The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  The garden was too big for her. Without Joyce and Eddie she would never have kept it under any kind of control.

  One of the most extraordinary of my childhood memories is of the day when we were allowed to set the field behind the house on fire. The grass had grown high and dry and yellow, and we were let loose in it with a box of matches. Even at the time I thought this was odd, and now it seems unbelievable, but it was so. We ran around, igniting clump after clump, and watching the flames spread and the grass flicker and then scorch and then blacken. It was thrilling. It was arson and anarchy. The flames flickered in my sleeping vision all night long.

  Auntie Phyl was not as conventional as she looked. One day she told me about her walk to the village dump by the river. I remember that dump: it was, when I was a small child, full of archaeological treasures, like old marbles and patterned bits of broken crockery, but as the throwaway society flourished it began to receive larger and less attractive detritus. One day, walking the dog (at that time a bad-tempered Staffordshire bull terrier named Hanley), Auntie Phyl reported that she had discovered a large, brand-new brassiere, 'just my size', but that she had resisted taking it home with her. More worryingly, she also found a horse's head. 'I let Hanley have a bit of it,' she said, calmly. 'And when I took her back the next day she had a bit more.'

  I can't remember now whether I ever put this dump incident in a novel. I don't think I did. I don't think I found a place for it. When you can't remember whether or not you've written about something before, it's time to stop.

  XXXIII

  A tiny bag, a tiny box, a baby house, a doll's thimble, Tom Thumb, Thumbelina. A cherry stone carved with scenes from the Old Testament, a minuscule, medieval, ivory sphere containing minuscule ivory figures playing chess, an antique intaglio the size of a thumbnail cut with nymphs by a fountain. Miniaturization is an industry of its own, beloved of connoisseurs, collectors, craftsmen, souvenir manufacturers and tourists, and it is also well represented in the book trade. At the turn of the eighteenth century John Marshall marketed a variety of boxed books and cards, for which he favoured titles like 'The Doll's Library' or 'The Doll's Casket'. His Infant's Library, manufactured around 1800, is a model bookcase containing sixteen little volumes. Adults today remember with affection their Nutshell and Thimble Libraries and their boxed sets of Beatrix Potter. Alison Uttley, who loved the diminutive, possessed miniature volumes of Shakespeare, the Iliad and the Greek New Testament as well as dolls' teasets.

  Princes and popes and scholars of the Renaissance assembled Kunstkammer and cabinets and studioli housing paintings, miniatures, shells, sculptures, minerals, coins, jewels, games and scientific instruments, sometimes with the avowed ambition of bringing all the world's learning into a single space. The cabinet (like Auntie Phyl's kitchen table, but in a more orderly though sometimes in as random a manner) would contain everything. In 1782, a singular experiment in educational publishing on these principles was conducted by a German theologian named Johann Siegmund Stoy, who came from Nuremberg, the home of toys. He created a Picture Academy for the Young, which purported to offer a comprehensive view of the world's knowledge. It consisted of a compartmented box measuring seventeen by twelve inches, containing 468 copperplate engravings. It was an illustrated encyclopaedia in miniature, but an interactive one that you could rearrange using a complicated system of cross-references. This elaborate and unique object does not seem to have found any imitators in England, but the book dealers of St Paul's Churchyard appealed to some of the same instincts with their miniature pocket books and boxes, their curiosities and novelties. And Spilsbury, with his maps, put the world in a mahogany drawer.

  The theme of pictures-within-pictures, of gallery paintings showing walls thickly plastered with densely hung pictures, and floors stacked with plaster casts and curiosities, has a lasting attraction for jigsaw-puzzle manufacturers. The puzzle solver gets many paintings for the price of one, and the satisfaction of being able to complete each small area separately, and then join the pieces into a pre-designed whole.

