william morris unbound

William Morris in Lancaster

2012-01-22T04:15:00.000-08:00

Last summer my son and I made a little You Tube video entitled ‘William Morris in Lancaster’ which commemorates Morris’s lecture here on Tuesday 2 November 1886, when he addressed 600 Lancastrians in Palatine Hall on ‘Socialism: The End and the Means’. Three key reasons for doing so. I want first to highlight Morris’s profile locally and to launch a campaign to get a blue plaque celebrating that visit on the wall of Palatine Hall (we already have a plaque which records Charles Dickens’s stays in the Kings Arms Hotel here in 1857 and 1862).

Second, because my students only come across Morris towards the end of our chronologically organised Victorian Literature course, when we get to the 1880s, too late in the day for him really to become a force in their own thinking. So with the You Tube video I can highlight his local presence for them rather earlier in the course and then keep a Morrisian socialist and utopian orientation towards the other writers on it active throughout. I want Morris to be a contemporary ‘tool for thinking’ for them, not just another dusty Victorian.

Part of our You Tube video concerns the history of the Lancaster branch of the Socialist League set up in the wake of Morris’s lecture here; and I feel, thirdly, that we have too little local history of the League, too little sense of its colourful local characters, polemics, struggles, successes and failures. We know the story of some of the key London branches quite well, but there are plenty of other groups up and down the country whose record remains to be fully reconstructed both from the local press and Commonweal reports. So may I suggest that UK readers of this blog consider posting a You Tube account of their own local Socialist League branch? Such videos may only be brief tasters of the full histories we need, but they will at least get us started.

Tweaking the Kelmscott Chaucer

2012-01-17T00:54:00.000-08:00

We are so accustomed to thinking of the Kelmscott Chaucer as the great aesthetic masterpiece of Morris’s later years that it comes as a bit of a shock to learn that in one significant respect at least he was disappointed with it. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t persuade Burne-Jones to illustrate Chaucer’s ruder tales; I don’t suppose he ever really expected that he would be able to! No, it is more a matter, as J.W. Mackail informs us in the biography, that ‘when designing the borders for the Kelmscott Chaucer, he expressed his regret at not being able to fill them with Chaucer’s favourite birds’ because of his incapacity for drawing birds and animals (I, 115).

I wonder, then, whether Morris’s famous meditation on political defeat in A Dream of John Ball might not also apply to aesthetic defeat? Would it be the case that, in the realm of art too, when the finished work comes it turns out not to be quite what you meant, and other men then have to fight for what you meant under another name? In which case, should we not seek out an enterprising artist today who could design us new Kelmscott Chaucer borders which would indeed feature the vigorous bird life of the medieval poet’s own verse, as Morris himself intended they should?

New Year's Thoughts

2012-01-04T06:49:00.000-08:00

Those spectacular fireworks over London at midnight on 31 December said it all. At a time of deep capitalist economic crisis, of accelerating unemployment and inequality, we in England will be offered New Year’s Fireworks, the Queen’s 60th Jubilee and the Olympics to keep us ‘proud to be British’. Or if all that’s not enough, David Cameron may even contrive a new little war - fireworks of a different kind - to add to the media spectacle: Iran, perhaps? ‘Bread and circuses’ indeed; but as bread gets scarcer in the Age of Austerity, so the circuses will get bigger and bolder.

As our Morrisian or Ernst-Blochian ‘principle of hope’ for 2012, we have the Occupy movement; tents in News from Nowhere signify utopian contentment, but for us they now indicate cultural and political struggle itself. If I complain that Occupy is more a question-mark than a movement, that it seems to me to lack strategy, tactics and clear-cut demands, then I reveal myself as the old-fashioned socialist I am; so let me, more generously, be delighted that young people are revealing so much political imagination and spirit of revolt, and let me be as open-minded as they themselves are about where it all might end up.

As for the William Morris Society, I think its own role should become more open too. As we enter the 21st century, so our old 19th century heroes begin to fall some 200 years behind us (as with the Dickens and Browning bi-centenaries this year); and discussion of their lives and works risks becoming an arcane hobby. We Morrisians are fortunate, however, in that our hero is a writer of the future, not just of the Victorian past, and that his greatest work is set in the mid-22nd century, not the 19th. So we need the Kelmscott Coach House to ring out once again with utopian debate about political choices and future destinations; and for starters we might well invite some of the London Occupy people in to set out their vision for us.

What do you think of it so far?: Comedy in Utopia

2011-12-27T08:19:00.000-08:00

Took my Mum for a Boxing Day visit to the Eric Morecambe statue at Morecambe seafront yesterday. We always used to watch Morecambe and Wise Christmas specials at home in my teenage days, and we all remain fans, even so many years later. When I was a Lancaster city councillor there was some talk of developing a Museum of Comedy at Morecambe to build on the success of the statue, though sadly that has not happened. Not yet, anyway.

Our visit made me wonder about comedy and humour in utopia. One doesn’t think of utopia as a laugh-a-minute genre – indeed, quite the opposite, with those long turgid lectures we tend to get from the Old Man who Knows Everything (to borrow H.G. Wells’s phrase). None the less, there are jokes (as well as much generalised neighbourliness) in utopia; and Morris’s News from Nowhere does occasionally reflect on the nature of humour in an ideal society.

For it may be that the threshold of comedy will be very much lower in utopia. When William Guest complains that the remarks of Dick Hammond’s workmates are ‘not much of a joke’, Dick retorts that ’everything seems like a joke when we have a pleasant spell of work on, and good fellows merry about us’ (ch.VII). So perhaps, in utopia, you wouldn’t need a Museum of Comedy as such because social life in general will have been ‘Eric Morecambeised’. My Mum certainly hopes so!

The Ethics of Horse Riding

2011-12-24T09:33:00.000-08:00

‘Up and away through the drifting rain!/ Let us ride to the Little Tower again’. These two lines, from Morris’s poem ‘The Little Tower’, constitute for me the most exciting beginning in all his poetry and make one realise how pervasive the experience of horse-riding is across it.

There are lonely horse-rides in Morris’s poetry, as when Lancelot makes his way dolefully across the Wiltshire downs in ‘King Arthur’s Tomb’; but the much more characteristic experience is of vigorous fellowship on horseback. ‘We rode together/In the winter weather/To the broad mead under the hill’; or ‘For many days we rode together/Yet met we neither friend nor foe’. The latter poem is even entitled ‘Riding Together’, which announces the ethic behind this series of texts clearly enough.

Morris had himself experienced such equine companionship on a brief riding holiday with Charles Faulkner in Wales in April 1875, and more extendedly on his two Iceland trips of 1871 and 1873. In News from Nowhere the children in the Kensington forest are ‘used to tumbling about the little forest ponies’ (ch.V), so one imagines that riding together counts for something in utopia too. That being so, I suspect that here is another new activity which the Morris Society should be promoting – Morrisian riding parties across the English countryside.

I am influenced in all this by that wonderful Edwin Muir poem ‘The Horses’ which I studied for A-level with my teacher Mr A.J. Webster. After a nuclear apocalypse humanity in that poem has to tentatively relearn its old, healthy relationship with horses; and in our own environmentally threatened epoch we surely have to do that too. Let us Morrisians lead the way!

Exploring Psychogeography

2011-12-17T03:28:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed Radio 3’s programme on psychogeography the other day, though if you are going to delve into its origins in Situationism in Paris, you really ought to find a presenter with enough French to pronounce his subjects’ names properly (Guy Debord, not Des Bords). And from 1960s Paris we moved on to 1990s London, with interesting interviews with such recent practitioners as Iain Sinclair and Will Self. If this is a literary movement that eventuates in the intriguing concept of ‘magical Marxism’, then Morrisians certainly ought to know about it, and I shall investigate that term further and report back.

But I also found myself wondering whether the powerful reimaginings of city space we already have in the utopian tradition, such as Morris’s transfigured London in News from Nowhere or Callenbach’s new San Francisco in Ecotopia, aren’t themselves exercises in psychogeography. Surely only a ‘punk walker’ on an unusually intense dérive (or drift) could re-experience the House of Commons as a Morrisian Dung Market?

And I got very excited about one particular psychogeographical practice which seems to suggest a whole new hermeneutics for utopian writings. The Situationists, it appears, used to attempt such bizarre experiments as navigating Paris with a map of the Berlin Underground, defamiliarising their home city rewardingly in the process. So could we not cross utopian wires in a loosely analogous way? Suppose we read News from Nowhere as if it were Marge Piercy’s Woman at the Edge of Time (in which case Ellen might be a time traveller from the future), or insert bits of News from Nowhere and H.G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia into each other, as if they are aspects of a single complex utopian vision? The reading experiments that ensue would probably cover the whole spectrum of psychogeography itself, from the powerfully illuminating to the completely wacky!

Tearing off Heads: the Animals of Ted Hughes

2011-12-07T00:37:00.000-08:00

Lot of fuss being made about the poet Ted Hughes this week, as he finally gets his memorial in Westminster Abbey. As a keen fisherman, Morris might have approved of the piscatorial quote that graces the Hughes memorial slab, but what would a Morrisian approach to Hughes’s poetry look like? I was a keen fan of his early animal poetry myself once, and vividly remember a reading, in Bristol in 1978, at which this dark, charismatic figure deeply impressed my female friends who were present (masochistic Isabella Lintons to his rugged Heathcliff, perhaps).

All those formidable poetic hawks, pike, jaguars, foxes! ‘My manners are tearing off heads’. Nature, then, as a radical alternative to civilisation; but Hughes can alas only conceive Nature as aggressive, predatory, ruthless, which is to say that he projects on to it the rapaciously competitive values of capitalism itself. Far from being any alternative to the system, Hughes’s early vision of Nature is – irony of ironies - just the pure distillation of that vile system’s inner values. So perhaps it’s apt enough that he gets his memorial at its heart in the Abbey after all.

British Association of Literary Theory

2011-12-04T07:25:00.000-08:00

‘The advantage of being old’, as F.R. Leavis remarks in his late writings, ‘is that you can say, “I was there”’. And in a more modest way middle age has that privilege too; for I can say that I was there, as a postgraduate student of Terry Eagleton’s at Oxford in the early 1980s, as wave after wave of newly translated work by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Hans Robert Jauss and others came across from Europe and transformed the foundations of literary studies in this country. Thus the genre of ‘literary theory’ was born here – heady days indeed!

Now, however, we are more likely to hear of the ‘death of theory’ than of its birth, a slogan which means various things. First, that the exciting polemics of the early days are long since over, with literary theory now routinised as a core element of undergraduate English literature syllabuses. Second, that the grand projects of theory are seen as suspect and a ‘return’ to supposedly new versions of formalism or humanism is called for. Third, that many of the founding European and American theorists are indeed now dead or on their last legs.

Are we mourning literary theory, then? Well, perhaps; but as Freud argued, mourning is an active work not a passive condition, as nicely summed up in Samuel Beckett’s formulation: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’. So I suggest that we ‘mourn’ theory as actively as we possibly can, and one good way of doing this will be to establish a British Association of Literary Theory (BALT), a professional association to match those we already have for such academic fields as Romanticism, Victorian Studies and Modernism. And if we do set up BALT, we shall surely find that, as with Mark Twain, reports of literary theory’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

Theory of Everything

2011-11-23T10:35:00.000-08:00

200 posts already clocked up on this Morris-and-utopias blog, and with this item I start my next 200; so this perhaps constitutes a good moment to pause and take stock. I have previously wondered whether there is any topic which could in principle not feature here (31.03.2011). Dog shit, you might think, would be one such; but no, for it briefly features in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopia Herland: ‘when Jeff told them of the effect of dogs on sidewalk merchandise and the streets generally, they found it hard to believe’ (ch.5). But if you are a dog lover who would prefer your canine turds rather more thoroughly utopianised, you just have to turn to Aldous Huxley’s Island: ‘”Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! Even dogs’ messes.” She pointed at a formidable specimen almost at their feet’ (ch.14).

My good friend Pamela White, when challenged to suggest a topic I would be able to make nothing of, promptly uttered ‘doughnuts’; and I must confess that I am still struggling with that one, though there is a brief mention of ‘the underflannel-and-doughnuts mother’ in Herland (ch.12). My students at the University of Notre Dame always wanted to bring doughnuts along for breakfast at our early morning seminars, but I don’t suppose that can count here.

I used to think that it was the genre of the blog itself – nimble, opportunistic, serendipitous – which meant that it could potentially scoop up any kind of topic into its capacious maw; and I’m sure that’s partly true. But now I’m inclined to feel that it is just as much the focus of this particular blog, its Morris-and-utopias emphasis, which makes this greed-for-content possible. For the literary genre of utopia would seem to have an in-built encyclopaedism to it; it wants to map out every conceivable aspect of life in its perfect world, so that in principle no topic whatsoever, no detail however tiny, escapes its totalising ambitions, which are well symbolised by that giant index or ‘universal eye’ of utopia in central Paris in H.G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia. While this might in some ways be politically scary, it can also lead to an agreeable aesthetic quirkiness too. How often, for example, should you have your teeth checked by the dentist in utopia? Well, the answer is there for the taking in B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (ch.22).

So I confidently predict that, though I haven’t come across it just yet, there will be some utopia out there somewhere in which doughnuts will turn out to be the main staple of utopian diet.

The Dickens Reading Project

2011-11-14T04:49:00.000-08:00

The William Morris Society is not, as far as I know, planning any particular event to celebrate the Charles Dickens bi-centenary next year; and yet given both Morris’s personal enthusiasm for Dickens’s novels and their appearance in some of our most memorable utopias, you would think it certainly ought to. So here is a Swiftian ‘modest proposal’ in that direction.

I suggest that the Society embark upon a long-term ‘Dickens Reading Project’ starting next autumn. It would devote one of its meetings per year to a particular Dickens novel, drafting in a Dickens specialist to lecture on it on that occasion, but also doing all it can to encourage widespread reading of the book among Society members by discussion across the year in the Newsletter. To pluck a novel out of the air as a starting point, let us take Barnaby Rudge, which Morris used to read aloud to Jane Burden as a significant part of his wooing of her in his Oxford days (not a tactic many of us would be inclined to use in our own relationships, perhaps).

Several years into this Reading Project, we would be reaching that happy position evoked in News from Nowhere where, in relation to Dickensian nicknames, Dick Hammond cheerfully observes to William Guest, ‘I see you take the allusion’ (ch.III); and perhaps a good few years further on we might even collectively rival that ‘exceptional familiarity with Dickens’ which Julian West claims in Edward Bellamy’s utopia (ch.XIII).

Sequels to Utopia

2011-11-09T04:02:00.000-08:00

‘You must take me there someday, darling ... I want to see your country’, remarks Ellador to Vandyck Jennings in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), which at once gives you the easiest of sequels. A utopian woman falls in love with the visitor to utopia (why they do this so regularly is matter for another post in its own right, perhaps); but instead of settling with her in utopia, as Julian West does with Edith Leete in Bellamy’s Looking Backward, the visitor now decides to take her back home to his own bad society. And there you have your volume two, With Her in Ourland (1916) in Gilman’s case.

Samuel Butler had already experimented with this narrative paradigm in Erewhon, where Higgins escapes from utopia in a balloon with Arowhena. In the sequel, Erewhon Revisited, written some thirty years later, we learn, however, that this hasn’t turned out too well. Arowhena has never really felt at home in London and she dies prematurely, a rather defeated and poignant figure. Gilman’s Ellador is made of sterner stuff, fortunately, and gets on well enough with Van in ‘Ourland’.

So I suppose the readiest model of a sequel to News from Nowhere, if Morris had ever been inclined to pen one, would have been to have Ellen return with William Guest to late-Victorian London as we see it in the opening pages of the book. Taking your utopian woman home, however, imposes more narrative problems for time-travelling utopias like Morris and Bellamy than it does for spatially-travelling ones like Butler and Gilman. If you can’t depend on an H.G. Wells-style Time Machine, then you must invent other temporal procedures – mesmerism or dream-vision – which work well enough in one direction but are not so easily reversed.

On the other hand, Morris’s Ellen shows so much interest in history in general, and in what she herself might have been in the nineteenth century in particular, to make us feel that a further dream-vision in which she woke up in 1890s Hammersmith alongside Guest might make a very lively book. Anyone out there fancy having a go at writing it on Morris’s behalf?

The Crisis of the Humanities

2011-11-02T10:52:00.000-07:00

I have just received the latest issue of the Oxford University alumni magazine Oxford Today, the front cover of which dramatically announces: ‘Whither the Humanities?: Uncovering a Global Crisis in our Midst’. Martha Nussbaum, Jonathan Bate and Colin Blakemore contribute articles on this crisis, which comes about, of course, as a capitalism lurching into deep economic trouble cuts back spending on what to it appear to be such merely decorative luxuries as History, Modern Languages, Literary Studies, Anthropology and so on.

What would the Morrisian angle on this lively current debate be? Three things, I think. First, that we in the Humanities should not, as the main focus of our energies, be trying to justify our activities to our capitalist pay masters; rather, we should be endeavouring to replace them. Which is to say that the ultimate function of the Humanities – the way in which they finally prove themselves to be humane, as it were - is not self-cultivation or the disinterested free play of the mind or to provide content for new creative industries, but rather to give oppressed groups intellectual resources with which to challenge their oppressors.

Secondly, that any contemporary practice of the Humanities which does not do this is as withered and dead as Morris believed the art and poetry of his own time to be; it is, that is to say, merely the privileged pursuit of a few in some leafy Oxbridge college garden with no invigorating wider social base. Political intellectuals (or ‘soldiers of the Cause’, in Morris’s own rousing phrase) will tactically support the ‘defence of the Humanities’ by the liberal-humanists, but their heart and energy will be elsewhere: in organising broader oppositional forces.

Thirdly, that the Humanities will one day – but now in a benign, indeed utopian sense - wither away, because the values they currently represent and protect will have become incarnated in everyday life itself. In a post-capitalist economy organised around mutuality, creativity and pleasure in work rather than private profit, the Humanities as a specialist preserve of aesthetic values banished from daily life will simply cease to be. No doubt intellectual enquiry and cultural expression will still continue, but the forms they then take are unlikely to be recognisable to dinosaurs of the old social order like us.

Gifts in Utopia

2011-10-29T04:34:00.000-07:00

‘Doubtless the Utopia is a necessary part of every Socialist’s library’, writes Morris in his preface to the Kelmscott edition of Thomas More’s book. So we must read and re-read it, and perhaps it may even have lessons for how we approach Morris’s own utopia, not least in the question of the role of the visitor to the new society. We tend to think of the visitor to utopia as passively wondering at the marvels of the new world, but this is by no means simply the case for More’s Raphael Hythloday.

Raphael learns much from Utopia, no doubt about it; but he also brings gifts to it – Greek literature, the manufacture of paper, the art of printing, and a knowledge of Christianity. So he certainly has an active and not merely a receptive role. Moreover, it is not at all clear that these gifts will be simple boons to the Utopians. Already, before he got to the island, Hythloday had taught local mariners the use of the lodestone in navigation, which then tempts them into dangerously reckless voyages. So this first, pre-Utopia gift already proves decidedly ambivalent; and the gift of Christianity itself later causes dissension, when one new Utopian convert starts preaching violently against all the other existing varieties of faith on the island. The visitor’s gifts may thus contaminate and even disrupt the perfect realm he has entered.

Can we carry this model across from More’s Hythloday to William Guest in News from Nowhere? Can we think of Guest, too, not just as the passive recipient of Nowhere’s benign pedagogy, but as an active, even perhaps a dangerous participant in the new society? What gifts might he be imparting to it, knowingly or unknowingly, and what effects may they have on the host society? Might Guest be about to trouble Nowhere as disastrously as Ellen declares she disturbs men’s minds?

