The sepia saga business - De Waal borrows Sebald's voice

What Sebald did for me was to say that a particular voice was allowed.  That voice was very internal, very quiet and credible across a whole piece of writing.  I think I learnt that entirely from reading Sebald.

Edmund de Waal did a little interview with a “pick five books” theme.  W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz was one of them; see above for why.

It is possible that I could write another post about de Waal and Walter Benjamin, another of his five picks, if only I had read Benjamin.

From the quotations I used yesterday, I would not guess that de Waal was especially Sebaldian, but he has more than one rhetorical mode, and at least one of them is the one he describes in the interview, Sebald played on a less complex instrument.  This is aside from common interests in modern European history, or the meaning of objects, or the meaning of loss.  De Waal has separated himself from Sebald enough to put captions on the images he uses, although he is writing non-fiction, which has different standards.

Some odd coincidences pop out.  De Waal’s great uncle, the one from whom he inherits the netsuke, was homosexual (a word never used by de Waal).  He finds a home, a career, and a companion, a husband, in Japan after World War II.  Part Four of The Hare with Amber Eyes is a portrait of the marriage of Iggie and Jiro, “my Japanese uncle.”

They explored Japan together, travelling to an inn that specialized in river trout one weekend; to a town on the coast for an autumn matsuri, a jostling parade of red-and-gold floats…  But music was closest to the heart of their life together…

And this is the fourth resting-place of the netsuke.  It is a vitrine in a sitting-room in post-war Tokyo looking out across a bed of clipped camellias, where the netsuke are washed late at night by waves of Gounod’s Faust, played loud.  (310-11)

This text is above a photo of the two smiling men, the young Jiro’s hand on the balding Iggie’s shoulder.  You can see it at de Waal’s website, along with a shot of Iggie and his vitrine.

Readers familiar with The Emigrants will likely find it hard to escape an overlay of the section of that books about Sebald’s great uncle, Ambros Adelwarth, and its narrative about his gay marriage before the fact, including this weird intersection:

Once, at Mamaroneck, said Aunt Fini, Uncle Adelwarth spent all of one afternoon telling me about his time in Japan.  But I no longer remember what he told me.  Something about paper walls, I think, about archery, and a good deal about evergreen laurel, myrtle and wild camellia.  (79)

The next page has a photo of a pagoda built over a lake, perhaps that “floating and well-nigh empty house” where Adelwarth lived for a time with his Japanese lover.

Why does de Waal need Sebald’s help?  Because he is not a writer. 

I know that my family were Jewish, of course, and I know they were staggeringly rich, but I really don’t want to get into the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss.  And I certainly don’t want to turn Iggie into an old great-uncle in his study, a figure like Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, handing over the family story, telling me: Go, be careful.

It could write itself, I think, this kind of story.  A few stitched-together wistful anecdotes, more about the Orient Express, of course, a bit of wandering round Prague or somewhere equally photogenic, some clippings from Google on ballrooms in the Belle Epoque. It would come out as nostalgic. And thin.  (15)

This is early.  De Waal has not even started researching the book.  He is expressing his fear about how to tell the story he wants to tell, how to avoid all of the clichés and received ideas of the genre.  He needs to do a lot more work – the book is in part a chronicle of his work – and he needs a model for the voice.  He finds it in Sebald.

Perhaps a new set of clichés will form around Sebald as his style hardens and dims in the hands of his imitators.  Not yet, though, not in The Hare with Amber Eyes.  Of course de Waal does write a narrative of loss.  But it is not nostalgic, not thin.

De Waal looks at art - a long-lasting, covert way of staking a claim for who you are

Edmund de Waal is a potter, so sensitive to the fell of objects, to their place in a room, to their use.  The little Japanese sculptures that give The Hare with Amber Eyes are purchased by a one of the great French collectors of Impressionist paintings.  The netsuke sit in a glass case along with

Two fans by Pissarro, solidly constructed of painstaking small strokes.  The Sisleys, the Seine and the telegraph wires and the sky in springtime,  The barge near Paris, with that loafer in the lanes.  And Monet’s flowering apple trees scaling a hill.  And Renoir’s dishevelled little savage…*  (67)

And a Morisot, and “another Morisot,” and “the other Renoirs,” and Cassatt, Degas, and later more of everything, including a Monet and, surprisingly, a pair of Gustave Moreaus, mythological scenes – Jason and Medea – done in gold and gauze, perhaps out of place among the Sisleys:

I realise that I am trying to police Charles’s taste.  I am worried by gold and by Moreau.

The Moreaus actually made me warm to Ephrussi, and they eventually work on de Waal, too. 

