The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  Stones may be reborn. There’s a phrase for this, as the book on antique spolia told me. Rediviva saxa. And if stones, why not we?

  I find even the title of this book about spolia oddly moving. It describes a process of melding, joining and reassembling that affirms not entropy but continuity and survival and the grand aesthetic of time. This may not have been what was intended by the architects of early Christian Rome, but this is what they have achieved in posterity. Maria Fabricius Hansen (of the Department of Art History of the University of Aarhus, and herself perhaps in the grip of the Northern longing for the South) is at pains to point out that appropriation, before the Romantic movement and our own authenticity-conscious age, was ethically and visually much more acceptable than it is now. Plagiarism was no crime, and originality and authenticity were not necessarily virtues.

  Jacob Burckhardt and Bernard Berenson may have judged the recyclings of Late Antiquity as a falling off from the creativity of Classical Antiquity, but that is not how Hansen sees them. She writes in praise of heterogeneity, plurality and diversity. Her photographic plates show some striking examples of recycling – of classical capitals transformed into baptismal fonts, of pagan columns erected upside down in Christian churches, and, most famously, of the miscellaneous panels, figures and reliefs of the Arch of Constantine rearranged in a new configuration with a radically different purpose, the sum having a different meaning from the parts. Constantine’s Arch, with its reused materials from the reigns of Hadrian, Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, was described as a ‘scrap-book’ by art historian Martin Robertson, but she allows it more dignity.

  It may be, as Hansen suggests, that Constantine and the early Christian emperors saw these transformations as a purging of paganism, as a deliberate profanation of the sacred stones of the old gods. Walking on a pavement of antique marble fragments furnished with outworn pagan inscriptions was literally an act of ‘trampling on the enemy’. The enemy is now long dead, and most of the creeds have faded, but the stones remain, reassembled, like the painted glass of Lincoln cathedral, to please the eye; they acquire, in the process of survival, other meanings and send us other messages. They cry out to us, with their own eloquence, through interpretation after interpretation.

  The pieces of the jigsaw scatter and are recombined in a new pattern that does not always strive to work from a lost template. (Is that because there is no fixed state, no frame, no archetype? The model may be evolution, not rediscovery.) Stone jigsaws, city jigsaws are around us everywhere, and not all the heroes of salvage are purists and conservationists. There are few emperors in this story. Some have been building contractors and demolitionists and scrap-metal merchants. John Mowlem of Swanage, stonemason and son of a quarryman, made a fortune as a young man in London, Dick Whittington style. With his nephew, the contractor George Burt, he spent much money refurbishing his home town with miscellaneous objects and reused materials, including ‘the lamps from London Bridge, an illuminated clock made for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the Cheapside entrance to the Mercers’ Company, re-erected as the town hall for Swanage in 1881’. Hardly Constantine’s Arch, but quite a memorial. This elaborate façade, described in Pevsner (Dorset, 1972) as ‘an overwhelmingly undisciplined example of the City of London style’ of the mid seventeenth century, became redundant when Cheapside was being widened; the original proposal had been to incorporate this fantastic erection, with all its swags and fruits and putti, into a new building on the old site, but it was decided that it was so thickly covered with ‘London black’ that cleaning and restoration would be too expensive. So it was moved to Swanage where, it was later noted, ‘at this remote spot Nature’s cleansers have perfectly done their work’.

  Saxa rediviva.

  I don’t know how these speculations connect with my sense of the safety of the frame, the safety that Auntie Phyl provided at Bryn, but I know they do. One of the pleasures of the jigsaw-puzzle world lies in that safety, of knowing that all the pieces will fit together in the end. But where is the frame of an evolving city? Or of an expanding universe? Where are the boundaries? As a child, like many children, I was intrigued, aroused and tormented by the question: ‘Where does space end?’ I used to lie on my back and gaze at the sky and try to imagine the boundaries of infinity. I could make myself feel quite faint with my own stupidity and desire. I am still waiting to find an answer that I can begin to understand.

  Very large round numbers make me feel giddy. How do we know that we are made up of a hundred trillion cells and a hundred billion neurons, as neuroscientist Steven Pinker so casually remarks? Did he count them all, one by one? How do we know that ‘between one and three million’ Cambodians died in Year Zero? That Cambodian number upset me so much that I wrote a novel about it, not because I wanted to justify Pol Pot, but because I didn’t like the large yet vague roundness of the large number. Who were all these in-between people? Didn’t they count at all? Could they be counted? The larger estimate has been revised downwards, and a sociologist in Chicago called Patrick Heuveline has tried to answer my query by devising a system of accounting, using electoral registers that attempted a more precise figure. I was pleased to think I had prompted him to that effort. It spared some of the unnumbered dead.

  Led by Kevin, I have strayed out of my frame and along a branching spiral track of free associations. But no associations come for free. They cost the neurons dear.

  XXVIII

  I used to think until quite recently that one would grow out of mental pain. One would simply become, towards the end, too old and too numb to feel it. I didn’t like the prospect but, looking around me, at old people I knew and old people I didn’t know, such insensibility seemed, like death, inevitable. As Hopkins warned us: ‘creep,/Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all/Life death does end, and each day dies with sleep…’ Bodily pains would replace the pains of the spirit. The intensity of despair would be overtaken by arthritis or cancer.

