The Pattern in the Carpet Read online

  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 snuff-boxes. 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.’

  Yes, that is fair enough.

  According to William James in The Principles of Psychology, ‘the hoarding instinct prevails widely among animals as well as among men.’ He quotes a description of the hoard of a Californian wood rat, made in the stove of an empty house, of which the outside was composed of spikes,

  all laid with symmetr
y, so as to present the points of the nails outward…Interlaced with the spikes were the following: about two dozen knives, forks and spoons…several large plugs of tobacco…an old purse containing some silver, matches and tobacco; nearly all the small tools from the tool-closets, with several large augers…The outside casing of a silver watch was disposed of in one part of the pile, the glass of the same watch in another, and the works in still another.

  James suggests that rats are like misers, and that they don’t have a plan. They collect for the sake of collecting. But that wood rat’s collection sounds very deliberate to me and demonstrated a fairly sophisticated degree of classification.

  Howard Hardiman is a collector who collects stray jigsaw pieces, found in the street. He has strict rules about his collection, rules that provide what Oulipo would call ‘constraints’. He is a sign-language interpreter by profession, which implies that he is interested in signs. He doesn’t actually do jigsaw puzzles; he just collects pieces. ‘They have to be on their own, rather than several pieces at once.’ So far he has collected about twenty-five to thirty pieces. One day he may be going to turn them into a work of art. This is clearly a metaphysical, perhaps even a metaphysical-topographical project, or perhaps, as he puts it, just ‘a little bit of madness’. While brooding on his strange habit, I encountered a soggy spread of jigsaw pieces on the edge of a muddy car park in Taunton. I don’t know what he would have made of that. Would any of these pieces have been eligible? I don’t think they would. And they were very wet.

  Raymond Queneau, one of the founder members of Oulipo, spoke at a meeting in 1961 of ‘rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape’. Baudrillard, in his 1968 essay quoted above, told us that ‘the organisation of the collection is itself a substitute for time’.

  Auntie Phyl and I collected car numbers on car number plates. This was the game: you had to begin at the beginning, with a single 1, and then note a single 2, and then a single 3, and so on, in strict sequence. We too had rules. You were not allowed to hoard or bank a spotted number, even for a couple of minutes. We used to report on progress during our weekly Sunday-morning telephone conversations, when we had finished with the exploits of Jimmy White or the early flowering of the aconites. It gave us something to talk about. I think I went through two or three rounds of this game, giving up each time round about 294 or 295. I don’t think I have ever reached 300.

  And the strange thing was that she was always ahead of me. Although in later years she led a fairly local village life, enlivened by shopping trips on the bus to Newark or Grantham, she spotted more car numbers than I did. I, in the thick of the thickest of London traffic, surrounded by number plates, always busy and always on the move, lagged behind. This was not because I was not concentrating. I was. It was because she lived on the Great North Road. Even with a bypass, it provided a good vantage point from which to see the world go by.

  Once, years ago, on a lecture tour of Mississippi and Alabama, I was put up for a night or two in a motel just outside Hattiesburg near the University of Southern Mississippi. It was on one of those American strips, lined on both sides by gas stations and Tex-Mex diners and Baskin Robbins and small superstores. As I remember it, the motel had a wooden veranda on which were lined up some wooden rocking chairs. Sitting on one of these chairs, rocking myself gently and watching the polluting traffic pass noisily by, I was at peace. It is a surprisingly pleasant memory. I think the motel reminded me of Bryn. It is one of the best recollections I have of all those book tours and lecture tours, where time was divided between frenzied anxiety at airports and imprisoned restlessness in hotel rooms waiting for the next interview. Sitting in the slipstream, rocking, watching the world go by.

  XIII

  Auntie Phyl was trained as a teacher at Homerton College in an era when the pedagogical concept of learning through play was well established. Learning through terror or by rote was well out of fashion by the time Auntie Phyl taught us to sew and encouraged us to do jigsaws and sat down with us to play Belisha and to learn, subliminally, our road safety signs. When my children were little, in the 1960s, ‘learning by doing’ and Galt toys (products of a long-established manufacturer of educational supplies) were in fashion, and their children benefited from toys made by the Early Learning Centre, which began trading in the 1970s. The progressive ideas of Pestalozzi and Montessori and Rudolph Steiner have long infiltrated the mainstream. But it is nevertheless claimed that games manufactured and marketed for and dedicated to children are of surprisingly recent origin.

