A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  From the guilty father John inherits anger, Arthur cowardice. John’s loss of temper alarms Arthur; ‘Are you in a rage with me? Why, do you know, your voice got something like Father’s in a rage.’ But just as Parson Risley fails to answer Eleanor’s letter, so Arthur conceals John’s.

  John’s struggle for self-control is marked by very small incidents. Resistance, as The Heir of Redclyffe recognizes, must be from within. At the beginning of the day’s outing, when Clara greets Arthur tenderly, ‘they did not notice that John turned away to the horse’s head.’ At Ruddywell Court, when Arthur begins to do the talking and Clara is entranced, John ‘got rather silent.’ On the return to the farm, when Clara kisses Arthur, John is left ‘whistling in sturdy resolution to keep his heart up, and rating himself for a feeling of discomfort and wrong.’ When she is poised for a few moments between the two of them in the rocking boat, but at length sits down by Arthur, so that both of them are facing the golden sunset to which John’s back is now turned, he pulls at the oars ‘sturdily,’ exerting his strength for them in silence. These small everyday victories of the will lead up to a disastrous failure, the furious and destructive letter, and the despairing attempt to redeem it by a postscript—‘tell Clara I wrote kindly to you.’

  Arthur, on the other hand, the ‘saint’ of the novel, is shown indulging himself in the sweetness of his dreams and the horror of his nightmares, and even when he becomes the centre of consciousness this self-indulgence is obvious. Clara’s love for him is founded, in the Chaucerian mode, on pity. When he reads John’s letter, he is afraid. He lies to Clara, who against her better judgement accepts the lie. Arthur is, in fact, almost without will power, while John, in his blundering way, understands keenly the importance of the will. ‘Nobody does anything,’ he tells Mrs Mason, ‘except because he likes it. I mean to say, even people who have given up most to please other people—but then, they’re all the better people, to be pleased by what’s good rather than by what is bad.’ And he has ‘a feeling, not very pleasant, of not being listened to.’

  In 1872 Samuel Butler published Erewhon, Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree, and George Eliot, Middlemarch. All of these seem very far removed from the unfinished taletelling on blue paper. But when Morris told Louie Baldwin that he was impatient at having to deal with prose, he underrated the poetry of his story. This lies in the interrelationship of the three journeys—the passage of a summer’s day, the first walk upstream to the paradise of the farm, and the crucial turning point of John’s adolescence. The June prologue of The Earthly Paradise opens (also in the meadows of the Upper Thames)—

  O June, O June, that we desired so,

  Wilt thou not make us happy on this day?

  Across the river thy soft breezes blow

  Sweet with the scent of beanfields far away,

  Above our heads rustle the aspens grey,

  Calm is the sky with harmless clouds beset,

  No thought of storm the morning vexes yet.

  This is the exact poise of the novel, between past darkness, present happiness (John when he first goes to Leaser is ‘happier than he was last year’), and the coming unknown discontent. And so John, at seventeen, stands on the confines of his own home, with ‘the expectant longing for something sweet to come, heightened rather than chastened by the mingled fear of something as vague as the hope, that fills our hearts so full in us at whiles, killing all commonplace there, making us feel as though we were on the threshold of a new world, one step over which (if we could only make it) would put life within our grasp. What is it? Some reflex of love and death going on throughout the world, suddenly touching those who are ignorant as yet of the one, and have not learned to believe in the other?’ Mackail quotes this passage in part, but dismisses the novel as ‘certainly the most singular of his writings.’ Jane Morris’s comment on the Life, however, is interesting: ‘You see, Mackail is not an artist in feeling, and therefore cannot be sympathetic while writing the life of such a man.’

  Introduction to the Journeyman Press edition, 1982

  ‘Whatever Is Unhappy Is Immoral: William Morris and the Woman Question’

  A protector by nature, Morris felt for women tenderness with hardly a hint of patronage. When he was at work on The Earthly Paradise he disliked writing about the thrashing of Psyche, and ‘was really glad to get it over.’ His care for his wife extended to her tedious sister, and his affection for his handicapped daughter, who got so dreadfully on Janey’s nerves, was described by Mackail as ‘the most touching element in his nature.’ Called upon for advice to a deserted lover, he suggested: ‘Think, old fellow, how much better it is that she should have left you, than that you should have tired of her, and left her.’