  In 2006 the Courtauld Gallery mounted an exhibition based on a book titled The Theatre of Painting or Theatrum Pictorium, compiled by the Dutch painter and curator David Teniers the Younger. This handsome volume, published in 1660, is the first known illustrated catalogue of a collection of paintings, and it contains etchings and engravings of masterpieces by artists who include Titian, Raphael, Veronese and Giorgione. These works, which had been acquired by Archduke Leopold Wilhem of Habsburg, were copied from the originals in oil on wood (with one or two in oil on canvas) by Teniers, and Teniers' copies were in turn copied by engravers and etchers for the printed catalogue. This Borgesian replication provides food for speculation about the strange attractions of reproduction and miniaturization. Teniers was clearly captivated by the notion of pictures-within-pictures, and copies of copies, for he also painted large gallery paintings showing rooms crowded with wall-to-wall masterpieces being viewed by fashionable cognoscenti, idle spectators and the inevitable little dogs. His versions of the Old Masters are works of art in their own right, often adding a more sombre (and perhaps more secular) gloss to the Italian originals.

  The Courtauld exhibition also contained a small portrait of an oil-on-canvas Doge, which scholar Margaret Klinge has suggested may have been cut out of a larger gallery painting of grouped figures, now lost. It is, perhaps, the surviving missing piece of a now dispersed and irrecoverable jigsaw. And the archduke's collection was in itself a collection of dispersed pieces, assembled from the spoils of earlier collectors forced to sell because of wars and disasters. Teniers captured and preserved all these works doubly and trebly, in a complex study in refraction.

  Just as the Teas-with-Hovis plates or the kilted officer with his turbaned Sikh servant in the original Camp Coffee advertisement offer a vista of diminishing but perpetual self-reproduction, so paintings of cabinets and galleries offer an endless journey into an ever smaller and more toy-like world. This is more disquieting than reassuring.

  Susan Stewart, in her essay on souvenirs and collections (On Longing), suggests that 'The miniature, linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination.' This is not very elegantly phrased, but it is true, and it clearly connects with the world of Alison Uttley as well as with the cabinets of popes. Alison Uttley, as we know, was a supreme manipulator.

  My father liked Camp Coffee, and we always had a bottle of this dark-brown syrup on the go in the kitchen cupboard. He maintained that if you didn't think of it as coffee, it was very pleasant. Sometimes we drank it at elevenses, but more often we used it to flavour cakes and custards. I like chicory in most of its forms, but it's a long time since I tried a cup of Camp.

  Georges Perec was inspired by the Camp advertisement. In La Vie: Mode d'Emploi he describes a case of whisky by the name of Stanley's Delight, the label of which

  shows an explorer of white race, wearing a pith helmet but dressed in Scottish national dress: a predominantly yellow and red kilt, a broad tartan over his shoulder, a studded leather belt supporting a fringed sporran, and a small dirk slipped into his sock-top; he strides at the head of a column of 9 blacks each carrying on his head a case of Stanley's Delight, with a label depicting the same scene.

  Camp has now changed its logo; it has been updated for modern times, with master and servant sitting side by side in egalitarian racial harmony. Robert Opie, scholar of advertising (whose museum contains a similar whisky advertisement for an imperial Edwardian brand of which I have never heard), claims that the new Camp logo is not much liked in India. Indians, he says, prefer the traditional.

  Georges Perec was preoccupied by commercial art and advertising copy, by replicas, forgeries and transformations. He had worked in market research and he knew a great deal about the business of advertising. His first novel, Things, was intended, he said, to explore the way 'th
e language of advertising is reflected in us', and his two young protagonists, Sylvie and Jerome, drop-out students who 'had become market researchers by necessity and not by choice', are enthralled by the world of contemporary objects of desire. So is Perec himself, though in a slightly different mode.

  La Vie: Mode d'Emploi is packed with detailed descriptions not only of promotional blotters and jigsaw puzzles, but also of elaborately faked works of art, mechanical toys and many kinds of kitsch. Engravings feature conspicuously, for engraving is the art of producing multiples, although Perec is equally interested (as was Baudrillard) in the concept of the unique object, the unicum, or uniquity – a concept inseparable from the twinned concept of the forgery and the fake. He would have been impressed by the achievements of the Greenhalgh family of forgers, based in Bolton, whose first effort was an implausible silver medieval reliquary containing a wooden fragment of the True Cross, which they claimed to have unearthed in 1989 in a park in Preston; they went on to hoodwink several distinguished institutions with their Assyrian and Egyptian antiquities. Their finest coup was a ceramic faun allegedly by Gauguin for which the Chicago Institute of Art paid good money. Shaun Greenhalgh made all these objects in his garden shed.

