The White Road Page 2

  It was dusty. Dust settles around clay. Someone was pinching a very small bowl out of white clay, cradling it in her hand and turning it round rhythmically.

  I sat at the electric wheel with a large ball of brown clay. I wore a red plastic apron. The wheel was very big. It had an on and off switch and a foot pedal for speed that you depressed and was hard to push.

  And next week my pot is there, hard and grey and dulled, smaller. You can dip it, says my teacher, into one of a dozen glaze buckets to make it sing in different colours and you can paint on to it in every colour. What are you going to decorate it with? She smiles. What does this pot need? I push my pot into the white glaze, as thick as batter.

  And the following week I take home my white bowl, three waves of clay as fat as fingers, a scooped inside with a whorl of marks and heavy, but a bowl and white and mine: my attempt to bring something into focus. The first pot of tens of thousands of pots, forty-plus years of sitting, slightly hunched with a moving wheel and a moving piece of clay trying to still a small part of the world, make an inside space.

  I was seventeen when I touched porcelain clay for the first time. All through my schoolboy years I had made pots every afternoon with a potter whose workshop was part of the school. Geoffrey was in his sixties, had fought in the war, was damaged by his past. He smoked untipped Capstan cigarettes, quoted Auden poems. His tea was deep brown like the clay we used. He made pots for use. They had to be cheap enough to drop, he’d say, beautiful enough to keep for ever. I’d left school early to start a two-year apprenticeship with him, and I spent a summer in Japan with different potters, trailing around the famous kilns where folk craft wares were made, the traditional villages where wood-fired tea bowls and jars were still being made. These pots were what I aspired to make – alive to texture and chance, good in the hands, robust and focussed on use. And on one humid afternoon in Arita, a porcelain town far down at the end of Japan, I sat and watched a National Living Treasure paint a few square centimetres of a vase with a brocade pattern in red and gold. It looked tight, breathless with expensive exactitude.

  His studio was silent. His apprentice was silent. His wife opened the paper screen with a sound like a sigh, bringing tea in porcelain cups and white bean-curd cakes.

  But I was given a small piece of the clay and worked it in my hand until all the moisture had gone and it crumbled.

  vii

  I am a potter, I say, when asked what I do. I write books, too, but it is porcelain – white bowls – that I claim as my own when challenged by the dramatic Syrian poet sitting on my right at a lunch.

  Do you know, she says straight back, that when I got married in Damascus in the early 1970s, I was given a porcelain dish this big – she sweeps her hands wide – that my mother had been given by her mother. Pink porcelain. And I was given a pair of gazelles. They tucked their legs up under them on the sofas like hunting dogs. We all love porcelain in Damascus. The politician’s wife on my left wants to cut in on Damascus – there is depressing news – but I need to know more about this pinkness. I’ve never heard about pink porcelain, it sounds unlikely.

  But the marriage gift bit sounds right, ceremonial, particular, freighted. Porcelain has always been given away. Or stored and then brought out on special occasions to be handled with that slight tremble of care that hovers around anxiety.

  And Damascus is intriguing as it is on the way from Yemen to Istanbul, or could be on the way if you wanted it to be and I remember, somehow, that a Yemeni sheikh collected Chinese porcelain in the twelfth century. The greatest collection ever, brought together to celebrate the circumcision of his son. There are supposed to be porcelain shards in the dunes near Sana’a. We talk about how to get to Yemen, about her grandmother’s porcelain dishes and where they came from. We are still talking porcelain as the plates are cleared.

  When I come back to the studio from this lunch I write up the conversation. And I put down another place, Damascus, on my list of places I have to visit. I have my three white hills in China, Germany and England and when I can’t sleep I run through my list trying to make patterns out of the names, shifting them into clusters of places where white earth was found, where porcelain was made or reinvented, where the great collections were made or lost, where the ships dock and unload, the caravanserai stop. I connect Jingdezhen with Dublin, St Petersburg with Carolina, Plymouth and the forests of Saxony.

