Edmund de Waal - Public Reading and Interview

what I want to talk about is really the journey to writing this book about these objects and really it's a journey about me and it's a journey about touch and it's a journey about trying to take on the world in the way that I know and that's a world which in which place and objects are very very important it's a story I don't know how many of you well some of you obviously read it because you're here to say it's a book about nets gay now nets gate are very small they're not that big and I bought some and the doors are going to be locked but can you pass these round could someone take one to the very back there oh I I'm I'm can you pass some round I am no one is leaving without my three with my three Netscape I need them back they've been through quite a lot there are three Nets gay there is one from 1770 of to a wall nutshell there's one of a node answer by one of the greatest nets gay people from 1800 and there's a mask that my grandmother used to play with in Vienna which is her favorite Netscape or and there's no ivory ones because they get confiscated by customs you bring them through customs but there they work in the hand and I wanted you to have that as I'm talking to you about objects and survival and touch and really also trying to navigate my journey from Paris to Vienna to Tokyo to Tunbridge Wells to my life in London and through lots of complicated places but as I say in the book right at the very end of this book I end up by mistake really in Odessa which was the place that my ridiculously ridiculously oligarchic Lee rich Jewish family shipped out from in 1850s and I'm there with my brother and I find myself in a in a in a cafe with a Ukrainian academic who is very fierce very alarming and he says what what are you doing here what are you writing about and I say well I think I'm here because and then I stumble and I come to a halt and I say I think I'm writing a book about myself but it might be about memory I might be about place or it may even be about Japanese objects but I don't know anymore which is a really bad sell for the book because I still don't know what the books about but it is about some of those things what I do know about is it's about these things which are going around and it's about place and the story starts here Paris in the 1870s if you look up there there's a very sophisticated thing here which I won't be able to do but the park more so if you look up and see the part more so there the the and in near that part more so is the Rue de Mille so with this beautiful beautiful beautiful Hill of golden buildings and my Jewish family there first scene they decided that they were going to do an Arras child they're going to send their there Jewish boy is out from Odessa and they were going to marry good Jewish girls and it was all gonna be hugely golden and dynastic and so some of the family was sent to Paris and they were sent to this building in the 1860s 1870 and they built this that Hotel F Rossi and there was three boys who were sent to Paris there was schooll who was the the kind of the good financier who married the right Jewish girl richer than him you know really good and then there was the second boy Ignatz a who was the the Playboy and got into scrapes and was a doula and loved horses loved horses racing and and he's endlessly getting into terrible terrible problems and you kind tracked him through the social columns little social little Ritz about little problems with his life and the third boy the third boy is Charles and he is he's he's the spare song and he his apartment is at the top and you have to imagine being 21 with an empty apartment in Paris and ridiculously rich and he loved art and so what do you do if you're that kind of boy with that kind of life well I've found it very difficult to get into into into making a relationship with this man but I found this in the Louvre I spent a ridiculous amount of time in the archives believe this is a dinner party invitation of Charles's and a third of the people here are artists and a third of them are poets and a third of them are men of the world mundane and that's the texture of his world that kind of thing art literature and society and here he is walking down the room also in his top hat with his jeweler forg his his his his secretary walking in front of him and we know him and we know what he looks like because here he is in the back of his friend Renoir painting I can't do the pointer but you can see him talking to Joel and there he is with his reddish beard that my grandmother remembers so well and what does he do what he's part of this society with his empty apartment and so he starts going shopping and he buy is amazing amazing Renaissance tapestries he buys a Medici bed and he unpicked the M and puts the Eber proceedeth which tells you about bling in a way that even you in Ireland can't understand and he buys a gobbler 7re carpet of the golden wings which was made for the Louvre and he cuts it down to size to fit his new apartment and then he starts to write about art and he starts to write for The Gazette de Bazaar and then he becomes that many buys it because he because that's what you do and he starts he starts to collect he starts to collect with passion he collects money this is at the National Gallery I've taken my children to see this and said this darlings is not part of your inheritance and he he buys money and he buys Renoir this beautiful beautiful picture of a gypsy girl he buys Renoir seriously this is in Chicago this is he by sizzly he buys MANET this isn't met he buys but more is so and he writes about them he writes about these people because he cares about them is not just a rich young man buying art thoughtful for an empty it becomes who he is he becomes a writer and an animator of art and that's the crucial thing and I realized that I loved him after far too long I thought I could knock this book off in six months and six months later I was still in the archives and a year and a half later when I found this wonderful letter which is from pubis - Siobhan the great impressionist painter which is - Charles's dog Carmen and how wonderful to have a dog called Carmen in Belle Epoque Paris and you have to be very kind of particularly imagine that don't walking down the street but then the letter says to calm and my dear Carmen tell your wretched owner to write back to me and he's generous he buys this bundle of asparagus and the artist who you know says it's 800 francs but charles sends him a thousand and then on tuesday gets back that with a note saying this one has slipped from the bundle but he's a man of the world and his