  One of the many stories in Perec's maze of stories describes a more elaborate hoax. It concerns the duping of Bartlebooth's great-uncle James Sherwood, a Lancashire-born druggist who emigrated to America where he made a colossal fortune in Boston from ginger-based cough pastilles. He then attempted to alleviate the neurasthenia and lethargy of excessive wealth by collecting unica. 'In the jargon of the rare book, antique and curio trade,' Perec tells us, 'an unicum, as its name implies, is an object which is the only one of its kind.' This rather vague definition, he says, covers several classes of object, which include a monstrous double bass for two musicians, an animal species like the tendrac Dasogale fontoynanti from Madagascar, a postage stamp or engraving of which only one example survives, the pen that signed the Treaty of Versailles, the boxing gloves Dempsey wore to defeat Carpentier on 21 July 1921, or Rita Hayworth's glove from the film Gilda. 'Scepticism and passion,' he informs us, 'are the two traits of unica-lovers.'

  The victim of an immensely lengthy and elaborate hoax, involving forged documents, hired actors, fake scenery, and a charade of vendors, Sherwood is brought to believe that he is on the track of the Holy Vase in which Joseph of Arimathaea captured the blood springing from the wounds of Christ. He purchases for $1 million a vase that turns out to be 'a slightly dissimulated gugglet of sorts, bought at a souk in Nabeul', but doubt is cast on the success of this deception when it appears that Sherwood is less downcast by the loss of a third of his fortune than might have been expected. Had he enjoyed the play-acting more than he would have enjoyed the acquisition of a real treasure, and regarded it as 'a powerful palliative for his melancholy', or had he paid the syndicate of forgers in faked twenty-dollar bills? Had he paid for a fake with fakes? The questions remain unanswered.

  Perec's densely packed storehouse of a novel is stuffed with descriptions of pictures-within-pictures, with marquetry and mosaics, stained-glass windows, scrimshaw and globular glass snowstorms, patterned tiles and parquet floors, maps and plaster casts of Beethoven, inflatable dolls and patent ashtrays, paperweights and biscuit tins, souvenirs and old postcards and other items of bric-a-brac. Perec also lists a large monastery transported stone by stone from France to Connecticut and a simulacrum of Chartres cathedral constructed out of lard. The prose grows lyrical as it evokes, sublimely, 'a ceiling divided into octagonal sections, decorated in gold and silver, and more exquisitely worked than any jewel', and, bathetically, 'a linoleum mosaic of jade and azure and cinnabar rhomboids'. The novel is an unparalleled celebration of mimicry, artistry, craftsmanship, detritus and all the half-arts that have ever been invented, and it seems to me to contain some clues to the very heart of memory and of my personal past.

  Which is odd, when I consider how different my life has been from Perec's, how long it took me to discover his work, and how hostile I was when young to most of the French avant-garde. I read Sartre and de Beauvoir eagerly, but I disliked the nouveau roman when I first encountered it at Cambridge (although I liked the cinema versions, such as Last Year at Marienbad) and the very thought of writing a book without the letter E irritated me. I thought this was frivolity itself. Games-playing! Games-playing! Life was too short for stuff like that, and books were too important.

  I am a convert. I eat my words. Perec was a deeply serious man.

  My interest in his work, however, although intense, remains selective. I greatly admire Life: A User's Manual, with its densely physical evocation of life in an apartment house in Paris, its cellular design, its cleverly overlapping stories, its obsessions, its closely observed descriptions of jigsaw practice and jigsaw mania, its sociological acuity, its multitude of 'things'. (Was he influenced, I wonder, by Zola's pullulating apartment-block novel, Pot-Bouille?) But I can't follow (or perhaps I mean I can't be bothered to follow) the structural use of the chess problem known as the Knight's Tour, which apparently involves moving a knight around the sixty-four squares of a chessboard without landing twice on the same square, and I can't grasp his employment of the Graeco-Latin bi-square. (I was unfortunately allowed to drop mathematics at the age of twelve, and that must be my excuse.)

