De Waal’s beautiful, bloodless world

An imaginary correspondence with a Jewish fin de siècle collector is too refined for its own good

LETTERS TO CAMONDO by Edmund de Waal

192pp, Chatto and Windus, T £12.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £14.99, ebook £9.99

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In all its shades of meaning, “precious” is the adjective that inevitably attaches itself to the work of Edmund de Waal. His slender, elegant ceramics are artefacts of exquisite refinement, as preciously delicate as they are preciously valued, designed for contemplation behind vitrines rather than any practical use. Look, but please don’t touch, they insist; breathe deeply, enter a realm of Zen purity and be inspired to compose a haiku: or, as W S Gilbert’s Reginald Bunthorne enjoins his precious lady votaries, “Cling passionately to one another and think of faint lilies.”

De Waal’s writing radiates a similarly precious aura. It is finely honed, of that there can be no argument. Throughout both his family memoir The Hare With Amber Eyes and The White Road, a monograph on porcelain, the prose is immaculately polished. His intelligence and scholarship are fastidious, his sensibility quivers like the wings of a hummingbird.

Following in the wake of W G Sebald’s enigmatic reveries, his texts are interspersed with uncaptioned photographs freighted with melancholy implications of loss and isolation; he carries the burden of a cosmopolitan European culture that made and valued great beauty, only to witness it incinerated in the holocaust of war and anti-Semitism. His quarter of Jewish ancestry haunts him – what is his inheritance, where does he belong?

Then it all gets so bloodless and sapless and self-absorbed that you end up wanting to punch something. Where is there any room in his hermetic vision of the world for the demotic, the commonplace, the ironic, the funny, the silly, the gory, the muddy, the messy, the dirty, the rude? As aesthetic fantasy, it may be ravishing. But it’s precious little to do with real life.

So de Waal’s new book Letters To Camondo is thus both enchanting and infuriating. A small and attractively produced volume, it consists of 58 brief letters addressed by the author to the ghost of Comte Moise de Camondo, a banker of Ottoman descent whose family emigrated to Paris from Constantinople in 1869, shortly before the collapse of the Second Empire. Immensely wealthy, the Camondos settled in a new enclave of palatial townhouses around the Parc Monceau, also inhabited by de Waal’s forebears the Ephrussi (the subject of The Hare With Amber Eyes), the Rothschilds and other Jewish dignitaries such as Proust’s doctor father. In the belle époque, Moise Camondo became a highly respected figure in French society, into which he considered himself fully assimilated. At his death in 1936, he bequeathed his house and its contents to the nation: preserved in almost unaltered state, they became part of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and can still be visited today.

Through his musing séance with Camondo, De Waal reviews the dynasty’s history and its tangential relation via marriage to his own family, as well as reflecting on Camondo’s taste as a collector. There isn’t much drama in this, at least until we reach the sickeningly familiar catastrophe that befalls the Camondo clan during the Nazi occupation: Drancy, the vélodrome and the extermination camps being the ultimate destinations for almost all of them (and nobody could remain unmoved at the reproduction here of the gruesomely terse record cards of their arrests and deportations).

Moise Camondo died before this horror kicked in, but he lived through the Dreyfus affair and the subsequent surge in French antiSemitism. Unfortunately for the reader, he appears to have had nothing to say about it, or indeed about anything much else. Although we are told that he left the most meticulous and comprehensive archive containing (or so de Waal implies) carbon copies of all his correspondence, we are seldom given any access to his own words.

He demolishes his father’s hôtel particulier and replaces it with a more lavish imitation of the Petit Trianon; his wife leaves him and marries someone else, but such life-changing events are merely reported. Even when his beloved son and heir Nissim is killed in the First World War, we only hear his response in the bleakly telegrammic “This catastrophe has broken me and changed all my plans.”

Keeping Camondo’s direct voice out of the picture seems to be de Waal’s deliberate intention, allowing him to commune with the man by wandering through the interiors of the house he created and musing with his ghost about his choices. What was his motivation? The answer, de Waal concludes, is that he wanted “to make a perfect stage set for conversation, enlightenment, for that moment when French culture was at its most refined, most searching.”

That moment is the 18th-century ancien régime, when baroque gives way to rococo and everything is “multiple, mirrored, paired, reflected, repeated” in porcelain chinoisierie, candelabra and marquetry. As De Waal wanders from room to room, his eye lingering on gilded Sevrès plates and the subtle

g ‘Multiple, mirrored, paired, reflected’: the Salon des Huet in the Musée Nissim de Camondo craftsmanship of ébenistes, he summons up quotations from Camondo’s neighbour Marcel Proust, reflections of Walter Benjamin on the psychology of collecting (“the struggle against dispersion” and the “confusion” in which “the things of the world are found”) and fragments of family history that link the Camondos to the Ephrussi and hence the de Waals.

The narrative has a point of climax during the Nazi occupation, but it is a nemesis that one has long anticipated, and in a strange way it only contributes to the pall of dusty elegiac sadness that wafts through de Waal’s lucubration. Lacrimae rerum (“the tears of things”), a phrase from Virgil’s Aeneid, is the book’s epigraph, and it sets the tone throughout. Very gently, I found myself drifting off as I read on.

There is one moment, however, that had me reaching for the smelling salts. It comes about a third of the way through the book, when de Waal makes reference to “a WTF heiress from Baltimore.” WTF – in this exalted and serene atmosphere? Could it stand for what I think it stands for? I checked on Google’s index of acronyms and there is no plausible alternative. World Trade Fair, Women’s Trichological Foundation, surely not? It would therefore appear that precious Edmund de Waal is capable of vulgarity – and making the glimmer of a joke.