  That’s what I used to think, or fear, or hope. When I was a child, my father had encouraged me to believe that the depression from which I suffered would pass with adolescence and, to a degree, he was right. Bringing up three children, working and writing to support the family and pay the mortgage, cleaning, shopping and cooking, left me too busy to sink too low for too long. I began to think that brisk activity, followed by a stiff whisky, could cure anything. My mother’s angry depression seemed to me to be clearly related to her inertia and frustration, which afflicted so many educated and half-educated women of her generation; if she’d had more to do, if she hadn’t had so much domestic help, if she’d been able to pursue a career, if she’d been more active, if she’d gone out for walks, things might have been different. I did notice that my father’s depression had not vanished with age and, indeed, began to gain on him towards the end, but I never thought this could happen to me. My father was too well mannered to indulge in complaints and laments, and I think he found some solace in a sense of religious and social hope, but he did, in his seventies, reveal dark moments of the kind of lonely melancholy that besieged Dr Johnson. He suffered as a boy and as a young man, and he began to suffer again when he retired from the bench and lived in too close a seclusion with my mother. Or that’s how I read what I observed. I should have taken warning from that.

  I keep the telephone number of the Samaritans to hand. I have a very high regard for them. They have saved me on a couple of occasions. I worry now about the 1471 facility, because the anonymity of the phone calls was so reassuring. I don’t understand the new technology of witholding numbers, and I suspect no phone calls are really secure. The Samaritans assure me that they never try to contact a caller without consent, except in the most extreme circumstances, and I trust what they say. But the very possibility is disquieting.

  At times I feel some pride in my continuing capacity for feeling really, really bad. I think of the envious comment of a friend of mine, at a party, observing a well-known, hard-drinking novelist who is even older than
we are: ‘How can she still manage to get so drunk, at her age?’ The friend who made this comment is not herself abstemious or censorious; her remark was made in a spirit of admiration. Drinking and suffering require stamina.

  My father published two novels while he was a county court judge. The first, which appeared in 1971, was a workmanlike detective story; the second, Scawsby, which appeared in 1977, was a more ambitious book about multicultural adoption, set partly in a north-eastern fishing village not unlike Filey. It is far-sighted, humane and moving. Adoption was a subject in which he had a keen professional and personal interest, and he was well acquainted with multi-ethnic issues. In his unsensational plot he includes the question of underage sex, of which he took a lenient and rational view that would horrify most of today’s journalists, and there is an ‘honour killing’ (a phrase not then current). He manages to evoke sympathy for the perpetrators of this crime as well as the victims, which not many writers would have attempted to do or have succeeded in doing. He was not inhibited by anxieties about political correctness. He was correct from his heart, not from fear of misunderstanding.

  He was working on a third novel, set in a northern solicitor’s office, after he retired. He asked me to read this work in progress, about which he said he was not confident, and I made some comments which he may have found discouraging, though I hadn’t meant them to be so. I wish now that I had been more positive. My mother was angry with me about this. ‘You should have told him it was going well, whatever you thought of it,’ she said. ‘It kept him busy. It gave him something to do.’

  She should have followed her own advice. Once she said to me, ‘I’d have written novels too, if only I’d had the time.’ And maybe she believed that.

  When I was young I used to repeat to myself, as one of my early mantras, some lines of Joachim du Bellay on the ruins of Rome. I found them more congenial, less terrible than the Terrible Sonnets of Hopkins, which I had learned at school. I bought my copy of du Bellay, an ancient, yellowing, 1918 Librairie Garnier paperback, in Cambridge in February 1959, in my last year at university, two or three years after I first went to Rome. It is still with me, its stitched and aged spine brown and peeling like bark, scattering Sibylline fragments whenever I handle it, and looking as old as the ruins it laments. These are the lines from Antiquitez de Rome that I know by heart:

  Tristes desirs, vivez donques contents:

  Car si le temps finist chose si dure

  Il finira la peine que j’endure.

  Edmund Spenser translated these lines, but I’ve never been able to commit his version to memory. It runs:

  My sad desires, rest therefore moderate:

  For if that time make ende of things so sure,

  It als will end the paine, which I endure.

  But time doesn’t finish either, ever.

  I had some grand and solemn moments in Rome aged seventeen, but I also had some trivial ones. Early one morning, after a night spent for some reason on the Stazione Termini, my friend (my friend of the melanzana parmigiana) and I tried to buy a ham sandwich at dawn in an espresso bar. The chap kept barking at us ‘Crudo o cotto?’ rather as the waiter in the Kenilworth had reiterated ‘Black or white?’ We weren’t stupid, we knew what both these Italian words meant, but we couldn’t imagine why he was using them. It seemed a very Lévi-Strauss kind of question. Who on earth would want raw ham, at six o’clock in the morning? Raw ham, in a sandwich?

  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, free-floating 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 jigsaw-puzzle 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 Goy
a.

  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.