The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  William has visitors. He walks. He reads. Being in Plymouth, rather than, say, London or Bristol, does not alter the velocity of his reading. Weary metropolitans always underestimate provincial life, the ways in which information, periodicals, knowledge are sensed and seized, consumed. This is a port, of course. You can see news coming round the headland, hear it in the shocking amount of noise as cargos are brought ashore. There may not be so many lectures and public experiments as in the courts off Lombard Street, but early evenings become long nights of reading and conversation here as a Greater Rain drums in the street.

  There are many conduits for books and papers. France is closer than London, and books, like rum, sidle in and are shared convivially. His neighbours are erudite. Sometimes, I think, it seems like every doctor and apothecary and cleric in the West Country in the eighteenth century was writing a book about the place they are in.

  William is drawn to pragmatic men, to the application of ideas back into the world. It is less problem-solving. It is more looking hard at the world and problem-creating, stubbing your toe against the intractability of what you don’t know and can’t find, and then kicking it with intent.

  William Cookworthy c. 1740

  Knowledge is in English sometimes, but it often arrives in Latin and French. German is tricky. And this means that you spend your time tracking ideas through mentions and notes and shrugs of dismissal in several languages. There are journals that offer abridged versions of lectures, synopses that worry you through their elisions. What is being missed out? You order An Abridgement of the Philosophical Discoveries and Observations of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris every year and devour its contents. This year there are some Observations on the Bezoar, a paper on the Flux and Reflux of the Sea made at Dunkirk, an examination of the silk of spiders, something tendentious on the eclipse.

  Certain names keep coming up, returning, retreating.

  It is like at a noisy dinner when you become more and more attuned to the shape of a name, until you hear it reverberating. Du Halde is insistent. This is where you have to put aside your Quaker broadcloth. Much of the news from the most occluded parts of the East comes in dispatches from the Jesuits. Father Du Halde is the editor of their Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, flimsy annual reports that act as bulletins from the Unknown World. They come out irregularly, like all the best periodicals – It’s here! It hasn’t folded! – and into the hands of novelists and philosophers and scientists, and William in Notte Street.

  And in 1735, Du Halde collects seventeen of these letters into four splendid volumes, vast and lavish, with beautiful unfolding maps and illustrations of silkworm factories and palanquins full of Chinese ladies. The title page shows a boat, laden, perhaps, with porcelain, in the harbour of a Chinese port, surrounded by Chinese figures, with Confucius the Celebrated Chinese Philosopher illustrated on the facing page. The books are published in English the next year, and then are printed again and again.

  ii

  And there is another name that keeps turning up – a Swedish metallurgist, Emanuelis Swedenborgii. He may well write in Swedish, but William reads him in Latin. Swedenborg is the superintendent of the mines to the kings of Sweden and the writer of a substantial book in three volumes that examines the composition of the mineral world. He is particularly good on copper, and copper is a perennial interest as it provokes conversation on your doorstep, on the quayside, whenever you ride westwards into Cornwall.

  Swedenborg is a natural philosopher, fixated on the transformation of shapeless energy into regular structure, grand rhymes that echo from the planets to grains of sand. But it is also clear that he is a deeply practical man, not only the inspector of mines but intrigued by new ways of discovering mineral seams through the divining rod, the virgula divinatoria.

  Diagram of divining rods, from Mineralogia Cornubiensis, 1778

  William has taken it up with enthusiasm. He has learnt how to use it first-hand from the captain-commandant of the garrison in Plymouth, a truly respectable man and, ‘by many experiments on pieces of Metal hid in the earth, and by actual discovery of a Copper mine near Okehampton’, has become convinced of its efficacy. There are different pulls, William writes in a pamphlet, the strongest being gold, then copper, iron, silver, tin, lead, bone and finally coals, springs and limestone. But be careful he says, ‘in metallic countries, vast quantities of attracting stones scattered through the earth … and, even about town, bits of iron, pins &c. may easily be the means of deceiving the unwary’.