taste changes and he buys gustave moreau and he falls in love with this remarkable his his mistress louise Gandiva and they have a child which is quite complicated but he also and they start buying Japanese art together because Japanese art is the thing that happens in Paris in this 1870s and 80s and that's what you do collection of Monsieur Charles FOC they buy lacquer together and what else do they buy well while the horse-racing brother is running horses in his racing colors out at long shore and the aunt is buying and making this little country retreat in cat fur at what does Charles do he buys nets K P by is two hundred and sixty four of them are Fox with n laid eyes in would a curled snake on a lotus leaf in ivory a boxwood hair and the moon standing warrior a sleeping servant children playing with masks in ivory children playing with puppies dozens of ivory rats monkeys and tigers and eels and a galloping horse and priests and actors in Samurai and craftsmen and a bathing woman in her wooden tub and a bundle of kindling tied up in a rope the meddler a Hornet on a hornet's nest three toads on the leaf a couple making love a reclining stag scratching his ear with a hind leg an octopus a naked woman an octopus and he woman 3 sweet chestnuts our priest on a horse a person and over 200 more a huge collection of very small things Charles brought them not piece by piece like his lacquers but as a complete and spectacular collection from his dealer seashell had they just come in each one folded in its square of silk then placed in wood shavings then created from Yokohama on one of those four month shipments by way of the Cape had seashell recently put them out in a cabinet to tempt his rich collectors ordered Charles unwrapped them one by one finding my favorite tiger turning in surprise on a branch of bamboo or the wrasse looking up as they're caught on the dried-up husk of a fish did he fall in love with the startlingly pale hair with amber eyes and by the rest for company I I don't know he bought them he bought this incredible collection and he buys them and you've got one in your hands I hope because they are the kind of thing you want to pass on that's what you're doing you want to have it in your hands sorry onion which I won't here for you as well and pass it on because that's the point they they animate and they bring conversation to the fore they make conversation happening and that's why he buys them and that's how they come in to this family conversation but but Charles lives in Paris it's the belly pork and he gets grand and he starts buying grander things he buys this which is now in the Getty and I went to the Getty and I said as a joke at a lecture there I've come to take this home and they really didn't think it was funny at all and he buys grander things and he moved to a bigger house and Charles the man who I actually grew really to love decides in 1899 that there's no room in his house for this vitrine of these small strange funny erotic delightful quixotic complicated things anymore and so in 1899 he decides to give them away and he gives them to the second branch the family remember this great wonderful sweeping out of family one lot to Paris one lot has gone to Vienna and they've gone I love maps they've gone to Vienna to the ring Strasser and they have built themselves a family house so this is where my father grows up the Palais Everett see bigger than the hotel ephra see by a mile and it's a dreadful dreadful place it's dreadful it's golden it's marble it's full of I find it very very complicated as a place to be in it's it's it's every ceiling is painted and gilded you can't move for four pretty but it's also the house of a Jewish family who have arrived in Austria under no longer wandering Jew's they've decided to stay put and it's a very interesting house and I'm very very very that's one of my things is place and it took me a long time in this house to work out when I was in this ballroom which is the only room in the house that Gentile families in fantasy Eckler Vienna would ever come that the pictures on that ceiling are Esther being crowned as Queen of Israel and ham being destroyed the enemy of the Jews being destroyed so you go into this Ballroom in this madhouse and you'd look up or you don't look up but there are very specific images of Zion on the gilded ceilings as well as endless pictures of people playing harps and Charles Charles cousin Charles sends his cousin Victor my great-grandfather as a wedding present in 1899 Victor is marrying the girl from the palais next door he's marrying any my great-grandmother who is ridiculously young and not in love with him and she loves dressing up she loves she really loves dressing and she loves dancing and she loves hats and she has lovers this is one of her lover's is an Archduke caught in the street an amazing picture but I found tucked into a book of my grandmother's white with their I don't know and into that house which is full of 60 years of good European shopping there's no room for for this vitrine and so the vitrine of Netscape end up in her dressing room and they end up this is the view from her dressing room over to the votive care across the rings dresser and that matters because that's the room that's the room in which she is alive that's the room in which she sheds her clothes and takes on the clothes and the next thing she has to do and that's the place that actually suddenly I have real oral history because that's the place where my grandmother here she is on their train going off to their country house where she is with her sister that's the place where these children play with the Netsky there they go because that's the one time that they see their mother in this house full of servants they go for an hour in the evening as their mother's being dressed by their maid Anna her maid Anna and then the great between is opened up the children in the dressing room choose their favorite carvings and play with it on the pale yellow carpet Gizella why today was very beautiful loved the Japanese dancer holding her hand her fan against the brocade gown caught in mid-step Iggy was the young boy my great-uncle loved the wolf a tight dark tangle of limbs faint markings all along its flanks and he loved the bundle of kindling tied up with the rope there's a dried fish and that's the mad old man with his bony back and Elisabeth contrary loved the mask with his abstracted memory of faces which I hope is here somewhere you can arrange these carvings ivory in wood all the 14 wraps in one long row the three Tigers The Beggar's over there the children the masks the shells of fruits you can arrange them by