The Morrisian Interview Series, #1: Professor Florence S. Boos

Today I have the pleasure of inaugurating my exclusive Morrisian Interview Series, in which I'll be interviewing all manner of influential and fascinating Morrisians.

The first interview is with Florence S. Boos, Professor of Victorian Literature at The University of Iowa. She's often written on the works of Morris (and Rossetti), and she has brought out annotated critical editions of The Socialist Diary, The Earthly Paradise, and The Life and Death of Jason. She's the current President of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association, and Vice President of The William Morris Society in the US. She's also the editor of the forward-looking Morris Online Edition, whose contribution to global Morris related studies cannot be overstated.

Our interview took place in Iowa City one day after Obama's campaign stop there, and the same day as an important football game, so the streets were festive and crowded. We met at lunchtime, but struggled to find a quiet place: at last we settled in the back of a roomy Italian restaurant and began.

Q- I have to ask, is there a specific text or set of texts that first attracted you to nineteenth century literature?

I did always like everything that I read of nineteenth century literature, but I think very important for me was a course that covered Victorian poetry, and we read Tennyson's In Memorium, and some of the other absolutely beautiful poems of the time, on time passing and death. What was appealing about them was their visual quality, of course that is the Pre-Raphaelite quality; and then they are so musical, so metaphysical and so reflective. So, I liked that aspect of the literature, and I still like it—the combination of the musical and the intellectual. Of course one finds this quality from time to time in Victorian fiction, but I do think in the poems of Morris and those of others of his time one finds it very exquisitely.

Later, I read The Defence of Guenevere. I was a very young woman, and it was the 1960s.  It seemed to me explosively sexual, and at the time, that would have been the case because people were re-discovering erotic qualities in literature in a way that would now not be required, because they would seem more commonplace. I still think there's a dramatic intensity in The Defence of Guenevere, and a sincerity, that is unique.

Q- You edited a collection of Morris’s juvenilia in 1982. What prompted your recent return to the subject, with your forthcoming book, Art and Love Enough: The Early Writings of William Morris ?

When I was young, I wanted to write an account of Morris's development that was thorough. I felt that all the one-volume works had not addressed the complexities of his literary works. But what I actually got into print at the time was the segment on The Earthly Paradise, so that incompletion nags at me, and I'm returning to those prior topics. I've written tons of articles on the subject, so it was time to come back and see if there was a greater pattern to it all, and to deal again with the question of to what extent you can find the full development of his thought in his earlier reflections.

And I also want to do that with the later materials, too, so this is section one. If I live long enough, I'll work on the third section. I'd also like to gather together something on the Socialist writings. I was so fortunate as to find almost ten unpublished essays, and that has attracted me again to the subject of how remarkably forceful and well-stated and well-thought-out those essays are. I don't have life enough and time to try for a collected edition of Morris's prose, but that's something that has been granted Carlyle and Arnold and many of the other Victorians, and I think Morris too should should be among them. But what I’m working on are little parts towards a whole.

The Richest Girl in the World

One of Doris Duke's Islamic art objects on show at the M.A.D. in New York City

Doris Duke was born in New York in 1912, to an incredibly wealthy family. She grew up on Fifth Avenue, and her beauty and wealth attracted much attention. Dubbed "the richest girl in the world," she became a celebrity as well as an heiress.

Duke soon married and became Doris Duke Cromwell, but their dream globe-trotting honeymoon became tiring as the media hounded the couple from place to place. Luckily, the harried pace of the tour didn't distract her: from the blur of daily sightseeing, one canon of art and architecture stood out clear as a flame. She was enraptured with Islamic Art.

With images of the Taj Mahal dancing in her head, she set out to extend her parent's Palm Beach home in the style of the grand mausoleum. Locals mocked her, joking about the impending “Garage Mahal”, until one day, the project was cancelled. Duke and her husband had decided to flee the media spotlight, and build their home in Honolulu instead.

Thus was born the famous house, Shangri-La, and it could be said that Duke spent the rest of her life furnishing it. She travelled the world to collect beautiful art objects like sculpted chairs, wooden chests flecked with mother-of-pearl, and delicately pierced iron lanterns, all which added to the mystique of her carefully-curated home.

