I
GIVEN the overall pollution of the seas, the land, the atmosphere, as well as the geological layers beneath the seas, the world, considered as a chemical organization, is undergoing an inversion. Dangerous gases derived from beneath the seas are being consumed on earth and elevated into the atmosphere with dire consequences for the biological organization of the world. As Rebecca Solnit points out, it is “the world turned upside down”, although that is not what is commonly meant by the phrase, which was always egalitarian and anti-imperial.1 Formerly it described spiritual and political revolutions; St. Paul was accused of ‘turning the world upside down’ when he preached universally to all—Greeks, Jews, men, women—in Thessalonica (Acts 17:6) and supposedly it was the name of the tune played at Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown which achieved American independence (“all men are created equal”).
As egalitarian and anti-imperial, E.P. Thompson and William Morris were both communists, and we need communists now as never before. But what does the term mean? I shall try to provide an approach that relies on “the commons”, its cognate.
As a founder of an anti-capitalist, revolutionary, working-class organization Morris had to come up with definitions suitable for a political programme: “Well, what I mean by Socialism is a condition of society in which there would be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master’s man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain-sick brain workers, nor heart-sick hand workers, in a word, in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all—the realization at last of the meaning of the word COMMONWEALTH.” 2 Most of the elements of this definition—that there may be several types of societies, that the prevailing society is based on the classes rich and poor, that equality is an attainable condition, that overwork and alienation of labour violate human solidarity—are derived from the struggles of the early industrial revolution as we have come to know them thanks to E.P. Thompson’s narrative, The Making of the English Working Class (1963). The only point that is distinctly that of Morris is the demand for “unwaste”. This is what makes his communism green.
We sense the green again when Morris loses his temper: “It is a shoddy age. Shoddy is king. From the statesman to the shoemaker all is shoddy” he exclaimed to a reporter. “Then you do not admire the common sense John Bull, Mr. Morris?” “John Bull is a stupid, unpractical oaf”, Morris replied. At a calmer moment he said, “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.” That hatred stems from a repugnance of all that was squalid, stupid, dull, and hateful in capitalism and it led to its repudiation root and branch. Morris’s anti-capitalism was nurtured by his study of the romantic poets and to show this is one of Thompson’s achievements.
Morris possessed “a deep love of the earth and life on it, and a passion for the history of the past of mankind. Think of it! Was it all to end in a counting-house on the top of a cinder-heap….?” The question has become more urgent, the counting houses have become skyscrapers, the cinder-heap has become mounds of coal ash, piles of tailings, poisonous slurry, vast oil spills, buried beryllium, et cetera. Morris says—think of it! Indeed, that is our order of the day. Or, more simply, towards the end of his life he provided a familiar meaning whose very modesty conceals what is most revolutionary in it, namely, the suggestion that the future is already immanently in the present: “We are living in an epoch where there is combat between commercialism, or the system of reckless waste, and communism, or the system of neighbourly common sense.”
Thompson as a stalwart member of the Communist Party of Great Britain did not have the same pressure as a founder to devise comprehensive definitions. His problem was the opposite. He joined a Party that had already attained victory in one country, the USSR, so that any definition was bound to include raison d’état, far from neighbourly common sense. As a founder of the New Left, Thompson grafted on to the old what was new, namely, “socialist humanism”, which however, as a name, never took lasting hold. Morris had an aesthetic practice as poet and crafts worker wherein the relation between revolutionary communism and the commons found manifold expressions. For Thompson, the relation found private, familial expression, and it infused his writing as an historian and peacenik. Thompson’s lasting political achievement was in the movement against nuclear weapons.
The periods of Morris’s writings at the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century when Thompson wrote about Morris were characterised by a planetary transition in the sources of energy driving economic development, from coal to petroleum to nuclear. These changes are largely absent in the writings of Thompson as they are from the commentators on Morris. I do not wish to “reduce” the thought of either man to the material and energy basis of the societies they lived in (the reduction of the ideological superstructure to the material base was the Marxist error Thompson criticised most). Morris was a craftsman of many and several materials, Thompson was an innovative and skilled historian; both were historical materialists. If we are to restore notions of the commons to revolutionary communism then we need to understand the materiality of history.
As communists they were both opposed to the capitalist mode of production but they wrote little about it per se. Since capital requires the separation of the worker from the means of production and subsistence, and since the most important such means is land, commoning must logically be the answer to the ills of a class-riven society. Not only is the commons an answer or therapeutic cure (as it were), it was the previously existing condition, because the original expropriation was from the commons. Morris was aware of this, and so was Thompson, who expressed it differently. Thus, historically speaking, capitalism is merely the middle, an interlude one might hopefully say, between the old commons of the past and the true communism of the future. Our language reflects the change in the degradation of the meaning of “commoner” from a person with access to the earthly commons to the undistinguished, ignoble mass, with the implicit understanding that he or she had nothing to call his or her own.
William Morris was born in 1834 in “the ordinary bourgeois style of comfort,” financed by a father who was a bill-broker in the City of London, one of the 250 richest men in England as a result of speculation in copper mining.3 He lived in Walthamstow near Epping Forest with its knobbly, majestic hornbeams. He loved to read. At Oxford University he fell under the spell of the critics of Victorian society, Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin. He began to write poetry and decided to become an architect. In 1861 he founded a firm with Rossetti and Burne-Jones producing decorative arts, such as carpets, chintzes, stained glass, carvings, wallpaper, thus realizing his ideal of handicraft and leading to the Arts and Crafts movement. His floral style remains familiar after so many years. In 1871 and again in 1873 he went to Iceland and translated its sagas. He started Anti-Scrape, or the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, preservation work that would lead to the National Trust. He was treasurer of the Eastern Question Association opposing war in the Balkans. He founded the Socialist League in 1884. He founded the Kelmscott Press in 1891, which published sixty-six volumes. He died in 1896.
Edward Thompson was born in 1924, the second son of Edward Thompson senior (1886-1946), a lapsed Methodist missionary in India, a poet and historian, veteran of the murderous Mesopotamian campaign, and liberal ally of the Indian movement of independence. Edward Thompson’s mother, Theodosia Jessup, was an American Presbyterian missionary, associated with the American College in Beirut. Their first son, Frank, was a brilliant classics student, who joined the Communist Party in 1939 and then signed up for war. His brother, Edward, followed in 1942 by joining the Communist Party and going to war. Frank was killed in Bulgaria in dubious circumstances in 1944, an episode in the transition from the anti-fascist alliance to the Cold War.4 Returning to university and then to adult education in Leeds, Edward began his work on Morris publishing some of it in 1951 and his major study in 1955, the year before he left the CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain), or the Old Left, and helped to found the New Left and work with its ally the CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). For two decades in the 1960s and 1970s he practiced as an historian taking further academic positions at the University of Warwick and in the U.S. In the 1980s he returned again to the peace movement and became a founder of END or European Nuclear Disarmament taking up themes of 1945, themes inevitably poised between the hope of the Welfare State and the terror of Hiroshima. He died in 1993.
Morris of the 19th century and Thompson of the 20th century were serious scholars and voluminous writers. Morris wrote more than half a dozen fantasy romances whose mood was dreamy, gothic, and “medievalist”; he wrote two socialist classics, The Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere; he wrote poetry and songs; for years he wrote weekly for The Commonweal, the socialist newspaper he financed and edited. Thompson wrote a novel and poetry; he wrote campaigning political essays; he wrote influential history books such as The Making of the English Working Class (1963), Whigs and Hunters (1975), and Customs in Common (1995). They were both prodigious agitators who wrote, spoke, and endured countless committee meetings. Actually Morris joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1883 and left it in 1884 to form the Socialist League, which had an influential run until 1890 when he was removed by anarchists, so Morris went on to form the Hammersmith Socialist League. Thompson, too, had a six-year career from expulsion from the Communist Party in 1956 to departure from the New Left Review in 1962. They both were English. They both too were Marxists, if we treat that term problematically, as we treat “England”, as a label. Finally, they were both craftsmen. “The poet loves words, the painter loves paints.: the historian loves getting to the bottom of everything in the sources themselves.” 5
III
This edition of William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary was published in 1977 considerably revised from the first edition of 1955 and with the addition of a fifty-page post-script. The first edition itself was the result of many years of work some of which had appeared four years earlier in the leftist literary journal Arena. So, we have three dates in the evolution of Thompson’s Morris, 1951, 1955, and 1977. Actually, the relationship begins earlier.
