193. Edmund De Waal, Letters to Camondo

COMO CITAR:

Zenha, Miguel. «Edmund De Waal, Letters to Camondo». Forma de Vida, 2022. https://doi.org/10.51427/ptl.fdv.2022.0022 .

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51427/ptl.fdv.2022.0022

Miguel Zenha*

(Versão em português / Portuguese translation)

Letters to Camondo continues the central premise of The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010): to talk about people and history as from things or objects. In The Hare with Amber Eyes, we have a collection, mainly assembled in the mid-19th century, of more than two hundred netsukes, which strolled around Paris, Vienna, Tokyo and London, while in Letters to Camondo we start with Moïse de Camondo’s house and decorative arts collection as leading figures. Still, the common ground between both books is especially noticeable if we find  Letters to Camondo trying to answer the question from the final pages of The Hare with Amber Eyes, “why keep things, why archive intimacies?”.

Moïse de Camondo was a Jewish banker born in the Ottoman Empire, who settled in Paris as a child. After acquiring the noble title of Earl Camondo—a symbol of his assimilation into the country which hosted him­—Moïse will gather one of the world’s finest collections of 18th-century French antiques: the current Nissim de Camondo Museum which can be seen in some of the photographs in this book. Having died in 1935, Camondo could not have known Edmund de Waal, born almost thirty years later. However, de Waal’s visits to the museum are the motive of more than fifty letters whose addressee is precisely Moïse de Camondo.

Resuming the connection between the two books, we must now ascertain their differences: though it is true that they share a common ground or starting point, Letters to Camondo adopts a precise and terse style—the letters are nearly always brief—and above all a more sober and less evasive tone, insofar as The Hare with Amber Eyes slips and sometimes loses itself onto a certain kind of social criticism which is fortunately absent in this book. This is also why Camondo is more personal due to an intimate or private mood, which renders it even more peculiar since it is The Hare that is on de Waal’s family—the Ephrussi. But there we come across with a cautious and defensive writer, an advocate of a precarious emotional distance. De Waal seemed hesitant, being The Hare a first step toward the questions matured in Camondo, as the attainment of concepts like “memory”, “mourn”, and “history” attest.

We read in the VII letter that “Dust comes from something. It shows something has happened, shows what has been disturbed or changed in the world. It marks time.” (p. 16). That is to say, the particular importance granted to the traces left by objects sets the notion of relation, contact or access, turning down then any sense of “dust” in the semantic field of destruction or detritus. Thus, this idea will be sealed further ahead, when John Rewalds’s text on Giorgio Morandi is quoted: “(…) it was a dust that was not the result of negligence and untidiness but of patience, a witness to complete peace” (idem). To withhold is the word “witness” since it is with it that de Waal will face up to Camondo, who “live without negligence or untidiness but I hope you might understand the ‘witness’ element of this” (idem). Witness works as a minimal differences flare gun: “Unpaved streets and the horses and carts and carriages and the stonemasons working outside (…) each producing their own clouds of particular dust” (p. 17). In other words, “relation”, “contact” or “access” witness particular features—of things and people—which are liable to challenge forgetfulness, since they mark time, i. e., the idea of rebound or upturn is being reported here.

Whoever is familiar with some of de Waal’s works in ceramics and porcelain—among others, lacrimae rerum, I (2016)—will soon acknowledge the influence of Morandi, who implicitly returns in the XX letter. Again from a web of quotations—now Proust talking about Jean Siméon Chardin­—for de Waal “Chardin takes us to still-life”, which deals with “the pleasure of putting things next to each other. And watching” (p. 57). The English expression “still life” is much more telling than the French “nature morte” or their Romance cognates: the associations between marking time and memory become sharper when condensed within the idea of a life that stills, holds, preserves and extends. This praise for delay affirms the existence of phenomena that require differing speeds due to non-instantaneous or automatic modes of revelation. Wherefore “delay” does not mean paralysis, neither does memory mean inactiveness. In this way, a distrust for self-evident and immediate instances is noticeable. “The archives in the attics help but now I need to look for those things that have not been catalogue and filed and photographed (…) the stuff you didn’t want us to find, the stuff that survived your editing, your prohibitions (pp. 19-20). This “survival” belongs, then, to the refusal of any crystallizer drive; that is, it is generated from those sorts of angles that exceed paradigms.

