This Wild Christmas-Eve

In Morris’s early poem ‘The Blue Closet’ Lady Alice informs us that ‘They give us leave,/Once every year on Christmas-eve,/To sing in the Closet Blue one song’, so those four enigmatic women - two queens and two damozels - are presumably at their eerie song even as I write.

The motif of female imprisonment in a tower comes to Morris from Tennyson, from ‘The Lady of Shalott’ above all, though that motif is part of a broader cluster of poems concerned with imprisonment and breakout in Tennyson (‘Mariana’, ‘Kraken’, ‘Palace of Art’, ‘Ulysses’). A quick structural analysis reveals the deep ambivalences at work here: imprisonment is stifling (obviously) but also protective (external dangers cannot get at you), while break-out is the jubilant emergence of an authentic self (obviously) but also, more unexpectedly, lethal, as for the Lady of Shalott, the Kraken and Ulysses.

I’ve sometimes felt that for every poet you could knock up a little analytic machine comprising a founding binary opposition with profound ambivalences on either side of it which would, at the level of deep structure, generate poem after poem on the surface. I try to show how this works around issues of higher versus lower reality in my undergraduate lecture on W.B. Yeats, for example. So could Morris’s early poetry, so close anyway to Tennyson’s in thematic content, be subject to a similar analysis? To some extent, yes: his ‘Golden Wings’ works exactly like ‘The Lady of Shalott’ or ‘The Kraken’ (you break out but die in the process).

Yet what is novel about Morris’s treatment of these issues is that there is typically not one but two imprisoned consciousnesses (one male, one female, as in ‘Spell-Bound’ or even ‘The Blue Closet’ itself), which strain longingly towards each other across an impossible distance: ‘Yet now I wait, and you wait too,/For what perchance may never come’.

Jane Morris on my Grandad

2012 has been the centenary of the great miners’ strike of 1912, the biggest strike the world had seen at that point in history, with around a million workers taking part. My paternal grandfather, Henry Smith Pinkney, was born into a mining family in the north-east of England in 1894, so in 1912 he was 18 years old and a miner himself. It seems highly likely (particularly in view of his later membership of the Communist Party) that he was an eager participant in that strike, though I have no documentary proof of this.

So I’m glad to find Jane Morris writing on 4 March 1912: ‘miners ought to be paid at least twice as much as they seem to get, and all the owners & Jews & financiers & idle rich people generally ought to work in the mines at least one day a week, perhaps by this means a little sympathy might be produced between the different classes’ (p.451). Her comment is certainly not as radical as Morris himself on the 1893 miners’ strike, and rather more in the spirit of that class-collaborationist handshake between foreman and boss at the end of Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis. But even so, I’m delighted that Jane Morris broadly sympathised with my Grandad’s political activities in the early years of the twentieth century.

The Friend of Engels

It is good that we have Members of Parliament participating in debates about the contemporary cultural relevance of Ruskin and Morris: Caroline Lucas for the Greens on Morris, Tristram Hunt (pictured) for Labour on Ruskin here at Lancaster the other day. His lively talk on ‘Ruskin, Engels and the City’ explored the thinking of both men about the city’s spatial dynamics under capitalism, and the shapes of its possible regeneration beyond that exploitative economic system.

During Hunt’s talk I occasionally found my mind drifting off to E.P. Thompson’s provocative 1976 description of Morris as ‘the friend of Engels’ (p.818). As a way of emphasising Morris’s intellectual and political importance, that is certainly an effective slogan; but how accurate is it? After all, I can’t quite imagine William and Friedrich having a quiet, matey afternoon together fishing for pike and perch at Kelmscott. They certainly had close consultations as Morris and his allies planned their break from the SDF in late 1884, and during these the two men discovered their shared love for old Norse literature, which might have become the basis of a genuine friendship. But Engels’s later dismissive phrases about Morris – ‘settled sentimental socialist’ – quickly come to mind at this point.

This is not just a scholarly issue, but also, I think, a problem of form, of mode of writing – and perhaps more an opportunity than a problem. Academic expository prose has probably reached its limits here, and we might now be able to learn more about the Engels-Morris relationship by dramatising it, by writing a play based on and heuristically exploring those tense months as the project for the Socialist League took shape. After all, at a socialist entertainment on 21 November 1884 Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx, themselves key participants in the SDF break-up, acted in a play based on their own colourful lives, so we do have some warrant for this approach from the period itself. Any creative writing volunteers out there?

Limericks in Utopia

2012 is not just the bi-centenary of Robert Browning (whose poetic relationship to Morris Peter Faulkner and I will be exploring in the Coach House on Saturday), but of Edward Lear too, whose great contribution to English literature is, of course, the limerick. Dante Gabriel Rossetti had quite a flair for limericks too, usually a good deal more malicious in nature than Lear’s genially nonsensical ones, and even Morris tried his hand at one or two as well.

Will the limerick survive in utopia? Who knows: utopia will be such a profound transvaluation of values (and genres) that we cannot legislate on this in advance. But I found that, on a recent re-reading of Morris’s utopia, some scenes were shaping themselves into the form of limericks in my mind, so I offer them here as my own small contribution to the Edward Lear bi-centenary.

First:

There was an old man in utopia
Who said to the Guest, ‘I hope you are
Not disappointed, though
Society goes so slow’,
That grumbling old man in utopia.

