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William Morris' works (2)

My very first contact with William Morris was through a recent, complete translation/edition of his work "The Well at the World's End". It had a preface by Anne Besson talking about the book, its author, and why it is at the root of the fantasy genre. Here are some highlights from it.

Morris' return to the stage is part of a movement wishing to return to the sources of fantasy. Now that the "big names" of fantasy (Besson mentions Tolkien, Rowling and Martin) have been explored fully and brought to life by many, there is a new interest and curiosity for the ones outside of them. The classical pioneers that are yet still ignored today, like George McDonald or Charles Kinglsey. The other British authors of the early 20th century that Tolkien overshadowed: Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, Hope Mirrlees, even T.H. White. And the parallel fecundity of the American pulp fiction - everybody knows of it Robert Howard for creating Conan, but now is the return of the others - Harold Lamb, Clark Ashton Smith, Abraham Merritt...

According to Anne Besson, William Morris is one of the greatest and most beautiful creators of the "unjustly neglected" literary monuments of early fantasy - and she considers his "The Well at the World's End" to be his masterpiece. Yet Morris is a very unique case, because he was first and foremost a material and visual artist. He was a drawer, a designer, a printer, and this is a part of his career that is still recognized to this day - often people only mention his crafts work, without a single word about the novels he wrote. Even in Encyclopedias of the fantasy, Morris' name often doesn't get a specific article, and is just a mention in either more general talks about the Preraphaelites, or an evocation in the articles of the authors he inspired (Tolkien, Howard, Eddings). This is the dual heritage of Morris - the great authors he inspired, and his carreer as the "Jack of All Arts" [a title Lyon Sprague de Camp gave him in 1974].

William Morris is first and foremost a part of the Confrery of the Preraphaelites, a group which deeply marked the art of England at the end of the 19th century. They had an hyper-realist technique mixed with a proud escapism when it came to selection their subjects ; this made them stand at odds to the abstractions and "progress" of the "modern" engaged art of the time, and as a result they were for a very long time neglected from the History of the Arts, deemed as being just "kitsch". But today, in England and France they have been fully rehabilitated.

William Morris stands proudly alongside the leader of the movement, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his great friend Edward Burne-Jones. They share common aspirations and inspirations, mixing the Primitives of the first Italian Renaissance (of which they recreated the realistic depictions of nature) and the Gothic (of which they admired the "spiritual purity") - the result were idealized Middle-Ages, "made of faith, heroism and purity" (words from Julia Drobinsky. But Morris is more unique as he is, first and foremost, a craftsman, a designer, a decorator - he was the one who inspired the movement "Arts & Craft". He doesn't just dream of a "golden age", he tries to make it real.

Morris designed beautiful items in the hope of raising the aesthetic level of the Victorian productions. He wanted England to find back its traditional, demanding crafts, so that the alliance of the beautiful and the useful could produce, among the creators and the users, the satisfaction of a "work well done". He is mainly famous for his creation of an intertwined-flowers decorative motif which covered a lot of furniture cloth and wallpapers. He also created a printing house dedicated to recreating medieval-like books, not just using vellum or specific inks, but also special fonts and marginalia - between 1891 and 1898 his Kelmscott Press published 54 books, 17 of which were his own creations.

Morris as such echoes our modern concern of fighting against mass-production and standardization, to have more personal, artistic productions, blurring the line between craftsman and designer, offering fluid artistic collaborations. Morris and Co.'s traditional floral motifs were for a very long time associated with "cosy British interiors" but are now all over the world. Morris himself lived by his aesthetic agenda, surrounding himself with his visual and ideological choices - first in his Red House in the South of London (he had a part in its construction), then at Kelmscott Manor, an idyllic countryside retreat near the Thames co-owned with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A lot of rumors and criticism was aimed towards the two men's relationships to one woman - Jane, who was the wife of Morris but the muse of Rossetti. Yet, these "loose morals" denounced at the time were in line with the Preraphaelites' protest against the normalized violence of the Victorian society, a protest that was mainly expressed through an exaltation of a proudly sensual feminity... In The Well at the World's End, this is found in the character of the Lady of Abundance, a third seductive fairy, a third jealousy-inducing witch, a third pagan goddess...

William Morris didn't just print beautiful books, theorized books in his crafting ideology, or collected medieval manuscripts - he also wrote many, many texts. His complete works, gathered by his daughter May, form 24 volumes (plus four volumes of corresponance, plus a hundred of articles and political conferences). And he did all that before dying at 62 years old. To give a few highlights, he started in the 1850s, under the influence of Thomas Malory's La Morte d'Arthur. He published medieval-inspired novellas in "The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine" (notably "The Hollow Land"), and he even decided to have an Arthurian dialogue with Lord Alfred Tennyson, the greatest poet of his time, by publishing in 1858 "The Defense of Guinevere".