color all the way from the dark brown mendler to the gleaming ivory deer or by size the smallest is the single rat with black inlaid eyes to his tail little bigger than the magenta stamp issued to celebrate the 60th year of the Emperor's reign or you muddle them up so that your sister can't find the girl in her roads or you stockade the dog and her puppies and they have to get out because this is the great thing is that these things these beautiful objects suddenly become toys they cease to be kind of objects of kind of conversation in a drawing room and become toys and that's the point of them that's the point of them and so they have this Second Life not in Vienna but in Paris not in Paris but in Vienna and they're part of this extraordinary assimilated Jewish life where you go constantly to the theatre and the Opera this is my grandmother's opera book for 1916 and look what they go to mama and papa and all those cousins all those Jewish cousins stories one after another about all of these people and that's that's what happens because this is what happens if you live in this place in Vienna in the greatest most civilized city in Europe at the turn of the 20th century and my grandmother got away she became a poet she became a lawyer she got to university and Iggy who I loved there he is rather spelt ready who was gay and didn't want to be the next banker in this dreadful dreadful dynasty runs away and becomes a dreadful fashion designer really really bad but my god he loves fashion and he I when the book when this book came out and I suddenly had to talk in public the very very first time I bought myself a suit my first suit which is this boot and I thought it a key and I thought but the Baron I leo efforts II would be so happy but finally I was well dressed enough to go out in public after all those years of making pots and no one wanted and the problem for me the problem for me about writing this book was that once I decided that in some way I had to write this book like I have to hurry I lost my I'm okay but I'm not I said okay okay I think that's yeah and the problem of course for me is that I knew what was going to happen because uh because because of this because of the Angelus because of the fact that I'd heard both from my grandmother and from Iggy both of them in their 80s about what happened in 1938 and the fact that but when when the first tanks crossed over from Germany into Austria that not very that very night that the the Palais was was broken into and my great grandfather and grandmother were beaten up and unwrapped and and that that was the beginning of of something which is is irreducibly difficult to talk about because it matters and to screw it up is an offense so how can you write about this particular period of time when my 78 year old grandfather was made to dig a trench outside his family house and when his shovel breaks was forced to dig with her hands and my great-grandmother in her 50s was forced to scrub the street in front of the house and the house is taken apart and very carefully very methodically by the Gestapo and by neighbors and it's Aryan eyes and the fortune goes and the bank has signed away and they are stuck and they're stuck in Vienna and my grandmother comes back and and she gets them moving and she gets them out of Vienna and she gets them to their house in Czechoslovakia where my great-grandmother commit suicide in 1938 and you know what I love archives I really really love archives and I really love research and that matters to me and this is a book which is built on encounter with real things but when you are in archives and it all goes wrong is when you're in archives where Eichmann has been before and where you find the gaps in the history and you're looking for cousins and you can't find them it's difficult and it's very difficult to write about with conviction but without that kind of emotion which means it's unreadable so it's difficult and that's the moment when I had to work out whether I could actually finish this book or not what happens is that my my my is that my victor is a refugee he comes to England he comes to Tunbridge Wells or wonderful birth vetting places to come to and with my father as a nine-year-old boy and my grandmother and Iggy in America joins the American army and he fights his way across Europe and here he is the Normandy landings and he's named his Jeep after his sister and in 1945 my grandmother goes back to Vienna to find out what's happened and do you know what I can't tell you the story about what happens because that's just too much but in 1945 she gets the Netscape back and I'm sorry I can't tell you the story because that's just that's just tough you know I don't see why I have to but Iggy sees the Netscape and he doesn't know what to do with his life he's demobbed he can't live in Europe he can't go back to America and he sees this jumble of Netscape which are his childhood which are the thing that has left and he says I know what I'm going to do with them I'm going to take them back so he takes them to Tokyo and here he is at Haneda Airport in 1947 and in Japan he gives parties and he builds a house and in this house which he has with his partner zero this lovely Japanese man who's now in his late 80s he builds a VAT room there's lots and lots of fraternization here Japanese and American and European friends sushi and beer served wine mrs. Kanako it's Liberty Hall it's a house with panache none of the clutter of his childhood in that Palais it's a dramatic interior of gold screens and Scrolls paintings and Chinese pots created as a new home for the Nets KFOR right in the center of this house in the center of Iggy's life are the Nets game egg we designed a glass case for them it has patterned papers on the wall not only are the 264 nets gay back in Japan but they're back on show in a cellar placed by Iggy hidden lights a dusk the between glows with order gradations of cream bone and ivory at night they can light the whole room again here the net sigue become Japanese again they lose their strangeness they are surprisingly accurate renditions of the food you eat clams octopus peaches person and bamboo sheets the bundle of kindling that is kept by the kitchen door is knotted like this netscape bicycle the slow emphatic turtles climbing over each other on the edge of the temple pond are your tamil katsu netsky and you are not perhaps meeting monks and peddlers and fishermen let alone Tigers on the way to your office in Marunouchi but the man at the noodle stand at the train station has the same permanent scowl as the disappointed rat catcher I was 17 when I first went to Japan 17 when I first saw these