The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  ‘I have long dwelt in the house of mourning’, he writes to his friend Richard, who has lost his own wife.

  ii

  For these two years it is said that William is so deeply distracted that he does not work. His mother comes to live in Notte Street to help with the children and his brother Philip, crooked, somehow damaged by his years away, is brought into the household as an apprentice. Their youngest sister comes to live with them.

  In the following years he takes up the strict observance of dress and adopts the peculiarities of speech ‘that distinguished the strict Quaker’. He dresses now in black, he addresses you as ‘thou’. He lives with a new intensity. He is obsessed with an idea, an image. In the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light, God is in direct communication with you. There is no need for liturgies or priests.

  You come into Meeting. It is a simple building. There are pews, the windows are glazed clear. You still yourself, quieten both the first levels of distraction – the sounds of the rain outside Meeting, the rattle in the window frame, Lydia’s persistent sniffle – and then the second levels – your anxieties around your mother, whether you have ordered enough moschatel and powdered oyster – until your truant mind comes into an equilibrium, ‘an inward silence and attention’ as he puts it. This is when there is the chance of clarity, of Inner Light.

  iii

  William is breaking down. He wants to ‘drop the doctors with their methodical wordiness and reasoned Pedantries’, but the doctors are his friends and he is a man of method and reason.

  He misses Sally.

  He misses her so much that he needs to know how and when he will be with her again. I cannot bear the thought, he writes to Richard, of being separated for ever from those I love, ‘for well am I assured that true friendship survives the grave’.

  Chapter forty-two

  Tregonning Hill

  i

  William returns to porcelain.

  He goes back to the hills and he digs here and then a little bit to the right. He stoops and brushes the soil away, breaks a piece of this crumbling stone into a cloth bag, moves on. He tests his idea through the turf, pushing aside the bracken, hawthorn, dog rose, scrambling across stream beds, slipping on these wet declivities, scanning rockfalls on cliffs, noting unexpected shadows emerging as dusk falls that show where the earth gives way.

  He starts to experiment with the materials he discovers ‘in the parish of Germo, in a hill called Tregonnin hill’, nine miles along the coast from Penzance.

  There are two kinds of rock here. They are closely allied. One is a kind of granite that the locals call growan or moorstone. This is what he has seen being used by the bell-founders. It is, he writes in a beautiful memorandum of eight pages written long afterwards:

  compounded of small pellucid gravel, and a whitish matter, which indeed is Caulin petrified. And as the Caulin of Tregonnin hill hath abundance of Mica in it, this stone hath them also. If the stone is taken a fathom or two from the surface, where the rock is quite solid, it is stained with abundance of greenish spots, which are very apparent, when it is wetted.

  ‘This is a circumstance noted by the Jesuits’, he adds, like the good scholar he is, joining the stone from the hills of Jingdezhen noted by Père d’Entrecolles to his own damp Cornish slopes. This growan is the first ingredient of porcelain, the petunse that ‘gives the ware transparency and mellowness, and is used for glazing’, looked for across Europe, theorised over by mineralogists and doubted by alchemists, found only in the back country of the Cherokees in Carolina. And it is present here, ‘in immense quantities, in the county of Cornwall’.

  Amazingly, he adds, ‘the whole country in depth is of this stone’.

  The other rock is kaolin itself, the white clay that he saw the men mending their pumping engines with.

  This material, in the Chinese way of speaking, constitutes the bones, as the Petunse does the flesh, of Chinaware. It is white talcy earth, found in our granite country in both the counties of Devon and Cornwall. It lies in different depths beneath the surface … It is found in the sides of the hills, and in the valleys; in the sides, where following the course of the hills, the surface sinks, or is concave, and seldom, I believe, or never, where it swells or is convex … I have a piece, by me, of this kind, very fine.

  William continues, ‘This earth is very frequently very white.’

  And he knows it is caulin, kaolin, because he has started to experiment. Every scrap of surmise has to be tested. In depth.

  ii

  I must follow William. So I go to Tregonning Hill.

  When I was a child, an elderly archdeacon gave me his collection of minerals and fossils, collected in the late nineteenth century by him and his brothers. Many were annotated in pen or with small labels, locating afternoons from ninety years before:Diss April 17th 1880. Ammonites and trilobites, ferns and the hipbone of an iguanodon, were passed over with a geologist’s hammer and chisel in its leather case.

  And he gave me a packet of Victorian Geological Survey of England and Wales maps. I had sheets 351– 8. Penzance, up on my wall as a child near my cabinet of things found, things given, things dug up.

  It is still a beautiful map, a field of washed nectarine pink for granite, sweeping up from the snub nose of Land’s End, scalloped by the two great bays of St Ives to the north and Mount’s Bay to the south, polka dot for Blown Sand, before meeting a pale green tide of Mylor Series Fine-grained Slate. A spattering of magenta Greenstone falls from west to east. And my hill – William’s hill – sits in a protective ring of pink dashes. Pleasingly, England doesn’t fit into the carefully calibrated square and the map ends in a drift of contours.

