The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  David is a carpenter’s son, and for him cabinetmaking is a pleasure and a skill that has offset a professional career spent at desks and in meetings. Like me, he enjoys an escape from words. I can see that creating an intricate and beautiful three-dimensional object gives a great and lasting satisfaction. The art of marquetry moves and excites him. His partner’s tastes are minimalist, but he loves the rich complexity and intricacy of wood and veneer, of inlay and trompe l’oeil, and maybe he hopes one day to introduce some Florentine fantasy into her austere domain.

  I have another witness to the lure of the manufacturing process, whose account illustrates very clearly why a ham-fisted person like me is wise to stay well away from saws and blades. My correspondent Anthony Brown writes:

  I had wanted to make my own puzzles for ages, even as a child. I had a fret-saw in my tool kit, but the broad blade and the inability to fix the wood securely resulted in most unsatisfactory pieces, far too loose for any pleasure in puzzle doing. After my apprenticeship as an engineer, I used to collect old calendars from the firm’s offices after the New Year holiday. I still have the drawer-full which I accumulated.

  Then I acquired an old treadle jig saw, which was subsequently stolen, but easily recovered with the help of the police when I saw it in an antique shop. (In fact, I only realised that it and a few other possessions had been stolen from our outhouse when I saw the jig saw in the shop window; I couldn’t believe that there could be another one.)

  Unfortunately, I have always been too busy with other priorities, although I did buy a scroll saw last year, in a moment of wishful thinking. My efforts on the treadle saw were fun and interesting, but frustrating, both in the making and in the subsequent doing. I have listed the plywood which I’ll need on the long list of timber which I must order from the saw mill. But even when it arrives, there are other wood-working priorities.

  One can see, from this kind informant’s dilemmas, that there is a whole other world of puzzle expertise into which Auntie Phyl and I would have been most unwise to enter. She was critical enough of my attempts at sewing; it would have been unwise to let me loose with a saw. She was not all that good with her fingers, either. Her rock cakes were a bit rough and ready, and her pastry was never as light as my mother’s.

  People who make their own jigsaws are in a different league and have very different interests from those who merely assemble them. They are craftsmen.

  One of the reasons why the jigsaw appeals to me, as I have already suggested, is that it is pre-made, its limits finite, its frame fixed. No ordinary degree of manual clumsiness (and mine is advanced, and inevitably advancing) can yet prevent me from finishing a jigsaw. It can’t be done badly. Slowly, but not badly. All one needs is patience. (The French used to call puzzles les jeux de patience, and the Germans called them Geduldspielen. Now they both call them puzzles.) In this aspect, the jigsaw is the very opposite of the novel. The novel is formless and frameless. It has no blueprint, no pattern, no edges. At the end of a day’s work on a novel, you may feel that you have achieved something worse than a lack of progress. You may have ruined what went before. You may have sunk into banality or incoherence. You may have betrayed or maligned others. You may have to scrap not only the day’s work, but the work of the preceding week, month, year, lifetime. You may have lost ground, and for ever. You may have lost your nerve, and indicted all that you have achieved. Writing fiction is frightening. Some novelists find the safety of a reliable formula, but I never did, nor did I really wish to.

  Editing The Oxford Companion to English Literature for five years, and then revising it for other, shorter stretches, was a comfort to me, for at the end of each day I could say, ‘I have made progress. I have added entries on Samuel Bamford and Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin and Angus Wilson, revised entries on Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, received and checked entries on Hopkins and Horovitz and Horror.’ The pieces fitted together, they interlocked. Asterisk led to asterisk in a finely articulated and complex pattern, in a vast jigsaw. This was satisfying. The end was sure to come. There would be spare pieces that never found a home and would have to be discarded, and missing pieces where dates or titles were lost and unavailable, but the book as a whole, as a self-referring entity, would be completed. Assembling and fitting the pieces together was a form of carpentry.

  Writing novels is not like that.

