Margaret Drabble

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Transcript

Ramona Koval: Margaret Drabble began our conversation by reading a passage from her new book The Pattern in the Carpet.

Margaret Drabble: [reading from The most famous early illustration... to ...but I am very fond of it.]

Ramona Koval: Jigsaws started as a fun way to teach children geography, didn't they.

Margaret Drabble: Yes, the first jigsaws were called dissected maps, and you learned the counties of England or the countries of Europe just by sticking the pieces together.

Ramona Koval: And is that how you came to them too?

Margaret Drabble: No, I came to them through the more conventional way of doing children's puzzles with my aunt, and then the interlocking sort with which we're all familiar, because the early ones didn't interlock, they lined up against each other. There was a little hole to put the Isle of Wight or Corsica in, but on the whole they didn't really fit very well. But the ones I was trained to do with my aunt were the conventional cardboard interlocking ones.

Ramona Koval: You say that famous English jigsaw puzzle fanatics have included Doris Lessing, Georgette Heyer, Queen Elizabeth II and your Auntie Phyl. And she may not be as famous as those other ladies but now she will be because you've written about her and people will read about her here and your time in her home at Bryn. So let's talk about who she was and what she was to you.

Margaret Drabble: She was my mother's younger sister. She was a classic maiden aunt in that she never married and I don't think particularly wanted to marry, but she did love children. She was a primary school teacher, and she was very good at teaching, unlike my mother who thought she was much cleverer than my aunt but was a very bad teacher except of quite old teenage children. But my aunt was really good at teaching you to do sewing. We were very bad at it but she did teach us and enjoyed...and she let us cook things and she let us mess around in a way my mother never did, so she was just the ideal person to spend a holiday with and to be able to be relaxed and not feel you were doing everything wrong, which my mother always made me feel.

Ramona Koval: She lived at this place called Bryn. You felt that you were part of the wayfarers' tradition at this place. Tell me why.

Margaret Drabble: Because Bryn was a bed and breakfast, it was on the Great North Road, the village has now been bypassed. So now you go along the A1 and you don't go through the village where my aunt and my grandparents lived. But my grandparents bought this house in the 1930s as a tea gardens and bed and breakfast, and to me it was the most wonderful place in the world because it was very romantic; strangers coming for the night and paying money, it was really very exciting. We children used to loiter by the kitchen door hoping to get a tip, and sometimes we would get a sixpence. I don't think we were meant to do that but it was really so exciting to be given a sixpence.

In those days, I'm sure some of you will remember this, the Great North Road was just a main thoroughfare that went through the heart of places like Stanford, Long Bennington, Newark, Grantham and all the way up to Scotland, and the village just was cut in half by it, as it always had been. So you were actually watching all the traffic from Scotland to London go past, and it made you feel in the centre of everything.

Ramona Koval: You went there for summer holidays, and, as you say, she was a teacher, and she had a whole collection of children's novels too. You can get the idea from this book that, like a jigsaw puzzle, one thing leads to another, and we keep coming back to jigsaw puzzles and we will...but everything makes you think, my goodness me...there's some fantastic things in here about the kind of people who write children's stories and about how evil they really are.

Margaret Drabble: They're not really very nice people. I became very intrigued by this because my aunt was a nice woman. She wasn't a kind, sweet, lovely old dear, as people tend to think when they hear I've written about my aunt, she was quite a stroppy difficult woman, but she was nothing like as horrible as PL Travers of Mary Poppins fame, or as Alison Uttley who was the worst of all. You know, children have this capacity for reading and rereading, and we would arrive there and I would just reread through The Little Grey Rabbit and Sam Pig that my aunt used for teaching at school. And I knew nothing about the horrors of Alison Uttley who'd created these little rabbits...

Ramona Koval: Tell us about it.

