The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws Page 8
The mahogany sideboard, the second most expensive single item in the sale list, had cost £510 s. The most expensive was a brass bedstead, which was bought for £8 10 s, and on which my grandmother died.
I don't know when my grandparents acquired the warming-pan that I rescued from Bryn, and which I keep in my study in London. I don't know whether it was ever used. I remember the cream-and-brown stone hot-water bottles, as does everyone of my age, but not the warming-pan. It may have been bought in Leeds in 1905, along with the brass bedstead, although it isn't listed in the inventory. But that would not in itself have confirmed it as an item of inauthentic retro-chic.
Can a horse brass ever be authentic? A warming-pan may be, but I'm not sure whether a horse brass can. Antique, yes, though not many are; authentic, no.
Samuel Johnson loved an inn as well as a post-chaise, and he claimed that good inns contributed greatly to human happiness. But he is very unlikely to have supped in Bryn, for it was not then a public house. He might well have stopped at the George in Stamford, or at the Angel in Grantham, or at the White Hart in Newark, and seen a group of fellow travellers or locals playing cards or the goose game. The Great North Road is lined with famous coaching inns with long pedigrees. The upper dining room of the Angel in Grantham, with its three fine, deep oriel windows, is one of the most handsome public dining rooms in England. King John and Richard III both knew this inn, so why not Dr Johnson?
There is no evidence that Johnson ever played the goose game. As we have seen, Boswell regretted that his friend did not play draughts after leaving college, 'for it would have afforded him an innocent soothing relief from the melancholy which distressed him so often ... there is a composure and gravity in draughts ... which insensibly tranquillises the mind.'
That's what I feel about jigsaws.
XII
Once you start looking for a motif like the Royal Game of the Goose, you find that it pops up in unexpected places. It has now been forgotten in England, but it had its day of fashion here. In the mid-eighteenth century in England, the Duchess of Norfolk planted an outsize goose game of hornbeam in the grounds of her vast mansion at Worksop, which Horace Walpole saw on his visit in 1758. Unfortunately the manor, its five hundred apartments, and all its paintings and objets de vertu were destroyed by fire three years later in 1761, and we hear no more of the hornbeams. A generation later, Byron knew about the goose game and refers to it in Don Juan: 'For good society is but a game/The royal game of goose, as I may say.' And the game lives on in the popular culture of Europe. French and Italian children still play it, as we play Snakes and Ladders. It surfaced recently in Spain and Italy as a game show. A human form of it, claiming to be more ancient than the board game, is played in the square in Mirano, near Padua.
In France, the game flourished from its first introduction. Many pretty, fragile and delicately coloured versions of it survive in the Print Room of the British Museum, with variants embracing journeys through the street vendors of Paris (a penalty is exacted for a stay at the vintner's), the myths of Greece, Roman history (a penalty for landing on the space representing the Emperor Commodus), the military campaigns of Napoleon, and even the lives of famous actors and actresses. Most of these spin-offs have vanished, but the classic board game is well remembered in France, and cheap and cheerful plastic mass-produced versions of it are still on sale in French toyshops. I bought one in Nice in 2005. Its images are of an old-world, bucolic, farmyard prettiness.
I had assumed that it was on the way out in Italy, its birthplace, as my attempts to buy it there in the spring of 2007 were unsuccessful. But my requests for it in newsagents and toyshops were met not with blank indifference but with a smile of happy, nostalgic recognition, the same kind of smile that often greets a query about jigsaws in England. Oh yes, of course they knew the Gioco dell'Oca, they didn't happen to have it in stock, but of course they knew it. And finally I found it, in the autumn, in a newsagent's in Sorrento, where the proprietor who sold it to me told me it was 'un gioco classico'. The board I bought is made by Clementoni, one of the most famous of contemporary jigsaw manufacturers, and the counters are in the form of little wooden geese. They are pleasanter to handle than the French plastic pieces. The scene portrayed is in the Italian Alps, with a mountainous backdrop, a chalet-style farmhouse, an old-fashioned well, cows, a goat, a pig, a rabbit, a tortoise, a butterfly and other designators of rustic life, and the game is described as suitable for players aged from five to ninety-nine. The description doesn't conceal the fact that it is a game of chance, but magnificently insists that the journey along the spiral track also symbolizes 'una vicenda, un'avventura, lo scorrere del tempo, la vita stessa'. (An event, an adventure, the flowing of time, life itself.) We need to justify our diversions.
