator of any puzzle.   
  
• Shortz wrote in his introduction to Cartoon Puzzles: "I haven't just solved something, I've discovered something that's pretty. And I don't know how the people who put this together did it." His sense of awe and gratitude is where religion begins.

So, to pass the time with a puzzle is not a waste of time. Neither is reading about it in Raphel's playful book.

*Cryptic clues are two-in-one: first, there's the answer, and then a play on words that gives the answer in another way. "Successor to The Sound of Music" gives you HEIR (a successor) which has the "sound" of music, i.e., air. "Entertain and wind again" gives you REGALE, which consists of the word "gale," i.e., a strong wind, and "re-" again.

I've crossed crosswords and theology before:

• Theology of Crossword Puzzles: A Shortz Sermon is an acrostic on the name of NPR's "puzzle master" for which each line relates a truth about crosswords to a spiritual principle (03/2010)
• Cartoon Puzzles: The Real Intelligent Design (01/2007) relates puzzles to humor and awe
• My poem "Cliff Hanger" was inspired by Raphel's simile for diagramless crosswords: solvers had to figure out where the black squares were, as well as the correct answers, relying on the letters provided like climbers clutching grips to scale a rock wall (105). Across the top of every draft of that poem, I wrote GOD-CLIFF-CROSSWORDS-POETRY