The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [70]
Then I decided that I needed to look at the polemical Karl Kraus in detail. I bought a copy of Die Fackel from an antiquarian bookshop in order to look at the particular colour of its cover. It was red, as any fierce, satirical magazine calling itself The Torch should be. But I worried that the red had faded over ninety years.
I keep hoping that the netsuke will be a key that unlocks the whole of Viennese intellectual life. I worry that I am becoming a Casaubon, and will spend my life writing lists and notes. I know that the Viennese intelligentsia like puzzling objects, and that looking intensely at one thing is a particular pleasure. At the moment that this vitrine is being opened every night by the children as Emmy dresses, Loos is agonising over the design of a salt-cellar, Kraus is obsessing over an advert in the newspaper, a phrase from an editorial in Die Neue Zeitung, Freud about a slip of the tongue. But there is no escaping the facts that Emmy is not a reader of Adolf Loos, that she managed to dislike Klimt (‘a bear with the manners of a bear’) and Mahler (‘a racket’), and that she did not buy anything from the Wiener Werkstätte at all (‘tat’). She ‘never took us to an exhibition’, says my grandmother’s memoir.
I do know that in 1910 small things, fragments, are very now, and Emmy is very Viennese. What does she think of the netsuke? She has not collected them, she is not going to add to them. There are other things, of course, to pick up and move around in Emmy’s world. There are the bibelots in the drawing-room, the Meissen cups and saucers, bits of Russian silver and malachite on the mantelpieces. This is amateur stuff for the Ephrussi, background noise to go with the putti hovering like plump partridges overhead, not like aunt Beatrice Ephrussi-Rothschild commissioning clocks from Fabergé for her villa in Cap Ferrat.
Emmy, however, loves stories, and the netsuke are small, quick, ivory stories. She is thirty: it is only twenty years since she was in a nursery further round the Ringstrasse, her mother reading her fairy stories of her own. Today she reads the lower part of Die Neue Freie Presse, the daily feuilleton.
Above the ruled line is the news, the news from Budapest, the latest pronouncement from the mayor Dr Karl Lueger, the Herrgott von Wien, the Lord God of Vienna. Below the fold is the feuilleton. Every day there is a charmingly phrased and sonorous essay. It could be on the opera or operetta, or about a particular building that is being demolished. It could be an arch memorialising of folk characters from old Vienna. Frau Sopherl, the Nachsmarkt seller of fruit, Herr Adabei the gossip-monger, walk-on parts in a Potemkin city. Every day there it is, mild and narcissistic, one filigree phrase twining around another, as adjectivally sweet as Demel’s pastries. Herzl, who starts out writing them, talked of the feuilletonist ‘falling in love with his own spirit, and thus of losing any standard of judging himself or others’, and you can see this happening. They are so perfect, a riff of humour, a throw-away, glancing look at Vienna, ‘a matter of injecting experience – as it were, intravenously – with the poison of sensation . . . the feuilletonist turns this to account. He renders the city strange to its inhabitants,’ in the words of Walter Benjamin. In Vienna the feuilletonist renders the city back to itself as a perfect, sensationalised fiction.
I think of the netsuke as part of this Vienna. Many of the netsuke are Japanese feuilletons in themselves. They depict the kind of Japanese characters written about in lyrical laments by visitors to Japan. Lafcadio Hearn, an American-Greek journalist, writes about them in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, Gleanings in Buddha-Fields and Shadowings, each short glimpse or gleaning essay a poetic evocation: ‘the cries of the earliest itinerant