  He is straightforward about divining. This is not mystical, but a practical approach to exploring the world. And he writes that ‘either the Hazel or the Willow actually answer with all persons, if they are in health and use it moderately and at a proper season’.

  Evidently the sight of this Quaker chemist, serious and meticulous, with his forked stick criss-crossing an empty field, has produced ridicule. He writes in the pamphlet, ‘I would advise in case of debates, not to be too warm and lay wagers on the success, but unruffled, leave the unbelievers to their infidelity.’ When lodging at Carloggas with his friend Richard Yelland, he ‘went about the country with a dowsing rod looking for materials’.

  William has become an Adventurer.

  Chapter thirty-eight

  readily stained in use

  i

  This is not adventuring in a haphazard way. He has his apothecary’s shop to run, his family to feed and preaching at Meeting to prepare for. His training and his cast of mind aren’t whimsical. With information like this, you sift and dry, and weigh, and measure. You test and then you retest. Two sources make an enquiry. Enquiry can start an adventure. This search is purposeful. The names in all those journals have begun to cohere around an idea, a possibility. William is a fisherman, and this is where he begins to cast his line.

  When he reads the second volume of Du Halde’s great book on China and has enjoyed the runs of chapters, ‘Of their Prisons and Punishments for Criminals’, ‘Of the Plenty that reigns in China’, ‘Of the Lakes, Canals, and Rivers, as also of their Barks and Vessels of Burden’, ‘Of the Chinese Varnish or Japan’, he reaches at the bottom of page 309, a chapter ‘Of the Porcelain or China-ware’.

  This chapter changes his life.

  ii

  This chapter reprints the two letters of Père d’Entrecolles, written from Jingdezhen twenty years ago. Porcelain, says the learned father, is made up of two kinds of stone that must be refined and then mixed together and fired at sufficient heat. One is kaolin and the other is petunse.

  This is extraordinary. It is the Arcanum in black and white. It is a map of clay. William notes it, as do others. Josiah Wedgwood, aged fifteen and working in his brother’s workshop in Burslem – one of the scatter of pottery towns in Staffordshire – copies it out into his commonplace book. Smallpox has permanently weakened this boy’s right leg so that he cannot throw pots on a wheel. He dedicates himself to experimenting, to understanding method: ‘Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance.’ Across the seas, extracts are also printed in the South Carolina Gazette.

  William is not alone in his adventuring. When the mist clears, the rains are blown away, you see that this landscape is alive with prospectors.

  Others have made a wild surmise about the white rocks of Cornwall and their use for porcelain – not the kind of hard, translucent Chinese porcelain that William is after, but the soft-paste porcelains that are springing up across England. This kind of porcelain is the Saint-Cloud kind, creamier, opaque. It feels warmer, when you pick it up, than the Chinese or Meissen kind, almost as if they have been passed from someone else’s hand.

  Some use frits, ground-up glass or other forms of silica like fine white sand or flint, others are experimenting with bone ash. This last ingredient whitens the clay body and helps prevent the biggest problem for these porcelains – their propensity to ‘all wear brown and [be] subject to crack, especially the glazing, by boiling water’. These wares are fired much lower than
proper porcelains and the constituent elements never fully combine to form a glassy whole.

  They are a beautiful simulacrum, a white surface on which to paint your peonies, colour your shepherd boys, but ‘readily stained in use, and scratched even by the friction of a silver spoon’. They even change with the weather, notes one disgruntled commentator.

  One possible ingredient that seems to work is a white stone, known on the north Cornish coast as soap rock. It is:

  a fine and beautiful clay, of a firm, compact and regular texture, considerably weighty and hard, of a smooth and unctuous surface … it does not colour the fingers, but drawn on a board, &c., marks a white line; it does not adhere to the tongue, nor does it melt, but when chewed, has an unctuous softeness, and is quite pure and free from all grittiness … the finest is generally white, sometimes with a yellowish hue, elegantly veined and spotted … it so greatly resembles hard soap, that it has obtained its English name of soap-stone, and that of steatite from our suet, from its resemblance to the hard fat of animals.

