The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  The story of the True Cross is one of the more incomprehensible and incoherent legends of the Middle Ages. It comes from a compilation of saints' lives and ecclesiastical commentary by Jacopo Voragine titled The Golden Legend, or the Legenda Aurea, which was once immensely popular; it was Caxton's best-selling title. (The story of the Holy Grail, in comparison, is straightforward.) The legend of the True Cross is most famously depicted in the murals of Piero della Francesca in Arezzo, in which we see Seth placing in the mouth of the dead Adam a twig from the tree of Good and Evil, which becomes the wood of the True Cross on which Christ was crucified. Further images show the meeting, centuries later, of the Queen of Sheba and Solomon, as she kneels and prays on a bridge made of the wood; the Dream of Constantine presaging victory in battle; a miracle in which the cross restores a youth to life; the recapture of the cross from the Persians by the Greek emperor Heraclius; and other related or possibly unrelated scenes. I am indebted for this précis (but not for any errors in it) to Helen Langdon's account in her 1984 guide to Italy, where she describes the frescoes as 'hauntingly still and grave', their beauty 'dependent on the masterly arrangement of geometric shapes and cool tones ... and on the dramatic power of expression and gesture'. Piero della Francesco's murals are of great dignity, unlike the medieval tourist trade, which thrived on fragments and splinters, but you may purchase them, of course, in irresistible postcard format. And you can buy his Madonna del Duca da Montefeltro as a jigsaw.

  We love replicas, and replicas of replicas, and we did so long before Jean Baudrillard came up with his theories of a simulacrum society. We like to take something home with us, to prove we have been there, to remind us of what we saw, to keep us in touch with the spirit of the place. We know they are not authentic, but we don't care. Historian Tom Holland writes in The Author (Summer 2007) that he treats himself to some antiquities to accompany each work on which he embarks: coins issued by Julius Caesar for research on the Roman Republic, a crusader's ring for the Middle Ages. But, his means being limited, he has also acquired a supplement of tat.

  Mostly, this consists of trinkets that have been flogged to me over the years outside a wide variety of archaeological sites. In fact, I like knowing they are wholly without value: it makes me less nervous about re-arranging them ... Among the treasures currently on display are a plastic Caesar bought from a rip-off merchant outside the Roman Forum; a fridge-magnet in the form of a Viking from Uppsala; and a statue of Artemis from Ephesus.

  He follows in an old tradition. Wealthy tourists taking the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century purchased real antiquities and commissioned original paintings and casts, but they also set in motion a vogue for miniature and easily transported copies of famous sights and objects. From the eighteenth century onwards the Piazza di Spagna in Rome was surrounded by the workshops and studios of artists and craftsmen and mosaicists, making snuffboxes, jewellery and other 'collectibles' for the tourist trade. As an Italian historian commented, 'Ladies now wear in tiny finger-rings the largest monuments of ancient and Christian Rome.'You could buy brooches decorated with St Peter's or the Coliseum, or a fan showing the tomb of Cecilia Metella, or a ring displaying the Temple of Vespasian, or a perfume bottle of green lava adorned with micromosaic views of ruins and doves.

  Goethe in his Italian Journey recorded his dislike of the degradation of classical art into 'snuffboxes and bracelets', but the fashion had caught on and continues to flourish. (Goethe's taste in knickknacks was not impeccable: in 1793 he tried to persuade his mother to buy a toy guillotine for his son August, but the wise woman robustly refused.) As with little pretty pocket books, the miniaturization is part of the attraction. Edith Wharton, whose wealthy American parents did the Grand Tour in the 1840s (and happened to run into a revolution in Paris in 1848) were avid collectors of bric-a-brac, mercilessly described by their daughter. In Wharton's short story, 'The Old Maid', she evokes the rosewood whatnots adorned with tropical shells, with 'feldspar vases, an alabaster model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, a pair of obelisks made of scraps of porphyry and serpentine picked up by the young couple in the Roman Forum'.