Morris' works were a succession and mix of translations, adaptations and re-creations. A good example of this is his work on the Volsung Saga, the great myth of Sigurd that was the source of inspiration for Wagner's operas. Morris first learned Old Norse from an Iceland man named Eirikr Magnusson (who was the key person for the diffusion of Norse culture in the Oxonian circles). He then co-wrote an "archaic" translation: Völsunga Saga - The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda, 1870. Five years later, he offered a vast epic versified rewrite: The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs, 1876. He was very proud of this book.

He also translated various French medieval romances (notably "Ami et Amile" in 1896's Four French romances), and the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf (in 1895). But it is much more relevant to point out how close he was to the Greco-Latin tradition. Outside of a long poem dedicated to Jason (The Life and Death of Jason, 1867), he published a translation of Virgil's Aeneid (1875-76), and one of Homer's Odyssey (1887-88).

Finally, his enormous compilation of 24 narrative poems called "The Earthly Paradise" (3 volumes, 1868-70) was the encounter of his two ancient inspirations : Vikings of the North enter a heavenly otherworld where Ionians survived, and with whom they exchange stories - all to offer a beautiful metaphor on the role of the "transmission of culture".

His writing of "romances" is only a late stage of his production. The Well at the World's End was only published in 1896, the same year as Morris' death - even though it had been written some years earlier. It forms a greater whole alongside "The Story of the Glittering Plain" (1891), "The Wood Beyond the World" (1894), "The Water of the Wondrous Isles" (1897) and "The Sundering Flood" (1897, posthumous work). It is a late but logical development as Amanda Hodgson noted: before that, Morris' work oscillated between the "historical temptations" and the political utopias turned to the future. On one side his historical novel "The House of the Wolflings" in 1880, defending the Northern aristocracies against the Roman invasions ; on the other side his "A Dream of John Ball" about the Middle-Ages confronting the Industial Revolution, or his "News from Nowhere".

These romances, beyond showing the tiredness of the end of a life dedicated to an unflinching political engagement, allow Morris to unite these contrasting aspirations. Their "lightness" and their happy endings glorify the ability of individuals and communities to transform. Through escapist stories, Morris captures the same hope he tries to offers to the people of his time. It is the meaning of the fourth part of "The Well", dedicated to a return to the homeland, during which the hero and his beloved go back through the same places they crossed before and see their evolutions.

It seems every aspect of Morris' life lead to these romances. They feed on his nature as a scholar in literary and languages, they feed from his passion for Arthurian romances and Medieval chansons de geste ; they are born from his interests for myths, epics, fairytales and folklore. But they are also very visual productions. Sober yet strongly evocative descriptions through an insistance on color and light ; the use of typical hyperbola and a stylistic unity ; the "chromatic exuberance" through the union of "absolute colors" (yellow, gold, green, blue, scarlet) in a limited palette reminding of the Medieval illuminations... Morris wrote his texts like he painted his images. The very plots, with their constant duality and doubles and counter-points, reminds of the ornamental motifs of the Morris Company.

In the end the "birth of the fantasy" Morris is credited with is no more than the fusion of magnified Middle-Ages with socialist visions of another world more just and more beautiful. Poetic and politically engaged, these romances, through their initiation processes and their rich symbolism, offer questions about self-fulfilment, the formation of a couple, the need to be inserted in a collectivity - while also promoting the values that are loyalty, perseverance, care for desires, and the importance of the community.

Did William Morris invent fantasy? At least this is how he is perceived...

Originally, outside of the publication of Morris' completed works by May Morris, they were very hard to access, only available to the best experts of English literature, until Lin Carter offered them a second life in the USA, in the collection "Ballantine Adult Fantasy". We are in the huge wave caused by the success of "The Lord of the Rings" (its pocket-edition of the revised version in 1965). Ballantine Adult Fantasy, the first fantasy collection ever, was created to fulfill the needs of a Tolkien fan, by ambitiously reprinting all of the "classics". Lord Dunsany, George McDonald, George Meredith and... William Morris. In five years four of his books were re-published, starting with "The Wood" in 1969, and "The Well" in two volumes in 1970. Lin Carter is also a very fascinating name when it comes to the fantasy world, very divisive. On the "light side", Carter is remember as a scholar and lover of fantasy who maintained and enhanced the genre ; on the "dark side", Carter is recalled as a mediocre author and a shady editor, hated by fans of Tolkien and Robert Howard for shaping and exploiting a twisted version of their works...

It is under the pen of Carter that Morris' romances earned their title of "origins of fantasy". Carter presented them as such: "From the world of the "Wood" and the world of the "Well" descend all of the later worlds of fantastic literature, Poictesme, and Oz and Tormance, Barsoom and Narnia and Zothique, Gormenghast and Zimiamvia and Middle-Earth. When he sketched out the map of those imagined realms which lie between Upmeads and Utterbol, William Morris blazed the first trail into the unexplored universe of fantasy".

