Sixtieth Birthday Reflections

Celebrating my 60^th birthday today up here in the northern Lake District might well seem more Wordsworthian than Morrisian; but two Morris-related thoughts do none the less pop up.  First, that I am now only two years away from the age at which Morris himself died.  Not that I intend, across the next twenty-four months, to accompany him on that sad final journey, but I certainly do feel more acutely than ever how premature his death was, even by Victorian middle-class standards, let alone ours.  Did the Morris family make special efforts for his sixtieth birthday, I wonder (no mention of it in Nick Salmon’s Chronology, though)?  How aware could they have been at that point that there would not be a seventieth?

Second, it was only a few years ago, surprisingly – I don’t know why I’d never happened upon the fact before – that I realised that I shared a birthday with the author of Wuthering Heights.  What Morris himself shares with Emily Brontë is a profound investment in the Gothic, but this is a term which has very different meanings, or rather belongs to very different traditions, across their two oeuvres.  I never have really understood the relation between the architectural and political Gothic of Ruskin and Morris, centred on the medieval cathedral, and the female or feminist tradition of Gothic fiction from Anne Radcliffe through the Brontë sisters to Angela Carter and beyond, whose archetypal narrative situation is: inexperienced, middle-class virgin sexually threatened by powerful older male in a rambling country mansion.

Perhaps there is some strong literary-critical study out there that would make sense of all this.  Are they just two parallel cultural traditions that don’t after all have very much to do with each other?  Or might they inter-breed in curious ways?  Does a Ruskinian-Morrisian Gothic text always also release, whether it intends to or not, aspects of the female or feminist Gothic within itself?  That, at least, would explain why Morris’s News from Nowhere, architecturally dominated by a new socialist Gothic as it is, also generates the enigmatic, energetic and decidedly disturbing figure of Ellen in the closing chapters.  Could the opposite also be true?  Might feminist Gothic novels also emit lateral Ruskinian-Morrisian messages that they may or may not be conscious of?

Ah well, I’m not spending my entire 60^th birthday on such abstruse literary and political matters. Time to go and enjoy the Lake District instead!

Jason and the Argonauts

As a child I used to enjoy watching the 1963 stop motion animation film of Jason and the Argonauts on the television with my father; for the time - in those far-back pre-CGI days - it was very striking in its visual effects. 

So today I can enjoy reading Morris’s Life and Death of Jason (1867) for the sake of comparison and contrast with that twentieth-century version, though I can well understand that for many contemporary readers its rhythms are so flat and mellifluous that they may send you to sleep after just a few pages.  It’s something of a truism in the modern criticism of Victorian narrative poems based on myth, legend or history that they only truly come to life if underlying psychic impulses of the author’s own get caught up in the act of composition.  Thus Matthew Arnold’s mini-epic Sohrab and Rustum has what impact it still has, it is argued, because the son of the formidable Dr Arnold of Rugby had his own powerful fears about fathers destroying their sons’ identities, as happens literally in the poem when the great warrior Sohrab unknowingly kills his son Rustum.

So when Morris’s Jason suddenly acquires a lot more narrative vigour in its last two books (for those who have managed to get that far) one suspects that something personal may be going on here too.  Perhaps in this case we have a reverse Sohrab and Rustum situation.  The episode in which Medea persuades King Pelius’s three daughters to chop him up into small pieces is certainly striking enough; did Morris, as a father of two daughters, fear that they might somehow one day overwhelm his identity?  And in the very last book, as a mid-life Jason contemplates abandoning Medea for the much younger woman Glauce, there is again real intensity in Morris’s story-telling.  The usual biographical account of his marriage is all about his depression at Jane gradually abandoning him; but the last book of Jason might suggest that he knew extra-marital temptation on his own side at first hand too.

Next year, 2017, is the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Morris’s Jason, so it might be well worth the William Morris Society organising some systematic, celebratory attention to the poem.

A Grandchild in the House

‘Since we have had a grandchild in the house ... ’: I first quoted these words of Raymond Williams, from his volume of writings on television, back in 1989 when I edited a memorial issue of our Oxford journal News from Nowhere on him and his work.  Now that I have my own first grandchild – a beautiful granddaughter, in fact – I shall be turning with interest to earlier attempts to make William Morris’s writings accessible to children.  I already have a copy of the 1913 Tales from the Earthly Paradise by W.J. Glover, in which, as he remarks in the Preface, ‘From [Morris’s] twenty-four stories twelve have been selected and here rendered for children, largely in Morris’s own words, and it is hoped, in such a way that later they will turn with interest to The Earthly Paradise, the work of a distinguished poet’.  The book also contains twelve full-page colour illustrations by Isabel Bonus to sweeten the reading experience.

Will W.J. Glover’s 1913 prose style still work for children a century later?  I intend to come to a decision about this well before my new granddaughter reaches an age where she wants stories from her grandfather, and, if Glover's versions don’t seem to do the job any longer, may have a go at making my own in the hope that they might serve the early twenty-first century better.  And why only these twelve stories out of the full twenty-four, I wonder?  What was Glover’s principle of selection here and is it still justified, or could there perhaps be a second volume of the other dozen tales too?  And then the thought arises of whether Morris’s other writings mightn’t be adapted for children too.  His late romances would seem a rich potential field here, and perhaps some of the political writings might be amenable to conversion as well.  Since my granddaughter Clodagh Sumiko is currently only three days old, I have a good long while to explore what suddenly seems a whole new field of Morris scholarship which this blog has hitherto neglected.