  Coleridge, in Chapter 22 of his Biographia Literaria, draws a famous distinction between FANCY (the drapery of poetry) and IMAGINATION (its soul), and at one point invokes the image of dissected maps, suggesting that Wordsworth sometimes woodenly (my word) combined instructions and described construction programmes of a pre-existing plan, rather than drawing on the deeper resources of the imagination. Referring to a landscape passage in The Excursion (Book III, 23–73), which describes in sequence yew tree, stream, crag, rock, stones and ‘a tall and shining holly’, Coleridge comments that the draughtsman or painter could have presented these images to the eye far more economically and satisfactorily. He continues:

  Such descriptions too often occasion in the mind of a reader, who is determined to understand his author, a feeling of labour, not very dissimilar to that, with which he could construct a diagram, line by line, for a long geometrical proposition. It seems to be like taking the pieces of a dissected map out of its box. We first look at one part, and then at another, then join and dove-tail them; and when the successive acts of attention have been completed, there is a retrogressive effort of the mind to behold it as a whole. The Poet should paint to the imagination, not to the fancy.

  Here, while dismissing or deprecating the satisfaction of this ‘retrogressive effort of the mind’, Coleridge in fact accurately describes the particular pleasure to be gained by the completion of a large jigsaw puzzle, the moment when the small local struggles of murky corners or blank blue skies or confusing geometric repetitions or (in Perec’s classic example) of ‘the belt buckle of a uniform which turns out in extremis to be a metal clasp holding the chandelier’ are resolved, and the whole emerges from the parts. The Jackson Pollock ceases to be an intense and frustrating battle with arbitrary splashes and streaks and blobs and blisters of paint, and becomes an intentional and recognizable work of art, caught within the frame of its canvas. Venus of Urbino emerges smiling from a sea of complacent apricot pink. Brueghel’s 246 children join the everlasting game.

  This is not to suggest that those who do jigsaws delude themselves that they are creating a new work of art. They are not so stupid. It isn’t an art. It isn’t a hobby. It isn’t even a craft. Making a jigsaw puzzle from plywood is a craft, and as we have seen a tricky one, but doing a ready-made cardboard or wooden jigsaw doesn’t qualify. It isn’t quite a game, either. It is a different kind of act. But what kind of an act is it?

  It could be argued that Georges Perec, in the immensely complex, enjoyable and intricate La Vie: Mode d’Emploi, uses the jigsaw as a central metaphor for the tragic futility of human endeavour and the tedium of existence, a vanitas motif constructed in the French metaphysical mode. And that is one way of looking at his novel and at this pursuit. The jigsaw has been used with satirical overtones in this manner by playwrights and film-makers who portray characters with nothing better to do and no thoughts to think, pointlessly wasting time as they work away at broken images, at puzzles without solutions. Crazy old Mrs Winemiller in Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke (first performed in 1948, but set in 1916) is told by her daughter to be quiet and work on her ‘picture puzzle’, but she complains, ‘The pieces don’t fit! The pieces don’t fit!’ She is in her disruptive second childhood, demanding to be bribed into good behaviour by promises of ice cream and cigarettes. Orson Welles makes brilliant play with the jigsaw motif in Citizen Kane, where the missing piece of plot is Kane’s childhood sleigh, Rosebud. The film is full of rich imagery of grandiose Roman rubble, towering crates, crazy collections of antique statuary and junk, newspaper cuttings and fragments, and amidst the fragments, stranded in
a dark echoing chamber by a cold baronial fire, sits Kane’s wretched second wife, endlessly assembling and reassembling large jigsaws of conventionally pretty landscapes. Her activity is pointless, her loneliness intense. Her problems, like her husband’s, are insoluble.

  Kane’s second wife, Susan Alexander, is said to have been modelled on Randolph Hearst’s wife Marion Davies. In a photograph by Cecil Beaton, Davies appears with some other society ladies assembling the pieces of a jigsaw. The photograph was taken in St Donat’s Castle in Wales, which Randolph Hearst had purchased in 1925. These pieces fit neatly together.