In Memoriam: Peter Preston

2011-10-20T11:07:00.000-07:00

Peter Preston, who died on Tuesday, had been a senior figure in the William Morris Society for many years. He brought to the public side of that role a gravitas which made him a highly effective representative of the Society to the external world, but there was also a patience, close attention to detail and skilled diplomacy which made him a most able chair of the Society during some difficult times. Peter was always one of the most forward-looking of the ‘old guard’ on the Committee, and he was certainly open to the idea of the Society taking back the first-floor Coach House flat (which it currently rents out) for Morrisian purposes – which in my view is the next necessary big step forward for us.

Peter’s academic work across the decades falls into two categories: his writings on Morris, which many Society members will already know, and his work on D.H. Lawrence, which related more to his professional career at the University of Nottingham. I’m not sure that Peter himself ever fully brought these two areas into relation with each other, though if life had been kinder and granted him more years, he might have done. So perhaps we must regard his Morris and Lawrence interests, in Adorno’s great phrase, as the ‘torn halves of an integral freedom to which, however, they do not add up’. Certainly for us, wanting to honour Peter’s memory by extending his work, it is the difficult relationship between those two authors which will most concern us.

For at stake there, implicitly, is the great question of Morris and modernism – of whether Morris can in any useful way be seen as a modernist, whether and how his work influenced later modernists (from Yeats to the Bauhaus), of whether (beyond the question of conscious influence) Morris’s utopianism survives in modernist experimentalism in general; and – beyond even all of this – of how the Morris-modernism relation needs to be rethought in our own postmodern epoch.

I am deeply grateful for the personal support Peter Preston gave me in Morrisian matters over the years, and will endeavour to keep that flame burning in the decades to come (including his project to get Morris’s diaries into print). I recently reported back to him from the Ottawa conference and hope it gave him some comfort to know that Morris studies were in such good heart internationally. And I am grateful too for the stimulus to thought that his work at the Morris-Lawrence frontier gives us; for to keep Morris current, as Peter most wished, we shall have both to modernise and postmodernise him.

Pierre Macherey and Utopia

2011-10-16T08:48:00.000-07:00

The very first time I heard Terry Eagleton speak was way back in Spring 1978 – not in person, but on the radio. My undergraduate flatmate Julian Pattison and I sat in a room in our house in Royal York Crescent in Bristol listening to Terry give an account of the work of French theorist Pierre Macherey on Radio 4. I have no doubt that Terry’s summary of Macherey was as beautifully lucid as he always is, but since Julian and I were part of a still militantly Leavisite English department, we didn’t have much grounding in literary theory with which to make sense of it. Indeed, for the Bristol University English department in 1978 literary theory just didn’t exist.

It now strikes me, decades later, that Macherey’s account of the relations of ideology and literary form, which may or may not be applicable to literature in general, is certainly apt enough – indeed inescapable – in relation to the genre of utopia. For any utopia (much more so than most works in most other literary genres) can be formulated in general ideological terms as a particular set of social values, preferences and customs: urban living, technological innovation and centralised organisation for Edward Bellamy, say; rural living, low-tech craft-work and general decentralisation for Morris.

But once you put such ideological values into literary form, into motion, into a narrative which you hope will embody them and make them more persuasive, then, as Pierre Macherey insisted, something very odd happens. Literary form has, as it were, a mind of its own, it internally distantiates the ideology it is supposed to be obediently embodying; narrative puts the skids under your ideological values in the very act of incarnating them, as Milton famously found in Paradise Lost. In my view, things are going wrong as well as right in Morris’s News from Nowhere, as narrative form puts even that work’s admirable socialist values into crisis.

So as Eagleton’s voice expounding Macherey comes nostalgically and hauntingly back to me across the decades, I’m grateful to him for that early introduction to such a key literary theorist.

Morris and Son

2011-10-10T05:54:00.002-07:00

In ‘The Man Born to be King’, the King remarks: ‘Though I had hoped to have a son/To help me get the day’s work done’ (Earthly Paradise, I, p.118). In ‘The Son of Croesus’, the wood-dwellers declare: ‘Dost thou not know, O King, how men will strive/That they, when dead, still in their sons may live?’ (EP, II, p.150). Georgiana Burne-Jones once applied this motif to William Morris himself, who of course had only daughters. She wrote to Sydney Cockerell: ‘Have you ever tried to imagine a son of Morris? I have tried to try, and failed!’ (MacCarthy, p.192).

Dombey and Son, Morris and Son: what Morris did not get in life, he bequeathed himself in fiction. For by making old Hammond in News from Nowhere the grandson of William Guest, the visitor to utopia (who is the Morris-surrogate in that text), which thereby also makes the hyper-athletic Dick Hammond Guest’s great-greatgrandson, Morris endows himself with the sturdy male progeny he did not achieve in life itself. And since Dick and Clara themselves have two children, this Morris lineage clearly continues well on into the 22nd century utopian future (if at the cost of a certain narcissism in his utopia).

The Deaths of Miners, The Idea of Communism

2011-09-29T06:06:00.000-07:00

We in the UK thought we no longer had a mining industry, and it’s taken the deaths of four miners earlier this month at a Swansea Valley mine and of Gerry Gibson on Tuesday at the Kellingley Colliery in North Yorkshire (where three miners have now died in three years) to remind us that we do. William Morris’s family fortune itself came from mining, though of copper rather than of coal, and he would presumably have known of the great Victorian mining disasters: 361 dead at Oaks Pit, Barnsley, in December 1866; 209 dead at Blantyre Mine in Lanarkshire in 1877; 295 dead at the Albion Colliery in Glamorgan in 1894. And in April 1887 Morris was speaking as a Socialist leader to some 6000 striking miners at Horton in Northumberland.

As I’ve noted before in this blog, my paternal grandfather and his sons, my Uncles Harry, Jack and Bill were all miners; and Grandad, unlike my uncles, was an active member of the Communist Party into the bargain. Years ago when I took my Mum and Dad to Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, Churchill’s birthplace, my father was rigid with anger and hatred because ‘Churchill wanted to shoot your Grandad’, i.e. had in 1942 wanted to turn the army on the striking miners at Betteshanger Colliery in Kent, where Grandad worked.

So this Communist family background gives a strange resonance to current attempts by philosophers like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zižek to reinvent ‘the Idea of Communism’. Some of Badiou’s formulations about the nature of personal political commitment are very stirring; and one can certainly understand why he wants to separate off a Platonic Idea of Communism from the Leninist party-form or the Stalinist State. The question is then what new organisational forms might become possible and appropriate (and, crucially, effective) when you do so; and that is an issue in which we shall surely find Morris’s own political thought – libertarian, decentralist and utopian but still emphatically socialist rather than anarchist (indeed, self-declaredly communist too) – as offering help and stimulus even today.

Jeremy Paxman on Morris

2011-09-25T04:18:00.000-07:00

I’ve always enjoyed Jeremy Paxman as a famously tough presenter on BBC’s Newsnight programme (though also feeling that, in terms of class formation, he is too close to many of the politicians he deals with). But Paxman has other intellectual strings to his bow too. I possess his excellent anthology, Fish, Fishing and the Meaning of Life (1995), as a treasured fortieth birthday present from my good friend Robin Gable. His recent BBC series on Victorian painting was consistently interesting, as is the book that emerged from it. And his undergraduate studies in English Literature at St Catherines College, Cambridge, were put to good use in his genial tome on The English: A Portrait of a People (1998).

However, I want to challenge Paxman’s Morris scholarship in this latter volume, because the slip he makes here is not just his own. On p.170 of the book he quotes Morris as saying that, in England, ‘all is measured, mingled, varied, gliding easily one thing into another, little rivers, little plains ... little hills, little mountains ... neither prison nor palace but a decent home’. Morris does indeed say all this in his 1877 lecture on ‘The Lesser Arts’; and many other people cut the quote off at this very same point. But if we follow it through into the next paragraph we find this panegyric to gentle Englishness giving way to quite different feelings. For ‘it would indeed be hard if there were nothing else in the world, no wonders, no terrors, no unspeakable beauties’.

This is the Morris of Iceland rather than England, of the sublime rather than the beautiful, of the late romances at their most disturbing; and it is that Morris, in my view, that we have more need of today. For Morrisian gentle Englishness is too easily captured by nostalgic conservatism on one side of the political divide and by contemporary Green politics on the other. The Morris of the sublime, however, shakes those too easy identities up. He stands for, and enacts in his best work, disruption, upheaval, danger and challenge, breaks rather than continuities, the possibility of total transformation, not modest tinkering here and there.

Ottawa Morris Conference

2011-09-19T01:18:00.000-07:00

As for the Ottawa Morrisfest itself, it was entitled ‘Rethinking Morris, Rethinking Ourselves’, and comprised a weekend of intensive debate by Canadian, American and British scholars in the genial fifth-floor seminar room of the Ottawa University Arts Building. Michelle Weinroth and Paul LeDuc Browne were our indefatigable hosts; and the military presence outside our hotel on both mornings served as a reminder that that particular weekend was also the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack on New York.

Plenty of stimulating rethinking of Morris, with a strong focus on how we get beyond older debates which polarised his aesthetics and politics. But how do we ‘rethink ourselves’ too? How do we pose a Morrisian version of that old Matthew Arnold question (in ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’): ‘And what am I, that I am here?’ Or, to put it in more up-to-date terminology, how might we factor the subject into the equation, as Frederic Jameson would phrase it, achieving a properly dialectical self-reflexivity? In a weekend much concerned with frames and framing, what are the frames in and through which we now respond to Morris, the situations to which we want him to be a response?

A quick checklist might include: 1. recent developments in literary studies (the ‘death of theory’, the ‘religious turn’, the rise of creative writing); 2. current national-political situations in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, such as the August riots in London for UK scholars (as I tried to show in earlier posts), or Canada’s alarming drift rightwards in the Stephen Harper years, or the frustrating Obama presidency for US colleagues; and 3. longer-term epochal-global trends that shape us all down to our toenails, such as economic globalisation, immigration and multiculturalism, postmodernism in culture, the digitalisation of communications, climate change and global warming, the rise of China to superpower status and, finally, 9/11 itself and the whole ‘war on terror’ that followed so disastrously in its wake.

‘Rethinking ourselves’, then, need not mean some touchy-feely collective therapy session, but rather this effort to get some grip on the historical determinants that make us the Morris scholars that we are. For we are most certainly not, to borrow E.M. Forster’s old image, sitting synchronously around a table at the British Museum with J.W. Mackail, Robin Page Arnot, J.M.S. Tompkins and E.P. Thompson.

Questions of Travel

2011-09-16T06:20:00.000-07:00

While travelling to and from Michelle Weinroth’s recent Morrisfest in Ottawa, I decided to read, as the most apt book I could think of, Lavinia Greenlaw’s Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland (2011), a curious little tome which slips handily in your pocket when you’re on the road. On the righthand pages, Greenlaw gives extended extracts from the 1871 Iceland travel diary; and on the lefthand pages, underneath a key Morris phrase, she offers her own brief, bulletpoint-style reflections. Some lefthand pages are entirely blank, others have half a dozen Greenlawian reflections which almost constitute a small poem in their own right.

What she does, in effect, is to subtly x-ray out the general issues of travel – philosophical, ethical, therapeutic – which get lost in the sheer welter of Icelandic detail that Morris throws at us. The quality of her commentary is mixed, sometimes falling into banality (‘You are moving and so things keep changing’), now and again sounding rather mystically portentous, and occasionally addressing Morris as an analyst might a patient (‘At last you let yourself be carried’); but also often achieving some startling illuminations, especially in her delicate metaphorising of some of the literal details of the trip (dark passages, floating helpless, messes in boxes).

What Greenlaw does to Morris is effectively what Roland Barthes did to Balzac in his wonderful study S/Z in 1971: break the primary text up into fragments and offer a subtle commentary on these discrete units. She has brilliantly found a new form for writing about Morris, and for this we can only be grateful; for increasingly my feeling about Morris studies is that we need to be more experimental, to invent new writing projects which might lead to the discovery of new content, rather than packaging new content into the familiar form of the scholarly essay. I have myself been trying to contribute to new modes in my blogging and tweeting on Morris, and intend to pursue them further in the form of a News from Nowhere sequel in due course; and I therefore salute Lavinia Greenlaw as a bold pioneer in such formal iconoclasms.

Thor the Mighty Thunder God

2011-09-07T00:48:00.000-07:00

As a boy, I was a great fan of the Marvel Comics hero Thor, and he was my way into Norse mythology in general: Loki, Odin, Asgard, Yggdrasil and all the rest of it. I loved the way Thor demolished enemies with his mighty hammer, which he also used to fly through the air (I was easily pleased in those days). And now, so many years later, Thor is back, in Kenneth Branagh’s recent film where Chris Hemsworth plays the Thunder God in his earthbound exile. Watching the various recent Marvel Comics movies – Captain America last month - I at once switch back into the old teenage mode of utterly uncritical enjoyment.

But Thor features in high culture as well as mass culture. Coleridge once planned a long poem on ‘The Excursion of Thor’; and the Thunder God makes brief appearances in Matthew Arnold’s narrative poem ‘Balder Dead’, where he grieves for his more thoughtful brother and muscularly pushes Balder’s ship of death off the beach into the sea. He gets a brief mention in Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung, though his one-eyed father Odin plays rather more of a role in that northern epic; and there are a couple of good evocations of him at the start of ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ in The Earthly Paradise, where ‘Thor’s hammer gleamed o’er Thor’s red-bearded face’.

And now A.S. Byatt has written a novel called Ragnarok, in which Thor will presumably play a major part in the final battle or ‘twilight’ of the Norse gods. So there seems to be much mileage left in my old boyhood hero the Thunder God. I wish Morris himself, with his passionate enthusiasm for Norse culture, had made rather more of him, but we can at least hope that Byatt has now penned the worthy mythic novel of which Morris himself alas wasn’t quite capable. My Amazon order for the Byatt book has just gone in; I shall report back.

The Kissed Mouth

2011-09-02T01:21:00.000-07:00

There is an excellent blog called ‘The Kissed Mouth’ (after Rossetti’s Bocca Bociata), which deals with Pre-Raphaelite art in a very lively way; and its title makes me wonder which are the most memorable kisses in Morris’s work.

Four examples leap to mind. First, the kiss between Lancelot and Guenevere in the garden in ‘The Defence of Guenevere’ where, as the Queen puts it, ‘both our mouths went wandering in one way,/And aching sorely, met among the leaves’ (ll.136-7). It’s a curious formulation, which reminds me of how the fragmented part-objects of the human body – eyes, arms, hands - live their autonomous life in T.S. Eliot’s early poetry. The Morrisian mouths go wandering on their way towards the compromising kiss, while their human owners dissociate themselves from the truth of what is actually happening here.

The second kiss is that imagined in ‘Concerning Geffray Teste Noire’, which is surely the ultimate Pre-Raphaelite femme fatale kiss of all time, coming at you through the air as lethally as a Bruce Lee shuriken: ‘I saw you kissing once, like a curved sword/That bites with all its edge, did your lips lie’. Better run fast if you ever see that one coming!

As for socialist kisses, well, the one William Guest receives from Annie in News from Nowhere, which ‘almost took away from me my desire for the expedition’ up the Thames (ch.XXI), must have been pretty impressive.

And finally, Morgan le Fay, in ‘Ogier the Dane’ from The Earthly Paradise, has lips that might ‘give at last the kiss unspeakable’, which sounds intriguing. That wouldn’t be a mid-Victorian euphemism for oral sex, by any chance, would it?

From Riots to Utopia

2011-08-30T00:16:00.000-07:00

I’ve been expecting the Saturday ‘Review’ section of the Guardian newspaper to devote its ‘Ten of the Best’ column to the subject of Riots in Literature; but it hasn’t done so yet. As a Victorianist, I’d start with the attack on Thornton’s mill in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, follow it up by the riot in George Eliot’s Felix Holt, and eventually pass on to twentieth-century examples. Such a column would be salutary in reminding us what a recurrent social phenomenon riots are, but in the present climate of moralistic indignation the Guardian probably feels it would be accused of trivialising the issue by converting it to literary history in this way.

How deep has the shock of those riots actually been, what impulses to personal change have they given to those of us who weren’t ourselves out on the streets earlier this month? To me, they demonstrated how much anger there is out there against capitalism and what it’s doing to people’s lives, but also how shapeless, unstructured and therefore self-defeating and ugly such anger currently is. They’ve made me ask again what an effective anti-capitalist politics might look like. When New Labour made the Labour Party hopeless, I joined the Greens expectantly and even became a Green Party city councillor for a while (1999-2003); yet now I feel that we have to reinvent the wheel and get the term ‘socialism’ back into circulation all over again instead. But how?

When William Morris lectured here in Lancaster on 2 November 1886 his topic was ‘Socialism: The End and the Means’. So even if we had the means, i.e. an effective socialist party (which we don’t), we would still require the ‘end’, i.e., an inspiring vision of the good society which that party was working towards. Which is precisely where utopianism comes in. Analysis of the causes of the riots, fine; new efforts at Left political organisation in the present, yes indeed; but happy visions of the future too, absolutely. Marxism has always been chary of utopia, and in a postmodern ‘image-culture’ that traditional suspicion was reinforced by a feeling that all positive utopian images were already somehow incorporated by the system.

But the great importance of Morris is in showing us that, however vulnerable the activity of utopian mapping and speculation may be, it is entirely indispensable to the Left too. We still need our own News from Nowhere, from a good future whose outlines we can as yet barely see, if we are to have any chance of remaining sane and resolute in the present.

Stories in Landscapes

2011-08-24T00:51:00.000-07:00

I feel that, under pressure of recent social events, I have been neglecting the ‘creative writing’ dimension of this blog, its aspiration to generate more Morrisian text, to finish his uncompleted works or to speculate on the shape and sources of new ones; and this is an emphasis that can apply to Morris’s circle as much as the man himself.

Georgiana Burne-Jones, for example, informs us that her husband ‘enjoyed making up stories about his backgrounds, as he painted them’, which might license us to make up our own stories on the basis of such haunting paintings as ‘Golden Stairs’ and ‘Mirror of Venus’. Such new tales may prove a good deal more disturbing or even science-fictional than you might at first think. ‘Now and then I want to see Hell in a landscape’, Burne-Jones himself remarked, criticising the too placid scenery of Surrey; and he once, according to his wife, offered ‘a description, I remember, of an era when “giant white cockroaches” reigned supreme’. Not Rise of the Planet of the Apes, then, but Rise of the Cockroaches instead.

So get down to your local museum or art gallery, locate its Burne-Jones holdings, and wait in front of them, pen and notebook in hand, until narrative inspiration descends.

Architecture and Social Unrest

2011-08-20T02:49:00.000-07:00

At one point in his three-part Channel 4 TV series on ‘The Secret Life of Buildings’, Tom Dyckhoff showed us images of pitched Parisian street battles from 1968, to which French architecture attempted to respond through the young Richard Rogers’s Pompidou Centre, conceived (as Dyckhoff remarked) as a ‘building for the people’. Might we then expect to see architecture, Morris’s great art of arts, respond to our recent riots?

Dyckhoff is a cheery, chirpy presenter and his series was entertaining and illuminating in equal measure. He examined the effects on human well-being of domestic, work and leisure buildings by wearing mobile eye trackers through a shopping mall, having an EEG cap strapped to his head in an open-plan office, and even by being doused in an ice-cold bath for as long as he could endure in different architectural settings.

The programme on working spaces was in the grip of a spatial ‘reformism’ which was all about introducing architectural wit and variety within existing power-relations. Dyckhoff showed us how you can ‘de-institutionalise’ prison-like old schools with colour and anti-geometry in ways that will calm troublesome kids down (perhaps this will work with rioters too); just as, over in Europe, you can brighten up – or even combine - office and industrial spaces in ways that improve staff morale (BMW’s factory in Leipzig). But there is all the difference in the world between redesigning a building to maximise your workers’ comfort, efficiency and productivity under capitalism; and designing a space, in post-capitalist society, in which workers may democratically govern their own production processes (see Morris’s own utopian writings on factories as they ‘might be’).

