The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  I know better now.

  Rome is an education.

  XXIX

  We didn't do art history at school, nor did we study the history of England very seriously. We did some ancient history, of which vestiges remain in my memory, and they may eventually have added to my appreciation of Rome. The eighteenth century, the age of the dissected map, was a huge bald space in my education, containing one or two random, disconnected, freefloating pieces – Fielding's Tom Jones, which we were surprisingly allowed to read as an A-level set text; the building I knew as Bryn; Dr Johnson; Fanny Burney's Evelina; Tar McAdam; the Prince Regent; the Bath Assembly Rooms; the rotation of crops and Turnip Townsend; She Stoops to Conquer; my father's silver candlesticks and the invention of Sheffield plate. These did not add up to any kind of a whole. I had no chronological sense of the social background of the period, and I have pieced it together laboriously, inadequately, over the years. I am still very hazy about the connections.

  But I do now know that the jigsaw puzzle was not always known by this name. Its name is a recent coinage, dating from the late nineteenth century, and derives from the tool known as a jigsaw. These tools, which have a very narrow blade used for fretwork, began to appear in the late eighteenth century, but the name by which we know them was not widely used for another hundred years. I have been using the term 'jigsaw puzzle' anachronistically, as did the Sotheby's catalogue of the Hannas Collection in 1984. It is mere chance that what we now call jigsaw puzzles are not called fretsaw puzzles, as the terms 'jigsaw' and 'fretsaw' are, I am assured, more or less interchangeable. We could now have been saying, 'I'm doing a fretsaw of the Garden of Earthly Delights,' or 'I've just finished a fretsaw of Tutankhamen, and the gold bits were very difficult.' That sounds very odd. Or jigsaws might have been called Zig Zaws, or Zag Saws, as some early models were. Those trade names might easily, perhaps more easily, have caught on. But they didn't.

  The treadle jigsaw dates back to the 1870s, and puzzles were named after it within a decade or so. We had a need for the concept and the word entered the vocabulary. Maybe the idea of 'jiggling' bits together had something to do with its permanent adoption (and the words do have a very distant etymological affiliation). The sound of the word fitted the meaning.

  The word 'fret' has less happy, less playful connotations: more Drabble than Tucker.

  A detailed history of the development of jigsaw-puzzle making in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is beyond my scope and my ambition, and probably the patience of all but the most committed reader, so I shall not tackle it in any depth. If I tried, I would largely be paraphrasing the research of others, and that seems pointless. Also, I would make a very bad job of it. I am not good at describing technology or mechanical processes. I can hardly tell a hawk from a handsaw, or a fretsaw from a jigsaw. The only treadle with which I was ever acquainted was my Auntie Phyl's venerable, black-and-gold, smooth-bodied Singer sewing machine, which stood in the guests' dining room at Bryn, and I could never get that to work properly. The thread snarled, the needle juddered and stabbed, the fabric snagged and puckered. I liked the silver bobbins, which looked like little science-fiction chrysalides incubating another life form, but I never understood how to load them. For Auntie Phyl, the machine sang smoothly along the seams. She had the knack.

  I have, I think, almost grasped the basics of the technical processes by which the hand-cut, non-interlocking, wooden puzzles of the eighteenth century were developed into the mass-produced cardboard puzzles of today. The jigsaw and later the die cutter (which was like a kind of giant pastry cutter) were the tools that made these changes possible, and made jigsaws as we know them cheaply available to a large public, thus changing the social class of the jigsaw, and turning an aristocratic schoolroom aid into what I would argue is one of the cheapest, most democratic and most accessible of all entertainments.

  A hospital in Connecticut has recently introduced a jigsawpuzzle table into the waiting room of its department of oncology and radiation, and the puzzles have proved popular with those whose 'loved ones' are undergoing treatment; they provide 'moments of interaction' that cut across 'the lines of gender, age, and status'. I am told that in England they are occasionally provided in the jury room to entertain jurors during interminable court delays. Several people have reported to me on the use of the jigsaw in bonding with new in-laws at family gatherings. This is all a far cry from the days of Lady Charlotte, and the princes at Kew, and Lord Spencer, and the little Spanish Infante painted by Goya.