  Perec’s jigsaw motif may be seen as the apotheosis of this conceit (though there are other ways of seeing it). The inspiration for Life: A User’s Manual, translated by David Bellos, came to Perec, he claimed, while he was working on a huge jigsaw puzzle portraying the port of La Rochelle. His protagonist, Percival Bartlebooth (and the name has a deliberate echo of Melville’s nay-saying Bartleby the Scrivener), is obsessed both by ports and by jigsaws. As the heir to a considerable fortune, he constructs a way of spending time that he trusts will occupy him fully until his death. Laboriously, over a period of some years, he undertakes to learn the art of painting watercolours, for which he has no natural aptitude whatsoever (just as Kane’s wife had no natural aptitude as an opera singer). Then he sets off with his servant and valet Smautf to travel the world, painting the harbours of the many ports where his ship puts in. These paintings Smautf dispatches back to Paris, where they are hand-mounted on wood and hand-dissected into puzzles. Bartlebooth will then return to Paris to spend the second half of his life reconstructing these harbour scenes, which, when reconstructed, will be deliberately destroyed. It doesn’t quite work out according to plan, but that is the plan.

  The massive and elaborate pointlessness of this project is like a parody of the wagers, voyages and contests to be found in the pages of Jules Verne, and indeed an epigraph from Verne’s Michael Strogoff fronts the work: ‘Look with all your eyes, look!’ But the effect of this extraordinary work is in no way nihilistic; it shares the vigour and sense of adventure of Verne himself, and a richness of detail that recalls the work of Balzac and Zola.

  Those who believe that they are spending their lives usefully and progressively on humanitarian projects, or on bringing up their children, or on achieving wisdom, or on running a country, may well be appalled by the reflection of nothingness that Perec’s long novel plays back, and which certainly constitutes part of its impact. Bartlebooth, crouched over his self-imposed and self-destroying task, is making nothing. Is he an image of the artist? Is he a Beckett-inspired version of Everyman, trapped in a possibly heroic but ultimately ridiculous effort to delude himself that life is not void?

  Sitting over a jigsaw as an adult, one may well feel foolish. When I described my new subject to a fellow author from a grander background than mine, her initial distaste was patent. Jigsaws? Yes, she remembered them. As a child, when she had stayed in country houses with her parents, there had always been a jigsaw on the table in the morning room, and guests would toy with a piece or two in passing, as though they were on a luxury liner. Clearly this pursuit for her represented the fatuity of the underemployed, upper-class life.

  She herself is one of the most influential writers and journalists of her time, a modern superwoman, and to her the notion of time-wasting seemed alarming, perhaps even threatening. (For do we not all, towards the end of our lives, become redundant, however busy we may have been in our prime?) Our conversation moved on to other time fillers and killers, like knitting and needlework and crochet, which again she appeared to regard with anxiety and contempt. I am sure that, like Huizinga, she would have disapproved of bridge, with its connotations of middle- and upper-middle-class female idleness, although chess, being a more masculine and intellectual game, might perhaps have been more acceptable to her.

  I have always felt a little judgemental about bridge myself, but that is largely because I never learned to play, and I suspect I could never get to grips with it even if I had tried. In one of my late novels, The Seven Sisters, I describe a group of friends who meet through reading Virgil in Latin in a reading group; they go on a trip in the footsteps of Aeneas, which is quite a highbrow form of tourism (a Jules Verne or a Martin Randall art-tour outing, not a Thomson’s Holiday) and, as they travel, their Virgil tutor offers to instruct them in the art of bridge. They take to this, very happily, for after all, they say to themselves, they are on holiday, and their tutor’s presence sanctions the diversion. I was quite pleased with this unexpected little moment in the plot, which came to me out of the blue as I was contemplating the ways that we find to amuse ourselves as we grow older. It seemed liberating. And I was pleased when a friend at dinner told me that she had enjoyed my novel, and had been relieved to find that I and my characters hadn’t been superior or condescending about bridge. She revealed herself as a keen bridge player and described the pleasure she gained, when travelling abroad, in coming across people with the same interest. She could find a new small temporary world of friends anywhere in the world, she said. I was impressed by this testimony and resolved never to think or speak ill of bridge or bridge players again.