In January 1944 Frank wrote Edward, two brothers now two soldiers in armies defeating fascism, about News from Nowhere as an example of “the most passionate possible idealism”.6 “Until we are conscious shapers of our own destiny there can be no balanced coherent goodness or beauty.” When the troops returned they were determined to shape their own destiny. News from Nowhere helped shape the outlook of Jack Dash, a London docker, and fierce rank-and-file leader of the dockers—port-wide, nation-wide, and world-wide—whose strike of 1947 was the beginning of postwar industrial turmoil.7
Morris remained with Thompson his whole life. He told an American interviewer, “[after the war] I was teaching as much literature as history. I thought, how do I, first of all, raise with an adult class, many of them in the labour movement—discuss with them the significance of literature to their lives? And I started reading Morris. I was seized by Morris. I thought, why is this man thought to be an old fuddy-duddy? He is right in with us still.” Thompson concluded that Morris was “the first creative artist of major stature in the history of the world to take his stand, consciously and without the shadow of a compromise with the revolutionary working class.” “The Morris/Marx argument has worked inside me ever since. When, in 1956, my disagreements with orthodox Marxism became fully articulate, I fell back on modes of perception which I’d learned in those years of close company with Morris, and I found, perhaps, the will to go on arguing from the pressure of Morris behind me.” 8 And perhaps it was a way of keeping faith with the passionate idealism of his brother. Thompson did not drop Morris’s unequivocal assertion of allegiance to “the revolutionary working class” from his 1977 edition. Thompson himself elaborated on it in his history The Making of the English Working Class (1963) if not in his current politics, for both terms had been perversely compromised by Cold War discourse.
The textual evolution of Thompson’s biography of Morris stems from this idealism of 1944. I shall comment on each of these texts, the Arena articles of 1951, the first edition of 1955 published by the Communist Party publishing house Lawrence and Wishart, and the excisions and excursus of the second edition of 1977. Before doing this, however, we have to step back before the war to the 1930s when unemployment and fascism necessitated such idealism.
In 1934 Stanley Baldwin inaugurated the Morris centenary at the Victoria and Albert Museum. An iron and steel magnate, leader of the Tory Party, and already twice Prime Minister, he was to lead the country again as prime minister in 1935-7. Edward Burne-Jones, Morris’s oldest friend, was Baldwin’s uncle. As a child Baldwin was “a great pet of Morris and Burne-Jones.” In fact Morris was in love with Baldwin’s mother’s sister. Baldwin’s discourse was sentimental and pompous: “to me, England is the country, and the country is England.” He evoked “the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy” or “the last load at night of hay being drawn down a lane,” or “the wild anemones in the woods in April.” In 1935 he spoke of that “dear, dear land of ours.” And “the level evening sun over an English meadow”. To Baldwin, William Morris was an innocent, child-like craftsman whose legacy was artsy-craftsy nationalism.9 The plutocrat ignored the fact that Morris was a communist revolutionary.
Hardly were the honeyed words out of the Tory mouth than R. Page Arnot, the Scottish conscientious objector and a founder of the CPGB in 1920, responded with a sixpenny pamphlet in defence of Morris, the revolutionary.10 All political persuasions claimed Morris, from the Labour Party, which only inhales “this fragrance of the Garden of England” to the fascists who claimed Morris because he was “imbued with the Viking spirit.” The Dream of John Ball (1886-7) is “one of the greatest imaginative books of the world”, said Arnot. Why so? Morris was studying Das Kapital when he wrote it. Arnot summarised the whole Morris, artist and revolutionary, in two points: “first, art must perish unless it be a people’s art; secondly, that the worker must be an artist and the artist be a worker.”
For May Day 1936 Jack Lindsay, editor of Left Review, published a long poem called “not english?” The ragged thief, the soldier, the sailor, the cotters, peasants, Anabaptists, Levellers, miners, and weavers, are not English according to ruling class definitions. Lindsay set about a working class definition of England.
Stand out one of the men who are not english,
come, William Morris,
you that preached armed revolt to the workers and said
of the men who died for us in the Commune of Paris:
We honour them as the foundation-stone
of the new world that is to be….
though we have plucked hazelnuts of autumn,
making faces at the squirrel, to kiss between laughter,
that was not our land, we were trespassers,
the field of toil was our allotted life,
beyond it we might not stir though blossom-scents
left tender trails leading to the heart of summer
This is what Edward, his brother Frank, the young students, read and which inspired them. Edward in conversation used to summarise the problem with the two-word interrogation whose simplicity, obviously, came from the distillation of years if not decades of thinking and talk: “whose England?” he’d ask. We also ask, what is England—an imagined community or hazelnuts? From this problem came an agenda too—the insurrectionary commune, woodland common rights, internationalism. The urban insurrection of the Paris Commune (1871) abolished night work and destroyed the guillotine, putting an end to the inhuman instrument of terror. What is the nature of the commons? Is it a natural commons that is free for all? Is it a regulated agrarian commons where only recognised commoners may gather hazelnuts or avail their pigs of forest pannage? Is it “public” ownership regulated by government? The contradiction points to the subtitle of the Morris biography: romantic to revolutionary.
IV
The Cold War played out domestically within the labour movement, within electoral politics, within ideology, and it showed itself in the international contest between the USA and the USSR. As a corollary to it was the transformation of leadership from Europe to America as the leading force of imperialism, as Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and Britain faced insistent demands of independence from their colonies. The matrix which undergirded these domestic and international conflicts was the world organization of the base commodity, petroleum, and the consequent reorganization of economic infrastructures.
The struggle against the industrial worker was presented as the supersession of coal. The labour of this change shifted to the new oil producing states, and while the European and American workers of the railway industry and the coal industry were defeated only by protracted struggle, for their struggles had achieved the social wage of the New Deal and the Welfare State, their power would be out-flanked by geo-political and technological means rather than assaulted directly.11
Suffice to say that in England the coal industry was nationalised in 1946, electricity in 1947, railways in 1948, and iron and steel in 1951, “culminating in the constitution of the world’s first universal welfare state”.12 In the US the powerful coal miners faced intense mechanization associated with the Bituminous Coal Agreement of 1950. The railway networks changed from coal to diesel and the limited access, interstate federal highway system began in 1956, long lobbied by the auto industry, providing the infrastructure for the trucking industry and automobile civilization. The European Coal and Steel Community formed in 1951 subordinating French and German coal production to a supranational “higher authority” becoming the forerunner of the Common Market and then the Europe Union. The Trans-Arabian Pipe Line, or Tapline, opened in 1950 linking the Persian Gulf oil fields to the Mediterranean at the port of Sidon in Lebanon. It loaded almost a thousand tankers a year.13 Israel obtained independence in 1948 and a million Palestinians were expelled on al-Nakba, or the Day of Catastrophe. As an additional measure of security in the geopolitical environment for the pipeline the CIA organised a coup in Syria in 1949.
