The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  This unworldly and outdated reproach is very much a Quaker attitude, and one that was drummed into us at the Mount School. Advertisement is wrong, we were taught. We must not put ourselves forward or boast about our achievements. Self-praise is no praise. It is curious, in the light of this indoctrination, that so many Quakers became such good businessmen, and that so many Quaker family names are so well known as brand names. In York, we were surrounded by Rowntrees and Cadburys and Terrys.

  I often think of my father and his Sunday gin and tonic. He was a good Quaker, and I do not think the Friends of Suffolk held his drinking habits against him. He liked a gin and tonic before his Sunday lunch. And so do I.

  Auntie Phyl very rarely had a glass of wine or sherry. She wondered 'what we all saw in alcohol'. (Some of us, and I speak for myself, saw what we saw in it all too well.) She kept a half-bottle of whisky 'for medicinal purposes' in her immensely cluttered kitchen, but it stayed on top of the dresser for years. She thought an aspirin was a better pick-me-up than whisky when she felt offcolour, and of course she was right. My mother, who made mock of her primitive faith in aspirin, thought it an old wives' remedy and, to be truthful, so did I. But I was wrong and my mother was wrong. Now I take my aspirin daily, like nearly everybody over sixty, on doctor's orders.

  At her eightieth birthday celebration at Jack Straw's Castle in Hampstead, Auntie Phyl accepted a glass of champagne. I have a fine photograph of her, taken by one of her nephews-in-law, looking happy and festive with a glass in her hand. That was a good lunch party. Auntie Phyl's reply to the toasts to her health was a little frisky, but none the worse for that.

  Did Joyce ever persuade her to join her in her half a pint of shandy, to accompany the scampi and chips in the village pub? I think not. I think she stuck to lemonade. But I do remember one Hampstead Christmas when I was uncharacteristically tempted to side with Auntie Phyl's disapproval of hard drinking.

  An ageing acquaintance of mine, who could without injustice be described as a whisky priest, had been for some years angling for an invitation to join us for a Christmas drink. I had resisted his hints, because I knew how it would turn out. This vicar was notorious both for his heavy drinking and for his intellectual and social pretensions, and he had taken it into his head that a drink with me and my family of an evening during the Christmas holidays would provide him with a memorable feast of literary gossip and highbrow chat. In vain, year after year, had I tried to warn him that it wouldn't be as he expected. He would not take no for an answer. So I gave in, and round he came, in his cassock, and there he discovered my mother, my father and my aunt, all firmly settled into their deep armchairs and unwilling to give. I poured him a whisky, and doubtless poured a stiff one for myself, plus a gin and tonic for my father. My mother may have had a glass of wine or sherry, and my aunt a soft drink. My father probably made some polite small talk, and my mother may have done the same. They could find no common ground of any sort. And Auntie Phyl sat there, like a rock, watching the priest as he dissolved into desperate incoherence, dropping the names of people most of whom we did not know. And if we did by chance happen to know them, or know of them, we despised them. He gaffed on, regardless, and I refilled his glass. It was not a happy hour. I don't know whether he noticed how badly his banter was being received. He was drink hardened.

  I thought he would never leave. By the time that I was finally able to thrust him into his great black crow's overcoat and manoeuvre him down the front steps, I was exhausted. I went back into the drawing room, where Auntie Phyl was still sitting, unmoved. Then she produced one of her rare spoken judgements.

  'I don't think it's right for a vicar to drink like that,' she said, her face expressing generations of inherited, chapel-going disapproval. And, as I staggered off to cook their supper, I felt that this time I was on her side.

  XXXV

  A year or two ago I went with my daughter Becky to see some Tibetan monks as they began to make a sand mandala in the heart of London. They piped brightly coloured sands into an elaborate and preordained traditional pattern laid out on a large low table in Asia House in New Cavendish Street. For a week they would slowly and patiently pipe the sands until the image was complete, and then, on the last day, when it was finished, they would blow it away. I would have liked to have seen the Day of Destruction, which surely had a metaphysical significance, but I could not make the date. And I could not comprehend the aesthetic of the mandala. The colours were too bright and garish for my taste. I mentioned this to my daughter, who replied reprovingly, 'Garishness is not a Buddhist concept.'

