The Trouble with Idealism

It was towards the end of his long life, after revolutionalizing many other aspects of design, that William Morris embarked on his ‘typographical adventure’ at the Kelmscott Press. Though it survived for less than eight years and was wound up shortly after his death in 1896, it managed to produce 53 publications, including many of his own writings and a celebrated edition of Chaucer in a highly distinctive dark, ‘Gothic’ style. Kelmscott provided the crucial impetus for the four leading private presses considered in an excellent new series from the British Library and Oak Knoll Press. All are lavishly illustrated tributes to some of the great idealistic book-makers, although the volume on the Golden Cockerel Press – where my maternal grandfather was star author, bookkeeper, general helper and sexual fly in the ointment – offers an additional bonus in the form of some fascinating, if mildly embarrassing family history.

Morris was crucial partly because he issued a number of design edicts – about the superiority of certain ‘old-face’ types, the evils of too much space between words and lines, the best proportions for the different margins – which his successors either adopted or reacted against. But it was also because of the way he perceived and promoted the whole enterprise, as an attempt to redeem the grimugliness of late-Victorian mass production. Intense, idealistic small businesses, as some of us remember from the 1960s, are often torn apart by sexual tensions or squabbles about ideological purity. People who can thunder with indignation about a misplaced margin are sometimes capable of great insensitivity or even cruelty in their personal lives. All these books offer admirable specialist accounts, but two of them – on the Doves Press and the Golden Cockerel Press – are also of far more general interest, gripping stories about the dark side of idealism and sexual experimentation. The Eragny Press, set up in 1894 by Lucien Pissarro (son of the French painter Camille Pissarro) and his wife Esther, was one of the very few which truly lived up to the Arts and Crafts ideal of the owners doing all the work. Lucien was something of a fish out of water in England and never totally got to grips with local taste. (‘In a country where everyone lives in bathrobes and slippers and drinks watered-down wine,’ he once asked, ‘what could be expected of them?’) The list was an eclectic mixture of French and English texts and concluded with a book of poems in memory of a beloved chow. A History of the Eragny Press includes a lot of interesting details about the Pissarros’ (largely unsuccessful) marketing plans and argues that their charming books have been underrated in comparison with the more ‘monumental’ productions of other presses. Charles Ricketts was a master wood-engraver who started as a designer of books and bindings for Oscar Wilde. He established the Vale Press in 1896 and became ‘a publisher in earnest’ because he wanted to take full control of the production process and make genuine works of art which did ‘for the book something in the line of what Morris did for furniture’. He lived with his partner Charles Shannon in The Vale, a ‘country retreat’ just off the King’s Road in Chelsea, and seems to have cultivated an image of himself as an artist whose ‘highly nervous temperament feels the commonplace as positive pain’. Their early publications were shrouded in mystery (‘Had Messrs Ricketts and Shannon been alchemists,’ an admiring fellow publisher recalled, ‘their operations could not have been veiled in a more thrilling secrecy’). All this fortunately proved good for business, since Ricketts and Shannon seem to have been two of the world’s most inept sales reps. Far more compelling is the strange drama unveiled in The Doves Press. This was founded in 1900 by Thomas James Cobden- Sanderson, one of the few members of Morris’s circle who dared to criticize the Master, and produced books which are far lighter, airier and more elegant. One would go mad trying actually to read the Kelmscott Chaucer, but the Doves edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, while it certainly makes a statement with its flamboyant initial calligraphic letters sweeping from the top of the page to the bottom, still manages to be inviting and reader-friendly. The Press produced some exceptionally beautiful books. But were they also examples of what Cobden-Sanderson called ‘the Book Beautiful, a threefold symbol of the universe, of order and delight’? All his statements of intent are written in this rebarbative style, full of raptures about the relationship between his books and ‘that complex and marvellous whole which amid the strife of competitive forces supremely holds its own’. When he published the Bible, he identified with William Tyndale, martyred in an age of religious persecution, describing the Authorized Version as ‘wrought with tears and laughter in the olden times, wrought again in the paroxysm of a nation’s reversion by the blood and tears of its first translator’. Cobden-Sanderson was not merely a clumsy, even repulsive writer: all his talk about submitting to the harmony of the universe was a mask for a deeply egotistical and unbalanced personality. When he fell out with his partner Emery Walker, he could not bear the thought that anyone else should ever use the type he had had designed for the Press – and so decided to throw all the punches and matrices into the Thames. This was no momentary impulsive gesture. For five months he struggled out on dark winter nights, a frail, heavily laden 76-year-old, and stood on Hammersmith Bridge waiting for a moment when a passing vehicle would muffle the sound of the type hitting the water. Marianne Tidcombe, the author of this history, estimates that he must have made at least 170 half-mile trips to complete the task. Cobden-Sanderson wrote a typically melodramatic account of this ‘Consecration’, wishing that the type could ‘share the fate of all the world, and pass from change to change for ever upon the Tides of Time, untouched of other use and all else’. He also produced but never published a long ‘Apologia’, a horribly compelling document in which he savages Walker for having

treated the Press as a Trade, and me as a tradesman. ‘Are you going to buy me out?’ still rings in my ears. To me the Press has always been, and is, or stands for, a Religion & the Type is, in my desire, a devoted thing, in the old biblical meaning of the word ‘devoted’, a thing ‘not to be sold or redeemed’.