These, then, are a few of the global effects of the petroleum economy driving industrial production and the Keynesian economies. They reverberated in and out of the Communist Parties. The Stalinist theory, as a rulers’ theory, obscured “the theory of class struggle in the process of production itself.” There capitalism developed a theory (Taylorism) and a practice (Fordism) which became the bureaucratic basis in production of what C.L.R. James called in 1950 “state capitalism.” He emphasised “continuous flow” and observed that it required “advanced planning for production, operating and control.” Domination by the machine and promotion of consumerism became the hallmarks of the 1950s as compensation for tyranny and terror in production.14
Petroleum became the hidden basis not only of economies. The materials of daily life changed to plastics, whose principle feedstock became petroleum. Culturally, in 1941 Plastic Man appeared as a crime-fighting comic book, and in 1944 Disney productions produced a Donald Duck cartoon “The Plastics Inventor.” 15 After the war in the US plastics became the modern material of daily life while in the UK plastics were associated with vulgarity and insincerity. Encouraged by the Arts Council, the BBC, and the Council of Industrial Design all still under the sway of the arts-and-crafts aesthetic, both the high priests of elitism, such as T.S. Eliot or Evelyn Waugh bemoaned the plastics of mass culture as did the tribunes of plebeian England, Richard Hoggart or George Orwell for whom plastics symbolised all that was false, American, and shoddy. Dustin Hoffman in the 1968 film The Graduate is advised by a family friend, “I just want to say one word to you … Plastics … There’s a great future in plastics.” To the soixante-huitards this was a supreme moment of hilarity. The laugh concluded a formless, ersatz era that had begun in 1951 with the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, which made the word “phony” the semantic signature of a generation’s cultural opposition.
T.S. Eliot on the one hand, a proper church-and-king conservative, published Notes towards the Definition of Culture in 1948, while Raymond Williams, on the other hand, began work in 1950 on Culture and Society which was very much a product of these times and an answer to Eliot though it didn’t appear until 1958. Arena was a literary and political magazine started on May Day 1949, and like Our Time, Circus, or the “Key Poets”, one of the leftist literary initiatives not quite completely under the political direction of the CPGB and therefore expressive of what Thompson later would call “pre-mature revisionism” 16 The Daily Worker attacked it as too intellectual, and the Party would order it to become an instrument of socialist realism after which it died. It published Neruda and Pasternak. Here in the spring of 1951 Thompson published “The Murder of William Morris” and then in the summer “William Morris and the Moral Issues To-day” especially for a Party conference called “The U.S.A. Threat to British Culture”. Indeed, as the Communists said, culture is “a weapon in the struggle” and Thompson’s contribution was a belligerent intervention in the cultural wars of the period.
Moral nihilism is how Arthur Miller saw the years after Hitler’s death. The dissenting intellectual and artist became the consenting intellectual and artist. 1949: Peekskill riot against Paul Robeson, NATO formed, USSR drops A-bomb, Chinese revolution succeeds, Berlin airlift ends, Greek Civil War ends, War Department changes its name to Defense Department. In June Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. The year before Bernard Baruch, the financier, used the term “cold war” to refer to the contest between the USA and the USSR, and Walter Lippmann published a book with it as the title.17 Intellectually speaking, this is when, as Thompson later said, “Vitalities shrivelled up and books lost their leaves.” Established in 1947 the CIA created concepts of “the necessary lie” and “plausible deniability”.
The God That Failed (1948) was “as much a product of intelligence as it was the work of the intelligentsia.” The Congress of Cultural Freedom founded in 1950 was the centrepiece of the CIA’s covert cultural campaign; it organised exhibitions, subsidised publishing houses and orchestras, and funded journals and magazines, notably Encounter (1953-1990). The British Society for Cultural Freedom was founded in January 1951 with Isaiah Berlin, T.S. Eliot, Richard Crossman, and at the same time the American Committee for Cultural Freedom was founded in New York, led by Sidney Hook.18 “The CIA was in effect acting as America’s Ministry of Culture”, dispersing money through the foundations of the robber barons, Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie. The postwar atmosphere indeed became poisonous and the attack was deliberate, secret, and well-funded. Doris Lessing arrived in London in 1949, a young communist with a two-year-old. She remembered the scene—“no cafés. No good restaurants… Everyone was indoors by ten”—and she remembered the mood, “The war still lingered, not only in the bombed places but in people’s minds and behaviour. Any conversation tended to drift towards the war, like an animal licking a sore place.” 19 For Thompson the emotional wounds of the period at the end of the war included the death of his beloved brother, the death of his father in 1946, and the unprecedented human destruction of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Thompson’s essays of 1951 were punches thrown in the second round of the contest for Morris. Furthermore he wrote within a distinctive culture of English communists which systematically organised its cultural life around various ethnicities (Irish, Cypriot, Jewish, Welsh), and the arts—music, folk songs, theatre, poetry, and—what concerned Thompson particularly—history. Another founder of the CPGB in 1920 was the scholar Dona Torr.20 She began a discussion group among British Communists before the war, and then following the war, she helped establish the Communist Party History Group, which was both one of the Party’s most creative cultural groups and influential in 20th century historiography.21 Thompson described his gratitude to Dona Torr in the preface to his Morris. “She has repeatedly laid aside her own work in order to answer my enquiries or to read drafts of my material, until I felt that parts of the book were less my own than a collaboration in which her guiding ideas have the main part. It has been a privilege to be associated with a communist scholar so versatile, so distinguished, and so generous with her gifts.” He preserved this generous tribute in the 1977 edition.
“Let us … [pay] even more attention to our own history and cultural achievements, and by bringing our almost forgotten revolutionary traditions once again before the people.” This was a project of the 1930s “red culture” and it was this culture which Thompson was seeking to renew. It was under attack, and Thompson attacked back. He provided a scathing critique of a biography by Lloyd Eric Grey called William Morris, Prophet of England’s New Order (London: Faber, 1949) not only for “the disintegration of the elementary standards of bourgeois scholarship”—wandering in and out of quotation marks, paraphrase, and commentary—but for its inability to notice “the integrating factor which bound together all Morris’s mature thought and activities—Marxism, with all that it implies of depth and breadth.” Grey was brought to task for claiming that Morris became disillusioned towards the end of his life with revolutionary socialism, and for arguing that Morris’s critique was “moral” and “visionary” rather than “economic”. This was the binary—“the Marx/Morris argument” he also called it—which worked in him like a dynamo.
“Lloyd Eric Grey” was actually a pseudonym for an American academic named Eshleman whose biography had originally begun as a Princeton Ph.D. in the 1930s before being published in America in 1940 under the title, A Victorian Rebel (New York: Scribner’s, 1940). He took the meat out of Morris, leaving a mild milquetoast socialism, “a doctrine of give and take—of sportsmanship and of fellowship….” His book reviews for the New York Times during the 1930s reveal a non-committal, liberal man of the American cultural elite, but I have found no evidence that Eshleman worked for the American government or was paid by it (he died in 1949). The animus of Thompson’s fury was partly driven by the policy of the CP.
He began his attempt to “take the moral offensive firmly in our own hands” against the threat of American culture whose targets included comic books and chewing gum.22 Both his Morris essays attacked U.S. academia. In his second Arena essay, “William Morris and the Moral Issues To-Day”, he lambastes American academia with an appalling anecdote. He met a New England English Literature professor who failed in the chaos of the post-war to profit from fresh meat, i.e. getting some of his buddies to put up some capital, chucking Shakespeare, renting a warehouse and an abattoir, buying “some first class American refrigerating equipment”, and returning to the Near East where he used to teach. “Boy, I could have set up a chain of slaughterhouses throughout the Holy Land! My God, I could have cleaned up.”
William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary was first published in 1955. At the beginning of 1956 Krushchev gave his “secret speech” denouncing Stalin but in October of that year Soviet tanks rumbled onto the streets of Budapest suppressing a revolt of the workers’ councils. Between these events Thompson and his comrade John Saville began a discussion in three issues of The Reasoner. Thompson had to make his mind up about the moralism that he’d been exploring through the study of Morris. He wrote in the third and last number of The Reasoner.23 The “subordination of the moral and imaginative faculties to political and administrative authority is wrong; the elimination of moral criteria from political judgment is wrong; the fear of independent thought, the deliberate encouragement of anti-intellectual trends among the people is wrong; the mechanical personification of unconscious social forces, the belittling of the conscious process of intellectual and spiritual conflict, all this is wrong.”24 He was expelled from the Party. It was a moment of personal liberation too. He described “a psychological structure among Communist intellectuals from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s which left us all lacking in self-confidence when confronted by the intrusion of ‘the Party.’” 25
It was not merely fortuitous that the questioning of the CPGB represented by The Reasoner and less directly by William Morris the year before, occurred as the students and workers of Hungary rose up against domination by the USSR forming as they did so councils of direct democracy. The Budapest students struck on 23 October 1956. A week earlier, on 17 October, Queen Elizabeth II opened the first ever nuclear energy plant commercially providing electricity. It was at Calder Hall, Sellafield, Cumbria on the coast of the Irish Sea. Otherwise electricity in England was provided thanks to the aid of tens of thousands of coal miners who, as we have seen, had the power to install the Welfare State and might change society even further. Ever since President Eisenhower gave his “Atoms for Peace” speech at the UN in 1953, the peaceful use of nuclear energy sparked as many fanciful dreams of cheap energy without the interruptions of either oil politics or industrial disputes. The response in England was the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament whose famous peace symbol signalled a taboo upon nuclear bombs but not nuclear energy. Although the New Left was defined by its relation to the Aldermaston marches (1958) against nuclear weapons, it was unable to organise against nuclear energy as such. The base commodity was directly linked to the war machine. Nuclear war was averted, but Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986) were down the road.