However, the first programme on domestic buildings had made more telling political points, noting that since 1980 there has been no legal minimum size for UK houses and that we are accordingly building some of the smallest and worst-lit dwellings in Europe. And the final programme on leisure buildings was more radical still, as Dyckhoff denounced 1980s ‘free market fundamentalism’ and tackled leading architects such as Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas about buildings (like the Bilbao Guggenheim, illustrated above) which are zany high-tech spectacles rather than genuine social spaces, which latter he found exemplified by the demotic idiom of the 1951 Royal Festival Hall in London and, as I have noted, the Paris Pompidou Centre.

Architecture alone will not solve our present violent social discontents, as Morris in his socialist phase knew well enough; but since he always was so concerned for its ‘prospects ... in civilisation’ (to borrow that lecture title), we might well now wonder whether it will find creative ways to respond to the riots we have just witnessed. Can video-gaming technology truly ‘democratise the process of architecture’, as Michael Kohn claimed at the end of Tom Dyckhoff’s fine series? In the days ahead we shall find out.

Tweeting William Morris

2011-08-18T01:14:00.000-07:00

Have just started tweeting on my usual issues of Morris and utopia. If you go into the Twitter website and search for ‘TonyPinkney1’, you should be able to find me (and could then choose to ‘follow’ the sequence, if you feel so inclined). After all, if The Earthly Paradise celebrates ‘The twitter of the autumn birds’ in ‘The Man born to be King’, why should we not try out the twitter of the literary critics? Perhaps it too might prove to be tuneful and consoling.

Apart from a few famous maxims (‘Have nothing in your house ...’, etc), Morris is the very opposite of an aphoristic writer. Think of those great sheets of poetry-as-tapestry in The Earthly Paradise itself, for example, or the family description of The Well at the World's End as 'the Interminable'. So will it indeed prove possible to evoke and discuss him fruitfully in the tiny genre of the 140-character tweet? I’m not sure. ‘Scorn not the Sonnet’, counselled Wordsworth; but that was fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, not 140 characters! Whereas if you were tweeting on Oscar Wilde, say, rather than Morris, you might feel that this mode of miniature commentary was in harmony with the lapidary, epigrammatic energies of your subject himself.

Yet I do believe that new modes of writing, however challenging, can themselves sometimes generate new thoughts, even new kinds of thinking. For in his Adorno book, Fredric Jameson writes of ‘the possibility of forms of writing and Darstellung [presentation] that unexpectedly free you from the taboos and constraints of forms learnt by rote and assumed to be inscribed in the nature of things’. And perhaps Twitter too, as Walter Benjamin did for Adorno, will offer ‘the possibility of another kind of writing – which is eventually to say: another kind of thinking’ (p.52).

So, as far as William Morris tweeting goes, I think the answer is: suck it and see! I intend to.

Crafts in a Time of Crisis

2011-08-16T00:39:00.000-07:00

My blog is relatively weak on the crafts side of Morris, I have to acknowledge that, though I hope it compensates on the literary and political dimensions of his work. Fortunately we do have other blogs out there which give stronger coverage of the arts and crafts aspects; see, for example, ‘William Morris Fan Club’ and ‘William Morris and Quilting’. But after a week in which so many English cities have seen such violent social unrest, perhaps it isn’t amiss to try and restate (as I understand it) the importance of craft activities in the wider Morrisian scheme of things.

When I read last week’s announcements about restoration of the Morris embroidery known as the Lanercost Dossal (kept just up the road from me at Lanercost Priory in Cumbria), my first thought was: hum, is this not a rather remote and antiquarian bypath when our cities are burning and our fellow-citizens are being killed (both by police bullets and by rioters’ violence)? And I think, yes, one does initially have to keep that extraordinary disjunction of different social realms – delicate embroidery versus flames in the streets – firmly in mind.

And yet it is, after all, surely the crucial importance of Morris that he brings these two things – craft activities and social upheaval – inextricably together. So my second and better thought is: it is precisely because capitalism cannot give its citizens work which has the kind of dignity or creativity which the Lanercost Dossal or any other craft artefact embodies (and oftentimes cannot offer them any work or hope at all), that people in their frustration at what Morris famously terms ‘useless toil’ (or no toil at all) will rise up in sporadic violent revolt against it. Only very serious political leadership could ever hope to get beyond such fruitless local riots into a principled challenge to the entire underlying economic system.

So all Morrisian craft works, then, as I have written elsewhere of the Kelmscott Press books, ‘are not evidences of medievalist nostalgia and political withdrawal, but are rather time-travellers from some far future we can as yet barely imagine, showing how lovingly artefacts might be crafted in the socialist world that is to come’. Such, at any rate, would be my own take on the Lanercost Dossal and its fellow works. If your own differs, as it well may, I look forward to learning of it.

Disaffected Youth - Some Utopian Remedies

2011-08-14T13:21:00.000-07:00

Instead of importing police specialists on gang culture from the United States, perhaps the government might consider adopting some local practices from the utopian literary tradition. Of course, you don’t, by definition, get disaffected youth in utopia, but even in these perfect societies there is sometimes an awareness that the high spirits and coursing hormones of young people are going to need some form of creative physical outlet (apart from just sex, that is).

So short of a socialist revolution, which I don’t think we are going to get any time soon, how about such lesser measures as:

Working for two years on the land, as everybody at some point in their careers has to do in Thomas More’s Utopia. They thus get to understand agriculture, perhaps develop a more empathic relationship with Nature as they do so, and, from our own perspective, might helpfully burn off a good deal of excess physical energy in the process.

Strenuous rock-climbing as in Aldous Huxley’s Island, where this is consciously practised as an initiation rite for young people (even though it leads to occasional fatalities). The utopians thrive on the sense of physical challenge and develop an acute sense of responsibility both for themselves and for the rest of the team with which they are climbing.

‘War games’ as – very controversially – in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (where he only lets men participate, but we’ll include women too). Teams of young people get semi-drunk, do some ceremonial chanting, put on their totemically decorated costumes, and then fight it out with spears till someone is seriously wounded (in this case, the narrator William Weston).

Sensuously creative physical labour with one’s hands is the central utopian practice in Morris’s News from Nowhere, but we might also note such tougher manual exercises as ‘trying how much pick-work you can get into an hour’ when you are road-mending (ch.VII). Thus the muscle-bound Dick Hammond, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of Morris’s utopia, works off those physical energies of which Huxley, in particular, is very wary.

Plenty of other ideas elsewhere, including Charles Fourier’s masterstroke of letting children collect the rubbish because they so enjoy getting mucky. But since I can’t see Cameron and co. paying any attention to what utopia has to say on all this, I think I’ll stop here.

The London Riots

2011-08-09T15:19:00.000-07:00

We know how Matthew Arnold wanted to deal with London rioters, in the wake of the Hyde Park disturbances of 1866; for as he tells us in Culture and Anarchy, ‘the old Roman way ... is always the right one; flog the rank and file, and fling the ringleaders from the Tarpeian rock’. And that is pretty much what we have been hearing for the last few days in the great tide of kneejerk rightwing commentary on our present urban discontents: ‘mindless thuggery’, ‘pure criminality’, ‘full force of the law’, 'water cannon and rubber bullets'.

The major riot of Morris’s socialist period was ‘Black Monday’, 8 February 1886, when, as E.P. Thompson puts it, ‘The Socialists led the crowds up Pall Mall for a further meeting at Hyde Park. There was some jeering from the clubs. The unemployed retaliated with stones and window-smashing, and then a good deal of indiscriminate damage and looting took place, in which Morris’s own shop was lucky to escape’. Morris himself had not in fact been present at these events on the day, but, as Thompson notes, ‘the Trafalgar Square riots were a sudden test of Morris’s ability as a Socialist leader, and also of the sincerity of his revolutionary opinions’.

Our own riots of 2011 differ in significant ways from the 1886 troubles: there is no Socialist leadership of any kind, and there is a racial dimension here (in the police killing of Mark Duggan and the long-term background of racist policing in Tottenham and elsewhere) which Morris could never have imagined. But of our riots we could still say what he did of his own, in the pages of Commonweal in March 1886: ‘What was the meaning of it? At bottom misery’. A generation of young people thrown on the economic scrapheap under both New Labour and the Con-Dems; obscene financial bonuses made by bankers and City traders; hopelessness and rage, with the gloomy world economic situation making our own grotesque inequalities and savage cuts to welfare provision all the more devastating. No major English political party speaks out against all this, and thus, as Martin Luther King insisted, ‘A riot is the language of the unheard’.

The violence, looting and fires on our streets over the last few days are the ugly dark truth of Cameron's and Clegg’s England, not whatever glossy Olympic facade we might be able to muster for global media consumption in twelve months time.

Socialist Poetry

2011-08-07T00:37:00.000-07:00

Andy Croft gave an invigorating talk with this title at the Wordsworth Study Centre in Grasmere the other day. Brandishing a copy of Red Sky at Night, the anthology of British radical verse which he edited with Adrian Mitchell in 2003, he spoke about general issues of poetry and politics, and read a selection of fine poems from the collection, of which the highlight was surely Adrian Mitchell’s own ‘Victor Hara of Chile’, about an Argentinian radical musician tortured and murdered by Fascists in the Pinochet coup.

The spectrum of radical poetry is wide and complex, and it would have required more time than Croft had in his talk to fully unravel socialist verse, Marxist verse, anti-Fascist verse, working-class verse, anarchist verse, and so on. Yet it left me uneasy that he was so dismissive of modernism in his quest for a lucidly communicative political poetry. Agreed, some modernisms can be wilfully difficult, not to mention politically suspect; but left-wing writers will surely need all those modernistic techniques of disorientation, alienation, defamiliarisation – which indeed go to an admirable political home in the work of Bertolt Brecht.

In the wake of the talk I turned up a copy of the 1970 Penguin Book of Socialist Verse, edited by Alan Bold, which takes the entire world’s left-wing poetry as its field, so that Brecht, Aragon, Mayakovsky, Hikmet, Ritsos, Neruda and even Mao Tse-Tung all feature prominently. Yet for all that, Bold’s collection, like Croft’s, features some of William Morris’s verse in its early pages (and even has a Walter Crane design for its front cover too); and I certainly feel that Morris’s ‘All for the Cause’ is still a rousing socialist poem.

In the space available here all one can do is record a few other personal favourites. I’ve always found W.H. Auden’s elegy for the left-wing Expressionist dramatist Ernst Toller deeply moving; Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘Second Hymn to Lenin’ is an intense work too; and Tony Harrison’s ‘V’ is perhaps the poem of English working-class experience in our own time. Brecht’s masterpiece ‘To those who come after’ is also a long-time favourite, and not just because I’m the proud owner of a German audiobook which features Brecht himself reading it. ‘Wirklich, ich lebe in finsteren Zeiten’, the poem begins, times politically darker than Morris himself ever knew, certainly. But the modest consolation that ‘without me, the rulers would have sat more securely’ is perhaps one which any adequate socialist poem might in the end tentatively offer itself.

Morris Blog Book Available

2011-08-01T01:00:00.000-07:00

If William Morris were alive today, he would certainly be busily blogging on all the literary, cultural and political issues that so passionately absorbed him; and in fact his ‘Notes on News’ items in his socialist newspaper Commonweal in the late 1880s do constitute a kind of political blog in their own right. But since we don’t actually have Morris’s own blog, we shall have to make do with blogs about him and his work.

There are by now several of these, but the blog you are currently reading, ‘William Morris Unbound’, was the world’s first blog on Morris-and-utopia. Now, with the publication of William Morris: The Blog from the Kelmsgarth Press, I have brought the 139 posts between its launch in October 2007 and the end of March 2011 from the blogosphere into print. These brief entries, which I hope illuminate and entertain by turns, explore the full range of Morris’s concerns: poetry and printing, Icelandic sagas and romance writing, art and architecture, utopia and socialism. But they also range into such unlikely topics as drawing pins, insults, Star Trek, Southend Pier and penis size, as well as offering a Morrisian commentary on national and international events of recent years.

At the very heart of my ‘blog book’ is Morris’s great utopia, News from Nowhere, and William Morris: The Blog offers many new approaches to that work, as well as the prospect of a twenty-first-century sequel to it. To purchase the book at £12.95 paperback (includes postage), please go to the Kelmsgarth Press website at http://kelmsgarthpress.com/ and use the Paypal facility there.

Seven of Everything

2011-07-28T01:44:00.000-07:00

Morris’s poem ‘The Tune of Seven Towers’ has perhaps the most hauntingly beautiful refrain in all his verse: ‘”Therefore,” said fair Yoland of the flowers,/”This is the tune of Seven Towers”’. The meaning of both poem and refrain remains obscure, despite the reference back to the Rossetti watercolour. But we might want to ask of both the painting and Morris’s delicately enigmatic little text, why seven towers, rather than five or nine or eleven?

So the Seven Towers motif makes me wonder why that particular figure has proved such a recurrent numerological theme in both literature itself and in literary and cultural studies more generally. In Thomas Campanella’s utopia City of the Sun (written in 1602) there are seven concentric circles bearing the names of the seven planets. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin in 1849 offered us Seven Lamps of Architecture, not six or eight. T.E. Lawrence entitled his autobiographical account of his war experiences Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922). William Empson, perhaps our most mischievously brilliant literary critic ever, proposed Seven Types of Ambiguity in 1930, although I am not sure anyone has ever believed that you could fully tell all the different types rigorously apart from each other. More recently, in a breathtakingly ambitious survey of the world’s story-telling, Christopher Booker has sketched out Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (2004); and in the field of linguistics rather than literary studies, Ronald Macaulay has just published Seven Ways of Looking at Language (2010). No doubt there are plenty more examples if one goes hunting for them (Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and so on)

Why then, I wonder, does this particular figure haunt our literary imaginations so? Do we all secretly want to live in that walled town called Sevenham which Morris mentions in his Child Christopher? I have a feeling, at any rate, that in the numbers game which the utopians play after dinner in Thomas More’s Utopia seven will certainly be the numeral which trumps all the others!

Death in Utopia: or, Lessons in Thanatology

2011-07-22T02:18:00.000-07:00

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida remarks somewhere that ‘one should not develop a taste for mourning’. I’m sure that’s true, but it may also be that, in some utopias, one mourns too little rather than too much; and Morris’s News from Nowhere may be one such example.

We hear of deaths in Nowhere caused by sexual jealousy and violence, but we don’t actually see any of that at first hand; and though Phillippa the carver, as we learn, has been quite seriously ill, far from that proving terminal she is back to something like full strength as she works on the new house on the upper Thames. Yet one powerful way in which utopia might win us over to its values is to demonstrate to us, existentially and on the pulses, that dying and mourning in a genuinely cooperative society are much less painful and lonely than they are in our own capitalist present.

We would need to turn to Aldous Huxley’s beautiful utopia Island (1962) to see that lesson being enforced. For among the utopians of Pala, Susila MacPhail is grieving for the death of her husband in a rock-climbing accident just four months earlier, and her father-in-law Dr Robert MacPhail is not only mourning his son’s death but also has to live through the actual dying of his wife Lakshmi from cancer in the course of the book. These are, in Huxley’s own term, ‘lessons in thanatology’ which test the Buddhistic values of the Pala utopia almost to breaking point, but which they do in the end successfully encompass.

And no sooner have we, as readers, lived through these experiences of death and grieving with the characters than we are subjected to a short sharp thanatological lesson of our own too. For as Colonel Dipa’s soldiers move ruthlessly into Pala at the end of the book, we learn that it is not just individual utopians who can die, but utopia itself, swept away as it is here by a toxic combination of oil-addicted Western consumerism and Third World dictatorship.

Japanising the Late Romances

2011-07-18T01:55:00.000-07:00

Having bought a curious ‘William Morris Puppet’ kit for £10-00 in the V & A shop the other day, I then made my way into the museum’s Japanese gallery. After admiring the samurai sword collection (which could easily lead into a meditation on the artistry and nomenclature of swords in Morris’s romances), I turned to the spectacular netsuke cabinets. These tiny, intricate carvings of gods, demons, animals and insects on ivory are miracles of delicate craftsmanship, and since we know how much Morris admired the carved ivories at the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, we can assume that he would have enjoyed these too. And it was while contemplating the netsuke that a great epiphany, a Matthew-Arnoldian ‘spark from heaven’, suddenly came to me: why not use the traditional Japanese form of bunraku or puppet theatre to present Morris’s late romances?

Film versions would be ideal, but are no doubt inordinately expensive, so the simplified form of bunraku, in which colourfully decorated, three foot tall puppets are made to act on stage by operators in black costumes, might do very nicely instead. Morris’s late romances have no real depth of character psychology, so bunraku, which is an art of exquisite surfaces (Roland Barthes valued it for exactly that reason), would serve very aptly to represent them. Having already tried the experiment of reading News from Nowhere as a traditional Japanese Noh play (in the Tokyo journal The Rising Generation, March 2009, pp.6-10), I should now like to see The Wood Beyond the World and its successors actually performed as bunraku. I would be willing to produce the scripts.

‘Japan was talked of, but all seemed uncertain’, wrote Jane Morris on 12 October 1892. Yes, we couldn’t be absolutely sure that bunraku would work for her husband’s late works, but I think it’s well worth a try.

The Cult of Beauty: Theorising Aestheticism

2011-07-17T01:20:00.000-07:00

If the Owl of Minerva does indeed fly only at night, then the best time to mull over the ‘Cult of Beauty’ exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum will be the day on which it closes (which happens to be today). This has been a wonderfully rich display of Aestheticism and its works, of which my own personal favourites were Albert Moore’s sumptuously orange ‘Midsummer’ painting, the recreation (by projectors) of Whistler’s Peacock Room, and Godwin’s Anglo-Japanese furniture designs. This being Aestheticism, there are of course sunflowers, peacock feathers, Japanese fans and sleeping women everywhere.

But if we want to theorise Aestheticism rather than just review it, if we want to offer an account worthy of Hegel’s philosophical Owl, then we might return to a book which I remember being very excited about when it was translated during the ‘literary theory wars’ of the 1980s, namely Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avantgarde. For Bürger broke dramatically with the ‘1848’ theory of modern art associated with Georg Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes, in which the revolutions of that year bring a transparently classical or realist mode of writing crashing down and replace it with the densely self-referential modernist writing of Flaubert, Mallarmé and others. Instead, for Bürger, it is Aestheticism at the very end of the nineteenth century which is the key turning point of modern art, because it radically separates artistic value from utilitarian daily life, an exclusivist gesture which will then let the early twentieth-century avantgardes angrily blast aesthetics back to the life-world.

Does Peter Bürger’s decidedly philosophical account mesh with the V&A’s Aestheticism exhibition itself? Well, yes indeed. For if the Albert Moore and late Burne-Jones paintings create a realm of pure beauty and exquisite decorative surfaces entirely removed from the quotidian, then even the works here which do engage the everyday – tiles, arm-chairs, garden gates, fire-dogs, and so on – pull so far away in the direction of a Tennysonian Palace of Art that they too vanish into the Aestheticist aether. What is created in both cases is an autonomous realm of exquisite aesthetic privilege which will indeed require the exhilarating cultural vandalism of the avantgarde – of the Marinettis and Mayakovskys and Wyndham Lewises – to bring it back to anything like the ordinary workaday world. So, thanks to the V&A for a superb exhibition, but we shall also need, with the Futurists, to take a pickaxe to all of these wonderful artefacts too!

'Nature of Gothic' Facsimile

2011-07-12T04:10:00.000-07:00

I’m glad to report that a paperback facsimile edition of the 1892 Kelmscott Press version of John Ruskin’s The Nature of Gothic – the first ever made of this rare book - has just been issued by Pallas Athene Arts. This publisher, which operates at the high-cultural end of the travel books market, ranges over history, art and architecture as well as travel, wine and food, and has a strong Ruskin list among its offerings. This attractively produced Nature of Gothic volume contains Morris’s Preface to Ruskin’s chapter, in which he grandly describes it as ‘one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century’. The Ruskin text looks formidable on the page in Kelmscott Golden Type with flamboyant Morrisian initials, and Afterwords by Robert Hewison and Tony Pinkney conclude the book.

