Edmund de Waal

Audio

Transcript

Ramona Koval: Edmund de Waal joins us from his home in London. Welcome to The Book Show Edmund.

Edmund de Waal: Very nice to be asked to be part of it, thank you.

Ramona Koval: Edmund, let's begin by describing these 264 netsuke. Not all of them of course, but we should say first that they are a design solution for there being no pockets in a traditional Japanese kimono. How do they work?

Edmund de Waal: They're really very clever, because they actually act as sort of toggles. For each one when you pick it up and handle it, you find either a space or a gap or a couple of holes that you can thread a cord through, and then use it as a toggle for your purse, your inro, the thing that you hang from your belt that contains everything you need: your money, your medicines, or your notebook. So they actually have a function even though they look extraordinary.

Ramona Koval: They would sort of work with your work as a potter, too. I mean you're an ceramicist but some of these pots—you could actually put things in your pots too couldn't you?

Edmund de Waal: Well the real connection with my life as a potter of course is that they are completely three-dimensional. They're little bits of sculpture for the hand, so that there's no right way up and you find that in tumbling them around and finding that they work completely three-dimensionally.

Ramona Koval: You describe some of the pieces, you know, the hare with amber eyes, of course, the source of the title of the book; 'dozens of ivory rats, a sleeping servant, a couple making love, a naked woman and an octopus, a persimmon.' What do they feel like?

Edmund de Waal: Well they're really extraordinary, because one of the great joys of them is that the carvers in Japan, from basically the middle of the 18th century to the end of the 19th, were making objects that feel either very soft or very hard. So you can get things—I mean the persimmon's a really good example, actually, I'm glad you picked that one, it's one of my favourite ones. Because actually that one, even though it's made of boxwood, when you pick it up it feels as though this persimmon's just so ripe it's going to fall apart in your hands. It's got that extraordinary kind of squishiness to it. But there are other ones that are just so like running water, where you've got a rat scampering along a coiled rope. And you just feel the enormous movement as your fingers sort of glide around this little sculpture.

Ramona Koval: They sort of tell stories as well, don't they? They seem to be in motion, some of them.

Edmund de Waal: Yes. You've got all kinds of emotions there. You've got a huge amount of humour. You've got the Japanese at their ribald best, telling jokes about each other, and you've got erotic ones which of course are extraordinary and my children find very bizarre. But then you've got very moving ones. You've got ones where a very bereft figure who's lost someone, or someone who's searching for something. So each of them has a sort of condensed story attached to them.

Ramona Koval: You inherited the collection from your great-uncle Iggy who was living in Japan, and before we speak of him, you say you made it your job to find out where the netsuke had been. You say, 'All this matters because my job is to make things, and how objects get handled, used and handed on is not just a mildly interesting question for me, it is my question.' Tell me more about your question.

Edmund de Waal: The thing is that we're all part of the world of things, and our world is made up of objects which we take notice of or we ignore. But there's quite a significant part of our world is also made up of things which have been given to us or which we give to other people. Then there are also the things which we choose to hand on to other people. And I suppose I wanted to sort of excavate that, to kind of go deeper into that.

Ramona Koval: Well you first went to Japan as a young potter looking for a master, in a way, and you talk about learning to be careful of 'the unwarranted gesture, That less is more.' And I wondered how you found that dictum when it came to doing the research for this book, because you talk about getting completely lost, and you actually talk about discovering another art, which I loved your name for it, the art of 'vagabonding in research.'

Edmund de Waal: Well do you know what, in my innocence I thought well, perhaps this book would take about six months. I would do some kind of research into some archives and I'd go to Paris where the collection started, and go back to Japan, and I could knock the book off, finish it all in about six months. And the thing is, I got so obsessed, I decided that my pact right from the very beginning was that I had to go to every single place these netsuke had been. Okay, that was my first idiotic pact with myself, so that it wasn't what I call a Google book. I couldn't just sit in London and kind of just put it all together. And then, even more kind of confusing for me and wonderful for me, is I started getting really involved in the archives and getting completely entranced by newspapers and magazines and stories, and the pictures that were hanging in the different apartments of the family. And before I knew it, five years had passed.

Ramona Koval: Edmund you say that—well of course your time management skills went awry, but it is an intriguing story for many reasons, and we'll come to all of them, but one is that you are now the son of a clergyman in the Church of England, and he's a Christian man, obviously, and through him, related to this wealthy Jewish banking family which you traced to Vienna and to Paris and to Odessa, and beyond that to a shtetl, a little Jewish village in the eastern Ukraine on the edge of Poland. How did your self-concept change with this story?