  I love Perec's lists, but I don't like some of his word games. I can't take the over-elaboration of the homophone experiments in which he phonetically distorts a name or an English proverb. Here are a couple of ludicrous examples: Loup de wigwam: bêtes aux veines (wigwam wolf: animal of the veins) becomes Ludwig van Beethoven, and All's well that ends well becomes Alice vêle; Satan, soûl, hèle. James Hadley Chase as J'aime ça, les laides chaises works a bit better, but even that's not a very convincing correspondence.

  On the other hand, I very much like two homophones I came across recently in Gregory Benford's introduction to a translation of Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, and I think Verne's admirer Perec would have liked them too. Benford, describingVerne's influence on other science-fiction writers, writes:

  Verne even influenced those who didn't quite know who he was. Isaac Asimov once told me that when he was still a young science fiction fan he found himself listening to a lecture about a great foreign writer, a master of fantastic literature. But Asimov couldn't recognise the name. Giving the French pronunciation, the lecturer said 'Surely you must know Zuell Pfern', and described From the Earth to the Moon. Asimov replied in his Brooklyn accent, 'Oh, you mean Jewels Voine!

  That's a Perec kind of anecdote. 'Jewels Voine' is beautiful. Hyman Kaplan couldn't have put it better.

  Wilful experiment used to annoy me. I was a Mimesis woman, brought up on the great Eric Auerbach and his magisterial version of what he calls 'The Representation of Reality in Western Literature', which he wrote in exile during the Second World War in Istanbul. (His concluding chapter, titled 'The Brown Stocking', discusses To the Lighthouse and James Ramsay cutting out his refrigerator.) I gained much and I missed much through this bias. I am catching up now.

  I have even come to like the visual artists connected with Oulipo (they sometimes call themselves Oupeinpo) who have invented ingenious games with well-known images, fracturing them, swivelling them, slicing them, restructuring them and turning them inside out. I used to think this kind of experiment akin to a schoolboy's painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa or adding arms to the Venus of Milo and thinking it funny, but, again, I've changed my mind. Their efforts include reversing the image of Ingres's Grande Odalisque by turning her around on her couch in sixty-four slices so that she faces in the opposite direction, and creating new paintings from composite Old Master sources in elaborate collages. Some of the results are surprisingly attractive. (They claim to distance themselves from the collages of Surrealism by introducing technical constraints, but in my view this distancing is in itself something of a technicality.)

  One of their proposals, the Module Oupeinpien
Universel (MOU), devised at a meeting of Oulipo on 11 January 1997, is for a jigsaw described as a 'puzzlomorphic trammel-net, all of whose pieces have an identical shape', which can be permuted indefinitely. 'Every painting in the world (and all its reproductions), every printed page and poster, the entirety of existing images could thus be cut up using the MOU, and reassembled in a near-infinity of combinations.' Tristan Bastit (who is a real painter, not a fantasy figure) suggested creating 'a Potential History of Art (text and illustrations) on the MOU principle by cutting up the 4,008 pages of the Universal History of Art (in 10 volumes)'. This could be achieved, he said calmly, with the help of a jigsaw punch.

  XXXIV

  Johann Siegmund Stoy, inventor of the boxed picture academy, appears to have been an isolated and eccentric figure, whereas the Oulipeans thrived (and still thrive) on interchange. Perec, who has written so powerfully of the experience of half-crazed loneliness, was, paradoxically, for much of his life a gregarious and clubbable man, with many close friendships. Most of the early children's publishers were similarly interconnected, though by patterns of kinship rather than friendship; they came from closely knit family businesses, which intermarried and created long-lived dynasties. F. J. Harvey Darton, who chronicled the rise of these family groups, came from one of the most powerful; he was the great-great-grandson of William Darton, the founder of a durable publishing venture. The Dartons were Quakers, whereas the Spilsburys ( John, the puzzle maker, and his older brother Jonathan) had leanings towards the Moravian Church, of which Jonathan became a member. An educational purpose informed both families, although John, with his dissected puzzles and printed kerchiefs, clearly had a commercial instinct as sound as John Newbery's.