Masters of the Microphone

In a wartime radio broadcast on the tercentenary of John Milton’s famous defence of freedom of speech, Areopagitica, E.M. Forster provocatively asked of Milton, ‘And would he have approved of the wireless?’ Can we ask the same question of William Morris, I wonder?

The question is, of course, slightly less anachronistic in Morris’s case than it is in Milton’s. Radio was invented as a technical possibility in 1895, one year before Morris’s death; but more importantly he was well aware of a developed literary representation of something rather like a wireless broadcasting system in the form of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1889). Edith Leete takes the visitor to utopia, Julian West, into her music room in chapter ten and, after twiddling a few knobs, floods the space with organ music being relayed by telephone from a live orchestra elsewhere in the city; Bellamy’s editors usually refer us to Marconi at this point.

Historically, there have been two major opposing positions among Left intellectuals in regard to new communications technologies. There are those, such as Walter Benjamin, who are inclined to see a democratising and liberatory potential in new technologies; and on the other hand, those, like Theodor Adorno, who incline to view the mass media as producing passive, one-dimensional audiences. Given Morris’s preference for hand-craftsmanship over industrial production, we might see him as belonging to the latter, Adornian camp; but recent studies have shown that in the case of photography, at least, his attitude was more positive and exploratory than one might expect.

I like to toy, then, with the notion of Morris being open to developments in wireless technology, if he had lived into his late eighties and heard the BBC’s first radio broadcast in 1922 or somehow broken through into Bellamy’s new Boston and enjoyed a broadcast concert with Julian West. Perhaps he might have rewritten The Tables Turned or even News from Nowhere itself as radio plays – and the Radio 4 reading of the latter a few years back certainly showed just how effective it can be in that medium. His younger socialist colleagues Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells certainly became left-wing ‘Masters of the Microphone’, to borrow a phrase from a 1939 issue of The Listener.

And how, after all, could the tall, handsome, grey-eyed woman in chapter XXX of News from Nowhere have possibly been expecting Dick’s arrival by boat at Kelmscott Manor unless there had been some form of wireless communication between them beforehand?

William Morris and 'Adam Bede'

Today’s Institute of English Studies conference devoted to George Eliot’s Adam Bede affords us an opportunity to think through William Morris’s judgement on this novel, which is recorded in May Morris’s account of her father’s literary enthusiasms in volume XXII of the Collected Works: ‘Of George Eliot he could only read with any great enjoyment the “Scenes from Clerical Life” and “Silas Marner”. “Adam Bede” he thought cruel and perhaps this irked him the more because he knew that cruelty was no part of the writer’s character’ (p.xxvi).

May does not elaborate further, but I would imagine that it was the novel’s treatment of its ‘fallen’ 17-year-old village lass Hetty Sorrel, who is first sentenced to death for the murder of her baby, then transported to Australia, which struck Morris as cruel – an assessment in which many later readers of the book, and particularly feminist critics, have also concurred.

I wonder, then, whether Morris in his own ‘Pilgrims of Hope’ isn’t trying to tell the Adam Bede story differently, with a more positive and less ‘cruel’ inflection. His hero Richard is, after all, the illegitimate offspring of a country woman and her rich seducer; so that this Hetty Sorrel figure not only does not kill her child, but gives birth to a son who heroically commits himself to the forward movement of history in his own society and who aims ultimately to abolish the very class divisions which made his parents’ own flawed relationship possible in the first place. Had the mother known of her son’s future, he tells us later, ‘As some old woman of old hadst thou wondered, who hath brought forth a god of the earth’ (XI). This is a powerful rewriting of George Eliot’s Hetty indeed!

But, alas, such cross-class sexual tragedies are not so soon abolished after all. Richard’s mother may be a redeemed Hetty, but his wife later turns out to be a Hetty Sorrel too, as a lower-class woman who gets emotionally and perhaps sexually involved with the suave gentleman Arthur when the latter joins the socialist movement. Is Morris’s use of the same Christian name as Hetty’s seducer Arthur Donnithorne in George Eliot’s novel just accident here? I suspect not. You can rewrite or mend one aspect of Hetty’s sad and ‘cruel’ fate, it seems, but it then only crops out again elsewhere in the text. Insofar as ‘Pilgrims of Hope’ is a reworking of Adam Bede, it can thus alas only be a flawed and partial one.

Happy Birthday, Ursula Le Guin!

Today is Ursula Le Guin’s 80th birthday – happy birthday, Ursula! She is, as far as I am aware, still hale and hearty, and new books in her distinctive veins of science-fiction and fantasy continue to emerge from the press – Lavinia, a retelling of Virgil’s Aeneid, being the latest (2008). Why, then, should Morrisians concern themselves with this festive occasion?

First, because Le Guin is the author of the most important utopia of our times, The Dispossessed (1974), which tells the tale of the physicist Shevek’s return journey from the troubled utopia of the moon Anarres to the decidedly dystopian capitalist home planet Urras. This rich book is surely the wisest and deepest of the 1970s generation of ‘critical utopias’ which Tom Moylan has rightly insisted have powerfully remade the genre for the late 20th and early 21st century.