His subtitle raises questions. What is a romantic? What is a revolutionary? Is the former all ideal and imagination, while the latter is all reality and science? The English romantic movement among poets corresponded with both counter-revolution and intensity in the enclosure movement. The agrarian commons and the subsistence it provided were fast disappearing. Although Thompson will make this the theme of one of his most important history books, Customs in Common, he did not in the 1950s tie it to the Romantic poets. Thompson claims that Morris’s greatness is found in the “moral realism” that infused especially News from Nowhere (1890) and A Dream of John Ball (1886).
The biography belonged to the year when the non-white people of the world met in Bandung, Indonesia, searching for a third way that was neither capitalist nor communist. Rosa Parks took a seat at the front of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The French historian Alfred Sauvy coined the term “the Third World” in 1952 to reflect the reality that neither the capitalist West nor the Soviet East comprised geographically Latin America, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Oceana. His usage referred to the Third Estate, the commoners of France who, before and during the French Revolution opposed priests and nobles who composed the First and Second Estate. Sauvy wrote, “Like the third estate, the Third World is nothing, and wants to be something.” Allen Ginsberg read “Howl” that year, seeking a rhapsodic, hip liaison with people of colour against “Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone.” Although Thompson’s biography was a powerful contribution to the search for indigenous radical roots in England it was also part of the global stirring of the moral capacities of humankind whose most bitter outrage perhaps was that greeting the American explosion of the H-bomb, code name Bravo, on the Bikini atoll in 1954, which poisoned the Japanese fishermen aboard the “Lucky Dragon” and inspired Godzilla.
VI
Comparing the Arena articles with the two biographical texts of 1955 and 1977 yields interesting results. The second one is shorter, less dogmatic, less strident, without “Stalinist pieties,” as he said. But there was more to it than that. To John Goode “The disappearance of Shelley from the book is remarkable.” 26 The suppression and emasculation of Shelley within the teaching of literature was one of the Cold War projects. Shelley remained true to the principles proclaimed with the dawn of modern history—liberté, égalité, fraternityé—even after darkness descended on the day with the guillotine. Liberty, equality, and fraternity had distinct and definite meanings in Ireland, Haiti, the United States, and England that were not confined to Francophilia. “The revolt of definite social forces championing definite human values in the face of definite tyranny” was not yet transmuted into the indefinite idealism of imaginative aspiration against the definite reality of 19th century life. In his tremendous sonnet “England in 1819,” precise wrath is directed to every part of the political and cultural superstructure. The agent of historical change—the working class in England—had been defeated at Peterloo and was present in Shelley’s poetry, not in its historical reality, but only as a “Phantom”. Morris had to find this real history again, i.e., the social agency of revolutionary change, from where Shelley had left it off. Morris explained, “… what romance means is the capacity for a true conception of history, a power of making the past part of the present.” Morris presented a copy of Shelley’s poems to the reading room of the Socialist League.27
To Perry Anderson the differences between editions fall under his consideration of utopianism and strategies. Thompson wrote of “the whole problem of the subordination of the imaginative utopian faculties within the later Marxist tradition: its lack of a moral self-consciousness or even a vocabulary of desire, its inability to project any images of the future, or even its tendency to fall back in lieu of these upon the Utilitarian’s earthly paradise—the maximization of economic growth.” To this Anderson objected that the discussion of desire was obscurantist and irrational. Moreover, Anderson “described the historical conditions for Morris’s utopianism” to be his rich inheritance from his father which released him from drudgery and enabled him to acquire his cornucopia of craft skills. Yes, Morris was a creature of a bourgeois upbringing and he had money. This is true. Yet history impinges on biography in additional ways. The historical conditions for his utopian book, News from Nowhere, included the new unionism of unskilled workers, the great dock strike of 1889, and the proliferation of organizational initiatives like the Fabians, the Scottish Labour Party, and the Irish Land League.
For Anderson the first edition was informed “by a fierce polemic against reformism that is notably mitigated in the second.” He quotes from an 1886 lecture anticipating civil war. Those who believed in piece-meal change underestimated the structural unity of capitalism; those who believed in the reform of the system did not understand its ability to beguile its opponents while simultaneously swindling them. Morris’s opposition to meliorists, reformists, palliativists, was often expressed. Anderson is convinced that these writings comprise “the first frontal engagement with reformism in the history of Marxism.”
Morris believed that revolution, or the “great change” or “the clearing of misery”, could not be attained without armed struggle. Anderson fusses because Thompson does not assess “his changing conceptions of the means to attack and destroy the bourgeois State.” Morris develops the scenarios of dual power (council, assembly, congregation) in the chapter in News from Nowhere called “How the Change Came”. Parliament became a dung market. But where does that power reside? To Anderson it is the state and the law, likewise with Thompson. They neglect the economy, from the points of production to the organisation of reproduction, from the base commodity to the division of labour.
“Thompson’s work is haunted by political or intellectual junctures that failed to occur—historical rendez-vous that were missed, to our enduring loss: romantic poets and radical workers at the start of the 19th century, Engels and Morris at the end of it, libertarian and labour movements today.” 28 The junction between Morris and Engels was made and it was via “the commons” in its European form. Engels had published an essay on “The Mark” as an appendix to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), written particularly for English and German comrades who did not know the history of these commoning forms of land tenure (Gehferschaften and Loosgter). The commoners practiced the jubilee and a land distribution system based on periodical assignments by lot. In describing the pigs, the mushrooms, the turf, the wood, the unwritten customs, the mark regulations, the berries, the heaths, the forests, lakes, ponds, hunting grounds, fishing pools, he has quite forgotten his polemic against the economics professors (which is what inspired his tract) and he relished an imaginative reconstruction of a pre-commodity world, the “mark”, and its indigenous inhabitants. “Without the use of the mark, there can be no cattle for the small peasant; without cattle, no manure; without manure, no agriculture.” That is the living commons. In 1888 William Morris wrote A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and all the Kindreds of the Mark, which is a historical fantasy of tribes (he says “kindreds”) of northern Europe facing invasions from Rome. The Wolfings practice a simple direct democracy. They combine cattle and corn cultures. They maintain equality between the genders. The “mark” may not be the complete intellectual juncture between Engels and Morris that Anderson believed Thompson longed for! Yet, it was part of the international debate about common property of the late 19th century which we find in Wallace on Malaysia or Cushing on the Pueblo or, indeed, Marx on the mir.29
VII
The 1977 edition omits a significant part of the chapter concerning “The Last Years of the Socialist League.” If we examine this omission closely we can wend our way to a central issue to both thinkers, the relation between the actual reality of commons and the revolutionary ideal of communism. “Under the Elm Tree,” first published in Commonweal, 6 July 1889, finds Morris lying on a strip of roadside green, near a riverbank, surrounded by wildflowers and meditating upon the landscape and England.
The structure of the essay moves from contemplation of the flowers, observation of the freedom of the fish and birds, to a meditation on history and the armed defence by Alfred the Great of this particular countryside, then to conversation with the agricultural workers and their struggle, to a conclusion advocating socialism, abolition of the class division between rich and poor, and the abolition of the geographic division between town and country. Thompson is right to call it “wayward” inasmuch as it begins by the side of the road, the verge, where so much of the conflict takes place between commodity civilization with its turnpikes and “the King’s highways” and subsistence culture, the by-ways and lanes.
