The Last Sane Man

Michael Cardew in 1936. Photograph: Imagno/Austrian Archives

Review: A.S. Byatt on a biography of the turbulent life of the potter Michael Cardew

«The last sane man» was a phrase used by Angela Carter to describe the potter, Michael Cardew. «Sane» in this context is associated with a simple life, and the ideal of the human as artist, art and life as one continuous work. Cardew came from a rich family and studied classics at Exeter College, Oxford – he was already obsessed by his father’s collection of Devon Country pottery, got a third-class degree and began a life of making pots. He was in the line of William Morris and Bernard Leach – a believer in making beautiful pots in a traditional way, suitable for daily use. This went with a studied simplicity of lifestyle – living in basic cottages, without much sanitation, wearing shorts and sandals. He was drawn to what he called «warm» pots, and his work has a range of subtle earthy colours – from sooty to soft golden, decorated with slipware trails and very simple stylised ducks, fish and leaves. Cardew’s work was collected by FR Leavis and his wife Queenie in Cambridge, who studied what Tanya Harrod calls «George Sturt’s elegiac [memoir] The Wheelwright’s Shop» and were «nostalgic for a lost rural community».

Although he described himself as three-quarters homosexual, Cardew married the artist Mariel Russell in 1933. They had three sons – Seth, Cornelius and Ennis. In 1939, he started work on a derelict inn that he converted into the Wenford Bridge Pottery. In 1942, he went to work in the Gold Coast, in Ghana, where he built and managed the Achimota pottery, designed for a handcraft-based industry to combat the dreary «corrugated iron» surroundings of colonial Africa, and allow the Africans to be independent and creative. He had been reading Marx, and moved idealistically from cottage-based art to the use of industry and machines for both beauty and utility. This failed in 1945, when Cardew moved to Vume on the Volta river, in west Africa, and made another attempt at creating a pottery. During this time, Mariel brought up the boys in England and earned her living as a teacher. Cardew returned to England in 1948, to make stoneware at Wenford Bridge. At the Achimota pottery he had an apprentice, Clement Kofi Athey, with whom he fell «desperately in love» and who remained part of his life as long as he lived.

These are the bones of the story, which can also be read as the history of an insane and unbalanced man, alternately insensitive and over-sensitive. Pottery as a vocation has an illusory air of peacefulness – wet hands on the original clay, spinning evenly, the use of «natural» materials, clays and glazes. The tale of Cardew’s potting is full of arduous effort – expeditions in Africa in search of African clays that could make new shapes and subtle colours. In fact, making pots is an unusually violent and chancy business. A kiln may be carefully stocked with vessels that have taken months to construct, sheaves of wood, having been cut, can be put in to keep the heat constant – and an error of temperature, damp, thickness of clay, arrangement on saggers (protective boxes used during firing) can produce a kiln disaster that leaves nothing but «a formless mass of black slag».

Pottery is a constant battle with the old elements – earth, air, fire and water. Harrod is particularly good at describing repeated kiln disasters. She describes Cardew writing to Mariel about the African clays: «These clays are absolutely intoxicating to pot with – so sweet and plastic you can do anything with them.» She describes a summer of ecstasy – making mugs, jugs, plates, pitchers and moulded dishes. Then says: «But we don’t know what these pots looked like. All are lost in the firing – the disaster probably due to Michael’s imperfect construction of an inlet for secondary air.» Or there is a later disastrous firing in 1947, including a deep bowl with a lily that was «not taken from nature, but was a symbol of tropical exuberance and generosity and gravid fruitfulness». This firing ended with beautiful pots that were shattered: «The loveliest and most richly coloured would simply fall to pieces when Michael picked them up.»

Cardew’s own temperament was very like the conditions of his work – simple, concentrated, explosive, dangerous, destructive. He was given to fits of intemperate rage, smashing his pots, damaging people. All his love for Kofi we know from his letters to Mariel, which sound purely self-centred. Harrod observes that when Mariel did finally come to Vume, she noticed things that Cardew had never commented on. He took Mariel back to Vume to collect Kofi, for whom he wanted to create a new job at the Volta pottery; Cardew explained disingenuously that only Kofi knew what he liked to eat, that Kofi needed a change of air, that his knowledge of the Hausa language would be invaluable in Abuja (in Nigeria). Mariel noticed that Vumë was very unhealthy, that the children were suffering from malnutrition, and «what Michael chose to ignore – the misery Kofi’s departure caused to his extended family. His wife and a cluster of children wept and his brothers-in-law glared angrily as Michael, Mariel and Kofi drove off.»

Cardew’s marriage, odd as it was, endured – it was Mariel’s name he called, coming back to consciousness after a near-fatal crash in 1953. Harrod tells the complicated tale with a splendid mixture of imagination and, where required, judgment. She describes Cardew’s self-obsessed letters from Africa as «cruel» and is properly shocked when he decides to omit the period of his early marriage and the birth of his children from his biography, as somehow inauthentic. He appears to have patched together a relationship with his sons, though Seth is recorded as once referring to him as «the devil». He himself coined the aphorism: «Narcissism is not a vice provided you go the whole way with it» – which, Harrod says, «he paired with Sylvia Townsend Warner‘s ‘he too was a beauty lover and loved himself with an untroubled and unselfish love'».