Margaret Drabble: Well, she was just a really, really mean women. There have been three books written about her now. Somebody from the States said to me the other day, 'I can't believe that you English have written three books about this children's writer that everyone's forgotten.' And I said it was because she was so fascinatingly horrible. She was extremely jealous of Enid Blyton, she hated the name of Beatrix Potter, she quarrelled bitterly with Margaret Tempest, her illustrator. The copyright row went on and on, and even now the estate at the Society of Authors is still having to negotiate dispirits between these long-dead people because they hated each other.

It's too sad really, but she actually drove both her husband and her son to suicide, and I was so shocked when I discovered this. I was pursuing my aunt and pursuing this happy train of thought about the books I loved, and I was sitting in the British Library and I got this biography out because I knew my aunt had read it...and my aunt had said to me, 'You know, Maggie, that book's not very nice,' and I didn't know what she meant, but I thought I'd better read it as I was doing my research. And I could see exactly what she meant; the book was fine but the life was not very nice.

Ramona Koval: And PL Travers, who was Australian and never liked to admit it so she used to say she came from the Commonwealth...

Margaret Drabble: I know somebody who lived in a house with PL Travers when PL Travers was 90 and she must have been considerably younger, and she said she was a very, very eccentric woman, but she was proud to know she was up there in the flat above, but I longed to hear more stories about her, but she quarrelled with her illustrator. I can actually see that there is a problem because if you create a children's character like Mary Poppins and everybody, including me, remembers...I don't remember the movie, which I've never seen, but I remember the illustrations, and of course that's infuriating to the author because they didn't do the illustrations and they want to repossess their character.

Ramona Koval: Here Margaret Drabble talks about her Aunt Phyllis who introduced her to the art of putting a jigsaw together.

Margaret Drabble: She would clear the table in the living room and we would get it out and then she would say, 'Now we sort out the edge,' and then you did the edge and you built from the edge, and we went on doing that until she was well into her 80s and that was the way we did a jigsaw. I remember very clearly, and in fact this is where the book opens, the last time she came to stay with me, which is a sad story, I can't remember how old she was, I did work it out, but she was in her 80s. She came to stay with me in the country, and we were working on this jigsaw and I had to drive her back to the Midlands the next day from Somerset and we couldn't finish it, we'd done about three-quarters of it. I remember the scene, it was a sort of landscape scene with birds and animals and little creatures and flowers, and she said, 'Oh it's such a pity we can't finish it tonight,' and it was a pity because I knew she'd never be well enough to come again, and she wasn't.

Ramona Koval: Did you finish it?

Margaret Drabble: Yes. And I finished the tapestry my father was doing when he died. It's the honourable thing to do, is to finish it.

Ramona Koval: Do you always complete the ones you start?

Margaret Drabble: No. I've failed to complete I think two jigsaws in my life. I do complete them and it sometimes takes me a very, very long time. I didn't complete one I bought from the National Trust because it was boring, it was just of a big cow or pig, it was an 18th century...you know those models of animals, livestock paintings, and it was fine, it would have been okay on a teacloth, it would have been fine on a National Trust teacloth, but it was too boring to do.

The other one, I was given it by a friend, and I actually don't know how to pronounce the chap's name but he's a painter who does those geometric...is he called Escher? And that was boring. She hadn't finished it, and she's a terrific jigsaw puzzle doer, and she handed it on and she said, 'I can't be doing with this,' and I said, 'Oh I'll do it,' because I quite like very difficult ones. But it was kind of boring because it was intensely repetitive. You never discovered a new bit, whereas with a very difficult one like Jackson Pollock, which is extraordinarily difficult, you are discovering all the time. You're discovering how the paint splashes join up and why that bit of black is so black. But with the Escher you do one bit and then it just repeats itself endlessly, and one bit could as easily belong to another bit, and that's not good.

Ramona Koval: So what can you learn about art when you're doing a jigsaw of a painting?