While I stood in the exhibit, “Doris Duke's Shangri-La” at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City the other week, gazing at an 18^th century Iranian chair, a woman beside me commented to her companion, “This reminds me of William Morris”. Yes, there was a floral pattern on the upholstery, but it was more than that. The chair had a slightly gothic shape, and the tasteful decoration was so painstakingly hand-crafted, its very existence reminded the viewer of the original artisan. There was indeed something very Morrisian about the chair.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise, since Morris admired the design of “Persian” textiles, and vastly preferred hand-crafted wooden furniture to poofy, fully upholstered pieces. It could be argued that Duke's chair is a rough intersection of the two. Perhaps if Morris had travelled farther from home than Europe or Iceland, he would have gone beyond Persian carpets, and collected more widely from the Islamic decorative arts. Because ultimately, William Morris was a collector. He may have had many other strings to his bow, but the truth is, he collected those strings before he added them.

The Guilt of Young Morris

William Holman Hunt's The Light of the World

When William Morris went to Oxford in 1853, he met Edward Jones (later Edward Burne-Jones), and they became close friends. One morning in 1855, "just after breakfast," Burne-Jones remembered,  "he [Morris] brought me the first poem he ever made." This was The Willow and the Red Cliff. Morris read it to Jones, and to their other friends, and it was a hit. That night, or soon after, he wrote another poem, one wracked with guilt:

Dear friends, I lay awake in the night 


When I sung of the willow-tree


And I thought, as I lay awake in the light, 


Of what you had said to me.

For you remember how you had said

That I should be a poet

Ah me: it almost made me sad,

As I lay in the light, to know it.

For I knew, as every poet does,

What a poet ought to be:

Straightway before me there uprose,

My hideous sins to me.

Sweet friends[,] I pray you pray for me

To Him Whose hands are pierced

That, as, on the breast of His Mother, He,

So I on His breast may be nursed.

William.

I consider this poem to be the first great mystery in the record of Morris's life--the mention of "hideous sins", and of failing to be "What a poet ought to be", is intriguing. Does he refer to a literal sin from his past, a transgression that he'd kept hidden, or was it something more subtle?

It's tempting to think that he felt guilty for misleading Edward and his other friends about the number of poems he'd written. He'd allowed them to think that The Willow and the Red Cliff was the first he'd ever written. It wasn't.

Sadly, we will never know what drove him to write the poem. But whatever the "hideous sins" were, they made him feel that he wasn't living up to the ideal of a poet; the poet who, in Mrs. Browning's poem, says “I seek no wages-- seek no fame:/Sew me, for shroud round face and name,/ God's banner of the oriflamme.” He may have feared instead that he was one of Browning's false poets, who boasted “we are not pilgrims, by your leave/ No, nor yet martyrs! If we grieve,/It is to rhyme to... summer eve."

Arts & Crafts Versus Arts & Crafts

The TV channel TLC recently declared that it was “about to turn crafting on its head” with its show Craft Wars, by assembling “craft virtuosos” for “a knock-down, drag-out fight for supremacy.” As reviews roll in, it seems that the show has indeed managed to turn craft on its head, but not in quite the peppy way that TLC intended.

On the first of last month, Alexandra Lange at the New Yorker posted a scathing review of the show. In her piece, she argued that the show is an offense to all that true craft stands for, by encouraging wasteful consumption, and by separating the creation of objects from their decoration. As an example, Lange picked an episode in which people competed to make the most attractive playhouse:

The contestants … weren’t even constructing the house part: nameless team members wielded saws and hammers, while the (female) contestants added decoration to the plywood frame. It was a setup that forced them to be decorators, and it also narrowed the skill set required for a win to sewing, glueing, and painting …

It's true that this is opposed to Morris's idea of an artist-craftsman who masters every aspect of his or her trade. But does this mean that Craft Wars deserves to be dismissed as a group of people wasting their time by making things “cute”?

A blogger over at “Crafty Manalo” begs to differ. In her rebuttal to Lange's piece, she writes that it is misleading to compare small home projects and the Arts & Crafts movement writ large, then goes on to quote another commentator who summed up the potential value of the show quite well:

I too recoil a bit when glueing pencils onto a window box is lumped into the ‘craft’ category. However, I have also witnessed acquaintances of mine start out stringing beads into nice earrings and necklaces, and become motivated to learn the full spectrum of jewellery-making techniques, or set about learning to make the glass beads by hand.