According to de Waal, being-in-the-world entails a reflection on concepts like “identity” or whatever “belonging to a place” may stand for. The XIX letter proves that what comes closest to identity logic are webs of resends and relations. And it is this that is at stake when we read, “your house is a place where everything is something else (…) everything is multiple, mirrored, paired, reflected, repeated” (p. 50). Even more so, “this house is like a complex mechanical box. Push this door, gently. There are spaces here, silences, one thing becoming another, one person becoming another. Doors to slip through, slip away” (p. 52). This dynamic mode of experience favors actuality, or actualization—most likely endless—rather than possibility: that particular object remits for other objects, that particular person depends on other persons, that particular context implies other contexts.

It must also be stressed the importance given to technique, which gets its visibility when “marqueterie” is the topic: “the art of veneering, is a way of making one thing look entirely other (…) elements can disappear into geometric patterning. Furniture (…) becomes a play on dimensionality, depth” (p. 67). Technique points out matter and materiality: speaking of things, we are also speaking of their composition modes. That is to say that there is a certain formal disposal—a minimal practical dimension of an object—which deserves to be envisaged since it fits in the sense of objects and also allows to temper potential reflexive overflows. In other words, cognitive experience and aesthetic judgment are manifestations of features like language, tropes, colors, canvas and sound too.

Nevertheless, the Camondo family does not escape from anti-Semitism. Moïse loses his son in the First World War, and, left by his wife, he seems to embrace something like seclusion in his own house until the end. On a shallow analysis, the house would function as a stronghold, as a protective halo from society, war and life or reality itself. Objects would be the attempt to oppose order to disorder, planned to unpredictable, sacred to contingent. But these are attitudes de Waal begins to advocate for and which he progressively challenges afterwards, with no rebuke nor indulgence toward Camondo whatsoever. In this regard, notice the following incident, especially indicative of the kind of ambivalence driving de Waal: the anti-Semite text Bagatelles pour un Massacre, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, “sells 75,000 copies in 1937”, at the same time that “The Musée Nissim the Camondo is hugely popular” (p. 131).

A conflicting society in which anti-Semitism lives next door to a successful museum made by a Jew prompts in Camondo a specific feeling of “melancholy”. In the XXXVII letter, de Waal tries to densify the mix of individuality and “mourn” at issue:

Benjamin wrote on melancholy, said that he ‘came into the world under the sign of Saturn—the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays. (…)’ There is some pleasure in, he says, an art to getting lost (…)

I think you are lost. There is no sign of it. You make this place for your father, for your son. And you do it impeccably. It is a site of mourning, lieu de mémoire. (…) Mourning has its rituals that allow us a particular space to return to loss: you mark out an absence (…)

But melancholy is the extraordinary prolongation, the refusal to give up. It takes you off into detours and delays (…) And I think you cannot give up your loss, cannot lose loss, cannot stop moving objects, adding, rag-picking.

I think this is truly melancholic. Not because of what happened next. Sadness isn’t melancholic.

I can’t stop either. (pp. 100-1)

For de Waal, assigning despair, apathy, cowardice, morbidness or even an irrevocable nostalgic inclination to Camondo is at least inaccurate. Camondo is not circumventing whatever it may be—nothing of this has to do with evasion, but rather with search—neither is he trying to create tricks in order to forestall death: conversely, he is internalizing contingency, making it his own, interpreting it, turning his own life authentic (and here one may right away think about Heidegger, but I also believe Derrida’s Mémoires—Pour Paul de Man has some key purposes in common with Camondo). Being now able to understand Camondo, de Waal “can’t stop either”.