  This is Cornwall, so there is a key for mineral lodes containing silver, arsenic, copper, iron, manganese, lead, antimony, tin, uranium and tungsten. And an hour after unfolding the linen-backed map, I am still tracing and prospecting my way through this landscape, from mine and seam and lode. Habitation seems so uncertainly placed against intractable geology. But then the mines come into focus and then the railways, and then the slew of shaft and mine.

  I park near the Methodist chapel, a dozen miles from Penzance. It is seven in the evening in July and almost cloudless. A lane leads up past some cottages and becomes a stony track, steep, banked with deep bracken, foxgloves, scabious, red campion. There are gatekeepers, small brindled flashes of butterfly, tumbling everywhere. A few calves are asleep, heavy in the shade. It is very quiet. A dog sets up on a distant farm.

  As pilgrimage routes go this feels pretty good. In my mind Tregonning Hill was an effortful climb but this is an easy track up to the top, a few twists around declivities where a clay working has given way. At the top there is a granite war memorial and a trig point and you can look around you, down the cliffs to St Michael’s Mount, across to Penzance and on to the end of England. I can just pick out the odd chimney for a tin works amongst the patchwork of farms and fields and woods. But mines disappear.

  I’ve brought a piece of porcelain with me.

  It’s a sweetmeat dish, a low moulded scallop shape with some very limited blue decoration around the outside, a few half-hearted sprays of flowers. And it is chipped, of course, which is how I could afford it from the quiet Kensington gallery where I bought it before this journey. The base is beautiful, a few iron spots, a piece of something gritty stuck fast and left on by some Devon boy at the Plymouth works who, in 1770, late on in the abbreviated life of William’s porcelain, should have ground it down to an alabaster smoothness, but didn’t. And it’s grey. It looks like badly washed linens.

  This is my Third White Hill. And what I have in my hands is Cornish white.

  iii

  William experiments. He is fifty. Fifty is very close for me too.

  He is mixing, grinding, calcining. He has no apprentice on his books, but his brother. Do the girls help him, watching the clouds of milky clay settle in a trough in the yard, running from the pump to the still with a bucket, from the still to the
trough to pour again? Do they scrape up the wet clay on to boards to dry it, pick at it behind their fingernails, watching as it reveals the estuary lines on their hands as it dries?

  He puts the two pure materials together, ‘equal parts of the washed Caulin and Petunse for the composition of the body; which, when burnt, is very white and sufficiently transparent’.

  William has done it. He has managed what only Tschirnhaus and Böttger have done before and created a new porcelain body. No emperors or kings are involved, no imprisonments and no theatrics. He has worked it out entirely on his own.

  And now he wants to turn this clay body into something, transform his academic quizzing, into a pot. He needs to work out how to glaze and then fire a vessel. So, remembering the good Jesuit father, William uses the same materials that went into the clay as the base for the glaze: ‘These, barely ground fine, make a good glaze. If ’tis wanted softer, vitrescent materials must be added. The best, I have tried, are those said to be used by the Chinese, viz. lime and fern ashes, prepared as follows.’ And he is off.

  William starts to involve other people. Someone needs to be sent to Tregonning Hill, to heave a basket of growan down the track. Someone is off collecting a lot of ferns, I realise, as I know from weary experience how many sackfuls you need to burn for a cupful of grey ash.

  He is not so removed. This private journey becomes a conversation, the private world is reaching others, ‘many ingenious men’, neighbours, men of learning and capacity.

  I realise that William’s way of moving through ideas is like the air and flame in the kiln, with lots of free ascent and play, motion and discussion. Tschirnhaus would have understood.

  It is becoming his obsession, a vision to make porcelain whiter than the Chinese. To make something so white and true and perfect, that the world around it is thrown into shadows as the blackthorn does when flowering in the hedgerows in early spring.

  And William’s obsession is also a sort of exhaustion of white. It is a way of keeping himself turned to the world, keeping himself away from all the absences in his life. Obsession can be useful.

  Chapter forty-three

  brighter in white objects

  i

  I’m now unexpectedly six months into my English journey.

  It is, of course, ridiculous to make porcelain and try to write.

  Just as the porcelain is coming into focus, a heat haze of white, William also starts to write a book. How on earth is he going to differentiate his time, I want to ask him, will you zone it so that you do your making, experimenting, talking in daylight and banish the words into the night? The pronouns slip and slide. I want to ask him if I’m really going to try and interweave the two, a notebook on his bench, like I’m doing this week.

  William, now widowed, an Elder, a little myopic and properly stout, as respectable and pragmatic as any Quaker caricature, is trying to make porcelain and he writes.

  He hearkens to his friends’ advice and is ‘committing his knowledge of chemistry to black and white’. These are his colours, of course. William is also reading of other people’s visions, and this is when his nights and days meld. Visions can happen to anyone and Emanuel Swedenborg, the practical, engaged scientist, the inspector of mines, evangelist for the divining rod and writer on copper, was in a London tavern when darkness fell, and he was vouchsafed a vision of a man telling him of the End of the World. This was not some general miasmic terror-vision, but one in colour, threaded with detail. Since then, Swedenborg – with increasing regularity – has been visited by angels whose teachings, of course, need careful exegesis.