If even one person is inspired to explore craft more deeply as a result of Craft Wars, the piece concludes, then “it will have served a useful purpose.”

(Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Passion Without Vocation

Morris's leading passion:  a "hatred of modern civilization"
Coalbrookdale by Night, Phillippe de Loutherbourg

Was William Morris possessed of that magical trait we hear so much about: passion? To understand the most popular definition of "passion" today, one needs only to read a cover letter. When a candidate writes, for example, “Good administrative practices are my passion”, or even “the study of history is my passion”, she wants to tell her potential employers that a specific thing is her vocation: don't worry, I will never get bored of the job and run off to start my own business or become a lobster fisherman in the Bahamas. If that's what passion is in the modern sense—a specific, directed, and reliable sort of vocation—then Morris was about as passionate as a piece of moldy bread.

But if by passion we mean a theme to one's life, a broad goal towards which all the many vocations are merely different paths, then Morris was passionate indeed. Later in his life Morris once said, “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.” Hypothetically, if he'd written this in a cover letter in late 1855 when he was applying to work at the office of G.E. Street, an architecture firm in Oxford, then he would never have gotten the job.

Indeed, perhaps they shouldn't have given it to him, as he'd only settled on architecture months before the beginning of the apprenticeship. For years previous to that, he'd been planning and training to enter the church. But he was so convincing about his new choice that he had many people in his life believing that architecture was his one true vocation. He wrote to his mother along those lines:

“If I were not to follow this occupation I in truth know not what I should follow with any chance of success, or hope of happiness in my work ... Perhaps you think that people will laugh at me, and call me purposeless and changeable; I have no doubt they will, but I in my turn will try to shame them, God being my helper, by steadiness and hard work. … but … I will by no means give up things I have thought of for the bettering of the world in so far as lies in me.”

Alas, architecture turned out to involve too much drudgery and exact drawing, so he switched to painting within a year, leaving G.E. Street in the dust. Was this a sign that Morris was changeable and purposeless, or was he simply seeking different types of work that suited his life's general theme, his life's passion? The latter seems most likely. After all, as he wrote to his mother, he had simple aims: “I do not hope to be great at all in anything, but perhaps I may reasonably hope to be happy in my work...”

After he failed to become a painter as well, this line from his mother's letter took on new meaning. He no longer wanted to work for decades at one thing, in order to become a decent architect or passable painter. He wanted to enjoy his work, and this he did, becoming eminently successful at many different things. He wrote poetry about the deep past, he wrote fantasy novels and Socialist lectures about the far future, and he designed fabrics and papers to beautify the present as much as possible. These projects seem scattered, but were in fact very focused. Every single one of them served one purpose: helping his fellow man to escape, or to improve, the ugliness and unfairness of Victorian civilization.  

"the sorrow that changed and changes my life"

Charles Eliot Norton in 1903

When Morris returned from Iceland in the fall of 1871, he wrote a long letter to his accomplished American friend, Charles Eliot Norton. Norton, a well-known editor*, had been in Italy with his wife Susan, but was now traveling North. Morris wrote: “Please give my kindest remembrances to Mrs. Norton and the rest of your party … I hope, but don't expect that you will enjoy Berlin—” **

Indeed Norton did not enjoy Berlin at all. In fact he never reached it, because in Dresden his wife died in childbirth. From that moment onwards, he was a changed man: his happiest times would now belong to the past.

Returning to the United States without his wife, he saw his country in a new light. He took no pleasure in coming home: the steamer journey across the ocean had just increased the “material distance between me and the best part of my life”, he wrote. The memories of his time in Italy had become “the secret treasure” of his life; his lonely existence in the US, by contrast, was bare. Perhaps this emotional dichotomy was what allowed him to make a cool, critical analysis of his home country, at a time when so many others were blindly patriotic.

A year after Susan's death, Norton wrote to Henry James in a reflective mode. His letter touched on the subject of the United States, and its relative greatness when compared with the rest of the world:

No doubt there is great & restless vivacity of mind, much brightness of surface; & certainly there are many virtues to be found, even in the newest & roughest sets (at least Bret Harte, our latest immortal, so assures us,)—and Cambridge is no doubt as near the centre of the earth as any place so far north can possibly be. But it is a barren & solitary earth,—and it would be a wretched and unworthy patriotism, or a mere love of paradox, or an unmanly timidity and self distrust, that would hinder one who has known the best, from saying distinctly, “this is not the best & will not in our time be the best.”

