A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  Meanwhile it’s difficult to know how to design a book about a great book designer. The Kelmscott Press is set in Bembo, which is a 1930 revival of a type cut in 1495; the rubrics are in Golden, spaced much more widely than Morris would have approved, and the initial letters are also Morris’s designs. There is a splendid range of illustrations, but the reproduction varies in quality. Quite certainly, however, Mr Peterson’s book is a superb account not only of the press itself but also of Morris’s final conclusions on ‘how we live, and how we might live.’

  New York Times Book Review, 1991

  Designs and Devices

  Rare Spirit: A Life of William de Morgan, 1839—1911, by Mark Hamilton

  William de Morgan had the pertinacity of mild-mannered people. He didn’t move with the times, never shaved off his beard, remained true to his early friends, worked side by side with William Morris, but took no interest whatever in politics. From 1872 to 1907, he single-mindedly decorated clay tiles and pots, buying them in, to start with, ready-made, later employing his own throwers.

  He was a great, and sometimes rash, inventor of devices and dodges. He began his career by building a kiln into the fireplace of his room and burning off the roof of the house, and went on to revive the metallic lustres of fifteenth-century majolica and to undertake majestic schemes such as the Arab room at Leighton House, where he had to match exactly the peacock-blue Iznik tiles. These processes were not secret, he said, and he was ready to share them with anyone who was interested. May Morris divided his work into three periods, corresponding, more or less, to his three potteries—‘the early Chelsea time, the bold-minded period (Merton Abbey) with big strong masses enriched with small ornaments, and then the later work (at Sands End), elaborate and full of curious invention.’ To describe their colour and deep luminosity, she says, is ‘to tell how the jewel-like birds fly across a blue-black sky, the pallid fish shine through green water, how the turquoise and purple flowers star the wooded lawns.’ There is, too, a kind of graceful grotesqueness in his bird and animal designs. They could only have been produced in the same century as Tenniel’s Dodo, or Lear’s Owl.

  As an employer, de Morgan was very successful—his kiln-master, Frank Iles, stayed with him for thirty-five years—but he was not a businessman, and there was a chronic shortage of money. He seemed, in fact, born to attract disaster. But he had a survivor’s instinct—not shrewdness, but a hidden sense which told him, in the gentlest possible manner, when the burden of his difficulties must be shifted onto somebody else. In 1885, he needed to build a larger pottery, but couldn’t afford to. By 1887, he was married, for the first time, at the age of forty-eight, and his wife had invested £4,000 in the business. He was one of those people who are in a sort of amiable conspiracy with chance and circumstance. Everyone loved de Morgan.

  The same thing could not quite be said of his wife. Burne-Jones (although Mark Hamilton doesn’t mention this in his new biography) was downright frightened of Mrs de Morgan, ‘a plain lady, whom I never look at when I talk to her.’ But her determination and confidence were exactly what was needed.

  Hamilton, rather unexpectedly for a biographer, says ‘it is pointless to speculate on the intimate details of a marriage which took place over a hundred years ago.’ Evelyn de Morgan, at any rate, was a Pickering from Yorkshire, who trained, in the face of family disapproval, as a painter, and worked all day long and almost every day at her meticulously coloured allegories and myths. Anyone lucky enough to have listened to her younger sister Wilhelmina Stirling will have some idea of what Evelyn was like. Until her death in her hundredth year in 1965, Mrs Stirling—latterly from a wheelchair—showed her guests round her home, Old Battersea House. The walls and recesses glowed with colour. She had made a notable collection of William’s ceramics and Evelyn’s paintings, both, at that time, out of fashion, but what did she care about that? As she moved stoutly ahead of her visitors, there was something valiant about her, even heroic.