  One night, for instance, he had a vision about porcelain. In a marketplace, filled with detritus, stands a palace. It disappears. And in its place there come plenty of beautiful vessels, ‘porcelain ware it seemed to me, recently put up there … everything was still being arranged’. Swedenborg writes this down: visions are for sharing.

  But what does it mean?

  Acolytes are spreading Swedenborg’s pamphlets, translating his texts from Latin. William has been sent some and is captivated. He decides that it is imperative to bring into English 400 pages of Latin. He begins to translate.

  ii

  I sit in the archive of the Swedenborg Society in Bloomsbury and open the first page of A treatise concerning Heaven and Hell, containing a relation of many wonderful things therein, as heard and seen by the author, the Honourable Emanuel Swedenborg, of the Senatorial Order of Nobles in the Kingdom of Sweden. Now first translated from the original Latin.

  I’m a little daunted by William’s translation of this text. It is a slow, obsessive, tidal wash of notes and references to Scripture. And the epigraphs from Isaiah – This is a rebellious people, which say to the seers, See not – and Proverbs – Where there is no Vision, the people perish – make me pause before starting my work. I am here to understand not to judge.

  There is a ‘want of simplicity’. Christianity has been in a state of falling away from its essential spirituality. There has been an undue exaltation of man’s natural rational faculties and powers, ‘it chains down the mind to the object of the senses, and things of outward observation, and totally indisposes it for the consideration of things inward and spiritual’.

  This is the Preface and I feel this is a proper Quaker talking, measuring his words like a chemist uses his scales, a corn-factor pouring the grain.

  And then it just goes completely and utterly wayward and Swedenborg is breathless with elixirs and angelic orders. The world is an interpenetration of the unseen and the seen, there are gradations in the spirit world similar to the ones that we know of. Everything we see has an angelic correspondence. ‘All nature’, he writes beautifully, ‘is a theatre of divine wonders’. It is like reading Blake turned to footnoted prose, a relentless Swedish version of a Beat poet. I remember performance poetry from my childhood on a 1960s campus and it shares this same satisfaction with bearded men taking up space with words, the same utter assumption that someone is listening.

  ‘To me it has been granted to associate with angels, and to converse with them, as man does with man’, writes Swedenborg. The earth is not as you see it. There is a sagacity in bees, there is a genius in trees. Everything coheres around God as light, the sun, illumination.

  And everything, everyone, every angel, is relentlessly ranked.

  It takes me 300 pages of this book to work it out: this is what white means.

  In Swedenborg’s world, the angels at the sepulchre have ‘raiment white as snow … their garments shall walk with me in white, for they are worthy’. White is truth; it is the glowing cloud on the horizon that shows the Lord is coming. White is wisdom. It is judgement and the subject of Swedenborg’s treatise De equo albo; On the White Horse mentioned in the Revelation. White brings us all into focus, it dispenses clarity, ‘the same light gives pleasing colours in one object, and displeasing colours in another; indeed, it grows brighter in white objects’.

  It reveals. It is Revelation itself.

  I finish the book. And I start it again. I realise that I have missed a crucial sound that runs through it, a hum that I have only half been aware of. On my second reading, I hear it properly. This is a book about white. But it is also a book translated by a widower, someone who is still married, still living in his marriage.

  We are to remain married after death to those we were married to on earth, writes Swedenborg and translates William. This is complete and total heresy, the vision of Marriage in Heaven, eternal Conjugal love bathed in the light of angels, ‘as a moon, glowing white like the moon of our earth and of like size, but more brilliant’.

  It is a book about white as grief and white as hope.

  Chapter forty-four

  thoughts of whiteness

  I’ve finally moved into my factory. There is an exhalation as crates are moved, and kilns reconnected. The heavy boxes of Jingdezhen tiles are moved again, with swearing. We mark out on the new black concrete floor the disposition of tiles and Chin
ese pots for the exhibition in Cambridge.

  Upstairs, where the offices used to be, is my writing room with books.

  On my white wall, I have my white texts.

  There’s quite a lot of poetry, some good bits of Wedgwood, some problematic, orotund Goethe on colour and light that I can’t fathom, but know that I must get to grips with if I can put aside a few days. A week? Have I got a week for Goethe?

  And then I have Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Chapter 42. ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’. ‘In many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls.’

  Then I have his extraordinary sentence, ‘the elusive quality it is, which causes the thoughts of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and couples with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds’. This sentence stretches across the wall, cutting through everything.

  Thoughts of whiteness is underlined, repeatedly.

  My desk is in the middle of the room at right angles to this wall. I face a window with opaque glass. There are security bars on the other side so that as the light waxes and wanes the lines come and go. When I’m lost it looks like a prison.

  When it is going well these shadowy bars are like a beautiful, fugitive Agnes Martin drawing.

  When it is going well the wall of words are exhortatory. They seem to connect my travels and my making together into cadence. I have my shards to my left as I write to keep me on track.

  What is white? It is the colour of mourning, because it folds all colours within it. Mourning is also endless refraction, breaking you up into bits, fragments.

  Part four

  Ayoree Mountain – Etruria – Cornwall

  Chapter forty-five

  an Idea of perfect Porcellain