nets Gay 17 when I first was told that there was a story I was 28 when I went to live in Tokyo to write a book and I used to spend my afternoons with with Iggy who was at that liminal point when he wanted to talk and was told what had happened and been given the nets gay it's of course being given a responsibility and it's taken me a very very long time to work out whether that responsibility to look after the memory of this man and here is his grave which I was in this beautiful Tokyo temple Cemetery I was there in December cleaning his grave was also a responsibility to work out what to do with this story and it it was a responsibility I tried very very very hard to avoid there's a problem about telling stories and there's a problem at writing stories and one of my problems of course was having started this wretched wretched wretched story was actually how on earth I was ever going to get my life back and finish this book I have children I have a marriage and we'll Sarah Potter and so I took myself as I said to a dessa to see whether I could find a way of finishing the story and of course I couldn't I was there in this beautiful place and because by now you probably got the sense of the picture the first house is the banking Hall the second part is the merchant thing in the third house is the afresh C Palais and there I was with my brother and it was all beautiful and I said let's that's fine that's fine that's great but we went round the back and for some reason there was a T de cheveux icon up on concrete how on earth was a 2cv in Odessa and as a trained Alsatian and there were lots of rather scary Ukranian workmen and there were three huge skips which were full of plaster work and paneling and iron work and bits of ceiling and the Ukranian Foreman says to my brother you know you're in perfect timing we've just ripped out all that it's perfect and so I went and stood up in that on window in this void nothing left to touch and looked out across the chestnut trees towards the Black Sea and I kind of wondered what to do do I go back even further to the shtetl to the poor tiny village where the family come from at the beginning of the 19th century do I go deeper into a death sir what on earth am i doing and I made a decision that I had to take a netscape back i had to go home and I had to start writing the book thank you very very much well I may have broken this if I haven't maybe you can hear me well how do you follow that I suppose the first thing is the roomful of readers here Ireland is full of stories you all got stories beat that one week it is an incredible story I'm going to start and I don't know what to say I find you say it's I suppose we think about this is a beautiful book but it's full of emotion I think it's great the fact that we're all here because of the the power of story and the power of emotion is he you meant tremendous humanity in the book and I think this book without sounding corny or kind of wall tarnish the book kind of brings out the best in us the reader and I think that's an incredible endorsement and a huge tribute it's the way you've written this the way you've told this and beautiful strange funny and desperately sad story I think it's a tribute to you is the fact that you've touched us it well I look at your there even more of you now them like it's very very very different there's a strange thing about writing about your family no one asks you one of your family asked you to write about your family for a start I mean they really don't because it's very dangerous and it's dangerous for them and it's very dangerous for you and it's dangerous for you because how do you navigate honestly that territory how on earth do you navigate that honestly and how do you shape it I mean there's I have a horror of picking a book up opening it up and finding a family tree I mean that it's the worst thing that you can ever do and this is a family tree which it's got three people with the same name in it over 150 years so it's scary on that level which is it's a story across generations and across countries but it's much much much more scary on the on the on the real level which is that you are very undefended if you choose to write about your family I think there's so many aspects to this but I suppose I should say I think it's an important point particular in the context of the Council of the conference when I opened the jiffy bag that the book was in I opened a few bags on padded envelopes books appear and opened them all the time I've been opening them for I know 25 years I still I'm excited every time I open a jiffy bag I love looking at books I love seeing what's inside you know the envelopes but when I saw this book my first reaction was what a beautiful book and then my second reaction was is that the Edmund evolved because I knew your work and that made it was all the more exciting and strange and and there is Bernadette The Potter's book I've had the book since 1980 and Edmunds written a monograph of each having its incredible all these wonderful connections and the whole richness of that whole central thing and the fact that you came to your family story as an English man the son of an Anglican priest yeah and you discover that you're a European Jew well I mean I couldn't be more in you can prompt to tell that I'm quite English really rather in sitting in Dublin Castle okay but do you know what I really really grew up in a in a in an Anglican Church of England English environment and and the one of the real imperative you know with evensong and and you know gowns and the whole lot you know the whole thing you know a chapel in the house and that the the one of the reasons that about the timing of the book is that my father is now in his mid 80s but my father had never ever ever talked about his life before he came to England and I my grandmother had talked about it my great uncle had told my father had never talked about it at all and I thought the only way I am going to get a conversation to happen with my father is to write a book it's the only legitimate way I can ask him a question and the only way I can get a conversation to my children who are growing up on their grandfather who is growing old so in some ways the book which is very personal is an attempt to get my father and I say early and early in the in the book I think at the beginning is I asked my dad for some help and he said well there's really nothing I don't have anything he comes down to my studio with a Sainsbury's bag with some Thomas Mann books in it and says well that's all I've got and then he comes down with a few a few photographs and says well that's the family archive you're now the