  Goethe was seriously and scientifically interested in stones and mineralogy, and on his travels could not resist collecting as he went. Edith Wharton's parents, the Joneses, were more like magpies. Mark Twain was a magpie malgré lui; he didn't mean to buy the stuff, but he did. The marketing and the ubiquity of souvenirs overwhelmed his better judgement. In Switzerland he resisted the Lion of Lucerne rendered in wood, ivory, ebony, marble, chalk, sugar or chocolate, and grew very tired of looking at wooden quails, chickens and chamois, but he succumbed to buying three wooden clocks, which he thought would be 'pretty enough, no doubt, when I get them home'. This was despite his long-held aversion to the inane, silly and aggravating cuckoo clock. The merchandise was too much for him.

  Even Wordsworth, that touchstone of the authentic, was intrigued and half attracted by souvenirs and mechanical toys, by 'imitations fondly made in plain Confession of Man's weakness, and his loves'. He was not above taking note of models of the Firth of Forth and Edinburgh Castle and microscopic views of Rome and Tivoli and the Temple of Sibyl. He saw the parts as parts, but with a feeling of the whole. (That's his own phrase, from The Prelude.) He condoned our weaknesses.

  Amongst Auntie Phyl's jumble of jewellery and curios are an inch-long Eiffel Tower on a chain and a tiny tortoiseshell book the size of my thumbnail. It's not really a book, and it's probably not really made of tortoiseshell, but it has a spine, and a metal clasp, and into it is set a tiny spyhole not much larger than a pinhead. If you look through this little spyhole, you can see, astonishingly, a large view of the Marine Parade of Margate, complete with Edwardian ladies in hats walking along the promenade. How did they get in there? I never saw this object or this view when I was a child, and maybe Auntie Phyl never knew they were there. Perhaps the little book had belonged to Grandma Bloor. It is sheer chance that I noticed the spyhole, and put it to my eye. The ladies had walked unseen for a century in their hermetic seaside kingdom before I saw them.

  I wonder if it was purchased as a souvenir of an outing to Margate. Mablethorpe, not Margate, was the favoured resort of the East Midlands, but I suppose my grandparents could have ventured to Margate. They loved touring with their motorbike and sidecar, and they purchased hundreds of postcards to mark their travels through the Lakes and the West Country. They kept them in a large tin toffee box from Doncaster, which accompanied my aunt to the care home in Newark, and is now in the custody of my sister Helen.

  Postcard views were, and remain, the cheapest form of memento, and old postcards now have dedicated collectors. Large art jigsaws are more expensive, but the jigsaw has been reinvented as a postcard, and is on sale in this format in many museum shops. You can buy greetings-card-sized jigsaws of Michelangelo and Van Gogh in galleries throughout Europe. In the shop of the Gilbert Collection in Somerset House in London, you can buy a little 'Post-Puzzle' of the collection's famous micromosaic tigress, complete with an envelope for posting, or more elaborate and expensive, wooden, seventy-five-piece jigsaws of the micromosaic 'Ponte Rotto and Tiber Island' or of the design on a Florentine pietra dura table top. As micromosaics and pietra dura tables are in themselves a kind of jigsaw, involving the fitting of small pieces together to make a larger image, we have here the manufacture of jigsaws of jigsaws. Sir Arthur Gilbert and his wife Rosalinde, the founders of this idiosyncratic collection, were very keen on dissections and resections, on patterns and shapes. The Lewins had jigsaw eyes, and the Gilberts had mosaic eyes.

  Charles Saumarez Smith, in an essay on 'The Future of the Museum' (A Companion to Museum Studies, 2006), points out that 'shops are becoming more like museums – places for visual and aesthetic display – while museums are becoming more like shops ... as shops become more creative, more historical, and more aesthetically suggestive, museums are driven by their financial circumstances to become more aggressively commercial.' It is claimed that more peo
ple visit the shop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York than visit the museum itself. Some gallery shops now sell specially commissioned objects, published by a gallery imprint. The Tate, which in the 1960s enjoyed everincreasing sales of postcards (particularly of Salvador Dali, always the people's choice), established a new gallery shop in 1972, and in 1995 a new company called Tate Gallery Publishing was set up, owned by Trustees, with the profits covenanted to the gallery. The Science Museum recently opened a retail outlet in Selfridges. Nick Prior, in an essay on 'Postmodern Restructurings' (A Companion to Museum Studies, 2006), notes that whereas 'Once upon a time, the stands at museum shops sold postcards and posters, a few books and some table mats', now 'merchandise covers everything from film, opera and poetry to fashionable clothes, catalogues and kitchenware'. He doesn't mention jigsaws, but he could have done.

