INTERVIEW:Edmund de Waal's memoir, 'The Hare with Amber Eyes', has been a runaway best-seller. On the eve of a public visit to Dublin, he talks to EILEEN BATTERSBY
IT TAKES AN ARTIST to understand form and shape, and at times only an artist will see the connections the rest of us miss. The British potter Edmund de Waal has spent his life surrounded by beauty and in the pursuit of it. His dramatic porcelain has been internationally celebrated and features in major collections. When his beloved great-uncle Iggie died in Tokyo, de Waal inherited an intriguing collection of tiny 18th- and 19th-century Japanese figurines, some ivory, some wooden, crafted as toggles for kimono belts and bags. All are small enough to hold in the palm of the hand, or keep in the pocket for luck, much as de Waal has carried one of them, a tiger with a glaring face, about with him. These objects, netsuke, became part of his family’s exotic European history.
Setting out to tell the story of these 264 animals and human forms, in The Hare with Amber Eyes, a narrative of rare beauty and singular tenacity, not only took de Waal on an extraordinary quest but also alerted him to his unique responsibility. "I realised I had to find out what happened; not only was there the story of the collection, but I needed to find the various people, these people who were my family. And, yes, I did see it as my responsibility."
De Waal describes himself as having become obsessed by loss and survival. This obsession caused him to become a detective and a historian. It also upset his view of himself as a very English Englishman – “I grew up in a deanery; my father was an Anglican priest.” His father was chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral and then dean of Canterbury, where the deanery was full of corners and had “a chapel at the very end of a long corridor”. It was a place that could not but fire the imagination and inspire a love of architecture. “I studied English at Cambridge; I couldn’t be more English,” he says, and he sounds it with his beautifully formal enunciation. But the enthusiastic de Waal, with his Dutch surname and gentle manner, his boy’s delight in connections and cross reference, is an original on all counts. He is excited by history and the way it frames the odd twists and turns of human lives. If he initially seems very English, it is only in contrast to the wealth of culture that has made him what he is, an artist alert to the subtle balance between craft and art and the role memory plays in confronting loss.
His book has become an international best-seller and suggests that, even in a technological age as curt as the one we now inhabit, readers still respond to well-told stories. De Waal is pleased yet admits to being “utterly perplexed” by its success. He recalls how difficult it was to write. “I set out to tell a story through feeling. Being an artist, I see things in terms of touch and of the spaces they inhabit.” He is a dreamer, and it becomes easy to understand how he could evoke the cluttered atmosphere of a young beauty’s dressing room in an opulent Viennese palace in which the collection, given to her as a wedding present, spent many years during which the great Austro-Hungarian empire died and flickering anti-Semitism became full-blown hatred as the Nazis took over and his family lost everything.
De Waal admits that his father, the Church of England clergyman who had been born in Amsterdam “and grew up everywhere in Europe”, had kept quiet for years. “I remember once asking him about Vienna in the 1930s. All he said he could remember were the fire engines.”
It was de Waal’s grandmother Elizabeth, an intense, plain, clever girl, who first opened the great box of family history. She had for a time corresponded with Rilke. Unlike her beautiful socialite mother, Emmy, Elizabeth had no interest in fashion, was indifferent to clothes and became a lawyer. She left Vienna but returned to the Palais Ephrussi after it had been commandeered by the Nazis, and her parents had been reduced to squatters. “My grandmother, by then happily English, was the one who told me the stories; my father said nothing, although he did become rather touched by my interest and then proved really helpful, finding photographs and documents.”
Although so much had been lost, destroyed and stolen, de Waal found clues. “I spent two years writing [the book], and that was full of difficulty. I rewrote it, perhaps three times. I worked hard at finding a voice. There is that first question to ask oneself: ‘How do I tell my story? How do I speak to the reader?’ But there was also the research. I spent about 18 months reading and travelling. I had to see the places.”
The more reimagining he did, the more unsettled de Waal felt about the person he had assumed he was. “I have no idea of who I am any more.” Suddenly this third of four sons born to an Anglican dean came to realise that he is a European Jew originating from Russian grain merchants who during the 19th century followed their wealth from the port of Odessa across Europe to Vienna and Paris. War took their wealth and scattered them. Yet the netsuke survived.
The reading was not a problem for de Waal. He loves books, and the vast personal library collected by his great-grandfather Viktor provides one of the many dramatic backdrops to this incredible tale, as do the references to the Austrian writers Robert Musil and Stefan Zweig; de Waal quotes Joseph Roth from that time: “It is terribly hard to be an Eastern Jew: there is no harder lot than that of the Eastern Jew in Vienna.”
Yet beyond it all is de Waal's passion for pottery. "I knew right away that I wanted to make things," he says. This idea of making things confers simplicity on the human complexity that shapes The Hare with Amber Eyes. De Waal's determination is surprising; he seems too gentle to be so driven. But he views his craft as a vocation. The irony on reading his book is obvious. Before him, his family had collected art; he makes it, and his crafted pots are dramatic architectural statements. "In the beginning, no one liked what I was doing," says with a laugh, then adds: "They weren't any good. It took time."
After his father was appointed dean of Canterbury Cathedral, de Waal attended the King's School in the city, where he was taught by Geoffrey Whiting, a disciple of the great English potter Bernard Leach. I tell de Waal that I have a copy of Leach's classic A Potter's Book, which was originally published in 1940; de Waal laughs and reminds me that he once wrote a monograph about his hero. "It caused some debate and is out of print." In common with Leach, de Waal also went to Japan. Leach had gone there as a young artist, in the early years of the 20th century; he returned to England with techniques he had mastered and subsequently created pottery that blended traditional English folk craft with the sophisticated simplicity of Japanese masters.
Near the close of the same century de Waal, already a trained potter, travelled to Japan on a multidisciplinary scholarship. During his time there he formed an intense bond with Iggie, by then the custodian of the netsuke. As an artist de Waal believes objects fulfil a special role in human history. “Things are mobile, they get passed around, they get lost but they endure.”
IN TELLING THE story of the collection, he is also writing a history of his family. The Efrussis arrived in Vienna and established themselves as bankers. One of them, Charles – a third son, as is de Waal – set off at 21 for Paris, where he changed the spelling of his name to Ephrussi and immersed himself in collecting and writing about art. It was he who purchased the netsuke from a dealer at a time when Japanese art was very popular in Paris – as was Charles. Proust modelled his Swann on Charles, who not only knew and commissioned Degas, Manet and Renoir but also appeared in one of Renoir’s most famous paintings. Charles never had children and died young. But before that he had presented his collection to his cousin Viktor, as a wedding present, the collection shipped to the palace in Vienna.
De Waal reimagines the brutality and humiliation inflicted on his family during the war. It makes him weep. He also remembers Anna, the loyal servant who smuggled the pieces, a handful at a time, in her apron, past the Nazi officers. She hid them in her mattress and presented them to Elizabeth when she finally returned to Vienna to visit the family home.
Having traced so many footsteps, de Waal needed to go to where it had all begun. “I went to Odessa, where Charles was born. It has the sense of a starting place that people seem to leave from: it is a place to be left.”
De Waal loved his grandmother and his great-uncle Iggie, but he is also fond of Charles Ephrussi. Why? “Because he loved art and he was very good at friendships.”
As part of the Year of Craft Edmund de Waal will give a reading and take part in an interview with Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times, at City Hall, Dublin, next Wednesday at 6.30pm; €10. Bookings at craftinireland.com/ events/details/public-talk-with-edmund- de-waal. De Waal is also the keynote speaker at a Year of Craft conference next Thursday, Craft Conscious, moderated by Fintan O'Toole