inheritor of the family archive and it's like a miniature envelope that's it and and then it was just that it's so gnashing thing about cadence I suppose that I say to him well I've been in Paris looking at at Impressionists and he says do you know what in 1934 we used to go to when we were living in Paris I used to go to the shared a poem with my mother and I and I remember see you know and then I'd say and I've been in Vienna recently and he'd go I was just walking down past the university to the the park beyond and he said there was a man there who used to sell ice creams and it was it was the only way that it could happen was to do this ridiculous journey and then talk with him and the things that emerged were real and that's the way it happened it did begin a conversation with him and now he's in his eighties and he is very not because of the book but because of where he is in his life he's very much more open and alive to his the fact that he's Jewish yeah but your grandmother Elizabeth she had been very important until she was a storyteller she was an incredible storyteller I mean she was completely she was she was scary in the right way for a grandmother yeah which is that she really cared I mean she I mean I did occasionally get letters corrected and sent back to me with so but but she made an assumption that some things mattered and one of them was was literature I mean she she'd had this great correspondence of Rilke which is pretty incredible and and and she knew her Proust inside out and her you know in her flat in Tunbridge Wells you know was this was always European literature from top from the ceiling to the floor butchy told stories and I'm convinced this is my theory of the day but that it's not every generation that's most generating the spirit cherished there's always someone who's listening to family stories is probably worth trying assassin mm actually family stories but this there's someone who's listening and it's not obvious who it's going to be in any generation but the stories do get passed on and kind of zigzaggy ways I don't know move on from that but anyway she did tell me a lot stories but this she was this quiet clever girl with the incredibly glamorous illusive mother so it was almost she became a watcher early in life and it's this thing of lunacy you can't think of them as the witness that this kind of a communal yeah this a chorus in the sidelines watching it's really difficult to talk about objects and not anthropomorphize them or it's very it's it's dangerous territory because you can't you know they're objects are objects they have been in places where things have happened you know and so in that sense they are witnessed they are witnesses and there are you know the extraordinary thing that that objects that have been held touched handled passed on have a particular feel to them and it's very difficult to talk about that I mean there is a partner and the warmth to these objects because they have been in people's hands for 200 odd years and in such interesting places at that including a mattress including a mattress and especially a mattress yeah but but but it's difficult you know I they've been there are some being some really bad books where people have tried to tell stories through object so we can all think of them but you know and it's dangerous territory because you can't you mustn't you must get that story around objects to work because objects really do matter and also places in space and I supposed to the sheer breadth of it we think of Victor born in Odessa and he dies in Tunbridge well yeah I mean yes yeah and and and he's born in Odessa and he he thinks that he's going to live in Vienna forever yeah you know he makes this library you know anyway yeah in the writing of it I think there's so many qualities to it the fact that you tell the story like the artist's eye is there but it in there is a distance a detachment a kind of the curiosity you are very much a detective you you are able to keep the emotional it's it's it's profoundly moving but if not saccharine are clawing but the one point I think it's of all the extraordinary sequences in the book it's the the terrible moment when you have to reimagine what it was like when the Gestapo firstly there's the warning signs the people we don't you're Jewish and we don't like you so the anti-semitism begins to kind of really filter through but then we have the Gestapo coming in and you create you reimagine what it was like when they came crashing in and destroyed the lives humiliated your forebears and you you say this is the point where you weep I mean how the historians here and you have written history a history a story that we know but you have reimagined this history again from a personal level what was that the pain in the grief and the anger and the anger is in the book guys yeah I I'm I mean if you're going to write I cared about these people you know I really really cared about them I you know I and and therefore there is that huge responsibility narrative responsibility to to be in that place fully and the thing is that so many people have written about it who were there you know unwritten about it was brilliantly and so it felt like hubris to be writing about it but I had to write about it and someone said to me some some bastard said to me how could you be so detached you know what didn't you feel I mean that's the only way I could write the hunt I'm sorry how on earth could I not write it in that way because if I if I if I was if I was emoti in it you know you you know you you you put the book down and you run away yeah yeah it's all the more moving because the detachment but that is the moment when they when your anger your expected and obvious and and you know but but the anger is anger is yeah you have to say you know every sink that the weather was like that on March the 17th and the newspaper says on March the 18th that you know air in toothbrushes are now for sale and that on March the 19th you know that the every single Jewish lawyer loses their job and in the afternoon and that's the way you do it that's the way you do it this way I did it anyway can we talk about the next bit I'm sorry I couldn't very two dudes this set the ease and the glamour of Charles and the fact that it really is the young man on the loose with incredible wealth in a beautiful city with and his own imagination and his response to these things yeah like he's in this dream environment for somebody who's interested in the arts but it's a it's a great moment I mean and you know when I started this this whole thing and I thought how on earth am I gonna like this man he's just horribly rich and then