Summer Thoughts in the Sheldonian

Sitting in Oxford University’s august Sheldonian Theatre on a hot summer’s afternoon for my son’s splendid D.Phil. degree ceremony, I was of course aware of Morris having spoken there on 15 November 1879 as part of the SPAB campaign against the restoration of St Mark’s in Venice. As the ceremony proceeded, however, I was also aware of the sound of drilling and hammering wafting in from the upper-floor open windows, which at first I took (in the spirit of News from Nowhere chapter VII) to be a road-mending gang outside in Broad Street, but in fact, as I realised later, was workmen revamping the New Bodleian Building opposite. So perhaps the more apt literary reference for the occasion was Jude the Obscure, which my MA supervisor John Goode once described to me as a novel about an Oxford workman repairing the very college walls and architecture which kept him excluded in the first place.



Vice Chancellor Andrew Hamilton (who incongruously appeared with a sticking plaster down his nose) told us in a trenchant opening address that we were to have a ‘solemn ceremony’, and with all the organ music, mutual doffing of mortarboards and Latin speeches, we certainly got that. He justified such heavyduty ritualism in Matthew Arnold-style terms, as being appropriate to the university’s 900-year dedication to pursuing the ‘best that has been known and thought’. Well maybe; but I couldn’t help feeling that it had as much or more to do with that other absolutely crucial social function of Oxford University, that of consolidating English ruling-class culture and values, of ideologically cementing that public school-Oxbridge circuit of privilege and entitlement which gives us, say, Boris Johnson, George Osborne and David Cameron today.



So the Morris we needed to remember in the Sheldonian was not after all the SPAB activist of 1879, but rather the revolutionary socialist who spoke just down the road at University College in 1883 or in the Holywell Music Room in 1885, and whose Oxford branch of the Socialist League did indeed try to break down the divide between undergraduates and workers, to let the drillers into the Sheldonian as it were. For if Oxford is a place where ruling-class cohesion is forged, it is also, by the same token, a place where it can be challenged; and the William Morris Society should certainly establish an intellectual and political presence there and rouse young minds to idealism and justice. Morris’s own ‘Oxford campaign’ between 1879 and 1895 sets an interventionist standard and challenge we have yet to match.

Why I Must Read Alain Badiou

Have just watched an excellent little online video in which Peter Hallward of Kingston University discusses Alan Badiou’s book on ethics (Verso, 2001) in the middle of London’s Housmans Bookshop: see www.guardian.co.uk.commentisfree/video/2013/jul/12/alain-badiou-ethics-video-radical-thinkers. Hallward lucidly summarises what he calls the negative and positive side of Badiou’s book, and it was the latter that suddenly made my Morrisian ears prick up.

Ethics for Badiou in this positive sense, according to Hallward, is a matter of ‘giving the participants, the militants of these [emancipatory] causes ... the resources that they need to continue in their projects when they become difficult, when they are vulnerable to despair or exhaustion or doubt, and ethics is about trying to meet that challenge and to find the resources ... to persist’. Hallward’s evocation of the activist’s crisis of morale recalls John Ball’s confession of his crisis of motivation in Canterbury prison in A Dream of John Ball or Old Hammond’s evocation in News from Nowhere of the doubts that afflicted late-Victorian socialists (‘shrunk from what seemed to them the barren task’); and we could certainly find such moments of political discouragement in Morris’s own personal letters too. So if Badiou can offer us an ethics of hope for such bad times, then I feel I had definitely better buy and read his book.

Peter Faulkner at 80

As we celebrate Peter Faulkner’s 80th birthday and his long and admirable contributions to Morris studies and the Morris Society, I recall a festive gathering which Samuel Beckett’s friends organised for him in New York in 1965. As his first biographer Deirdre Bair informs us, ‘Jean Reavey planned a special dinner to include all the foods mentioned in his writing, ending with a grand finale of Banane à la Krapp’ (p.485). Could we then devise the Morrisian equivalent of such a literary banquet for Peter’s birthday event?

The centrepiece of our feast would surely be roasted dragon’s heart, but other meats would be available too: good foison of venison, salt pork, elk and even, albeit unseasonally, the Holy Boar of Yule (though the vegetarians among us will be happy to see girls arriving with baskets of early peas). The fish course might include a leash of fine perch, fat and red-flecked trouts cooked outdoors on a fire of sticks, and Icelandic char. There would surely be cabbage-leaves full of strawberries, and plenty of cherries, pears, apricots and wood-berries. Also curds and new cheese (meat of the herdsmen) and syllabub fresh from the farm dairy. Many different breads would be on the table: dark-coloured farmhouse loaves, rye bread, thin pipe-stems of wheaten crust, bread made of sweet-chestnuts.

All this would be washed down with ginger-beer and lemonade for the youngsters, and for the adults plenty of Steinberg wine, good Kentish mead, Grimhild’s thick murky concoctions and, naturally, some deep invigorating draughts from the Well at the World’s End (for how else can one wash eight decades away?). And as a final, non-Beckettian touch we should have Sigurd and Gunnar playing on the harp in the background throughout. Happy birthday, Peter.

Spirit of 45 - which 45?

Among the sailors returning victorious from the fight against Fascism in 1945 in the opening scenes of Ken Loach’s documentary film Spirit of 45 would somewhere have been my Uncle Harry and Uncle Jack, each of whom had done years of service in the navy during World War Two. And I imagine that both of my young Uncles-to-be were as keen on a Labour electoral victory, as determined that this country would not go back to the slums and unemployment of the 1930s, as all the other returning servicemen and women in Loach’s film. There was much rousing celebration in this wonderful documentary of Labour’s post-war achievements – the creation of the National Health Service, nationalisation of mines and railways, the building of council houses and new towns – but there were, importantly, some dissenting voices from the Left too. The creation of the National Coal Board actually meant ‘the same old gang back in power’, one ex-miner wryly remarked; ‘we are defending a flawed project’, commented a historian, and Tony Benn offered some astute critical thoughts on top-down reform too.