Why the goose game survived on the continent and not in England is a mystery. Why did we go for Snakes and Ladders and Ludo instead? It was clearly well known in Zembla, that northern realm created by the arch-cryptographer and games-player Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire, where his royal narrator alludes to a version 'played with little airplanes of painted tin'.
Games and manias come and go – board games, card games, collecting crazes. One year the playgrounds and streets are full of mini-scooters, or hula hoops, or yo-yos, or Frisbees, or skateboards, or roller skates, or children wearing bouncy antlers or springy tiaras on their heads, and the next year these objects vanish, or go underground for a while. Pokémon succeeds cigarette cards, and tamagotchi pets succeed Pokémon, while sudoku and kakuro chase the crossword. Some seemingly classic pursuits veer towards extinction or linger on with a small cult of practitioners. Diabolo, a juggling game played with two sticks and a spinning top, and once considered wickedly addictive, is rarely mentioned now, but it was once immensely popular. It is said to have been imported from China to England in the 1790s, round about the same time as the emergence of the jigsaw, and it caught on throughout Europe. Unlike gambling, it wasn't a social evil, but it was a real time-waster and, unlike the hula hoop two hundred years later, it could not be convincingly claimed that its aim was to provide bodily exercise. Dexterity, perhaps, like fivestones, but not good health.
One of the most bizarre tributes to the Royal Game of the Goose appears in a little-read novel by Jules Verne titled Le Testament d'un excentrique,published in 1899. I came across this very recently, but as a child I read and re-read Verne's more popular stories. I loved Journey to the Centre of the Earth, to which I owe an enduring interest in volcanoes and a character in my novel The Realms of Gold. I treasure a copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, given to me by my parents for Christmas 1948, which I reread with intense pleasure and renewed admiration as part of the research for my most recent novel, The Sea Lady. The edition is an attractive Rainbow Classic, published in Cleveland, Ohio, by the World Publishing Company, and edited by May Lamberton Becker, who, I now find, was a distinguished Anglophile American scholar and journalist. (There was a room dedicated to her memory in the National Book League at 7 Albemarle Street; it was opened in 1960 by none other than'T. S. Eliot.) My copy has good illustrations by a German-born and widely travelled artist, Kurt Wiese. As a nine-year-old, I liked best the pictures of the narwhal and the submarine forest. As an adult, I was pleased and astonished to find the narrator and his manservant Conseil portrayed in handsome (though not full-frontal) nakedness.
Verne has long been the darling of armchair parlour travellers. He had an interest in scientific discovery and experiment, and an extravagant love of all forms of locomotion and communication, coupled with a childlike eagerness for geological 'wonders'. The travel industry is greatly indebted to his novels. He preceded mass tourism and globalization, but he was a prophet of both.
I used to feel slightly embarrassed by my juvenile liking for Verne's work, and was both surprised and relieved to discover that he is one of the heroes of Oulipo, that 1960s games-playing and cryptogram-loving movement of the French avant-garde. (Oulipo stands for 'Ouvroir de littér
ature potentielle'.) Verne is a frequent point of reference for Oulipian Georges Perec, author of the classic jigsaw novel, La Vie: Mode d'Emploi, of which we shall read more later. Raymond Roussel, the rich man's Proust, considered Verne one of the greatest of French novelists. His bold and adventurous imagination, his passion for puzzles, challenges, wagers and scientific marvels, appealed to a ludic and fantastic strain in French artists and writers, who took him more seriously than we have taken his English counterpart and literary descendant, H. G. Wells. Long after his death, his fictions continue to create new forms.
