The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  Just as the Teas-with-Hovis plates or the kilted officer with his turbaned Sikh servant in the original Camp Coffee advertisement offer a vista of diminishing but perpetual self-reproduction, so paintings of cabinets and galleries offer an endless journey into an ever smaller and more toy-like world. This is more disquieting than reassuring.

  Susan Stewart, in her essay on souvenirs and collections (On Longing), suggests that ‘The miniature, linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination.’ This is not very elegantly phrased, but it is true, and it clearly connects with the world of Alison Uttley as well as with the cabinets of popes. Alison Uttley, as we know, was a supreme manipulator.

  My father liked Camp Coffee, and we always had a bottle of this dark-brown syrup on the go in the kitchen cupboard. He maintained that if you didn’t think of it as coffee, it was very pleasant. Sometimes we drank it at elevenses, but more often we used it to flavour cakes and custards. I like chicory in most of its forms, but it’s a long time since I tried a cup of Camp.

  Georges Perec was inspired by the Camp advertisement. In La Vie: Mode d’Emploi he describes a case of whisky by the name of Stanley’s Delight, the label of which

  shows an explorer of white race, wearing a pith helmet but dressed in Scottish national dress: a predominantly yellow and red kilt, a broad tartan over his shoulder, a studded leather belt supporting a fringed sporran, and a small dirk slipped into his sock-top; he strides at the head of a column of 9 blacks each carrying on his head a case of Stanley’s Delight, with a label depicting the same scene.

  Camp has now changed its logo; it has been updated for modern times, with master and servant sitting side by side in egalitarian racial harmony. Robert Opie, scholar of advertising (whose museum contains a similar whisky advertisement for an imperial Edwardian brand of which I have never heard), claims that the new Camp logo is not much liked in India. Indians, he says, prefer the traditional.

  Georges Perec was preoccupied by commercial art and advertising copy, by replicas, forgeries and transformations. He had worked in market research and he knew a great deal about the business of advertising. His first novel, Things, was intended, he said, to explore the way ‘the language of advertising is reflected in us’, and his two young protagonists, Sylvie and Jerome, drop-out students who ‘had become market researchers by necessity and not by choice’, are enthralled by the world of contemporary objects of desire. So is Perec himself, though in a slightly different mode.

  La Vie: Mode d’Emploi is packed with detailed descriptions not only of promotional blotters and jigsaw puzzles, but also of elaborately faked works of art, mechanical toys and many kinds of kitsch. Engravings feature conspicuously, for engraving is the art of producing multiples, although Perec is equally interested (as was Baudrillard) in the concept of the unique object, the unicum, or uniquity – a concept inseparable from the twinned concept of the forgery and the fake. He would have been impressed by the achievements of the Greenhalgh family of forgers, based in Bolton, whose first effort was an implausible silver medieval reliquary containing a wooden fragment of the True Cross, which they claimed to have unearthed in 1989 in a park in Preston; they went on to hoodwink several distinguished institutions with their Assyrian and Egyptian antiquities. Their finest coup was a ceramic faun allegedly by Gauguin for which the Chicago Institute of Art paid good money. Shaun Greenhalgh made all these objects in his garden shed.

  One of the many stories in Perec’s maze of stories describes a more elaborate hoax. It concerns the duping of Bartlebooth’s great-uncle James Sherwood, a Lancashire-born druggist who emigrated to America where he made a colossal fortune in Boston from ginger-based cough pastilles. He then attempted to alleviate the neurasthenia and lethargy of excessive wealth by collecting unica. ‘In the jargon of the rare book, antique and curio trade,’ Perec tells us, ‘an unicum, as its name implies, is an object which is the only one of its kind.’ This rather vague definition, he says, covers several classes of object, which include a monstrous double bass for two musicians, an animal species like the tendrac Dasogale fontoynanti from Madagascar, a postage stamp or engraving of which only one example survives, the pen that signed the Treaty of Versailles, the boxing gloves Dempsey wore to defeat Carpentier on 21 July 1921, or Rita Hayworth’s glove from the film Gilda. ‘Scepticism and passion,’ he informs us, ‘are the two traits of unica-lovers.’

