William Morris (1834-1896)
The Hollow Land and Other Contributions to The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856, posthumously collected and published 1903)

I rolled 895, which drops me in the William Morris range. Since I haven’t read anything by him, my system has me then fall back to his first entry: 891: Early Romances.

The first question as always is: what does Harold Bloom mean by this? Well, “Early Romances in Prose and Verse” is the title of a 1907 Everyman’s Library volume. Seeing as Bloom lists “Poems” as a separate entry under Morris’s name, I felt justified in skipping the Verse; that’s for another time, somewhere far off in the mists of my infinite, random future. This leaves the Prose. A bit of research reveals that the prose items in the Everyman’s volume had been collected earlier as “The Hollow Land and Other Contributions to the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine,” and that this collection is itself to be found in Volume I of Morris’s Collected Works, which unlike the other sources linked above is available at my local library. See above for the requisite scan of its completely unlovely binding.

I note its unloveliness because loveliness was one of Morris’s principal concerns, and bookmaking one of his chosen crafts. Take a gander at any one of the obsessively lovely volumes from his Kelmscott Press, which I gather to have been the birthplace of the entire modern tradition of the small press, and thus of the whole wide world of print geekery. All the fussy fetishes that constitute our present-day idea of “beautiful books” would seem to stem from here.

While the posthumous collection that I read definitely wasn’t up to Morris’s own flowery standards, it was still laid out with a certain ostentatious typographical dignity. (See the linked title above for a look at the interior.) My personal response to preeningly aristocratic type layout is to be at once enthralled by it and distracted from the content. Poems laid out in all their beautiful limpid pellucid lambent limpidity (to quote Nabokov) often impress and charm my eye and then proceed to leave no impression as poetry. I’m open to the beauty, but it’s not literary beauty. Nor is it a particularly apt complement to literary beauty; it’s as though the swimsuit and talent portions have been misguidedly combined. And compared to actual thoughts, type design is pretty thin stuff. It’s important that your typography not be more put-together, more cared-for, than your words themselves. So say I, anyway; there are large swaths of the bookstore that seem to disagree with me.

William Morris, I suspect, would also have disagreed. His attitude seems to have been that type design is no more and no less important than textual content; that they are both mediums for conveying aesthetic experiences, impressions, vague Romantic what-you-may-call-its. (Mind you, I infer this almost entirely from reading these stories; I did hardly any further research.) The fantasy of his dreamy medievalist writing is not just complementary but actually equivalent to the fantasy of his dreamy medievalist designs.

When I first encountered Lord Dunsany, the phrase occurred to me that reading his super-saturated fantasy stories was “like eating sweet brains.” I never had the chance to share this image with anyone, so I’m pulling it into service now. It applies to Morris too, though where Dunsany’s writing feels unwholesome in its purity — like the refined precipitate of fantasy; freebased fantasy — Morris’s feels unwholesome in its abundance, its boundlessness. It stretches on and on, disinterested in narrative; it wants only to prolong itself. The writing revels neither in words nor events but in its own atmosphere, which it exists solely to continuously renew — like a fog machine. I got the sense that Morris wrote not with the ambition to create discrete works, but rather to open a window on a certain precious configuration of unreality, and that having once gotten it open, his aspiration was simply to keep it open.

Morris’s writings are manifestly the work of a great wallpaper designer. His art aspires to the condition of wallpaper.

What else is one to make of a passage like this?:

The Abbey where we built the Church was not girt by stone walls, but by a circle of poplar trees, and whenever a wind passed over them, were it ever so little a breath, it set them all a-ripple; and when the wind was high, they bowed and swayed very low, and the wind, as it lifted the leaves, and showed their silvery white sides, or as again in the lulls of it, it let them drop, kept on changing the trees from green to white, and white to green; moreover, through the boughs and trunks of the poplars we caught glimpses of the great golden corn sea, waving, waving, waving for leagues and leagues; and among the corn grew burning scarlet poppies, and blue corn-flowers; and the corn-flowers were so blue, that they gleamed, and seemed to burn with a steady light, as they grew beside the poppies among the gold of the wheat. Through the corn sea ran a blue river, & always green meadows and lines of tall poplars followed its windings.

