The White Road Read online

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  For Sue, always

  What is this thing of whiteness?

  Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  Prologue

  Jingdezhen – Venice – Dublin

  i

  I’m in China. I’m trying to cross a road in Jingdezhen in Jiangxi Province, the city of porcelain, the fabled Ur where it all starts; kiln chimneys burning all night, the city ‘like one furnace with many vent holes of flame’, factories for the imperial household, the place in the fold of the mountains where my compass points. This is the place where emperors sent emissaries with orders for impossibly deep porcelain basins for carp for a palace, stem cups for rituals, tens of thousands of bowls for their households. It is the place of merchants with orders for platters for feasts for Timurind princes, for dishes for ablutions for sheikhs, for dinner services for queens. It is the city of secrets, a millennium of skills, fifty generations of digging and cleaning and mixing white earth, making and knowing porcelain, full of workshops, potters, glazers and decorators, merchants, hustlers and spies.

  It is eleven at night and humid and the city is neon and traffic like Manhattan and a light summer rain is falling and I’m not completely sure which way my lodgings are.

  I’ve written them down as Next to Porcelain Factory #2 and I thought I could pronounce this in Mandarin, but I’m met with busy incomprehension, and a man is trying to sell me turtles, jaws bound in twine. I don’t want his turtles, but he knows I do.

  It feels absurd to be this far from home. There is televised mah-jong at high volume in the parlours with their glitter balls like a 1970s disco. The noodle shops are still full. A child is crying, holding her father’s finger as they walk along. Everyone has an umbrella but me. A barrow of porcelain models of cats is wheeled past under a plastic tarp, scooters weaving round it. Ridiculously someone is playing Tosca very loudly. I know one person in the whole city.

  I haven’t got a map. I do have my stapled photocopy of the letters of Père d’Entrecolles, a French Jesuit priest who lived here 300 years ago and who wrote vivid descriptions of how porcelain was made. I’ve brought them because I thought he could be my guide. At this moment this seems a slightly affected move, and not clever at all.

  Pages from Père d’Entrecolles’ letters on Chinese porcelain, 1722

  I’m sure I’m going to die crossing this road.

  But I know why I’m here, so that even if I’m not sure which way to go, I’ll go confidently. It is really quite simple, a pilgrimage of sorts – a chance to walk up the mountain where the white earth comes from. In a few years I am turning fifty. I’ve been making white pots for a good forty years, porcelain for twenty-five. I have a plan to get to three places where porcelain was invented, or reinvented, three white hills in China and Germany and England. Each of them matters to me. I have known of them for decades from pots and books and stories but I have never visited. I need to get to these places, need to see how porcelain looks under different skies, how white changes with the weather. Other things in the world are white but, for me, porcelain comes first.

  This journey is a paying of dues to those that have gone before.

  ii

  A paying of dues sounds appallingly pious but it isn’t.

  It is a lived truth, a bit declamatory, but a truth none the less. If you make things out of porcelain clay, you exist in the present moment. My porcelain comes from Limoges in the Limousin region of France, halfway down on the West. It comes in twenty-kilo plastic bags, each bag with two ten-kilo sausages of perfectly blended porcelain clay, the colour of full-fat milk, with a bloom of green mould. I unwrap one and thump it down on to my wedging bench, pull the twisted wire through a third of the way along, pick up the lump and push it into the bench, raising it and pushing it down in a circular motion, like kneading dough. It gets softer as I do this. I slow down and the clay becomes a sphere.

  My wheel is American and silent and low to the ground, jammed up against the wall in the middle of the slightly chaotic studio. I look at the white brick wall. There are too many people in this small space, two full-time and two part-time assistants to help with glazing and firing and logistics and the deluge of mail from my last book. There is too much noise from the neighbours. I need another studio. Things are going well. I have just been invited to show in New York and I have a dream of walking through an expansive gallery, full of light, walking far away from a piece of my work, turning around and seeing it with new eyes, alone, seeing it as if for the first time. Here I stretch my long arms and touch packing crates. I can get fifteen feet away. On a good day.

  Everyone is being as quiet as they can but, damn it, the concrete floor is noisy. There is an argument outside. I need to make time to be nice to estate agents again as getting a studio is difficult in London. All those useful bits of space where people used to make things or mend them round the backs of house are being developed for apartments. I need to talk to the accountant.

  I sit at my wheel.

  And I throw the ball of clay into the centre, wet my hands and I am making a jar now and pulling the clay up with the knuckle of my right hand on the outside, three fingers of my left tensed inside to support, as the walls grow taller and the volume changes like an exhalation, something being said. I’m in this moment while also being elsewhere. Altogether elsewhere. Because the clay is the present tense and a historical present. I’m here in Tulse Hill, just off the South Circular road in South London, in my studio behind a row of chicken takeaways and a betting shop, sandwiched between some upholsterers and a kitchen-joinery workshop, and as I make this jar I’m in China. Porcelain is China. Porcelain is the journey to China.