and then reading him and seeing I tried to track down all his paintings they don't actually look at them yeah madness but actually standing in front his pictures and thinking why why did he buy that you know that and then finding that he'd written about them and then reading his book on diora and seeing how alive he was and how he grew through this art and grew through conversation and then and then and then and then of course there's his astonishing thing which is that he turns out to be swung he turns up in Proust he turns out that the Proust is his secretary and comes to his apartment and looks his paintings and Charles his paintings touch start turning up in in proofs writings and priest comes his parties and and then Charles if receive becomes Charles Swan and so there's that astonishing kind of layering of of people and place in that way to know the the the the the danger that the the real danger of that was that I could I could still be writing about Belle Epoque Paris and it would have been sort of a hyperventilating Englishman writing about ball gowns and a nun priest and an opera and I would still be gone writing for 20 years it'd just be schmaltzy nostalgic waffle so I had to kind of I had to kind of you know and I think that the the the the way the the fact was that there was all that but it was also against the backdrop of the Dreyfus Affair so there was the that there was this glamour but it was shot through with this fault line of an Tyson I I thought I you know I'd done my history a laugh but I thought I knew about the Dreyfus Affair but it's appalling yeah it's sorry I mean your story but it's appalling it's a point it's appalling and it and the things that are said there and tried out in Paris prefigure yeah German anti-semitism Austrian anti-semitism it's a it's a public rehearsal for where Jews belong in in in Western society it's very very very complicated yeah there's a brilliant book by Ruth Harris Andre first came out last year yeah really good book but even the fact that Charles's life is is running parallel with the reality of social history Zola was right yes I mean and yes at the same time the this is the way fate determines people's lives and you don't have to make a great claim for Charles because it's there when he dies how distressed everyone is because it was loved yes that's it's the simple statement it was very very popular very much loved yeah well yeah one of one of the most peculiar after-effects of this book is is having letters I got handles very moving neces from people who have had parallel stories about diaspora but there's a whole pile of letters which go you may not know this but I am your cousin because there are quite a lot of quite complicated love affairs in Paris I've been having these letters which go into a different pile called family question mark questions we're going we share as it happens a great great it's very fun when you go as this very rug rather rather very kind of sort of English English manner and with the choice of being rather sort of kind of French maybe kind of a bit sort of yeah Viennese I mean do you find yourself gravitating and let's not forget the rushes there in the background too I mean is there a place that you naturally gravitate towards I mean the style your style your immersive style is very much that there's a sense of Japanese design as well so it's kind of complicated as well yeah I mean I kind of made sense of of sort of the journey made sense of my kind of diasporic kind of you know the fact that I love I'm always sort of on the move I guess in one way but I'm a Potter you know and I I'm a very grounded Potter I have a studio in London and I sit down and I make pots and you can't move I don't move around I make pots in that place and and so there's a I always come back to my life as a maker I mean this this this book which has derailed my life hasn't stopped me being a Potter it's actually opened up other ways in which the kinds of things I now want to make in some ways reflect some of the story of the book like the motif of collection and gathering chorus and the communal voice and you can see that with the pots the standing these installations with a group standing there standing along ledges galleries as witness and that motif of witness it's so important and memory and I you know and I when I was trying to finish the book and finding it very very difficult and writing what I found very very uncomplicated bit right at the very end of the book which was really about whether I should write the book or not there was a real moment when I wondered whether to just walk away I was also trying to finish a a commission for the viene London for the ceramics Keller isn't it's up high in the dome it's a red ring which has got 450 pots up and they're really really high up I finished the book and book was published and I was I suddenly rised that I'd make I'd made an installation of pots that can't be moved can't be touched can't be got rid of can't be can't be dispersed a can't there's no diaspora about those pots their memory and they're there and you know I mean that's just how I was all working out for me you mean think of permanence and mobility whether you stay in the place or whether you move survival is really the same I suppose the little objects they're survivors yes yes but what's really really interesting is that I still hope they're in the room the doors are locked is that they are absolute survivors but I but but but what's the irreducible things not the objects is the fact is that if this is the story and they're handed together and it's trying the book is trying to unpack unpack the story from the objects but it's very very very very interesting because the story is not is obviously about the things I could find but it's absolutely about the things I couldn't find it's about silences all the way along that's about silences each generation of people being silent about their Jewishness in particular places it's about silences about where you come from it's about where you who you are like some of the paths I mean what in Victor Victor's journey was remarkable it was very long very painful and any commit suicide at vacation the family the holiday house which was always associated for her with you with lively listen and fun and that's actually where she chooses to die because she's had enough but some of the other members of the family you can't trace them the past runs cold so I'm wondering do you feel I mean these are there ghosts or they part of you I mean this you love these people that you never met you you came to love them through a journey yes how do you how do you feel about them why do