Edmund de Waal: It was so strange, because I did grow up in this very establishment Church of England background, you know, evensong, cathedrals, the whole English thing which will make you laugh from your end of the phone in Australia. But that whole thing was very much my upbringing. I suppose this journey into discovering extraordinary European Jewish background, this background of exile and travel and extraordinary culture—none of which I knew about—was really a discovery about, I suppose, about the silences in my family, about the things that hadn't been talked about, and I sort of began to realise why they hadn't been talked about, why this family, which had ended up as a refugee family in England in 1938, had made this sort of extraordinary silence around where they'd come from. And I suppose discovering that has of course changed my sense of who I am, and the telling of it has completely changed my life, of course.

Ramona Koval: What about your father's sense of who he is? He obviously knew his mother was Jewish because when she died he recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

Edmund de Waal: Completely. He absolutely knew where he came from. But I think it's a very common experience in children of refugees, and the children of exile, that they begin again in another country, and this is something that you will know in your culture too, very profoundly, that when people start again in a different country, they often find themselves unable to tell the whole story of where they've come from to their children, that somehow they want to assimilate so totally into this new society that it's almost dangerous to start telling people where you come from. And certainly an experience in 1938 of a Jewish family arriving in England was absolutely that, was that of trying to make yourself more English than English. And my goodness, they made themselves more English.

Ramona Koval: My goodness, being a clergyman in the Church of England. That's a pretty fantastic cover.

Edmund de Waal: Exactly. You couldn't...my father grew up in Tunbridge Wells, which for your listeners is the most genteel place in the whole of the United Kingdom.

Ramona Koval: Well let's get back to the collection, because the first time it appears in your family it's in Paris, with Charles Ephrussis. He was a collector, he was influenced by the craze for everything Japanese at the time, as was his mistress Louise. Tell me about them.

Edmund de Waal: He is an extraordinary figure. He was the third son of this extraordinarily rich family and had nothing to do. He loved art as a young man, he absolutely adored art, and so he started collecting. He had a salon. He had a wonderful apartment in which he collected incredible Impressionist paintings, 40 or 50 paintings by Degas and Manet and Renoir, everyone. And then with his extremely glamorous mistress, who I have to say looks absolutely terrifying, she was very fond of herself, I have to say, and her lovers, and constantly had portraits painted of herself. But they fell in love, like everyone else did, with Japanese art, the great tidal wave of Japanese art that poured in to Paris in the 1870s. And I think really to impress her, Charles bought this collection of ivory carvings. And he had them in his salon, in his drawing room, to pass them around after dinner to his friends: poets, painters, writers, musicians, Proust of course was one of his secretaries. So they were used as kind of props I suppose really, for good conversation in Paris.

Ramona Koval: You mention of course that he was a friend and critic and patron of the arts. It's a wonderful story about the painting of the asparagus from Manet. Tell us that story.

Edmund de Waal: Well he'd seen this picture of asparagus in Manet's studio. Eight hundred francs. And he bought it. He bought it off the easel, and he sent Manet a thousand francs and then two days later a small, little canvas came back to his house in the Rue de Monceau, with one asparagus spear on it and a little note saying, 'This has slipped from the bundle'. You know, it's such a lovely, lovely story about friendship. He didn't just buy things, he talked about them and wrote about them and obviously, being a rich man as well, gave extraordinary parties...and I got rather captivated by him, I spent far too long...I thought here was a man who I really could get on with.

Ramona Koval: This begins also the relationship that we hear of between your family and the writers of their time, which goes actually throughout the whole story. The Ephrussis appear in Proust, in A la recherche du temps perdus, don't they? They are a major family of the time.

Edmund de Waal: They're very visible, and obviously they turn up in periodicals and newspapers and stuff like that. And this is the effect of love, I have to say. You know, Charles Swann, who's one of the great characters in Proust's novels, is based almost entirely on Charles Ephrussis. There's this great fictional retelling of this collector in these pages. For me, as I researched and wrote this book, this was a playing around with what was real, where they were, and then the retelling of their stories in fiction, gave a sort of richness to my whole mad, over-lengthy journey into my family.

Ramona Koval: Yes, he was obviously a great friend of the artists, but he was also the object of French anti-Semitism—even from his friends the artists, like Renoir.

Edmund de Waal: This was the first chill for me in the whole story, which was at the end of the 19th century there was the terrible, cataclysmic Dreyfus Affair, where a Jewish soldier, an officer in the French army was accused of treason and sent off to Devil's Island. French society was divided completely down the middle. And it was an outpouring of anti-Semitism and the Jews were absolutely vilified. And because my family was a visible family of the day, they got it in the neck, they really did. There were pamphlets, there were absolutely horrific attacks on them. And this is the first moment, I suppose, that I began to think this is the first intimation of the kind of horrors ahead, I suppose, in the next century, of what it was like to be Jewish in Europe at that particular point.

