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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THROUGH A GRID, DARKLY  
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Adrienne Raphel
March 14, 2024
Los Angeles Review of Books
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_ This book, writes reviewer Raphel, "is both a memoir and a cultural
analysis of American crosswords from the 1910s through the 2010s." _

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_The Riddles of the Sphinx
Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle_
Anna Shechtman
HarperOne
ISBN: 9780063275478

_THE RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX: Inheriting the Feminist History of the
Crossword Puzzle_ (2024), by media scholar Anna Shechtman (a former
editor at _Los Angeles Review of Books _and currently an editor at
large), is both a memoir and a cultural analysis of American
crosswords from the 1910s through the 2010s. The book is also itself a
kind of crossword, bringing together worlds that might not otherwise
exist in the same place at the same time. Shechtman is a longtime
crossword constructor, and constructors love answers that are 15
letters long because they traverse a standard American-sized puzzle
grid. These answers, called grid-spanners, also often illuminate a
larger theme or serve as seed entries from which the puzzle grows.
Shechtman’s book has its own reveals and surprises too: one is
CROSSWORD PUZZLE (15); another is ANOREXIA NERVOSA (15). Shechtman’s
exploration of puzzle logic and anorexic thinking—and how she
learned, physically and psychologically, to tease them apart—is the
real enigma of her book-as-crossword.
Shechtman’s history is actually a “group portrait,” focusing on
“women, [herself] included, who have attached themselves to language
rules.” She begins by spotlighting Ruth Hale, a feminist activist
who founded the Cross Word Puzzle League of America in 1924 and
established bylaws that still characterize the game: interlocking,
symmetry, and accessible words. On the surface, Hale—also the
president of the Lucy Stone League, which advocated for married women
to keep their last names—seems like a paragon of women’s
liberation. Yet Shechtman astutely observes that Hale was also
strictly rule-abiding: she eventually leaned so far into progressivism
that, for her, even freedom became regulated. Hale’s diagramless
puzzles, Shechtman points out, thus embody the paradox of her strict
progressivism: “What looks like a wide-open grid, an expanse of
freedom, is rigidly, but subliminally, rule-bound.”

Margaret Farrar, editor of Simon & Schuster’s crossword book series
and the first puzzle editor at _The_ _New York Times_, then takes
center stage in Shechtman’s exploration of crosswords and
domestication. Farrar shepherded the game from 1920s craze to
household staple. Expanding on Hale’s rules, Farrar set a gold
standard for grids and championed creativity, encouraging constructors
to find new clueing angles, steering away from recycling (say,
“World War II Battle” for BULGE) and toward fresher word choices,
even if PROTUBERANCE or the spicier CONVEXITY seemed strange at first.
As Shechtman writes, during the 1950s, Farrar began encouraging
constructors to include themes, like Harold T. Bers’s feline-focused
“Catalogue,” featuring KITTY ALLEN, KRAZY KAT, PUSSY WILLOW, and
THE CATS MEOW. Yet Farrar chronically undersold herself, even crossing
picket lines because she didn’t identify crossword-making as
“labor.” At this point, for Farrar and the culture at large,
puzzle construction was considered a leisure activity, so even when
women were paid for the task, they were still not considered a part of
the workforce. Not long after, when crosswords and puzzles became
viable business ventures, and puzzle-making became a real job, women
would find themselves on the other side, systemically barred from
leading the crossword world that Farrar had helmed.

Shechtman’s most ambitious section is her discussion of sexual
politics and semiotics. As she pointed out in an earlier essay
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on the subject published by _The New Yorker_, Jacques Lacan’s advice
to budding psychoanalysts was “Do crossword puzzles.” Shechtman
speculates about the connection between puzzles and analysis, writing
in the essay that, “[l]ike Freudian analysis, or a linguistic
Rorschach test, the puzzle creates meaning out of the chance
encounters between words and images, proper and sometimes improper
nouns, and acts as a window into our fantasies, tastes, and unyielding
fixations.” In the book, she also elucidates the role of serious
wordplay in the critical practice of écriture feminine, and explores
how wordplay that might seem trivial in a crossword grid actually
worked to undergird New Wave feminist theory. Shechtman focuses on the
work of Julia Penelope, an activist and a “cunning linguist” who
seemed to consolidate all of these ideas in her puzzles, creating
crosswords with spellings like “wimmin” and deliberately arcane
clues such as “___ and Melita (companion lovers who lived in
Pelasgia) Answer: THALIE.” And yet, Penelope’s inflexible
commitment to a lesbian lexicon and her politics as a lesbian
separatist (as well as racist and transphobic statements), ended up
alienating her from her peers. Words build worlds, but taking letters
too literally promotes isolation.