You think you know what’s coming—centuries of the pastoral have prepared us, and hundreds of cameras have filmed the vision—green lawn, ancient elms, white people in white dress, leisured innocence, and a recent scholar, Michelle Weinroth, falls for it. She observes that the Communist Party accepted this pastoral ideal: “their propagandist efforts could neither escape nor eclipse a traditional Englishness, figuratively crystallized in the sensuality of the countryside where [here she quotes “Under the Elm Tree”] ‘the fields and hedges … are as it were one huge nosegay … redolent of bean-flowers and clover and sweet hay and elder blossom.’ This fragrant bucolic place cradled the tender affections of their mainstream public and was thus a source of powerful rhetoric.” 30 I am not going to dispute whether or not the CPGB was able to escape “a traditional Englishness figuratively crystallized in the sensuality of the countryside,” but I shall say that there is nothing like this in Morris!
What Morris actually sees is war. Hollywood and English Lit have not prepared us for this. There is first the heroism that he sees in Ashdown. This was the site of a battle in 671 when a young Alfred helped defeat the Danes, or Vikings, advancing up the Thames Valley. The victorious soldiers cut turf from the slope of a chalk hill in these Berkshire Downs so that the white showed through the green in the figure of a horse. Scholars date the “White Horse” to the late Iron Age, but in Morris’s day it was part of the iconography constituting the history of the Anglo-Saxon nation.31 The Saxons were led by Alfred, “the sole man of genius who ever held an official position among the English”, admitted Morris (at least there was one!). On another occasion Alfred fled battle and took refuge in a peasant’s cottage where the woman scolded him because while she was out fetching water, he allowed the cakes to burn in the oven! His is a legend of royalty and domesticity, a fable worthy of Lao Tzu.32 This is the history Morris loved and wrote, history from below.
Thompson comments that the flooding sense of “the earth and the growth of it and the life of it” which pervaded News from Nowhere was returning. In the first edition he has some paragraphs describing “the most unusual piece of socialist ‘propaganda’ ever written” “with its deliberate waywardness, its intermingling of Socialist homily and of the leisurely lyricism of the Oxfordshire countryside!” 33 Yes, as a homily it expounds chapter six of the Book of Matthew. For those from a Christian culture, and Thompson certainly was, Morris begins by considering “the birds of the air” and “the lilies of the field”. The aura of this “commons” is a mix of nature and divinity.
“It opens with the conventional summer scene of the poet” Thompson says, and quotes,
Midsummer in the country—here you may walk between the fields and hedges that are as it were one huge nosegay for you redolent of bean-flowers and clover and sweet hay and elder-blossom…. The river down yonder … barred across here and there with the pearly white-flowered water-weeds, every yard of its banks a treasure of delicate design, meadowsweet and dewberry, and comfrey and bed-straw….
Next, the scene is placed within the lengthening perspective of man’s history: “the country people of the day did verily fight for the peace and loveliness of this very country where I lie, and coming back from their victory scored the image of the White Horse as a token of their valour, and, who knows? Perhaps as an example for their descendants to follow.” This last thought is the key to both Morris and Thompson. It is not one of teleological determinism but of exemplary suggestion. Thompson continues with Morris picturing the socialist future, of “friends working for friends on land which [is] theirs”, when “if … a new Ashdown had to be fought (against capitalist robbers this time) the new White Horse would look down on the home of men as wise as the starlings, in their equality, and so perhaps as happy.” Interweaving the beauty of nature and the struggle of man, past, present and future, and employing the eye of the craftsman and the poet, the whole is a tour de force. And yet, so quiet and mellow is the tone that the excellence of the artist’s handiwork passes almost without notice. Certainly, in his respite from intense political activity, Morris was re-opening old veins of feeling.” 34 Thompson is moved to ask whether Morris is losing interest in socialism? But why should acute observation of birds, fish, and flowers dull interest in socialism? Thompson wonders whether Morris found propaganda and creativity incompatible? But why should this be a contradiction?
Thompson’s formulations are abstract: for example, “The beauty of nature and the struggle of man.” Morris is much more particular. Thompson speaks of “nature” and this is where the trouble lies. What is evoked depends on the commons. Morris stops and talks to the workers in the field about money. Thompson’s omits the conversations with the agricultural workers. Morris employs the ear of the socialist and historian, as well as the eye of the craftsman and poet, and it is the ear that saves the essay from becoming another pretty picture. It is neither conventional nor a scene.
The transition in the essay from the birds and fish to human beings was via a four-footed creature, a shambling and ungainly cart-horse, and he saw other animals, male and female, two-footed, ungraceful, unbeautiful, and thirsty! Could they be the same creature as those depicted in the Sistine Chapel and the Parthenon frieze? Beauty and these labourers are contrasted, and beauty is associated with gods or heroes. Could they be the same creature? He starts the conversation, “Mr So-and-so (the farmer) is late in sending his men into the hayfield.” Yes, the older men and the women bred in the village are past working, and the young men want more wages. They learn, one at a time, that, yes, they can refuse 9s a week. However, they find no farmer willing to pay 10s. Such is the fatuity of the phrase “free wage labour.” These are the stories of “unsupported strikes”.
Morris laments the ugliness of exploitation and the squalor of the landscape which is artificialised in the most grovelling commercialism. The agricultural system of landlord, farmer, labourer produces parsimony and dullness, just as the excitement of intellectual life in the city produces the slum. The essay moves from impressionistic natural observation through working-class oral testimony to an exposition of the systemic structure of capitalism in both town and country. In a mere four and a half pages Morris creates powerful effects alluding to the deepest well-springs of his culture—the harvest, Christianity, animal life, classical and Renaissance artistic ideals—all this while lying on the side of the road!
VIII
The strike for “the dockers’ tanner” closing the imperial Port of London occurred one month after the essay was published. If it reverberated on the other side of the world in Australia, surely it did so up the river in Hammersmith. Indeed Morris returned to the place (the upper Thames valley) and the occasion (the hay harvest) to provide the concluding chapters to News from Nowhere which appeared in Commonweal from January to October 1890 while the memory under the elm tree of the farm labourers was still fresh. But now, men and women are equal, money, prisons, formal education, the state are no more. The countryside is no longer polluted. Men, women, children gather in colourful tents “with their holiday mood on, so to say,” for the haysel, or hay harvest, up the river Thames, with description of elms, blackbirds, cuckoo, clover, the gleaming river bank, the wild roses. And a scene preceding the haymaker’s feast of returning home and seduction: “She led me to the door, murmuring little above her breath as she did so, ‘The earth and the growth of it and the life of it! If I could but say or show how I love it!’” Morris has imagined past and future as one—equality, love, a feast—at one of the most ancient human activities. It is the opposite to the dull squalor of “Under the Elm Tree.”
Internationally, harvesting was being mechanised. In fact, it was the strike by the iron moulders who made the mechanical reaper in Chicago that set in train the well-known events of the Haymarket bombing, the kangaroo trials, and the state murders the protesting of which was the occasion of “Bloody Sunday” at Trafalgar Square. Morris was not enamoured by machines. One of the characters in News from Nowhere says that
“only slaves and slave-holders could live solely by setting machines going.”
Clara broke in here, flushing a little as she spoke: “Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature’, as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another. It was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them.”
Terry Eagleton has pointed out that “coulter” (the cutting blade immediately in front of the plough share) shares a cognate with “culture”.35 There is a strong relationship between subsistence food production, or cultivation, and other forms of human creativity, and this relationship is reflected semantically in such words as agriculture (ager = field), horticulture (hortus = garden), and viticulture (vitis = vine), and that in all of these cases culture is an activity rather than a thing.