In May 2006, an astonishing piece of public art, in the form of a vast mechanical elephant five storeys high, appeared in the streets of London. The elephant walked through Trafalgar Square and along the Haymarket, seeking a giant wooden maiden. The spectacle was based on Verne's travel-quest story, The Sultan's Elephant, and children and adults gathered from far and wide to see it, summoned by word of mouth, mobile phones and glimpses on the television news. Both of my sons saw it, independently, as did two of my grandchildren, who reported to me that the elephant was 'bigger than a house'. I have a photograph of nine-year-old Stanley Swift, sitting on a bollard just inside the crowd barrier, holding up a copy of the specially printed Elephant Echo, with its headline FOUR MAGIC DAYS IN MAY. His seven-year-old sister Constance Swift, who was with another group, was one of the children who climbed up onto the arm of the giant girl to be scooped up by her and swung into the air.
I like the thought of these members of my family, unknown to each other, being drawn together in a huge crowd in central London by a magical elephant. And Jules Verne would have liked this evidence of the durability and adaptability of his fantasies, living on into another medium, another millennium.
Le Testament d'un excentrique has not been revived or much reprinted, but it is not without interest, particularly to one trying to distract herself by puzzles and travel games. In this novel, translated as The Will of an Eccentric, Verne converts the traditional goose game into 'the Noble Game of the United States of America'. Like its more famous predecessor, Around the World in Eighty Days, published a quarter of a century earlier, this is a race game, involving wagers made in a gentleman's club, large sums of money, and an eccentric millionaire. (Wagers in gentleman's clubs are a staple ingredient in the fiction of adventure writers such as Verne and John Buchan; as a Yorkshire schoolgirl, I didn't know what a gentleman's club was, but I liked the conceit.)
The story begins in Chicago, at the vast and festive funeral celebrations ('funérailles à la fois pompeuses et joyeuses') of William J. Hypperbone at Oakwood Cemetery. This character had been a well-known bachelor member of the Eccentric Club in Mohawk Street, where he had been a devotee of
the Royal Game of Goose, the noble form that has come down to us in a more or less altered form from the Ancient Greeks. It would be impossible to say how passionately he was fond of it ... great was his excitement in leaping from one division to another at the caprice of the dice, hurling himself from goose to goose to reach the last of these denizens of the poultry yard, walking on 'the bridge', resting in 'the inn', falling down 'the well', losing himself in 'the maze', casting himself into 'the prison', stumbling against 'the death's head', visiting the compartments of'the sailor', 'the fisherman', 'the harbour', 'the stag', 'the mill', 'the snake', 'the sun', 'the helmet', 'the lion', 'the rabbit', 'the flower-pot', etc.
This breathless encomium, which credits the game with greater antiquity than Irving Finkel would grant it, provides the spring of the action. Hypperbone, apparently dying suddenly and mysteriously in his club, in mid-game, has left a will that selects by lot six random citizens of Chicago, who are expected to chase his fortune through the States of the Union at the dictates of the throw of the dice. (The novel incorporates a pull-out spiral track printed on thin paper and based on the original goose track, showing the fifty states with their heraldic devices.) The first contender to arrive at number 63, back in the home base of Chicago, inherits a fortune of sixty million, and the runner-up wins the sum of the fines and losses of all the other players.
The reading of the will created a frenzy of excitement in the press. Bets were taken on each of the players, and the chase took place largely by rail, though some contestants resorted to steamer, cariole, schooner, motor car, horse and bicycle as they made their way through the hazards of coyotes, stampedes, shipwrecks, storms and armed robbers. (The threat of 'Red Indians' has vanished from the scenario since the days of Phileas Fogg and Passepartout.) The chief delight of the book lies in its role as a vehicle for highly coloured travelogue, and its appeal to railroad enthusiasts. The beauty spots of America – Yellowstone National Park, Colorado, the Mammoth Caves of Kentucky – are described in purple prose, and the complex connections and timetables of the iron network of the railways are explored with the scholarly and pedantic enthusiasm of a railroad fanatic. The Mammoth Caves held a particular fascination for Verne; he invokes them in many of his works, including his bizarre and moving tale of life underground, Les Indes noires, published in 1877, which is improbably set in a Scottish coal mine beneath Lake Katrine. Maybe I owe my liking for caves to Jules Verne, or maybe we both drew from the same source – prehistoric folk memory, perhaps?