you make us love these people that you never met but they're part of you because I suppose if I'm really honest I am a writer as a Potter there sit in public as first time I've ever said she made me she made me do it she made me do she made me she made me do it doesn't mean I'm sure I something else but I thought I'd said it now but but it's the thing is what's revealed and what's hidden and what and what you choose to hide and what you just just just just one one story one story which is about this which is that about Englishness and about Jewishness which is them that when we were growing up in Canterbury it's a it's next to the Cathedral all the deans of Canterbury since the Reformation have had their portraits painted okay and so they're all these portraits in the house but gilt butchers so my father's there it's been there for five years and then they say to him you've got to have your portrait painted this is fine so he says I'm gonna have my portrait painted by my cousin Viennese cousin Marie Louise from Wantage shitski who lives in Hampstead refugee known him since he was a boy she's done in her eighties and so he Mary Louise says of course Tasha that was the patronymic course Tasha and course are paying important on one condition that no one sees the portrait until it's unveiled that's fine so there we are a family Dean and chapter Archbishop portrait red velvet thingy you know over it and they say and they pull it off the red curtain off and mary-louise has painted my father as a rabbi and contention and she said to him yura yura Church of England yeah Benjamin but yours ladouche boy yeah and it's an amazing portrait he's there as a rabbi and there was silence its portrait still in the Deanery it's a great great portrait of my father and that and that's done that's absolutely about identity you know and that's that's about the silences and you know in it cetera there you go I'm sure you all want to ask questions they may not want to have there's a microphone down there if I'm if I'm honest and I'm seem to be there's a book that I absolutely want to do I can't work out how to do it I can't work out about voice in it so it's about five years away but yes there is another book there is another book it's a book about memory and it seems a terrible personal question to ask you but I'm afraid your your memoirs like I can't see you I can't stand up I can't I can't talk to someone I call thank you I just wanted to ask you and about your father's response to how the book is is out in the world just if it's not no no no no no no I um he's he's terribly pleased he says bemused as I am but I had there's one just on that there's one other thing which is I did say to him and to my uncle that they could read it and proof and if either them objected to anything in the book I'd take it out of they objected to the book I would pay back my pathetically small advance and it wouldn't be published and my uncle rang me up and said I have to meet you and I thought and he said to me there's a problem and I went oh okay he said on page 232 you say in the Tarot where we were living in exile that there was a cacophonous village band I was the conductor of that band and it was very very good so I bought him a wonderful bottle of wine and his it's kept it's still in the book poverty dose battle wait where you came from how did you make sense of that yourself um well I'm completely uninhabited huge wealth you know I've been understood in those houses and felt how mausoleum like they are you know and what was very very interesting is that the generation the diasporic generation the four children who got out of Vienna and lived as refugees in England and Mexico in America and Japan all started again their lives of absolutely nothing with no nostalgia at all and had that sense of liberation from the great wealth now you know that's not a that's not a comment on anyone else's experience of being in exile or refugee or whatever it's just their experience which was that actually they made their lives very fully without it you know so you know I mean it's very very important that the book was an and attract against nostalgia and attract against melancholia and it's absolutely not one of those books which is sort of saturated and dusted with sort of icing sugar because the shtetl is absolutely there was absolutely there I think it's interesting to that thing about wealth and poverty is that when you go to our desert and the only it's left is the balustrade yeah and again the artists are the these things that the rest of us don't but you see the blackened motif the ear of wheat on which the family wealth had been the grain the grains from the Ukraine that's where the money had come from from from the wheat fields and I think it's incredible that this well ostentatious opulent sort of lifestyle yeah these massive kind of palaces but it's all it's all tracks back to the we you know I think that's quite interesting the connection between the two I mean I really wouldn't mind a dega I really really wouldn't mind a day job and I'm not so I'm not I'm not stupid but but but but but there's there's something very very real yeah about not having it and that doesn't transform into nostalgia yeah you deliberately don't go down the road of trying to find your families well artistic well no but did you know what this is really really important this is so important because I restitution is incredibly significant it's incredibly it's about lofts it's about it's about theft it's about facing families and erasing them and States and museums and collectors just just refusing to admit to the 20th century so I'm a huge and passionate support and restitution but what I chose to do was to restitute my family's story in a book now I absolutely know I that's my thing I've got brothers if they want to you know if they want to go and argue with viennese lawyers about there are paintings in Viennese museums that we can battle to get back and that's fine that's up to them but what this this book is coming out in Austria in the autumn and I think that's my bit of restitution you know I yes I see you sleeve I think your three children one of them is called Anna isn't she the heroine the non of the Gentile heroine of the book is that correct do you think she's called Anna well that's a wonderful tribute to that obviously amazing woman I do you know what I I have absolutely no doubt that when I'm in Vienna in October that a week after its published someone is going to come up to me and say pianos is tiny someone is gonna come up to me and say that's my great-aunt that's my cousin that's my absolutely did you manage my adamantane knowledge that