Margaret Drabble: If you do proper paintings, as I tend to prefer to do, you learn technique, you learn the way they paint clouds, the way they paint pillars. You observe things because you're doing them very slowly. I'm a very impatient viewer in a gallery, I walk too fast and I get distracted by other people being in the gallery. But if you sit with the Kinderspiele as I did for a month or two you get to know every child in that painting. And if I were to go now and...I think it's in Vienna, I've never seen the original, I know it would be like seeing something so friendly and familiar because I would have learned the detail by heart.

Tracy Chevalier who wrote The Girl with the Pearl Earring said to me after she'd read this book, she said, 'You know, I bought a jigsaw of the View in Delft, Vermeer's painting in the Vermeer Museum, and I did it after I'd written the book. I learned so much about his landscape and his cloud formation just from doing that jigsaw.' For those of us who aren't trained art historians it's a fascinating way of making the acquaintance of somebody's style.

Ramona Koval: What's the relationship between your writing and your jigsaw puzzling? Do you use it as a release or a relief from the kind of thinking you do when you're working? Or do you save them for a time between books?

Margaret Drabble: No, I do them intermittently, and they're much less hard work than writing. Writing has this open-ended, rather frightening aspect to it, and you think it could all be going wrong, and when you're working you don't know whether you're doing it right or wrong, whereas with a jigsaw you have the reassuring feeling that when you put a piece in it has really, really gone in, and that's not like writing a sentence at all.

I did a very good stretch on Van Gogh's Irises last week because there was a good program on Radio Three about Herodotus, and I thought if I sit down with my jigsaw, Radio Three and glass of wine, I'll be really happy for an hour and a half.

Ramona Koval: So you can listen and do it at the same time? It doesn't take your whole of your brain?

Margaret Drabble: No, it doesn't take the whole of your brain, and indeed no-one is going to cross-examine me on this radio program so it didn't matter if I missed bits, whereas when you're writing it needs the whole of your brain and more. So the brain needs a rest.

Ramona Koval: You say you're drawn to jigsaws because they have no verbal content, and then you say, 'Writing is an illness, I caught it by default when I was 21.' What does that mean?

Margaret Drabble: I just slipped that in, hoping you wouldn't notice.

Ramona Koval: I found it, I noticed it, I thought 'what does she mean?'

Margaret Drabble: She notices everything. I think I meant that I didn't really mean to be a writer when I was young, and then I wrote a book and I became a writer without quite intending to be, and I suppose the significance of that sentence is that I now feel a bit landed with it and rather wish I had something else to do.

Ramona Koval: Well, you could do anything, couldn't you?

Margaret Drabble: No, it's a sort of professional deformation (is that a phrase?), that you become what you do.

Ramona Koval: What would you have imagined you might be? A long-distance truck driver along that road?

Margaret Drabble: That would have been fun. No, I did want to be an actress but that was not to be because life didn't work out that way...

Ramona Koval: You trained as an actress.

Margaret Drabble: Yes, and I did a lot of acting, but then children and life intervened. But I now feel that I would have liked to have been an archaeologist or an anthropologist, there are many things I would have liked to have done, but I became a writer, and now I struggle with the fact that that's what I am.

Ramona Koval: But when you're a writer you can be an archaeologist or an anthropologist, can't you?

Margaret Drabble: That's what I used to say, yes.

Ramona Koval: And what happened? You don't believe it anymore?

Margaret Drabble: I don't believe it as much as I used to, no, I don't feel...maybe it's just that I haven't got the energy to impersonate another career as I used to be able to. I used to find it very challenging and exciting to become in one of my novels a property developer, I loved doing the research for that, but it literally required a lot of leg work, and I now feel I can't cover the ground. I want something that's more housebound, and I can't quite work out what that should be. Writing is sedentary but my earlier books took me out a lot.

Ramona Koval: This book took you around a bit though, didn't it?

Margaret Drabble: It did.

Ramona Koval: You followed your nose. There's a London taxi driver in it, there's discussions of Roman mosaics.