We don’t yet have an adequate account of Le Guin’s relationship as utopian writer to William Morris and News from Nowhere, though there are some glances in this direction in Laurence Davis’s admirable collection, The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Dispossessed’ (2005). Nor do we yet have a fully developed ‘Le Guinian’ reading of News from Nowhere itself, though my own hunch is that Shevek and his Syndicate of Initiative in The Dispossessed would tell us a great deal about where Ellen might politically end up in Morris’s utopia.

But there is another strong connection between Morris and Ursula Le Guin, for both are authors of remarkable fantasy fictions as well as utopias. In a very general sense, of course, all twentieth-century fantasy is indebted to that extraordinary series of late writings which Morris inaugurated with The Wood beyond the World in 1894. But the connections may be more specific and illuminating than that; for as John Purkis noted in 1994, ‘the Earthsea tetralogy of Ursula Le Guin … is far more worth reading [than Tolkien or C.S.Lewis] as an example of a distillation of Morrisian romance at its best’ (Morris Society Journal, 11.1, Autumn 1994, p.17).

Morrisians thus have good cause to celebrate the 80th birthday of Ms Le Guin and to wish her many more years of productive living and writing.

Letter to Marina Warner

Dear Marina Warner,

I’m teaching H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine on an undergraduate literature course on ‘Decadence to Modernism: 1890-1939’ and, my old Pan Classics copy of the book having finally disintegrated (to my great sadness, it having such a wonderful image of the time machine on its front cover), I have finally had recourse to the Penguin Classics edition of 2005, which contains your 14-page Introduction to the text. Overall, you've given us a very fine piece of writing, highly illuminating about Wells’s book and its literary and scientific context; and I shall be glad to direct students to this. But when you deal with the relation of The Time Machine to Morris’s News from Nowhere (p.xviii) my reservations begin.

First, matters of accuracy. Morris was not a ‘founder of the Pre-Raphaelites’, as you claim. That honour belongs to Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais; Morris and Burne-Jones come along later and constitute a second-generation of the movement. And to call Morris a ‘much softer optimist and dreamer’ (than Samuel Butler) puzzles me too. I certainly wouldn’t use the adjective ‘soft’ to describe a man who threw himself so militantly into the early socialist movement as Morris did, risking violence and arrest many times over, or whose utopia contains an impassioned and detailed account of the bloody civil war of 1952-54 which brings its socialist society into being.

Second, questions of literary interpretation. Has the world of Nowhere ‘regressed’ behind modernity quite as thoroughly as you suggest? Isn’t it in fact a brand-new energy source (admittedly not much specified in the text) which powers both the ‘banded workshops’ and the ‘force-vehicles’ which William Guest happens upon?

And to talk, as you do, of the ‘Morris-like Eloi’ of Wells’s book is certainly to stretch a point – most implausibly, in my view. The Eloi are the descendants of capitalists who have brutally driven the working-class underground; Morris’s Nowherians are the descendants of socialist revolutionaries who defeated those masters. The Eloi don’t work at all; the Nowherians are devoted to the vigorous practice of the crafts, not to mention the heavyduty road-mending we come across at one point. The Eloi are feeble and effete; the Nowherians contain spectacular physical specimens like Dick Hammond, the musclebound Arnold Schwarzenegger of this text. The Elois’ love-making is lightweight and transitory; the Nowherians have intense encounters which lead, at worst, to extreme sexual jealousy and crimes of passion. The most memorable Eloi is Weena, who is more of a pet than girlfriend to the Time Traveller; the most memorable Nowherian is Ellen, an extraordinary ‘second-generation’ utopian who proves just how much more dynamism this society is capable of generating.

So: many thanks indeed for your helpful thoughts on The Time Machine itself, but may I recommend another, and more careful, reading of Morris’s utopia to you?

Slavoj Žižek on Jane Morris

It isn’t often that the leading cultural theorists of our time turn their attention to Jane and William Morris, but Slavoj Žižek does briefly do so in his 1994 volume, The Metastases of Enjoyment. A chapter on ‘David Lynch, or, the Feminine Depression’ offers us a defamiliarising opening sketch of ‘Lynch as a Pre-Raphaelite’ which transforms the ways in which we see both the contemporary film-maker and the nineteenth-century painters themselves. ‘How was it,’ Žižek provocatively asks, ‘that the Pre-Raphaelites became “readable” only retroactively, through the postmodernist paradigm?’ (113).