  Maybe, when I have finished this book (which, like Penelope’s tapestry, could go on for ever), I shall set myself the task of driving the Belisha route, from Oban to London, stopping off at every one of the beauty spots and towns and villages illustrated in the pack of cards. It would be a pointless and glorious undertaking, somewhat in the Bartlebooth mode, but much more fun.

  XXX

  Our capacity for disapproving of and moralizing about one another’s amusements, as of one another’s artistic tastes, is almost limitless. Class prejudice and religious intolerance lie behind most of these attitudes, and most of us are guilty. Huizinga disapproved of bridge, and Plutarch of fishing, which he considered ‘a filthy, base illiberal employment’. John Northbrooke’s 1579 treatise against dicing condemned it as ‘the mother of lies, of perjuries, of theft, of debate, of injuries, of manslaughter, the verie invention of the Divels of hell’.

  Some people disapprove of jigsaws, some of knitting, some of chess, and many more of dancing and lotteries. (Chess is forbidden in some states under Islamic law.) Willard Fiske’s Chess in Iceland (1905) is a treasure house of commentary on social attitudes to games and gaming; he quotes as a classic example of the partisan spirit Mauritio Bardinelli’s 1604 dismissal of cards (suitable only for stablehands and cobblers), chess and dice in favour of backgammon. Backgammon, he claims, is ‘a perfect diversion, adapted to every lofty intellect…it is not a sport which strains the mental powers, but is cheerful, varied, diverting’. This resembles Boswell’s view that Johnson should have played draughts for the sake of his spirits. Bardinelli also applauds the fact that backgammon is played sitting down.

  David Hume, too, endorsed backgammon as a relief to the spirits and a cure for mental exhaustion. Worn out as a young man by venturing too far into the terrible wastes and forlorn solitude of abstract thought, and dreading the storms of controversy he had aroused amongst ‘metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians’, he learned to take comfort in human society and the conversible world: ‘I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends.’ He became well known as a man who enjoyed a good dinner (Gibbon described him, with friendly admiration, as one of the fattest of Epicurus’ hogs) and, more remarkably, he appears to have learned how to cook himself, writing on 16 October 1769 in his fifty-ninth year to his friend Gilbert Elliot that his temporary lodgings in Edinburgh were

  very cheerful, and even elegant, but too small to display my great Talent for Cookery, the Science to which I intend to addict the remaining Years of my Life…I have just now lying on the Table before me a Receipt for making Soupe à la Reine, copy’d with my own hand. For Beef and Cabbage (a charming Dish), and old Mutton and old Claret, no body excels me. I also make Sheep head Broth in a manner that Mr Keith speaks of
it eight days after, and the Duc de Nivernois would bind himself Apprentice to my Lass to learn it…All my Friends encourage me in this Ambition; as thinking it would redound very much to my Honour.

  Hume, one of the greatest philosophers of history, did not overrate the life of the mind. He believed that other pleasures, if pursued with equal passion, were of equal value. He played billiards, and enjoyed a game of whist of an evening with the old lady who lived on the floor below him. This is from his one of Essays, ‘The Sceptic’:

  The inference upon the whole is, that it is not from the value or worth of the object, which any person pursues, that we can determine his enjoyment; but merely from the passion with which he pursues it, and the success which he meets with in his pursuit. Objects have absolutely no worth or value in themselves. They derive their worth merely from the passion. If that be strong, and steady, and successful, the person is happy. It cannot reasonably be doubted, but a little miss, dressed in a new gown for a dancing-school ball, receives as compleat enjoyment as the greatest orator, who triumphs in the splendour of his eloquence.

  Dr Johnson disagreed with this position, arguing, according to Boswell, that ‘A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness. A peasant has not capacity for having equal consciousness with a philosopher.’ But Hume knew how unhappy philosophy could make a man, and he spoke and wrote of what he knew.

  Herbert Spencer is famous for claiming that ‘A propensity to play billiards well is a sure sign of a misspent youth,’ whereas Jeremy Bentham more provocatively argued that