ALL FIRED UP
An author with a passion for ceramics recalls a winter of fevered creativity, throwing pots while crafting her vivid debut novel
It began with a small splintering sound, then a crash, and by the time I’d stood up from my pottery wheel, I was surrounded only by dust and shards of clay. The shelves had collapsed, taking with them more than £1,000 worth of stock that I had spent months making.
‘These shelves will withstand an earthquake,’ my husband had said the week before, with titanic confidence, as he hammered in the final nail. Now he was crouched over, holding back the tears, while sweeping up fragments of mugs.
The next day, I sat at my laptop and undertook a second quiet destruction: I deleted three weeks of writing without giving it a second thought. But I wrote through that winter, until I had a first draft and a title, The Doll Factory. I surrounded myself with things I’d made: a mug or a lamp or a planter. They encouraged and goaded me. You’ve made a mug, so why can’t you write a book? You’ve sold a mug, why can’t you publish a book?
My chosen vocation is a dual one: it is to make objects and write stories. They fit together neatly; in one, the creation is physical, in the other it is mental. To produce an object or publish a novel is to acknowledge that your work might outlive you, remaining static while you age, existing beyond your control. But there is a certain pleasure in that too, the idea of creating permanent things to be left behind and cherished by others.
I still remember the first pot I ever sold, two years ago. I had a stall at a market in Stratford, some shiny brand stickers, and about 30 pots that I’d lugged there on the Tube. I wrapped up the little speckled planter in tissue paper and swapped it for coins. It felt so glorious that I was sure there’d been a mistake. A year and a half later, I held a proof copy of my novel for the first time. I flicked through the pages and tried not to cry. Here, in my hand, was
a physical manifestation of all those months I spent hunched over my laptop. My words were an object. I have always been fascinated by the meaning that collectors find in objects, and I suppose it is unsurprising that my first novel explores these themes. Set in 1850s London, it introduces Silas, a collector of curiosities who becomes obsessed with Iris, a beautiful artist’s model. He sees her as a possession. He wants to own, to preserve, to catalogue, to display. Silas’ dream of opening his own museum is dwarfed by the Great Exhibition, a vast glass temporary gallery that opened in Hyde Park in 1851. Filled with items ranging from the obscure to the beautiful, it featured a hat made of mutton fat, taxidermy frogs being shaved and the Koh-i-Noor diamond, which was lit by a dozen little gas jets. Queen Victoria wrote in her diary that there was ‘every conceivable invention’. How, Silas wonders, can his own collection compare to something on this scale?
Meanwhile, in Fitzrovia, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painted tiny mice and ivory fans into their clutter-filled canvases, each item telling a story. They painted women, such as my character Iris, caging them in gilt frames. With this crowded world forming the backdrop, I started to write The Doll Factory. The winter the shelves broke, I made over a thousand new pots and wrote in a frenzy. As the rows of finished ceramics grew, so too did I fill my pages with little objects signifying freedom, entrapment and ambition. An oily-feathered sparrow. The brick chimney of a pottery factory in Stoke. A pair of false teeth made of walrus tusks. At the centre of it all is Iris, a young woman who paints the feet and faces of china dolls, who is herself painted into beautiful canvases, and often objectified in more or less malign ways. But through it all, she strives to be free and to unleash her own creativity.
I like the idea that, a thousand years from now, a fractured piece of pottery will be discovered in a garden in Limehouse. Nobody will know anything about how I spent that winter in the cold of my shed, moving between my laptop and the potter’s wheel, throwing object after object while trying to write a book.
And nobody will know that, as my husband scrabbled on the floor and clutched broken mug handles and chipped salt cellars, I started to laugh. Here I was, surveying the ruins of my hard work, and there was nothing I could do about it. ‘They’re only things, after all,’ I said to him, ‘not worth getting upset about.’ And we swept it all into the bin.
‘The Doll Factory’ by Elizabeth Macneal (£12.99, Picador) is out now.