The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  XL

  The explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton gives us an extended description of pack ice as a jigsaw, which poses interesting questions about the nature and source of fabric and pattern, and the interlocking of blocks. As he describes in South (1919), on 18 December 1915, his ship Endurance found herself

  proceeding amongst large floes with thin ice between them. The leads were few ... I had been prepared for evil conditions in the Weddell Sea, but had hoped that in December and January, at any rate, the pack would be loose, even if no open water was to be found. What we were actually encountering was fairly dense pack of a very obstinate character. Pack-ice might be described as a gigantic and interminable jigsaw puzzle devised by nature.The parts of the puzzle in loose pack have floated slightly apart and become disarranged; at numerous places they have pressed together again; as the pack gets closer the congested areas grow larger and the parts are jammed harder till finally it becomes 'close pack,' when the whole of the jigsaw puzzle becomes jammed to such an extent that it can with care and labour be traversed in every direction on foot. Where the parts do not fit closely there is, of course, open water, which freezes over in a few hours after giving off volumes of 'frost-smoke.' In obedience to renewed pressure this young ice 'rafts,' so forming double thicknesses of a toffee-like consistency. Again the opposing edges of heavy floes rear up in slow and almost silent conflict, till high 'hedgerows' are formed round each part of the puzzle. At the junction of several floes chaotic areas of piled-up blocks and masses of ice are formed. Sometimes 5-ft. to 6-ft. piles of evenly shaped blocks of ice are seen so neatly laid that it seems impossible for them to be Nature's work. [italics added]

  'It seems impossible for them to be Nature's work.' This powerful passage seems to suggest that the jigsaw is at once a force of nature, a natural phenomenon, and the product or by-product of some supernatural plan. Nature creates its own puzzles, and we imitate them. (Maps demonstrating continental drift and the earth's tectonic plates always look like huge jigsaws; they are the original Spilsburys. It's amazing that tectonic plate theory wasn't formulated until the 1960s, and that, once formulated, it was so bitterly resisted. Once you know, it's obvious, but Shackleton didn't know, couldn't have known.)

  It also makes one wonder, less philosophically, whether Arctic and Antarctic explorers, like imprisoned passengers on cruise liners or underemployed members-in-waiting of the royal family, used to while away the time with jigsaws when they were not busy working at scrimshaw or fitting ships into bottles. Shackleton's crew seem to have been keener on playing cards, strumming the banjo and singing than on the quieter half-arts, and Shackleton's biographer, Roland Huntford, says that he cannot find any record of his subject's personal application to jigsaws, although the passage above shows that he was familiar with them. Huntford suggests that he may have come across them when an officer on the Union Castle Line. Or perhaps his wife and children may have done them during his long absences? Penelope's weaving was as pointless as a jigsaw, as ephemeral as a sand mandala, and the wives of explorers have much time to kill.

  XLI

  Jigsaws and maps have always fitted together, and jigsaws and cottage gardens have, as we have seen, a long and soothing association. Jigsaws and detective fiction also have a natural affinity. During the 1930s there was a vogue for publishing simple thrillers with a real jigsaw puzzle offering the solution attached to the back flap in a brown-paper pocket. Walter Eberhardt's The Jigsaw Puzzle Murder, published in 1933 by Puzzle Books Ltd of Covent Garden (but set in and printed in the USA), is even more elaborate. It consists of two volumes, one a short narrative of 184 pages, which ends with the arrest of the murderer, but does not give the murderer's identity; the second a book-shaped cardboard box containing a 200-piece cardboard puzzle portraying the scene and the 'solution'. This jigsaw shows a jigsaw within a jigsaw, for the plot, such as it is, revolves around a jigsaw, and it also incorporates several (not very well-made) pieces shaped like pistols. The box alerts us: 'Watch Next Month for Another Jig-Saw Puzzle Murder Mystery!' (The red-dressed heroine of this drama, Diana, has just seen the movie, Cavalcade.)