  Go from the purest white in Dresden to the creamiest white in Stoke-on-Trent. Follow a line. Follow an idea. Follow a story. Follow a rhythm: there are meant to be unopened cases of imperial porcelain in a Shanghai museum, left on the quayside when Chiang Kai-shek sailed for Taiwan in 1947. And cases of Chinese porcelain still packed up after 500 years in a cellar of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. I could go there and work my way across to Iznik where they made white pots in imitation of unattainable porcelains, delicate jars with tulips, carnations and roses bending slightly in a breeze.

  I’m making small porcelain dishes today, a few inches across, to stack together in rhythmical groups. I could follow this simple image of repetition. There was a monastery in Tibet, travelling with my girlfriend Sue over twenty-five years ago, before we married, where there were stacks of Sung Dynasty porcelain bowls low down behind chicken wire in cupboards in a long hall. I can remember the sounds – a dog, laughter – and I can see the coils of incense rising into the impossible clarity of the air. I can remember the massed porcelain, the feeling of casual, untidy plenitude.

  Or it could be a journey through singular, spectacular beauty. There is meant to be another piece of Marco Polo’s porcelain in Venice in some ducal palazzo somewhere, if I can face it.

  Or I could journey through shards.

  Porcelain warrants a journey, I think. An Arab traveller who was in China in the ninth century wrote that ‘There is in China a very fine clay with which they make vases which are as transparent as glass; water is seen through them. These vases are made of clay.’ It is light when most things are heavy. It rings clear when you tap it. You can see the sunlight shine through. It is in the category of materials that turn objects into something else. It is alchemy.

  Porcelain starts elsewhere, takes you elsewhere. Who could not be obsessed?

  viii

  Obsession builds. As I’m starting a journey, these first porcelains to arrive in Europe from China hold a claim on me. They are beginnings, after all. I return from Venice and Marco Polo and I realise that I need to see the Fonthill vase. It is the most irreproachably aristocratic, double-barrelled porcelain object in Europe: its proper name is the Gaignières-Fonthill vase.

  Watercolour of the Gaignières-Fonthill vase, 1713

  If you want provenance it is here: a Chinese vase from the early fourteenth century augmented with medieval silver heraldic mounts that has been in the collections of Louis the Great of Hungary, the king of Naples, the duc de Berry, then the dauphin of France in his rooms at Versailles, and then a great antiquarian collector until the French Revolution, when it was bought by the English author and collector William Beckford, who kept it in his strange cabinets of curiosities in his ersatz Gothic palace at Fonthill. And then his finances collapsed and it was sold, sold again and disappeared from view.

  It is now in a Dublin barracks, an acre of grey tarmac and grey stone walls like cliffs. This is where the British garrisoned for a hundred years, drilling regiments, thousands of stamping feet echoing off the sheer faces of the building. It is now the National Museum of Ireland, Decorative Arts and History.

  I go in November and the museum is spectacularly empty. I’m taken up to the office of the Keeper of Decorative Arts – proper piles of books on the floor – where it is lying in bubble wrap in an orange crate. We put on white gloves and the vase is lifted out.

  It is a flummery of ideas. It is decorated with flowers and foliage under a pale grey-green glaze, and your eye might travel across it as you see Old and Chinese and Jar. It is all those, but it is also New, a trying-out, a conversatio
n in a workshop, an attempt to create an extra depth to a porcelain vessel.

  And it’s a complicated new shape, too. To handle it, scrape a layer away – a few millimetres – to make a slight recess, damp the clay, and then press with affection the sprays of leaves and the daisies, and clean up the small scrapings and indentations, without knocking it, without it all collapsing, folding into your hands, is very hard.