  Tenderness and responsibility, of course, are not the same as understanding, still less a recognition of equality. It can be fairly said, however, that as soon as his own personality defined itself, Morris began to treat women as people. Quite certain, from his own experience, that pleasurable work was necessary to happiness, he tried to find out what they could do. Embroidery became, under his persuasion, their natural activity. It was a queen’s work, and also a peasant’s and guarded against the threat of idle or empty hands. Mary Nicholson, who kept house for Morris and Burne-Jones in the 1850s, was perhaps the first to learn. Morris stitched, she copied his stitches. ‘I seemed so necessary to him at all times,’ she said—this, if unconsciously, being part of the persuasion. During the early years of his marriage—‘a time to swear by,’ wrote Georgiana Burne-Jones, ‘if human happiness were doubted’—Morris and Janey worked together on English embroideries, unpicking old pieces to see how they were done. In the Seventies he admired and promoted the work of Catherine Holliday, who remembered that ‘when he got an unusually fine piece of colour he would send it off for me or keep it for me, and when he ceased to dye with his own hands I soon felt the difference.’

  Yet Mrs Holliday and her skilled colleagues were for the most part executants rather than designers, and no better off in this respect than the ‘paintresses’ of the Potteries. This was a limitation of Morris’s own mind. Writing in 1877 to Thomas Wardle about a figure designer for high-warp tapestries, he says he has ‘no idea where to find such a man, and therefore I feel that whatever I do I must do chiefly with my own hands…a cleverish woman could do the greeneries, no doubt.’ On the administrative side, May took over the management of the embroidery section from 1885 onwards, but there was apparently never any suggestion that she should become a partner in the Firm.

  There is not much evidence, in fact, of what Morris thought about women in the professions, or in public life. He worked, of course, side by side with them in the Movement, and made a strong protest at the arrest of Annie Cobden-Sanderson, but Mrs Besant tried him sorely not only, I think, on account of her Fabianism, but because she was Mrs Besant. By the time Georgie Burne-Jones entered local politics, ‘going like a flame’ through the village of Rottingdean, Morris had ceased to have much interest in ‘gas-and-water socialism,’ or in anything short of total change. In that same year (1884) he watched the haymakers, men and women both, distorted and ugly through overwork, and dreamed of the outright battle that would be needed to restore the fields to the labourers. But might he not, in any case, have agreed with Yeats that a woman in politics is a windy bellows? In an unpublished letter to Bruce Glasier he allowed himself some tart remarks about the Woman Question:

  [B]ut you must not forget that childbearing makes women inferior to men, since a certain time of their lives they must be dependent on them. Of course we must claim absolute equality of condition between women and men, as between other groups, but it would be poor economy setting women to do men’s work (as unluckily they often do now) or vice versa.

  Old Hammond, in News from Nowhere, undertakes to discuss it, but becomes evasive. There are no women members of Parliament in Nowhere, he says, because there is no Parliament.

  Ruskin, in his strange treatise on woman’s education, Of Queen’s Ga
rdens (1865), gives her the distinctive powers of ‘sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision,’ to which Morris would have added perspicacity and strength. That strength he greatly respected—he told his sister Isabella, who worked in the slums of South London, that she practised what he could only preach—and he depended perhaps more than he knew on his wife, and more than he could ever express on Georgie Burne-Jones. There is a confusion of viewpoints in the later poems and romances, where, as E. P. Thompson puts it, ‘the mournful Pre-Raphaelite ladies of earlier days have given way to maidens who can shoot with the bow, swim, ride, and generally do most things, including making love, a good deal more capably than their young men.’ In The Pilgrims of Hope the speaker, his wife, and his friend set out to join the Communards in besieged Paris, ‘we three together, and there to die like men.’ News from Nowhere depicts a land of effortless female superiority, and Ellen is the spirit of the earth itself and all that grows from it. On the other hand, in A Dream of John Ball, Will Green’s daughter is sent away from the skirmish and told to ‘set the pot on the fire, for that we shall need when we come home,’ and, to return to Nowhere, Mistress Philippa is an Obstinate Refuser, who works obsessively at her woodcarving although the men could manage without her (‘Could you, though?’ grumbled the last named from the face of the wall). It has to be admitted, also, that at the Guest House the comely women (however much Old Hammond tries to explain it away) are waitressing.

