The Book of the Dead (17 page)

His early childhood was idyllic. He grew up near Epping Forest; his father had bought him a pony and toy suit of armor, and he would ride into the forest as a miniature knight, carrying out quests and making up tales of chivalry while sketching the birds and wildflowers that would become central to his designs. He loathed formal education. At Marlborough, he recalled, “I had a hardish time of it, as chaps who have brains and feelings generally do at school.” His nickname was Crab, and he was famous for his stormy temperament, rushing after those who teased him “with his head down and his arms whirling wildly.”

This restless, impulsive quality persisted throughout his life and made him both lovable and exasperating. Before going to Oxford, he toyed with the idea of becoming a High Church Anglican clergyman, but the work of John Ruskin converted him to architecture instead. Next, he became a passionate advocate of medieval art and communal living. After he graduated, he was apprenticed to G. E. Street, the Gothic revival architect, whom he later came to despise as a “vandal.” Inspired by his best friend, the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones, Morris decided that his real calling was painting. Then poetry took him over and he wrote
The Earthly Paradise
(1869), a kind of reinvention of the
Canterbury Tales
, in which a group of medieval Norwegian wanderers sets out in search of a land of eternal life. This mythic verse epic became an immediate bestseller, establishing him as one of the most popular poets in the country. From then on, most people knew him as the “author of
The Earthly Paradise,”
and the poem was still popular enough, more than twenty years later, for Morris to be offered the Poet Laureateship when Tennyson died in 1892. As well as poetry, novels, fantasies, and essays flowed out of him—his
Collected Works
comes to twenty-four large volumes. After poetry, his next preoccupation was dyeing, a complex technical process that he taught himself. Having mastered that, he learned weaving, then tapestry, then printing. On top of all this, he found time to become a political activist: first a liberal, then a socialist and the spiritual godfather of the British Labour Party. His friend Burne-Jones encapsulated the roller-coaster ride of Morris’s life: “All things he does splendidly … every minute will be alive.”

Morris never felt more alive than when he was making something. He summed up his philosophy in saying: “If a chap can’t compose an epic poem while he is weaving a tapestry, he had better shut up.” His infectious enthusiasm rubbed off on all those around him. Whether at home or in the factories and shops he built, Morris had a genius for getting everyone to join in. Much of this was due to his bonhomie and unconventional sense of fun. At Oxford, he was noted for his purple trousers and once ate dinner in a suit of chain mail he’d had made by a local blacksmith. His unruly mop of hair led his friends to nickname him “Topsy” (as in the phrase “growed like Topsy”) after the ragamuffin slave girl in the popular contemporary novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(1852).

William Morris was a short, portly, barrel-chested, bright-eyed,
tousled ball of energy: absentminded, charming, continually breaking chairs by means of what Ned Burne-Jones called “a muscular movement peculiar to himself” and capable of terrifying fits of foul-mouthed temper. When in a rage, he could crush forks with his teeth and smash holes in plaster walls with his head: One Christmas Day he threw an undercooked plum pudding through a window. In return, his friends would wind him up terribly, resewing the buttons on his waistcoat to make him seem even fatter, or refusing to answer his questions at dinner. Mostly it was with Morris’s cheery compliance. He liked being the center of attention, even when it cast him in an absurd light.

He was a man of large appetites: He “lusted for pig’s flesh” and always kept the dinner table groaning with good wine. “Why do people say it is so prosaic to be inspired by wine,” he protested. “Has it not been made by the sunlight and the sap?” He liked the grand gesture: On becoming a socialist he sat on his top hat to mark his resignation from the board of the family’s copper mine. With his shaggy beard, blue work shirt, and rolling gait, he was often mistaken for a seaman, though he sometimes seems more like a Viking who has stepped out of one of his beloved Norse sagas.

Perhaps because of his lovable, faintly batty streak, Morris’s contributions to public life are often overlooked. He has been called the father of Modernism in architecture, the most important English socialist thinker, and the first environmentalist. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the Art Workers Guild, both of which he helped found, continue to thrive. Even in literature, where his reputation has suffered its steepest decline, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien both cited his prose romances, such as
The Wood Beyond the World
, as inspirational for their own work.

Considering why Morris’s poems were no longer read, G. K. Chesterton once remarked: “If his poems were too like wallpapers, it was because he really could make wallpapers.” Morris’s design has become a byword for English bourgeois good taste. It appears everywhere—often in contexts that Morris could not possibly have foreseen, still less approved of. Morris’s ideal house was a big barn, “where one ate in one corner, cooked in another corner, slept in a third corner and in the fourth, received one’s friends.” His own actual houses were, quite literally, handmade works of art. The core idea of his thought is that art begins at home, in the making and furnishing of a house. True art, for Morris, is indistinguishable from craftsmanship: It isn’t about abstract “self-expression” but practical collective labor that gives pleasure in the doing and creates beauty that everyone can share. He was extraordinarily influential in his lifetime: The social progressives who applauded Galton’s eugenics—George Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, the Pankhursts, J. M. Keynes—had homes that were veritable shrines to Morris & Co.