  I am not particularly interested in the technical processes of manufacture, but the social ends of jigsaws interest me very much.

  We did not do wooden jigsaws with Auntie Phyl. We did cardboard ones. Was this because of the war? I don't know. Recently, on advice, I have indulged myself by purchasing one or two expensive modern wooden models, and I can see that there is something satisfactory about handling the pieces and clunking them together. One could learn to despise cardboard. I am sure the Queen orders wooden jigsaws from her jigsaw club. But why acquire expensive tastes, if you are happy, as I am, with the mass-produced?

  In the 2006 film about the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana, we can see Helen Mirren as the Queen in an authentically old-fashioned-looking drawing room in Balmoral, where an unfinished jigsaw is displayed upon a table. I couldn't see whether it was made of wood or cardboard, or what the image was.

  The only concession I made to research on the fretsaw front was to pay a visit to a friend who is a skilled amateur cabinetmaker, and who possesses a fine collection of wood-working tools, including a replica of an eighteenth-century tool chest that he made himself, based on the 1796 Seaton chest now in Rochester Museum. I felt I had to try to get some kind of grasp of the processes in question, but what I chiefly acquired from listening to David and handling the items in his collection was a sense of the hand-crafted beauty of the tools themselves, with their ivory or wooden handles, their fine blades, their distinctive personal histories. These objects, like their products, are now collectors' items, growing rarer and more expensive year by year. And, in their presence, it became easier to see why the early dissected maps would have been beyond the reach of Fanny Price's family in Portsmouth. Each mahogany map was hand-made, by craftsmen. They were not throwaway toys, destined to join the junk of the nursery.

  David is a carpenter's son, and for him cabinetmaking is a pleasure and a skill that has offset a professional career spent at desks and in meetings. Like me, he enjoys an escape from words. I can see that creating an intricate and beautiful three-dimensional object gives a great and lasting satisfaction. The art of marquetry moves and excites him. His partner's tastes are minimalist, but he loves the rich complexity and intricacy of wood and veneer, of inlay and trompe I'oeil, and maybe he hopes one day to introduce some Florentine fantasy into her austere domain.

  I have another witness to the lure of the manufacturing process, whose account illustrates very clearly why a ham-fisted person like me is wise to stay well away from saws and blades. My correspondent Anthony Brown writes:

  I had wanted to make my own puzzles for ages, even as a child. I had a fret-saw in my tool kit, but the broad blade and the inability to fix the wood securely resulted in most unsatisfactory pieces, far too loose for any pleasure in puzzle doing. After my apprenticeship as an engineer, I used to collect old calendars from the firm's offices after the New Year holiday. I still have the drawer-full which I accumulated.

  Then I acquired an old treadle jig saw, which was subsequently stolen, but easily recovered with the help of the police when I saw it in an antique shop. (In fact, I only realised that it and a few other possessions had been stolen from our outhouse when I saw the jig saw in the shop window; I couldn't believe that there could be another one.)

  Unfortunately, I have always been too busy with other priorities, although I did buy a scroll saw last year, in a moment of wishful thinking. My efforts on the treadle saw were fun and interesting, but frustrating, bo
th in the making and in the subsequent doing. I have listed the plywood which I'll need on the long list of timber which I must order from the saw mill. But even when it arrives, there are other wood-working priorities.

  One can see, from this kind informant's dilemmas, that there is a whole other world of puzzle expertise into which Auntie Phyl and I would have been most unwise to enter. She was critical enough of my attempts at sewing; it would have been unwise to let me loose with a saw. She was not all that good with her fingers, either. Her rock cakes were a bit rough and ready, and her pastry was never as light as my mother's.

  People who make their own jigsaws are in a different league and have very different interests from those who merely assemble them. They are craftsmen.