  But Morris had dedicated himself, in the face of all discouragements and even of his own inconsistencies, to the transformation of human existence throughout the whole social order. Nothing less than this would do, ‘nor do I consider a man a socialist at all who is not prepared to admit the equality of women as far as condition goes.’ This last phrase sounds like a qualification, but Morris is as clear as spring-water in his condemnation of the marriage and property laws, which made women the slaves of slaves: ‘Whatever is unhappy is immoral. We desire that all should be free to earn their livelihood…with that freedom will come an end of these monstrosities, and a true love between man and woman throughout society.’

  To his old friend Charlie Faulkner, who was exercised on the subject and wished to ‘blow off,’ Morris expanded his views a little. ‘Copulation is worse than beastly unless it takes place as the result of natural desire and kindliness on both sides.’ The divorce laws he saw as particularly hard on the poor, who were cooped together for good like fowls going to a market. In a true partnership husband, wife, and children would all be free, the children having their inalienable right of livelihood. A woman would not be considered ‘ruined’ if she followed a natural instinct, and separation would always be by consent, though Morris adds ‘I should hope that in most cases friendship would go along with desire, and would outlive it, and the couple would remain together, but always be free people.’

  The most striking thing about this letter, written ten years before Morris’s death, is that he had married Jane Burden in 1859 with much the same convictions. There is no other way to explain the patience of this impatient man during the ‘specially dismal time’ from 1869 to 1873, when his marriage was at breaking point. Whatever the pain of it, Morris regarded Janey as a free agent, because he believed she was truly in love with another man, and love has a right to freedom, and, on the other side, a right to grant it. He left his wife to make her choice because anything else would have been ‘shabby,’ and twenty years later had not changed his mind. ‘A determination to do nothing shabby…appears to me to be the socialist religion, and if it is not morality I do not know what is.’

  Contribution to William Morris Today (Catalogue for

  Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts,

  London), 1984

  * * *

  1The head of the Greek community in Victorian London was Constantine Ionides, ‘the Thunderer,’ a wealthy stockbroker and a generous patron of the arts. Mary Zambaco was a granddaughter of the House of Ionides, a wealthy beauty with ‘glorious red hair and almost phosphorescent white skin’ who had left her commonplace husband in Paris in 1866 and come to London. She was also a talented sculptress, with a temperament that Burne-Jones described as ‘like hurricanes and tempests and billows…only it didn’t do in English suburban surroundings.’ In 1868 he made his first attempt to break with her; she threatened to throw herself into the Regent’s Canal. In 1869 he painted her as Phyllis pleading with Demophoön, with the epigraph Dic mihi quod feci? nisi non sapienter amavi (Tell me what I have done, except to love unwisely). Rossetti was in their confidence, writing in 1869 to Jane Morris that Mary had become more beautiful ‘with all her love and trouble…but rainy walks and constant journeys are I fear beginning to break up her health.’

  2H. de la Motte Fouqué. The Seasons: Four Romances from the German (English trans: 1843). Sintram and His Companions is the winter romance.

  ARTS AND CRAFTS

  Lasting Impressions

  The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure, by William S. Peterson

  William Morris did not think the human race was ever likely to solve the question of its own existence, but he wanted society to change in such a way that the question would not be ‘Why were we born to be so miserable?’ but ‘Why were we born to be so happy?’ By 1890 he knew he probably would not see these changes in his lifetime. He felt old, he knew he had diabetes, and he realized that his outstanding natural energy was deserting him. Work was his natural recreation. It was at this point that he turned to the last of his handcrafts, making books.