  In a later and darker world, the tormented victim of detective writer Henning Mankell's The Return of the Dancing Master (Harvill, 2003 ) is a jigsaw addict who orders his puzzles from a club in Rome:

  Whenever he finished a puzzle, he would burn it and immediately start on a new one. He made sure he always had a good supply of puzzles. It was a bit like a smoker and his cigarettes ... He didn't think much of the mechanically produced ones. There was no logic in the way the pieces were cut, and they didn't fit in with the patterns. Just now he was working on a puzzle based on Rembrandt's The Conspiracy of the Bathavians under Claudius Civilis. It had 3,000 pieces and had been made by a specialist in Rouen.

  Scattered pieces of the jigsaw, naturally, suggest clues to the brutal murder that shortly follows.

  The world of jigsaw competitions, or 'the professional US speed puzzle circuit', is the background of the plot of a novel titled The Missing Piece by French novelist Antoine Bello, published in 1998. This is a macabre thriller about a serial murderer who polishes off various rivals and competitors, using severed body parts as clues in the deadly puzzle he creates. It was praised as 'Borgesian' when it appeared in English in 2002, and I was expecting to enjoy it, but found it an unpleasant if well-informed exercise in historical pastiche, sadistic fantasy and smart post-modern narrative. One of the characters is a young American called Nicholas Spillsbury, in homage to John Spilsbury, and there is a good deal of knowing discussion about collectors and cutting techniques and solving techniques (both of the morphological and colour-coding variety), but the spirit of the novel contradicts all the virtues that jigsaws traditionally embody. (This is, of course, intentional.) It is all about speed, money, enmity, rivalry and the cutting of throats. The jigsaw is treated as a race, and the tone is macho and ageist, which I suppose is the reason why I didn't find it very entertaining. It promises much, with its pseudo-academic sections on 'The Detective Novel during the Depression' and 'The Puzzle as Metaphor for Police Procedure', and its references to nonfictional scholars such as the American jigsaw historian Anne Williams. But it fails to deliver. This isn't because Bello isn't a clever writer, but because there is an insuperable mismatch between his subject and his plot. It's hard to turn innocent, everyday jigsaw puzzles into a hard-edged, brutal male fantasy about dismemberment.

  There are signs that Bello is well aware of this difficulty. He may have been attempting to satirize the corrupting commercial spirit of capitalism in the United States, but if so he chose the wrong vehicle. Dismissive comments about 'the most inoffensive of pastimes, once so beloved of our grandmothers' sit uneasily in his text. In short, he abuses the jigsaw. The jigsaw isn't a metaphor for cutting throats or dismembering legs. It is a different kind of metaphor. It may be a complex metaphor, even a despairing metaphor, as Georges Perec's novel shows, but it is not a violent metaphor.

  The jigsaw, like push-pin, is innocent. It is more innocent than poetry.

  Jules Verne's Royal Game of the Goose novel is full of American capitalism, ruthless competition, cheating and gambling, but it is a romantic and high-spirited story, from a less brutal age.

  Auntie Phyl and I, unlike some of the puzzle solvers mentioned in or cross-questioned for this book, and unlike the eighteenth-century card-playing ladies condemned by Mrs Sherwood, were not at all competitive. We were strictly non-violent. We never came to blows. We sometimes got in one another's light, but we weren't trying to win anything, or break any records. Speed was of no interest to us. It was depressing to me to read a book about jigsaws that concentrated on record breaking and murdering by numbers.

  Anthony Brown, one of my most seasoned jigsaw correspondents, admits to 'a competitive spirit', which sometimes upset his puzzle companions. He, his wife and his four sons would sit round the kitchen table with a puzzle each, of about ninety pieces, 'and, ready, steady, go, each would tip out his
cylinder and race to finish his puzzle first'.

  We weren't like that.

  Once I lost my temper with my daughter when we were doing a puzzle together in the country. I accused her of getting in my way. The real problem, as I remember with shame, was my recognition that she was now much better at it than I was, partly because she could see the pieces better than I could, partly because she'd drunk less wine with her dinner. My eyes and wits were failing, and I didn't want to know this.

  I was and am turning inexorably into Auntie Phyl.

