50 Years of Morris Studies

I certainly can’t match Peter Faulkner’s peerless erudition as he told the tale at of the 50 years of Morris studies in which he has been involved at Kelmscott House on Saturday. But I did have a feeling that I might want to tell the story in a rather different way. After all, Peter’s starting point, 1963, was also the very year in which my parents, as a young working-class couple with three children, moved from their rented first-floor flat to the new house they had just bought directly across the road, and three or four years later they bought their first car too.

My father was working very long hours to afford this – full days in the Ekco television factory followed by four-hour evening shifts there too – but still, British society was clearly entering a quite new phase of capitalism; and as such consumerism set in, debates about the ‘embourgeoisement’ of the working class were in full swing too. This new economic and cultural phase could not but have a considerable impact on ‘Morris studies’. For Morris himself, art was the explosive ‘outside’ of a philistine capitalist economy; but now – in what would eventually become full postmodernism – art was increasingly part of economic innovation and production. Could Morris still be of use in such a context, and if so, how?

In fact, I think the very phrase ‘Morris studies’ – as if it were an autonomous academic region, with its own laws and temporality – may not be very helpful. What we have, always, are mutations in capitalism and attempts at popular or socialist resistance to this; and the question is then to what extent Morris can be a resource for the latter. We have had another major mutation of capitalism and its ideologies in our own time – everything that the terms ‘globalisation’ and ‘neo-liberalism’ gesture towards – and so the question comes up freshly for us too: how can we make Morris’s thought and art newly useful to us in all this, how can we secure its relevance for the next 50 years?

Grayson Perry's Reith Lectures

‘We are now in the end-state of art’ claimed Grayson Perry in his lively BBC Reith lectures, which came to a close this morning. But this didn’t stop him from generating and citing an extraordinary number of definitions of art in the course of these four talks. It was, by turns, an ‘asset class’, an ‘inner shed’ or psychological refuge, a ‘perfect R & D department for capitalism’, ‘spirituality in drag’ (Jennifer Yane), a means of ‘expressing one’s universal wound’ (Raymond Tallis), a process of ‘meaning-making’, and so on. It has to be something, at any rate – one or some or all of these things – because what seems to be Perry’s ultimate trauma as artist and thinker on aesthetics is Marcel Duchamp’s scandalous demonstration, with the famous urinal of 1917, that anything at all can be art. Avantgardism as extreme as that Grayson Perry will not accept: for him, there are limits or boundaries marking art from non-art, even if they are ‘softer’ than for traditionalist aesthetics itself.

Perry gave us an entertaining tour of the institutions as well as the definitions of contemporary art, from the high-end curators and museums of his first lecture, through the commercial art market of the second (with a staggering £43 billion pounds sloshing through it last year), to the art colleges of his more autobiographical final talk. So powerful are such institutional forces that they even remake urban space itself: Walthamstow becomes, in his term, ‘Awe-samstow’ as yesterday’s counter-cultural bohemianism becomes today’s gentrification under ‘the dead hand of the developer’. There doesn’t seem much – or anything – that multinational capital cannot incorporate, from the ‘ironic market sell-outs’ (among whom one senses Perry places Damien Hirst) to the ‘worthy activists’ who hoped they could make a difference.

And it was here, I felt, that in the end Grayson Perry’s Reith lectures were lacking. I wanted to hear more about what an activist art might be, about how – in the teeth of all the difficulties he evoked so cogently - one could forge aesthetic forms to effect that ‘cognitive mapping’ that Fredric Jameson used to talk about, or to articulate new ‘structures of feeling’ (to borrow Raymond Williams’s term) that might point in a socially utopian direction. It was heartening to hear of Jeremy Deller’s ‘Battle of Orgreave’ as politically-inspired participation art in the first lecture, but there was too little of this in the successor talks (though there has been more of it in Perry’s own tapestries and TV work). So I felt that, in these lectures at least, our ‘Essex transvestite potter’ was too much of an insider or licensed jester; for as he himself ruefully acknowledged in the last lecture (dressed this time not as Claire but as a Pierrot clown), mocking the pomposities and contradictions of the contemporary art world was like ‘teasing my best friend’.