Shechtman brings readers into the 21st century through her own story
and her internship with legendary _New York Times _crossword editor
Will Shortz. She held this position in 2013 and 2014, when the
crossword world was undergoing many seismic shifts. Construction
software was becoming ubiquitous, paralleling a rise in major outlets
publishing the work of mostly male constructors. Though independent
crossword puzzles were being published online at an increasing rate,
offering new platforms for more diverse voices in puzzling, this very
discrepancy between the major outlets and the indies exposed the
implicit male domination that had taken over the landscape. Gone were
the days of Ruth Hale and Margaret Farrar.

The personal side of the book is also the A plot of _Riddles_—a
story of language rules, gender norms, and anorexia. (Shechtman wryly
dubs herself “Anna Rexia,” riffing on _rex_, a male king: “I
wanted to be both the hottest girl in school and a boy.”) Shechtman
discusses the ways she herself has been written about (full
disclosure: my own book on crosswords, which opened with an analysis
of Shechtman’s influence, is discussed in one of the later chapters
here). Shechtman is very much aware of how her own work and persona
have situated her in the history of puzzling. Shechtman also
ruthlessly depicts the connection between crosswords and the
strictures of her eating disorder. As she recovered, she learned how
to untether herself from the dangers of literalism.
“Intellectualization” isn’t being an intellectual;
“perfectionism” doesn’t mean perfect.

Shechtman’s depiction of her current relationship to crosswords has
the elegiac tone of 1 Corinthians 13: “When I became a man, I put
away childish things.” She mourns the primacy that software places
on cultivating word lists—that is, continuously adding to and
tweaking a weighted bank of words and phrases that the software uses
to suggest fillers for the grid. Constructors use these lists to make
certain that exciting phrases float to the top by virtue of their
scores, but, perhaps more crucially, they use the scored-list system
to suppress certain words, such as awkward abbreviations or very
obscure terms that might be vowel-rich but that very few people will
know. Shechtman calls construction “no longer a ‘space’ but an
ongoing activity.” Yet crosswording has always been a state of mind.
Farrar herself used an address book for her own proto–word list. And
there’s this: today, more women than ever lead the puzzle vanguard,
including Shechtman herself and Liz Maynes-Aminzade at _The_ _New
Yorker_, Patti Varol at the _Los Angeles Times_, Juliana Pache with
her Black crosswords, and so many others.

Shechtman is delightful when sly—the “dic(k)tionary”!—and she
sees the implications in every bit of linguistic play. From
“Paradise” (rehab) to “Pleasantville” (her internship with
Shortz), she has a preternatural gift for perceiving perfectly placed
pieces of language. At the same time, linguistic games that seem to be
the most fun also contain dangerous undersides—hence the
CROSSWORDPUZZLE/ANOREXIANERVOSA double bind. Yet I found myself
wishing that the book could crack into spontaneous joy. Paradoxically,
where I do find some of that spontaneity is in arguably the most
formally wound part: a crossword itself. Shechtman opens _Riddles_
with an excellent original puzzle titled “I Pronouns Thee” that
(spoiler warning!) features double-faced rebus squares that read one
way going down and another across. This puzzle is complex but not
convoluted, providing just the right kind of aha! moment. When you see
through a grid, darkly, you can still have fun.

 

ADRIENNE RAPHEL IS THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOKS _THINKING
INSIDE THE BOX: ADVENTURES WITH CROSSWORDS AND THE PUZZLING PEOPLE
WHO CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT THEM _(2020), _OUR DARK ACADEMIA _(2022), AND
_WHAT WAS IT FOR _(2017). SHE HOLDS A PHD FROM HARVARD AND AN MFA
FROM THE IOWA WRITERS’ WORKSHOP. RAPHEL TEACHES AT CUNY BARUCH
AND AT THE WRITER’S FOUNDRY MFA PROGRAM AT ST. JOSEPH’S
UNIVERSITY. SHE IS ALSO ON FACULTY WITH THE BERLIN WRITERS’
WORKSHOP AND SERVES AS A MENTOR WITH THE PERIPLUS COLLECTIVE.

* Crossword puzzles
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* Women's History
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* history of games
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* Feminism
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* 20th Century U.S. History
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