  It is the same when picking up this Chinese porcelain bowl from the twelfth century. The bowl was made in Jingdezhen, thrown then moulded with a flower in a deep well, unglazed rim, green-grey with a slightly pooled glaze, some issues as the dealers would say, chips, marks, scuffs. It happens in the present tense and it is, itself, a continuous present of active, dynamic movements, judgements and decisions. It doesn’t feel in the past, and it feels wrong to force it into one just to obey a critical orthodoxy. This bowl was made by someone I didn’t know, in conditions that I can only imagine, for functions that I may have got wrong.

  But the act of reimagining it by picking it up is an act of remaking.

  This can happen because porcelain is so plastic. Pinch a walnut-sized piece between thumb and forefingers until it is as thin as paper, until the whorls of your fingers emerge. Keep pinching. It feels endless. You feel it will get thinner and thinner until it is as thin as gold leaf and lifts into the air. And it feels clean. Your hands feel cleaner after you have used it. It feels white. By which I mean it is full of anticipation, of possibility. It is a material that records every movement of thinking, every change of thought.

  What defines you?

  You are by the sea at the turn of the tide. The sand is washed clean. You make the first mark in
the white sand, that first contact of foot on the crust of sand, not knowing how deep and how definite your step will be. You hesitate over the white paper like Bellini’s scribe with his brush. Eighty hairs from the tail of an otter ends in a breath, a single hair steady in the still air. You are ready to start. The hesitation of a kiss on the nape of the neck like a lover.

  I pull the twisted metal wire under my finished jar, dry my fingers on my apron and pick it up from the wheel, place it with brief satisfaction on a board to my right. Reach for another ball of clay and begin again.

  It is white, returning to white.

  iii

  This moment, this pause, holds a kind of grandeur.

  Porcelain has been made for 1,000 years, traded for 1,000 years. And it has been in Europe for 800 of these. You can trace a few shards earlier. These broken fragments of Chinese pot gleam provocatively alongside the heavy earthenware pitchers they were found with and no one can work out how they got to this Kentish cemetery, this Urbino hillside. There are scatterings of porcelain across medieval Europe in inventories of Jean, duc de Berry, a couple of popes, the will of Piero de’ Medici with his una coppa di porcellana, a cup of porcelain.

  You see a glimpse of white in a list of presents given on an embassy from one princeling to another: a stallion, a jar of porcelain, a tapestry with golden thread. It is so precious, goes the story in medieval Florence, that a porcelain cup prevents poison from working. A beautiful celadon-green bowl is deeply encased in silver and disappears into a chalice. A wine jar is mounted and becomes a ewer for a banquet. You can even see a glimpse in a Florentine altarpiece; one of the kings kneeling stiffly before the Christ child seems to be offering him myrrh in a Chinese porcelain jar, and this homage seems about right for a substance so scant and so arcane, for an object that has come such a long way from the East.

  Porcelain is a synonym for far away. Marco Polo came back from Cathay in 1291 with his silks and brocades, the dried head and feet of a musk deer and his stories, a Divisament dou monde, his Description of the World.

  The stories of Marco Polo are iridescent. Every element glistens and glitters as strangely as lapis lazuli, throwing off shadows and reflections. They are digressive, repetitive, rushed, rehearsed. ‘In this city Kublai Khan built a huge palace of marble and other ornamental stones. Its halls and chambers are all gilded, and the whole building is marvellously embellished and richly adorned.’ Everything is different, marvellously, richly so. Tents are lined with ermine and sable.

  Numbers in Marco Polo are either vast – 5,000 gerfalcons, 2,000 mastiffs, 5,000 astrologers and soothsayers in the city of Khan-balik. Or singular. A great lion that prostrates himself with every appearance of great humility before the khan. A huge pear that weighs ten pounds.

  And colours are drama. Palaces are decorated with dragons and birds and horsemen and various breeds of beasts and scenes of battle. The roof is all ablaze with scarlet and green and blue and yellow and all the colours that are so brilliantly varnished. There is a feast, recounts Marco Polo breathlessly, for the New Year in February:

  and this is how it is observed by the Great Khan and all his subjects. According to custom they all array themselves in white, both male and female, as far as their means allow. And this they do because they regard white costumes as auspicious and benign, and they don it at the New Year so that throughout the year they may enjoy prosperity and happiness. On this day all the rulers, and all the provinces and regions and realms where men hold land or lordship under his sway, bring him costly gifts of gold and silver and pearls and precious stones and abundance of fine white cloth … The barons and knights and all the people make gifts to one another of white things … I can assure you for a fact that on this day the Great Khan receives gifts of more than 100,000 white horses.

  Marco Polo reaches ‘a city called Tinju’. Here,

  they make bowls of porcelain, large and small, of incomparable beauty. They are made nowhere else except in this city, and from here they are exported all over the world. In the city itself they are so plentiful and cheap that for a Venetian groat you might buy three bowls of such beauty that nothing lovelier could be imagined. These dishes are made of a crumbly earth or clay which is dug as though from a mine and stacked in huge mounds and then left for thirty or forty years exposed to wind, rain, and sun. By this time the earth is so refined that dishes made of it are of an azure tint with a very brilliant sheen. You must understand that when a man makes a mound of this earth he does so for his children; the time of maturing is so long that he cannot hope to draw any profit from it himself or to put it to use, but the son who succeeds him will repay the fruit.

