The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  Many decades ago, my mother-in-law gave me a tiny hand mirror with a little handle, an ornate gilt frame, and a French, eighteenth-century-style, faux-shepherdess painting on the back. It wasn’t valuable, it was just a trinket, a stocking-filler gift, but I loved it. (My Jewish in-laws didn’t do stockings and Christmas, as such, but they did presents in a very big way.) My sister, when she saw this small gift, eyed it with a mixture of censure and envy, and said, ‘We don’t give one another pretty things like that in our family, do we?’

  No, we didn’t. We weren’t very good at gifts of any sort.

  I still have the mirror, but the painting has come unstuck and mislaid itself.

  I occasionally bought what I thought were pretty gifts for my mother-in-law, in reciprocity. It was a pleasure to do so, and I wish I had dared to buy her more. I once bought her a beautiful silver serving spoon embossed with fruit from Shrubsole’s famous shop in Museum Street. And a Venetian lace handkerchief in Venice. These were ceremonial objects, expensive and delightful.

  Opulence moves me. When I started to leaf through a book on the restoration of Federico da Montefeltro’s studiolo in Gubbio, I was astonished to find tears starting to my eyes. There I sat, in Humanities Two at the British Library, weeping. My quest for jigsaws and mosaics had by now meandered to a search for marquetry images of cabinets within cabinets, for trompe l’oeil bookshelves, for benches and cupboards, for intricate geometry and perspectives, for cunning woodwork. And they are all there, in the Gubbio studiolo, in abundance – fictive niches of illusionistic intarsia, musical scores and instruments, birds in birdcages, lecterns and books, hunting horns and candlesticks, some of them so convincingly three-dimensional that the eye cannot persuade itself that it is seeing a flat surface.

  But what brought the tears of joy to my eyes was a photograph of a coffered ceiling.

  The Gubbio Studiolo and its Conservation shows photographs of the main ceiling and of a ceiling in a window niche of the Gubbio studiolo, and ceilings from the Palazzo Vecchio and the Chapel of the Palazzo Medici in Florence. These ceilings, with their glorious symmetries of gold, scarlet, silver and azure, with their mix of patterned surface and rich embossed depth, are astonishing works of art, which satisfy something profound in our desire for ornamentation and control, for exuberance and majestic regularity. Lowered as I was by ill health, and by a journey on the underground, and by the habitual stress of negotiating what was then the building site of King’s Cross station, with its steps and its barriers and its ever-changing grey congeries of exits and entrances, I was overcome by this small vision of ordered polychrome splendour on my library desk. These were only photographs in a book, but they made me weep.

  Had I ever seen any of these ceilings, had I ever bothered to look upwards? I’d been to Florence, I’d been to Gubbio, but I couldn’t recall that I had noticed any ceilings. (The Gubbio ceilings are now in New York, but I haven’t seen them there, either, and as I’m very unlikely to go to New York again, I never will.) The designs of palmettes and acanthus leaves, of five-petalled gilded flowers and flower buds, of octagons and trapezoids, of panels painted to resemble green, red and purple porphyry, seem to unite the natural and the unnatural, the organic and the mathematical, in the great artifice of eternity. These ceilings are the starry vaults of the heavens themselves, re-created upon earth.

  Are the Gubbio ceilings still the Gubbio ceilings, now that they have been relocated and restored in America? This is not an idle question. They were purchased in Italy in 1937 by the international dealer Adolph Loewi, who found them not in Gubbio but in the Villa Lancellotti in Frascati, whither they had been transported during the 1870s. Loewi bought them from their (disputed) owner Prince Lancellotti, and shipped them to America for their better health in 1939, along with all the marquetry panelling of the studiolo. They arrived in their crates in New York on 15 May 1939, were purchased by and eventually delivered to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 30 November, and the restored studiolo was unveiled on the first floor of the museum in January 1941, amidst much wonder and acclaim, and learned reference to the hyper-realist and surrealist spirit of the marquetry. Then, in 1966, the studiolo disappeared once more from public view, this time for thirty years, to re-appear after a second and much longer process of restoration and conservation (1987–96) in May 1996. And there, in the Metropolitan, the studiolo remains. It is of Gubbio, and not of Gubbio. It is even less likely than the Elgin marbles to make its way home.