  I once bought a really disappointing jigsaw in a National Trust shop, I think at Stourhead. It's one of the very few I've never finished, and I failed to finish it not because it was too difficult, but because it was too dull. It represented, as I remember, an eighteenth-century painting of some prize specimen of livestock – a large cow, or perhaps a bull, of an ancient breed, with small legs and a large square bulk of body. I thought it would be fun to do, and even mildly educational, but it wasn't. After wasting some time on its enormous flank, I gave up. It was not interesting enough to finish.

  This was an instructive experience. I didn't take against the creature, as I took against Venus of Urbino, but I didn't think it repaid attention. Maybe it was badly cut. I can't now recall the shape of the pieces. An expert might well have blamed the cut. And maybe it was a pig, not a cow. A huge sow, like the sow at the Home Farm in Blue Anchor. Maybe that is why I took against it.

  XXXIX

  Jigsaws have now been with us for so long and have become so much a part of our way of thinking that it is hard to know how we did without them. The jigsaw as metaphor and simile is everywhere. It is used as a logo by Microsoft Word and by the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and it pops up on the screen of the Barclays Bank Hole in the Wall. Those instantly recognizable little shapes, dubbed in friendly fashion by Perec 'les bonhommes' (the little chaps), 'les croix de Lorraine' (the double crosses) and 'les croix' (the cross-bars), are familiar to us all, although they post-date Spilsbury and belong to the age of the fretsaw and the cardboard punch.

  Clothes shops and furniture designers have adopted the word 'jigsaw' as a brand name. I wrote some of this text while wearing a Jigsaw cardigan given to me for Christmas by my son and daughter-in-law. Kiran Desai uses the word as a verb in her novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006), where she speaks of jigsawing 'cups, saucers, teapot, milk, sugar, strainer, Marie and Delite biscuits' on a tea tray. (Is there a suggestion here that jigsaws, like Marie biscuits, are part of a threatened and fading Anglophile world? I think not.)

  Every day a journalist or broadcaster uses the word in one context or another – in the space of a few weeks we had the avian flu jigsaw, the England cricket team jigsaw, the Ipswich murders jigsaw, the juvenile crime jigsaw, and innumerable other jigsaws, too many to note, too many to quantify. We even had the missing-pieces-of-God jigsaw on 'Thought for the Day'. Open any newspaper any day and you are likely to find a jigsaw. I have stopped counting. The word suggests at once difficulty and comfort – the frustration of the unsolved puzzle, the satisfaction of the possible solution.

  The word 'jigsaw' was never patented or enshrined in copyright. It has appeared in many titles. Barbara Cartland's first novel, a Mayfair romance of implausibly resolved misunderstandings, is called Jig-Saw (1923). Sybille Bedford's volume of autobiography, which fits together the disparate characters and episodes of her long and international life, is also, more relevantly, called Jigsaw (1989). Michael Holroyd's second volume of memoirs, which fits together the missing pieces of family information that emerged after the publication of Basil Street Blues in 1999, is called, analogously, Mosaic, though it too could have been called Jigsaw, for much of the new information revolves round the missing piece (and missing portrait) of his grandfather's mistress Agnes May, the blonde beauty who ruined the Holroyd family fortunes. Vikram Seth at one point thought of calling his memoir of his aunt and uncle Mosaic, but Holroyd got there first, and Seth settled on the title of Two Lives.

