The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws (33 page)

This was an instructive experience. I didn't take against the creature, as I took against
Venus of Urbino,
but I didn't think it repaid attention. Maybe it was badly cut. I can't now recall the shape of the pieces. An expert might well have blamed the cut. And maybe it was a pig, not a cow. A huge sow, like the sow at the Home Farm in Blue Anchor. Maybe that is why I took against it.

Jigsaws have now been with us for so long and have become so much a part of our way of thinking that it is hard to know how we did without them. The jigsaw as metaphor and simile is everywhere. It is used as a logo by Microsoft Word and by the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and it pops up on the screen of the Barclays Bank Hole in the Wall. Those instantly recognizable little shapes, dubbed in friendly fashion by Perec 'les bonhommes' (the little chaps), 'les croix de Lorraine' (the double crosses) and 'les croix' (the cross-bars), are familiar to us all, although they post-date Spilsbury and belong to the age of the fretsaw and the cardboard punch.

Clothes shops and furniture designers have adopted the word 'jigsaw' as a brand name. I wrote some of this text while wearing a Jigsaw cardigan given to me for Christmas by my son and daughter-in-law. Kiran Desai uses the word as a verb in her novel
The Inheritance of Loss
(2006), where she speaks of jigsawing 'cups, saucers, teapot, milk, sugar, strainer, Marie and Delite biscuits' on a tea tray. (Is there a suggestion here that jigsaws, like Marie biscuits, are part of a threatened and fading Anglophile world? I think not.)

Every day a journalist or broadcaster uses the word in one context or another – in the space of a few weeks we had the avian flu jigsaw, the England cricket team jigsaw, the Ipswich murders jigsaw, the juvenile crime jigsaw, and innumerable other jigsaws, too many to note, too many to quantify. We even had the missing-pieces-of-God jigsaw on 'Thought for the Day'. Open any newspaper any day and you are likely to find a jigsaw. I have stopped counting. The word suggests at once difficulty and comfort – the frustration of the unsolved puzzle, the satisfaction of the possible solution.

The word 'jigsaw' was never patented or enshrined in copyright. It has appeared in many titles. Barbara Cartland's first novel, a Mayfair romance of implausibly resolved misunderstandings, is called
Jig-Saw
(1923). Sybille Bedford's volume of autobiography, which fits together the disparate characters and episodes of her long and international life, is also, more relevantly, called
Jigsaw
(1989). Michael Holroyd's second volume of memoirs, which fits together the missing pieces of family information that emerged after the publication of
Basil Street Blues
in 1999, is called, analogously,
Mosaic,
though it too could have been called
Jigsaw,
for much of the new information revolves round the missing piece (and missing portrait) of his grandfather's mistress Agnes May, the blonde beauty who ruined the Holroyd family fortunes. Vikram Seth at one point thought of calling his memoir of his aunt and uncle
Mosaic,
but Holroyd got there first, and Seth settled on the title of
Two Lives.

John Fowles, writing in a similar autobiographical mode, worked for a long time on a volume of autobiographical fiction called
Tesserae,
a ghost title that occasionally appears in his bibliography, though it was never published. Fowles said it would have been 'a sort of existentialist mosaic of what it was like in the 1950s to be poor, unfocused, and unpublished', but he did not finish
it. He thought of reusing the title for his collected essays and writings, which appeared in 1998 as
Wormholes,
and in the preface to this volume he tells us that 'An early book I tried to write was entitled
Tesserae;
to be of minor relationships, dabs of colour. I always felt then that I was best understood and seen – or felt – as a sequence of very small happenings, little brick squares of opinion and feeling.'

The assembly of squares and fragments: the picture made up, like Queen Adelaide's face, in stitches, or in pixels, or in small blocks, or in dots, or in stipples, or in particles. Virginia Woolf, reflecting in her diary (September 1924) on the heterogeneity of daily life and its mixed tapestry composed of postmen, invitations to Knole, and lectures on the League of Nations, notes: 'All this confirms me in thinking that we're splinters and mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes.' (It's not clear who the 'they' are who used to hold this view of identity – old-fashioned novelists like Arnold Bennett, perhaps?) A fragmented view of personality and consciousness has been widely held since the days of Locke and Berkeley and their successor David Hartley, and neuroscientists today nudge us even further towards the notion that memory, character and consciousness itself are made up of small, discrete, neurological events, events that build up a mosaic, a jigsaw, a pattern, which we may take for a whole. A pointillist self, made up of tesserae.

Experimental novelist Paul Ableman in
the secret of consciousness
(1999) proposed the view that the human mind is fundamentally discontinuous: 'a "person", even though fully material, and indeed biological, is not a stable and continuous entity but rather an intermittent and discontinuous one.' We need to make up a linking narrative, but the links may be arbitrary or even false. Identity is no more (or less) than the unique set, or narrative, of sensory data in each individual. The novelist's use of 'interior monologue' is an
attempt to mimic both the instant chaos and the archival organization of the mind.

When Paul tried to explain his theory of the mind to me, he seemed to think I might find it in some way threatening, although he argued that it wasn't; he insisted that it didn't imply that we were 'robotic', but he insisted a bit too much. I wasn't sure whether I understood him fully. (He was amused by my lack of grasp of the simple principle of the transistor, which I had always thought was something to do with tiny radios, but which proved to be an important part of his twin-data-stream theory of consciousness.)

To me, the concept of the self as a sequence of very small but discrete happenings is persuasive and attractive, not alarming. It allows for addition, for retrieval, for accretion, and for the retrospective solving of puzzles. If one could only retrieve from long ago that little block of fear, or disgust, or attraction, that sudden flash of recognition or enlightenment, one could hook it into the pattern, one could rebuild and reinterpret the fuller picture.

The Oulipians had a word for language used in small, recognizable blocks, in the verbal equivalent of little brick squares. They called this 'langage cuit', or 'pre-cooked language' or 'canned' language, and in this category they included 'proverbs, clichés, quotations, historical declarations, book and film titles etc.', which became for them the base of many artful substitutions and variations. Auntie Phyl and I, in our daily converse, used a good deal of canned language (just as, during and immediately after the war, we ate a lot of canned food), and I found it a comforting medium of exchange. You knew where you were with canned language. I have used quite a lot of it in this book. Writers spend much time—sometimes too much time—striving for originality of diction. You can communicate perfectly well with many people, indeed often better, if you stick largely to a common canned language, and draw from a common source.

Mary Poppins uses a great deal of canned language, which forms a piquant contrast with her unpredictable behaviour. She is fond of phrases like 'Care killed a cat' and 'I wouldn't half like a cup of tea' and 'You got out of bed the wrong side this morning' and 'Strike me pink!' Children find this reassuring.

Auntie Phyl had a friend, Mr Hubbard, who used to come to sit with her on Sunday afternoons. He was, I think, a neighbouring farmer. He hardly ever said anything, and neither did she. I used to find these silences trying, until it occurred to me to look at them in a different light. These were Long Bennington silences. They were the silences of the tribe, and they had a long history. And the phrases of greeting and parting that they uttered were time-honoured, and the odd scrap of information about a dog, or the weather, or the crop of apples or greengages needed no embellishment. They were what they were. They were complete in themselves.

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.

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.