Edmund de Waal has now authored or edited six books (and he's at work on a seventh, a novel), all the while conducting an internationally acclaimed career as a potter and installation artist. Most of the titles in the de Waal bibliography serve his guild in one way or another, whether by relating the history of ceramics to the museum-going crowd; by explaining design principles for novice practitioners; or by attempting to expand the theoretical and practical horizons of British ceramics—particularly through his controversial (in one reviewer's estimation, "patricidal") takedown of the so-called "father of British studio art," Bernard Leach. For readers who wish to get to know the more studious de Waal, I recommend his insightful volume for the Thames and Hudson "world of art" series, 20th-Century Ceramics (2003), and his gorgeous pictorial guide to the "schools and styles" of ceramics ancient and modern, The Pot Book (2011). De Waal's name is likely familiar to you, however, thanks to his initial foray into memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), which traced a "hidden" Jewish family history through the provenance of his collection of miniature Japanese sculptures called netsuke. The Hare received rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, became a surprise bestseller, and garnered multiple literary awards. Pulpy paperback copies now await patrons in museum gift shops throughout the Anglo-American world.
A number of de Waal enthusiasts, including the reviewer, have eagerly hoped for a follow-up book that would set The Hare loose in de Waal's own studio, marrying the memoirist's voice and narrative technique with the potter's deep and intimate knowledge of clay. De Waal's new book, The White Road, aims in this direction, chronicling the history of his primary medium, porcelain, through an autobiographical lens, albeit a rather less polished one than that employed in The Hare. Here again, travelogue mixes with biography and offhand art criticism, de Waal interspersing his field notes from a globetrotting "pilgrimage of sorts" to landmarks of porcelain's past with embroidered narratives of artisans, alchemists, and overlords who suffer "la maladie de porcelaine, die Porzellankrankheit" (words de Waal borrows from Augustus II, the early 18th-century Elector of Saxony, King of Poland, Grand Duke of Lithuania and porcelain fanatic).
But if de Waal has cast The White Road with The Hare's model in view, the work does not simply rehearse the old formula. Stylistically, de Waal seeks to create a greater sense of immediacy through a more vernacular diction and relaxed attitude about syntax than we saw in The Hare. Meanwhile, the architecture of the book, which juggles multiple plotlines in far-flung settings (reaching from early modern China to the author's present in London), is busier, at times deliberately unsettled. Structurally, The Hare resembles a European row house, intricate but orderly; The White Road recalls Frank Gehry. Both style and structure seem to me calculated risks on the part of a practiced author. Unfortunately, neither strategy enhances our understanding of de Waal the potter or porcelain's fascinating history.
Regarding style, consider first the opening paragraph of The Hare's initial chapter:
One sunny April day I set out to find Charles. Rue de Monceau is a long Parisian street bisected by the grand boulevard Malesherbes that charges off toward the boulevard Pereire. It is a hill of golden-stone houses, a series of hotels playing discreetly on neoclassical themes, each a minor Florentine palace with heavily rusticated ground floors and an array of heads, carytids and cartouches. Number 81 rue de Monceau, the Hôtel Ephrussi, where my netsuke start their journey, is near the top of the hill. I pass the headquarters of Christian Lacroix and then, next door, there it is. It is now, rather crushingly, an office for medical insurance.
The light Nabokovian flavor of this prose may not please all palates, I recognize (Michael Dirda pronounced it "lyrical artiness"). But even so, the care that de Waal has taken in constructing this paragraph warrants our respect. Notice, too, how the paragraph has been organized to achieve an effect: de Waal builds our expectation that this quest has a grand termination—and then brings us back down to earth, albeit with room for bemused laughter, in the final sentence. The signs of thoughtful composition and vigilant editing are many.
Its counterpart in the first chapter of The White Road reads thus:
It looks as if it has been busy for hours. It is six a.m. and stalls are up, watermelons arranged in pyramids, the bicycle-repair man sitting next to his kit. The roads are eddying with bicycles and knots of people. The carp seller with a polystyrene crate on the back of his scooter cuts in front of us, turns and swears extravagantly. We are going north out of the dusty city towards the hills, past alleyways squeezed between great high brick walls, factories with open windows, rubbish. The day is grey and promises deep, grey heat.
One can see resemblances, of course, with the paragraph above, such as in the narrator's eye for detail. But the stylistic difference is immediately evident with the bland and grammatically untethered first word, "it," which is disappointingly repeated twice in the space of ten words. We can be sure based on the evidence of his earlier writing that the author knows what he is doing, and we easily discern his purpose: to provide the impression that our pilgrim is rattling off his thoughts and observations as they arise amid the commotion. There's no need—or no time—to finesse or elevate the language. I will not call such writing lazy, since it bespeaks a design; I simply find it dull.