The revival of the socialist movement in the UK during the 1880s was initiated by discussions of land. The Land and Labour League (which Marx had praised) demanded land nationalization and the settlement of the unemployed on unused land. Alfred Russel Wallace published his Land Nationalization in 1882. The Irish Land League led the tenantry in the land wars of 1879-82 (boycott, “outrages”) under the slogan “the land for the people” and encouraged a revival of communal custom and the Brehon law. The expropriated crofters of the Scottish Highlands provided the energy of the Scottish Land and Labour League. In a different kind of land struggle, the Labour Emancipation League of the East End of London (1883) led the fight for public places of speech and propaganda which led to the struggles to assemble at Trafalgar Square of 1886 and 1887. In fact on “Bloody Sunday” 13 November 1887 Morris lectured on “The Society of the Future” anticipating the extinction both of asceticism and luxury. He noted “the common people have forgotten what a field or a flower is like.” 36 Easy to do, we hasten to add, when the places where they might flourish become forbidden behind enclosing boundaries of fence or hedge.
So, Morris was unequivocal about land. “The Communist asserts in the first place that the resources of nature, mainly the land and those other things which can only be used for the reproduction of wealth and which are the effect of social work, should not be owned in severalty, but by the whole community for the benefit of the whole.” Again, with a choice of words whose etymology sums up the transition from nature to capital, “The resources of nature, therefore, and the wealth used for the production of further wealth, the plant and stock in short, should be communized [emphasis added].” Here stock equals inventory and plant equals factory. To Morris, “communism” was a verb; it signified conscious human activity, at a social level in a cooperative spirit to attain human equality. To communize is to convert the reified products of the land, the live stock, the cattle herds, the kine of the pastoral economy or the grasses, the grains, and botanical plants of the agricultural, once again into means of attaining practical equality, rather than the ancient means of class division. “The communization of the means of industry would speedily be followed by the communization of its product…”
IX
I don’t know why Thompson excluded “Under the Elm Tree” from his second edition. Was it because it was too close to his own childhood experiences? He referred to these once. While living with him I broke off the tedium of desk-work to lend a hand to a neighbouring farmer harvesting hay in a field adjoining Wick Episcopi. Unused to such labour I did not last long. Thompson heard about it, and I prepared myself for some ribbing, instead, he smiled, and I seem to recall him referring to something similar in his own youth. Or, perhaps, war was still fresh in his mind, a “new Ashdown … against capitalist robbers”, and his own battle losses. Thompson and Morris kept Jesus stories well below the surface of their writing, yet the sufficiency of the natural commons as described in the Book of Matthew, chapter six (“behold the birds of the air,” “consider the lilies of the field”) depend on living in righteousness: “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”
Thompson and Morris were walkers, not outdoorsmen as Americans understand as a sport, but as habit, a restorative. To Americans, the flower is the sign of the wild, as in, for example, “Sunflower Sutra”, Allen Ginsberg’s contrast with industrial petro-waste. Similarly, it may take on anti-imperial connotations. In 1965 Allen Ginsberg coined “flower power,” as an expression of antiwar non-violence. By 1967 hippies, or “flower children”, wrapped army induction centres in daisy chains. “The cry of Flower Power echoes through the land”, said Abbie Hoffman. “We shall not wilt.”
But if you look at the flowers not as wild, or scenery, or symbol but as resources, you find uses for them which could be significant to labourers on 9s. a week. Richard Mabey, in the great compendium of late-20th-century popular knowledge, Flora Britannica organised by Common Ground, notes that despite the Puritan’s suppression of sport and village festivals which generally accompanied the enclosure movement, plants remain essential to the rituals and mystical gestures of the seasons—holly at the solstice, kisses under mistletoe, red poppies for the war dead, et cetera. Inherently sexual, the spirit of vegetation precedes commerce. Mabey suggests that the grass roots of vernacular relationships with nature should be taken every bit as seriously as the folklore of less developed areas. They “may yet be the best bridge across the gulfs between science and subjective feelings, and between ourselves and other species.” Wild flowers belong to an ecology and can no more be understood in isolation than can land, factories, workshops, or mines be understood in isolation from the subjectivity of human uses and desires or the objectivity of the social division of labour. We can list the flowers Morris names with some of their uses.
Bean-flowers—many escape the garden and are naturalised in wastes and rubbish tips.
Clover—children learn that the white flower can be pulled and sucked for a bead of honey and that the four leaf, or five-leaf clover brings luck.
Elder—roots so easily and grows so quickly that in the era of enclosures it was called “an immediate fence.” When its freshly-opened umbels are fried in butter you have elder-flower fritters. Malodorous and works as a charm against warts, vermin, and the Devil.
Meadowsweet—contained an ingredient used as a remedy for chills and rheumatism which was isolated in 1899 as acetylsalicylic acid and which the pharmaceutical company Bayer called aspirin after its botanical name, Spiraea ulmaria.
Dewberry—a common bramble in hedge banks, a fleshy indehiscent fruit, succulent in jams and pies. Berrying going back thousands of years one of the universal acts of foraging to survive through industrialization. Comfrey—found near streams and damp roadsides played a part in the sympathetic medicine of the doctrine of signatures as a poultice for bruises as it contains allantoin, which heals connective tissue. In Yorkshire coal miners applied it to their knees after a day of crawling underground.
Thompson admired the country crafts, the wheelwright’s shop, pig-keeping, and the songs. He wrote a foreword to one of Roy Palmer’s collection of folk ballads; he wrote a foreword to George Sturt’s beautiful work of social history, The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923, 1992), which was recommended to him in 1939 as a school boy as an introduction to “the organic community”. Sturt was a writerly kind of craftsman, and a socialist contributor to Morris’s Commonweal. Sturt was a listener and observer who found philosophy at “the point of production” which yielded up its insights only after hands-on attention. Thompson also wrote an introduction to the second edition of M.K. Ashby’s memoire of her father, Joseph Ashby of Tysoe, 1859-1919: A Study of English Village Life (1974). If Sturt was the Wittgenstein of the village, Miss Ashby was its Wollstonecraft. Although Tysoe was a post-enclosure village, the struggle for allotments is described with precise artistry and emotional subtlety. It ceased to be “a sound co-operative village of freemen, free to get a living, free to say yea and nay in their own affairs”. The hedge became sanctified; “it carved up the hills and valleys absurdly” pushing out the hawthorn “one of the loveliest of smaller trees.” 37 The children could no longer roam, threading by balk and headland, from one village to another, instead they were carted off to the cotton factory. The poor become pauperized, the paupers become degraded, forced to creep and cringe, taking to drink and “foolishness of outlook”.
The young Joseph Ashby learned that “under the wide acreage of grass and corn and woods which he saw daily, there was a ghostly, ancient tessellated pavement made of the events and thoughts and associations of other times.” The intertwining of history and morality occurred from the bottom up. Joseph searches “new forms of communal land-holding relevant to the English countryside…” Thompson calls it a vestigial communal democracy, and compares it to the “participatory democracy” which we in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) named. This relationship between knowledge of the flowers and freedom to roam in recently enclosed land was often exercised by Edward Carpenter (1844-1929); the socialist, gay liberationist, and reformer was trained from childhood to observe the wild flowers of the Sussex Downs—red clover, pink centaury, dwarf-broom, and yellow lotus. And wherever he went from the Alps to the Himalayas he looked for them.38 Thompson’s powerful conceptual contribution to the discussion of food and land was made in 1972 with his article on the “moral economy”. It put food, not profit, as the agrarian priority. It is not a great distance of thought to go from “moral realism” to “moral economy”. The concept, like the practice, arose “from below”.
Edward loved wild flowers. Walking with him in Worcestershire or Wales he’d stop and talk about them as they appeared on the path. I lived upstairs in 1972-3 at Wick Episcopi, which had a grand staircase at the end of the flag-stoned hall on the ground floor. At the time Reg, the paperhanger, was exactly aligning a Morris print on its walls leaving his ladder, his glue pots, and paper rolls strewn about. Here I saw Edward slowly mounting the stairs brooding with papers in his hand or steadily carrying a vase of flowers to an upstairs room, passing as he did so the emerging Morris design.
His father and brother, Frank, wrote one another about them, these soldiers, the father from Mesopotamia in the Great War, the brother from Syria and Persia during the Anti-Fascist War. It was a distinct aesthetic that was a signal across the world to one another in the midst of war. This was part of the patrimony of this family of writers, scholars, and soldiers. Wild flowers were one of the links between father and sons.