It was surely one of the greatest prophetic achievements of William Morris’s political imagination to have offered us just such a critique of the Welfare State fifty years before its actual formation, when he pondered in 1893 ‘whether the Society of Inequality might not accept the quasi-socialist machinery above mentioned, and work it for the purpose of upholding that society in a somewhat shorn condition, maybe, but a safe one ... The workers better treated, better organized, helping to govern themselves, but with no more pretence to equality with the rich, nor any more hope for it than they have now’. The achievements of Clement Attlee's 1945 Labour government look all the more precious and poignant, now that so many of them have been destroyed by neo-liberalism from Thatcher onwards; but they were, in Morris’s own term, ‘State socialism’, not socialism proper as he understood it. And we will have to come up with a vision beyond them, a prospective rather than retrospective politics – Spirit of 2045 rather than 1945 – if we are ever to turn that neo-liberal tide.

Introducing 'News from Nowhere'

At the end of Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, the journalist-narrator William Weston, who has decided to settle in Ecotopia rather than return to the dystopian United States, declares: ‘I want to try out some different kinds of writing’. I’ve been wanting to do so too for some time now, which is why my Introduction to News from Nowhere for Florence Boos’s Morris Online Edition takes the form of a catechism between ‘TP’ and an imagined reader of Morris’s utopia (see morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/news.html). This is, I believe, the first introduction to the book that has been written in that form, though the long dialogue between old Hammond and William Guest within the text constitutes a kind of precedent here (particularly chapter XI).

I’ve always admired a formulation of Frederic Jameson’s in his discussion of Adorno and Benjamin in Late Marxism, where he evokes ‘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 ... the possibility of another kind of writing – which is eventually to say: another kind of thinking’ (p.52). So it is that my year of tweeting and six years of blogging on and around Morris, my catechistic Introduction to his utopia, and above all my idea for News from Nowhere Two, a sequel using Morris’s characters to explore twenty-first-century political dilemmas – all these constitute plans for new kinds of writing or Darstellung. Whether they amount to new thinking too is a judgement for you, dear reader, to make for yourself.

Roman Abramovich Goes for a Swim

The Morris community is understandably excited by Jeremy Deller’s wall painting at this year’s Venice Biennale of a giant William Morris rising from the sea like Neptune and hurling Roman Abramovich’s yacht down to a watery doom. It’s a grand ebullient image certainly, with all the immediate, one-dimensional vigour of Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop Art comicbook paintings of the 1970s (like ‘Whaam’, for instance, which shows a fighter plane firing its missiles). How enjoyable to see Abramovich getting his comeuppance - a whole series of sacked Chelsea football managers might feel this too - and how invigorating to see Morris turned into an iconic superhero, brusquely meting out justice to the super-rich. We turn from this witty, exuberant image with a rosy glow in our hearts on both counts.



How different Deller’s wall painting is from David Mabb’s exhibition ‘Regime Change Begins at Home’ at the William Morris Gallery, where political slogans past and present are framed within Morris floral fabric designs. Each individual work here is modest and low-key compared to Deller’s enormous wall painting, but Mabb, we might say, is a classical modernist as political artist, in contrast to Deller’s depthless postmodernism. That is to say, Mabb’s Morris-based work has constantly operated by the principle of Eisensteinian montage, clashing discordant realities violently together to generate an effort of thought on the observer’s part which may result in a third term or new concept which goes beyond both of the original images. If I had to choose, I would plump for Mabb’s abstemious, thought-provoking political aesthetic over Deller’s one-dimensional sensuous exuberance; but perhaps we can clash these two opposites together too, and tentatively imagine a future political art which would combine the strengths of both.

James Joyce reads William Morris

In Stephen Hero, the draft version of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce tells us that Stephen was ‘captivated by the seeming eccentricities of the prose of Freeman and William Morris. He read them as one would read a thesaurus and made a garner of words’. It has usually been assumed that it is Morris’s late romances which are being referred to here; and one is certainly reminded of the decorously chivalric style of those works in reading, say, the more parodic elements of the ‘Cyclops’ chapter in Ulysses.



But if we were to follow up the Stephen Hero Morris reference, we might want to cover more than the late romances. Take these lines from ‘A Painful Case’ in Dubliners: ‘he had assisted at the meetings of an Irish Socialist Party where he had felt himself a unique figure amidst a score of sober workmen in a garret lit by an inefficient oil-lamp. When the party had divided into three sections, each under its own leader and in its own garret, he had discontinued his attendances’. It is hard not to believe that Joyce - himself a socialist in the early years of the twentieth century - has just come away from reading the first page of News from Nowhere, with its dysfunctional Socialist League meeting at which socialists are divided against anarchists; and that he has carried the fissiparous political tendencies at work there even further in his own story.

The hero of Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses is, like Morris himself, a man who painfully tolerates his wife’s adultery, even if it’s a far cry from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Blazes Boylan; and as parents both Joyce and Morris had to cope with daughters who had life-changing illnesses (Lucia’s schizophrenia, Jenny’s epilepsy). I suspect the Morris-Joyce literary relationship is capable of much further development, and the mention of Morris in Stephen Hero is thus a signpost announcing ‘dig here!’.