Pallas Athene’s commercial logo is a quaint little square-shaped owl, who might remind us of Hegel’s great claim that ‘the Owl of Minerva flies at night’, i.e. you can theorise only what has already been achieved in practice. Ruskin powerfully theorised the medieval architectural past for Morris and deeply shaped the latter’s life in so doing. But, as Morris knew, we have to theorise the future as well as the past (or it will never come into being in the way we want in the first place), so I suspect that today we will need a Society for the Protection of Future Buildings quite as much as Ancient ones.

News of the World

2011-07-10T02:17:00.000-07:00

‘A deputation of leading commercial people ... together with a number of newspaper editors, had a long interview with the heads of the Government ... The deputation came away from that interview ... smiling and satisfied’. This is News from Nowhere chapter XVII, but Rupert Murdoch too has been ‘smiling and satisfied’ at his ready access to political leaders of both Tory and Labour Parties in government for some years now, so it is good to see him so thoroughly discomfited at last; and as for the News of the World itself, well, good riddance to that. The important task now is to stop Murdoch’s NewsCorp getting full control of the satellite broadcaster BSkyB.

The recent ructions in the British newspaper world remind us, as Patrick Parrinder insisted in a little-known 1991 article on News from Nowhere, that ‘Morris (among his multifarious activities) was a newspaperman’ too. Thus it is, as Parrinder notes, that ‘a surprising amount of space in the “How the Change Came” chapter is given to recounting the tactics of the socialist press and of their enemies, the capitalist newspaper barons’, including the Rupert Murdochs of the day. Politically shrewd though Morris is about much of this, however, he naively ‘stops short of imagining that a threatened state apparatus would turn on its journalistic opponents’ (pp.30-1).

‘News’ is important both in utopia and in the present, where Morris put remarkable amounts of time, energy and money into trying to create an effective socialist newspaper; and this task remains as pressing today. I’m addicted to my daily copy of The Guardian, but its left-liberalism is hardly socialism; and while I admire the staff of The Morning Star for keeping that paper going beyond the fall of the British Communist Party itself, I can’t feel that it has successfully plugged into everyday social experience (even if you can buy it in Sainsburys). So Morris’s Commonweal project remains no less urgent than on the day of that paper’s first publication in February 1885, and it is good to know that there are plans afoot for an exhibition on the radical press at Kelmscott House to inspire us in that direction.

William Morris Holidays

2011-07-04T00:40:00.000-07:00

There have been a good number of Morris-orientated mini-holidays advertised in the quality press and on the internet this year. Dr Anne Anderson will be leading three-day trips entitled ‘At Home with William Morris’ in September and October; these will ‘examine the profound influence of William Morris’ and include tours of Red House and Standen House. You can also explore ‘Pre-Raphaelite Oxford’ in trips during July, September and October; these aim to ‘explore Morris’s life and work in the city of Oxford with visits to Christchurch, Keble, Exeter, and Oxford University Museum’. Or you can join ‘William Morris: A Great Victorian’, with expert talks by Anne Anderson and Peter Cormack, and visits to Kelmscott Manor, Rodmarton Manor and All Saints Church, Selsey.

Now these all look very fascinating and worthwhile, and I might even go on one or two of them myself. But they are not in the end, we have to admit, really William Morris excursions at all. For they are passive, aesthetic and contemplative, while genuine Morris holidays, as modelled for us in News from Nowhere itself, are active and very hands-on indeed. As Dick Hammond informs us, ‘many grown people will go to live in the forests through the summer ... Apart from the other pleasures of it, it gives them a little rough work’. And presumably, like the children in Kensington forest, these adults are also ‘living in tents ... they learn to do things for themselves and get to notice the wild creatures’ (ch.V).

So never mind your learned tours of Standen and the Oxford Museum. Pack a tent in your rucksack, put some dubbin on your walking boots, polish up your binoculars, and head off boldly to the rough places. For that is how you truly have an authentic Morrisian holiday experience!

J30: Public Sector Strikes and the New Art

2011-06-29T09:46:00.000-07:00

‘First I must ask you to extend the word art’, Morris remarks in his great 1883 Oxford lecture on ‘Art under Plutocracy’. He wants his audience to expand the term beyond painting and sculpture to ‘the shapes and colours of all household goods, nay, even the arrangement of the fields for tillage and pasture, the management of towns and of our highways of all kinds’. But I think we need to take one step further still, and extend the word ‘art’ to encompass tomorrow’s coordinated strike action of so many public sector workers against government cuts to pension provision.

Morris himself, I think, doesn’t quite make that semantic extension. His view of the matter, as expressed in his November 1893 letter on the miners’ strike of that year, is a future-oriented one: ‘The first step, therefore, towards the birth of a new art must be a definite rise in the condition of the workers’. For Morris, every strike is a building block towards an eventual new culture that would itself be aesthetic rather than utilitarian, based on Ruskinian creativity-in-labour rather than the subjection of human inventiveness to the vagaries of the world market.

But one of the big slogans of 1960s identity politics was that you must be the change which you aim to bring about, i.e. that you must incarnate its values in the present, not just project them distantly into the future (thereby separating ends from means), so we therefore need to understand strike action as an aesthetic as well as economic activity. Walter Benjamin made the point even earlier when he noted of ‘refined and spiritual things’ (i.e. aesthetic values) that ‘it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humour, cunning and fortitude’. That Morrisian ‘new art’ is then already at work in us as soon as we actively begin to challenge our political and economic masters.

Art isn’t just something that happens in the Royal Academy summer exhibition in Piccadilly, but will rather be active on our streets tomorrow in the collective protest of so many good people against a rightwing government determined to reinstate Victorian levels of economic inequality.

Namesakes in Morris

2011-06-25T13:28:00.000-07:00

Trawling through the Collected Works for any namesakes I can come up with, I’ve had mixed results. There is an Anthony in Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair, and since he serves with the men around Jack of the Tofts, he ought to be a decent, if somewhat rough, sort of chap; but unfortunately he doesn’t actually feature in the work, he is merely named in absentia.

So I then turn to the Anthony who appears in The Water of the Wondrous Isles. ‘He was a grizzled-haired man of over fifty summers by seeming’, so he fits me closely enough in age range. However, he has a nasty voyeuristic habit of spying on attractive young women as they take their daily bath; for as he tells the heroine Birdalone, ‘never saw I ... a fairer body than came like rosy-tinted pearl fresh out of the water while I lay hidden in yonder thorn-brake’. Given the current gender distribution of students in university English Literature Departments, I shall have to be careful not to adopt this particular Morrisian namesake as any kind of role model in my professional life.

So let’s try Morris’s unfinished poem ‘Anthony’. There initially seems rather more hope here, for this Anthony is on his way to Norway to rescue his sister; and I like to think that in the unlikely event that my sister Carole were kidnapped by Vikings, I too would promptly get off my backside and try to remedy the situation. But this Anthony is, all the same, a decidedly doleful figure, a ‘restless helpless loveless man’, as he describes himself, ‘since earth is all at strife with all I am’; and we have anyway no idea how the poem is to end. No real luck with namesakes yet, then; and the quest continues.

New College of the Humanities

2011-06-19T06:24:00.000-07:00

There’s much controversy around the philosopher A.C. Grayling’s New College of the Humanities, a project for a new private university which would charge its students an eye-watering £18,000 a year in fees. At a time when the public university sector is in such confusion and crisis (much exacerbated by the managerial brutalism which now dominates it), one can certainly see the temptation to get out altogether; but Grayling’s scheme will, of course, simply entrench educational inequality even faster than the current government is doing so.

But suppose we take the Grayling scheme as a metaphor rather than a reality, as a heuristic tool rather than a politically obnoxious fact. We might then think of William Morris, say, not just as a colourful individual Victorian, but rather as a ‘new college of humanities’ in his own right. What might a student signing up to this Morrisian programme for the humanities actually study?

Well, there would be some busy preliminary learning of languages, which would include Icelandic, Middle English and Anglo-Saxon. There would be practical hands-on sessions in the various ‘decorative arts’ (pattern design, weaving and tapestry, stained glass, calligraphy and so on), accompanied by a rigorous course in the history of all of these crafts across the centuries. There would be intensive modules on Victorian history, painting and poetry (with some attention to twentieth-century developments in the latter two fields).

In the advanced phase of the programme, the languages would be put to work, in the study of sagas, romances and Beowulf. Craft work would move from basic skills and history to original composition in all those different modes. There would be a lively course in the history of socialism and Marxist theory, followed by a survey of utopian writing from Thomas More to Kim Stanley Robinson. Study of medieval romance would eventually give way to more advanced work on the contemporary genre of fantasy writing, from Morris’s own late romances to Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet. And, as with craft work, one would be expected to contribute original work of one’s own in the genres of utopia and fantasy as well as study the masterpieces of the past.

All this to be accompanied by brisk sessions of rowing up and down the Thames and regular participation in political marches and demonstrations to keep body healthy as well as mind; and our three undergraduate years in the Morrisian College of Humanities will, I believe, have been time well spent.

Celebrating Bloomsday

2011-06-16T01:36:00.000-07:00

I always tell my students, in a bid to encourage them to read the book, that James Joyce’s Ulysses is simultaneously the most difficult, the most comic and the rudest novel in the English language. The book recounts in stupendous detail the events in Joyce’s imaginary Dublin of 16 June 1904; and this great modernist work is therefore now celebrated every year in that city on that day by a whole host of festive activities. It’s hard to imagine Londoners taking Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway to heart in quite the same way.

What would a Morrisian analysis of Joyce’s great novel look like? Morris’s last public talk was given to the Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising, so perhaps he wouldn’t have been wholly sympathetic to Joyce’s hero, the advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom. On the other hand he might have enjoyed the novel's utopian dimension, with its vision of the ‘new Bloomusalem’, and with his own ‘robust and daring parts’ (Burne-Jones’s neat phrase) he might have relished some of its earthy rudeness too.

But a Morrisian analysis is not the same as Morris’s personal literary tastes. The former would focus on that great structural split which tears Ulysses apart right down the middle. On the one hand, we have the uniquely encyclopaedic detail of that vigorous day in Dublin, as Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Molly Bloom and all the others go about their interlinked business. On the other hand, at some radically other level of textual and readerly attention, we have the great mythic underpinnings of the plot, the numinous archetypes embodied by it: Bloom = Odysseus; Stephen = Telemachus; Molly = Penelope.

There is no Hardyesque ‘convergence of the twain’ here. Colourful surface detail and its underlying mythic meaning, the sensory and the semantic, simply do not add up, do not in any way come together; they remain schizophrenically alternative reading modes. All the good work that Morris’s News from Nowhere did in unravelling the stark binary oppositions of capitalism – city vs country, work vs pleasure, gentleman vs artisan - is here undone. Binary opposition reasserts itself forcefully in a mode of modernism that articulates an opaque society whose immediate experience absolutely cannot grasp its underlying structural determinants.

Exuberant though it is in so many ways, Ulysses is tragic in this particular one; and its brand of structurally fissured modernism is, as it were, what you get when the Morrisian revolution does not take place. This, alas, must be the literary-critical ‘skull at the feast’ of today’s merry celebrations.

Kelmscott, Australia; or, Happy Birthday, Auntie June!

2011-06-16T01:04:00.000-07:00

Today is not only Bloomsday but also the birthday of my Auntie June in Australia – she and Uncle Bill and their children having emigrated out there from Deal in Kent in 1969 (along with 80,000 other ‘Ten Pound Poms’ in that year). Before she moved to her current address in Armadale, she used to live in Kelmscott, a south-eastern suburb of Perth. I’d always been struck by the name, of course, and for a while (carefully not checking the facts) liked to imagine that it was originally a utopian community set up in the Antipodes by Morrisians who had got tired of the old country and its intractable politics.

Alas, that is not it at all (as T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock might say). Kelmscott, Australia was indeed named after Kelmscott, Oxfordshire; but that is because the latter was the birthplace of the first Anglican clergyman in the Swan River Colony, of which Kelmscott was one of the earliest towns. The Reverend Thomas Hobbes Scott lived from 1783 to 1860, and since the antipodean Kelmscott was founded in 1830, it predates William Morris altogether. So we still await a full-blooded Kelmscottian utopian experiment; and happy birthday to my dear aussie Aunt in the meantime.

Bows and Arrows

2011-06-14T04:12:00.000-07:00

‘Bows and Arrows’ in literature is the topic of this week’s Guardian Review ‘Ten of the Best’ column, in which (among others) Homer’s Odysseus, George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth and the Tolkienian Elf Legolas all feature by virtue of the memorable quality of their marksmanship.

I would be inclined to add a few more instances from Morris and his contemporaries. Felix Aquila, in Richard Jeffries’s After London (1885), is rather shamefaced about his awesome prowess with the bow, since in the post-apocalyptic feudal society he inhabits it is the sword alone which is considered the noble aristocratic weapon. From Morris’s own copious oeuvre, A Dream of John Ball gives us in its opening Kentish battle a spectacular lesson in the power of ‘one of the most terrible weapons which a strong man has ever carried, the English long-bow and cloth-yard shaft’ (ch.V); and the most gifted of all Morrisian archers, who are surely worthy of comparison with Tolkien’s elvish marksman, are the bowmen of the Woodlanders and the Wolf in The Roots of the Mountains, ‘huntsmen, cragsmen, and scourers of the Waste; men who could shoot the chaffinch on the twig a hundred yards aloof’ (ch.43).

Plenty of archery in Morris, then. I’ve occasionally wondered what the William Morris Society might look like if it modelled its activities and fellowship, not on its hero’s craft or political practices, but rather on the fictional world of his late romances. Might we all then be reaching for our longbows for a spot of target practice with the butts in the fields around Kelmscott manor?

Cycling in Utopia

2011-06-12T13:07:00.000-07:00

I’ve written before in this blog about May Morris’s passion for cycling (2 August 2008), but it can hardly be said that this enthusiasm is shared by society at large today. In an interim assessment of the current ‘Understanding Walking and Cycling’ study, Dave Horton remarks that ‘many people barely recognise the bicycle as a legitimate mode of transport; it is either a toy for children or a vehicle fit only for the poor and/or strange’ (The Guardian, 4 June 2011). So we need to find all the positive images of cycling we can to pit against this indifference or hostility, and utopia, I’m glad to say, offers us a good many.

In A Modern Utopia (1905) H.G. Wells gives us a Darwinianly kinetic utopia which will embody what he calls ‘the travel age of mankind’. Transport systems are accordingly an important part of his futuristic vision, and it is encouraging to know that ‘cycle tracks will abound in Utopia, sometimes following beside the great high roads, but often taking their own more agreeable line amidst woods and crops and pastures’.

Spinning briskly down those genial tracks will presumably be the admirable bicycle that Joanna Russ imagines in her utopian Whileaway in The Female Man (1975), ‘a stout machine, with broad tires (compared to ours) and a receiver for registering radio beacons ... Her bicycle was singing the musical tone that lets you know you’re on course, a very lovely sound to hear over the empty fields’. So there you are: sat-nav decades avant la lettre.

But my favourite utopian bicycles are those in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge (1990), which won’t need H.G. Wells’s cycle tracks at all because they are, after some rugged muscular work to get their propellors going, aerial rather than terrestrial: ‘Kevin would hear a voice from above, and looking up he would see her in her little Hughes Dragonfly, making a cyclist’s whirr and waving down like a sweaty air spirit’ These wonderful flying bikes will certainly take some beating; so let us hope that future utopian writers can rise to the challenge!

William Morris Pub

2011-06-08T14:30:00.000-07:00

Swift visit to Oxford today to see how our son Justin is bearing up after his shoulder operation yesterday. To cheer him up as the anaesthetic wears off, we took him out for a drink to an Oxford pub called ... the William Morris! But lest this conjure up a scene of genial medieval fellowship akin to that in the Rose tavern in chapter two of A Dream of John Ball, I have sadly to inform you that this public house is named not after our socialist William Morris, but rather after the Oxonian capitalist William Morris (1877-1963), who from modest beginnings in his small garage in Longwall Street eventually ran a giant car-manufacturing empire, became Viscount Nuffield and founded a postgraduate Oxford college which he had named after him.

Sigmund Freud has an important essay on ‘the antithetical meaning of primal words’ (1910); and with these two radically opposite William Morrises before us, I think we will have to extend his model to personal names too. The capitalist William Morris has won out over our man, not least in the naming of this pub, but even he can’t in the end escape from antithetical meanings, because the William Morris pub is situated in Between Towns Road in Cowley, which is exactly where Raymond Williams’s fine Oxford novel, Second Generation (1964), begins.

Williams, as a great socialist theorist in the Morris tradition, is interested in the social liminality evoked by that most peculiar street name, the way it indicates an indeterminate no man’s land or ‘border country’ (to use his favourite metaphor) between the dreaming spires of Oxonian middle-class intellect and the hard-pressed working-class lives of the Cowley car factories. So, even if the pub is named after the wrong William Morris, we can down our pints in it in Between Towns Road and warmly remember Williams’s socialist novel as we wipe the froth from our lips.

Wearing William and Mrs Morris

2011-06-03T00:55:00.000-07:00

‘Wearing William’ is a 75 cm gypsum cast of a male bottom decorated with colourful patterns loosely based on Morris designs; its counterpart, ‘Mrs Morris’ is a little more muted in its colour scheme, but more than makes up for that by its sheer callipygous breadth. Both are the products of Kent-based artist C.J. Munn, and the former featured recently on the BBC’s ‘Show Me The Monet’ show, in which it got the critics’ votes it needed in order to be displayed at the Royal College of Art where, if you were so moved, you could have bought this handsome Morris rump for £2100.

Introducing her sculpture to the panel of critics, C.J. Munn attacked artistic work based solely on ‘shock value’ and argued for a ‘return to a time when old-fashioned aesthetic values become important again’; art shouldn’t just be based on clever instant gimmicks, but should ‘still be lovely in 30 years time’. Well, there’s something a little disingenuous in this. Morris floral designs may have the requisite aesthetic loveliness, but a Morris arse is in itself, clearly, a piece of ‘shock art’; for, as one of the critics aptly remarked, ‘William Morris would be turning in his chintz shroud’.

The Morrisian visual artist David Mabb has said that his own aesthetic aim is to make Morris designs ‘nasty’, which is in his view the only way to prevent them collapsing into kitsch. Do Munn’s male and female Morris bottoms succeed in this? Perhaps to a degree; for the ‘Wearing William’ cast, in particular, disturbingly resembles the whole-body colourful floral tattoos of the Japanese yakuza or mafia. But I think in the end that the graceful organic curves of the Morris-inspired patterns and the organic curves of the human (and particularly the steatopygous ‘Mrs Morris’) anatomy are too comforting, and dissolve the initial visual shock value of the artefacts into contemplative and mildly eroticised pleasure.

‘It’s ridiculous, but yes’, remarked one of the BBC judges in giving his vote. So I’m glad ‘Wearing William’ has graced the walls of the Royal College of Art; anything that draws renewed attention to Morris’s work and thought is a good thing. But we will need more challenging reinterpretations of his designs if we are truly to remake them – to effect a Brechtian Unfunktionierung of them - for our own century.

Morris Kitsch

2011-06-01T01:10:00.000-07:00

‘Morris is everywhere’, David Mabb declared at his excellent talk on ‘Morris Kitsch’ at the Society AGM in the Kelmscott Coach House the other day; and in his extraordinary slideshow of artefacts decorated with Morris designs, which included boots, tea-towels, bags, trays, garden tools and even Strawberry Thief bondage knickers, he certainly persuaded an astonished audience that, as he put it, ‘it’s all been Morrised!’