Margaret Drabble: Yes, it was the taxi driver who introduced me to them. This was a wonderful stroke of luck. I'd been to the British Library to look at the earliest maps, the Spilsbury 1760s maps, and I'd indeed been allowed to do them in the map room in the British Library, which was very exciting. So I thought I'll now go the Museum of London and have a look at the Victorian ones which are a generation or two later because I knew they were in the Museum of London. So I come out of the British Library and I hailed a cab, which I very rarely do because I don't really like travelling in cabs, but I thought it will take me straight to the Museum of London, which I can never find because it's in the Barbican and if you go on the tube it takes you half an hour to find where you're going.

I'd asked 'British Library to the Museum of London', and he said to me, 'Doing London in a day, are you?' And I was really quite offended and I said, 'No, I'm doing research in the British Library.' He said, 'Research into what?' I said, 'Jigsaws,' which didn't sound quite so grand, and he was silent for a bit, and then he said, 'When was the first jigsaw?' I said, pretty sharply, '1766.' And then he was quiet for a bit more, and then he said, 'That can't be right, can it. What about mosaics?' Which was such a brilliant remark, so brilliant.

Anyway, Kevin and I went around London six weeks later and he showed me his favourite buildings, he showed me the mosaics he loved, and as we were driving past St Ethelburga's which was very heavily bombed by the IRA into smithereens and reconstructed, he said, 'That's a sort of big stone jigsaw really, they put it together again.' And my mind started moving in a completely different way, thanks to Kevin. It was such a lucky accident that I hailed his cab and nobody else's.

Ramona Koval: Absolutely. In that part that you read before you didn't get up to the part where you said that 'prisoners and royals and convalescents are fond of jigsaws.' What have they got in common?

Margaret Drabble: They're trapped, basically they're trapped. The Queen we know does jigsaws, the Duke of Windsor and the Duchess of Windsor did a lot of jigsaws. In fact they met while doing a jigsaw. There was a big jigsaw at that place in Windsor Great Park where she was married to somebody else at the time and he was doing a big jigsaw. It's rather sad really, and they met and they went on doing jigsaws all through their married life, and they would commission their own of course because they were grand people. They commissioned ones with little Scotty dogs in because they were fond of little Scotty dogs, so they had little Scotty dog shapes inserted into their pieces. And they did them because they had nothing else to do. I mean, after he was abdicated he had to fill in the rest of his life.

Convicts are in rather the same positions, and convalescents...the category of people that I've met while talking about jigsaws, and I talked about them to everybody for two or three years while I was doing this book, and the people who didn't like them were people who associated them with being ill, which I thought was very interesting. They said, 'Oh I can't bear doing them because I was given one on a tray when I was really ill.' And I can see that for them it was a sort of sickroom association.

Ramona Koval: Here Margaret Drabble concludes by explaining why she likes doing jigsaw puzzles.

Margaret Drabble: It's an escape from boredom and an escape from books. I love books but I read several a week anyway and it's quite good to have something that isn't reading and that isn't slicing vegetables and that is a sort of space where your mind can wander and yet your hands are occupied.

Ramona Koval: So that space, the 'not reading', 'not slicing vegetables' space for you seems a bit frightening if it hasn't got something in it to do.

Margaret Drabble: Yes, I'm hopeless at sitting doing nothing, I'm very, very restless and not good at doing nothing much. I'm not good at relaxing, everyone tell me that and it's true. So the jigsaws do provide me with a very good way of bypassing my restlessness. In fact somebody said to me last week that...I think it's Winnicott who has this view about the waiting room of the mind, and when she put this to me I thought that is absolutely right, that the mind has a waiting room where...and in fact people do do jigsaws in waiting rooms, hospitals lay them on in waiting rooms...but it's as though your mind is preparing itself for the next, more serious engagement.

Ramona Koval: You also write of jigsaws as a relief from melancholy. You say that they are a problem that can always be solved.