  This is the first mention of porcelain in the West.

  It describes porcelain as a material that is beautiful beyond comparison, that is complex to create, that these vessels are innumerable. Porcelain demands attention and dedication. And Marco Polo shrugs, ‘What need to make a long story out of it?’

  And ‘Let us now change the subject.’

  He came back with a small grey-green jar made from this hard, clear white clay unlike anything seen before. And it is in Venice that object and name come together and start this long history of desire for porcelain. The name of this grandest of commodities, this white gold, the cause of the bankruptcy of princes, of Porzellankrankheit – porcelain sickness – comes from eye-stretching Venetian slang, the vulgar wolf-whistle after a pretty girl. Porcellani, or little pigs, is the nickname for cowrie shells, which feel as smooth as porcelain. Cowrie shells lead, obviously, to Venetian lads, to a vulva. Hence the echoing shout.

  iv

  Marco Polo can change the subject but I can’t. Knowing that this jar is somewhere in the Basilica di San Marco in Venice, it is imperative that I go and find it.

  I start out straightforwardly: ‘I’m an English writer and potter and I’m trying to find…’, but letters and emails disappear into nothing. I escalate. ‘The papal nuncio recommended that I contact you…’ Still nothing. A phone rings on a mahogany desk. Perpetual lunch, I assume sourly. Or, a second bottle of wine, or a holiday celebrating some Republican martyr.

  I borrow Matthew, my middle child, and decide to chance it.

  We get to the far left corner of the basilica, the knots and eddies of tourists, handbag salesmen scanning for police, and through the glass doors of the patriarchate where I make my pitch to a monsignor who is charmed and delighted and suggests tonight, when everything is closed? There are, he stretches and sighs, in a pantomime of weariness, far far too many foreigners in the basilica in the day.

  Always take a child, if possible, to Italy.

  And as they are closing up we are taken by the man with the key along a marble corridor in the patriarchate past endless portraits of cardinals and into the shadows, the rolling swell of the marble pavements of the basilica with its dull glimmerings, the red flare of the sanctuary lamps, into the treasury.

  It is small and high-vaulted. Rock crystal and chalcedony, agates, an Egyptian porphyry urn, a Persian turquoise bowl held in a golden vice; all materials that hold light. Chalices. A reliquary of the True Cross with gems set emphatically as a child’s kisses. This is Byzantium, this treasury, Christ ascendant, conquering, one object after another from somewhere far away transfigured through Venetian skill.

  And my jar is there, at the back of a cabinet between a pair of incense holders and a mosaic icon of Christ. It is five inches tall, I guess, far less than a hand span, a frieze of foliage, four small loops below the neck to hold a lid, five indentations for thumb and fingers. An object for a hand’s memory. I can’t pick it up. The clay looks grey and rough and a bit raggedy where it has been trimmed roughly. It has come a very, very long way.

  We peer it at it for ten minutes until the man with the key starts tapping his foot. The treasury is locked up. The basilica is empty.

  It is a start. Matthew is pleased I’m pleased and we go and celebrate at Florians in the piazza with hot chocolate and macaroons.

>   v

  Any obsession with porcelain echoes as much as any Venetian alleyway.

  What is it? It is ‘made of a certain juice which coalesces underground and is brought from the East’, wrote an Italian astrologer in the mid-sixteenth century. Another writer asserted that ‘eggshells and the shells of umbilical fish are pounded into dust which is then mingled with water and shaped into vases. These are then hidden underground. A hundred years later they are dug up, being considered finished, are put up for sale.’

  There is agreement on the strangeness of porcelain, that it is subject to alchemical change, rebirth. John Donne movingly writes in his ‘Elegy on the Lady Markham’, of her transformation in the earth, that when you lose something precious to sight, something rarer and more beautiful can be created: ‘As men of China, after an age’s stay, / Do take up porcelain, where they buried clay’.

  So how do you make it? How do you make it before anyone else makes it? How can you have a single piece? How can you have it all, surround yourself with it? Can you ever get to the place it comes from, the source of this river of white?

  Porcelain is the Arcanum. It is a mystery. For 500 years no one in the West knew how porcelain is made. The word Arcanum, a jumble of Latin consonants, is pleasingly close to Arcady, Arcadia. There must be some kinship, I feel, between the first secret of white porcelain, and the promise of fulfilled desire, a kind of Arcadia.

  vi

  White is also my story. From my very first pot.

  I was five. My father went on Thursdays to an evening class at the local art college to make pots, taking my two older brothers with him. You could do screen printing on to T-shirts or paint scumbly canvases. You could go up to life drawing, a lady in front of a draped red velvet curtain with a plant in a brass container, or you could go down to the basement and make pots. And I wanted to go down the stairs. There was a break after an hour and you were allowed a glass of Ribena and a chocolate biscuit.