  Jigsaw puzzles have led me to explore concepts of childhood that had not much interested me when I was bringing up my own family. As a 1960s mother, I had consulted the reassuringly liberal Dr Spock, and worried about the ‘separation theory’ of John Bowlby, and espoused the principles of comprehensive state education, but I had never been particularly interested in childhood as a subject, nor had I been much drawn to write about children in my fiction. I didn’t consciously share T. S. Eliot’s view of childhood as a rotting corpse best left buried; I just hadn’t bothered to think about it much, in the abstract. Flashbacks and formative memories had featured in my novels, but I’d never tried to re-create a sustained childhood sequence – no imitations of The Mill on the Floss, or David Copperfield, or The Shrimp and the Anemone. I’d succeeded in forgetting much of my childhood, and was surprised by the powers of recall of some of my friends and colleagues. My novels began and ended in mid-career. I was interested in the contemporary world and enjoyed tracking events as they happened, or as they were about to happen. (I guessed right about several topics, including the privatization of public utilities.) Age has given me a different timespan and a different agenda. The Sea Lady is largely a retrospective narrative, looking back over five decades of social change and scientific discovery. I wouldn’t have been able to write that kind of novel when I was in my twenties, and I wouldn’t have wanted to.

  Early images of children at play have, over the last fifty years, been intensively analysed. The French social historian Philippe Ariès, in Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1962) – first published in 1960 as L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous L’Ancien Régime – initiated a growing interest in what had been a surprisingly neglected subject and inspired a host of scholars in various disciplines. I had left university and completed my formal education just before this important book was published, and when I look back to what I absorbed at school and college about children and educational theory, I recognize that most of it came from commentaries on Blake (whom I revered) and Wordsworth (whose work I learned to enjoy somewhat later). I also knew a fair amount about schooling in the days of Jane Austen and George Eliot, and must have registered, without any particular interest or sense of recognition, the presence of an early jigsaw in Austen’s Mansfield Park, just as my eyes had moved unseeingly over the Royal Game of the Goose in Goldsmith.

  Ariès, in his fourth chapter, ‘A Modest Contribution to the History of Games and Pastimes’, briefly outlines the history of games and the changing attitudes to childhood and children’s amusements. He argues that adult games and children’s games were much less sharply differentiated in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance than in later periods, and he harks back, somewhat in the spirit of Goldsmith or Clare, to ‘an old community of games’, when music, festivals, carnivals, maypoles, snowballs and skating united old and young, peasants and gentry. The names of traditional games, such as hot cockles, sweet knight, Blind Man’s Buff, the love-pot, the knife-in-the-water-jug, and the little man who doesn’t laugh (main chaude, chevalier gentil, colin-maillard, le pot d’amour, le couteau dans le pot à eau, le petit bonhomme sans rire), are listed by him with relish and regret. John Clare, in his poetry, provides a similar compendium of traditional, eighteenth-century, English-village games, some of which must have been played for many centuries: ducks and drakes, dancing the maze, town of Troy, pitch and toss, duck neath water, taw and hollows, lost love letter, hunt the slipp
er, crookhorn, nine men’s morris…Perhaps inevitably, these phrases are imbued with an overwhelming sense of loss: of childhood itself, of a bucolic past, of a lost harmony. Clare mourned the death of the commons as well as the loss of love, and in ‘Remembrances’ he mourned his own boyhood:

  Dear heart and can it be that such raptures meet decay

  I thought them all eternal when by Langley bush I lay

  I thought them joys eternal when I used to sit and play

  On its banks at clink and bandy chock and taw and ducking stone

  Where silence sitteth now on the wild heath as her own

  Like a ruin of the past all alone.

  When I used to lye and sing by old eastwells boiling spring

  When I used to tie the willow boughs together for a swing

  And fish with crooked pins and thread and never catch a thing…

  In the work of Philippe Ariès we find a similar, prevailing sense of loss and falling from grace, though it occurs at the other end of the social spectrum from that experienced by Clare. Later historians have associated his backward glance with his political affiliations with Vichy France and Action Française, for Ariès was a romantic royalist. He gives much space to the well-documented infancy and education of Louis XIII – indeed, this seems to have been the starting point of his intellectual journey. Louis graduated from dolls, toy soldiers, clockwork pigeons, crambo, playing charades, cutting paper with scissors, hide-and-seek, and other childish diversions, to the manly pursuits of hunting, riding, fencing, archery, tennis, hockey and bowls. Ariès notes that at this period games of chance using dice were played by both adults and children alike (Louis XIII, Louis XIV and his mother, Richelieu and Mazarin were all keen gamblers), and that these games attracted no censure except from those sections of the clergy who disapproved indiscriminately of all amusements. (Little Louis XIII was applauded for winning a turquoise in a raffle.) The notion that dice games were in themselves wicked had not yet been widely disseminated.