The Lower Circles of an Anagram Hell

New Rules and Regulations for a Game That Has Long Since Lost Its Pristine Innocence

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

BEING of the opinion that my new threeroom flat on the East River, which, although the renting agents are good enough to call it a five-room apartment, is admittedly only a fraction of a building, is, nevertheless, as clearly entitled to a name of its own as any of the equally recent and more anachronistic chateaux that try to be feudal out on Long Island, I made public appeal this past Spring for help in naming the little nest. The response was immediate, hearty, varied and not nearly so offensive as you might have expected. It was Lord Jeffrey Amherst (in person, not a motion picture nor a popular song) who suggested Little Casino, his notion being that any home of mine must be a gambling hell, if only in a modest way. Now I wish to deny with some heat that the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club has had so much as a single meeting under my new roof. For, as exclusively announced in these very pages, I resigned from that iniquitous coterie of highwaymen four years ago. Indeed, I resigned for the third time as long ago as last November, and when those pickpockets get a resignation three times it becomes theirs for keeps.

But I must admit that my new home is what you might call an Anagram dive. Long, tense sessions of that harrowing game are played in my library (one set of Dickens, with Great Expectations missing, 14 copies of Enchanted Aisles and 10 copies of Going to Pieces).

The contests may begin after breakfast (10 A.M. until 6 P.M.) and last through the night till the dawn comes up like thunder out of Brooklyn 'cross the river and touches with its rosy fingers the winking minarets of the prison on Blackwell's Island.

These games are played for blood and money. As yet no one, having lost all save honour, has flung himself from the balcony. But then we have not been open as long as Monte Carlo has and, anyway, I always did feel that that rival spot on the Azure Coast was given—at the suggestion of its Boosters' Committee, I suppose—to flagrant exaggeration of its suicide record.

I have a certain fellow-feeling for a morose creature of my acquaintance who had won his way to the giddy height of the world championship in court tennis, only to find that no one was looking at him—that no one knew how or when or why court tennis was played, nor, in fact, that there was such a game. The last proficiency in so elegantly rare a sport has a kind of enforced reticence. Even this fellow's friends were surprised to read of his championship—surprised in the manner of the Cockney whose fiancee startled him during the trained-animal act by going up on the stage and wrapping a docile boa constrictor around her neck.

"You never told me you was a snake charmer," he said afterwards.

"Well," she replied, "you never asked me."

The hoodlum fringe of society may gape at the more conspicuous Tildens and Hagens of our generation but does not even know that I am (in many respects and in a quiet way) the best croquet player on the Atlantic seaboard (Hoarse cries from Charles and Kathleen Norris out in California: "Oh, you are, are you?") and that I am, and for years have been, the undefeated champion at the game of Anagrams. At this moment I might as well confess also my addiction to Parchesi. At any rate, you could not say, as did the snake-charmer's boy friend, that I never told you. There are some of us about whom that, at least, can never be said with any justice.

Due to popular misconceptions as to the nature and possibilities of this old-fashioned game and due more especially to the widespread ignorance of the bacterial corruptions to which they have been subjected in recent years, there is usually a routine titter at the thought of anyone of my years and bulk and era challenging the world at croquet, Anagrams, and in moments of Luciferian recklessness, Parchesi. I suppose they think of me as preparing for this great contest by passing through the chenille portieres into the dusk of the back parlour and there softly playing Hearts and Flowers on the pianoforte, or, after reading a chapter in St. Elmo, taking a little lavender and valerian to quiet my poor nerves. They conceive of me, I take it, as one tutored when young by that Miss Prism who, in leaving the fair Cecily Cardeiv to her lesson in economics, bade her omit the chapter on "The Fall of the Rupee" as too stimulating. Well, this very treatise is an effort to restore a little of the lost standing of the game of Anagrams and, if encouraged, I will then devote myself to a monograph entitled Parchesi: Then and Now.

I am inclined to suspect that the popular notion of Anagrams as an insipid pastime derives to some extent from the depressing picture of a family at play which still adorns the box containing the game as it is manufactured by the Parker Brothers up Salem way. A glance at this picture would suggest that Anagrams went out at about the time of Siveet Marie and that even in its hey-day it was intended chiefly as a way of distracting the not too bright. How different is this from the picture of the First Wit of Her Time, bent over a real Anagram game, her highball glass held fiercely till empty, her face contorted with dislike of the human race as she tries, with only a K, a Q and a J available, to change either BATIK or DROMEDARY into another word—how different, indeed, from the home-life of our own dear Queen.

