19 Eliot’s magnum opus may have struck Lucas as a “toad”, but Eliot actively embraced animal personae throughout his career, not only as the Old Possum behind a Book of Practical Cats (1939), but also as a March Hare in his juvenalia, T. Lucas in 1923, should metamorphose posthumously into a tsetse. How apt that the author of The Waste Land, skewered as a “maggot breeding in the corruption of poetry” by F. In a strange misdirection of his ambition to an afterlife in the crossword, he is often abbreviated and doubled to clue TSETSE, an African insect known for transmitting insomnia. 17 Undeterred by Ezra Pound’s disdain for such games as “an abomination” in his ABC of Reading (1934), Eliot held the cryptic crossword in enough esteem to consider “finding a reference to myself and my works in The Times crossword” a crowning achievement, aspiring to a rank on the same allusive food chain in which he had chewed, without satisfaction, over Johnson and Jerome. Eliot’s voracious appetite for puzzles certainly seemed idling (or even addling) to many of his colleagues, who often found him smuggling The Times crossword into “tedious” editorial meetings under the table. Jerome’s The Idler (despite having been his neighbour in Marlow between 1917–1920), which, alongside a nod to nature’s busiest workers - the classical models of allusion itself - yielded the answer.
16 He had seemingly forgotten Samuel Johnson’s The Idler (despite having written on Johnson throughout his career), as well as Jerome K.
Up to date disease like cross-word mania can be banished in one dose.” 14Įliot only got as far as the crossing letters, which he correctly reckoned to be ▢🄳▢🄴▢🅂. Furnished as meaning supplied.” 13 Another humorous critic writing for the Daily Mirror on “Rhymes to Cure the Cold”, that is, on literature as medicine - Longfellow, for instance, gets prescribed to insomniacs - disagrees with the toffee analogy: “Much more modern and infinitely more powerful in its effects is Gertrude Stein. In this case absolutely a question in question. Eliot”, reads, through squinted eyes, like someone shuttling over the rows and columns of a weekly crossword’s clues: “In this case a description. 12 Stein’s story, glossed as “a portrait of T. With London Zoo barely recovered from the alphabetic siege, a journalist for the Aberdeen Press and Journal remarked, in a review published on Novemabout Gertrude Stein’s “The Fifteenth of November”: “Cross-word puzzles are like eating toffee to this stuff”. 4Īs 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. 3 The 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. 2 To add insult to (genicular) injury, the zoo was under siege by “requests for aid in solving ‘cross-word’ puzzles’”: “What 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?” London Zoo, as one reporter suggested, “has enough to do with the care of its own animals, and cannot act as consultant to the world at large”. 1 A fortnight later, a “fugitive monkey” named George escaped from the zoo, bruising a naturalist’s knee on his way out. On January 4, 1925, the acquisition of a thirteenth ostrich had led to public pressure “to train one of them for police purposes”, a feat supposedly “accomplished some years ago on an ostrich farm in Florida”, reported the Evening Post.
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