  The victim of an immensely lengthy and elaborate hoax, involving forged documents, hired actors, fake scenery, and a charade of vendors, Sherwood is brought to believe that he is on the track of the Holy Vase in which Joseph of Arimathaea captured the blood springing from the wounds of Christ. He purchases for $1 million a vase that turns out to be ‘a slightly dissimulated gugglet of sorts, bought at a souk in Nabeul’, but doubt is cast on the success of this deception when it appears that Sherwood is less downcast by the loss of a third of his fortune than might have been expected. Had he enjoyed the play-acting more than he would have enjoyed the acquisition of a real treasure, and regarded it as ‘a powerful palliative for his melancholy’, or had he paid the syndicate of forgers in faked twenty-dollar bills? Had he paid for a fake with fakes? The questions remain unanswered.

  Perec’s densely packed storehouse of a novel is stuffed with descriptions of pictures-within-pictures, with marquetry and mosaics, stained-glass windows, scrimshaw and globular glass snowstorms, patterned tiles and parquet floors, maps and plaster casts of Beethoven, inflatable dolls and patent ashtrays, paperweights and biscuit tins, souvenirs and old postcards and other items of bric-a-brac. Perec also lists a large monastery transported stone by stone from France to Connecticut and a simulacrum of Chartres cathedral constructed out of lard. The prose grows lyrical as it evokes, sublimely, ‘a ceiling divided into octagonal sections, decorated in gold and silver, and more exquisitely worked than any jewel’, and, bathetically, ‘a linoleum mosaic of jade and azure and cinnabar rhomboids’. The novel is an unparalleled celebration of mimicry, artistry, craftsmanship, detritus and all the half-arts that have ever been invented, and it seems to me to contain some clues to the very heart of memory and of my personal past.

  Which is odd, when I consider how different my life has been from Perec’s, how long it took me to discover his work, and how hostile I was when young to most of the French avant-garde. I read Sartre and de Beauvoir eagerly, but I disliked the nouveau roman when I first encountered it at Cambridge (although I liked the cinema versions, such as Last Year at Marienbad) and the very thought of writing a book without the letter E irritated me. I thought this was frivolity itself. Games-playing! Games-playing! Life was too short for stuff like that, and books were too important.

  I am a convert. I eat my words. Perec was a deeply serious man.

  My interest in his work, however, although intense, remains selective. I greatly admire Life: A User’s Manual, with its densely physical evocation of life in an apartment house in Paris, its cellular design, its cleverly overlapping stories, its obsessions, its closely observed descriptions of jigsaw practice and jigsaw mania, its sociological acuity, its multitude of ‘things’. (Was he influenced, I wonder, by Zola’s pullulating apartment-block novel, Pot-Bouille?) But I can’t follow (or perhaps I mean I can’t be bothered to follow) the structural use of the chess problem known as the Knight’s Tour, which apparently involves moving a knight around the sixty-four squares of a chessboard without landing twice on the same square, and I can’t grasp his employment of the Graeco-Latin bi-square. (I was unfortunately allowed to drop mathematics at the age of twelve, and that must be my excuse.)

  I love Perec’s lists, but I don’t like some of his word games. I can’t take the over-elaboration of the homophone experiments in which he phonetically distorts a name or an English proverb. Here are a couple of ludicrous examples: Loup de wigwam: bêtes aux veines (wigwam wolf: animal of the veins) becomes
Ludwig van Beethoven, and All’s well that ends well becomes Alice vêle; Satan, soûl, hèle. James Hadley Chase as J’aime ça, les laides chaises works a bit better, but even that’s not a very convincing correspondence.

  On the other hand, I very much like two homophones I came across recently in Gregory Benford’s introduction to a translation of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, and I think Verne’s admirer Perec would have liked them too. Benford, describing Verne’s influence on other science-fiction writers, writes:

  Verne even influenced those who didn’t quite know who he was. Isaac Asimov once told me that when he was still a young science fiction fan he found himself listening to a lecture about a great foreign writer, a master of fantastic literature. But Asimov couldn’t recognise the name. Giving the French pronunciation, the lecturer said ‘Surely you must know Zuell Pfern’, and described From the Earth to the Moon. Asimov replied in his Brooklyn accent, ‘Oh, you mean Jewels Voine!

  That’s a Perec kind of anecdote. ‘Jewels Voine’ is beautiful. Hyman Kaplan couldn’t have put it better.