Before the tragedy, Norton had been a dear friend to Morris and his circle, but he was sometimes a bit neglected. Edward Burne-Jones wrote to Norton just before the disaster, apologizing for forgetting to write, and pointing out that Morris was just as negligent in writing: “He behaves as badly to you as I do—fifty-two times a year we say to each other 'Have you written to Norton?' ” ***

Although Norton changed after the disaster, his friendship with the circle became closer than ever, and he was clearly less neglected. Georgiana, Burne-Jones's wife, explained the shift: “from that time [Susan's death] our sympathy with her husband changed affection into devotion.'There was no need for you to be dearer to your friends,' Edward wrote to him, 'but you will be.' ”

*  His distinguished career as a Harvard Professor had not yet begun.

**  From letter #154 in The Collected Letters of William Morris, Vol. I, edited by Norman Kelvin.

***  See page 23 of linked text. Georgiana's quote can be found on page 27.

William Morris's Great Weakness

Morris's Oxford Union mural, How Sir Palomydes Loved La Belle Iseult with Exceeding
 Great Love out of Measure, and how She Loved Him Not Again but Rather Sir Tristram

Morris struggled with the figures in his mural.

In 1856, at the age of twenty-two, William Morris decided to become a painter. It's not a coincidence that this decision came after just a few months of friendship with one of his heroes, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. At the time, Rossetti had very forceful views, which placed painters above everyone else. According to a friend of his, he claimed that if “any man had poetry in him, he should paint it.” Morris found Rossetti's arguments irresistible, and by July he was writing: “Rossetti says I ought to paint... now as he is a very great man, and speaks with authority and not as the scribes, I must try...” He would never succeed, and his attempts would often drive him wild with frustration.

Very little evidence survives of Morris's long struggle with figure sketching and painting. Morris would be pleased with this situation: indeed, he probably destroyed many of his early works himself. The only canvas painting spared, La Belle Iseult, is good enough to suggest that he was a fine painter, but it was worked on by a number of Morris's friends, including Rossetti, after it left his hands. To Morris's dismay however, an unflattering example of his figure painting did survive, and can be seen to this day.

When Rossetti gathered a group of artists to paint murals in the new Oxford Union building in 1857, Morris agreed to do one of the panels. After being mocked for his figure of Iseult, who apparently looked like an “ogress”, Morris altered the painting, and covered over much of the panel with a twisting thicket of plants and sunflowers. The result was a huge swathe of green, with the rather crude faces of the lovers Tristram and Iseult peeping out in the upper right corner, and the jealous Sir Palomydes watching them from the left.

Morris was embarrassed by the result, writing twelve years later “I believe it has some merits as to colour, but I must confess I should feel much more comfortable if it had disappeared from the wall, as I'm conscious of it being extremely ludicrous in many ways.” When he wrote those words, his wish was coming true. The murals were fading rapidly, and were very difficult to see. It was only later that a restoration revealed the original in all of its awkward glory.

This experience pushed Morris ever closer to the decorative arts, for although he disliked his wall mural, he was very pleased with his ceiling design, a flowing pattern that was very capably done. Sadly, this pattern can't be seen any more, as Morris re-painted the ceiling to a new design in 1875.

If you haven't been to see the Oxford Union Murals, then watch this video prepared by Oxford Brookes University. It was filmed at night, so the murals—normally hard to see for all the sunlight—come out beautifully. They focus on a few of the murals, including Rossetti's and Morris's, while Dr. Christiana Payne and Nancy Langham discuss them.

Unattributed Morris quotes in today's post come from Norman Kelvin's The Collected Letters of William Morris, Vol I. 
The Ogress comment was made by Val Prinsep, and can be seen in Fiona MacCarthy's biography, William Morris: A Life for Our Time.
To read more about Morris's canvas painting, see Jan Marsh's article "La Belle Iseult" in the Summer 2011 edition of the Journal of William Morris Studies. (Vol XIX, Number 2)
There's also a master's thesis on the topic of the murals, here.