The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws (29 page)

Office life repels him; he hates the smell of paper and disinfectant, the tedium, the impoverished illustrators and engravers, the 'priddy liddle Victorian uglinesses' of the magazine stories, the meanness, the lack of imagination, the rejection of anything original or beautiful. He hates the 'awful chromo-lithographs, with their staring reds and their glossy finish'. But the public like 'finish'; the best way to use flesh or red, maintains his father, is to use 'only a little, but just so that it hits you in the eye'.

Harvey Darton paints a gloomy picture of the dirty London streets and alleys round Ludgate Hill and St Paul's Churchyard, a picture far removed from the romantic antiquarian world that captured many budding bibliophiles. But he writes with more feeling of St Paul's itself, and the 'astonishing exhilaration of seeing London's most glorious monument against the morning sun'.

At Oxford the fictitious William had been encouraged to scout around for up-and-coming children's authors, and had even wondered whether he could 'divert the firm's energies to broader, more humane channels than those of the Church and childhood'. Nothing comes of these dreams and he finds himself musing, 'If only I had control of the business ... If my father were no longer alive!' At this very moment in time his father is conveniently killed by a dray horse, but William is already so deep in debt and deceit
that he decides to flee the country, and ends up doing quite well growing bananas in British Honduras.

Harvey Darton's second novel,
When: a Record of Transition
(Chapman & Hall, 1929), is credited to 'the late J. L. Pole', and its story is even more darkly illuminating. The novel, in memoir format, is introduced by Pole's old friend Peter Grimstone and 'edited' by his late aunt (conveniently mown down by a fast-moving car 'as she emerged from a tavern into which (no doubt) she had pursued one of the fallen women whom she gloried in rescuing'), who tells us that John Pole, an alcoholic, had died in an institution of an overdose of methylated spirits. Pole's family, like Penn's in the earlier novel, was bookish; they read over meals with a book propped up against a tumbler or a cruet, but they read 'ephemeral stuff', and his father had been a publisher of 'small magazines and cheap books for housemaids'. Pole describes himself sardonically as three persons: 'a general utility "littery-gent", a piety-monger and a licentious novelist', with a weakness for the bottle. His 'wicked' pseudonymous novels (The
Goats of Hell, The Jellied Eels of Purity)
were published under the pen-name of Vincent Snarsgate and were, he says, 'a safety-valve for my natural malice'. He also published under his own name 'sob-stuff' with titles like
Susan's Repentance.

Pole, like William Penn in the earlier novel, toys with entering the Civil Service after Oxford but he too ends up in Grub Street, reviewing over a thousand novels a year, taking twenty minutes on average over each, and learning all the tricks of the trade. He thinks there must have been some strain of 'literary crime' in his blood, for one of his great-uncles had written what Pole calls 'Christian Dreadfuls'. He gives a vivid account of Grub Street poverty:

The most flippant cynic cannot treat as a humbug a man who, on a cold day, pulls up a dickey and shows you his bare skin underneath and implores you to buy his rubbishy story. The artists were even more painful, in some ways, for the great transition in book and magazine illustration was at its critical point. The wood-block, that even now underrated glory of the sixties, was virtually dead.

Some of these illustrators held their own under the title of Bohemians, while others crept

from office to office, even more shabby, more feeble, some hungrier, some more sodden, until at last an editor would say to a colleague 'Where's old Stickey? He hasn't been in for weeks...' In those days publishing houses possessed, through compassion, a rubbish heap of unusable or forgotten ghosts, bought out of sheer pity. I am told there is less pity now. The publishers are forming combines, and few combines have any bowels for the old.

There's a familiar ring to that complaint.

Pole does not reach old age, and the descriptions of his decline into alcoholism are painfully authentic. He continues to function in 'the same dreary round of aimless soaking and drab administrative efficiency', realizing that he is ruining his health, but also resolving

in my clearer moments, to set down my memories of the War before my memory failed – as it was beginning to fail. I also began research, chiefly at the British Museum, for a large serious work I had long contemplated – a history of relations between the author, the journalist, and the publisher in England, from the earliest times. to today, with its numerous subdivisions and classifications.