  Wilful experiment used to annoy me. I was a Mimesis woman, brought up on the great Eric Auerbach and his magisterial version of what he calls ‘The Representation of Reality in Western Literature’, which he wrote in exile during the Second World War in Istanbul. (His concluding chapter, titled ‘The Brown Stocking’, discusses To the Lighthouse and James Ramsay cutting out his refrigerator.) I gained much and I missed much through this bias. I am catching up now.

  I have even come to like the visual artists connected with Oulipo (they sometimes call themselves Oupeinpo) who have invented ingenious games with well-known images, fracturing them, swivelling them, slicing them, restructuring them and turning them inside out. I used to think this kind of experiment akin to a schoolboy’s painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa or adding arms to the Venus of Milo and thinking it funny, but, again, I’ve changed my mind. Their efforts include reversing the image of Ingres’s Grande Odalisque by turning her around on her couch in sixty-four slices so that she faces in the opposite direction, and creating new paintings from composite Old Master sources in elaborate collages. Some of the results are surprisingly attractive. (They claim to distance themselves from the collages of Surrealism by introducing technical constraints, but in my view this distancing is in itself something of a technicality.)

  One of their proposals, the Module Oupeinpien Universel (MOU), devised at a meeting of Oulipo on 11 January 1997, is for a jigsaw described as a ‘puzzlomorphic trammel-net, all of whose pieces have an identical shape’, which can be permuted indefinitely. ‘Every painting in the world (and all its reproductions), every printed page and poster, the entirety of existing images could thus be cut up using the MOU, and reassembled in a near-infinity of combinations.’ Tristan Bastit (who is a real painter, not a fantasy figure) suggested creating ‘a Potential History of Art (text and illustrations) on the MOU principle by cutting up the 4,008 pages of the Universal History of Art (in 10 volumes)’. This could be achieved, he said calmly, with the help of a jigsaw punch.

  XXXIV

  Johann Siegmund Stoy, inventor of the boxed picture academy, appears to have been an isolated and eccentric figure, whereas the Oulipeans thrived (and still thrive) on interchange. Perec, who has written so powerfully of the experience of half-crazed loneliness, was, paradoxically, for much of his life a gregarious and clubbable man, with many close friendships. Most of the early children’s publishers were similarly interconnected, though by patterns of kinship rather than friendship; they came from closely knit family businesses, which intermarried and created long-lived dynasties. F. J. Harvey Darton, who chronicled the rise of these family groups, came from one of the most powerful; he was the great-great-grandson of William Darton, the founder of a durable publishing venture. The Dartons were Quakers, whereas the Spilsburys ( John, the puzzle maker, and his older brother Jonathan) had leanings towards the Moravian Church, of which Jonathan became a member. An educational purpose informed both families, although John, with his dissected puzzles and printed kerchiefs, clearly had a commercial instinct as sound as John Newbery’s.

  The talented Spilsburys, unlike the Dartons, did not found a dynasty, although as we have seen John Spilsbury’s name is now firmly recorded in history (or at least in the ODNB and the records of University Challenge) and the intricacies of the Spilsbury family tree have been disentangled. The name of Darton, however, is threaded through the long history of children’s literature, and is still current. William Darton (1755–1819), writer, printer, bookseller, stationer and engraver, was the son of the landlord of the Coach and Six Horses in Tottenham, Middlesex, and was apprenticed to an engraver before setting up his own business. He became a Quaker, joining the Society of Friends in 1777, and ten years later began to trade in 1787 in White Lion Alley, Birchin Lane. It was from this address that he published Engravings for teaching the elements of English history and chronology after the manner of dissected maps for teaching geography, which has a claim to be the earliest historical jigsaw puzzle. He soon moved two streets to the east to 55 Gracechurch Street, where he formed a long-lasting partnership with printer Joseph Harvey (1764–1841). Darton’s son, another William Darton (1781–1854), was to pursue the same line of business in the same neighbourhood, from an address in Holborn Hill.

