The View from Kelmscott

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

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.

Gunpowder, Treason and Plot

The Spring 1966 issue of the Journal of the William Morris Society (vol II, no1) contains James Alfred Wilkes’s genial memoir of political meetings in the Kelmscott House coach house in the late 1880s and early 1890s. In the course of this he fondly remembers, among many other vivid occasions, a lively talk by Annie Besant on socialist tactics in relation to the unemployed. After Besant’s stirring address, Wilkes notes, ‘one of the speakers in the debate created a small sensation by the statement that he carried in his pocket an explosive which was sufficient to send us all to kingdom come’.

A ‘small’ sensation?! I’d have been sprinting out of the coach house and leaping off the bastion into the Thames before this speaker (who sounds as though he might have been the Professor from Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent) had even finished his sentence. Which just shows that, though we sometimes bemoan the fact that our scholarly papers in the coach house today don’t have the fire and passion of the socialist lectures in the same venue in the late nineteenth century, there are benefits to this more sedate approach too!

News from Nowhere Day

The William Morris Society always has a commemorative event around Morris’s birthday on March 24th, involving a birthday cake and a collective toast over glasses of wine, and I imagine many of us in private have more sombre commemorative thoughts on the anniversary of his death on October 3rd. Both such dates, however, make for rather general reflections, marking a life in its entirety rather than any particular aspects of it, so I feel that we need more specific Morrisian anniversaries in addition to these two life-markers.

So, in the spirit of the ‘Revolutionary Calendar’ that Commonweal used to publish, I’d like to suggest that we have an annual ‘News from Nowhere Day’ to celebrate the greatest of Morris’s literary works and, more generally, the genre of Utopia to which it belongs. What would be the appropriate date for such an event? Well, the book itself answers that question; for ‘it was winter when I went to bed the last night, and now, by witness of the river-side trees, it was summer, a beautiful bright morning seemingly of early June’ (ch II).

So let us declare, say, the first Saturday in June to be News from Nowhere Day, on which we commit ourselves to organising some celebration of that work in particular and/or the genre of Utopia in general. Such events needn’t be elaborate and might simply take the form of a reading of one chapter of Morris’s utopia followed by discussion of the issues it raises (a model he used in his own lifetime, as it happens); but if we could make this happen up and down the country on 4 June 2011, then we might begin to make his finest work – and the politically crucial genre to which it belongs – socially current again.

William Morris Society Activities: 3

In his volume of essays and autobiographical writings Untold Stories (2005), the playwright Alan Bennett writes of his dislike of William Morris and Pre-Raphaelitism during his undergraduate years at Morris’s own Oxford college, Exeter; and then he adds: ‘I would have liked Kelmscott had I seen it, but there was no hope of that. Too far to cycle, it was lost in the depths of the car-free countryside’ (p.526).

Too far to cycle – nonsense! Keen young socialists such as Arthur and Georgie Gaskin were doing the cycle ride from Oxford to Kelmscott Manor even in Morris’s own time (on 3 June 1895, to be precise); and on the much superior machines we have available to us 115 years later we would hardly need to be as hyper-athletic as Dick Hammond in News from Nowhere to get there successfully.

So here is a project for the William Morris Society: to organise a collective bicycle ride from Oxford to Kelmscott, which would celebrate fresh air, exercise and sunshine, and commemorate the socialist cycling culture of the 1890s into the bargain. For in the memorable words of José Antonio Viera-Gallo, Assistant Secretary of Justice in the government of President Allende of Chile – words which apply equally to the Clarion Clubs of the 1890s and to the Green-Left cyclist of today - ‘socialism can only come riding on a bicycle’.

William Morris's Rudest Insults

I remember seeing somewhere a volume entitled – and gathering – Shakespeare’s Rudest Insults, a handy compendium if you ever wanted to overwhelm an opponent with colourful Elizabethan invective – ‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon’, from Macbeth, being a relatively modest example. Try using that as a greeting next time someone knocks on your office door at work!

Could such a volume be compiled from Morris’s works, and if so, what might it include? One obvious candidate would be Jack Straw’s contemptuous call to the spokesperson of the lords, knights, bailiffs and lawyers in the opening battle of A Dream of John Ball: ‘hearken, thou bastard of an inky sheep-skin!’ (ch.VI) – which would certainly have been a satisfying formulation to throw at Chancellor George Osborne after his Comprehensive Spending Review speech in the House of Commons (or Dung-Market) the other day.

But there must be many others (from both life and works), so could we between us come up with a full list of Morris’s Rudest Insults to match Shakespeare’s?

Otters in and out of Literature

It’s excellent news that otters are now returning to the British countryside, after being on the brink of extinction thirty years ago. The ban on organo-chlorine pesticides in the 1970s has had its desired effect, and the Environment Agency reports that today more than 1,500 rivers show signs of otter presence, with populations having reached maximum level on the river Wye and elsewhere. Only Kent, for some reason, has bucked this admirable trend.

We might expect William Morris, as a lover of rivers in general and the Thames in particular, to wholeheartedly welcome the return of otters to his native rivers. But Morris was a passionate angler as well as a lover of riparian flora and fauna; and to the angler otters are an absolute bane, since they feed on fish. Izaak Walton in The Compleat Angler writes that ‘all men that keep Otter-dogs ought to have pensions of the King, to encourage them to destroy the very breed of those base Otters’; and some Thames angling clubs in the nineteenth century were offering a one pound reward for each otter killed in their waters.

So Morris might in fact have highly conflicted feelings about the return of the British otter; and it is then perhaps no surprise that the one character named Otter in his literary works should turn out to be such a curiously ambivalent figure. This Otter, the fearsome military captain of the dark Lord of Utterbol in The Well at the World’s End, cheerfully carries out the ruthless commands of his vicious master, and yet somehow despite this remains an honourable man of war and fits readily enough into the new and more benign regime at Utterbol once Bull Shockhead has taken over. So in a classic Freudian displacement, Morris’s mixed feelings about the natural creature are projected on to the literary figure who bears its name.