Edward’s father was chaplain to Indian and Leicestershire forces in the catastrophe of the Mesopotamian campaign of 1916. He did not want to fight (“I feel ashamed about the war”), so he did hospital duty and kept a diary. “The poppies were a larger sort than those in the wheat fields, and of a very glorious crimson. In among the grasses were yellow coltsfoot; among the pebbles were sowthistle, mignonette, pink bindweed, and great patches of storks-bill. Many noted the beauty of those flowers, a scene so un-Mesopotamian in its brightness.” Melancholically he wrote, “among us were those who would not drink this wine again til they drank it new in their Father’s Kingdom.” 39 His is a sacred and a nationalist view. Dorothy Thompson wrote me, “I think wild flowers were one of Edward’s close links with his much-loved father. Edward senior used to take him on flower walks in Oxfordshire…”
In May 1942 Frank Thompson describes the wild roses, hawthorn, and garden freesia, honeysuckle of Nablus and Jenin. During the desert campaign Frank Thompson saw the goosewort, stitchwort, groundsel and ground ivy. He describes the Libyan desert’s flowers—“dwarf toadflax, purple stock, small marigolds, red and yellow ranunculus, and even small blue irises.” We see him in Cairo going around to florists looking for the name of morning-glories in French, Greek, or Arabic. When in the spring he expressed homesickness, he thinks of blackthorn which more than any other flower symbolises “the peculiar loveliness of the English spring”. In January 1944 Frank writes Edward, “the English countryside is still the only one that really moves me.”
Frank Thompson was among the first to land on Sicily in 1943. He and his comrades were under heavy mortar fire. “I could see that all the men were badly shaken. With a vague feeling that it was up to me to rally morale, I said the first thing that came into my head. ‘Blackberries, by Jove! How delicious! It’s years since I had a meal of blackberries!’ I picked a few. The men stared at me a little oddly and then picked some themselves… The wadi almost reeked with thyme and mint and the nearby lemon-groves.” 40 Fragrance, appetite, picking: these stave off traumatic reactions under fire.
In one of his last letters Frank wrote, “the question of building a new communal ethic is one of the most important that we have to elaborate. My own list of priorities is as follows.
1. People and everything to do with people, their habits, their loves and hates, their arts and languages. Everything of importance revolves around people.
2. Animals and flowers. These bring me a constant undercurrent of joy. Just now I’m reveling in plum blossom and young lambs and the first leaves on the briar roses. One doesn’t need any more than these. These are enough for a hundred life-times.” 41
Lives were at stake. Parenting, brotherhood, sanity, health, communal ethics: these were some of the values triggered by encounters with non-commodified botanical species, not to mention the pleasures of recognition, the delight in colour, or the tokens of love. Morris helps us to see this and to see it in Thompson. On the other hand, Thompson helps us to understand the expropriation, the loss, and the contest for such a world. The building of a new communal ethic required the sensibility aroused by the vestiges preserved from the expropriation of the commons.
Morris was active in Anti-Scrape, or the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, also the Commons Preservation Society, and the National Footpaths Preservation Society. Morris was a street fighter, he was muscular, and admired traditional soldierly virtues such as courage, fortitude, solidarity, dynamic stoicism. He presents thriving organic systems, extensive living thickness, powerful tangles of hedgerow or meadow array, floral and vegetal motifs, chunky clusters of hawthorn blossom. Morris was fascinated by illuminated representations of wodehouses, or wild men, in costumes of green like “vegetable man”. The wodehouse was naked, a satyr, faun, ivy-covered man, or savage. Morris was interested in the deep “past characterized by communal tribal living.” His design work structured around issues in 1870s that in the next decade will be articulated in class terms. The tree of life in Sigurd the Volsung (1876) is symbol of connectedness of all life, and the ritual of the earth-yoke cutting away the greensward represents this integration.42
Morris’s coffin was borne in an open hay-cart “festooned with willow-boughs, alder, and bulrushes.” The church itself was decorated with ears of oats and barley, pumpkins, carrots, and sheaves of corn. “For three miles or more, the road lay through the country he had loved so well and described so often, between hedges glorious with the berries and russet leaves of the guelder rose, hips and haws and dark elder berries….” Thompson lived in the English midlands for some years, Wick Episcopi, and here was a large tulip tree with wild cyclamen round its base. The original plants had come from Palestine before the war. “Edward’s coffin had a large pile of them on it.”
John Gerard wrote in his Herbal (1597), which Morris studied as a child—“it is reported to me by men of good credit, that cyclamen or sow-bread groweth upon the mountains of Wales; on the hills of Lincolnshire and in Somerset-Shire. Being beaten and made up into trochisches, or little flat cakes, it is reputed to be a good amorous medicine to make one love, if it be inwardly taken”. More than aesthetics, more than pastoral nationalism, more than the Christian sacred, knowledge of wild flowers helped the expression of emotion and the renewal of subjectivity.
X
I have been arguing in this introduction that both Thompson and Morris possessed strong attachments to what I can only call “the commons”. The waste or the margins or the roadside was a rough-and-ready commons which nourished Morris’s roots and designs and dyes and which helped inspire Thompson by releasing him from the Stalinist and utilitarian grip of the CPGB without falling as an apostate into the septic system of the CIA and its fragrant out-houses in academia. For Morris this showed itself aesthetically, for Thompson it usually found private expression. These attachments were restorative. Earlier in quoting Jack Lindsay’s poem, “not english?” I referred to a contradiction. How is it possible that the earth can be at once beautiful and a source of exploitation? It is this which both Morris and Thompson sought to resolve for one or the other must cease. G.D.H. Cole concluded that Morris “helps to keep the cause sweet” but this is to forget the cinder-heap.43
When the anarchists ejected Morris from the editorial control of Commonweal at the meeting May 1890 we learn that “As the room thickened with tobacco smoke and revolutionary bluster, he busied his hands with flower-patterns and lettering on his agenda paper, in the end flinging himself back in his chair growling, “Mr. Chairman, can’t we get on with the business. I want my TEA!” 44 The next issue contained another instalment of News from Nowhere. I don’t know whether that agenda paper has survived among the archives of Morrisiana, or the flower patterns he drew on it. What is clear is that his urge to make floral designs was never far away, even in such times of maximum sectarian stress. Thompson did not doodle in this way, but he had immense admiration for the floral observations which the Spitalfields weavers revealed in their patterns.
In 1896 he designed the last of his wallpapers called “Compton”. It is a sinuous, swirling, several layered, combination of flower blossoms, leaves, and stems in an energetic and mysterious interplay of light and dark. A red tulip blossom is the largest shape, and it is accompanied by three different pink blossoms against a background of willow leaves in deepening shades of green. There is an impression of both brilliance and depth, like spattered sunlight through the tall trees upon the forest floor. I do not think that the colours (red, pink, green) were intended as political allegory though in light of Morris’s subsequent influences on the revolutionary, reformist, and environmental movements it is tempting to see them that way. “In wilderness is the preservation of the world”, wrote Thoreau towards the end of his life.45
Weinroth quotes part of Marx to the effect that society offers consolatory “imaginary flowers”. This is the “false consciousness”. To give up illusions is to give up the conditions that require illusions. She might have continued the quotation, “Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.” 46
William Morris gave a lecture on communism in 1893 towards the end of his life at the Hammersmith Socialist Society. He stated, “If our ideas of a new Society are anything more than a dream, these three qualities must animate the due effective majority of the working people; and then, I say, the thing will be done.” The three qualities wanting to attain practical equality were the “intelligence enough to conceive, courage enough to will, power enough to compel.”
The strength of Thompson’s biography is that it takes you right into the political developments of Morris’s life as an activist. Therefore, it must go to the working class, and hence to the mode of production. Thompson may not have written about the material changes of social life at the time he was writing, but he was assuredly aware of them at the time Morris was living. “What was the hinge that Labour depended upon at present?” Morris asked. “Coal-mining,” he answered.
