Crosswords ruined my marriage!
A common pop-cultural theme of the 1924 crossword craze was the ruinous effect of the fad on marital bliss. We've already seen a number of examples poking fun at how crosswords were affecting marriages — even purportedly leading husbands and wives to trade blows.
Domestic comedies were no stranger to the comics pages of one hundred years ago, and the works of cartoonist Clare Briggs (author of the popular "Mr. and Mrs." strip, among many others) were no exception.
We've previously covered Briggs as not just an artist but as a lecturer and a movie producer. So it comes as no surprise that this single panel scene — "The Cross-Word Puzzler's Bridegroom," published in the New York Herald Tribune and syndicated in other newspapers — could be right at home on the stage. Let's conduct a brief analysis of the melodramatic tableau being depicted.
The certificate identifying the obsessive bride as a member of the Cross Word Puzzle Association of America is from a real organization which we first covered in our May 8th entry Much of the crossword's early history was based in New York City, and with Briggs' living in New York and working for the Herald Tribune, it's natural to expect him to be familiar with it. Perhaps he was inspired by the Herald Tribune's own coverage of the association's inaugural convention on May 18th.
A quick scan of the scattered crossword grids exhibit a semblance of grid symmetry. Margaret Petherbridge (soon to be known as Margaret Farrar) is often credited with having standardized rotational symmetry in crosswords. The puzzles that Petherbridge and her fellow editors at the New York World supplied to Simon & Schuster for the first crossword puzzle book a few months earlier showed rotational symmetry, and Briggs seems to have taken note.
We can spot various reference books too: an atlas, a huge tome on the bed, and an even bigger book in the bride's frantic hands. Maybe a dictionary and a thesaurus? Even back then, Roget's Thesaurus was available in the United States for crossword fans to peruse.
As for the weeping bridegroom, he could double for great dramatic actor John Barrymore, whose career was ascending at the time.
Clare Briggs used other distractions in his marital strips (notably husbands messing with shortwave radio sets, seen here and here), so let us all hope that this new couple worked things out before it was too late. Luckily Scrabble was still at least two decades away.