The paragraph, furthermore, fails to assign a larger significance to the string of fairly ordinary images that our narrator observes on the streets of Jindezhen, the ancient Chinese capital of porcelain; and, indeed, when a few paragraphs later de Waal reaches his destination—a hillside of ostraca—we realize that these details don't bear any greater meaning. Nor does his passing comment (given its own paragraph on the first page), "When did farmers get rich in China?" Again, the inclusion of such remarks is not without purpose: they seek to render experience immediately, rather than in a more polished prose that suggests subsequent rumination. To be fair, the whole book is not like this, and at other moments the strategy of immediacy produces its own brand of brusque beauties (often resulting from the use of asyndeton, or the omission of conjunctions). De Waal has made a writing career, as noted above, describing ceramics, and accordingly his lyricism is especially high-pitched when he's faced with a pot. In these moments, his syntax often becomes mimetic, pressed and pulled to convey the shape of the object under scrutiny. But these passages are surrounded, and thus diminished, by far too many desultory ones, which, moreover, add unnecessary tonnage to a volume that even fellow diehards—for porcelain, for de Waal, for creative nonfiction—are likely to find bulky (nearly four hundred pages in the US edition).
Regarding the book's architecture, let's begin with the table of contents. The White Road contains a prologue, 65 chapters (arranged into five parts), and a coda (which is also listed as chapter 66). The sections are named for the principal setting(s) to which de Waal travels directly or imaginatively: to cite a few examples, "Jingdezhen-Venice-Dublin" (the prologue), "London-Jingdezhen-Dachau" (part five), "London-New York-London" (the coda). Ultimately, the circuitous and increasingly congested itinerary detracts from our full engagement with the "three white hills"—in China, Germany, and England—that the prologue puts at the purported center of the narrative. Once more, we may detect a plan in these haphazard arrangements. Chaos is, in fact, the point. The book's disorganization corresponds to de Waal's hectic research process (which, as we are repeatedly reminded, is carried on amid his preparations for major exhibitions of his pottery in Cambridge and New York) and his ever-evolving sense of where porcelain's history really lies. All this shuttling, however, may induce a degree of jet lag in the reader.
As noted above, de Waal mixes his field notes of each pilgrimage site with the stories of the historical personages who made each spot holy ground "of sorts." In this way, the book comes to resemble a multi-plot novel, particularly the anarchic early works of Dickens (such as Pickwick Papers) when the novelist began publishing his stories serially without a fully laid-out plan. Some chapters contain three or four thematically related strands, while at other times de Waal follows a particular character or cohort for several chapters successively. The second chapter, for example, begins with personal anecdotes about de Waal's childhood, transitions into a somewhat scientific explanation of porcelain's ingredients, kaolin and pentuse, and then ends with an account of how the author climbs a hill, visits a shed, and steals a brick of pentuse, which he later accidently leaves in a bar.
In the third and fourth parts, de Waal the character goes missing for long stretches, the author immersed in the tales of the inventors and businessmen, such as Josiah Wedgewood, who founded the English porcelain industry. At such moments (and there are others, particularly in his records of the Germans), The White Road becomes historical fiction, de Waal assiduously fabricating the inner lives of his chief historical figures based on their letters and journals. The mode of narration in these sections also fluctuates—sometimes successfully, sometimes awkwardly—from a conventional third-person perspective to an unusual historical second person. Narrating an 18th-century character's ramble through Cornwall, for example, de Waal writes, "If the mist comes down to Dartmoor, who knows what will happen to you. There are unfenced mine workings all over the country, sheer drops that take you, your pack and your horse." I will leave it to you, reader, to decide whether this technique works; my point is simply that such narration, once again, is of a piece with The White Road's other efforts to bring us close, if not inside, the experiences it relates.
In "Omission," a recent piece for The New Yorker, John McPhee makes the following remarks about creative nonfiction:
What is creative about nonfiction? … The creativity lies in what you choose to write about, how you go about doing it, the arrangement through which you present things, the skill and the touch with which you describe people and succeed in developing them as characters, the rhythms of your prose, the integrity of the composition, the anatomy of the piece (does it get up and walk around on its own?), the extent to which you see and tell the story that exists in your material, and so forth. Creative nonfiction is not making something up but making the most of what you have.
In The White Road, de Waal strives to be creative in the McPheean manner; as we've seen, there's method in the book's mad arrangement, nonchalant prose, and unstable mode of narration. The technique bears an organic relation to its content: porcelain's past being in de Waal's account a great history of experimentation. McPhee's larger argument within "Omission," however, is that the writer's felicity ultimately hinges on "what you leave out … . Writing is selection." And McPhee speaks reverently, in turn, of a ritual he learned during his formative tenure at Time. Articles were returned from the final page designers with instructions for "greening," the practice of scratching out a specified number of lines using a green pencil. "Groan as much as you liked," McPhee writes, "you had to green nearly all your pieces, and greening was a craft in itself—studying your completed and approved product, your 'finished' piece, to see what could be left out." You see where this is going: as he drafts his next work of creative nonfiction, I'm hoping that de Waal practices the art of the green pencil.
Richard Gibson is associate professor of English at Wheaton College. He is the author of Forgiveness in Victorian Literature: Grammar, Narrative, and Community (Bloomsbury).
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