But Ballantine's Morris can be seen as almost a betrayal of the original spirit... It implies a new genealogy, a new target-audience, and a new interpretation. His romances are not part of a complete architectural unit. The American audience split them away from the rest of Morris work, differentiate the author from the artist. Yet, it was widely recognized at the time that the first English fantasy and artistic theories were closely linked... George MacDonald, the author of "Phantastes" and "The Princess and the goblin" was a friend of John Ruskin, an influent art theorician, whose texts were for Morris (just like for Proust) a massive revelation... Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the most famous of the Preraphaelites, belonged to a family of artists: his sister, Christina Rossetti, was a figure-head of a darker Victorian fantasy, with her poems (Goblin Market) or her Lewis Carroll-like fairytales (Speaking Likenesses).

The reason so many of these early names rarely reached us is because of the huge meteorite that crashed on the "fantasy land" - named Tolkien. A meteorite that changed forever the "fantastic ecosystem" - after him, all fantasy works shall be compared to Tolkien and no one else. It is unfair, but it is so. Anne Besson highlights how her work edition for writing this preface was a 2003's publication by the Inkling Books which claimed would "give back Morris to the people" and yet systematically and heavily referred to him as "the author who influenced Tokien". The editor, Michael W. Perry, seemed to strongly imply that the only reason Morris' Well deserved to be read, was because of its association with Tolkien. The first lines are: "On the lines of Morris's romances, two books that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien, The Wood beyond the world and The Well at the world's end, by William Morris". Tolkien's full name comes before Morris' own full name! And the introduction, titled "William Morris and J.R.R. Tolkien" is entirely about what Tolkien found in Morris for his own works... And the dedication is "For the fans of Tolkien who are wishing for books like the Lord of the Rings".

Despite everybody linking Morris to Tolkien, his influence is more relevant in th case of C.S. Lewis, who was very enthusiastic about the author and wrote a beautiful presentation of him in his 1939's "Rehabilitations". Tolkien's inspiration was there, though lesser and smaller... He mostly took broad elements (a hieratic style, a Medieval Northern Europe setting, a discreet ambiant magic) and punctual details (the malevolent Gandolf and the Silverfax horse of Morris predate Tolkien's Gandalf and Shadowfax). Tolkien did write that the Dead Marshes were more directly influenced by Morris' romances. And to this list of influences can be added two more things. One, the importance of the "return" of the characters - the story doesn't end with the quest, the characters have to go home. Two, the image of the dead tree brought back to life - brought back to life by the heroes' return, by the return of a vital harmony, of a just government. For Tolkien it is Gondor's White Tree, for Morris it is the Dry Tree, the opposite of both the Well with its waters of life and of the arms of Upmeads, a fruit-bearing apple-tree by a river.

To read "retrospectively" Morris as just another fantasy author, or as in the line of posterior creations, is thus for Anne Besson a big mistake, because Morris, who wrote at the very dawn of a new genre, is very "original" in his work compared to what is expected of a fantasy today, and what might seem in the context of modern fantasy as "naive" or "blinded" was very fresh, very troubling, very "primordial" in the light of the end of a life-time of social fighting alongside the poor and the victims of misery an injustice.

And it is not because Morris' work is great, or a classic, or very influential on modern works, that it means it is easy to read today. While the text feels simple, fresh, fluid, it is a false sense that is quickly broken down by how unfamiliar modern audiances will be with the content of the book. The book has a very ambivalent "moral system", where it is hard to discern what is good an what is evil - exemplified by the troubling relationship between religion and magic in this fictional universe. It is a work done in a style purposefully archaic, avoiding Latin-derived words to search for a purely English language paying homage to its Nordic roots. It is also a work with the traditional "flatness" of the medieval romances and illustrations: everybody happens on the same plane, there is no pause, no acme, everybody speaks the same way, and the same episodes return over and over again.

However as C.S. Lewis wrote, while Morris' style is very artificial, it shall be praised for being very simple, very obvious, very clear, "more so than any "natural" style could be". It is a form of stylistic sobriety that invites to see beyond the words. Morris' stories don't have a "set", a "stage" or a "decorum", they have a geography. Morris makes sure the reader can "breathe the air" of the mountains they read about. Morris started there this ideal that all fantasy authors seeks to reach, the same ideal that Tolkien popularized - but when Tolkien talks of the "tales of Faërie", he seems to be echoing and evoking the texts of William Morris. Simple, fundamental stories filled with light, that invite to look at things like everyday colors and rediscover them, and that get rid of banality and familiarity to literally "possess" the reader.

Anne Besson concludes by claiming Morris IS the Well which all the 1930s-onward fantasy authors drank from, as well as the more distant source of the flow of "new fantasy" of the 70s.

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