  It was to be ‘a little typographical adventure,’ to see whether he could produce books through traditional craftsmanship ‘which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing.’ At first there was no thought of selling, although later on Morris found he had to do so to meet some of the costs. Characteristically, he spent a year of inquiry and research into how things should be done. With an expert friend, the printer and process engraver Emery Walker, he looked into presses, inks, and handmade papers. (The artist Robin Tanner, lecturing in 1986 at the age of eighty-two, held up a sheet of the paper Morris chose: ‘Listen to it! How it rings! What music!’) New types, of course, had to be designed. For his Golden type Morris turned for a model to fifteenth-century Venice, and for the blackletter Troy to fifteenth-century Germany. What mattered to him most was the total effect of the integrated pages, verso and recto together. Disagreeing fiercely with many other designers, both then and now, he believed that the page should be a solid, brilliant black and white.

  Between 1891 and 1898 the Kelmscott Press (named for Morris’s house by the river in Oxfordshire) issued fifty-two wonderful books. Some were illustrated, some had lavish borders and initials designed by Morris himself, some were small, delicate 16mo volumes. The only way to judge them is to hold them and turn the pages. The culmination of the whole series, the great Kelmscott Chaucer, was finished only just in time. In June 1896, after more than three years in production, the sumptuous first copy was put into Morris’s hands. Three months later he was dead. ‘But I cannot believe,’ he had said, ‘that I shall be annihilated.’

  This year, 1991, then, is the centenary of the Kelmscott Press, and its history, The Kelmscott Press, has now been written by William Peterson, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, who also, in 1984, produced the bibliography of the press. He says that he suspects more has been written about William Morris than any other printer but Gutenberg. But a great deal of new evidence has become available since the last full-length study, in 1924, by Henry Halliday Sparling, Morris’s unsatisfactory son-in-law. All of it is here, in the clearest, most readable, most scholarly form that anyone could ask for.

  First Mr Peterson gives the background of Victorian book production, correcting the notion that the Kelmscott Press arose, without precedents, out of nowhere. He considers the life-giving force of Victorian medievalism and Morris’s part in it, and, on the other hand, Morris’s awkward position as a socialist
employer and as a producer of fine books that only the rich could afford. Mr Peterson follows the story of the press itself step by step, with all its improvisations and successes. In a particularly helpful chapter he pauses to give the production history of three individual Kelmscott books—Morris’s own Poems by the Way (1891), The Golden Legend (1892), and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s Love-Lyrics & Songs of Proteus (1892). All these illustrate Morris’s progress as a typographer, and Songs of Proteus, as Mr Peterson says, ‘gives off echoes of very odd psychological resonances’ since Blunt, only a few years earlier, had been the lover of Morris’s wife, Jane.

  The history of the press, in fact, is also a history of human emotions and human friendships. Fortunately, Mr Peterson is as interested in these as in the art of the book. He doesn’t let us lose sight of the helpful, patient, skilled craftsman, Emery Walker, who nursed Morris in his last illness; the invaluable but deeply self-satisfied secretary, Sydney Cockerell; and the oldest friend of all, the artist Edward Burne-Jones. If he is capable of unfairness Mr Peterson is perhaps a little unfair to Burne-Jones. True, his delicate, silvery pencil drawings for the Chaucer meant endless hard work for other people before they could appear as wood engravings, but Morris wanted Burne-Jones illustrations and no others. At every turn, however, Mr Peterson’s attitude is courteous and sympathetic, above all to Morris himself. Indeed, Morris and Mr Peterson seem to be in a kind of partnership, interpreting together Morris’s genius and his shortcomings.

  The influence of the ‘typographical experiment’ was powerful in northern Europe and the United States until the turn of the century, but is difficult to assess today. Reluctantly Mr Peterson concludes that the gap between the private printer and ‘the automated realm of offset presses and computerized typesetting’ has come to define two separate worlds. But he still believes that ‘the profound questions that Morris posed about the triumph of the machine’ are relevant to everyone in a technological society. Can we recover not only simpler and slower methods and infinitely higher quality, but a joy and freedom in work which, perhaps, once existed? Can we rebuild the foundations?