  I hold it. And it becomes clear that the trails of minute porcelain balls that sway and swag their way round the vase are just wrong. They were meant to add texture to the proportions, clarify and define the transition between neck and shoulder, but they do that bad fashion shtick of calling attention to an unexpected part, so that this fulsome curve is more of a bulge. And one trail has given up and slipped like a hem, untucked. And it has been lifted too warm from the saggar – the container of rough clay that protects porcelain from the smoke and flames of the kiln during the firing – as the kiln was unpacked and so the base has cracked. There are many complexities to working with porcelain. Any discrepancy in thickness can lead to fractures, as it cools from 1,300 degrees Celsius – the white heat of the firing – down to 300 degrees, when it’s safe to handle. You can get away with unevenness with other kinds of clay, but it is chancy with porcelain. Your errors, your slapdash decisions, are revealed.

  Where you run your finger over the foot ring, the thickness of this vase is astray. But for whoever made this it was good enough.

  I love these moments when you feel the decision. This was to smudge a piece of wet clay over an incipient crack and press down and move on. Good enough is not a term in art history, I think, as I slowly shift the vase round in my hands from daisies to camellias to daisies, but Good enough should be there. I hold the Gaignières-Fonthill vase and think of the Silk Road from China and the kingdom of Naples and the duc de Berry – the poor young dauphin trying to impress his unimpressible father – then Beckford collecting his treasures like a Medici in a damp valley in Wiltshire. The silver mounts have gone leaving very small drilled holes to show where they were attached 600 years ago.

  I’ve taken off the Michael Jackson white gloves and sit with it in my hands. This is a moment of some danger. I could follow this, I think.

  It is a lure.

  Following this means a journey into connoisseurship, pedigree, a history of collections, and good God, I’m not doing that again. My last book followed an inherited collection of netsuke, small Japanese carvings, across five generations of my family: I know what collecting and inheritance entails. Before I came here to Dublin to pay homage I read the strange Gothic novel of Beckford and looked up in the sales catalogue to find where this beautiful thing stood amongst his treasures, and I can see how I could lose myself in his fantasy, mired in sultans and concubines and gerfalcons and all that sort of embroidered and gilded stuff. I can see unspooling time in archives, thinking about ownership. It would become a story of rich people and their porcelain.

  This jar offers something different.

  I’m late for the taxi to the airport, lunchless, high, and I run with the generous Keeper of Old and Strange Objects through the museum. She needs to show me a final thing before departure.

  It is Buddha. He is reclining on an elbow, long fingers, bare feet, golden robes like eddies of water. Warm white marble. Stolen by Colonel Sir Charles Fitzgerald on a punitive military expedition to Burma and sent to join the Fonthill vase in 1891 to the museum in Dublin, where they sat near each other in Asia, Antiquities.

  He is ‘taking it easy with hand under his cheek’ says Bloom in Ulysses. Molly recalls him breathing ‘with his hand on his nose like that Indian god he took me to show one wet Sunday in the museum in Kildare Street, all yellow in a pinafore, lying on his side on his hand with his ten toes sticking out’.

  I count Buddha’s toes, then taxi, airport, home, wondering if Bloom or Molly or Joyce noticed the white vase in the case opposite in the echoey, mahogany-cased, imperially pillaged museum in Kildare Street on a wet afternoon.

  Who could not be obsessed by porcelain? I write in my notebook.

  And then after this foolish rhetorical question I write: most people. And then I add James Joyce.

  ix

  It’s not that I like all porcelain.

  If you look at the cases of eighteenth-century porcelain in any museum, a shelf of palely loitering Vincennes, two of Sèvres, a bit of Bow, they seem irredeemably precious. Not only can you not work out what most of this stuff was for – a trembleuse, a chocolatier, a girandole – but there is a mismatch between the amount of work that has gone into it and the result. The thimble-small cup and saucer with a view of Potsdam, courtiers, gilding, was pointless then and looks like they did it because they could.

  And because they can, they do. Dinner services for kings and queens and princelings aren’t in themselves interesting. There is an awful lot of it out there and I don’t want to get lost in the scholarship around small kilns of the eighteenth century.