  Joseph Harvey, like the Dartons, was a Quaker, and the firm of Darton and Harvey, which flourished for well over a hundred years, had a strong ethical policy. It published anti-slavery literature for adults, and its many publications for children included works by two immensely successful sisters, Jane and Anne Taylor, who came from another prolific and thriving family business of writers and engravers. Anne wrote ‘My Mother’ (Original Poems for Infant Minds, 1804), and Jane wrote ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’ (Rhymes for the Nursery, 1806), which inspired many commercial spin-offs. Darton and Harvey also published the formidable Mrs Sherwood, whose memoirs were edited by F. J. Harvey Darton. It was William Darton Junior of Holborn Hill who invested heavily in table games and puzzles; his surviving products include an illustrated version of Anne Taylor’s ‘My Mother’ in puzzle form, which was followed by ‘My Bible’, ‘My Son’, and ‘My Grandmother’.

  The firm of Darton and Harvey also published an author whose name was very well known to me as a schoolgirl in York, though I did not know much about him. In the school garden of the Mount there was a charming, eighteenth-century, octagonal summer house with an ogee roof, which was known to us as ‘the Lindley Murray’, after the Pennsylvanian-born Quaker grammarian (1745–1826) who eventually settled in York, and whose best- selling English Grammar was published by Darton and Harvey in 1795. Murray had been asked to write his famous Grammar in a ‘humble petition’ from three friends who were teachers at the Quaker school for girls in York, then located in Trinity Lane, and now known as the Mount School. His work was immensely successful in its day, and the school continues to prosper. It continues to be, as it was then, both Quaker and single sex, and the summer house named after him stands in its garden just as it always has. A history of the school written in 1931 tells us that it was then ‘the haunt of schoolgirls, who would still talk of “the Lindley Murray”, meaning a summer-house and not a book’, and this was true when I was there in the 1950s.

  My sisters and I were not sent to the Mount School because my parents were Quakers. They became Quakers as a result of sending us to the Mount. My mother had taught there, briefly, before her marriage, and had retained happy memories of its friendly and egalitarian spirit, so when my parents were looking for a suitable boarding school its name came up. My father thought we would have a less ‘snobbish’ education there than at some other well-known schools for girls, and he was right. I cannot remember precisely when he joined the Society of Friends, but it must have been at some point during the 1950s. (My mother, once a vocal, Shavian, anti-chapel atheist, took some years to follow him.) My father, unlike my mother and my aunt, had a religious temperament,
and intermittently attended the local Anglican church in Sheffield (now, I believe, demolished), but he found the service unsatisfactory. He could never say the Creed, because he did not believe in most of it, and he hated some of the Old Testament and the psalms, which were intoned from the pulpit or chanted by the congregation. Passages about dashing out the brains of children caused him particular distress: I recall his response to a reading of Psalm 137, which ends: ‘O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed: happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.’ No, he said, as we walked home down the tree-lined suburban avenue; that was not the way to behave, or the way to talk.

  I didn’t mind those bits then (I do now) but in St Andrew’s I developed a lasting dislike of organ music. To this day the sound of the organ sets my teeth on edge. Just as the cant of Methodist chapels and Sunday schools annoyed my mother and Arnold Bennett, so the windy, droning screech of the organ annoys me. And I didn’t like the collection, either. My father would give me a threepenny bit to drop into the nasty, dusty, velvety pouch, which made me feel a hypocrite. It hadn’t been mine to give, nor had it been given willingly.

  My father escaped from what he saw as the hypocrisies of the Church of England by becoming a Quaker. He was not a Pacifist, as he maintained that the Second World War was a just war and he was right to have served in it, but by and large the enlightened and rational Quaker faith suited him. It did not compel him to say he believed in the impossible, and he liked the emphasis on social service and internationalism. He became involved, as lawyer then as judge, with the Quaker prison reform agenda, about which he felt strongly. He thought it important to try to belong to a community of believers, although he was in many ways a solitary man. I don’t know whether or not he believed in God, but he would certainly have liked to have been able to do so, and he behaved as though he did. I have often wished I could have asked him what he made of Hugh Kingsmill’s words about the Kingdom of Heaven, which ‘cannot be created by charters and constitutions nor established by arms. Those who set out for it alone will reach it together, and those who seek it in company will perish by themselves.’ But I didn’t discover these moving words until after his death. I was introduced to them by Michael, Kingsmill’s biographer, who found them for himself in Maidenhead Public Library, and by the time Michael met my father in Amsterdam in 1982, my father was on his deathbed.