Margaret Drabble: Yes, that's absolutely true, they can always be solved, because there's no jigsaw in the world that you can't do if you really stick at it, which is untrue of many activities in life, if not to say most.

Ramona Koval: The idea of melancholy, of sadness? How can they make you happy if you're sad?

Margaret Drabble: They just take your mind off being sad. I do get quite depressed, we all do, it's a completely natural feeling, and writing exacerbates it whereas jigsaws alleviate it. Some people do gardening, and in the summer I quite like doing a bit of very primitive gardening, but you can't do that when it's dark and you can't do it all the year round. So the jigsaws use that space that needs to be filled.

Ramona Koval: I looked at an interview that you did with The Paris Review in 1978, a little while ago, where you talked about the relationship between coincidence and plan. You were talking about what would happen if you were to get high up over the world and see things that looked like coincidence are really a pattern. And then I thought about jigsaws as well.

Margaret Drabble: There is an overall pattern, it's just that we can't see it because we're too close. And I suppose I do have this faith in pattern. I know we're now meant to believe in a random universe, but we're just too small to appreciate the pattern in it, and I suppose I do still cling to the belief that I will before I die see what the pattern was meant to be. I won't, but it's possible. Somehow the jigsaw gives an illusion of the possibility of completion.

Ramona Koval: You say that you thought that by writing this book you'd find the answer to the question you asked yourself; Do I believe in the jigsaw model of the universe or do I believe in the open-ending, ever-evolving, even undetermined future? Did you find an answer to that?

Margaret Drabble: No, but I think I cling to the jigsaw model because it means that everything could be understood, and I suppose at school we were taught that if we truly sought we would truly find. I suppose I do still believe that eventually if I keep on putting the pieces together I will make a pattern.

I was reading, this week, a passage by Georges Perec, who I quote in the book, who wrote the great jigsaw novel of all time, a most brilliant novel. Georges Perec, he was in analysis for four years, and he describes this analysis. He says that finally the sentence was uttered by him and heard that meant that the puzzle made sense, and he said he found writing like a perpetually unfinished jigsaw puzzle. In fact it was after those four years that he wrote that great book, so something had happened, that he'd seen a pattern and then wrote his great book. And then he died in his 40s, which was very sad, but he didn't die without writing what I think is a really thrilling novel.

Ramona Koval: But you didn't always think that, did you. You thought that it was a bit tricksy. Because I've always thought it was a bit tricksy to write a book without an 'e' in it and that sort of thing.

Margaret Drabble: I thought it was pretentious stuff, but in fact what he was doing, I now discover, writing a book without the letter 'e'...and he was very fond of palindromes and...he actually set crossword puzzles for years in a popular French magazine. He was a true word intellectual. I think that he was trying to escape from himself with all these games. He thought that if he were to write from the heart that he would disappear, he would disintegrate, but that tension between form and what you're trying to say is fascinating. But I only got to it through reading this really very readable novel about this jigsaw question, and then I began to go back into his work and see how he'd got there. So I made some wonderful literary discoveries as well as painterly discoveries through this book.

Ramona Koval: You say jigsaws are actually connected with depression, they serve the depressed and they certainly flourished during the Depression.

Margaret Drabble: Yes, during the Depression in America the jigsaw became an immensely popular form of entertainment. They were very cheap to produce, people couldn't afford to go to shows, they were sitting at home unemployed, and there was an enormous boom in jigsaw manufacturing. I've got a book called Masterpieces of the Depression with these wonderfully colourful paintings. One of the few categories of artists that throve during the Depression were the people who painted for this market, and I just found that a very interesting coincidence. In fact somebody has just sent me an email about a book about her great uncle's designs during the Depression. So one of the wonderful things about publishing a book like this is that people then tell you a lot of material that was completely unavailable because you didn't know where to look for it, but I've now got waiting for me somewhere this book about her great uncle who designed jigsaws during the Depression in New York.

Ramona Koval: So will you read that with gusto even though you've finished this book?