  You can’t buy it in jigsaw format in the Met Store, which is a pity, but you can buy a reproduction wood-inlay copy of one of the panels for $125, including hanging hardware.

  America, like the British Museum, is full of expatriated treasures.

  Would it be a good idea to try to repatriate at vast expense the cloister of Saint Michel de Cuxa from the Cloisters of Fort Tryon Park in New York to its original site in the Abbey of Saint Michel de Cuxa in the French Pyrenees? Baudrillard thought not, arguing in Simulacra and Simulation that

  if the exportation of the cornices was in effect an arbitrary act, if the Cloisters in New York are an artificial mosaic of all cultures (following the logic of the capitalist centralization of value), their reimportation to the original site is even more artificial: it is a total simulacrum that links up with ‘reality’ through a complete circumvention. The cloister should have stayed in New York in its simulated environment, which at least fooled no one.

  I see what he means, which, with Baudrillard, is not always the case. But I think I am happier with the concept of second-hand representations than he is. I can burst into tears over a picture or a photograph in a book. I can do a Clementoni jigsaw of Botticelli’s Primavera and feel that I am paying homage to the painting rather than insulting it. I am quite humble in that way. Goethe might have agreed with Baudrillard. But then again, he might not.

  When I was first in Florence, aged seventeen, encouraged by a sophisticated young man called Geoffrey who said it was ‘all right’ to do this, I bought a cheap reproduction of the head of Flora from the Primavera. It was painted on wood, with a gilt edging, and I thought it was beautiful. It can’t have cost more than a few shillings, because that was all I would have had to spend in those days. It had a very ‘antique’ look to it, and I was pleased on my way home when the Customs Officer at Dover detained me to look at it quite carefully. I kept it for years, but I always thought of it as a cheap copy, and I must have thrown it away when I sold the house in Hampstead. How could I have done that? My daughter now tells me that it was in her Hampstead bedroom for years when she was a child. I wish she had told me to hang on to it. I wish I had hung on to a lot of the things that I took to Oxfam.

  The original transportation of the cloister of Saint Michel de Cuxa from France to America did not go unremarked. Englishman Alfred Emberson, in an English guidebook to the fashionable spa of Vernet-les-Bains (All about Vernet-les-Bains, 1913), commented on the threatened appropriation with indignation. He wrote, in 1913, just before its removal:

  One experiences a sort of shock when one reads in all the papers of the efforts of an American sculptor to capture and carry off to his own country the ruins of the ancient Abbaye of Saint Michel de Cuxa, near Prades…The incident recalls the alarm I experienced when a charming American and his wife and daughter, who were staying here, quietly announced at lunch how disappointed they were that they had not been able to buy the quaint old church bell at Casteil to take home with them.

  It always impresses me…how regardless our cousins from across the Atlantic are of the terrors of ‘extra luggage’…

  It would require a Shakespeare to adequately describe the sensations – if they could only ‘sensate’ – of these mediaeval stone-built structures, which withstood not only the raids of the Visigoths, Moors and Romans, but more wonderfully still the ravages of Time, when they find themselves helpless before the power of Money and the relentless disregard of their feelings of Modern Barbarity.

  The French government tr
ied but failed to save the cloisters for France. Thirty-seven capitals, nineteen abaci, seven arches and various bits of parapet and doorway were bought, transported and eventually re-erected in New York. I have seen them there. Other fragments made their way to the Louvre, to Boston, to Philadelphia and to Eze-Village on the Riviera. Some have now made their way home to Prades, but yet more are no doubt standing as ornaments in private gardens or serving humbly and unrecognized as doorstops or cattle troughs all over the department of Roussillon. Perhaps on the Day of Judgement they will all rush together again, at vast destructive speed, like a disaster movie being played backwards.

  Rediviva saxa.

  The cloisters and the studiolo went to New York, but the horseshoes of Scarrington stayed at home, saved from American purchasers by a preservation order and Nottinghamshire County Council.

  The American novelist Booth Tarkington wrote an amusing parody of American collectors titled The Collector’s Whatnot (1923), in which he satirizes the habit of acquiring frying pans and sow scrapers and hooked rugs and camping stools and bits of wood full of wormholes, as well as the practice of hanging agricultural implements as decorations on restaurant walls. There is a chapter on how to avoid being cheated in Europe, which makes it clear that the antique dealers usually have the upper hand.