If kitsch takes a challenging form of art and makes it anodyne, mechanical, easily digestible, then Morris kitsch, like any other form, is a cheapening of our hero’s utopian patterns, bleeding them dry of every trace of aesthetic or political radicalism. And yet, on the other hand, many people – as Mabb’s own audience attested - first arrive at an interest in Morris through kitsch, whether this be Daisy notelets or a Willow-decorated bath-towel. Moreover, Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay on ‘the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, gave us a stronger framework for thinking about all this. To have the Mona Lisa on the front of your T-shirt is for Benjamin a welcome democratisation, breaking open the intimidating bourgeois ‘aura’ of the great work hanging on the walls of the Louvre.

I wonder, however, whether a Jacques Derrida-inspired model might be more helpful here. So that it is not just that kitsch supervenes upon Morris’s works from outside, degrading and cheapening them, but rather that a certain ‘kitschiness’ perhaps already inheres in them from the start. After all, could we not argue that Morris ‘kitschified’ his own poetry, as he abandoned the difficult, edgy, angular rhythms of his Guenevere volume for the somnolent mellifluousness of the Earthly Paradise style?

And in the realm of design itself, I wonder if there isn’t a too gentle, genial, lullingly upper Thames-style Englishness in patterns like Daisy and Willow which makes them too easily appropriable for the middle-class consumerist pleasures of kitsch? If Morris had taken his designs from the Icelandic sublime rather than from such bland English beauty, from volcanoes, razor-sharp lava-fields and raging glacial rivers, then there might indeed be some radical resistance in the raw material to any subsequent ‘kitschification’.

So: there may be positive dimensions to kitsch itself (Benjamin), and a certain ‘kitsch-icity’ may anyway inhere in the original. The relations between Morris and kitsch are a complex dialectic, not a simple ethical binary opposition of good versus evil.

Teachers of Lore: Raman Selden 20 Years On

2011-05-25T11:24:00.000-07:00

‘I longed for the coming of the Teacher of Lore’, remarks the Lady of Abundance in Morris’s The Well at the World’s End; and I have myself been lucky enough to know some remarkable teachers, whom I intend to commemorate in this blog. My former Lancaster colleague Professor Raman Selden died twenty years ago today, at the shockingly premature age of 53 and at the very height of his academic career and intellectual powers. In a kinder world, he would still have been with us enjoying retirement, and we would have had two decades’ more writing from him.

Ray Selden is best remembered today as a highly successful populariser of literary theory during the so-called ‘theory wars’ of the 1980s, though his more scholarly work on the eighteenth century retains its importance too. As Head of Department, he appointed me to the Lancaster University English Department in 1989 just as he himself was leaving it, and my brief was very much to take forward the second-year literary theory course which he had instituted. Ray himself wasn’t a Morrisian (though he was a Marxist), but I had copies of my journal News from Nowhere balanced on my knee when I was interviewed by him and I like to think that played a part in his decision.

In literary studies more generally, we now sometimes hear of the ‘death of theory’; but in Morris studies in particular, I still don’t think we’ve had enough theory in the first place! Names like Barthes, Kristeva, Foucault, De Man, Lacan, Bakhtin, Bloom, Iser, Jauss and Derrida, whom Selden expounded so lucidly in his various readers’ guides to theory, don’t feature very regularly in discussions of Morris’s work, so in our specific field at least, the task that Raman Selden enjoined upon us – to get literary theory thoroughly integrated into our literary-critical thinking – remains to be carried through. So I salute this wise and humane Teacher of Lore, still much missed two decades later.

TV: The Only Way is Essex, innit?

2011-05-21T00:21:00.000-07:00

‘I come not from heaven but from Essex’, the time-travelling narrator declares proudly in Morris’s A Dream of John Ball; but he might be inclined to keep his county shamefacedly to himself if he had watched the trashy ITV reality-show The Only Way is Essex. The latest series has recently ended, with a spectacular pool-party in Brentwood at which Mark and Lauren, Arg and Lydia, Mick and Gemma, Joey and Sam kept us entertained with their romantic entanglements.

‘Essex man’ once denoted the aspirational working class that voted for Thatcherism, but this particular set of young Essex people wouldn’t have a clue who Margaret Thatcher was in the first place and probably couldn’t name the current Prime Minister either. It would be easy enough to see them as a group of glamorous air-heads whose main concerns are fake tans, vajazzles, boob jobs (‘mine are from Belgium’, one woman announces at the pool-party), night clubs, fashion boutiques and who’s shagging whom this week. Meantime, ‘estuary English’ perpetrates horror after horror upon the language of Shakespeare.

Yet we keep watching, and in our millions, apparently. Why? Partly because, for all the ridiculously staged petty tiffs and jealousies, this is none the less a community of sorts, centred around Mick’s Sugar Hut night club; and there is thus something utopian about this sense of close-knit Gemeinschaft, however degraded it might currently be.

And partly because, if Mark’s Nanny Pat reminds us of an older working-class Essex, we just can’t wholly believe this lot are as hollow as they seem on the surface either. History won’t forget them, however much they might like to forget it; and it will take the form of public service cuts and unemployment in the short term, and climate change in the medium term as Essex becomes an ever drier county. ‘You have to try to think well of people’, as Raymond Williams once remarked; and watching The Only Way is Essex therefore becomes in the end a test of us, the viewers, a test that we don’t fall into the kneejerk dismissals that would be so easy here. We have to remain not ‘pilgrims of hope’ but, as it were, viewers of hope.

‘In Essex they were on the verge of rising’, Morris’s narrator tells us in A Dream of John Ball. Well, we are a very long way indeed from that in this ITV series, but we have to believe that Mark, Arg, Kirk, Amy, Lauren and Sam are capable of political growth and change, capable one day, we trust, of blasting my old home county out of the current media stereotypes that have so engulfed it.

Living Fast in Syria

2011-05-19T15:09:00.000-07:00

I knew that Morris’s favourite tobacco was Latakia and had always presumed this entailed on his part at least a minimal interest in Syria (for that is where the city of Latakia is); but it was still a surprise to come across the more specific remarks on Syria in News from Nowhere itself. For Dick Hammond, in the context of a discussion about the Bible, refers to ‘Syria, a hot dry country, where people live faster than in our temperate climate’ (ch.VIII). And people certainly are living faster in Syria just at the moment, with sustained protests against the Assad regime and extreme government violence in repressing them.

News from Nowhere has confidence that government massacres of protestors, as happens in Trafalgar Square in 1952 in the book, will kick off rather than stifle wider revolutionary upheavals; but that isn’t what happened in the wake of the Bloody Sunday violence of Morris’s own day (which led to a shift towards reformism rather than revolution), and it’s hard to see the ruthlessly widespread murder and torture practised by Assad and his henchmen as generating a mass movement that will sweep them all away in the near future.

Nor are there any good options for the West in all this. The sanctions against Assad and his cronies announced by President Obama today are too little too late; while, at the other extreme, British and French-led NATO military action in Libya is bogged down in a stalemated civil war, has lost the initial credibility the UN ‘no-fly zone’ resolution gave it, and is looking increasingly like old-style Western imperialist intervention.

In Morris’s utopia, extreme repression proves counter-productive; one hopes for the sake of the brave people of Syria that he is right. But at the moment they are dying fast as well as living fast in that country; and, outside utopia, we will have to content ourselves with Antonio Gramsci’s old slogan of ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’.

Eating Squirrels

2011-05-18T00:19:00.001-07:00

We know that when they lived at Woodford Hall the young Morris and his brothers would shoot rabbits and wild birds. ‘The redwings and fieldfares which they shot on winter holidays they were allowed to roast for supper’, J.W. Mackail tells us (I, 9). But did they also shoot and cook squirrels, I wonder?

I’m moved to ask the question because of that curious moment late in The Life and Death of Jason (1867) when Jason first visits Glauce in her woodland abode and she offers him refreshments after his day’s hunting: ‘of fair simple flowers ... Your drink shall savour, and your meat shall be/Red-coated squirrels from the beechen tree’ (book XVII). This certainly sounds more to me like a boyhood memory than it does any kind of reference to Apollonius’s Greek original.

If so, then is squirrel-hunting an activity the William Morris Society should be promoting (grey-coated rather than ‘red-coated’ today, of course); and what exactly anyway, I wonder, does squirrel meat taste like?

Joanna Russ: renewing utopia

2011-05-15T04:38:00.000-07:00

I’m saddened to learn, through obituaries in the national newspapers, of the death of Joanna Russ on April 29 at the age of 74. We have had some eloquent testimonies of how her great science-fictional utopia The Female Man changed its readers’ lives when it was first published in 1975. I didn’t encounter it myself till much later, but certainly found it an electrifying book, though for reasons less connected with its gender politics than those earlier readers.

It is a splendidly disorientating work, formally speaking. With its complex time strands and its sly fictional self-consciousness, it may be the first utopia to have fully taken on board the great formal upheavals of the modernist movement of the early twentieth century. No ‘Old Man Who Knows Everything’ (to borrow H.G. Wells’s term) placidly explaining the system here; instead, the actual outlines of the utopian society only emerge in fragmented form across the book as a whole.

The all-female utopian world of Whileaway (all the men died in a plague, conveniently) owes something to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist vision in Herland (1915). But what is most striking to me about Russ’s utopian vision in The Female Man is rather that which links it so closely to Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). For in both books we have, not the traditional visitor from the bad society going forward in time to the new utopia (as William Guest travels forwards to Morris’s Nowhere), but rather a utopian – Janet Evason for Russ, Luciente for Piercy – travelling back in time or probability to the bad old world, our world – as if Morris’s Dick Hammond or Ellen had time-travelled back to 1890. This is a powerful new convention for utopia, which I’m still not sure we fully understand. It seems to suggest how precarious utopia is; for if these visitors from the far future don’t mange to rouse us in the present to fight actively for a better world, they will never come into being in the first place.

Classical utopias can alas be – let us admit it among friends – boring, both in social content and manner of telling; and that is the one thing that could never be said of Joanna Russ’s wonderfully unsettling book. So I salute a bold literary pioneer who made utopia possible again for the late twentieth century.

Grettir as Guest

2011-05-13T10:31:00.000-07:00

We can always learn more about Morris by cross-breeding his texts in new ways – in this case, his translation of the Grettir Saga and News from Nowhere. For what, we might ask of both these works, is the point of adopting the name ‘Guest’ when you arrive in a new household, as the outlawed Grettir does when he stays with Steinvor the goodwife of Sand-Heaps, south of Isledale-River, and as the narrator of Morris’s utopia does when he unexpectedly wakes up in the Hammersmith Guest House in the far future.

In the case of News from Nowhere the reason for adopting the surname Guest is, it would appear, to avoid any complications caused by your time-travelling status so that you can passively absorb as much as possible about the new utopian world all around you, both its political history and the social principles which underlie and shape it. But in the Grettir Saga the choice of the name Guest has a much more active motivation. The outlawed Grettir conceals his identity from his hostess so that he can challenge and defeat the deadly enemies that threaten her household, first the hideous troll-wife and then the even more powerful giant who lives under the waterfall nearby.

Let’s try taking that active model across from the saga to the utopia. We would then have to think of William Guest as having arrived in Nowhere with a very specific mission, even if he himself isn’t consciously aware of it. He is now, on this showing, the potent hero who can rid the Hammersmith household or, by extension, utopia in general of certain dangerous threats that menace it, even if the utopians in turn are not very aware of what these might be (though Ellen and old Hammond have some clues). This, it seems to me, would be a very salutary hermeneutic perspective indeed to take towards News from Nowhere – though it will require a good deal more critical work to develop it in full.

B.A. or B.Sc. by Combat

2011-05-10T08:41:00.000-07:00

On the day on which our utterly shameless Tory government briefly floated the possibility of wealthy British students buying their way into our universities (if they are prepared to pay the exorbitant fees which overseas students are currently charged), I note that Morris might mischievously be seen as also promoting an unusual approach to higher education issues in his early short story ‘Golden Wings’. For the young knight Lionel finds in that tale that ‘the next day they held a grand tourney, that I might be proven ... And Alys sat under a green canopy, that she might give the degree to the best knight’!

So: degrees by physical combat rather than by Finals examinations – well, it might be an improvement of sorts (definitely involves less marking for over-stretched academics). And certainly either system is better than just using your accumulated family wealth to buy your way in - no youthful prowess of any kind, martial or intellectual, at stake in that.

Radical Shakespeare

2011-05-07T10:20:00.000-07:00

Coming home from a lively day-symposium to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Terry Eagleton’s book on Shakespeare in his Blackwells ‘Rereading Literature’ series (which famously kicks off with the provocative claim that the three witches are the heroines of Macbeth), I find myself impressed by how clairvoyantly Morris predicted the whole subsequent history of radical Shakespeare criticism in a single pregnant remark in News from Nowhere. For William Guest reflects of Dick Hammond that ‘the nineteenth century ... counted for nothing in the memory of this man, who read Shakespeare and had not forgotten the Middle Ages’ (ch.VIII).

Reading Shakespeare without forgetting the Middle Ages: if all philosophy has been a footnote to Plato, all later Marxist criticism of the Bard has been a footnote to that terse remark of Guest’s. For as Fredric Jameson put it in 1995, ‘Shakespeare would thus be the name for the space and locus of transition as such – the immense historical dislocations and sufferings of an incomprehensible and seismological shift from the feudal to the commercial and later on the capitalist’. Of all the plays, King Lear would be the privileged text of that transition from medieval feudalism to capitalism; and this is the great epochal transformation from which not only Shakespeare but the very genre of utopia itself emerges (through the good offices of Thomas More).

Ground Zero: US policy after bin Laden

2011-05-05T13:08:00.000-07:00

When old Hammond describes the civil war of 1952-54 to William Guest in News from Nowhere he notes that during it the ruling class ‘at least and at last learned something about the reality of life, and its sorrows, which they – their class, I mean - had once known nothing of’ (ch.XVIII). I suspect that the appalling terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre of 9.11 potentially had just that kind of impact on the United States in 2001. The US had blithely intervened militarily, both openly and covertly, in so many other countries, and now some of that relentless violence had horrendously bounced back and hit it in its very heartlands.

That might have been a moment of great awakening as well as great trauma, in which the USA seriously reassessed its role in the world. But no, George Bush was at the helm with his fellow neo-cons, so we got the disastrous ‘war on terror’, Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. Now, with the killing of Osama bin Laden, one particular strand of Bush’s war on terror has been pushed through to a conclusion which he himself wasn’t able to achieve in his own term of office.

So Barack Obama has now done the gung-ho, cowboy-style ‘wanted dead or alive’ thing as Commander in Chief, which may also serve to get him re-elected in 2012 (for, heaven help us, we don’t want Donald Trump). And perhaps, having done that, Obama can now turn to the more thoughtful international approach he seems eminently qualified to pursue. Serious non-violent American support for the ‘Arab Spring’ and a determined attempt to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict (which will involve standing up to Israel in ways American presidents traditionally have not done) might just possibly create a new democratic Arab politics and a new US relation to the Arab world which would dissolve the bitter sense of grievance which gave bin Laden and Al Qaeda their emotional pull in that part of the world in the first place.

Lloyd Webber's Pre-Raphaelites

2011-05-02T02:59:00.000-07:00

'I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house,/Wherein at ease for aye to dwell’. The opening words of Tennyson’s ‘The Palace of Art’ came surging up as I watched Andrew Lloyd Webber hold forth on ITV about the Pre-Raphaelites last night. He sat beneath Rossetti’s ‘Proserpine’ (which he owns) and at a Kate Faulkner-decorated piano (which he also owns), and with the walls of his house absolutely chock-a-block with other famous Pre-Raph paintings from his personal collection. ‘And who shall gaze upon/My palace with unblinded eyes ...?’, Tennyson’s poem hubristically continues; and how could it be that so many important paintings that should absolutely be out in the public domain could be so greedily hoarded by one wealthy individual like this? Let’s hope that Lloyd Webber doesn’t have the shattering guilty nervous breakdown suffered by the soul in Tennyson’s poem, but he has certainly created around himself a palace of culture quite as dead and inert as hers.

On the day Lloyd Webber’s programme was broadcast, the veteran British heavyweight boxer Henry Cooper died, whose great fights with Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali I watched on television with my father many years ago. More genuine culture in Our ‘Enry’s basic human decency than in the whole of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stifling Palace of Art, one would think.

Novelising Morris's Poems

2011-05-01T00:26:00.000-07:00

If a dramatic monologue is, in effect, a speech from a play or novel with the rest of the text cut away, and if as a reader you greatly enjoy the monologue, then why not extend your pleasure by writing the rest of that imaginary text? Which is exactly what Gabrielle Kimm has done in her novel His Last Duchess (2010), a title which gives the game away at once. For she builds on Robert Browning’s most famous dramatic monologue to tell the full story of the young Lucrezia de Medici’s marriage to the dangerous fifth Duke of Ferrara, in the context of a rich portrayal of sixteenth-century Tuscany and Ferrara.

In my earlier meditations in this blog on generating more Morrisian text I focused on his prose works – unfinished romances, and so on. But why not, as Gabrielle Kimm’s book so brilliantly suggests to us, extend this approach to his poetry too? Why not write the novel of what may well be these days Morris’s most anthologised poem, ‘The Haystack in the Floods’? It is not a dramatic monologue, but it certainly has rich narrative potential: how did Robert and Jehane first come together, why do the people of Paris bay for her blood, how had Godmar come to be so obsessed with her, will she ultimately revenge herself for the murder of her lover? We could surely have a gripping Morrisian novel here, with a fourteenth-century Froissartian French background every bit as richly detailed as Gabrielle Kimm’s colourful Renaissance Italy.

Who gives a fuck about the royal wedding?

2011-04-29T00:32:00.000-07:00

In his great study Culture and Society (1958) Raymond Williams takes Morris to task for his ‘generalised swearing’. Perhaps it is more the generality than the actual swearing that bothers Williams, so some more particularised political swearing (as in this blog post’s title, which I have borrowed from an anti-monarchist Facebook site) might therefore conceivably serve some useful purpose.

Today’s royal wedding has already been the occasion of the usual spectacular display of obsequiousness on the part of the British media (the BBC’s Jenny Bond and Nicholas Witchell have over the years been perhaps the most abject specimens of all in this respect). In the wider society, however, I don’t sense quite such intense devotion as usual. Perhaps we are all remembering what an utter fake the so-called ‘fairytale’ wedding of Charles and Diana (which I watched in an Oxford pub thirty years ago) actually was, and we might therefore be a tad more sceptical and cautious this time round – and these are, anyway, chastened economic times.

So a Windsor is marrying a commoner – one, indeed, who even (like myself) has County Durham miners among her ancestors; so might there be a socially utopian dimension to our celebration of this particular wedding? Good luck to the young couple themselves, of course; but if William were becoming a miner rather than Kate a princess, if the social transformation were operating that way round, then I might believe that utopia really had come.

Morris’s derogatory references to Queen Victoria as ‘Empress Brown’ are a good index of how refreshingly rude his attitude to British royalty could be; and in July 1887 my own local (i.e. Lancaster) branch of the Socialist League was doing its best to disrupt Victoria’s Golden Jubilee by distributing leaflets denouncing Britain’s imperial violence. So it must always be the task of socialists to challenge such national royalist outpourings, to prick the nauseating bubble of British complacency and obsequiousness in whatever ways they can.

TV: William Morris MasterChef

2011-04-26T00:35:00.000-07:00

‘Cooking, Morris’s skills at’ runs an entry in the index to Fiona MacCarthy’s biography, and J.W. Mackail backs her up: ‘to Morris cookery had an important place among the arts of human life, and he knew a great deal about it in theory, and something also in practice’ (I, 223). So we might expect Morris to be an enthusiastic viewer of Gregg Wallace and John Torode’s BBC ‘MasterChef’ series; and perhaps his daughters Jenny and May, in a moment of family mischief, might even have put his name forward as a potential participant.