  I connected the idea of the mandala with the jigsaw, and, indeed, that is probably why we went to see it. I was interested in the ephemerality of the object, an object made with its end already in mind. Is not the act of completion of a jigsaw often accompanied by the sense of disappointment that Southey experienced when he had finished pricking a playbill – a 'sort of dissatisfied and damping feeling'? We build sandcastles, knowing that we or the tide will destroy them. Is that too in some way part of the satisfaction?

  Jigsaws may be connected with depression. They serve the depressed, and they certainly flourished during the Depression.

  Jigsaws, like tatting and netting and knitting and scrimshaw, are time killers, and when technology had advanced sufficiently for the mass production of cheap cardboard puzzles, they became the occupation of the unemployed. They were cheap to buy, cheap to assemble, and they filled in the empty days and empty evenings. Alan Sillitoe, whose family was hard hit by unemployment in the 1930s and sank into near-destitution, records passing time as a ten-year-old with his sisters doing a jigsaw. (His boyhood fascination with maps and codes continues, but he says his interest in jigsaws quickly waned.) And in America, a curious boom in puzzle manufacturing was to follow the stock market crash of October 1929. In the early 1930s, artists and illustrators had, like so much of the population, been suffering from the country's lack of spending power for luxury items. In America, two decades after Harvey Darton's description of the plight of British illustrators, artists had been suffering in much the same manner, until suddenly a reprieve came in the form of a nationwide craze for weekly jigsaws. This curious little story illustrates the randomness of fashion.

  According to Chris McCann, author of Master Pieces: The Art History of Jigsaw Puzzles (1998), the miracle began in 1931, when

  a customer asked the Einson-Freeman company in Long Island, NY, to make a new product, a die-cut puzzle that the customer could give away with toothbrushes. The puzzle was an outstanding success. Other customers liked the idea, and more orders followed. Then, the next year, somebody thought people might actually pay money for a cardboard puzzle, and began making them for sale. They were distributed one at a time, once a week. This event marked the beginning of the weekly puzzle, and the puzzle industry was never the same again.

  In a similar kind of promotion, mini-jigsaws were given away in England in the mid-1930s to any customer who bought two bars of Knight's Castile soap.

  The twentieth-century connection of jigsaws with advertising is in itself a bit of a mystery. The British-born artist Derek Boshier, born in 1937, painted several paintings showing jigsaw-shaped pieces and cut-out paper men during his pop-art phase in the 1960s, and seems to have intended them as a satiric commentary on the power of 'the culture of commodities' – a theme also dear at this period to Perec. Identi-Kit Man, in Tate Britain, shows giant toothbrushes and a man whose right arm is composed of a giant tube of red-and-white-striped toothpaste. His body is punched by a jigsaw-piece-shaped hole, and other jigsaw shapes float elsewhere in the frame. The Tate's caption reminds us that the first advertisement ever shown on British TV was for toothpaste – in 1955, for Gibbs SR. The jigsaw shapes are instantly and uncannily recognizable. Do they suggest that we are all composed of nothing but little interlocking blocks of manufactured desire?

  Chris McCann claims that the 1930s spin-off jigsaw boom in America created hundreds of new companies and
rescued many commercial artists, at least temporarily, from destitution. By early 1933, over $1 million a week was being spent on jigsaws, and a whole new art form of jigsaw art, a new version of calendar art, was in demand. This was the 'Golden Age of Puzzle Art'. McCann presents many highly coloured images, giving the current market price of each (which varies from $5 to $75 and more), and lists brief biographies of the artists. McCann's account of the boom and what he describes as the subsequent 'Great Jigsaw Puzzle Panic' is as highly coloured as the paintings themselves. The panic was caused by excess demand, which resulted in December 1932 in a forty-eight-hour jigsaw 'famine', followed by increased production during which six million puzzles were sold weekly. This hysteria, we are told, came to an abrupt end when Franklin Roosevelt closed the banks for nearly two weeks, and people began to think more seriously about how to spend their money. The lust for puzzles was over, and the jigsaw began to go the way of the Harlequinade and the diabolo.