  It is found near Mullion Cove, on the raggedy bit of the coast that seems to be nothing but cliffs and wind and it is mined God knows how, and at God knows what cost, as the mines flood at every high tide. This soap rock is ‘much coveted, and barrelled up for London, the reasons concealed, but for the porcelain most likely, or glass manufacture, or both’.

  These factories – Chelsea, Bow, St James, Worcester – are friable: chip one person off and a new one is formed. Robert Brown is said to have hidden in a barrel in the workshop of the Bow factory to see what was being added to the paste. He has now started his own porcelain works in Lowestoft. Alexander Lind, starting a porcelain manufactory near Edinburgh, reports that he has managed to see the furnaces at Bow and Chelsea, ‘which were what I chiefly wanted to see’, by accompanying an aristocratic visitor.

  Another Arcanum. Another set of secrets.

  Everything is a secret around porcelain. Everything is locked up. The secret formulae themselves are ‘deposited, locked up and secured in a box with three different locks and keys one of which shall be in the hands of the inventors’, the others with the investors.

  For goodness’ sake, in Meissen they are making dinner services, dozens of perfect dishes of the lightest, whitest porcelain, while here in England there is an air of desperate casting, a scraping together of investors, promising and promising, uncertain of outcome. A General Description of All Trades remarks that potters ‘stand little Chance to set up for themselves, unless born to good Fortune’.

  Or born elsewhere.

  Chapter thirty-nine

  china earth

  On 30 May 1745, William writes a letter to his friend and client Dr Richard Hingston of Penryn, a Quaker surgeon, ‘Dear Richard, My Eastern and South-Ham journeys hath kept me of late so much abroad that I hath not had opportunities to write to you.’ He apologises for the damage to the pillboxes which are normally well wrapped. His latest order has just been sent by sea to Falmouth. Has Richard been following the sales of prize cargos in Plymouth and the Friends who have been involved?

  And, he goes on, evidently picking up an old conversation:

  I had lately with me the person who discovered the CHINA EARTH. He had with him several samples of the china-ware, which I think were equal to the Asiatic. It was found on the back of Virginia where he was in quest of mines and having read Du Halde, he discovered both the petunse and kaolin, but it is this latter earth which he says is essential to the success of the manufacture. He has gone for a cargo of it, having bought from the Indians the whole country where it rises. They can import it for £13 per ton and by that means afford their china as cheap as common stone ware, but they intend to go only about 30% under the company. The man is a Quaker by profession, but seems as thorough a deist as I ever met with. He knows a great deal about mineral affairs, but not funditus.

  This traveller has brought with him examples of new porcelain, talked of where the real materials for its manufacture lie. He has sketched a possibility. William listens.

  The weather changes here within the quarter-hour. This mostly means you come home drenched, whatever you were expecting at breakfast. But today, staying with Friend Nancarrow, a superintendent of mines, you set off with a whippy little wind in your ears. It is a June morning and early, but you are glad of the thickest broadcloth you have and within your quarter-hour you are baked in your good black preacher’s coat.

  You are passing Nancarrow’s works, so you stop to draw breath, and unwrap your stock from your neck. You take a drink of water from the brook that cuts down the hillside and you watch the labourers who are mending the furnace that drives the engine to pump water from the mines. It has split and they are caulking it with a local white clay from the moors, they tell you, spreading it into the cracks like a paste. As the furnace heats up, this white clay bakes on to the metal to fill the fissures. It is the use it’s commonly put to, ‘mending the tin furnaces and the fire places of the fire engines; for which ’tis very proper’.

  Lives can change within the quarter-hour too. You take some of this white earth between your thumb and forefinger and it crumbles only slightly. Spit on it and rub again and it is a paste that spreads across the pads of your fingers and dries whisper-thin. Might it be? You know it. You take a knuckle of it home.