What would a Morrisian analysis of the ‘MasterChef’ TV series look like? No doubt Morris would have admired the inventive culinary skills on display, the concern for excellent ingredients and presentation, and the cooperative endeavours of the amateur cooks on the many challenges they are given to face during the programmes. On the other hand, he wouldn’t care much for the programme’s occasional forays into ‘molecular gastronomy’, he would loathe the rampant social snobbery of some of those challenges (cooking for the Duke of Bedford in his big country house), and, most crucially of all, he would surely deplore the competitive nature of the programme’s basic format.

For it is here, above all, that we receive a subliminal cultural training in the values of a capitalist society. We don’t particularly mind the over-the-top competitiveness of the repulsive young entrepreneurs who enter Alan Sugar’s TV show, ‘The Apprentice’, for this just is capitalism pure and simple; what you see is what you get. But when so many other cultural and social activities are turned into competition too – cooking on ‘MasterChef’, dancing on ‘Strictly Come Dancing’, singing in ‘The X Factor’, and even just living itself as in ‘Big Brother’ – then capitalist values are insidiously colonising our entire life world.

So we must imagine a new version of ‘MasterChef’ altogether, in which our amateur cooks, like the craftsmen at work on the medieval cathedral for Ruskin and Morris, would express their individual culinary creativity in ways that also contributed to a satisfying and spectacular collective project. If there still is TV in utopia (for Morris, there probably wouldn’t be), this is what we would then be watching.

90% Blogging

2011-04-23T00:32:00.000-07:00

The Chinese artist, architect and activist Ai Weiwei, who has recently been arrested by his government at Beijing airport, remarked of his blog (before it was closed down by that same government): ‘I spend 90% of my energy on blogging’. Wow, that’s certainly very impressive, though it doesn’t seem to leave a lot of time or energy over for the rest of life. Posting an entry every day for nearly four years surely would take it out of you, even if you were doing a terrific job of challenging an authoritarian regime in the process.

So I feel myself inspired by Weiwei’s blogging commitment, though I think I’ll stay well on this side of his 90%. And I’m inspired too by his project of contemporary cultural and political challenge, even if in a democracy that obviously doesn’t pose the severe dangers that it did to him. I don’t want to give up my exploration of William Morris and literary utopia, which has been the goal of this blog from its beginning in late 2007; but I do want – moved partly by Weiwei’s example – increasingly to turn both Morris and utopia to contemporary account, to make them ways into an engaged cultural analysis of our present.

Countries of Ultimate Testing

2011-04-16T00:39:00.000-07:00

In her biography of Morris Fiona MacCarthy uses a most evocative phrase to conjure up our hero’s 1873 trip to Iceland with Charles Faulkner: ‘Sometimes they met whole barricades of boulders and great mounds of shaly flagstones. It was the country of ultimate testing, a deathscape drawn by Dürer’ (p.333).

Such landscapes of testing then occur regularly in Morris’s later literary works. One thinks of Golden Walter’s strenuous ascent across the mountainous waste in The Wood beyond the World, or of Hallblithe’s near-fatal wanderings amongst the mountains in The Story of the Glittering Plain, or of the armies of Face-of-god and the Burgdalers making their arduous way up to the great waterfall and then across the volcanic ‘rock-maze’ in The Roots of the Mountains, or, above all, of Ralph and Ursula threading their way painfully across ‘this huge manless waste lying under the bare heavens and threatened by the storehouse of the fires of the earth’ in The Well at the World’s End. It’s all a far cry from William Guest rowing cheerily through the verdant upper Thames Valley in News from Nowhere.

All of which is to suggest that ‘ultimate testing’ just as much as genial fellowship ought to be the goal of the William Morris Society itself, that, in the spirit of its namesake’s own romances, it should be organising SAS-style survival treks in the wilderness, now and again parachuting a party of stout Morrisians into the very inner heart of Iceland in winter and letting them make their own dogged way back to Rekyavik living off the land as best they can and using all their Ray Mears skills in the process. All is not sweetness and light in Morris’s literary works, not by means; and therefore it should not be so in our celebrations of him either.

To Boldly Go ...

2011-04-12T01:01:00.000-07:00

Fifty years ago today, on 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to orbit the earth, in what was surely one of the great technological leaps forward of human history; but I also recall a remark by one of Aldous Huxley’s utopians in Island just one year later, who firmly declares that his society ‘has not the slightest desire to land on the backside of the moon’ (ch.13). There are advanced 'force-vehicles’ in William Morris’s News from Nowhere, but they only travel horizontally (up the river Thames) and not vertically (into space).

The Western utopian tradition has been fissured from its very origins by a split between low-tech utopias of ecological sustainability, like the founding text of the genre, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), and high-tech utopias of endless scientific advance, like Francis Bacon’s fragmentary New Atlantis of 1627 (which has its own dreams of flight, if not quite of space flight). The Thomas More tradition has assumed that human desires can be simplified down to a decent minimum; the Francis Bacon counter-line assumes the infinite expansibility of our desires, which only a vigorous science could possibly satisfy. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward is a powerful late nineteenth-century restatement of the high-tech tradition, of which News from Nowhere is then the angry repudiation and ecological mirror-image.

But we today shall surely want to get beyond this split, this T.S. Eliot-style ‘dissociation of sensibility’ at the very core of the utopian tradition. Green utopias are always immensely appealing, but a genuinely cooperative human society will in my view want to spend at least some of its physical and intellectual energies launching its Morrisian ‘force-vehicles’ vertically as well as horizontally. Yuri Gagarin’s extraordinary feat in 1961 was totally caught up in Cold War ideology; and only a utopian society could afford to be genuinely and disinterestedly curious about the wider universe beyond itself.

Journalists in Utopia

2011-04-10T10:59:00.000-07:00

I always enjoy the literary ‘Ten of the Best’ column in the Review section of the Guardian newspaper on Saturday, which is this week devoted to Journalists in the novel. One invariably comes across some old favourites – in this case, Henrietta Stackpole from Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, a text I’ve shamefully not re-read since undergraduate days – and discovers some intriguing new works that one at once adds to an already long ‘to read’ list. Part of the fun is that there will always be letters the following Saturday saying: why on earth didn’t you include X, Y or Z, as blindingly obvious examples of last week’s topic? - and I’ve even contributed to that particular epistolary genre myself on occasion.

This week I’m inclined to write in again saying: why didn’t you include that important trope in some recent utopian writing of having a well-travelled but also hard-boiled and deeply cynical journalist as the visitor to utopia, as with Will Farnaby in Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962) or William Weston of the Times-Post in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975)? Such aggressively debunking investigators – men who, in Farnaby’s own phrase, ‘won’t take yes for an answer’ – are determined to test to destruction every positive assertion that utopia makes to them. So if the good new society can win even them over, as in complex ways in both books it does, then there is hope that consciousness more generally can be transformed in a socially benign direction.

Varieties of Violence

2011-04-07T00:20:00.000-07:00

Well done to those Morris Society members who marched behind the Hammersmith Socialist League banner at the Trades Union Congress’s recent day of action against the Tory-Lib Dem cuts to public spending. Very splendid they and the banner look in the photos posted up on the Society website, and I’m sure this outing must have aroused much interest in Morris amongst other marchers on the day. Media coverage of the event predictably focused on the violent actions of some small protest groups later in the afternoon, rather than the vast mass of peaceful protestors; and in response to such disturbances the Society website carries a notice recording – accurately enough – that ‘Morris condemned anarchist violence’.

Indeed he did; but he did not by any means condemn all kinds of political violence. I have just been external examiner to a wonderful PhD thesis by Ingrid Hanson of Sheffield University on the functions of violence in Morris’s writings. She notes the intense fascination with physical combat in his stories and poems – to the point, indeed, where one might almost think he was reformulating the Cartesian cogito as ‘I fight, therefore I am’; and she convincingly shows too that Morris believed passionately in the disciplined collective violence of the oppressed against the often invisible violence that an oppressive system inflicts upon them.

So: anarchist violence, no indeed; that is just counter-productive. But in response to the silent and actual violences of capitalism, Morris certainly agreed with Sun-Beam in The Roots of the Mountains that ‘if ye would live your happy life that ye love so well, ye must now fight for it’ (ch. 20); and he has shown us in the English revolution of News from Nowhere how that might be done in detail.

Blogs and Hedgehogs

2011-04-06T03:27:00.000-07:00

Skimming through Simon Critchley’s entertaining Book of Dead Philosophers, I’ve come across the famous defence of the literary fragment that the German Romantics Novalis and Schlegel published in their journal, the Athenaeum, in the late 1790s: ‘A fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog’.

Now if we are looking for traditional literary genres on which to model our blogs (see my entry for 1 January 2011), then we could certainly do worse than adopt this Novalis and Schlegel maxim. But it is surely the final memorable simile of the hedgehog that is most telling here. Blog entries, like German Romantic fragments, should sting you and hurt you if you try to pick them up. Whereas John Keats’s Grecian Urn may ‘tease us out of thought’, blog entries, more painfully but therefore also more rewardingly, will prickle us into further reflection!

Universities: What's in a Name?

2011-04-04T13:38:00.000-07:00

‘These are the neighbours, and that like they run in the Thames valley’, remarks Dick Hammond proudly as he sets off across a transfigured London with William Guest in Morris’s utopia (ch. IV). But Thames Valley University, I learnt today, doesn’t want to keep a name that thus finely resonates with Morrisian utopian values. Instead, orienting itself rather to what Morris, after William Cobbett, contemptuously referred to as ‘the Great Wen’, it wants to rename (or should that be rebrand) itself as the University of West London.

The change of name, the University’s website tells us, is not just a matter of geographical reorientation. Rather does it also signal a ‘change of emphasis in terms of its mission with a strong focus on employer engagement’; and since the new Chancellor Designate of Thames Valley/West London University is the President and CEO of Strategic Hotels and Resorts, it certainly sounds as though they have the right kind of man for the job.

In short, to rename yourself as the University of West London is to play your own bit part in that wholesale commercialisation of British universities which Laurie Penny finely exposed in her ‘Dispatches’ programme on Channel 4 this evening. One might think the scale and cynicism of all this (especially as reflected in Vice Chancellors’ pay and perks) is far beyond anything that Morris himself could have imagined; and yet since Old Hammond informs William Guest in News from Nowhere that in the Victorian period British universities ‘became definitely commercial’ (ch. X), Morris might in fact not have been that surprised after all.

Morris among the Pinkneys

2011-04-04T00:27:00.000-07:00

Did any of my family members, I wonder, ever hear William Morris at one of his innumerable socialist lectures up and down the country in the 1880s? There is a possibility – just a faint one – that my great-grandfather Mark Pinkney may have been in the audience when Morris addressed striking miners at Ryton Willows on 11 April 1887.

The day before Morris had travelled down from Glasgow to Newcastle. On the morning of the 11th he headed north to Horton in Northumberland, where he and other speakers addressed a huge crowd of between 6,000 and 10,000 people. Morris then returned to Newcastle and in the evening spoke again at Ryton Willows, ‘a piece of rough ground by the Tyneside under the bank by which the railway runs’, as he describes it in his Socialist Diary. And, he continues, ‘we had a very fair meeting there of most attentive persons’.

Now Ryton Willows is only some three miles from High Spen, the colliery village where my grandfather Henry Pinkney grew up and later, working as a miner, raised his own family; my Uncle Harry used to recall his boyhood there fondly in later years. So the geography works nicely, but does the chronology hold up? Grandad himself was born in 1894, so it is a question of whether his father Mark Pinkney, who was also a miner and would have been in his early twenties when Morris spoke at Ryton Willows in 1887, might have attended that event.

I can’t be sure. My great-grandmother Mary Pinkney is buried in High Spen, but I suspect that my great-grandparents in 1887 were living further to the south in County Durham (their third child, my Grandad, was born in Wingate seven years later). Still, no matter; next time I revisit our old family mining haunts in High Spen I shall think of Morris speaking to striking miners at Ryton Willows just up the road, and that will be almost as good as my great-grandfather actually having been there!

The Next Thirty Years

2011-04-02T00:06:00.000-07:00

One’s thirtieth wedding anniversary seems a good moment for reflection and taking stock – not just in marital and life terms, but even for one’s Morris-and-utopias blog too. How, after all, can a blog really hope to contribute to William Morris studies, given both the brevity and transience of its entries? Perhaps this is a question I should have asked myself long before now, having posted 140 entries over the last few years; but it poses itself more sharply today, in the midst of personal celebrations.

Thirty years of marriage takes us to our pearl wedding anniversary; and no doubt blog entries are, ideally, pearls of a sort too, lustrous miniatures that one can appreciate for their compact artistry. But I would like to think that they can (again ideally) be more than this, be outward-looking and impactful rather than nacreously self-contained. I like to imagine them as tiny grenades of meaning, that can explode transformatively in the reader’s mind if all goes well.

Blog entries can, I would hope, illuminate the strange by-ways of both Morris’s writing and utopia as a genre, their peculiarities and perversities, all that crucial semantic potential which can at times get lost in mainstream scholarly criticism. They can also, at their best, sustain a Morrisian and utopian political commentary into our own historical moment, into a postmodern capitalist present vastly more complex than Morris himself could ever have imagined (or, it can sometimes seem, than utopia itself can cope with). They should certainly also test both Morris and utopia against the best thought and theory of our own time, but they will of course do this in short and snappy, heuristic and suggestive, rather than systematically elaborated ways.

And lastly, they will aim, while doing all these things, to entertain, to contribute to a Morrisian fellowship in the blogosphere which can sustain us in difficult political times. For as Folk-Might wisely announces in The Roots of the Mountains, ‘in that fellowship shalt thou find both the seed of hope, and the sun of desire that shall quicken it’ (ch. 36).

Right, enough reflection: time now to climb a Lake District mountain by way of strenuous celebration; for I am not at all sure that we will still be up to that on our fortieth wedding anniversary and beyond.

Another Blog Entry There!

2011-03-31T00:58:00.001-07:00

Hearing the ‘sudden thunder of the mounting swan’ as he looks over the lake in his wonderful poem ‘Coole Park and Ballylee’, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats declares excitedly, ‘Another emblem there!’; and in the lines that follow he transforms the swans into an image of the human soul flying off into the unknown. This is a splendidly high-handed Yeatsian moment, as he magically transmutes the natural object into an ‘emblem’ or metaphor of his own preferred psychical realities. Ecological critics have deplored the way he rides roughshod over the natural creature at such moments, but such is the energy of Yeats’s poetic rhetoric that one suspects he could pull off the same metamorphic trick with any stray bit of nature that he happened across.

Does a blog today have the same extraordinary (but also possibly high-handed) power of transmuting any random fragment of reality it comes across into its own substance? Is there any bit of the objective world out there, or any topic of debate, that could in principle not find its way into a blog, Morrisian or otherwise; that could resist to the death and not in the end be transmogrified? In his seminal ‘Metaphysical Poets’ essay in 1921, T.S. Eliot proposed that ‘The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience’; and I wonder if that is not true of the genre of the blog today, that it can devour and digest anything whatsoever that it serendipitously happens across.

Is there any item or any topic out there, then, that could absolutely not, under any circumstances whatsoever, find its way into this blog, into ‘William Morris Unbound’? In the months and years ahead, dear reader, we shall surely find out!

Tolkien and Languages

2011-03-27T02:57:00.000-07:00

J.R.R. Tolkien once remarked of his literary writings that ‘the invention of languages is the foundation. The stories were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows’ (letter of 1955). William Morris may not have been a philologist of Tolkien’s stature, but, as I have noted above, he certainly had a lively interest in nineteenth-century philology; so could we try out the same Tolkienian hypothesis in his case? In News from Nowhere, for instance, could we, as a thought-experiment, play with the idea that language comes first and that everything else just provides a convenient world for it?

The ‘invention of language’ in News from Nowhere is the resurgence of Anglo-Saxon. Characters go round giving each other the ‘sele of the morning’, attending ‘motes’, or referring to each other as ‘old carles’. At the same time, what Old Hammond refers to as the ‘long-tailed words’ of a polysyllabic Latinate vocabulary are fading away. If such is the basic philological impulse of the book, Morris then as it were has to ask himself: what social conditions would I have to put in place to make such linguistic developments likely, what political changes would have to occur to de-Latinise and re-Saxonise English in this way? And the answer then is the socialist revolution of 1952, which is now, on this showing, nothing more than what the Russian Formalist critics would have called the ‘motivation of the device’, or mere pretext, of the linguistic innovations of the News from Nowhere world.

When Morris intervened in debates about English studies at Oxford in 1886 he spoke forcefully in favour of philology rather than criticism. That being so, it is a salutary exercise, I think, to consider even the great works of his socialist period as being initially philological rather than political works, as needing to invent that particular brand of politics purely in order to provide a plausible frame for their strange linguistic experiments – which then explode even more forcefully through into the last romances themselves.

Size Matters; or, Morris's Rudest Moments

2011-03-22T00:21:00.000-07:00

We know that Morris had hopes that Burne-Jones would do some illustrations for the more improper moments of the Canterbury Tales for the Kelmscott Chaucer, but the latter declined, averring that Morris ‘ever had more robust and daring parts’ than he did. But if he thus failed to get his old friend to liven up the Kelmscott Chaucer, Morris had none the less got some pretty rude moments of his own into some of his earlier literary works.

My own personal favourites come from his translation of the Grettir Saga. We have first Grettir’s finely contemptuous vision of the cowardly Gisli propelling himself away by farts from Grettir’s rage: ‘And sweating o’er the marsh with fear,/He helped the wind from mouth and rear’.

But we also have a nicely sceptical moment about Grettir himself, put into the mouth of the handmaiden at Reeks when she sees him naked in bed the morning after his great swim from the island of Drangey: ‘So may I thrive, sister! Here is Grettir Asmundsen lying bare, and him I call right well ribbed about the chest, but few might think he would be so small of growth below; and so then that does not go along with other kinds of bigness’.

So size does matter, though Grettir might perhaps have offered in defence of his shrivelled manhood that he has just had a long exposure to what James Joyce once memorably called ‘the scrotum-tightening sea’. However, he does then pull the handmaiden into bed to show her just what he is capable of with what he’s got; she shrieks out, ‘but in such wise did they part that she laid no blame on Grettir when all was over’.

Any other candidates buried in the Collected Works for Morris’s rudest moment?

A Syllabus for Utopia

2011-03-17T11:36:00.000-07:00

Education is always a delicate, not to say positively tricky, issue for utopia. On the one hand, utopia certainly wants to inculcate its own benign values deeply into its young people; for how else could it make sure there will be no political backsliding to the bad old society it has left behind? On the other hand, it just as certainly does not want to impose these values too monolithically on its young; for that would, in effect, be to brainwash their innocent spirits into its ways and values, which would be totalitarianism rather than utopia proper.

Utopia must therefore find ways to educate its young people sensitively and discretely; and I think this is also true of the manner in which literary utopias educate their readers. Such utopias not only discuss education as an explicit theme within the book, they must also delicately educate their readers as they go along, subtly emitting signals as to what an appropriate ‘syllabus for utopia’ might look like.

Thus when Old Hammond in News from Nowhere twice mentions the French utopian writer Charles Fourier within twenty pages – first to criticise his notion of ‘phalangsteries’, second to praise his insights into creative labour – we must imagine the text saying to its readers: dig here, check this out, investigate further, explore the whole range of Fourier’s ideas and debate them with your comrades as impassionedly as the Socialist Leaguers argue out their visions of the future on the opening page of this book itself.

If we totted up such references across News from Nowhere, we would indeed arrive at a reading programme or syllabus for utopia, which would culturally qualify us as readers of the genre and as political participants in the present. Thus it is that utopia gently educates us even as it holds forth about the teaching of its own youth.