  XLVII

  I have strayed far from my plan, which was to write a brief illustrated history of the jigsaw puzzle. I find myself with a bucket full of leftover tesserae, some with jagged and uneven edges encrusted with old mastic and resin, which do not fit into my original design. Nick Tucker wrote to me that one of the lessons of the jigsaw is that ‘order is always attainable in the end so long as one works hard for it’, but of course I have made things difficult for myself by straying out of my frame and finding new pieces as I go along. This is not the book I meant to write.

  I think I have been trying to write about authenticity and family and folk memory, and how these concepts affect our view of the idyll of the Cider with Rosie, Teas-with-Hovis, Golden Legend past. I have been trying to recapture my aunt and my childhood. I have been trying to use simpler shapes and brighter colours than I have used in my work of late. I have been trying to fit the simple building blocks together. Bryn stands for the house the child draws, the simple solid village house on a main thoroughfare in the middle of England.

  I have long been uneasy about the Uttley-style fetishization of the past. I was wary of it long before I read Raphael Samuel, Georges Perec and Jean Baudrillard. (I don’t think any of them would have read Alison Uttley, though one can never be sure with Perec.) They articulated my sense of the overlay and appropriation of ‘real’ objects by fashion and nostalgia, and the concomitant fear of ‘inauthenticity’. A fear, one might posit, of horse brasses and crinoline ladies embroidered on tablecloths. This is akin to the more solemn and political mauvaise foi, which exercised us in the 1960s, but it is more object-based, more materialistic. It is more concerned with ‘Things’.

  Let me return to the warming-pan from Bryn. It has a very dark wooden handle, thirty-four inches long. Its circular copper pan has a diameter of just under a foot and is about three inches deep. The copper cover is engraved – one might say scratched – with a very simple and basic design of five leaves and five sprays of flowers. I cannot see any manufacturer’s name on it and I do not know how old it is. It was not made as a replica, and it was certainly not a unicum, so there may be many almost-identical objects surviving in Britain. It is, in this sense, the real thing, and was once filled with hot coals to warm damp beds.

  I do not think it was given to my grandmother as part of her brass collection. When it came ‘into the family’ I do not know, nor do I know how it came to me rather than to anyone else in the family. Maybe I appropriated it, maybe nobody else wanted it, maybe Joyce rescued it for me and made me take it away before it got lost or was put in the house sale (into which, to my regret, the grandfather clock vanished). Now it stands, ornamentally, decoratively, non-functionally, in my study, inside the brass fender of the tiled fireplace in my husband’s house in North Kensington. The fireplace may or may not be an original feature of this London house. The copper has a soft, yellow-gold, burnished glow.

  What does this object mean? It has come to me, for better or worse, but it is not very intimately connected with my evenings playing Belisha or pegging rugs or making spills and lavender bags or going to bed in the apple loft by the Kelly light. The Kelly light and the Campbell tile from Stoke-on-Trent have much more powerful associations for me. The warming-pan was as decorative and non-functional at Bryn as it is now in London. But it is durable, and too good to throw away.

  My mother discovered electric blankets. I was converted to them for a while, but began some twenty or thirty years ago to consider them a fire risk. They heated the bed, fine, but what if you fell asleep on top of all that unreliable and prickly wiring? And I didn’t like the fuzzy, felted texture of the covering. So I returned to the safety, the traditional comfort, of the hot-water bottle. You really can’t do yourself much damage with a hot-water bottle, apart from mottling yourself with red blotches, and the fact that they are still so widely available means that others agree with me. You’d have thought they might have gone out of production by now, but they haven’t.

  My mother wanted to be modern. She hated coal fires, because they were dirty and reminded her of the South Yorkshire where she was born, and from which she had always longed to escape. She liked central heating and electric blankets and her electric kettle and her Teasmade. My daughter wrote a fine poem invoking that Teasmade.