that's what's going to happen because you were saying that you I asked you about that but maybe yes no yes well yes but it's the awareness is there I mean and she's and you have this note of regret that you don't know her last name you know nothing about her do you just know her name was Anna yeah yeah and I you know I didn't want him I didn't want to lie yeah I didn't want to go and you know and make up some yeah anyway yeah which is where her name is lost it's just what happens it's it's very true that's what happened it really is about it is so much about life yeah the story my compliments on the book a fabulous read I think you impression that if anybody had was to write this book it should have been Iggy he renounced his background his Jewishness and I noticed on the stone there's no Jewish symbol how did his background sit with them he he was so Jewish you have never met he was fully fully Jewish it's interesting there's no Jewish symbol on the on on there great stone it's in you know and and he planned his Buddhist funeral but my god he knew what he was giving me you know he really did and even though I died when I was there at his funeral I hadn't planned to say it I said the Kaddish for him there and I know that he would have been very very very pleased about that he wrote terribly you know he couldn't have written the book he loved he loved his idea of a really good read was Frederick Forsyth really really do you know I know he had all the proof that I know through the first volume we're just another hello yes hello I just asked about the net skis today yes do your children get a chance to line up all the rats in a row and kennel the dog and so on yes yes they do yes they do if they do I'm I'm slightly cherry or talking too much about them because it's their story I can't feel I feel that's crossing their threshold for them they there I do what yes sir I'm sure I'm going to have it in my old age I can have a misery memoirs from my children about how they were forced to play the Netscape you know but but do you know what they really by its very extraordinary because um you know there is which is that thing about how big they are in the hand they're so small when you had went when you hand them around and you see them in a child's hand and they're so big it's such a basic thing but but it's so moving it's so moving thank you and hello I'm halfway through the book so I'm really enjoying I want to thank you very much but I question as a linguist myself I'm interested in first of all you know when you're in France in Paris and you're going to the archives and you're obviously reading with facility French language you then go to Vienna and you're reading in German well yeah yeah yeah and and I mean I'm at the section where Elizabeth is looking to be schooled as her brother and you know she and you you described how in the family they spoke with ease you know at least three languages and I'm wondering if that is part of your inheritance do you know what this is this makes me so cross not your question because it's brilliant but but because my this completely classic that under child of a refugee my father speaks five languages his mother spoke seven languages plus obviously Battin Greek and Hebrew ammunition you know obviously but that's growing up with this defiantly English man all I hear is English so no I I can read read French I speak French at Pauling Li badly my stumble through German and had to have quite a lot of help with German so my Japanese is okay but I can't it but but i but the no I'm terrible at languages I've got brothers who have good languages but um no I don't I haven't and I want my youngest brother Tom has inherited this ridiculous polyglot thing which I'm really envious about a bit about being in at home across languages which is really interesting but I had to struggle I had to struggle with that I have to say that the most I had um I know we're running late but I'm just very briefly the book came out in Paris in in March and I had to go and do press there which was fine and it was very nice and etc except for an extremely cross incredibly spelt Parisian tiny Parisian journalist and she said to me okay you're English and you're writing that priest all day I you know you know and there was a level of offense I think I will treasure but anyway thank you very much real quick thank you so much thank you one question just one more question at the end the actual the objects themselves what's their original purpose of oh sorry some J what I'm actually I would it be possible if they could gently come back to me very grateful before any more gentlemanly P okay okay here's one and what happens is that if you notice there were two okay there's one okay that basically a chord a sash goes fact that there a sash goes through them the cord goes through it and so they actually hang toggles and they they close up what's a little brocade bag that you or a in or a lacquer or a client own a little box you'd have on your belt and they're mostly used they were yeah and it would be merchants or scholars or Sameera so they're kind of they must have the kind of the subcultural seemed like a beautiful watch that might produce from your from the orbit waistcoat you know waistcoat pocket you know something very beautiful that could be handled but again is something I think it's very interesting that you make art in beautiful things it's you know the craftsman as artists you know I mean and these are crafted pieces and they're functional practical so I think and why what place is more fitting than an international craft conference in which it's so important to acknowledge the craftsman is the artists yeah artists may not always be craftsmen but the best craftsmen are actually artists so I think this thing is very important to be addressed tomorrow no doubt by the various speakers but it's terribly important and the other thing great thing about now craft of course is the fact that object and about object it's of course that objects are always on the move I mean that's that but you know I'm gonna get really professora Lang shut up actually about that I really am thank you so much New York aiiii across europe a journey to Japan and back to Europe to a to England and quite quite a tricky journey in the room and um one we've I have to say I've been the most generous generous generous audience

Channel: Design & Crafts Council Ireland

Views: 17,867

Rating: 4.7837839 out of 5

Keywords: Edmund de Waal, Ceramic, artist, author, CCoI, Crafts Council of Ireland, Dublin Castle, reading

Id: -504RbknCNo

Length: 73min 41sec (4421 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 27 2013