Place Hacking Hammersmith Creek

As I walk to and from Lancaster University, I pass an interpretation board which celebrates the recent de-culverting of Burrow Beck in Hala Square. It took three months of work to remove the twenty-year-old, fifty-four meter-long culvert, and the newly revealed brook should reduce the risk of flooding, improve water quality and fish migration, and reconnect the local community to the river. Local schoolchildren were involved in designing the logo for the interpretation board itself, and I have indeed spotted pied and yellow wagtails perching on stones in the newly opened Beck (though I have yet to see the roach and brown trout we've been promised). So this would seem to be an entirely positive local environmental development.

We won’t any time soon be de-culverting the Hammersmith Creek beside Kelmscott House in London (though this has, of course, been one of the post-revolutionary tasks cheerfully undertaken in News from Nowhere), so we may have to adopt another approach in this case. The notion of place hacking, defined as ‘recreational trespass in the built environment’, has gained a lot of traction recently through the publication of Bradley L. Garrett’s Explore Everything: Place Hacking in the City (Verso). Garrett seems to be as at home in underground tunnels or disused military installations as he is on the counterweight of a crane 400 feet above the ground.

So in the spirit of place hacking a particularly hardy group of Morris Society volunteers, equipped with hard hats, wellies and powerful torches, might boldly venture up the Hammersmith Creek culvert at low tide, digitally recording everything as they go – a record which could then be played to visitors to the Coach House. In this way, we will at least keep interest alive in a waterway which may one day rejoin other lost London rivers (Counters Creek, River Fleet, the Tyburn, the Walbrook, and so on) in coming above ground again.

A Modern Utopia: Wells and Morris

It’s taken me a while to gather my thoughts about the Wells-Morris conference at Kelmscott House on Saturday 14 September, not least because of the extraordinary pace at which the day proceeded, with a long series of 18-minute papers jammed back to back with only minimal breaks. That was certainly testimony to the interest the event aroused among potential speakers, but it was also quite a test of the participants’ stamina, especially if (like me) you’d had to be on a train at the crack of dawn to be there in the first place.

Some lively scene-setting by Ruth Levitas and Mike Sherbourne reminded us of Wells’s attendance at Coach House socialist lectures, and we subsequently heard many fine papers, of which Patrick Parrinder’s meditation on ‘Do Utopias Need to be Modern?’ and Rhys Williams’s ‘Moreau’s Eewtopia’ (comparing Wells’s island to Thomas More’s) were particular highlights. Wells and Morris proved an admirable combination, and not just for biographical reasons: a focus on Wells pulls Morrisian-utopian concerns into the twentieth century and forces them into a fruitful confrontation with issues of science, technology and (in terms of literary genre) science fiction, while Morris’s communism sharpens up Wells’s own more diffuse political focus.

Ruth Levitas evoked Hammersmith as a ‘fulcrum of utopian thinking’, and a more formalised Wells-Morris pairing might be a way of furthering that admirable goal. The H.G. Wells Society is a peripatetic grouping that does not have an established base or venue; the Morris Society has the Coach House which is arguably under-used for academic and political work. So if the two societies combined forces in order to take the upstairs Coach House flat back into Morris Society usage, could not the expanded venue then become a ‘Morris-Wells Utopias Centre’ which would celebrate the lives and thought of two of our most important British utopian writers?

Return to Nowhere

If Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward has had over 150 sequels or other fictional responses, then it is high time News from Nowhere had a few sequels as well; and George Duncan has made a spirited effort in this direction in his Return to Nowhere, serialised in recent issues of the USA Morris Society Newsletter. A Canadian carpenter attends a lively book group meeting at which Morris’s utopia is discussed, and he wakes up the next morning in Nowhere itself, but twenty years after William Guest’s own visit there. So Ellen is now forty rather than twenty as in Morris’s text, old Hammond is dead, Dick and Clara have broken up again, and so on.

For my taste, there is rather too much focus on the previous William Guest visit, which takes time and energy away from exploring the new social and personal realities of this updated Nowhere. Certain significant cultural and political developments have indeed taken place: a group of ‘refusers’ lives off the new society without contributing anything to it in terms of work (the exact opposite of Morris’s Obstinate Refusers, who can’t stop working), and they arouse considerable resentment from other Nowherians; tokens are being used as a kind of currency as a result of certain undefined local problems; and a religious revival of sorts seems to be underway, initiated by old Hammond himself. These would all be interesting avenues to explore, though they remain undeveloped both politically and narratively: is a new exploitative leisure class really beginning to emerge, does Nowherian economics not work after all, is the return of religion a good or a bad thing, how do these three cultural developments relate to each other, and might they ultimately add up to a dangerous challenge to Nowhere’s communism? Such questions are raised, but not gone into.