  I suppose it is just possible that my grandparents bought the warming-pan as a non-functioning item of decor that would help to authenticate their removal from the coal belt of Mexborough to the clean air, flat fields, mild beasts and marching pylons of Lincolnshire. I have explained that they had no hereditary stake in that agricultural Midlands county; their forebears were from industrial Leeds, the horrors of which were chronicled in the 1850s by Engels and Elizabeth Gaskell, and from the Five Towns, which had to wait until Arnold Bennett for their scribe. What, then, was the source of their feeling for their Teas-with-Hovis home, and, two generations later, to what kind of legitimate connection with it could I make a claim?

  John Clare, the poet of the local, loved his native Midlands. In middle life, suffering from a form of dementia, he was taken south to an asylum at High Beech (now High Beach) in Epping, whence after a few years he absconded. He walked his penniless way back up the Great North Road (or, as he sometimes called it, the Great York Road) to Helpton, guided at one point by gypsies, and sleeping rough for several nights in trusses of clover, or sheltering from the wind beneath a row of elms or in a dyke bottom. On the third day, he writes, ‘I satisfied my hunger by eating the grass by the roadside which seemed to taste something like bread I was hungry and eat heartily and in fact the meal seemed to do me good.’

  Clare in his madness had delusions of grandeur, and thought at times he was Robert Burns or Byron or Ben Caunt the prize fighter. (Some of his lyrics are more than worthy of Burns, and his pastiche of Byron is brilliant.) But he was at the same time realistically aware both of his own declining fame and status and (as Jonathan Bate has convincingly argued) of the falling sales of poetry in general, lamenting in his poem ‘Decay’, ‘O Poesy is on the wane/For fancys vision all unfitting…’ And yet he went on writing, not only at High Beech, but after his brief return to Helpton, and also through most of the years he spent in Northampton General Asylum. He could not cease to be a poet. The poetry poured from him; as another poet once said, ‘there was no stopping it’. His first-hand observations of the natural world and his faultless ear did not fail him, even when there was hardly anybody left to read or to listen.

  We do not know how much a sense of failure and the drifting away of powerful friends contributed to his madness. Like many peasant and ploughmen poets, he had both profited and suffered from the dislocation of being taken up by publishe
rs, aristocratic admirers and established literati. The gap between the world of the village and the world of literary London was almost unbridgeable, although at times he had seemed to have succeeded in crossing it. His instinct was to walk back to his birthplace, in a hope of finding himself and a way out of ‘this sad non-identity’. But when he got there, he was not there.

  Writers are often and rightly accused of self-absorption and egoism, but many have a very fragile hold on the self. (These states are not incompatible.) At times I am not at all sure that I am a writer, although I have published more than twenty books and have earned what I consider a good living at the trade. I clearly remember an occasion years ago when I set off to deliver the typescript of a new novel (I think it was my fourth, Jerusalem the Golden) to my publishers, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, whose offices were then in Bond Street. I was walking along cheerfully with my package, not quite able to visualize the building that was my destination, although I had visited it on one or two occasions. But I was confident that I had the correct street number and that it would materialize. However, when I reached 20 Bond Street, it wasn’t Weidenfeld and Nicolson at all, but a dress shop. I stood there in the street, astonished. And my first reaction was shocking. Instead of assuming that I had made a mistake in the address, I knew, suddenly, in a thunderbolt of awareness, that I had been deluding myself for years, and had madly fancied myself a writer, when I was nothing of the sort. I had been living in a fantasy, and I had better get on the bus, go home to Highbury and adjust to reality. It was a bad moment, but I swallowed humbly and prepared to confront the madhouse that might await me.

  In a matter of seconds, I worked out that either the publishers had moved, or that I was in the wrong bit of Bond Street. And I was, of course, in Bond Street, instead of at 20 New Bond Street where I should have been. It was a simple mistake and easily rectified. I just walked down the road. But I was shaken by my first response. It wasn’t even as though I had longed all my life (as some do) to become a writer. I hadn’t. I had no lofty sense of destiny, I didn’t suffer from that form of hubris. I had wanted to be an actress, but my stage career hadn’t worked out as I’d hoped. Being a writer was a second choice for me. I had settled into ‘being a writer’, for better or worse, because I was (and am) no good at doing nothing, but I hadn’t sunk my whole identity into the occupation. I now think that at that moment in Bond Street I was confronting the other life I might have led. Time might have split, as in an H. G. Wells or Borges story, and I might have rejoined the real world in which I might have lived, and rediscovered another and perhaps happier identity.