  And the other material: the petunse?

  You have been talking again. This time to some bell-founders in Fowey. You are asking them about the different materials that they use, and notice that the heat of the molten metal had fused some of the stones used to line the mould. What fuses in this way? You take a handful back. This same rock, you realise, white with greenish spots, has been used to strengthen the gun emplacements at the Plymouth garrison.

  What does William see? He sees one material changing into another. He sees workers, Creation, the great rhythm of change. And because William is truly interested in people at work, he asks questions and then he listens to replies.

  He comes back to Notte Street with geology on his boots, up the road from the docks.

  Chapter forty

  a shard, which, by leave, he sometime broke

  This isn’t a bad place to make a living. William is doing well enough that he can repay Silvanus, and finally put Cookworthy and Co. above the side gate.

  And though this is a carefully run and prudential family, there is the odd dropped plate, a handle swiped from a cup in the scullery sink, and one day a Chinese plate – one of the precious set that his midshipman brother Philip brought back from his time at sea – is severely chipped. And William, for whom the world of things is an Adventure, keeps on going and breaks the plate into shards.

  The glaze hugs the porcelain clay tightly, a Cornish shoreline of white. It is a different hue from their crockery. ‘I have, now by me, the bottom of a Chinese punch bowl, which was plainly glazed, when it was raw or a soft biscuit; for the ware wants a great deal of being burnt; it being the colour of coarse whited brown paper’, he writes. And it has broken in a different manner too, sounded in a different way in its demise.

  All porcelain sounds differently at the moment it hits the floor.

  Sometime before, Quakers had been urged to ‘refrain from having fine tea-tables set with fine china, being it is more for sight than service … It’s advised that Friends should not have so much china or earthenware on their mantelpieces or on their chests of drawers, but rather set them in their closets until they have occasion to use them.’ He has a use for them now.

  He starts to break pots.

  He becomes known for it. In a memoir written twenty years after he died, a pious Quaker writer says that William always asked permission before he broke your pots, ‘a shard, which, by leave, he sometime broke’, but this is so firmly stated you know that it cannot be true, that here must be a secret history of casually snapped saucers, cut finger- tips as he traces the line of the break, silently below a table, before ‘shewing the owner the excellence of the texture’.

>   There is now a shelf of shards in Notte Street. Fossils, minerals, books. And shards. There is now a shelf of shards in my studio too. Broken tea bowls from a hillside in China and a crescent from the floor of Albrechtsburg Castle, surreptitiously gathered.

  ‘To acquire a competent knowledge in Mines, &c., a long residency in their vicinity is certainly necessary’, writes Dr Pryce, the expert on the geology of Cornwall. ‘Much study is weariness of the flesh’, says Ecclesiastes. You need to stay still. You need to know what study means. These sentences sit next to each other.

  William is now forty, energetic and long-time resident in the West Country, much studied and quick-witted and curious to take bits of Cornish rock home. He has seen a rock melting to make a viscous white puddle, then harden until it is as strong as metal.

  Chapter forty-one

  silences

  i

  Sally dies.

  She is only thirty-five, the girls are nine and seven and five and the twins are two and a half, for goodness’ sake, and what are you supposed to do with a God who knocks the earth from under you as totally as a shaft giving way, takes away the ground on which you walk? You are voided. And again. Elizabeth, the older of the twins, dies eighteen months later. She is four.

  You are changed by grief. You are the same man but you know what change means, that one substance cannot recover its previous state, and this is it.

  For two years you are ‘removed’ from the world. The world comes up Notte Street and rings on the dispensary door, runs round the corner of the kitchen chasing a top and bumps you, asks you, again, to explain about the drying of simples in crucibles, but you cannot hear it or feel it or answer it.

  It is a kind of optics this living, with some things very close and in terrible focus, and some things opaque and very, very far away.