Margaret Drabble: I will certainly read it with...I will speed-read it but I will read it because I'm just very interested in the kind of people that were drawn into this. What it is, this subject, is an ever-expanding subject because every little piece can hook onto something else, which is one of the reasons why I don't know if the pattern will ever be completed because you can always add a little bit more.

Ramona Koval: And you say 'Now that I am old,' which you're not, 'I may have to live with an unresolved sky and an incomplete picture.' So it's a huge move from the need to complete things and make the picture smooth and then put it away to allowing the nagging hole in the picture.

Margaret Drabble: That's the book I'm writing and will never finish or the book I haven't begun and will never begin. That's the big hole, whereas the jigsaw...I've got two jigsaws on the go at the moment and I will finish them both.

Ramona Koval: What are they?

Margaret Drabble: One of them is Van Gogh's Irises, which I've been doing since June, and the other one is a seashore scene by a Pre-Raphaelite...he was billed as the unknown Pre-Raphaelite and he had an exhibition at the Tate. So unknown is he that I've forgotten his name. He's called Walter-something, and it's a...Alison Lurie who is also a jigsaw puzzle doer gave it to me because she'd just been to the exhibition on her London trip. And I've done the edge, only the edge, and it's sitting in my study with just the edge, but I've been too busy, I've been rushing around, I haven't had time. But it's satisfying that I've done the edge, so I have a possibility of going back to it, and it's in a lot better state than the books I'm trying to write at the moment.

Ramona Koval: And you're allowed to do two at once?

Margaret Drabble: Oh yes, one's at one house and one's at the other.

Ramona Koval: So you've always got one at hand.

Margaret Drabble: I wouldn't have two in the same house, that would be very wrong.

Ramona Koval: That's what I'm asking.

Margaret Drabble: I wouldn't know what to do...no, I have one table in Somerset and one table in London.

Ramona Koval: So if people are wanting to choose to do a jigsaw, to embark on this, what's your advice for how to choose a good jigsaw? Obviously not with a big pig in it...

Margaret Drabble: No, the big pig is really boring. If you're not already a jigsaw person then you should choose something with a lot of bright activity, so you can complete a little bit of the action and feel 'I've done those characters, I've done that lot'. Bruegel is very good from that point of view. But there are wonderful natural scenes, you know, the birds of Britain, which are also wonderful to do, and you learn a bit of natural history and you can complete a bird. The difficult ones are the ones where there's just no connection...just splurge, and they're quite difficult, and monotone ones...too monotone are boring, lots of dark background or sky is not a beginner's work, you have to be really persevering to do those.

Ramona Koval: Is there something you're aiming towards? Is there a PhD of jigsaws that you think 'that's where I want to be'?

Margaret Drabble: No, one of the joys of it is that it actually doesn't go anywhere at all, it doesn't do anything for anyone, it's completely pointless, and that is one of the joys of it. I had this discussion with a 90-year-old very distinguished lawyer, he has a tremendously distinguished brain, and he attacked me quite severely one evening and he said, 'I don't know how a woman of your brain can waste her time doing jigsaw puzzles. They're beneath contempt.' He is 90 so I wasn't too fierce, but I did say, 'I'm sure you do something things that are really, really time wasting.' He said, 'No, I don't. I never play cards, I don't do jigsaws.' And I said, 'Well, what is the most time wasting thing you do?' He did say, 'I watch a lot of sport on television.' And I said, 'Well, I never do that!' But it is very interesting that to him that was a pointless thing, watching sport, which it is I suppose, but he permitted himself to do it.

Ramona Koval: I've enjoyed myself and I think you should show whether you have too.

Margaret Drabble: Thank you.

Ramona Koval: Dame Margaret Drabble in conversation with me at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. The book is called The Pattern in the Carpet: A personal history with jigsaws, and it's published by Atlantic Books.

Publications

Title: The Pattern in The Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws

Author: Margaret Drabble

Publisher: Atlantic Books