  Evelyn was prepared to support the pottery to her last penny, and looked after William (who referred to her as ‘the Missus’) untiringly. They lived in The Vale, Chelsea, of which Hamilton prints a delightful photograph. But by 1891 one of his brothers and three of his sisters had died of TB, and he was advised to winter in Italy. Florence, of course. This meant that for six months of every year the pottery had to be run by post between de Morgan and his partner in London, the architect Halsey Ricardo. They managed, but only just. The firm closed in 1907. But by that time William de Morgan, after more than thirty years of ceramics, had taken on a second, unannounced, career. He had become a novelist. They were in Florence; William was in bed, suffering from depression; Evelyn handed him a pencil. He began—‘just to see what I could do’—to write Joseph Vance, and, as Bernard Shaw put it, ‘suddenly became a pseudo-Dickens and filled his scanted pockets by writing prodigiously long novels in the style of Nicholas Nickleby.’ There were nine in all, and they sold well.

  Mark Hamilton, like everyone else who writes about de Morgan’s life, has to rely largely on Mrs Stirling’s memoirs. On his art and craft much more has been written, and Hamilton records it, as a dutiful amateur. But what is truly distinctive in his book is his approach to the novels. He was encouraged, he tells us, by his father to read Joseph Vance as being ‘one of the funniest books in the English language.’ It wasn’t until he had finished the next one, Alice-for-Short, that he discovered ‘the extraordinary plates, pots, and tiles.’ He has never lost his enthusiasm for the nine de Morgan novels with their nostalgic picture of the Victorian London suburbs and seaside, their gallant young heroines and yarn-like plots—lost memories, buried skeletons, the evils of drink. In six chapters he summarizes what might seem the unsummarizable, and in doing so he restores a lost balance. The pots and tiles are now collected in a class by themselves. None of the novels is in print, but Hamilton, a literary agent by trade, thinks it quite possible that some enterprising firm might republish them. That would be, as de Morgan himself would have said, the rummest go.

  Times Literary Supplement, 1997

  The Gospel of Joyous Work

  The Simple Life: C. R. Ashbee in the Cotswolds, by Fiona MacCarthy

  Charles Ashbee—C.R.A., as he asked to be called—must be counted as a successful man. He was an architect whose houses stood up, a designer whose work has always been appreciated, a homosexual who in his fifties became—almost absent-mindedly, it seems—the father of four daughters, and a dreamer who, by founding the Guild of Handicrafts, put his ideals into practice and then kept them going for twenty years. He has not many competitors there.

  For a complete view of this much-loved, offensively beautiful, tactless, irritating, unknowable man—unknowable in spite of his frank gaze—we have to wait for the family biography and for the definitive study by Alan Crawford. Meanwhile Fiona MacCarthy has written The Simple Life, an excellent introduction to C.R.A. and his most ambitious experiment. This was the Great Move of 1902, when he led his band of 150 craftsmen from the East End of London to an unknown land, Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds. In the picturesque and then half-decaying little town he envisaged workshops and kitchen gardens for his cabinetmakers, jewellers, blacksmiths, weavers, and printers. He had already written an inspirational book for his apprentices, From Whitechapel to Camelot. Even more courageously, he took the foremen down to look at Campden in November, though he does appear to have given them plenty to drink. Then, as a socialist, he took a poll—one man, one vote. One of the apprentices walked eight miles through the snow to bring Ashbee the result. It is interesting to learn that the cabinet-makers, the most unionized of all the workshops, were decisively in favour of the Move.

  C.R.A. was born in 1863, the son of Henry Spencer Ashbee, a wealthy businessman and bibliophile and, as his granddaughter has pointed out to me, a serious pornographer. The mother was from a good Hamburg Jewish family, of the kind that in every generation produces a sensitive aesthete to plague them. C.R.A. refused to enter the business,
and is said to have been cut off with £1,000. At Cambridge, where his closest friends were Roger Fry and Lowes Dickinson, he was passionately open to influences, as to the winds that blow. In 1886, Edward Carpenter came on a visit, and ‘after supper we had a delightful walk through the green cornfields in the afterglow. He unfolded to me a wonderful idea of his of a new freemasonry, a comradeship in the life of men which might be based on our little Cambridge of friendships. Are we to be the nucleus out of which the new Society is to be organised?’ Deeply impressive were the sage’s words about the simple life, and, apparently as part of it, the ‘homogenic force’ that transformed homosexual love into an energy that would redeem society. Carpenter was Ashbee’s man, though the Guild, of course, was inspired by William Morris. This was in spite of the fact that Morris had thrown ‘a deal of cold water’ on the idea: for him, by that time, nothing would do short of revolution. But undoubtedly Ashbee had shown the Lamp of Sacrifice. He could perfectly well have salved his conscience in his high-minded practice as an architect. Instead of this, he set out with his men for the Promised Land.