  XLII

  The concept of the jigsaw is, as I hope I have shown, deeply embedded in our language, and we use the word so often because it is useful. But it is recent. I often think about Kevin's words in his cab on the way to the Museum of London, when he asked me to consider the phenomenon of the mosaic. He made me think about the history of shapes and patterns, and to wonder whether that was part of my enquiry. The fitting together of small pieces to make larger objects and images is a curious and widespread human activity, common to many (almost certainly to all) cultures, and there is an intrinsic physical pleasure in it, as well as an aesthetic satisfaction. Our responses to pattern – within a culture, across cultures, within a class or a family – are personal and idiosyncratic. Why do some of us like the long-surviving and stillubiquitous Paisley motif, while others fastidiously recoil from it? And is this motif a teardrop or a flower or a pine cone? Whatever it is, its sinuous outline has spread far beyond the cashmere or Kashmir shawls that brought it to Europe in the eighteenth century, and like a form of algae it has colonized the world. Why?

  Why do some of us like tiled floors, or William Morris wallpapers, or minimalist decor, or marquetry, or ogee arches, or Islamic domes, or the pelta pattern, or the 'line of beauty'? (Mary Russell Mitford believed that the greyhound represented 'the line of beauty in perpetual motion'. She was very fond of her pet greyhound Mayflower, despite the fact that her father lost so much money on the dogs.) Some of us prefer curves, some geometry. Some hate the opulence and artificiality of pietra dura table tops, while others (like me) respond to them with rapture. Who knows what genetic combinations these choices reflect, what fragments of DNA they embody, what early-implanted memories they carry?

  DNA itself is a puzzle, a zipped and helical puzzle.

  I can understand why objects made in pietra dura can set the teeth on edge. They are, at various stages in their manufacture, not unlike jagged teeth. But I find it hard to imagine anyone who could remain unresponsive to the beauty of classical mosaics.

  The word 'mosaic' is of much more ancient and distinguished provenance than the word 'jigsaw'.

  After my brief tour of London with Kevin, I thought I ought to look further into the subject of mosaics, and I went off to inspect a few in the British Museum, where I used to visit them regularly in the days when I worked in the old BM Reading Room. I browsed in books about them in the British Library, and googled them on Google. I talked about mosaic restoration with the head of conservation at the British Museum, and he showed me ways of spotting which bits of a Roman mosaic have been replaced or restored. The fashion now is to restore less, and to leave bald patches to show where the missing pieces would have been; the result is a deliberately unfinished jigsaw. An artist may still sketch in the missing portions, but restorers will not necessarily fill the gaps. I have been told that at the end of a large restoration a bucket or two of leftover tesserae may remain: not so much missing pieces as extra pieces.

  At first I was looking for anything that would connect mosaics with games and play and therefore, by analogy, with jigsaws, and I found a passage that suggested something of the sort in a book by Peter Fischer, translated from the German ( Mosaic: History and Technique, 1969,1971). He writes:

  The birth of mosaic art can be seen when children press shells and pebbles into the sandy beach and discover that the various hues can be laid out to form patterns or pictures. This happens so naturally that it may be regarded as one of the basic inventions as old as that of cooking. Very early man may have used this simple method to make a firm floor in his cave or hut ... When one thinks of existing cave paintings, prehistoric mosaics seem quite conceivable – but of course they would have been washed away by the waters of thousands of years.

  This seemed quite promising, as an introduction to mosaic history, but it didn't really lead anywhere, and none of the other mosaic experts seemed interested in the sandcastle aspect of mosaics. They eschewed idle speculation in favour of dating techniques. So, I learned that the earliest surviving mosaics are pebble mosaics, like that of Gnosis at Pella, made of pebbles coloured by nature, not by man. (Opus signium are humble floors; they and their name are still current.) I discovered that Sir Arthur Evans found at Knossos a stone box containing fragments of rock crystal, amethyst, beryl, lapis lazuli, and gold, which might or might not have been something to do with mosaics. I found no suggestion anywhere, except in Fischer, that children might have played with pebbles, though of course they must have done.

