Archives are addictive. Once you start, you can’t stop. One box becomes 20. You chase paper, pick up threads, turn back at dead ends. You are driven all the while by the promise of discovery and the thrill of the “gotcha” moment. Edmund de Waal’s Letters to Camondo opens with the author in an archive. He is in Paris on a wet day in spring, up in the old servants’ rooms at 63 rue de Monceau, now the Musée Nissim de Camondo.
We meet him in a sea of papers. “I find inventories, carbon copies, auction catalogues, receipts and invoices, memoranda, wills and testaments, telegrams, newspaper announcements, cards of condolence, seating plans and menus, scores, opera programmes, sketches, bank records, hunting notebooks, photographs of artworks, photographs of the family, photographs of gravestones, account books, notebooks of acquisitions.” Anyone who has spent any part of lockdown sorting through family flotsam will nod in recognition. What do you do with it all? What story do you tell? “I want to ask,” writes de Waal in an imagined letter to a hoarder, “if you ever threw anything away.”
De Waal, who is a potter first, an author second, writes wonderfully about the tactility of paper, about weight and texture and scent. Letters to Camondo is a companion piece to his bestselling history The Hare with Amber Eyes which told the story of the 264 Japanese netsuke (decorative toggles carved in ivory or wood and worn on the belt of a kimono) bought by Charles Ephrussi, a cousin of de Waal’s great-grandfather, and their extraordinary survival hidden for years in a mattress in occupied Vienna.
The Hare was a rare beast: a scholarly page-turner, richly written yet with hardly a wasted word. De Waal’s second book, The White Road, a history of porcelain, was less satisfactory. Structured as an anguished quest, it hadn’t the heart of The Hare. De Waal can be precious: porcelain paragraphs — handle with care.
Having said which, de Waal on an off day is still streets more interesting than many writers. Perhaps it’s the discipline of the potter’s wheel or the habit of turning cups this way and that in the light but, pots or prose, de Waal has a way of looking at the world that surprises, delights and upends expectations.
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Count Moïse de Camondo was a friend and neighbour of Ephrussi. They moved in the same belle époque circles; their families arrived in Paris in 1869, the Ephrussi from Odessa, the Camondo from Constantinople; they were very rich and they shared the acquisitive itch. Moïse’s father, Nissim de Camondo, bought Dutch paintings, Chinese porcelain and Flemish tapestries. He built a spectacular hôtel on the edge of the Parc Monceau. “Everything in this house is capitalised, underlined, illuminated,” de Waal writes.
Moïse Camondo pulled down his father’s house and commissioned another. Very French, very effacing, modelled on the Petit Trianon. He became a thoroughgoing Paris man. He donated gifts of art and artefacts to the state. He was a model citoyen. He was Jewish.
The book is written as a series of letters to Camondo. De Waal meanders and wonders, muses and questions. There are lots of ideas in this little book. It is a book about taste, display and ostentation; about showing off or shutting out; about polish and veneer; about belonging and possession; assimilation and separation; loss and restitution; gilt and dust; silent shrines and rooms that still live.
The book is about leaving in three different senses. Leaving as departure, exile or death. Leaving as in leaving behind, leaving what cannot be carried. And leaving as in inheritance or passing on: leaving your house to your children, your collection to the nation, leaving instructions in your will. The book’s epigraph is “lacrimae rerum”. In The Hare de Waal tells us that these were words his great-grandfather Viktor Ephrussi used to repeat to his grandsons. They were said by Aeneas on his return to Carthage. Standing before walls painted with scenes of Troy, confronted by what he has lost, Aeneas weeps. “Sunt lacrimae rerum” — these are the tears of things.
This is also, inevitably, a book about antisemitism. There is a sense, as there was in The Hare, of the compression of time, of sands running out. As the letters approach 1940, de Waal’s sentences become shorter and plainer. As he recounts what happens to the Camondo family, to French Jews, his spareness lets events speak. Day by day he follows the round-up, the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the internment camp at Drancy, the deportations to Auschwitz, Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen. These passages act as a reminder that you don’t have to tell people that what happened was awful or devastating or evil, you just have to tell them what happened. Between June 22, 1942 and July 31, 1944, 67,400 Jews were deported from Drancy.
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Letters to Camondo is the opposite of a page-turner. It’s a page-pauser. It is subtle and thoughtful and nuanced and quiet. It is demanding but rewarding. It will make you think differently about trunks in the attic and it will make you read old letters with new eyes.
Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal, Chatto & Windus, 182pp; £14.99