The Glasgow branch of the Socialist League in 1887 declared, “When the Miners resolve to demand an advance, let it be understood that, should it not be conceded, every riveter would lay down his hammer, every joiner his plane, every mason his trowel. Let it be known that every railway guard, porter, signalman, and driver folded his arms; that every baker refused to make his dough, every cook refused to make dinner, and every maid refused to wait at table.”
Miners and socialists spoke from same platform on Glasgow green in 1887. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, attended socialist meetings. In Scotland Morris spoke on a cinder-tip at night to a crowd which gave him good heart (“the thing is taking hold”) before travelling to Newcastle arriving 10 April where he marched six miles to a meeting-field to address thousands of men and women from the surrounding pit villages. “They worked hard day in, day out, without any hope whatever. Their work was to work to live, in order that they might live to work. (Hear, hear, and ‘Shame’.) That was not the life of men. That was the life of machines.” “They must rebel or be slaves.” 47
If there was to be a general strike, he warned, they must expect “that the masters of society would attack them violently, he meant with hot shot, cold steel, and the rest of it. It was not that the master could attack them by themselves. It was only the masters with a certain instrument, and what was that instrument? A part of the working classes themselves.” He saw half a dozen policemen in the crowd and began to tease them to the crowd’s delight for the bright buttons, white gloves, red livery of their uniforms. “When these instruments, the soldiers and the sailors, came against them and saw that they were in earnest, and saw that they were many—they all knew the sufferings of the workers—what would happen? They would not dare obey their masters.” He wished them not to stop at shorter hours or more wages. “He wished that the men might have a life of refinement and education and all those things which made what some people called a gentleman, but what he called a man.” At this the crowd burst into cheers.48
Morris went on to catch the Newcastle train to take him to Ryton Willows, a recreation ground by the river Tyne. This was “a piece of rough heathy ground … under the bank by which the railway runs: it is a pretty place and the evening was lovely.” It was Easter and there were lots of folks on the swings, playing cricket, “dancing & the like.” Morris thought it was “a queer place for a serious Socialist meeting” but he felt “lectury” and spoke until the dusk fell and the stars came out. The people stood and listened, and “when we were done gave three cheers for the Socialists….” The green, the heath, a meeting-field, a river-bank by the railway: these were places to assemble or to play, the common places of that time during the era of coal.
NOTES
1 “Bulletin from Louisiana”, London Review of Books, vol. 32, no. 15 (August 2010).
2 “How I Became a Socialist”, Justice (1894), reprinted in A.L. Morton, Political Writings of William Morris (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1973) p. 241.
3 Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London: Verso, 1980) p. 163
4 Thompson tells this story in Beyond the Frontier: The Politics of a Failed Mission: Bulgaria 1944 (London: Merlin Press, 1997).
5 Mike Merrill, “Interview with E.P. Thompson”, Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization (1976), reprinted in Henry Abelove et al. (eds.), Visions of History (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 13.
6 Theodosia Thompson and E.P. Thompson (eds.), There is a Spirit in Europe … A Memoir of Frank Thompson (London: Victor Gollancz, 1948p. 170.
7 Jack Dash, Good Morning Brothers! (London: Lawrence & Wishart,
8 E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, 2nd edition (1977) pp. 727, 810.
9 Michelle Weinroth, Reclaiming William Morris: Englishness, Sublimity and the Rhetoric of Dissent (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1996),
10 William Morris: A Vindication (London: Martin Lawrence, 1934)
11 This was a story we told in Zerowork 1 (December 1975) & 2 (fall 1977).
12 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 161.
13 Captain A.A. Brickhouse, Jr., “Tapline’s Sidon Terminal”, World Petroleum (June 1957)
14 C.L.R. James, “State Capitalism and World Revolution” (1950) reprinted in The Future in the Present: Selected Writings (London: Allison & Busby, 1977), pp. 128, 131. James, too, turned to literature in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1952), to Moby Dick, as a means of developing his theory of an autonomous socialist black movement and as a critique of the democratic centralism of the Marxist organization.
15 Jeffrey Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), pp. 82, 85, 154, and Claire Catterall, “Perceptions of Plastics: A Study of Plastics in Britain, 1945-1956”, in Penny Sparke (ed.), The Plastics Age (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1993) pp. 67–8.
16 Andy Croft (ed.), A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1998) and Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flinn, Communists and British Society, 1920-1991 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2007)
17 Orwell used the term “cold war” in the Tribune (19 October 1945), “You and the A-Bomb.”
18 Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999), pp. 2, 65, 129.
19 David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945-51 (New York: Walker & Co., 2008), p. 344.
20 David Renton, Dissident Marxism: Past Voices for Present Times (London: Zed Books, 2004), chapter 5.
21 “The Historian’s Group of the British Communist Party”, in Maurice Cornforth (ed.), Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in Honour of A.L. Morton (Lawrence and Wishart: London, 1978), p. 22.
22 The Party Congress of 1952 passed a resolution calling for increased “activity against the Americanisation of Britain’s cultural life, against reactionary film and lurid and debased literature and comics” but overlooked the opening of Coca-Cola bottling plants. Quoted by Andy Croft, “Authors Take Sides: Writers and the Communist Party 1920-56”, in Geoff Andrews, Nina Fishman and Kevin Morgan (eds.), Opening the Books: Essays on the Social and Cultural History of British Communism (London: Pluto, 1995) p. 92. I happened to be in school in north London at the time and remember that the hostility greeting the use of the ballpoint pen was mixed with “American” modernism.
23 “Through the Smoke of Budapest”, The Reasoner, no. 3 (1956), p. 3.
24 John Rule quotes this in his fine biographical entry on Thompson in The Dictionary of National Biography.
25 “Edgel Rickword”, Persons and Polemics, p. 238.
26 John Goode, “E.P. Thompson and ‘the Significance of Literature’,” in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (eds.), E.P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 194–6. F.R. Leavis hammered the nails into Shelley’s coffin, Revaluations: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1949), chap. 6.
27 I do not know the source of Thompson’s aversion to Shelley.
28 Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London: Verso, 1980), pp. 176, 189, 206-7.
29 Frank Hamilton Cushing, My Adventures in Zuni (1882-3)
30 Michelle Weinroth, Reclaiming William Morris: Englishness, Sublimity and the Rhetoric of Dissent (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1996), p. 4. Although she does not take the story much beyond the 1950s her judgment of Thompson is inexplicably harsh: “his redemptive efforts are aristocratic and foreclose the possibility of engendering a real democratic movement; his following is always compelled to surrender irrationally to his judgment”, p. 244.
31 Thomas Hughes, The Scouring of the White Horse (London: Macmillan, 1859).
32 A recent biographer of Morris states, “The kitchen had always been his favorite of rooms.” Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 517.
33 MacCarthy criticizes Thompson for excluding anarchist influences on Morris, for missing “his qualities of waywardness and danger”, p. 543.
34 Morris continued to visit the White Horse annually to the year before he died. See MacCarthy, p. 654.
35 Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 1.
36 A.L. Morton, op.cit., p. 193.
37 Ashby, pp. 281–3
38 Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (London: Verso, 2008), p. 20.
39 Mary Lago, “India’s Prisoner”: A Biography of Edward John Thompson, 1886-1946 (London: University of Missouri Press, 2001), pp. 128–9.
40 Theodosia Thompson and E.P. Thompson (eds.), There is a Spirit in Europe … A Memoir of Frank Thompson (London: Victor Gollancz, 1948), pp. 48, 51, 118
41 Ibid., p. 20.
42 Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings (London: Yale University Press:, 2008), pp. 21, 25, 93.
43 G.D.H. Cole, The History of Socialist Thought, volume 2 (London: Macmillan,1954), p. 424.
44 Thompson, 1977, p. 566.
45 It is the title of a Sierra Club classic. Thoreau published his in Atlantic Monthly (1862) though he’d been lecturing on “Walking, or the Wild” for ten years.
46 Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” first published 1843-4, in Early Writings, translated by Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 244.
47 Thompson’s account is on pp. 437–45.
48 Thompson’s relies on the local newspaper’s account (Newcastle Chronicle) as confirmed by Morris’s diary.