  One of the reasons why the jigsaw appeals to me, as I have already suggested, is that it is pre-made, its limits finite, its frame fixed. No ordinary degree of manual clumsiness (and mine is advanced, and inevitably advancing) can yet prevent me from finishing a jigsaw. It can't be done badly. Slowly, but not badly. All one needs is patience. (The French used to call puzzles les jeux de patience, and the Germans called them Geduldspielen. Now they both call them puzzles.) In this aspect, the jigsaw is the very opposite of the novel. The novel is formless and frameless. It has no blueprint, no pattern, no edges. At the end of a day's work on a novel, you may feel that you have achieved something worse than a lack of progress. You may have ruined what went before. You may have sunk into banality or incoherence. You may have betrayed or maligned others. You may have to scrap not only the day's work, but the work of the preceding week, month, year, lifetime. You may have lost ground, and for ever. You may have lost your nerve, and indicted all that you have achieved. Writing fiction is frightening. Some novelists find the safety of a reliable formula, but I never did, nor did I really wish to.

  Editing The Oxford Companion to English Literature for five years, and then revising it for other, shorter stretches, was a comfort to me, for at the end of each day I could say, 'I have made progress. I have added entries on Samuel Bamford and Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin and Angus Wilson, revised entries on Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, received and checked entries on Hopkins and Horovitz and Horror.' The pieces fitted together, they interlocked. Asterisk led to asterisk in a finely articulated and complex pattern, in a vast jigsaw. This was satisfying. The end was sure to come. There would be spare pieces that never found a home and would have to be discarded, and missing pieces where dates or titles were lost and unavailable, but the book as a whole, as a self-referring entity, would be completed. Assembling and fitting the pieces together was a form of carpentry.

  Writing novels is not like that.

  Coleridge, in Chapter 22 of his Biographia Literaria, draws a famous distinction between FANCY (the drapery of poetry) and IMAGINATION (its soul), and at one point invokes the image of dissected maps, suggesting that Wordsworth sometimes woodenly (my word) combined instructions and described construction programmes of a pre-existing plan, rather than drawing on the deeper resources of the imagination. Referring to a landscape passage in The Excursion (Book III, 23–73), which describe in sequence yew tree, stream, crag, rock, stones and 'a tall and shining holly', Coleridge comments that the draughtsman or painter could have presented these images to the eye far more economically and satisfactorily. He continues:

  Such descriptions too often occasion in the mind of a reader, who is determined to understand his author, a feeling of labour, not very dissimilar to that, with which he could construct a diagram, line by line, for a long geometrical proposition. It seems to be like taking the pieces of a dissected map out of its box. We first look at one part, and then at another, then join and dove-tail them; and when the successive acts of attention have been completed, there is a retrogressive effort of the mind to behold it as a whole. The Poet should paint to the imagination, not to the fancy.

  Here, while dismissing or deprecating the satisfaction of this 'retrogressive effort of the mind', Coleridge in fact accurately describes the particular pleasure to be gained by the completion of a large jigsaw puzzle, the moment when the small local struggles of murky corners or blank blue skies or confusing geometric repetitions or (in Perec's classic example) of 'the belt buckle of a uniform which turns out in extremis to be a metal clasp holding the chandelier' are resolved, and the whole emerges from the parts. The Jackson Pollock ceases to be an intense and frustrating battle with arbitrary splashes and streaks and blobs and blisters of paint, and becomes an intentional and recognizable work of art, caught within the frame of its canvas. Venus of Urbino emerges smiling from a sea of complacent apricot pink. Brueghel's 246 children join the everlasting game.

  This is not to suggest that those who do jigsaws delude themselves that they are creating a new work of art. They are not so stupid. It isn't an art. It isn't a hobby. It isn't even a craft. Making a jigsaw puzzle from plywood is a craft, and as we have seen a tricky one, but doing a ready-made cardboard or wooden jigsaw doesn't qualify. It isn't quite a game, either. It is a different kind of act. But what kind of an act is it?

