“Let it go. Let it lie. Stop looking and stop picking things up,” wrote the ceramicist Edmund de Waal at the end of his family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes. “Just go home and leave these stories be. But leaving be is hard.”
Ten years on from that beguiling book, which sold more than 1.5 million copies and was translated into 30 languages, de Waal is unable to leave these stories be. He was always adamant that there would be no sequel. He couldn’t keep living in the shadow of that book, he said. But at 56, he has changed his mind: “Why does being told to move on make me so angry?” he asks.
Letters to Camondo is not technically a sequel but a slimmer, more lyrical companion piece to the earlier work. It takes us back to fin-de-siècle Paris to reconstruct the gilded life of a wealthy, cosmopolitan Jewish family, the Camondos, who moved in the same elite circles as de Waal’s ancestors, the Ephrussis.
It was Charles Ephrussi, one of the models for Marcel Proust’s Charles Swann and a cousin of de Waal’s great-grandfather, who first purchased the Japanese netsuke miniatures that played the starring role in Hare. He reappears here as a neighbour of Count Moïse de Camondo, the scion of a banking family who had come to Paris from Constantinople by way of Venice. Like the Ephrussis, they took “a bet on assimilation” and filled their mansion with one of the greatest collections of French 18th century art. However, their vast riches did nothing to protect them from the horrors of the 20th century.
The Camondos lived ten houses up the hill on the elegant Rue de Monceau and the two families were fixtures of belle époque society, at the centre of a constellation of writers and artists that included the Goncourt brothers, Proust and Renoir. The principal link between the two dynasties was Charles’s married lover, Louise Cahen d’Anvers, a golden-haired “alpha muse” who commissioned Renoir to paint her daughters. The eldest, Irène, married the older Count Moïse, giving him two children, Nissim and Beatrice, before fleeing to marry a different count. “Rather gallingly he is practically the same age as you,” de Waal says, addressing Moïse.
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Written in short, elliptical letters to the Count, this book is very different in format to The Hare. It’s a piece of visual storytelling, interspersed with tasteful photographs of the Count’s opulent home, filled with lavish candelabra, Chinese porcelain, Persian carpets and a mechanical table, as well as extraordinary art, all of which was to be inherited by Moïse’s beloved son, Nissim. When Nissim was killed in the First World War, it became a memorial and upon his death in 1935, Moïse bequeathed it to the French nation. After the Nazi invasion, the mansion remained beautifully intact, while Moïse’s daughter and his grandchildren perished in concentration camps.
Letters to Camondo is a melancholy book about rootlessness and restitution, about how objects carry the past into the present or, as de Waal writes, “belong in all tenses”. Visually, it resembles an exhibition catalogue, which is no coincidence. It appears to have been written to precede the show de Waal has curated for the Musée Nissim de Camondo, due to open later this year. It also bears the strong influence of WG Sebald, who embedded photographs into texts, and covered similar themes: memory, decay, Jewishness, the traumatic aftermath of two world wars.
De Waal is one of a generation of Sebald-worshipping writers who is a little too prone to wafty poetic musings (“Holding the story, your story, Monsieur, Ariadne’s thread”). He uses words like “deliquesce”, “petrichor”, “sinuous” — clichés of a rather precious kind of literary narrative non-fiction. He rattles through the political events of the 20th century, almost listing them. Because he doesn’t have as much material or personal connection with the Camondo story, it becomes a reverie, buried in abstractions.
In both books de Waal seems to be caught in a dilemma. He doesn’t want to seem too infatuated with these gilded objects and so he turns to family tragedies to justify his curiosity. But then he’s embarrassed about trespassing into other people’s emotional lives. As he writes in The Hare: “I have the slightly clammy feeling of biography, the sense of living on the edges of people’s lives without their permission.”
In the first book, de Waal’s ambivalence felt natural because such an inheritance — both materially and emotionally — “will complicate your life”. Here, it’s more problematic. Letters to Camondo has the plaintive, slightly tortured feel of a lockdown work. In his other books, de Waal is forever hopping on planes on the trail of some thread, like “some sad-art historical gumshoe”. Here, he calls himself a “spectator of absence” and makes self-deprecating references to his own “bourgeois Englishness”.
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While he never mentions Brexit, a feeling of being cut off from Europe looms over the book. He writes of helping his 91-year-old father reclaim Austrian citizenship. “I think you can love more than one place,” he concludes. “I think you can move across a border and still be a whole person.” For all its frustrations, there is beauty and tenderness in de Waal’s endeavour. I was deeply moved by his fear of being stripped of his Europeanness, of being marooned from his past. He has found a way to meditate on exile, migration and polarisation that feels painfully relevant.
Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal
Chatto £14.99 pp182