Morris was well aware of the contradiction of being a socialist visionary, on the one hand, and a businessman who supplied decor to the rich and famous on the other. But he was far too busy to wallow in guilt. He pointed out that he paid his staff more than most and taught them to make beautiful things that would last a lifetime. What would be the point, he asked, of his giving his money away? The poor would be just as poor. “The world would be pleased to talk to me for three days until something new caught its fancy. Even if Rothschild gave away his millions tomorrow, the same problems would confront us the day after.”

In some ways, the brand of socialism that Morris championed
has fared no better than Galton’s eugenics, but he was never a hard-line party man—Engels and the other London-based communists were deeply suspicious of him. Neither he nor they could have foreseen the Gulags, any more than Galton could have predicted the Nazis. What Morris did see coming, though, with great clarity and dismay, was the consumer society. Even as a teenager he refused to go into the Great Exhibition of 1851 with the rest of his family, suspecting it would be brimful of industrial ugliness and wasteful luxury goods. “I have never been in any rich man’s house which would not have looked the better for having a bonfire made outside of it of nine-tenths of all that it held,” he wrote. Far ahead of his time, Morris saw that consumerism would come to oppress those who did the consuming: He foresaw a nation drowning in cheap tat and clutter, its people ruled by their own possessions. “Luxury,” he said, “cannot exist without slavery of some kind or other.”

He also saw how capitalism would get around the growing clamor for freedom and equality. In 1869, long before the Labour Party was founded, he predicted that the establishment would survive by adopting “quasi-socialist machinery” with “the workers better treated, better organised, helping to govern themselves, but with no more pretence to equality with the rich, nor any more hope for it than they have now.” They were prophetic words. Though the overall standard of living has improved in the 140 years since Morris was writing, inequality in British society has actually widened. The top 20 percent in Britain today now earn seven times as much as the bottom 20 percent.

As the novelist Henry James said of Morris, he is “wonderfully to the point and remarkable for clear, good sense.” He wasn’t a sophisticated political theorist; he was a problem solver,
a doer, and he was the first major figure to utter the heresy that unless art is accessible to everyone it is worthless.

His personal life, friendships and merriment aside, was painful. His wife, Jane, had two long affairs, one with his friend the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (who rather cruelly called his pet wombat Topsy) and the other with the louche poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. Her infidelities wounded Morris deeply, although his own emotional inadequacies were partly to blame. His view of romantic love never developed beyond adolescent idealization and fell far short of the emotional intimacy that Jane needed. She was a depressive and Morris escaped her moods by burying himself in his work. Nevertheless, they remained together and he managed the situation over forty years with tact and kindness. By way of compensation for his failings as a husband, he was endlessly attentive to his children—particularly his daughter Jenny, who lived life as a semi-invalid because of her epilepsy. They, in turn, adored him.

In the last two years of his life his great passion was the production of a hand-printed edition of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
, in type he designed himself, with eighty-seven illustrations by Burne-Jones. A masterpiece of book design, it is the embodiment of his theory that work should be collaborative and the results both beautiful and useful. Burne-Jones called it “a pocket cathedral.”

In 1895 trouble with Morris’s lungs proved to be tubercular and he started to weaken. But, visiting a badly restored Norman church in Sussex, he still had the energy to unleash paroxysms of fury at the absent architects: “Beasts! Pigs! Damn their souls!” On hearing that John Ruskin had described him as “the ablest man of his time,” he summoned his old jollity to order up a bottle
of Imperial Tokay (one of his favorite wines) from the cellar. But he knew the end was near. “I cannot believe I will be annihilated!” he fumed. His final words were defiant: “I want to get mumbo jumbo out of the world,” but his death was peaceful. Several of his friends noted how beautiful he looked lying there in repose—and being motionless, how unlike himself.

Morris’s contemporary, the tireless naturalist T. H. Huxley, had died the previous year. He wrote that “the great end of life is not knowledge but action.” Genghis Khan conquered most of the known world; Peary and Mary Kingsley explored unknown lands; Humboldt took on the cosmos; Galton and Morris designed the future. For all of them, “doing” was the only setting on their dial. Yet none had happy marriages and only Morris passed muster as a loving parent. They probably hardly noticed: The job in hand was what mattered and absorption in the task was reward enough in itself. All would have agreed for sure with that other nineteenth-century overachiever, Benjamin Jowett, master of Balliol, Oxford: “Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Let’s Do It

Personally I know nothing about sex because I have always been married.

ZSA ZSA GABOR

S
ex is the most natural but least straightforward of all human urges. It fascinates and repels us, and it’s the ultimate leveler. Rich or poor, prince or plumber, saint or private equity fund manager, we all got here because somebody, somewhere, had sex with someone else. Yet human sexual activity takes up less of our time than eating, sleeping, watching television, or even choosing what clothes we wear in the morning. Of the twenty-five years the average couple spends in bed, only two months are spent making love. And despite what you read in the papers, we don’t think about it all the time, either. The cliché about men’s minds straying to sex every seven seconds is pure invention. The Kinsey Institute found that almost half the men they survey think about sex only once or twice a week.