The story of The Will of an Eccentric is racy, and it is inconspicuously educational, for it teaches the reader the names of the States of the Union, which may or may not have been part of Verne's agenda. When I reread Nabokov's Lolita recently, it occurred to me that this notorious and brilliant novel of the road is like a pornographic parody of Verne – a vast travelogue of the United States, with a guide to all the motels, hotels and historic tourist sites that might appeal to a dissatisfied teenager. It is a Belisha route darkened by a ghastly combination of boredom and lust, a wild-goose chase that can end only in death.
Verne's novel, unlike Nabokov's, makes the reader long to buy a rail pass and set off at once across America on Amtrak. I did that very thing in 1974, travelling from San Francisco to New York with my three young children, courtesy of the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I don't think Forster would have approved of his money being given to a woman writer encumbered by children, but he was dead by then – not long dead, but dead. Ours was an epic, a memorable journey. We didn't mean to go all the way by train, having booked our passage on a Greyhound bus, but the bus system was in chaos because of a random bomber (this was way back in the mid-1970s, and I can't remember why he was bombing the buses) so we switched to Amtrak. We arrived a mere nine hours late in New York, and just in time to catch the QE2 home. I wouldn't fly in those days. Crossing the continent was exhilarating, and the railway staff were kind to the children.
Angus Wilson, a novelist much given in his prime to travelling abroad, liked to tick off the names of the American states that he had visited. He had an innocently childish desire to see them all, which he almost fulfilled. According to his partner Tony Garrett, the only ones he missed were Colorado, Oklahoma and Alaska, although Tony wonders whether he ever actually set foot in Wisconsin – he sent Tony to put a foot over the border (in much the same manner as I once put a foot over the 39th parallel into North Korea) but Angus may not have followed him over.
Michael, in most respects a man with adult interests, proved surprisingly eager to tick off all of the Canary Islands. This he achieved, with the exceptions of a few inconsiderable rocks, but not without much persistence and some hazardous journeys.
Like Perec's tragic protagonist, Bartlebooth, in La Vie: Mode d'Emploi, we invent arbitrary goals. We tick off states and islands. We make wagers with ourselves. We spot aeroplanes, and thereby risk being imprisoned as spies. We stand on stations or crowd by level crossings in the middle of the countryside, wearing thick glasses and anoraks, sporting binoculars and spotting trains. We collect stamps or coins or cigarette cards or jigsaws of the American Depression or Victorian and Edwardian biscuit tins or moustache cups or Sylvanian families or plastic toys from cereal or
crisp packets. According to a visitors' book on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum, we collect elastic bands and chocolate coin wrappers and fridge magnets and bottle caps and sick bags and dead bees. And worse, unmentionably worse.
We collect objects that have no purpose other than to be collected, and we call them 'collectibles'. If we are very rich, like Elgin or Arundel or the Farnese family, we collect marbles. If we are less rich, we collect micromosaics or first editions or snuffboxes. My father, as a barrister practising in Sheffield, collected Sheffield plate. (I worry about polishing the valuable pieces I inherited, as he said he knew I would. I polish them, spasmodically, irregularly, for his sake.) Twelve-year-old Rémi Plassaert, living on the top floor of the apartment block where Bartlebooth struggles with his self-appointed jigsaw labours, collects promotional blotters, with the help of the concierge, Madame Nochère. Perec itemizes these blotters in characteristically evocative detail: a singing toreador stands for Diamond Enamel toothpaste; The Fox and the Slork (sic), a print by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, advertises Marquise Stationery, Stencils and Reprographics; The Four Musketeers of Tennis (Cochet, Borotra, Lacoste and Brugnon) represent the Aspro series of Great Champions of the Past.
I don't think promotional blotters are made any more, though they were clearly still abundant in 1975, the year in which Perec's novel is set.
Jean Baudrillard, in his essay on the 'Non-Functional System of Objects' (1968), notes that the taste for collecting is at its height between the ages of seven and twelve; it tends to disappear with puberty and reappears most frequently in men over forty. In this essay he also discourses at length on the inauthenticity of the warming-pan. Its presence in a modern home, he claims, is 'strictly mythological'. It is unwarranted, vain and perfectly useless. The warming-pan standing in my study, he suggests, is 'like a splinter of the True Cross', 'something like a talisman, like a fragment of absolute reality which would be at the heart of the real, and enshrined in the real. Such is the bygone object.'