Ramona Koval: Well in 1899 Charles gives the collection to your great-grandparents, Emmy and Viktor, for their wedding. And so the netsuke travel to their new place of residence, which is Vienna. And Vienna at the time is a whole different thing too, and you describe a dinner party and the conversations held, and I wonder where you get this from. Are they imagined, completely?

Edmund de Waal: Everything comes from somewhere. The Vienna life of my great-grandparents in this completely sort of mad house, this palace on the Ringstrasse, this marble and gold, terrible marble and gold house of vast proportions—everything there is recorded. It was either recorded in journals and in newspapers or diaries, but also absolutely at this point with my great-grandparents of course, this is where I start my conversations with my grandmother and my great-uncle. So this is where I begin to kind of come into oral history, I guess..

Ramona Koval: The family at this point is reflected in the work of another writer, of Joseph Roth, who I love, especially his non-fiction. But here the family is described really as a perfectly assimilated family, more Austrian than the Austrians, almost.

Edmund de Waal: They were. They were so perfectly assimilated, and Roth gets this completely right, that they didn't go to synagogue, they thoroughly approved of their emperor, and during the first world war my great-grandfather Viktor gave huge amounts of money to the government, and he thought the Austro-Hungarian empire was the place where he belonged, which makes the story even more dreadful and powerful obviously later on.

Ramona Koval: In 1918 your grandmother Elisabeth, who is a lawyer and a poet, she writes and gets replies from Rilke.

Edmund de Waal: She was absolutely formidable. She was a wonderful woman. She was absolutely determined that unlike her mother, who had no education at all, she was going to get to university. And she did. But then—she was passionate about poetry, absolutely passionate, and she wrote to Rilke saying, 'Here are some of my verses, I love your work,' and my goodness, can you imagine, he wrote back, and they had this extraordinary correspondence, with Rilke critiquing her poems and sending her drafts of his own poetry, and there's this beautiful correspondence, almost ten years, between the two of them, which is preserved. Imagine being at the breakfast table, you're 18, and your younger brothers and sisters are squabbling around the table, and someone comes in with the mail, and there's a letter from Rilke. I mean, opening that up—can you imagine how wonderful that would be?

Ramona Koval: Well, yes, and you have imagined it so beautifully. The netsuke stay in Vienna but they stay with the great-grandparents and a lot of the rest of the family leave Vienna, very sensibly, like great-uncle Iggy, who goes to New York where he is saved by frocks and boys.

Edmund de Waal: Yes. Iggy loves clothes, but I think more than anything else Iggy just doesn't...is in despair, I think, at the idea of being the next person in the great banking dynasty. He really runs away, gets to New York and he makes a new life, and designs clothes and lives this completely free life. My sense of Vienna is so negative, I've been having very cross letters from people in Vienna, going, 'Why do you hate our city so much?' There are obviously reasonably good reasons, but I found it...

Ramona Koval: I don't think they've read the book, then. They mustn't have read the book that closely if they have to ask that. But great-uncle Iggy, he was obviously gay, and he was making a huge leap into the modern world, the future, the more accepting time in New York amongst people he could live with.

Edmund de Waal: Yes. The thing that I really love, that I sort of honour, and I suppose the book is a kind of access of honour in that kind of way, is that the generation of people that really made their lives anew. You know, he got away, he left behind this gilded cage, he was a baronet in the Austro-Hungarian empire, he left it all behind and ends up in New York designing frocks, living with his lover, enjoying his life elsewhere. And I kind of think, good on you for doing that.

Ramona Koval: But he uses the whole sort of baron thing as a very camp thing.

Edmund de Waal: Yes he does. I'm not sure how good he was as a fashion designer, but boy, did he know about style. He really did. He knows exactly how to work the European, the slightly kind of camp European demeanour for the Americans.

Ramona Koval: So the netsuke of course stay in Vienna with the great-grandparents and the terrible story of what happens to them, but these little objects are saved from theft and destruction by a character that only makes a slight appearance beforehand. She's Anna, the maid that's lived with the family since she was a teenager, and whose last name you still don't know. Tell us what she did for the netsuke and the family.

Edmund de Waal: Anna was my great-grandmother's maid, and had dressed her every single day of her married life. Extraordinary intimacy there. When the Anschluss arrives and the Nazis invade Austria and are greeted by hundreds of thousands of Viennese on the streets, applauding, and the family house is ransacked both by neighbours and then by the Gestapo and everything is taken off, looted...Anna does this extraordinary thing: she's Gentile, the family is imprisoned and beaten up, but Anna does this extraordinarily brave thing. Under the eyes of the Gestapo she takes this collection of netsuke one by one and she hides them. She doesn't take the kinds of things of ostensible value, the kind of grand things, she takes the most personal things, which are these objects, the things that the children in the family played with. And she hides them, and in fact when my grandmother Elisabeth goes back to Vienna in 1945 to his ruined house and meets Anna, Anna gives back this collection, it is an act of unbelievable restitution, an act of extraordinary reparation. And the great and mysterious thing is I simply don't know what she was called. All I know is from my grandmother, and from my great-uncle, is that she's called Anna.