  I have a bowl, eight-sided, lobed and pinched, ten inches across and four high, with a sort of raised basketwork pattern, and a flat gilded rim. It is from Meissen, around the 1780s and it sits primly on a high foot, as if expecting to be the centre of a table and hence the centre of attention. There are panels on the outside with pears, apples, plums and cherries, and on the inside is a bouquet of fruit, redcurrants and strawberries and gooseberries and half a pear.

  It is valuable. Its insipidity is total.

  I’m not sure if its horridness is that everything is just so plump and sweet and high-summerish. You can taste nothing, no bite, no acidity, just sugariness waiting for the phlump of Schlagsahne, that coating of cream. You can feel the boredom in the fruit painter; berry, berry, berry.

  Actually as I force myself to look at it, it is precisely the coming together of late summer in the 1970s – holidays as a teenager, boredom, small cottage, brothers, endless plums, blackberries, compulsive rereadings of bad novels – that makes me realise this is passive-aggressive porcelain.

  I feel certain this is a new category of porcelain. I start a list.

  x

  A good list helps. And proper note taking, too, with full citations of where I’ve found references or quotations, seen a piece of porcelain that offers a lead for the journey. I have learnt from the research for my last book and this time I know how to do it. I have none of that stupid knock-it-off-in-six months bravado. I will not digress. I will plan this pilgrimage.

  Pilgrimage is a complex word for me. I grew up near cathedrals and my childhood was full of pilgrims. We lived in a deanery, a vast house next to a cathedral. It was a house built and rebuilt over 600 years with grand rooms with panelling and portraits of deans. I had a room on the top corridor alongside my three brothers. The house gave up here with a lumber room, No War but Class War on our bathroom door, a table-tennis table, steps up to another tower where we smoked with school friends, plotted our lives.

  My parents were proud of their open door. The Pope came. Princess Diana came. People came for meals, for weeks, for months. One American monk stopped wandering for a summer and stayed as a hermit for several years, using a room at the top of the spiral staircase in the tower, cleaning the house in the early hours in exchange for bed and board, and praying in our oratory.

  I think my childhood was quite odd, choppy with priests, Gestalt therapists, actors, potters, abbesses, writers, the lost, the homeless and family-hungry, God-damaged, pilgrims.

  Pilgrims don’t know what to do when they finally reach the end. We were the end. They go on and on about their journey. They share. This is a risk I add to my list, another list.

  I’ve read Moby-Dick. So I know the dangers of white. I think I know the dangers of an obsession with white, the pull towards something so pure, so total in its immersive possibility that you are transfigured, changed, feel you can start again.

  And there is the issue of time. I have a family. I have a proper life making porcelain. The diary is alrea
dy full, but I can always write at night.

  I have my ground rules for this journey to my three white hills. All I have to do is find my lodgings next to Porcelain Factory #2. I dodge the scooters and taxis and set off towards the south.

  I have to be up at six for my first hillside.

  Part one

  Jingdezhen

  Chapter one

  on shards

  i

  It looks as if it has been busy for hours. It is six a.m. and stalls are up, watermelons arranged in pyramids, the bicycle-repair man sitting next to his kit. The roads are eddying with bicycles and knots of people. The carp seller with a polystyrene crate on the back of his scooter cuts in front of us, turns and swears extravagantly. We are going north out of the dusty city towards the hills, past alleyways squeezed between great high brick walls, factories with open windows, rubbish. The day is grey and promises deep, grey heat.

  The car turns off the new highway on to the old road and off the old road on to the old track rising between two farmer’s houses. Each is three storeys high, gabled. The one on the left has a portico held up by gilded Corinthian columns.

  When did farmers get rich in China?

  The rice is young in the paddy fields. We bump up and stop outside another farm, a modern house, half built, half stucco over thin Chinese brick, old barns, set amongst trees. A wrecked car sits on breeze blocks. We are a few hundred feet up in the lee of a hill, bamboo stretching up to a ridge, a mountain beyond that, fields half-heartedly cultivated below us. There is a small lake, a muddy declivity ringed with reeds.

  A woman comes to the doorway and shouts at us and it is explained by my guide, through shouting, that I’m an archaeologist, a scholar, legitimate.