Charles buys what he likes.  He is not buying art for the sake of coherence, or to fill gaps in his collection.  (87)

So, also, somewhere among these paintings in Ephrussi’s study is a first-rate collection of Japanese lacquer boxes, a yellow armchair, and the netsuke in their vitrine, the case an object almost as interesting to the potter as the sculptures:

This is what I realize now I failed to understand about vitrines.  I spent the first twenty years of my life as a potter earnestly trying to get objects out of the glass cases in which my pots were often placed in galleries and museums.  They die, I’d say, behind glass, held in that airlock…

But the vitrine – as opposed to the museum’s case – is for opening.  And that opening glass door and the moment of looking, then choosing, and then reaching in and then picking up is a moment of seduction, an encounter between a hand and an object that is electric.  (66)

Incidentally, de Waal’s book must set some sort of record for the use of the word “vitrine.”

De Waal is foreshadowing the netsukes’ eventual move to Vienna as a wedding gift, where they find themselves in, if possible, more rarefied surroundings, making them a problem to be solved (brilliantly, it turns out, by the new bride).  The objects are no longer handled by Charles’s artist friends but by the Ephrussi children who are allowed to play with them and arrange them while mama dresses.  This kind of handling is also foreshadowing.  It turns out actual life uses foreshadowing and other literary devices.

Charles Ephrussi’s Paris mansion is gone, but in Vienna, de Waal is able to tour the palace, to figure out the layout and distribute the furniture and art. Then the people – how do they use it? 

All I can see is marble: there is lots of marble.  This doesn’t say enough.  Everything is marble…  Everything in this place, I realise, is very shiny…  This is aggressively golden, aggressively lacking in purchase.  What was Ignace trying to do?  Smother his critics?  (124-5)

But then de Waal discovers, in the ballroom, ceiling paintings from the Book of Esther, “the only Jewish painting on the whole of the Ringstrasse,” “a long-lasting, covert way of staking a claim for who you are,” and he finds his way into this house and this family, his family.

*  This passage is not written by de Waal but is from a letter by Jules Laforgue, who for a time worked as Ephrussi’s enthusiastic assistant.  Jules Laforgue, one of the great French poets, inventor of vers libre, that Laforgue, yes.

There must be a trace of their hands somewhere - on Edmund de Waal's The Hare with the Amber Eyes

Edmund de Waal is a high-end ceramicist and a descendant of the Ephrussi family, Jewish merchants and financiers who were never as rich as the Rothchilds, but were rich enough to marry Rothschilds.  De Waal wanted to trace the origin of a collection of netsuke he inherited, and the story led him to write an unusual memoir of his unusual family, The Hare with the Amber Eyes (2010).

I know that these netsuke were bought in Paris in the 1870s by a cousin of my great-grandfather called Charles Ephrussi.  I know that he gave them as a wedding-present to my great-grandfather Viktor von Ephrussi in Vienna at the turn of the century.  I know the story of Anna, my great-grandmother’s maid, very well.  And I know that they came with Iggie to Tokyo, of course, and were part of his life with Jiro.

Paris, Vienna, Tokyo, London.

At times, it seemed as if it were written for me.  The Paris of de Waal’s book, of Charles Ephrussi, is that of Marcel Proust, who borrowed some fragments of Ephrussi for Charles Swann (“Charles has become so real to me that I fear losing him into Proust studies,” 105).  Proust makes regular guest appearances, along with more writers (Huysmans, Goncourt, Zola) and every major Impressionist painter.  I had come across references to Charles Ephrussi many times while reading about Impressionist art.  How pleasant to be able to assemble the pieces.

Charles Ephrussi’s name appears not just in art journals and society pages, but in anti-Semitic writing:

The Ephrussi family comes up again and again.  It is as if a vitrine is opened and each of them is taken out and held up for abuse.  I knew in a very general way about French anti-Semitism, but it is this particularity that makes me feel nauseated.  (92)

And when the story moves to Vienna, well, we know and de Waal know what is coming.  De Waal never quite takes to Vienna, never can fathom the scale of his family’s life, their wealth or the size of the palace in which they live, or the catastrophes that crash into them, first a world war and then worse, much worse.  De Waal has a variety of rhetorical strategies at hand – social history, archival digging, personal story-telling.  For World War I, and again for the Nazi annexation of Austria, de Waal almost turns the book into a chronicle.  What would commentary add?

On 9th April Adolf Hitler returns to Vienna…

On 23rd April a boycott of Jewish shops is announced.  That same day the Gestapo arrive at Palais Ephrussi.  (247)

We know the netsuke escape the Nazis.  They return, by coincidence to Japan.  Civilization returns to the world, art returns.  The memoir is an artist’s firm defense of the value of art.

Christopher Benfey’s A Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (2003), a history of artistic and intellectual exchanges between Boston and Japan, would make an outstanding companion to de Waal’s book.  It is possible that I am the only book blogger who has written about it.

Side note to Jenny at Shelf Love: the answer to your “why” questions is “W. G. Sebald.”  Search for “quiet.”

Title quotation from p. 47.