  His mission was not so much to revive traditional crafts—that had been done already. It was to restore the workers’ birthright of fresh air—as Fiona MacCarthy points out, his role was ‘close to the Garden City prophets’—and to spread the gospel of joyous work. The like-minded Romney Green once said that if you leave any man alone with a block of wood and a chisel, he will start rounding off the corners. Ashbee’s trust, in defiance or perhaps in place of experience, had this quality. And what was more, leave him alone with any group of craftsmen and he would have them singing glees or producing an Elizabethan play, or giving readings from Carpenter and Ruskin.

  The Simple Life in the Cotswolds had three golden summers, with all the workshops commanding good prices, then a decline, and by 1908 it had foundered. Mismanagement perhaps, and unfair competition from Liberty’s and other commercial semi-mechanized craft enterprises. But C.R.A. blamed society, which had not seen fit to support his great experiment. Bitterest of all to him was the dismantling of the print shops, which he had taken over, together with Morris’s honourable grumbling old socialist foreman, from the Kelmscott Press. But his optimism survived: so, too, did his cantankerousness. In 1918 he was appointed Civic Adviser to the British Military Governor in Jerusalem, with responsibility for planning both the old and the new cities. But he did not last long in the job. He disliked being told what to do, and his sympathies were inconveniently with the Arabs.

  In preparing her book, Fiona MacCarthy has found plenty of original material. The main sources are the diaries of Ashbee and his wife—for, against all expectations, C.R.A. married a young girl, Janet Forbes, who took swimmingly to the Simple Life and the awkward position of ‘comrade wife’ among the many ‘comrade friends.’ We are told that she called her husband ‘Dear Lad.’ Ashbee’s journals were meant to be edited, and he did edit them, all forty-four volumes; Janet’s entries are in a different key, full of spirit and bounce.

  Both their points of view are reconstructed here with skill and delicacy. Then there is the view of Chipping Campden itself. A long drama began when the local gentry, the vicar, the Parish Council and the cottagers heard that 150 crazed socialists were expected from London. Even more unsettling were the visitors, for C.R.A. was determined to show his experiment to the world. Teachers, lecturers, and American well-wishers poured in, tourists came with the swallows and buttercups. Laurence Housman and Masefield came and wrote folk-ballads; the Webbs came, and C.R.A. sang ‘Wid-decombe Fair’ to them ‘in a singularly sweet tenor voice,’ beginning: ‘Mrs Webb, will you lend me thy grey mare?’ Yet in four years’ time the Guild and even its new experiments in rural education were acceptable to and accepted by Campden. Perhaps only someone as highhanded as C.R.A. could have seen it through. That might stand as his greatest achievement.

  It should be added that Ashbee, unlike most of his fellow dreamers of dreams, ran his Guild as a genuine profit-sharing co-operative. But his temperament never allowed him to face, as Morris did, the great tormenting paradoxes of his position. How can nostalgia for an imagined past be reconciled with an unimaginable future, a future whose news is from nowhere? Morris himself, across the supper table, had told him ‘the thing is this, if we had our Revolution tomorrow, what should we socialists do the day after?…We should all be hanged because we are promising the people more than we can give them!’ Ashbee does not seem to have understood. Again, how can the Romantic solution, which must be total, and therefore boundless and free, be realized through constant restrictions—so much machinery and no more, so much comfort and no more, the Simple Life? Even more obtrusive was the absurdity of selling simplicity only to wealthy patrons. This difficulty C.R.A. avoided, at first by thinking as little as he could about them, while involving them in considerable expense by allowing his craftsmen ‘to do the job well and take their time.’ Later he showed a certain indulgence towards the beauty-loving people of the world and in particular towards the ‘British aristocratic.’