  People suffered during the famine of the Depression without their daily jigsaw fix, just as crossword puzzlers today suffer without a daily crossword. Playwright Ronald Harwood and his wife Natasha do a crossword every day and feel deprived if they can't get hold of one. And there are many who are still addicted to jigsaws. Theatre producer Michael Codron does a jigsaw, or part of a jigsaw, every day. Actor Sir Donald Sinden is proud of his three-dimensional jigsaw version of the Duomo in Florence, constructed while he was working on a film that was set in the Uffizi. The film was never shown, but his puzzle survives. Perhaps the intermittent nature and the time-wasting and hanging about of theatrical employment encourage actors to take up these time-filling pursuits. Maroussia Frank, wife of the late Ian Richardson, is famous throughout the profession for her formidable Green Room skills at Scrabble, and many actors, less competitively, take up crochet or knitting or rug-making. For many years I cherished a circular rug decorated with the signs of the Zodiac pegged for me by a walk-on friend at Stratford-upon-Avon.

  It was Michael Codron who disposed of my theory that most adults who do jigsaws were introduced to them by kind aunts in their childhood. He says that one Christmas he bought a jigsaw of Canterbury cathedral in a village shop in Kent as a stocking-filler for a friend, but the friend showed no interest in it, so he took pity on it and did it himself. And thus, already well into middle age, he caught the habit. He did all the cathedrals, one after another, and then embarked on other motifs. Now he says he usually does one a day. When he has finished a jigsaw, he needs somebody to admire his handiwork before he puts it back in its box, and then, after two or three days, it goes up to the attic, where he has thousands stored away. He says he likes making order out of chaos, and he likes the solipsism of living inside the world of the jigsaw. He was full of advice about where to buy puzzles. Some manufacturers I knew, others I had never heard of. At his prompting I have now ordered more jigsaws than I can ever finish.

  He is the kind of client who keeps the puzzle manufacturers in business. He makes his way through the catalogues.

  XXXVI

  The artwork of the American 'Golden Age' of the compulsive 1930s in Master Pieces is extraordinary, and some of it is repulsive. It deserves a page or two to itself. The subjects are largely traditional and familiar – hunting scenes, dogs, cottage gardens, ships at sea, life in the American West, children blowing bubbles and clutching kittens. We recognize reproductions from Rubens and Hobbema, Joshua Reynolds and Millais, Rosa Bonheur and Norman Rockwell. Thomas Moran, famous for his vast views of Colorado, is well represented. But many of the paintings are by artists otherwise unknown or little documented. The phrase 'the archives were silent on this illustrator' recurs frequently in the biographical listing, but nevertheless there are some intriguing brief lives here, and Chris McCann, an energetic man of multiple talents (which he has employed variously in management with General Electric, in computing and in community theatre), has clearly enjoyed his detective work.

  A few of the artists, like R. Atkinson Fox (1860–1935), now have a committed following of fans and collectors. Fox, who emigrated from Toronto to the United States to pursue a highly successful commercial career, is represented in McCann's book by hunting dogs, a sailing ship, a girl with a pony, a principal-boy-style female pirate with magnificent legs, and a painting in which a maiden in an orange-and-blue Oriental robe stands precariously on a window ledge with a large bowl of chrysanthemums, overlooking a brightblue lake, some snowy Rocky Mountains and an orange sunrise.

  Robert Atkinson Fox's career trajectory is more conventional than that of Abd'el Kader (1852–1940), said to have been born in Germany, the grandson of Hussein Pasha, the Dey of Algiers. He abandoned his life in Europe as an opera singer, signed up with Oscar Hammerstein to sing in America, was injured in a train crash, lost all his money, and ended up 'living free in part of an airplane hangar at Municipal Airport in Atlantic City, where he painted and gave art lessons for the next eleven years'. His jigsaw work is represented in McCann by two rustic cottage images, one with snow, the other with a small dog and lupins, and a village scene of sheep going to pasture. His signature, we are told, has 'always fascinated and mystified collectors', and, if half of this story is true, one can see why.

  Some of the pictures of children are, by today's more fastidious standards, pornographic. Mabel Rollins Harris's Look Who's Here shows two small, fat girls, one naked except for shoes and socks, the other wearing shoes, socks and vest, gazing out of a window at two plumply suggestive lovebirds. In her Dinner for Six another little girl is lifting her skirt to show her knickers as she feeds a family of ducks. Nothing is known of Mabel Rollins Harris, not even her dates.