He then moves on to a discussion of Lynch’s classic film Blue Velvet. This in his view centres around Dorothy’s depression, which is to be understood, however, not as the effect of Frank’s sexual terrorising of her, but rather as a primary datum which Frank is ‘therapeutically’ trying to jolt out of itself, into some renewed relation to the world. This is a disturbing revaluation of Lynch’s film, from which Žižek at once generalises out historically:

‘The tradition of a deadened, lethargic woman aroused from her numbness by a man’s call was well under way in the nineteenth century: suffice it to recall Kundry from Wagner’s Parsifal who, at the beginning of Act II and Act III, is awakened from a catatonic sleep (first through Klingsor’s rude summons, then through Gurnemanz’s kind care) – or, from “real” life – the unique figure of Jane Morris, wife of William Morris and mistress of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The famous photo of Jane in 1865 presents a depressive woman, deeply absorbed in her thoughts, who seems to await a man’s stimulation to pull her out of lethargy: this photo offers, perhaps, the closest approximation to what Wagner had in mind when he created the figure of Kundry’ (121-2).

With his scare quotes around the adjective in ‘”real” life’ Žižek neatly hedges his bets here, of course; is this just a clever literary recontextualising of the famous Rossetti/Parsons image, or does the Wagnerian paradigm sketched here genuinely map out the contours of the Morris marriage itself?

Morris and Detective Fiction

In her 1940 memoir of May Morris, Una Fielding notes that May would relax in the evenings at Kelmscott Manor by curling up with a Dorothy Sayers detective novel. This curious fact reminds us that May’s father himself displayed similar literary enthusiasms on occasion, with the nineteenth-century French detective novelist Emile Gaboriau standing in for Dorothy Sayers.

In his 1884 review of the Royal Academy exhibition Morris makes reference to Gaboriau’s novel, L’Argent d’Autrui; May Morris, as she lists his ‘heterogeneous reading’ in the Collected Works introductions, refers to ‘a Gaboriau story of gilded crime hard on Elton’s “Origins of English History”’ (vol XXII, xxv); and Hilary Sparling confirms the catholicity of Morris’s literary tastes: ‘I have seen him read the Gesta Romanorum and Gaboriau’s Monsieur LeCoq with what appeared to be equal absorption’. Edward Burne-Jones was also enthusiastic about the French author: ‘There’s one writer who hasn’t had justice done to him – that’s Gaboriau ... he’s the most wonderful inventor of detective business that has ever been’.

Interesting though such references are, they remain mere antiquarian information unless we can put them to active interpretative work, unless, that is to say, we can use them to frame new generic hypotheses about Morris’s own writing. Would it, for example, be possible to read News from Nowhere as some kind of detective fiction rather than as a utopia pure and simple? William Guest would then become an active investigator, a kind of rudimentary Sherlock Holmes in the making, rather than just a passive visitor to the brave new world.

But where is the ‘crime’ he might be taken to be investigating? Well, the world of Nowhere has its crimes passionels, as we know, but they are transparent enough; so it is some more general conundrum that we must see Guest, newly equipped with an imaginary Holmesian lens and deerstalker hat, as investigating. I would suggest that he must seek for clues as to why Old Hammond, the utopian expositor, is ‘disappointed’ in the new society, or why Ellen should be so concerned about its fading historical consciousness. Nowherian culture is, I would argue, in danger, is subject to degeneration as well as celebration in Morris’s utopia; and William Guest’s role as detective is both to find out why this should be so and, if he can, to do something to prevent it. The ‘crime’ hasn’t yet been committed in Nowhere, but it is brewing; and William Guest comes into being to detect and stop it.

William Morris Society Activities: 2

In the very first issue of the Society Journal in 1961 there is a letter from John Purkis entitled ‘What I Expect of the William Morris Society’. In it he identifies certain dangers that threaten the fledgling Society: ‘first, mere historiography - the exploration of pleasant nineteenth-century by-ways … second, fragmentation [such that] the whole man disappears’ (p.21).

The historiographical danger is still a real one, I think. A glimpse at the Society’s programme for the current year shows a considerable focus on old things: old paintings (mostly Pre-Raphaelite), old stories, old buildings, old poems, old places. Even the emphasis on craftwork, which is creative activity in the present, at times shares this historic slant (‘using Kelmscott House and other designs as inspiration’).

All this focus on the past is certainly worthy and admirable, but I feel it needs to be counter-balanced by a stress on the future. After all, Morris’s greatest fictional work is a utopia set no less than two centuries ahead of his own time, so to celebrate him aptly we ourselves should be thinking about the twenty-third century (i.e. 200 years ahead of our own present) as well as about the nineteenth.

I therefore am minded to propose that the William Morris Society sets up a 'Utopian Futures Sub-Group'. It might start with a focus on literary utopias, but then broaden gradually outwards. Some very apposite literary anniversaries are coming up, after all. 2012 is the 50th anniversary of Aldous Huxley’s Island; 2014 is the 40th anniversary of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, surely the finest of all recent utopias; 2016 is a very big event in this field, in that it is the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia, which was such an important text for Morris himself (hence his Kelmscott edition of it).

Analysis of the great utopias of the past could then lead to new ways of studying and supporting utopian developments in our own present. John Purkis hoped to head off academicist dangers in his 1961 letter on the Society’s future ‘without going to the other extreme and founding a new political party’ (p.21). But perhaps we should now begin to think about founding some such quasi-political grouping, or what Fredric Jameson, our own most important contemporary theorist of utopianism, has referred to several times in his work as ‘the party of Utopia’.