In the case of the new personal developments, too, Duncan’s sequel seems to go half-way and no further. Ellen has taken over from old Hammond as custodian at the British Museum, which in my view makes her too much of a clone of the old man himself and ignores the wider political role which such a charismatic figure might play in her society She has had a child by Dick Hammond, but we see very little of this daughter Claire and thus do not really get a sense of what a new generation of Nowherians is making of socialism’s current problems and ultimate future. The narrator and Ellen head upriver together and get as far as her cottage at Runnymede, where the sequel ends; and this really does leave us frustratedly betwixt and between. The sacred spaces for Morris, the crucial locales where Nowhere’s future will surely be decided, are London and Kelmscott; and Runnymede is neither one nor t’other.

So while I admire the wit and energy with which George Duncan has composed his brief follow-up to Morris’s text, I feel that the political pressure behind this sequel is in the end too low, that having brilliantly fast-forwarded Nowhere by twenty years, it doesn’t then quite know what cultural and political questions to ask of this new reality. Still, Duncan has very welcomely broken the ice for us, and we can now hope that this pioneering News from Nowhere sequel will lead to many more.

William Morris's Servants

My former Creative Writing colleague Jo Baker has just published a novel entitled Longbourn, which is described on its front cover as ‘Pride and Prejudice: The Servants’ Story’. Here are a few early sentences from it: ‘The air was sharp at four thirty in the morning, when she started work. The iron pump-handle was cold, and even with her mitts on, her chilblains flared as she heaved the water up from the underground dark and into her waiting pail. A long day had to be got through, and this was just the start of it’. If the Victorian novel famously gave us the experience of the governess, marooned uncomfortably between the upper-class family she serves and the servants below stairs doing the actual manual labour that keeps the house going, Jo Baker’s novel plunges us instead directly and brutally into that world of lower-class work.

Similar projects of recovery of lost social experience have been undertaken in the world of scholarship too, as with Alison Light’s weighty 2007 tome Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service. So it is high time someone undertook such a study – creative or scholarly – in relation to the Morris family. We have had occasional remarks pointing in that direction, as when Michael Wilding remarked of Morris in 1980 that ‘his was a vision that depended on having had servants’; but the detailed spadework of recovery and recreation has not yet been done. Some of the Morris servants across the decades achieve a limited picturesque individuality in the best biographies – Mary Nicholson of Red Lion Square pre-eminently, but also old Philip Comely, the gardener-handyman at Kelmscott House who tugs his forelock deferentially at every available opportunity. But we don’t, I think, yet know very much about the cook, housemaid and coachman-groom at Red House, or cook Annie, housemaid Elsa and parlour maid Elizabeth at Kelmscott House. For the tenacious feminist Victorian researcher, there may well be rich pickings to be had here.

Bombing Syria, Finding a Voice

In his lively but flawed biography of Raymond Williams, Fred Inglis writes of the Thatcherite 1980s: ‘it mattered like mad that there were still a few people capable of a calm courage when a country’s best values were down and out, and defeat so familiar an experience. As long as Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson were still there, still speaking and writing in the splendid rhythms and time-honoured litany of the Labour movement, of common hopes and purposes, of the visible and monstrous injustice and indifference, the cruelty and wrong so apparent in all that mere power and ruling class did, then we could keep up a good heart’. Personally, I would want to add cultural theorist Stuart Hall to that list of two, since he was certainly one of the Left’s best orators in those dark years.

We have some very effective radical voices speaking out today against the continuing neo-liberal assault on working people – David Harvey, Owen Jones, Caroline Lucas and Slavoj Žižek among them, though I think that none of these has quite the gravitas of Raymond Williams himself. But I have a dream (if I may borrow a currently topical phrase) that the William Morris Society might join this roster, that at moments of national cultural and political crisis – from the London riots of August 2011 through Thursday’s Parliamentary debate on bombing Syria without United Nations authorisation to whatever comes our way next – it might find both the political will and the appropriate internal mechanisms of consultation to make public statements from a Morrisian viewpoint, with the weight and authority of Morris’s unique brand of communism behind it – ‘Socialism seen through the eyes of an artist’, as he once memorably phrased it. And if the current Morris Society were to prove incapable of doing this, then we would need an alternative Morris network that can.