  A classicist whom I met at a philological conference in Montreal sent me some interesting material about Greek and Roman children and games in antiquity, which described games with oyster shells, potsherds, knucklebones and dice, and gave detailed accounts of the Roman board game, 'Ludus Latrunculorum', to which allusion is made in many literary sources, including Ovid and Seneca. He also alerted me to an essay titled 'Games and Playthings' (1932) by bio-mathematician and classicist D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, which tells us that 'Suetonius wrote a whole book on children's games, just as he did on the cries of animals and on the nightingale's song; but all these pleasant books of his are lost, though we should willingly have given three lives of his grammarians or one life of an emperor in exchange.' D'Arcy Thompson, more famous for his mathematical work on organic growth and form and natural patterns, systematically collected any references he could find to children's play in classical literature and the ancient world, but he gives no hints of a proto-jigsaw. We may never know for certain whether or not Greek and Roman children played at making pictures with pebbles or tesserae, or whether they amused themselves by reassembling broken crockery with ancient resin and mastic. They must have done, but we can't prove it.

  Most mosaics were and are made of tesserae, which are little cubes of stone or terracotta or glass, but there is a form of mosaic called opus sectile, which uses marbles, tiles and stones pre-cut into shapes and fitted together 'like a jigsaw puzzle into geometric or figural patterns'; these are the antique precursor of Renaissance Florentine hardstone mosaics. The National Museum in Naples has a small collection of early Roman panels in opus sectile. In jigsaw terms, modern successors to opus sectile mosaics are made by Wentworth Puzzles, which incorporate pieces shaped like dogs or birds or flowers, or other motifs appropriate to the pictured design. These are called whimsies. The more whimsies you order, the more you pay for your puzzle; just as in the old days of Spilsbury, when you had to pay more for maps with the sea. It was Michael Codron who explained whimsies to me. I had never heard of them. We did not have them at Bryn.

  In pursuit of mosaics, I found a pleasant little book about how to draw your own Roman mosaics, by an author called Robert Field, who is fascinated by patterns. He has also published books on Geometric Patterns from Islamic Art and Architecture (1988) and on patterns from churches and cathedrals and patchwork quilts and tiles and brickwork and mazes. Very laboriously, at his prompting, I drew a Solomon's Knot on graph paper. It took me a long time, but it was, as he had promised, quite satisfying. (Why?) If I were more persistent I could learn to do guilloches and palmettes. The very words of these patterns enchant. The guilloche, the palmette, the scroll, the acanthus, the arabesque, the chevron, the crowstep, the meander, the coffer, the cable, the Greek key...

  And I started work on a tapestry cushion, based on a design I adapted from the border of the Orpheus Mosaic at Littlecote in Berkshire, illustrated in Field's booklet. I haven't got very far with that, and wouldn't k
now what to put in the middle anyway. Orpheus is too hard for me.

  I wrote to Mr Field to ask him why he liked patterns so much, but he didn't answer.

  I am really bad at sewing. Auntie Phyl used to tick me off for my bad hem stitches, which strode unevenly along the edges of squares of practice handkerchiefs. I am ill placed to criticize those anonymous stitchers who cobbled together Judy Chicago's Dinner Party. But tapestry is easy. You don't need finesse or delicacy. You can't go wrong (or not very wrong). You just fill in the grid. It's quite like doing a jigsaw. My father used to do tapestry, and I think it was he who taught me.

  At boarding school we were obliged to have a hobby to pursue on wet Wednesday afternoons, and after a few desperate and messy stabs at bookbinding and throwing pots I declared that my hobby was tapestry. I bought a stretched canvas printed with a wreath of so-called Jacobean flowers against a brown background, on which I worked, year after year. I made very slow progress, because when I was supposed to be sewing, I was secretly reading the novels of Thomas Hardy or the plays of Christopher Marlowe or the Terrible Sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I remember the expression on the face of the supervising teacher as I displayed, term after term, like Penelope, my unfinished wreath. She smiled a sceptical but complicit smile. She knew quite well what I was up to, down in the boiler room. I think that was when I realized that I was grown up, and could do as I pleased, provided I seemed to obey the rules. Nobody minded. The teacher agreed with me that my time was better spent reading poetry than doing tapestry. She couldn't say so, because of the school rules, but she agreed with me.