But I'm completely convinced—the book's coming out in German in the autumn—I'm absolutely convinced that as soon as it gets published in Vienna the next day someone is going to ring me up and say, you know, that's my great-aunt... I'm so excited by this. I've got a shiver down my spine just thinking about it. I'm absolutely convinced that someone is going to bring that story to some kind of conclusion.

Ramona Koval: And you say that in her pocket, as she took them out one by one, they've never received so much care.

Edmund de Waal: Yes, but you know what, you've got this whole grand story about the dynasty and connections and wealth—but actually what you've got, you know, that's one whole part of it—what you've really got is you've got real people, real relationships, people who cared for each other, people who loved each other, people who tried to get away from each other; and right at the heart of it you've got this thing about someone who was loved and someone who loved a family and wanted to keep something—when everything else was completely destroyed wanted to keep something together and did it, and it's very, very moving; very moving indeed.

Ramona Koval: Well the collection becomes Japanese again in a sense, in the care of Iggy and his lover Giraud, and is that where you first see them?

Edmund de Waal: Yes, when I'm 17 and sort of run off to Japan to be a potter, this earnest young potter, that's where I see them. I end up in Tokyo, and there in a great glass case, a great vitrina in Iggy's apartment is this collection of netsuke, and he says, 'Well these are family things, and one day I'll tell you the story about them.' And he does. And the lovely thing about that is they begin in Japan, of course, then Paris, then Vienna, then in exile in England briefly and then back to Tokyo. It is—in terms of crossing the world, then they are very, very well travelled.

Ramona Koval: I think it's funny that...I saw an interview of you at the Cheltenham Arts and Crafts Exhibition where you described sideboards as 'a nightmare where hideous objects handed down from great-grandmothers are displayed.' I don't know when you did that interview, but now, I wonder whether your idea of display cases and vitrines and the display of objects—has it changed?

Edmund de Waal: Do you know what, it's such a great question, because they have. I spent so much of my life trying to get objects in people's hand. But this story is of course about people handling objects. It's completely...but it's also about showing them, carefully, in glass cases, having them there on display. And this sounds so stupid, but a year ago I had an exhibition in London in an art gallery and it was only when I finished hanging the exhibition: installations of pots, groups of pots, someone came up to me and said it's very interesting you should have made a vitrine—and I had, I'd made a group of work behind glass. I stood there with my mouth opening, thinking I'd spent five years running around Europe, vagabonding, in archives, thinking about vitrines, and now I'd made one, and I hadn't worked that one out until it was pointed out to me. And now I'm making things...I'm making vitrines. It's part of my life.

Ramona Koval: This time, on the edges of people's lives, which you say gives a slightly clammy feeling—how has doing this book changed you?

Edmund de Waal: I think it's changed me in lots of different ways, really. I have a very, very strong sense now, much stronger sense of how painful it is to try and tell family stories, whoever you are, whatever story it is. How incredibly dangerous it really is, that territory of telling stories. because all families' stories are actually about secrets. They're all about things that don't get told, things that are very private. And somehow I feel like I've crossed all these boundaries in telling this story. And it was the right thing to do, but it's made me feel very undefended, and the other thing which of course I hadn't...I thought about three people would read it, and so I'm completely taken aback by the response, and by the fact that every single day I'm getting letters from people who are telling me incredibly painful stories about where they come from and what they inherited and what they didn't inherit—about loss. And so I've now got this other life, which is basically writing back to people who've written to me about this extraordinarily painful story.

Ramona Koval: But it is for your children, isn't it. They will thank you when they're older and they can—I'm not sure how old they are, but you have handed them this story which is theirs, and I guess you'll hand them the netsuke when the time comes.

Edmund de Waal: Yes. I said to them you can read this when I've done it. You don't have to read it; it's there if you want to read it. And the lovely thing is that they can do whatever they want with these netsuke. They're there for them. They love them, but what they do with them is—thank goodness it's not my problem.

Ramona Koval: Well Edmund de Waal, thank you so much for being on The Book Show today.

Edmund de Waal: It's been a huge pleasure, thanks you so much for having me on The Book Show.

Ramona Koval: And The Hare with Amber Eyes is published by Farrar Straus and Giroux, and in Australia by Random House

Publications

Title: The Hare with Amber Eyes

Author: Edmund de Waal

Publisher: Random House