Harrod is the perfect biographer for such a complex and gifted man. She has that great virtue of not inventing what she does not know – there are spaces and absences, such as what Kofi really thought and felt, which are moving. What she does know is extraordinary – she has talked to everyone Cardew knew, both in Africa and on his later travels in the US and Australia. She is sagacious about his relations with colonialism, noting that he confessed to liking the idea that the Africans were innocent and lazy, while avoiding a colonial lifestyle.

Above all, she has a sure and extensive knowledge of the craft world of which Cardew was a part. She records his diatribes against modern studio potters – the great Lucie Rie, for instance, whom he categorised as making «functionalceramics which one couldn’t use for anything at all». Harrod remarks drily that Rie’s tableware, besides being delicate and exquisite, was nonetheless perfectly usable. This reminded me of Edmund de Waal‘s observation that the ideal plain brown slipware was often not as useful as it claimed to be. He quotes Henry Bergen «one of Leach and Cardew’s most supportive collectors, who complained that peasant work is quite out of place in the modern kitchen. Practically all the slipware I have begins to lose its glaze after a short time. Much of it is porous.»

Harrod sums up Cardew’s life as a critique of modern consumer capitalism, a series of romantic refusals, a plea for irrationality. The biography is wonderfully illustrated, transforming our attempt to imagine the man and his work. Photographs of Cardew at work show his intent, uncanny face and his long, wiry fingers, working gently and firmly with the wet clay – we can see the work, the new form, the alert obsession.

And I return again and again to the colour plates of the pots themselves, the lovely range of browns and golds and greenish greys – colours you couldn’t quite imagine, yet all looking natural and right. They have the warmth, the rims and lips, that Cardew found «warm and kind and generous» in the Devon Country pottery as a boy.

 Source: The Guardian, Friday 12 April 2013.

Cloud Atlas (2004) by David Mitchell

Most readers already know the basic structure of Cloud Atlas, which consists of six overlapping stories: a mid-nineteenth-century journal written by Adam Ewing, an American lawyer on his way home from business in Australia; a series of letters from an ambitious young composer, Robert Frobisher, to his lover Rufus Sixsmith, about how he has apprenticed himself to an ailing composer, Vyvyan Ayrs, shortly before the rise of the Nazis; a pastiche of a 1970s reporter/detective novel in which feisty journalist Luisa Rey investigates corruption at a nuclear power plant; a contemporary piece about a small-time publisher, Timothy Cavendish, whose brother tricks him into entering a nursing home; a post-apocalyptic interview with an android, Sonmi-451, who has transcended her programming to become fully human; and campfire account told by Zachry, who lives in a tribal world set even further in the future, and focuses on his encounters with a woman named Meronym, whose people still possess advanced technology. Only the last narrative is told in full: each of the other stories is told in part, with Mitchell returning to each narrative in reverse sequence until the book ends, once again, with Ewing’s account.

I have mixed feelings about this book that have mostly to do with its technical execution. The success of the different accounts, for instance, varies greatly: some of them are quite dull in the first half, but pick up measurably in the second, and it is for this reason that the first-time reader should be somewhat patient with this book. It does drag at first, but as more connections start to appear, it definitely gets more interesting. Two sections in particular stand out for me: the Luisa Rey section is hilarious if you are familiar with 1970s culture, especially because of the hyperbolic way in which Mitchell frames the narrative as a knee-jerk reaction to the times, from the Three-Mile Island accident to Watergate. But the best parts of the book belong to Sonmi, both because she is the most sympathetic character and because Mitchell’s technique seems at its smoothest here.

Mitchell is a very good writer, but he still has some polishing to do before he becomes truly great. Like many other readers, I did not appreciate the silly flourishes he gives to the English language of the future, and my reading speed noticeably slowed in that sixth story because of it. However, the greater technical flaws lay for me in two other areas. First, Mitchell’s characters are not always as interesting or developed as they might be, so that they sometimes seem to be ciphers for ideas rather than complex beings. Second, Mitchell’s use of literary allusions can sometimes be really clumsy. When Cavendish is waking up from his apparent stroke, for instance, he thinks the words “speak, memory” in a very unsubtle allusion to Nabokov’s autobiography. Similarly, there is Mitchell’s decision to call the faceshaper Madam Ovid after the Roman author of The Metamorphoses because, you know, she metamorphoses people. Such references are too unrealistically close to the surface of the text, and as such they are jarring. I really wish authors would trust the intelligence of their readers rather than using such clumsy devices.

Where Mitchell’s novel really hits home, though, lies not so much in the writing, but in the probing questions it asks about human existence. The shifting time periods of the narratives is a calculated tool designed to push readers outside the received political and philosophical assumptions of our time. When we strip these away, Mitchell shows, what remains are the ineradicable differences between weak and strong, which express themselves in different ways throughout human history. Through a logic that is explicitly informed by Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche, Mitchell argues for a qualified version of eternal recurrence: not that history repeats itself literally, but rather that it follows a cycle of birth, strength, decline, and fall in a way that applies equally to individuals, civilizations, and ideas. Mitchell aligns these ideas in the Timothy Cavendish story, which pointedly overlays Cavendish’s decrepitude, both in terms of his physical weakness and his out-dated ideas and slang, with quotes from Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In terms of its ideas, Cloud Atlas delivers a brilliant, incisive blow to the modern reader’s assumptions, a potential for greatness that, unfortunately, is not quite matched by Mitchell’s technical skills as a writer.