Second:

The Obstinate Refusers
Thought all other utopians were losers;
They worked with obsession
And refused all digression,
Did Phillippa and her Refusers.

Is it just accident that it is two of the more dissonant moments in Morris’s Nowhere that seem to lend themselves to this curious literary form? I don’t know. Try inventing some of your own and we might find out.

The Manor in the Floods

‘The grey rain driveth all astray -/Which way through the floods, good carle, I pray?’, asks the narrator in Morris’s ‘The Little Tower’; and if you explore Lechlade and Kelmscott in November, you are likely to encounter weather conditions every bit as challenging as those in this poem or the more famous ‘Haystack in the Floods’.

The path from St Lawrence’s Church in Lechlade across to the Trout Inn has become a causeway with flooded fields on both sides; water rats swim beside it and a great gathering of migrant geese honk furiously from a raised bank a stone’s throw away. Vast quantities of muddy water force their way through St John’s Lock and the Trout Weir, and under such inclement conditions the normally idyllic upper Thames takes on some aspects of the Icelandic sublime (faint shades of the great waterfall at Dettifoss, perhaps). At Kelmscott itself the field you normally walk over to get to the Thames now is the Thames (see image above). The brook behind the Manor has burst its banks and reached the outbuildings, so the staff are moving items up to the first floor for fear of worse to come. ‘God send us three more days such rain’, cries the ‘Little Tower’ narrator, which is the very last thing people here want.

November tourism has much to be said for it; you certainly avoid the madding crowd. ‘I am a man of the North’, William Morris once stoutly declared, and I therefore can’t help feeling that the gentle, willowy, summer Thames-scapes of Kelmscott frustrated as well as delighted him. So we can and should share his own November exhilarations, as with that ‘insane attempt to fish’ here on 9 November 1875: ‘out on the river ... the wind right in one’s teeth and the eddies going like a Japanese tea-tray: I must say it was delightful: almost as good as Iceland on a small scale’.

Names and Naming

The publication of Alastair Fowler’s Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature affords an opportunity to think about William Morris’s naming practices. Basically, there are two options in the field of literary nomenclature. Realist fiction wants its characters’ names to signify as little as possible, and ideally not at all, so Fielding’s Tom Jones, which Colin Burrow calls ‘the least interpretable name you could imagine’, is representative here. Other modes of fiction, such as allegory or Gothic, aspire towards the ‘Cratylic name’: in this case name and nature bond, as the former very strongly signifies what the character is or does. Charlotte Brontë gives us Jane Eyre (air) and Helen Burns (fire) as the four elements make themselves felt in her Gothic characterisation in that novel.

Morris doesn’t write realist fiction and in his late romances names are often unashamedly Cratylic. The central figures in The Story of the Glittering Plain are Hallblithe and Hostage, so we at once know exactly how and where the former likes to spend his time and what’s soon going to happen, in plot terms, to the latter. News from Nowhere, however, doesn’t fall into either camp and its names are therefore unsettling, we can’t quite tell if they are meaningful or not. George Brightling sounds like a Sigurdian sun-god appropriate to this happy utopia (compare Marissa Brightcloud in Callenbach’s Ecotopia), but though we hear of him he never actually features in the narrative. And consider Hammond/Hammersmith: is Morris working a pun there, phonetically asserting the unity of man and nature in his utopia? I’m not sure: maybe, maybe not. Or what about Biffen/Boffin? Why should those two names (Victorian boatyard/utopian dustman) be so curiously akin to each other? Is that phonetic resemblance semantically meaningful for Morris? Perhaps, then, we shall need a third category, beyond the realist/Cratylic binarism, for Morrisian naming in News from Nowhere.

Caroline Lucas in the Coach House

To have Caroline Lucas, Britain’s first Green Party MP, delivering this year’s Kelmscott Lecture in the Coach House was indeed to feel that that venue had been restored to its 1880s/90s purpose as a debating hall for pressing contemporary political concerns. The debate took place not so much in the lecture itself, which was a lively overview of Morris’s manysided aesthetic and political commitments, as in the questions and answers that followed, many of which focused on prospects for Green politics in our own time.

For me, Lucas’s talk was a chance to reflect on my own relation, as a Morrisian, to the Green Party. Having been a member since about 1993, I put in two very intense years of local campaigning for Lancaster Green Party in 1997 and 1998, and accordingly got elected as one of Lancaster’s first-ever Green city councillors in May 1999, standing down at the end of my four-year stint in April 2003 (though the local Party successfully defended what had been my seat). I felt then that in the Green Party one could both be a full-blooded socialist and engage people’s pressing everyday concerns – housing, transport, recycling, anti-social behaviour; but my confidence that I could reconcile those two frameworks there has dwindled since.

In her Kelmscott Lecture Caroline Lucas mentioned the word ‘capitalism’ only once, and that to me is the problem. In the light of global economic crisis since 2008 (and with general strikes taking place in Spain and Portugal as I write), I’ve come to feel that Green politics and socialism are quite different things. The former is an essentially ethical appeal for lifestyle changes in the name of a universal interest - the survival of human life on this planet - while the latter addresses a class interest against a class enemy in the name of the overthrow of the existing economic system. Yes, certainly, there is some overlap here: capitalism is committed to endless growth and thus threatens the environment too. But though Caroline Lucas herself probably is a person of the Left, I have ceased to believe that the UK Green Party as a whole is or can ever be a party of the Left; and that is why, regretfully, I am a member of it no longer.