William Morris on the Red Planet

2011-03-04T23:54:00.000-08:00

As a boy, I often used to go fishing on Southend Pier, which is still officially the longest pleasure pier in the world (at one and a quarter miles in length). With a flask of steaming hot tomato soup and the packed lunch my Mum had made, one could brave the chilliest of conditions; and the catch might include flounders, dabs, mackerel, codling, mullet, the occasional starfish, and sometimes the highly disagreeable (because poisonous) weaver fish. So imagine my surprise and delight when I reached volume three of Kim Stanley Robinson’s stunning 1990s Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) and found that Southend Pier actually features in it – though I am not going to give away any key narrative secrets of the book here by explaining why my boyhood Pier suddenly pops up in Robinson’s great s-f epic.

A little less surprisingly, Blue Mars also contains references to William Morris (whose name is given to one of the square harbours being built on Mars), to Hammersmith (an underground station on the mobile city on planet Mercury), to ‘the almost forgotten guild socialism of Great Britain’; and the Martians have even formed their own version of Morris’s Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (‘committees to protect the earliest buildings from destruction’). And all this is eminently appropriate because the Mars trilogy is not only about the physical process of terraforming the Red Planet, but also about the political attempt to build a good new human world there too.

One could take such references as graceful allusions on Robinson’s part back to an important utopian precursor, as a respectful nod back from the 1990s to the 1890s; but I think they are more than that. Such allusions announce to us, in my view, that the Mars trilogy in effect is the contemporary form of News from Nowhere, that it is Morris’s utopia postmodernised and science-fictionalised as we now need it to be; and that Morrisians will, over the years to come, have to read and engage and debate it as such.

Principles of a Sequel

2011-03-02T00:23:00.000-08:00

According to his daughter May, William Morris used to remark that ‘When you are using an old story, read it through, then shut the book and write it in your own way’ (Collected Works, III, xxi-xxii). Could we, I wonder, apply this Morrisian maxim to his own News from Nowhere? One hundred and twenty years after its first publication it certainly now counts as an ‘old story’, so what might it mean to read it through, shut the book and write it in our own way in 2011 or beyond? How might we elaborate the principles that ought to guide such a retelling or rewriting?

The Guide in Utopia

2011-02-28T00:48:00.000-08:00

In H.G. Wells’s National Observer version of The Time Machine, the Time Traveller, as he explores the baffling new world of 802,701 A.D., reflects that: ‘Odd as it may seem, I had no cicerone. In all the narratives of people visiting the future that I have read, some obliging scandal-monger appears at an early stage, and begins to lecture on constitutional history and social economy, and to point out the celebrities. Indeed so little had I thought of the absurdity of this that I had actually anticipated something of the kind would occur in reality’. And Marina Warner has suggested that ‘William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) was probably uppermost in his [Wells’s] mind when he wrote’ this passage.

Is Dick Hammond, then, as William Guest’s cicerone in the brave new world of Nowhere, an ‘obliging scandal-monger’? I’m not sure I’d use that phrase about Dick, but I do think that the Time Traveller’s remark can helpfully defamiliarise the literary convention of the guide-to-utopia for us, prompting us to observe it quizzically in the spirit of a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. We should not simply admire the guide for his or her genial helpfulness and expository patience, but also ask, more challengingly, ‘what’s in it for them? What does he or she get out of occupying this role?’ Or, as my colleague Keith Hanley wryly puts it, ‘who’s having whom?’

Clearly, you get a good deal of control of what the bewildered visitor to utopia sees or learns of the new society. You can ward off other utopians, as Dick Hammond does with Boffin the Dustman at the Hammersmith Guest House, and make sure that the visitor learns about the new culture only through the particular route that you want him to (Old Hammond at the British Museum, in Dick’s case). And as the guide does this, he may also be imposing his own particular utopian emphases upon the visitor, as Dick, with his passion for manual craft work, is clearly doing – to the point, indeed, where his friend Bob as mathematician and historian has to protest about this.

So H.G. Wells has done us good service, I think, in drawing to our attention the far-from-innocent convention of the utopian cicerone; and we now need to extend our study of this figure across the genre at large.

Feats of Wild Swimming

2011-02-22T01:44:00.000-08:00

Outdoor swimming has become popular in recent years, particularly since the publication of Kate Rew’s book Wild Swim in 2008 – and the hyper-active Kate is also founder of the Outdoor Swimming Society . But we shall find, if we look carefully at Morris’s work, that here as in so many other areas, he was a great precursor who was well ahead of his time.

Dick Hammond and William Guest go for a brief dip in the Thames towards the end of News from Nowhere, but the truly great feats of outdoor swimming in Morris are elsewhere. Birdalone in The Water of the Wondrous Isles is without doubt his most athletic female; and ‘there is no swimmer stronger than I’, she hubristically declares as she embarks on her prodigious swim back across the lake to the Witch’s house.

But the most impressive of all Morrisian swims is surely that in his translation of the Grettir Saga, when Grettir and his friend ‘swam in one spell all down Hitriver, from the lake right away to the sea’ (ch. LVIII). Having had a brief, hypothermic dip myself one summer in a Norwegian fjord when on holiday out there with my son (who judiciously chose not to come in), I can truly appreciate just what an awesome achievement this is.

Eager Restless Heroism

2011-02-19T02:29:00.000-08:00

News from Nowhere contains what must surely be one of the most inspiring sentences in all English literature to that date, when Old Hammond remarks that between 1952 and 1954 ‘the sloth, the hopelessness, and, if I may say so, the cowardice of the last century, had given place to the eager, restless heroism of a declared revolutionary period’ (ch. XVII). This stirring formulation surely gives us a fine epigraph for the current political struggles and sacrifices taking place in Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and the Middle East generally. Not a socialist revolution in the making, admittedly, but a democratic one at least; and certainly involving an eager, restless heroism that can and should inspire us all.

Svend and Style

2011-02-12T01:06:00.000-08:00

In a local secondhand bookshop a few years back I picked up a quaint little volume (which I have mentioned in this blog before) in the ‘King’s Treasuries of Literature’ series general-edited by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch. First published in 1922, it is titled: Atalanta’s Race and Two Other Tales from ‘The Earthly Paradise’. At the back of the book, after the three tales, we are offered a brief ‘Appreciation by Alfred Noyes’ and, more surprisingly, the text of Morris’s prose story ‘Svend and his Brethren’ from the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.

Why the ‘Svend’ story, then? Well, first, ‘it is given here for purposes of literary comparison with the foregoing verse romances from the Earthly Paradise’. All well and good: let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth. But then, second and much more intriguingly, ‘it is suggested that the reader should attempt the rendering of portions of it into one or other of the poetic forms represented in the three verse stories of this collection’ (p.169). The question of why one should want to perform this curious creative writing exercise is never addressed, but it is surely a lovely idea none the less.

To rewrite one of Morris’s works in the style of another, just for the hell of it! To an extent Morris himself did something like this, of course, since May Morris notes that he would occasionally write a particular story first as prose and then, not liking that version, as poetry – or vice versa. We might regard such stylistic rewritings as a kind of five-finger exercise that any keen Morrisian ought to chance his or her arm at now and again. So, just to start the ball rolling, I offer my own (very crude) version of the first chapter of News from Nowhere rewritten in something like the forceful anapaestic manner of Sigurd the Volsung. Comments – or improvements – would be very welcome:

At the League one sullen evening, great debate there gan to flare,
On the Morrow of Revolution, and the days that are fairer than fair;
And as Anarchists rant onwards, representing different schools,
Silent William broke amongst them, damning all the rest for fools.
As he wends his iron way homewards and stews in the vapour-bath,
‘If I could but see the future!’ he cries, and his great heart laughs.
Ugly bridge upon the river, young moon tangled in the sky,
Swirling waters up to Chiswick, as the hot debate goes by.
And as William lies to slumber loss and doubt come to the fore,
But he shapes them to a story, and they fall back to the floor.
Clock strikes three and he is sleeping, and now time begins to shift,
As the dark past gins to loosen, the claws of Capital to lift.

He awoke and tossed the bed-clothes, dazzled in the gleaming sun;
For the past was rent asunder, the days of Nowhere had begun.

Prequel to Nowhere

2011-02-04T10:48:00.000-08:00

I have speculated occasionally in this blog on what the elements of a ‘sequel’ to News from Nowhere might consist in (Old Hammond coming out of retirement, say, and re-engaging in political struggle); but J.J. Abrams’ wonderful recent Star Trek film, which tells the ‘back story’ of how the original Enterprise crew of Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Uhura, etc, first came together, suddenly opens a new Morrisian possibility to us: what would a prequel to News from Nowhere look like?

There certainly already are prequels within the utopian tradition. Several years after his environmental masterpiece Ecotopia (1975), Ernest Callenbach published Ecotopia Emerging (1981), which fleshes out in more detail how the Ecotopian society on the west coast of America first came into being. One might argue that Morris himself has already provided us with a prequel of this kind in chapter XVII of News from Nowhere on ‘How the Change Came’, which vividly narrates the civil war of 1952 onwards and the early days of the new socialist society. The French scholar Paul Meier has written particularly well about this, the immediate Morrow of the Revolution.

That may be so politically, but we have always valued News from Nowhere for its personal immediacy as well as its social content, and therefore we shall want a prequel at the level of character as well as politics. Such a work would need to answer many questions: how did Old Hammond become Old Hammond, what was he in his long-past youthful and middle-aged phases? Who exactly was the man for whom Clara abandoned Dick Hammond, and how did that painful episode play itself out in detail? How had Dick and Bob the weaver met and become fast friends in the first place, given what total physical and intellectual opposites they are? What were the nature of Ellen’s earlier sexual entanglements which had led to her living in a kind of exile at Runnymede, and how had she come to have once been Old Hammond’s pupil in the first place? And the list could go on.

The real trick in writing a prequel would be in relating such personal issues to the wider development of the post-revolutionary society, thereby demonstrating that (as the 1960s so abundantly taught us) the personal always is the political after all. And since Morris was certainly interested in time travel to the past (as in John Ball) as well as to the future, we can take it that he might well have approved the principle of a prequel to his utopia.

Philology in Utopia

2011-01-25T01:11:00.000-08:00

Dystopia has its philologists, such as Winston Smith’s friend Syme in 1984: ‘Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary’. And it makes sense that dystopia should value the science of philology. For if you can remake language – warp it and simplify it – to the point where no one can even any longer think a dissident thought in the first place, then you will be saved a great and costly apparatus of repressive monitoring and control. Not that dystopia shows any gratitude to the individual linguists who are engaged upon this project; for 100 pages later we learn that ‘Syme had vanished. A morning came and he was missing from work’.

Does utopia need philologists too? If all the customs and structures of a bad old society have mutated into those of a good new one, will not language, as the very underlying medium of culture and politics, necessarily mutate too? And could this be a willed, conscious mutation, not just an incrementally slow organic one?

Sometimes philologists arrive in utopia, as guests or visitors. The narrator of Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) makes detailed use of the philology of Max Müller, with its isolating, agglutinative and inflectional strata of language, to analyse the discourse of his utopian hosts, the Vril-ya; and it seems to me that this philological model might with benefit be carried over into Morris’s News from Nowhere.

Language is certainly mutating in Nowhere, as what Old Hammond terms ‘long-tailed words’ such as administration and organisation are giving way to more physically immediate Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, such as carle, sele and mote. Hammond’s ‘long-tailed words’ are clearly those of Max Müller’s agglutinative stratum, ‘polysynthetical or polysyllabic monsters ... devouring invaders of the aboriginal forms’. And in Nowhere with its emergent Anglo-Saxonisms, as among the Vril-ya, ‘as the inflectional stage prevailed over the agglutinative, it is surprising to see how much more boldly the original roots of the language project from the surface that conceals them’.

But is this a conscious or unconscious process in Nowhere? Is the young man engaged on literary work up the Thames at Bisham in chapter XXIV a philologist, like Syme in 1984, though working to benign rather than totalitarian ends? We know that Morris as a young man had a strong interest in the philology of Richard Trench and we still await a fullscale study of Morris’s writings in relation to the rich field of Victorian philology.

Burne-Jones, Luddite

2011-01-21T02:19:00.000-08:00

William Morris’s social vision in News from Nowhere is sometimes seen as technologically backward and excessively pastoral, with its Utopians flitting among the Thames-side fields and flowers in Dylan Thomas mode, ‘happy as the grass is green’.

I have written about this issue elsewhere, since I feel there are ways in which the book itself incorporates and actively responds to this kind of critique. But if Morris’s utopia truly were as technologically simplistic as its detractors suggest, then it would have an eminently appropriate inhabitant in the person of his closest friend, Edward Burne-Jones; for, as we learn in Penelope Fitzgerald’s biography of the painter, ‘he was defeated by the simplest mechanical devices, even drawing-pins’ (p.35).

The mind boggles. I sometimes struggle with the DVD recorder or with putting a new battery into my mobile phone or with the complexities of page set-out on the laptop – but drawing-pins ... ?

Terminator at Kelmscott

2011-01-18T00:57:00.000-08:00

I once had a dream that, on some sort of Time Team-style archaeological dig, I excavated part of the broken exoskeleton of one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator robots in the grounds of William Morris’s Kelmscott Manor. I woke up in a state of fear and shock. It is true that there is a World War Two pillbox in the grounds of the Manor, so in that sense the memory of the political barbarism of the twentieth century reaches even into the idyllic corners of Morris’s upper Thames. But what was a robotic image from one of our own most powerful postmodern dystopias, the Terminator series of movies, doing in my dream in the utopian Kelmscott landscapes of News from Nowhere itself?

I take this disturbing dream to be some sort of oblique confirmation, from a Morrisian rather Jungian collective unconscious, that there may be dystopian elements to News from Nowhere, notes of warning built into that text just as they are, very much more obviously, in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine; and that such warnings may ultimately focus around the issue of technology in the text. Old Hammond, as I have noted before in this blog, may be ‘disappointed’ in the new society, and Ellen frets about where its lack of historical consciousness may be politically leading it.

I find my mind circling around the ‘force vehicles’ of the Nowherian society, which do not seem to be very clearly focused or understood in the text itself. What is the nature of that ‘force’? How are democratic decisions about its use or availability made in this society? Who is manufacturing such vehicles? What else do they manufacture? Why do such high-tech products seems so out of kilter with the slow, neighbourly, arts-and-crafts lifestyle of the other Nowherians? If, historically speaking, energy-rich societies have militarily imposed themselves upon their energy-poor neighbours, might it not be that the ‘force-rich’ manufacturers may seek to impose their will upon the force-poor neighbours of the Thames valley in Morris’s novel?

For if they – whoever ‘they’ are – can build force-vehicles, could they not ultimately, if push came to shove, build Terminator robots too? And the English revolution of 1952 would then have to be fought all over again, but now – to borrow a phrase of T.S. Eliot’s from Four Quartets – under conditions that seem unpropitious.

Lessons from the Sherlockians

2011-01-12T00:57:00.000-08:00

In order to satisfy their unquenchable enthusiasm for Sherlockian adventures, fans of the Sherlock Holmes stories have taken to writing out in full imaginary versions of cases which Dr Watson only mentions in passing, usually at the beginning of a story. Thus it is that we have lively full-length versions of X, Y and Z, all of which only get the briefest of allusions in the Conan Doyle canon itself. What might William Morris fans learn from this practice, in order to feed their own unquenchable reading addictions?

Take the case of Morris’s late romances. I have already suggested that we try completing those fragmentary tales which Morris left unfinished at his death (see entry for 3.03.09); but even the completed ones offer much additional, undeveloped narrative potential. Many intriguing minor characters seem to have complex life stories of their own, which the romances do no more than hint at. Much room for further creative development here, one would think!

In The Wood beyond the World (1894) Walter and his crew, driven off course by tempests as they attempt to return to Langton, encounter an elderly man on an unknown shore who gives them food and shelter. ‘Father, meseemeth thou shouldest have some strange tale to tell’, remarks Walter, but we get no more than glimpses of what this colourful tale might be; it seems to have involved killing a predecessor who had tried to stop him going through the ‘shard’ in the cliff-wall that later takes Walter himself to the Mistress, Maid and Dwarf. So here is a story ripe for further narrative development, surely.

As with the minor figures, so, often and surprisingly, with the major ones too. As the Maid tells her story to Walter as they fly towards the Land of the Bears, she herself concedes that ‘there are, as it were, shards or gaps in my life’, particularly in the early years. We have no more than misty glimpses, including the figure of the old woman who taught magical ‘lore’ to her. So here, too, is a tale that would bear imaginative recreation in full. Some bold Morris scholars have already done some work along these lines, as Peter Faulkner notes in his obituary of Norman Talbot: ‘he was to go on to draft a version of The Sundering Flood from the point of view of its female protagonist’.

Much potential for further Morrisian text here then; it isn’t only the Sherlockians who can look forward to new additions to the canon well beyond Conan Doyle’s own demise.

Masters of the Universe

2011-01-06T02:30:00.000-08:00

As British bankers resume their culture of huge bonuses and manage to evade many of the regulatory measures proposed in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008, so one turns with a mixture of glee and relief to Paul Lafargue’s account of the Morrow of the Revolution in Commonweal on 9 July 1887 – an article which Morris, as editor, described in that issue as ‘surely well worth our attention’.

For in the industrial towns, Lafargue tells us, the Socialists ‘will have to get hold of the local governments ... open the prisons to let out the petty thieves, and put under lock and key the big ones, such as bankers, financiers, big manufacturers, landowners, etc ... Not that one would do them any harm, but to treat them as hostages responsible for the good behaviour of their class’.

I can’t recall any mention of bankers in News from Nowhere, but since Morris in a later lecture remarked that ‘our friend Paul Lafargue’s late article in Commonweal points out clearly enough the direction of the steps to be taken in the re-organization of society’, we can assume that the bankers and hedge-fund managers find themselves locked up after the revolution there too. After all, as Bertolt Brecht put it, in a finely pithy example of his plumpes Denken or ‘crude thinking’: ‘what is robbing a bank compared to founding one?’

The Blog as Literary Form

2011-01-01T02:44:00.000-08:00

We have distinguished essays on the essay as a literary form by Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno, but we do not yet, as far as I know, have an account of the blog as a literary form. Yet blogs are a sufficiently well-established social practice in the early twenty-first century to deserve some generic self-consciousness, one would think. So here are my own preliminary thoughts in that direction: not an essay on essays, but a blog on blogs.

Blogs are, on the whole, very much shorter than essays, in my own case averaging out at about 250-300 words a time. Essays may themselves be a nimble, opportunistic, socially topical form, but blogs, which might only take 15-20 minutes to compose, will clearly therefore be even more so; especially since they can be self-published immediately. Blogs may have something of the immediacy of a diary entry, but they will on the whole tend to be more crafted than a diary jotting, to be more of an aesthetic artefact than a scribbled memo; and since in their brief compass they often try to crystallise a single epiphanic insight about their subject matter, perhaps we should think of them as the electronic equivalent of haiku, that traditional miniature Japanese poetic form.

Indeed, we are not short of traditional genres on which to model our blogs: the Oriental ‘pillow book’, the Nietzschean aphorism, William Morris’s own ‘Notes on News’ in Commonweal (and Walter Benjamin’s more avantgarde idea of an essay composed entirely of footnotes might be relevant here too). The blog entry will be to these modes what Bruce Lee’s fighting style jeet kune do was to karate, judo, kung-fu, aikido, and so on; it will opportunistically incorporate elements from all of them, while being reducible to none. The blog is a twenty-first-century genre still in the making; and like the novel for Mikhail Bakhtin, it is as yet more of an unsettling energy or force than a classical genre with formulable rules of its own. Long may it thrive, and happy New Year to you all!

Thomas More in the Coach House

2010-12-30T01:07:00.000-08:00

In his study of William Morris: His Life, Work and Friends (1967) Philip Henderson evokes the Kelmscott coach house in its glory days: ‘a meeting place for the progressive intellectuals of the time – austerely and simply furnished, with its rush-bottomed chairs and wooden forms, its white-washed walls covered with rush matting and hung with engraved portraits of Sir Thomas More and other “socialist” pioneers, and its speakers’ platform at one end over which hung [Walter] Crane’s banner’ (p.320).