  It could be argued that Georges Perec, in the immensely complex, enjoyable and intricate La Vie: Mode d'Emploi, uses the jigsaw as a central metaphor for the tragic futility of human endeavour and the tedium of existence, a vanitas motif constructed in the French metaphysical mode. And that is one way of looking at his novel and at this pursuit. The jigsaw has been used with satirical overtones in this manner by playwrights and film-makers who portray characters with nothing better to do and no thoughts to think, pointlessly wasting time as they work away at broken images, at puzzles without solutions. Crazy old Mrs Winemiller in Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke (first performed in 1948, but set in 1916) is told by her daughter to be quiet and work on her 'picture puzzle', but she complains, 'The pieces don't fit! The pieces don't fit!' She is in her disruptive second childhood, demanding to be bribed into good behaviour by promises of ice cream and cigarettes. Orson Welles makes brilliant play with the jigsaw motif in Citizen Kane, where the missing piece of plot is Kane's childhood sleigh, Rosebud. The film is full of rich imagery of grandiose Roman rubble, towering crates, crazy collections of antique statuary and junk, newspaper cuttings and fragments, and amidst the fragments, stranded in a dark echoing chamber by a cold baronial fire, sits Kane's wretched second wife, endlessly assembling and reassembling large jigsaws of conventionally pretty landscapes. Her activity is pointless, her loneliness intense. Her problems, like her husband's, are insoluble.

  Kane's second wife, Susan Alexander, is said to have been modelled on Randolph Hearst's wife Marion Davies. In a photograph by Cecil Beaton, Davies appears with some other society ladies assembling the pieces of a jigsaw. The photograph was taken in St Donat's Castle in Wales, which Randolph Hearst had purchased in 1925. These pieces fit neatly together.

  Perec's jigsaw motif may be seen as the apotheosis of this conceit (though there are other ways of seeing it). The inspiration for Life: A User's Manual, translated by David Bellos, came to Perec, he claimed, while he was working on a huge jigsaw puzzle portraying the port of La Rochelle. His protagonist, Percival Bartlebooth (and the name has a deliberate echo of Melville's nay-saying Bartleby the Scrivener), is obsessed both by ports and by jigsaws. As the heir to a considerable fortune, he constructs a way of spending time that he trusts will occupy him fully until his death. Laboriously, over a period of some years, he undertakes to learn the art of painting watercolours, for which he has no natural aptitude whatsoever (just as Kane's wife had no natural aptitude as an opera singer). Then he sets off with his servant and valet Smautf to travel the world, painting the harbours of the many ports where his ship puts in. These paintings Smautf dispatches back to Paris, where they are hand-mounted on wood and hand-dissected into puzzles. Bartlebooth will then return to Paris to spend the second half of his life reconstructing these harbour scenes, which, when reconstructed, will be deliberately destroyed. It doesn't quite work out according to plan, but that i
s the plan.

  The massive and elaborate pointlessness of this project is like a parody of the wagers, voyages and contests to be found in the pages of Jules Verne, and indeed an epigraph from Verne's Michael Strogoff fronts the work: 'Look with all your eyes, look!' But the effect of this extraordinary work is in no way nihilistic; it shares the vigour and sense of adventure of Verne himself, and a richness of detail that recalls the work of Balzac and Zola.

  Those who believe that they are spending their lives usefully and progressively on humanitarian projects, or on bringing up their children, or on achieving wisdom, or on running a country, may well be appalled by the reflection of nothingness that Perec's long novel plays back, and which certainly constitutes part of its impact. Bartlebooth, crouched over his self-imposed and selfdestroying task, is making nothing. Is he an image of the artist? Is he a Beckett-inspired version of Everyman, trapped in a possibly heroic but ultimately ridiculous effort to delude himself that life is not void?

  Sitting over a jigsaw as an adult, one may well feel foolish. When I described my new subject to a fellow author from a grander background than mine, her initial distaste was patent. Jigsaws? Yes, she remembered them. As a child, when she had stayed in country houses with her parents, there had always been a jigsaw on the table in the morning room, and guests would toy with a piece or two in passing, as though they were on a luxury liner. Clearly this pursuit for her represented the fatuity of the underemployed, upper-class life.

  She herself is one of the most influential writers and journalists of her time, a modern superwoman, and to her the notion of time-wasting seemed alarming, perhaps even threatening. (For do we not all, towards the end of our lives, become redundant, however busy we may have been in our prime?) Our conversation moved on to other time fillers and killers, like knitting and needlework and crochet, which again she appeared to regard with anxiety and contempt. I am sure that, like Huizinga, she would have disapproved of bridge, with its connotations of middle- and upper-middle-class female idleness, although chess, being a more masculine and intellectual game, might perhaps have been more acceptable to her.