  John Fowles, writing in a similar autobiographical mode, worked for a long time on a volume of autobiographical fiction called Tesserae, a ghost title that occasionally appears in his bibliography, though it was never published. Fowles said it would have been 'a sort of existentialist mosaic of what it was like in the 1950s to be poor, unfocused, and unpublished', but he did not finish it. He thought of reusing the title for his collected essays and writings, which appeared in 1998 as Wormholes, and in the preface to this volume he tells us that 'An early book I tried to write was entitled Tesserae; to be of minor relationships, dabs of colour. I always felt then that I was best understood and seen – or felt – as a sequence of very small happenings, little brick squares of opinion and feeling.'

  The assembly of squares and fragments: the picture made up, like Queen Adelaide's face, in stitches, or in pixels, or in small blocks, or in dots, or in stipples, or in particles. Virginia Woolf, reflecting in her diary (September 1924) on the heterogeneity of daily life and its mixed tapestry composed of postmen, invitations to Knole, and lectures on the League of Nations, notes: 'All this confirms me in thinking that we're splinters and mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes.' (It's not clear who the 'they' are who used to hold this view of identity – old-fashioned novelists like Arnold Bennett, perhaps?) A fragmented view of personality and consciousness has been widely held since the days of Locke and Berkeley and their successor David Hartley, and neuroscientists today nudge us even further towards the notion that memory, character and consciousness itself are made up of small, discrete, neurological events, events that build up a mosaic, a jigsaw, a pattern, which we may take for a whole. A pointillist self, made up of tesserae.

  Experimental novelist Paul Ableman in the secret of consciousness (1999) proposed the view that the human mind is fundamentally discontinuous: 'a "person", even though fully material, and indeed biological, is not a stable and continuous entity but rather an intermittent and discontinuous one.' We need to make up a linking narrative, but the links may be arbitrary or even false. Identity is no more (or less) than the unique set, or narrative, of sensory data in each individual. The novelist's use of 'interior monologue' is an attempt to mimic both the instant chaos and the archival organization of the mind.

  When Paul tried to explain his theory of the mind to me, he seemed to think I might find it in some way threatening, although he argued that it wasn't; he insisted that it didn't imply that we were 'robotic', but he insisted a bit too much. I wasn't sure whether I understood him fully. (He was amused by my lack of grasp of the simple principle of the transistor, which I had always thought was something to do with tiny radios, but which proved to be an important part of his twin-data-stream theory of consciousness.)

  To me, the concept of the self as a sequence of very small but discrete happenings is persuasive and attractive, not alarming. It allows for addition, for retrieval, for accretion, and for the retrospective solving of puzzles. If one could only retrieve from long ago that little block of fear, or disgust, or attraction, that sudden flash of recognition or enlightenment, one could hook it into the pattern, one could rebuild and reinterpret the fuller picture.

  The Oulipians had a word for language used in small, recognizable blocks, in the verbal equivalent of little brick squares. They called this 'langage cuit', or 'pre-cooked language' or 'canned' language, and in this category they included 'proverbs, clichés, quotations, historical declarations, book and film titles etc.', which became for them the base of many artful substitutions and variations. Auntie Phyl and I, in our daily converse, used a good deal of canned language (just as, during and immediately after the war, w
e ate a lot of canned food), and I found it a comforting medium of exchange. You knew where you were with canned language. I have used quite a lot of it in this book. Writers spend much time—sometimes too much time—striving for originality of diction. You can communicate perfectly well with many people, indeed often better, if you stick largely to a common canned language, and draw from a common source.

  Mary Poppins uses a great deal of canned language, which forms a piquant contrast with her unpredictable behaviour. She is fond of phrases like 'Care killed a cat' and 'I wouldn't half like a cup of tea' and 'You got out of bed the wrong side this morning' and 'Strike me pink!' Children find this reassuring.

  Auntie Phyl had a friend, Mr Hubbard, who used to come to sit with her on Sunday afternoons. He was, I think, a neighbouring farmer. He hardly ever said anything, and neither did she. I used to find these silences trying, until it occurred to me to look at them in a different light. These were Long Bennington silences. They were the silences of the tribe, and they had a long history. And the phrases of greeting and parting that they uttered were time-honoured, and the odd scrap of information about a dog, or the weather, or the crop of apples or greengages needed no embellishment. They were what they were. They were complete in themselves.