I take it that this imaginary work,
The Workshop of Letters
(a precursor of the subject that is now known as the History of the Book?), stands in for the
Children's Books in England,
which Harvey Darton heroically completed, and I also take it that Pole's description of his sudden collapse is autobiographical: 'It was in a tavern, near the B M, just after the Reading Room had closed for the day. I went there with a journalist I knew, with whom I had been discussing some small point of interest, and laid (as I thought) the foundation for a good dinner with a couple of strong whiskies. "At one stride came the dark".'

He wakes from this fit in the mental ward of a London hospital, suffering from delirium tremens, and is taken to Broadwindsor Hall, a private asylum, to which, after various sorties and efforts at recovery, he returns to die.

This is not the private life that, perhaps naively, one would have expected of the master scholar of children's literature, and Harvey Darton's own life mirrored his fictional creation's all too closely. He died of cirrhosis of the liver on 26 July 1936, aged fifty-seven, and his last address was a public house in Dorset. He was buried at Cerne Abbas.

Which was the real Fred, the spendthrift alcoholic, or the tolerant and delighted observer of children's books and games, the connoisseur of woodcuts and half-tones, the amused and amusing recorder of literary taste and 'the struggle between instruction and amusement'? His fictional characters feared some kind of hereditary insanity. Perhaps descent from a clan of high-minded publishers of pretty poems for little people, jigsaws and grammars did not provide an ideal heritage, although it provided him with rich materials.

I searched in vain for a mention of jigsaws in his two novels, but failed to find one. Children play with an abacus and make 'nasty little mats of coloured paper' but they do not assemble Darton and Harvey jigsaws.

And perhaps it is childish to expect that those who devote themselves to children's games and literature should be good citizens or good family members. Some are. Some are not. Some are neurotic and obsessive, and some do not like children at all. Some are perpetual children, which is not always a happy fate.

Auntie Phyl occupied the middle ground.

I feel, from no evidence, that Fred Harvey Darton must have liked children. He was known as a gregarious man with many friends, and a lover of country life and sports. Maybe, like J. L. Pole, he was at least two people: the outdoor man who wrote about Dorset and Kent, and the indoor man who pored over books in the British Museum and drank himself into a stupor in the tavern across the road. And maybe there was a third and disappointed Harvey Darton. His marriage to the daughter of a schoolmaster was annulled on grounds of non-consummation, a piece of information that brings to mind another scholar-eccentric, John Cowper Powys. Powys, too, was a rambler, a reader and a topographer, with strong connections with Dorset and Cerne Abbas. I wonder whether they ever met.

Children's writers and writers about children's writing are not as Goody Two-Shoes or as Little Grey Rabbit as one might expect.

Remarkably, Harvey Darton left a lasting legacy, and his great work, revised and updated, is still handsomely in print, as well as available on the shelves of every reference library. There must have been an inheritance of discipline that enabled him to finish this book. But the sales during his lifetime were a disappointment to him, and he felt he had, in his own modest phrase, 'let his publishers down'. He was not a boastful man. He did not like to advertise his own wares and carried this fastidiousness to an extreme. Writing about his association with the highly profitable
Chatterbox
and
The Prize
in his
Cornhill
article of 1932, 'The Youth of a Children's Magazine', he refrained from naming them because he
thought 'it would be improper of me to advertise them against their many rivals by dwelling on their well-established fame.'

This unworldly and outdated reproach is very much a Quaker attitude, and one that was drummed into us at the Mount School. Advertisement is wrong, we were taught. We must not put ourselves forward or boast about our achievements. Self-praise is no praise. It is curious, in the light of this indoctrination, that so many Quakers became such good businessmen, and that so many Quaker family names are so well known as brand names. In York, we were surrounded by Rowntrees and Cadburys and Terrys.

I often think of my father and his Sunday gin and tonic. He was a good Quaker, and I do not think the Friends of Suffolk held his drinking habits against him. He liked a gin and tonic before his Sunday lunch. And so do I.

