The ceramicist Edmund de Waal recently installed a series of his elegant, accessible pots high up in the dome of the porcelain gallery at the V&A. He had to make sure they made "lyrical sense", that they talked to each other, had the right "space around them". That was how he spent his days.
At night, he worked on his remarkable family memoir, The Hare With the Amber Eyes, which is also the story of a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke - tiny, thumb-sized, wood, bone and ivory carvings - left to him by his great-uncle Iggie. The book is beautifully, poetically written, not to be missed (to get a sense of it, read his essay in Saturday's Guardian Review), and listening to him talk about it at the Hay festival today, I began to think how unfair it is that somebody who excels as an artist also manages to be such an unusually able literary stylist too.
Who are other examples? Off the top of my head, I can think of Charles Rosen, a concert pianist, who writes so very well about music; and, a slightly different case, Simon Callow, a fine actor, who also turns out extremely accomplished books and book reviews.
De Waal was reticent and careful in his choice of words, but he has a dynamic story to tell. The collection of netsuke was bought in Paris by a distant relation of his, Charles Ephrussi, who happened to be a friend of Renoir and Degas, and the model for Charles Swann (Proust was once his secretary). Later, they were housed in the Palais Ephrussi in Vienna, a fairytale palace owned by de Waal's great-grandfather - the Ephrussis were one of the richest families in the world, with many ties to the Rothschilds - until the Gestapo requisitioned its contents, and the carvings had to be smuggled out, one by one, in the pockets of his great-grandmother's maid.
He drew on Joseph Roth, Proust and WG Sebald in writing the book, he told the audience (he did a lot of walking around European cities), and was deliberate in describing The Hare With the Amber Eyes as not just another study of Mitteleuropa grandeur and good connections, but a study of memory and what survives, about what gets said in families, what doesn't and so is lost or forgotten - and an exploration of the beautiful and complicated stories that can accrue around objects.
He is clearly smitten by the netsuke (which were originally toggles for kimonos). They can be of animals - an octopus, say, or dog, or hare - or people (a cross child, a sleeping monk). They can be "mesmering encapsulations of people's characters", he said, and in different ways, his collection is made up of "objects of enormous power". As a potter he is "an advocate for things to be held and touched", and so perhaps has a particular affinity for these minuscule wonders. I can't imagine how his powerful story could be better told. Talented swine.