  The oddest jigsaw in the whole collection is a bizarre work by an English painter, Briton Rivière (1840–1920), titled Daniel in the Lion's Den. This shows a white-haired Daniel, dressed in a red, gold-embroidered caftan, looking away from the artist with his hands clasped (and presumably shackled) behind his back, calmly confronting a group of seven orange lions. The lions crouch and snarl and lour at him in a surge of seething orange. Bones litter the foreground. We are not told when it was manufactured as a puzzle, but Rivière died in 1920 so we know he did not live to enjoy the profits of the American Golden Age. The lions may have been pirated, and they are very ill painted, with strange facial expressions, caught between cringe and attack.

  It is surprising to learn that Briton Rivière RA was considered one of the finest of nineteenth-century British painters of animals, second in reputation only to Landseer. (His most famous work is a picture of a barefoot Dickensian waif lying by a milestone and clutching a large dog, titled His Only Friend. This, too, must once have been made into a jigsaw.) It is unwise to judge the quality of a painting from a reproduction of a photograph of a jigsaw of a painting, and it would be interesting, though perhaps not sufficiently interesting, to try to track down this peculiar and arresting work, to see what it looks like in its original state.

  As a jigsaw illustration, Daniel in the Lion's Den is both startling and memorable. It is so very orange.

  Alan Sillitoe, in his late novel The Broken Chariot, invokes the art of Briton Rivière, who goes largely unmentioned these days. His novelist hero, sitting in a cheap rented room in south London, is inspired by a Rivière reproduction from a second-hand album of prints, which shows, curiously, Phoebus Apollo driving the chariot of the sun, which is drawn not by the more customary horses but by a 'sullen pack of lions in long shafts gnashing their teeth'. This reproduction, Sillitoe's hero reflects, provides 'another stitch in the tapestry of his progress'. It would have been better, from the point of view of my thesis on the ubiquity of the jigsaw, if he'd called it 'another piece of the jigsaw puzzle', but it's near enough. Tapestries and jigsaws connect. Rivière studied his lions in the London Zoo, and Sillitoe says he bought the reproduction he describes in his novel from a print-seller in North Kensington.

  The phenomenon of the American jigsaw as a collector's item, regardless of its aesthetic merit, is well doc
umented by McCann, who appeals for information about 'America's Ten Most Wanted Puzzle Artists', about whom 'little or nothing is known'. These are listed as J. Adams, Edwin Bolenbaugh, C. B. Colby, Thomas Crane, Anthony Cucchi, Arthur Frahm, Frederick D. Ogden, Irene and Laurette Patten and Hy Whitroy, and their subjects include sporting pictures, children at play, historic monuments, fat babies, comic genre scenes and Santa Claus in an aeroplane – this last a very popular item. (Georges Perec would have loved this list.) Why these are more wanted than some other artists about whom the archives are silent is not immediately evident, but would no doubt become so if one allowed oneself to be led down this path. Are Irene and Laurette Patten sisters? Why not? And is Hy or Henry Whitroy a pseudonym of the prolific R. Atkinson Fox, reserved perhaps for his more ambitious and less vulgar work?

  Not all jigsaw artists sign their work, but many do. I had not known this. Nor had I known that Greek and Roman mosaic artists sometimes signed their work. I suppose everybody else in the world knew this, but I didn't. The creator of the magnificent mosaic representing a stag hunt in the House of the Abduction of Helen at Pella in Greece, dating from the late fourth century BC, is signed by someone called Gnosis. Gnosis epoesen. 'Gnosis made this.' He wrote his name in white pebbles. That to me is very unlikely, and very poignant.

  XXXVII

  Anon-geographical, quasi-educational apologia for the doing of jigsaws lies in the 'Old Master' theory, which also raises the question of signature and copyright. Jigsaws reproducing famous works of art may now be purchased on line, as well as in many museum and gallery shops. (In the Matisse gallery in Nice in 2005, you could buy a jigsaw of Matisse's Dance, although you could not then find a copy of Hilary Spurling's biography of Matisse.) And there is no question but that in 'doing' a famous painting, as Jill Shefrin said in her letter of 23 September 2006, you learn a great deal about it. 'Assembling a puzzle of, say, a Brueghel painting, reveals all sorts of details.'