Auntie Phyl very rarely had a glass of wine or sherry. She wondered 'what we all saw in alcohol'. (Some of us, and I speak for myself, saw what we saw in it all too well.) She kept a half-bottle of whisky 'for medicinal purposes' in her immensely cluttered kitchen, but it stayed on top of the dresser for years. She thought an aspirin was a better pick-me-up than whisky when she felt offcolour, and of course she was right. My mother, who made mock of her primitive faith in aspirin, thought it an old wives' remedy and, to be truthful, so did I. But I was wrong and my mother was wrong. Now I take my aspirin daily, like nearly everybody over sixty, on doctor's orders.

At her eightieth birthday celebration at Jack Straw's Castle in Hampstead, Auntie Phyl accepted a glass of champagne. I have a fine photograph of her, taken by one of her nephews-in-law, looking happy and festive with a glass in her hand. That was a good lunch party. Auntie Phyl's reply to the toasts to her health was a little frisky, but none the worse for that.

Did Joyce ever persuade her to join her in her half a pint of
shandy, to accompany the scampi and chips in the village pub? I think not. I think she stuck to lemonade. But I do remember one Hampstead Christmas when I was uncharacteristically tempted to side with Auntie Phyl's disapproval of hard drinking.

An ageing acquaintance of mine, who could without injustice be described as a whisky priest, had been for some years angling for an invitation to join us for a Christmas drink. I had resisted his hints, because I knew how it would turn out. This vicar was notorious both for his heavy drinking and for his intellectual and social pretensions, and he had taken it into his head that a drink with me and my family of an evening during the Christmas holidays would provide him with a memorable feast of literary gossip and highbrow chat. In vain, year after year, had I tried to warn him that it wouldn't be as he expected. He would not take no for an answer. So I gave in, and round he came, in his cassock, and there he discovered my mother, my father and my aunt, all firmly settled into their deep armchairs and unwilling to give. I poured him a whisky, and doubtless poured a stiff one for myself, plus a gin and tonic for my father. My mother may have had a glass of wine or sherry, and my aunt a soft drink. My father probably made some polite small talk, and my mother may have done the same. They could find no common ground of any sort. And Auntie Phyl sat there, like a rock, watching the priest as he dissolved into desperate incoherence, dropping the names of people most of whom we did not know. And if we did by chance happen to know them, or know of them, we despised them. He gaffed on, regardless, and I refilled his glass. It was not a happy hour. I don't know whether he noticed how badly his banter was being received. He was drink hardened.

I thought he would never leave. By the time that I was finally able to thrust him into his great black crow's overcoat and manoeuvre him down the front steps, I was exhausted. I went back
into the drawing room, where Auntie Phyl was still sitting, unmoved. Then she produced one of her rare spoken judgements.

'I don't think it's right for a vicar to drink like that,' she said, her face expressing generations of inherited, chapel-going disapproval. And, as I staggered off to cook their supper, I felt that this time I was on her side.

A year or two ago I went with my daughter Becky to see some Tibetan monks as they began to make a sand mandala in the heart of London. They piped brightly coloured sands into an elaborate and preordained traditional pattern laid out on a large low table in Asia House in New Cavendish Street. For a week they would slowly and patiently pipe the sands until the image was complete, and then, on the last day, when it was finished, they would blow it away. I would have liked to have seen the Day of Destruction, which surely had a metaphysical significance, but I could not make the date. And I could not comprehend the aesthetic of the mandala. The colours were too bright and garish for my taste. I mentioned this to my daughter, who replied reprovingly, 'Garishness is not a Buddhist concept.'

I connected the idea of the mandala with the jigsaw, and, indeed, that is probably why we went to see it. I was interested in the ephemerality of the object, an object made with its end already in mind. Is not the act of completion of a jigsaw often accompanied by the sense of disappointment that Southey experienced when he had finished pricking a playbill – a 'sort of dissatisfied and damping feeling'? We build sandcastles, knowing
that we or the tide will destroy them. Is that too in some way part of the satisfaction?