The old Church had been burned, and that was the reason why the monks caused me to build the new one; the buildings of the Abbey were built at the same time as the burned-down Church, more than a hundred years before I was born, and they were on the north side of the Church, and joined to it by a cloister of round arches, and in the midst of the cloister was a lawn, and in the midst of that lawn, a fountain of marble, carved round about with flowers and strange beasts; and at the edge of the lawn, near the round arches, were a great many sun-flowers that were all in blossom on that autumn of the day; and up many of the pillars of the cloister crept passion-flowers and roses. Then farther from the Church, and past the cloister and its buildings, were many detached buildings, and a great garden round them, all within the circle of the poplar trees; in the garden were trellises covered over with roses, and convolvulus, and the great-leaved fiery nasturtium; and specially all along by the poplar trees were there trellises, but on these grew nothing but deep crimson roses; the hollyhocks too were all out in blossom at that time, great spires of pink, and orange, and red, and white, with their soft, downy leaves. I said that nothing grew on the trellises by the poplars but crimson roses, but I was not quite right, for in many places the wild flowers had crept into the garden from without; lush green briony, with green-white blossoms, that grows so fast, one could almost think that we see it grow, and deadly nightshade, La bella donna, oh! so beautiful; red berry, and purple, yellow-spiked flower, and deadly, cruel-looking, dark green leaf, all growing together in the glorious days of early autumn. And in the midst of the great garden was a conduit, with its sides carved with histories from the Bible, and there was on it too, as on the fountain in the cloister, much carving of flowers and strange beasts.

Clearly one should not read such things. Either one is not sympathetic to its ends and susceptible to its effect, in which case it is an inexcusable embarrassment — or else one is sympathetic and susceptible, in which case it is deeply unwholesome. This is where my image of the sweet brains comes from. As a reader of such stuff I do my best to play both the skeptic and the addict, which gives the work its essential profile of seduction/repulsion. A vampiric metaphor would do just as well: Whatever I’ve just been drinking, it’s delicious… wait a minute, is this someone’s neck?

Just as the pre-Raphaelite painters probably deserve credit for inventing the RenFaire worldview, it should be acknowledged that Morris here seems to lay the groundwork for Tolkien (and, beyond him, all manner of nonsense). He shows us how to grind myth and history into a nostalgia sausage, which, on second taste, may not have any actual myth or history in it. In a way, his priorities embody the essence of Romanticism: things are important only for how they make you feel, and once you have a grip on those feelings, pump them up as much as you possibly can. You know that feeling of yearning you have when circumstances separate you from someone you love? Well, what if every concept in that sentence (i.e. “you,” “feeling of yearning,” “circumstances,” “someone you love,” “love”) were holy, royal, illuminated in gold leaf, placed in a sacred vault on top of the highest mountain, haunted, eternal, etc. etc.? Now that’s what I call artistic!

If you are foolhardy enough to take the stories seriously, that hypnotizing Tristan und Isolde effect of nauseating emotional elephantiasis is ever-present. Many of the pieces follow knightly characters through long dream-like lives (and ghostly afterlives) full of moral murk and confused unfurled-banner bombast, against which a single fleeting instant of hyper-chaste love is agonizingly juxtaposed. It is an attempt to multiply romance by infinity. But all this is only what Morris does distractedly, reflexively, while in the front of his mind he’s really only concerned with describing the garland on the bower over the queen’s head. The result is both obscene and blurry. And honestly, that has its place in my aesthetic palate. It certainly had its place in Poe. I just wish Morris had had the formal restraint to make it effective. If you’re going to take this trip, you want the good shit. This supply comes from an old-timey apothecary with an unreliable druggist; ingest at your own risk.

These stories were the product of a period of youthful, bright-eyed self-publication by Morris and friends in their early twenties (in the form of the short-lived Oxford and Cambridge Magazine), and there’s always a charismatic impression of sincere self-delight running under the surface, even as that surface itself is generally a thicket of impenetrable affectation. Nonetheless, tedium set in rather quickly for me, since the medium was the message and one story was about as good as the next. If you relished the passage above (from “The Story of the Unknown Church”) then maybe you’d enjoy this. In which case I also recommend avoiding it.