Although a paragraph that seeks to tell how a game is played, is always about as readable as the limpid "BK to WQ4" prose of the chess problems, I must attempt a slight description of an Anagram contest in action. All the letters, each painted on a bit of wood, lie prone on the table. In turn the players draw them, one at a time, the unused letters accumulating, face up, in a common pool. When, by drawing and adding a new letter to this pool, a player can form a word, he grabs it and it remains his until another player takes it, who, by using its letters and adding one or more to them, forms another word. Thus you stare long and resentfully at your neighbour's BANSHEE until you swoop down on it and, by aid of your newly-turned S, change it into HAS-BEENS. Then it is yours unless he happens to change it, in turn, into BALANCE-SHEETS.

I know that in their instructions those old softies, the Parker Brothers, allow you to begin with words of one letter, such as A or I, and, as I study the eager little faces on the cover of the box, I can see that even that requirement would quite exhaust them. To make it harder, we rougher boys fix five letters as the minimum and will not accept any mere participial or plural variation of a fourletter word. Thus SCONE (though nothing to boast about) would be allowed as a starter, but not CONES.

It is the rape of words from other players that gives the game its sadistic satisfaction. To pounce down and carry off a word from your opponent's wretched little collection (of which he is so pitiably proud), you must, however, change the root. Thus you must leave SCONE alone if you can only change it to SCONES, but if you can change it to SECOND or CORNERS or SCORNED or INNOCENCE or CORNETS, you'll be a man. my son.

If it has been agreed that seven words, let us say, shall constitute a game, it is when a player has got his seventh that the real strain sets in. Then the other players, each drawing a letter, go into a huddle. Some of the seven words look hopeless. For instance, what could you do with KODAK or JIFFY? But GOODLY now. There's an X long unused in the pool. And if only an O turns in time, there is DOXOLOGY right there and disaster is, for a time at least, averted. There have been great last minute rapes (each player is supposed to have only one minute in which to function) in the history of the game. There was a time when a contest turned on F. P. A.'s drawing a serviceable letter. The old fool drew a K. Groans from the huddle. Beams from the leader. Yet with that K, he carried off the word POINT. Could you? On another occasion in a similar crisis, one who shall he nameless drew an I and, after a spasm of efTort (which left him unstrung for weeks) he walked off with CRAVES. From at least eight white lips a feeble and reluctant cheer was wrung. "Good work, Woollcott!" was their comment.

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Any common word, confirmed by the dictionary or admitted by the sense of the meeting as being in usage, may pass muster. Among habitual players the game develops aesthetics which are difficult to impart. Mere length of word is not enough. I only know that one gets a curious glow from forming such a word as LETHARGY, say, or COGNOMEN or TRUMPERY which MOANING or DOCILE would never yield.

In employing the phrase "in usage", I was at some pains not to say "in good usage". One cannot always be squeamish. Once, in a game played on an available bit of deck space on the Albany Night Boat, the players

were oppressed by such a close swarm of kibitzers as to be all but suffocated. The Albany Night Boat is without many distractions for worthy old couples coming down the river to New York, so they gathered in great numbers and breathed stertorously down our necks. It was the First Wit of Her Time who rescued us. Since this magazine must go through that noble filter, the United States Post Office, I cannot venture to quote here the rescuing word she got, but I may say that it was a fine old English verb of two syllables and that, when it was exposed, half our kibitzers melted away. Flushed with success, she then got another word. Thereafter we had the deck to ourselves.

I have hitherto reported my pretty confusion when I read in an old essay written by Capt. Mayne Reid that croquet was "too refined, too intellectual ever to become a gambler's game." I hope you will not be too shocked to hear that there be those among us so abandoned that they even play Anagrams for money, gearing the game at so much a letter so that a player will win in proportion to the richness of his words instead of according to the mere number of them.

Since some of these Anagram desperadoes occasionally visit me of a Sunday morning, there was some appropriateness in the suggestion that my new place be called either Little Casino or The Dictioneyrie or even The Anagrampian Hills. But just then Dorothy Parker suggested that it might be called Wits' End, and the stationery is now being engraved.