I don’t recall seeing that reference to an engraved portrait of Thomas More in contemporary accounts of the coach house, and I am not sure what source Henderson is drawing on in citing it here; but it seems to me eminently appropriate to have the author of Utopia (1516) represented on the walls. If you enter the coach house today, you will see portraits of many of the speakers who took part in political debates there in the late nineteenth-century: Bernard Shaw, Peter Kropotkin, Annie Besant, Keir Hardie, and so on; but there is no Thomas More among them.

But what is special about Kelmscott House is that it is a portal to the future as well as the past, that it is the gateway forward to the twenty-second-century Thames-side of Morris’s utopian imaginings in News from Nowhere as well as back to the socialist debates of the late 1880s and early 1890s. That being so, that we are here in the very place where the greatest of English utopias opens, it seems entirely apt that the founder of that essential literary genre, Thomas More himself, should also be honoured on its walls. So if we can locate the old engraved portrait of the author of Utopia, we should restore it to its place; and if we can’t, we should commission a new one and get it nailed up as soon as possible, certainly before the 500th anniversary of Utopia in 2016.

Socialism and Fun

2010-12-24T01:51:00.000-08:00

Green Party conference sessions often begin with a few minutes of silent ‘attunement’, but how many socialist political meetings these days start with a rousing bout of singing? Not many, I would think; but Socialist League branch meetings in the late 1880s sometimes did. For socialism in those heady early days aimed to be fun – not just heavyduty industrial organising or intensive study of the works of Marx and Engels (though there was plenty of that too).

Hence it was that, in addition to those socialist choirs that opened some branch meetings, the wider movement also organised literary readings, excursions to Epping Forest, a Socialist Supper Club in Soho, the embroidering of banners, Clarion cycling or camping or rambling trips, the playing of a harmonium on the official Socialist cart, private theatre productions (whether one-act revolutionary dramas or an Ibsen play or a three-act social comedy), the study of natural history, occasional dancing, and so on. It was as if they had invented avant la lettre May 1968’s great utopian slogan of ‘sous les pavés, la plage’; beneath the standardised and oppressive world of capitalism, this whole extraordinary, vibrant subculture.

Clearly we will need to reinvent some of this shared sense of fun, adventure and Morrisian fellowship – in new forms, naturally – for any emergent postmodern socialism of the early twenty-first century; and we will need to learn both from the socialist pioneers of the 1880s and from the Green movement of our own day as we do so.

Reading in Utopia

2010-12-19T01:14:00.000-08:00

In his great study, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005), Fredric Jameson poses a telling issue: ‘Readers have a right to wonder what they will find to read in Utopia, the unspoken thought being that a society without conflict is unlikely to produce exciting stories’(p.182). All utopias, I would suggest, have to address this issue in one way or another, either by delivering to us a satisfying form of utopian art or by arguing that, for whatever reason, art in the older senses has withered away in the new world.

For example, Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward, as Jameson himself notes, delivers into Julian West’s hands the novel Penthesilia by Berrian: ‘It is considered his masterpiece, and will at least give you an idea of what the stories nowadays are like’ (ch.xv). The visitors to utopia in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, on the other hand, witness extraordinary new kinds of drama, ‘a most impressive array of pageantry, of processions, a sort of grand ritual, with their arts and their religion broadly blended’ (ch.9).

News from Nowhere contains Ellen’s fierce attack on the nineteenth-century novel, so even if the Nowherians are still reading them (they love their Dickens), they won’t be writing books like that any more. There is a theatre in Morris’s transfigured London, but we alas learn nothing about what is showing there; and on the whole News from Nowhere is on the other side of the utopian argument here, not so much trying to deliver to us a new literature or art, but rather implying that art in the old sense has now been dissolved away into that ‘work-pleasure’ or Ruskinian creativity-in-labour which characterises the new society.

The most interesting suggestions about what there might be to read in Nowhere have accordingly come from Morris scholars rather than the novel itself. For various critics have argued that the ideal reading in Morris’s utopia would be nothing other than ... Morris’s own late romances themselves! These, it is claimed, in their one-dimensional, desubjectified story-telling would avoid Ellen’s critique of the psychologistic Victorian novel, and would be open to collective modes of reception in ways that the private experience of novel reading obviously is not. So could it indeed be the case that when Annie in the Hammersmith Guest House says she wants to press on with the ‘pretty old book’ she began yesterday she is referring after all to The Wood beyond the World or The Water of the Wondrous Isles?

Lecture Audiences: Research Project

2010-12-14T00:35:00.000-08:00

In the posthumous essay collection What I Came to Say (1989), Raymond Williams remarks in the course of an essay on nineteenth-century cultural developments: ‘The lecture is worth a special note, because it is so often overlooked or treated as an extreme minority form. It is significant how much of the important social thought of the century was in lecture form: from Coleridge through Carlyle and Ruskin to Morris. We know far too little about the audiences at these lectures, but in cases where research has been done – as on Ruskin’s lectures at Bradford – it is clear that quite large and general lecture audiences were a significant feature of nineteenth-century urban culture’ (p.125).

I’m quite sure that far too little research has been done on the audiences of Morris’s artistic and political lectures. We have a few well-known and colourful anecdotes, as when hostile students let off a stinkbomb at the back of the Holywell Music Room during one of Morris’s talks in Oxford; but sustained research into the social composition of his audiences, and the effects of his thought and rhetoric upon them, remains to be done. So here, one would think, is a worthy PhD project for a student in search of a topic.

Mathematising 'News from Nowhere'

2010-12-10T02:31:00.000-08:00

We should surely be grateful that in News from Nowhere Bob the weaver has ‘taken to mathematics’ – to the point indeed where it has ‘muddled his brain’, according to Dick Hammond. For the inclusion of a mathematician in Morris’s utopia may allow us, in turn, to ‘mathematise’ that text. Morris’s close friend, Charles Faulkner, was a mathematics tutor at Oxford, and it is possible, even likely, that he would have come across Edwin Abbott’s wonderful geometrical fantasy Flatland when it was published in 1884. He may even have drawn it to Morris’s attention, so can we then ‘flatlandise’ Morris’s utopia too?

Well, it certainly is a very flat utopia! Set in the Thames valley, it has none of the dramatic verticality of its author’s late romances; there are no formidable peaks to scale or precipices to cross. Moreover, if there is a southward gravitational pull in Flatland, so too have we ended up thoroughly in the south in News from Nowhere, despite the occasional mention of Hadrian’s wall or snakes in Iceland. And if the geometrical entities of Abbott’s fantasy have to make out each other’s shapes and status by ‘feeling’, I wonder if this doesn’t bear upon the remarkably tactile nature of relationships in Morris’s utopia, where everybody is very rapidly holding hands or kissing or patting each other on the head.

Mathematically speaking, is not William Guest’s bafflement in Nowhere due to the fact that he is a two-dimensional product of capitalism adrift in an unsettlingly three-dimensional socialist world? And may not Ellen’s radical difference from all the other characters in the book in its later chapters be because she hails from Abbott’s mysterious Fourth Dimension, and is thus far beyond both two- and three-dimensional understanding?

I like to think that if Bob the mathematician attempted to interpret the book in which he himself features, this is how his geometricising reading of News from Nowhere might proceed!

In Praise of Student Protest

2010-12-05T04:43:00.000-08:00

It’s great to see students in England fighting back so vigorously against both the massive increase in university tuition fees that the coalition government is about to impose upon them and the swingeing general cuts to public services that are now under way. And young people more generally are getting radicalised too, as with the very lively UK Uncut campaign against alleged tax avoidance by many major companies and banks (Vodafone initially, but now Boots, Barclays, Lloyds and HSBC).

At the same time, under a Conservative government (albeit with their Lib-Dem poodle in tow) we see the police becoming predictably more aggressive towards protestors. There was the nasty ‘kettling’ of students in London the other day, and now we learn that undercover plain-clothes police officers are being used against UK Uncut. We recall too how Margaret Thatcher unleashed the police and MI5 as her private army against the mining communities in 1984-5.

We know perfectly well where William Morris would stand in all this. Between 1883 and 1885 he was regularly preaching Marxism and revolution to undergraduates at Oxford; he was a keen admirer of the very vigorous Edinburgh University Socialist Society; in 1887 he wrote enthusiastically that ‘in Russia the universities are closed in order to damp down the revolutionary fire spreading so quickly among the students’. And he knew equally well how aggressively the police would be let loose on protestors by an Establishment that felt threatened in a period of capitalist economic crisis.

So, in the admirably Morrisian words of the Edinburgh students’ 1884 manifesto, which are as true in 2010 as they were then, ‘Utopia now: we can bring it about. The power is ours if we have the will’!

Morning Chat with Mr Morris

2010-12-04T04:01:00.000-08:00

Oh dear, one always finishes writing a book too early! No sooner has one got the first copies back from the printer, gleaming, glossy and reeking so delightfully of printers’ ink, than one discovers – if one has continued reading around the same subject or field – some crucial fact which should have gone into the volume, and which would perhaps have involved wholesale reinterpretation of one’s conclusions had it done so.

So it has proved, to some extent, with my book of Morris interviews, We Met Morris: Interviews with William Morris, 1885-96 (Spire Books, 2005). Because some time after it was published I happened upon a reference to another Morris interview which should ideally have gone into the collection in the first place. Darn, drat, grinding of teeth! On investigation it turned out that the additional interview didn’t involve any radical reinterpretation of earlier findings, thank goodness, but it would certainly have been nice to have it in the collection for the sake of historical completeness.

It is an interview or ‘chat’ with Morris conducted by R. Ponsonby Staples and published in The New Budget under the title ‘Morning Chats with William Morris’ (2 October 1895, p.24). Staples arrives at Kelmscott House to sketch Morris and his surroundings, and chats with him in a rather desultory way as he does so about such topics as the Catholic Church, Russian politics and literature, racial identity among Jews and native Americans, contemporary painting and the railway system. On the latter, Morris ends with a splendid suggestion: ‘Well, with the railways, I would go further than that Zone system you would like tried in Ireland; they ought to be quite free!’

I can’t now put this interview in my We Met Morris collection, alas, but I have made it available on my Lancaster University website entry. So if you want to read it, please go to this (decidedly unwieldy) address: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/english/research/englishliterature.htm#tp

December 1910 One Hundred Years On

2010-12-01T01:10:00.000-08:00

‘On or around December, 1910, human character changed’, as Virginia Woolf boldly announced in her 1924 essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’. As we today enter December 2010, a hundred years on from her supposed turning point, we can see just how busy this mischievous remark is keeping the Woolf and modernism scholars. A conference around the December 1910 claim is being held in Glasgow, and will inaugurate the British Association of Modernist Studies; and my wife, Makiko Minow-Pinkney, is gathering a volume of some twenty international essays together on the topic for Illuminati Books.

Woolf uses her December 1910 claim to defend the practice of modernist writing against the restrictive conventions of the realist novel, as they come through from the nineteenth century to her immediate precursors like Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy. William Morris also didn’t have much time for the realist novel (Ellen speaks passionately against it in News from Nowhere, for example), but would he have been open to Woolfian – or other kinds of – modernism?

The jury is still complexly out on this question. For Nikolas Pevsner, there is a strong continuity between Ruskin and Morris and twentieth-century modernist architecture; we know that Morris’s early poetry had a significant impact on Ezra Pound and, through Pound, on Imagism; and it has been argued that Morris’s late romances partake in that turn to the ‘mythic method’ (T.S. Eliot’s phrase) that characterises the work of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce and Eliot himself in the modernist period. On the other hand, Red House doesn’t look remotely like a functionalist Bauhaus building or a purist white Le Corbusian ‘machine for living in’; T.S. Eliot rejects Morris’s poetry vigorously in his great essay on Andrew Marvell; and Morris himself would presumably have regarded Woolfian and Joycean ‘stream of consciousness’ as even more isolationistic than that ‘dreary introspective nonsense about ... feelings and aspirations’ which for Ellen in Nowhere characterises realism itself.

I therefore find myself agreeing with Norman Kelvin, who emphasises ‘how truly problematic is the relation of Morris to early modernism’; yet it is, for that very reason, a topic we shall have to go on pondering about, all the way through, I would imagine, to the bi-centenary of Woolf’s impish remark in December 2110.

'Earthly Paradise': the Greatest Hits

2010-11-25T00:49:00.000-08:00

Is it possible to hazard an informed guess as to which is the most anthologised of the twenty-four tales in Morris’s Earthly Paradise? To do a full accounting one would need to look first at volumes which offer truncated versions of The Earthly Paradise itself, such as Atalanta’s Race and Two Other Tales from ‘The Earthly Paradise’ (1922) in the ‘King’s Treasuries of Literature’ series general-edited by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch. There are also several prose-version anthologies from Morris’s magnum opus designed specifically for children, such as Tales from ‘The Earthly Paradise’, selected by W.J. Glover in 1913. And one would then need to turn, more generally, to anthologies of narrative poetry and tot up the most popular Earthly Paradise offerings from such collections.

It would be a huge scholarly task to do such an audit in detail, so I can only offer an impressionistic answer to my opening question. But my hunch would be that, as the little King’s Treasuries volume of 1922 already suggests, it may well be Atalanta’s Race which is the most anthologised of all the twenty-four poetic tales. It is not the most critically acclaimed, certainly - that would more likely be The Lovers of Gudrun – but it may, just possibly, be the most anthologised.

As some relevant straws in the wind, we might note that Atalanta’s Race appears in George G. Loane’s Longer Narrative Poems (Nineteenth Century) in 1916, in the ‘English Literature for Secondary Schools’ series; in the World’s Classics Book of Narrative Verse, edited by V.H. Collins in 1930; and in T.W Moles and A.R. Moon’s Longman Anthology of Longer Poems as late as 1963.

If Atalanta’s Race has indeed been the most popular of the Earthly Paradise stories, why should this be? It is a fairly lightweight genial tale, offering no particularly impressive formal or thematic features, so why so much emphasis on it among anthologisers? One troubling answer instantly suggests itself. It is the very first of the Earthly Paradise stories, so does its regular appearance imply that anthologisers have certainly felt the need to have something from so weighty a narrative monument as Morris’s great collection, but have in practice, as readers and would-be editors, not actually been able to get beyond the first story in it?

The Socialist Reading Room

2010-11-21T09:21:00.000-08:00

In Morris’s Socialist years a reading room and newsroom were provided at Kelmscott House; they were under May Morris’s supervision and opened from 10.30am to 1.00pm on Sundays. Fiona MacCarthy informs us that ‘Walter Crane had suggested a reading list for young Socialists and Morris presented a number of volumes, including a copy of Shelley’s Poems’ (p.520).

Does Crane’s reading list survive anywhere, I wonder, or can we reconstruct what it might have contained by educated guesswork? Was Shelley on it or not, or was that an additional graceful thought of Morris’s own? If we can speculatively put a list of titles together, what was it about these books that made them pedagogically suitable for young socialists specifically?

And Walter Crane’s 1880s reading list might inspire us to draw up one of our own. What would a suggested course of reading for young socialists look like today, in the 2010s? I’d certainly be inclined to have G.A. Cohen’s delightfully produced little book, Why Not Socialism? (2009), with its audacious ‘camping-trip’ metaphor, high on the list. We, in the postmodern, have lost sight of the question of socialist pedagogy for the young; and if the more buoyant and innocent movement of the 1880s and 90s can reactivate that question for us, it will have done us a great service.

With How Sad Steps, O Moon

2010-11-16T12:05:00.000-08:00

When my son was small we were both great fans of the eccentric British astronomer Patrick Moore. We once went to see him speak at Blackpool’s Grand Theatre, we bought his Yearbook of Astronomy, and we equipped ourselves with a modest astronomical telescope which, at its best, let us see four of the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.

However, not all the astronomical knowledge that the two of us mustered between us helps me to fully understand Morris’s biographer J.W. Mackail when he remarks, in his Studies of English Poets (1926), that ‘It is curious how constantly descriptive writers, both in prose and verse, go wrong about the moon’s movements and phases. Even Morris does so, in the lovely opening scene of “The Message of the March Wind”’ (p.100).

In that poem, you will remember, the narrator announces that ‘The moon’s rim is rising, a star glitters o’er us’, and then two stanzas later reflects that ‘When the young moon has set, if the March sky should darken,/We might see from the hill-top the great city’s glare’. So is Mackail right here? Has Morris really got his lunar observations in a twist?

The View from Kelmscott

2010-11-11T14:14:00.000-08:00

John Lendis’s ‘View from Kelmscott’ paintings, currently on display at John Ruskin’s Brantwood, are not at all, thank goodness, the sort of genial, mild, greenly ‘English’ landscape images one might have expected from the title of the series. They are, instead, eerie and unsettling (as one sees from comments in the Visitors’ Book), avantgarde in both their pictorial techniques and some of their semantic content (London Underground and SONY signs built into the image, for example). They express paralysis and defeat, projects of aborted break-out, articulated through those powerful Victorian icons of graceful female death, the Lady of Shalott and Millais’s Ophelia; and the most extraordinary picture here, in my view, is accordingly the ‘Winter Boat’, with the Lady of Shalott trapped in a bleakly snowy treescape.

Why should this be, and what is the ‘View from Kelmscott’? Surely not just bucolic fields and the stripling Thames, nor even just Morris himself and his family and friends; but rather Dick Hammond, Ellen and the utopians of News from Nowhere: ‘gaily-coloured tents arranged in orderly lanes, about which were sitting and lying on the grass some fifty or sixty men, women and children, all of them in the height of enjoyment and good temper’ (chXXXII).

But then this, alas, was a utopia that never in fact happened, a future that failed to materialise, that went down in the bloodbath of Stalinism, the counter-revolution of Fascism, World War and, for us today, that dismantling of the post-war Welfare State we’ve been witnessing since Thatcher and Reagan and now under the banner of globalisation.

‘I wish I had a river I could sail away on’ is the title of one bleakly longing painting here, but she doesn’t. Thwarted hopes, broken utopias, political paralysis, the vibrant energy of Morris’s Ellen shattered into the deathward-tending horizontal stasis of Millais’s Ophelia, or the ‘Kelmscott Ophelia’ as she becomes here. Thomas Hardy once wrote that ‘If a way to the better there be,/It exacts a full look at the worst’; and in these haunting Kelmscott paintings John Lendis has given us a disturbing image of that Hardyesque ‘worst’ blighting our most beautiful utopian English landscapes.

William Morris Martial Artist

2010-11-06T02:46:00.000-07:00

I belong to the generation for whom the films of Bruce Lee, from The Big Boss to Enter the Dragon in 1973, were a revelation of what the human body could do and of what screen violence could be. Instead of two ham-fisted cowboys slugging it out John Wayne-style, you suddenly had the extraordinary balletic intensity of Lee’s high-kicking jeet kune do; we were entranced, and within weeks we were signing up at local kung fu or karate clubs which mushroomed across the country.

It takes a considerable effort of mental reframing to see William Morris as a martial artist, and yet he clearly was, as J.W. Mackail makes clear early in his biography: ‘in playing singlestick, of which he was very fond, his opponent had to be guarded against Morris’s impetuous rushes by a table placed between the two combatants’; and later, in Maclaren’s gym at Oxford, Morris offered to teach his new friends ‘the cuts and guards’ in singlestick. Little known though it may be in the epoch of kung fu, singlestick is a longstanding indigenous British martial art, one which has indeed been making something of a comeback in recent years (it was revived by the Royal Navy in the 1980s, for example).

Perhaps the most famous literary adherent of singlestick is Sherlock Holmes, who uses it fight off various enemies in the course of his exploits. ‘I am something of a single-stick expert, as you know’, he boasts to Watson in the ‘Adventure of the Illustrious Client’, though it is another martial art, ‘baritsu’, which Holmes employs to defeat Moriarty in their final one-to-one tussle. For anyone who wants to do further research on Victorian martial arts, I would recommend the finely named online Journal of Manly Arts, which no doubt also has articles on Bruce Lee’s contributions too.