That is the reason why de Waal concedes such an amount of significance to “history”, a maximized background in The Hare, but something that here shows up personalized, namely in Camondo and de Waal:

My book on the collection passed down to me is a fitting tribute to a lost family, naming the dead, saying their names as a way of making it cohere. I make a book, an attempt to try and work out what to pass on. (…)

But I no longer believe this. It isn’t like this: it doesn’t work. Tribute and restitution sound like the end, closure. (…)

History is happening. It isn’t the past, it is a continuing unfolding of the moment. It unfolds in our hands. That is why objects carry so much, they belong in all the tenses, unresolved, unsettling, essais. (pp. 155-6)

“History” is being described as that kind of state which the hermeneutic vocabulary of the 20th-century names ”historicity”, i.e., the decisive localization or insertion in a context broad and complex enough to overreach determinism, meaning then that history works as dam regarding those drifts seeking to establish general, changeless and dogmatic “befores” and “beyonds”. History is an event setting a problematic and non-instantaneous relation towards social and individual architectures: it highlights the belief in the nonexistence of innocent kinds of acquaintances, because total and unprecedented, with the world, being the affinity between private and social characterized by obliquity. Thus, “history is happening” since Camondo’s past is blending itself with de Waal’s. These are the resending networks that ascribe intelligibility to each person’s life, so to perceive objects as “unresolved” means affirming that concepts like “identity” or “human nature” are not self-interpreting or static, consequently betraying the sometimes pivotal aim of “saying all”: objects imply series of techniques and properties that, in turn, are adjustable due to their purpose of being recontextualized. What does come closest to an answer are the “dust” and “marks” amplifying experience and stemming from the historic facticity that, for de Waal, needs to be reconsidered since it barely gets along with systematization or paradigm. It is not irrelevant that Camondo has lived in France during that period, that has been a collector, that he was a victim of anti-Semitism, or that his son was killed in the war since history is strongly made of colliding circumstances, which can be expanded when assumed, problematized and envisaged as a vital drive. Then, “archiving intimacies” will become clearer: it is the embedding and fostering of some interdependent features of those individuals who experienced them to appeal to what is unfinished. This is why de Waal ends up refusing to see Camondo’s house as a vault.

Thus, Letters to Camondo moves away from any programmatic interest—we are far from Schiller’s Letters, for example. We see the rejection of both any worship repairing plan, as well as of the embrace of juvenile iconoclast versions: at stake is to surgically create and refine interpretive vocabularies more than to move forward with answers or to profess political or cultural scheduling. For de Waal, objects and human beings significantly share the following attributes: they do not have just a physical and current presence and they both signal the existence of other dimensions of reality other than the immediate one; and de Waal’s originality lies in suggesting that some objects are especially eligible to trigger those dimensions. Thereby, closer attention to the testimony given by objects can allow us to see with acuity some of the friction in the interactions between human beings and the world. The route amid experience and knowledge is sometimes discontinuous since it is handled by problematic instances, which simultaneously presupposes and implies particular properties, but also—and most likely—broadened contexts. And the option for a focused, reduced and plain language in this book does not hinder, though, an approach toward a certain search for sense; adjusting an influent philosophical designation, we are before hermeneutic investigations.

Letters to Camondo is both the narrative of Moïse’s life and the autobiography of de Waal; they are embedded within each other. This remarkable book is, aside from memory reconstruction through imagination, a defense of commitment, here regarding some modes of impure coexistence: form mutability, epoch interconnection, interdependence between individuals, objects denoting human deliberations, interplay between self-knowledge and world-knowledge, undecidability between necessity and contingency, perspective variations, (auto)biography and literature. Thus, Camondo offers an allegory of state change and mode switch, that is, of an instance that cannot be reduced to withdrawal, namely motion. The V letter alludes to an 18th-century carpet with the four winds represented, a carpet bought by Camondo somewhat through a de Waal’s cousin, a key figure since he is “the cousin who set me off on my adventures. And I suppose I want to know that you notice it. Notice that you are walking on air. On exhalation” (p. 10). In a book that can be taken as an elegy only dimly and hastily, the story returns in the last letter with de Waal finally reconciled:

So I sit here in this beautiful room with the carpet of the golden winds under my feet on the edge of the Parc Monceau and I think ce que nous sommes, that you can make a place a home and there is honour in that and I think this is witness. This is what I’m coming back to. (p. 167)

*PhD candidate funded by FCT (SFRH/BD/143281/2019). Program of Literary Theory, University of Lisbon. Email: miguel17@edu.ulisboa.pt

REFERÊNCIA:

Waal, Edmund de. Letters to Camondo. London: Chatto and Windus, 2021.