  The Simple Life can’t, in its eight chapters, discuss these questions at length, nor does it make clear how far Ashbee supervised or even dictated the designs that the Guild workshops produced. But the book maintains an expert balance between C.R.A’s career, the movement he represented, and his private life. It is easy to accuse him of the bad habits of faith and hope. To treat him ironically is even easier, and seems consoling. But Fiona MacCarthy, although she has a keen sense of humour, is always just. For example, in describing his eccentric choice of Guildsmen—one of them was ‘called’ from a cat’s-meat barrow—she writes: ‘His ideal method of selection (and who has found one better?) was to grasp the man’s hand to see what mettle he was made of, simultaneously gazing searchingly into his eyes…The making of the object and the making of the man went together, as he frequently explained to anyone who cared to listen to him.’ All the ridiculous and the sublime of C.R.A. are there.

  London Review of Books, 1981

  The Grange1

  Nothing (with one small but important exception) remains of The Grange, where the Burne-Jones family lived for more than thirty years. It was in North End, Fulham, and consisted, from the eighteenth century on, of two red brick houses, standing back a little from the road, with iron gates and a short flagged path. Samuel Richardson had lived there from 1738 to 1754 (when his rent was put up to £40 p.a.), but there is no evidence that either Burne-Jones or Morris took any interest in Richardson. I’m writing not about the architectural history of the house, not even about the pictures that were painted there, but from the point of view of a biographer.

  The Burne-Joneses went there in 1867, eleven years before Morris discovered Kelmscott House, but why did they go there at all? Certainly, they had to move. After the death of their second baby, Christopher, they went to 41 Kensington Square, where Margaret was born. But in 1867, when they came back from their summer holiday in Oxford with the Morrises, they found that their landlord had sold the lease and they had to be out by Christmas. Still, there were always plenty of houses to let in London. Why The Grange?

  North End contained two brewers, a horse-dealer, and a private asylum for ladies. This in itself shows how remote the place was, since (as readers of The Woman in White will remember) private asylums had to be as far as possible from any form of transport, and although the Thames Junction Railway ran through the fields below The Grange, trains didn’t stop there. Milk was still delivered in pails and there were briar roses in the lanes (but Burne-Jones was never a countryman anyway—the country, he complained, was so noisy). The north house, which was the one they chose of the two, had the advantage of a good north light and an indoor studio, but even with two children it was too big for them, and the rates were high in Fulham. They had in fact to share it at first with an old Birmingham friend, Wilfred Heeley, and his wife, who were waiting to go out to India, or they could never have managed the rent at all.

  The Grange, then, had almost
nothing to recommend it to Georgie except inaccessibility. The directions were said to be ‘Go down the Cromwell Road till your cab horse drops dead, and then ask someone.’ But, as it turned out almost immediately, it was not inaccessible enough.

  The two menaces from whom Georgie was in strategic retreat in 1867 were Charles Augustus Howell and Mary Zambaco. Howell was a kind of dubious confidential agent, a sparkling, gossipy Anglo-Portuguese who amused Rossetti, was ignored by Morris, and proved much too worldly and slippery for Burne-Jones. ‘Mr Howell was a stranger,’ Georgie wrote, ‘to all that our life meant.’ He lived in Brixton, and she must have thought that North End was far enough away. What can she have felt when, not long after the move, Howell suddenly appeared in Fulham? He gave it out that Ruskin, for whom he had done some charity work, was paying for him to live in North End Grove ‘in order to keep Jones in health and spirits.’ There is no record of Howell in the Fulham rate-books.

  With Mary Zambaco, that wild and wealthy Greek beauty, the trouble was not that she came down to The Grange, but rather that Burne-Jones himself kept making a dash for it, ‘running up’ to London in a cab to Mary’s house in Porchester Terrace, knowing that in his absence—as Rossetti put it—she ‘beat up the quarters of all his friends for him.’ Georgie remained steadfast at The Grange, seeing to the decorating, which she calls ‘a veil of green paint and Morris paper,’ all, of course, from the Firm. She was the source of energy, taking charge of everything. When, in 1868, her sister Alice Kipling arrived from India and had her second baby in the study, Georgie wrapped it in a rug and carried on unperturbed.