The Doves Press not only celebrates its achievements but also amounts to something close to a psychiatric case history – a powerful, archetypal story of a preening, plaintive (and utterly unself-aware) ‘artistic soul’. And then, as always, there is the question of sex. Here too William Morris is an important precedent. He had first-hand experience of a tangled triangular relationship and even (knowingly or unknowingly) published a book of poetry by his wife’s lover, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. By far his most important illustrator was the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones – dominant themes in whose work, according to his biographer Penelope Fitzgerald, include ‘the enchantment of the willing victim . . . love dominant and without pity, the haunting angel’. If the ‘medievalism’ of the Kelmscott books was a reaction to industrial mass production, it also surely reflected a particular vision of relations between men and women. Cave and Manson’s superb book on the Golden Cockerel Press is more discursive than the other three and only includes a list of titles published rather than full bibliographic details. But this leaves more room for them to explore wider issues of social history and sexual politics. The Press was founded in 1920 by the sickly and sadistic Hal Taylor, his wife Gay and two debutante friends, who soon got bored with the hard, ill-paid work in a remote village. Taylor had high ideals but not even the most basic knowledge of printing, publishing or business. He also saw himself as a sexual radical and virtually ordered Gay to take a lover. He had a rare moment of inspiration when he cycled to Oxford and turned up at the cottage of my grandfather, A. E. Coppard, who was then ‘living in romantic poverty’ and trying to establish himself as a writer. Thus it was that the Taylors’ very first Golden Cockerel title was a story called Adam & Eve & Pinch Me; it proved to be one of their few successes. My grandfather was a man of great practical energy and soon became closely involved in the running of the Press. He also became sexually involved with Gay Taylor – and her husband, unsurprisingly, found the reality of ‘married adultery’ rather less comfortable than he had naïvely assumed. She kept a diary which was later published and which makes clear (even discounting her self-dramatizing attempts to turn herself into a Thomas Hardy heroine) that tensions between the three of them reached a tragic pitch. Hal Taylor was dying of consumption, destroyed by his efforts at the Press; money was running out; and none of the books found a real market. Some private presses were run essentially for pleasure by men or women of independent means, but those that had to turn a profit faced a perennial dilemma about the texts they should publish. Lavishly produced selections from the Romantic poets or other wellknown authors were one common solution. Another was to seek out mildly titillating minor classics such as the late Greek romance Daphnis & Chloe. Taylor published this and also planned an edition of Brantôme’s extraordinary Lives of Gallant Ladies, a cheerful hymn to female sexual appetite which could perhaps be described as a seventeenth-century Hite Report. Brantôme sets out, as if in a scientific spirit, to decide whether sight, touch or speech delights lovers most; whether older women are as eager in love as the young; and whether maids, wives or widows are ‘hottest in play’. His ‘research’, of course, proves to be an excuse for a string of urbane, bawdy anecdotes about the ladies of the royal court. It seems fairly mild today but in the mid-1920s risked prosecution for obscenity, so at one point Taylor suggested that his wife and her lover should go and publish the book in Italy, leaving the Press only with far more limited liability as the printer. It was not to be. Financial difficulties and illness forced the Taylors to sell the business in February 1924. But the wood-engraver Robert Gibbings, who had produced the illustrations for Gallant Ladies, was so disappointed about the cancellation of the book that he decided to buy the Press himself. If the Taylor era had been a tragic mess which produced few memorable books, Gibbings created a high-spirited atmosphere and steered the Press to both commercial and artistic success. My Grandfather was still closely involved and collaborated with Gibbings on Rummy, a lively account of a trip to Ireland interspersed (for no obvious reason) with the rules of the card game. Yet Gibbings’s main collaborator now became the Catholic engraver and typographer Eric Gill, famous alike for his monkish smock and his sexual appetite. There were cheerful threesomes between Gill, Gibbings and Gibbings’s wife Moira, not to mention the occasions when (much to the apprentices’ embarrassment) the typesetting was done in the nude. Gill produced some unpublishably raunchy illustrations for E. Powys Mathers’s Procreant Hymn (devoted to the delights of open-air screwing) and some openly erotic engravings for the Songs of Songs, and splattered Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde with foliage supporting some ‘curiously fashionable and even Parisian’ nudes. But he also, typically, worked on The Passion and a version of The Four Gospels which is often ranked among the masterpieces of the private press movement – and one of its rare books which was later reproduced in facsimile. The Golden Cockerel Press published some splendid books, but its contrasting fate under Taylor and Gibbings also offers an intriguing glimpse into the wider world of 1920s Bohemia and changing sexual attitudes. It is part of Cave and Manson’s great achievement to bring this back to life.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 7 © Matthew J. Reisz  2005