Peacock and Vine: Byatt on William Morris and Mariano Fortuny

Peacock and Vine is a long, thoughtful, and loving essay by A.S. Byatt musing on two famous designers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The book itself is a beautiful object, with glossy pages and gorgeous prints and photographs.

Victoria & Albert Museum, "Trellis" wallpaper by William Morris.

Englishman William Morris was the main influence on the Arts and Crafts movement, a return to traditional methods of producing textiles and decorative art. His designs feature intricate patterns of floral and animal prints and other folk motifs, hearkening back to Medieval and Renaissance styles. He was closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of artists founded by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Sometimes the association was a little too close, considering Morris's wife Jane's relationship with Rossetti, who among other things, liked to paint her.

Byatt explains how she came to understand Morris in a kind of counterpoint to the southern aesthetic of the Spaniard Mariano Fortuny, who lived and worked in his 13th-century Venetian palazzo with his wife and artistic partner Henriette Negrin. Fortuny worked as a painter, photographer, etcher, theatrical designer, and couturier. One of his most famous designs is the Delphos dress.

Victoria & Albert Museum, "Delphos" by Fortuny

Fortuny was inspired by the simplicity of ancient Greek designs and the idea to "free" the female form from corsets and layers of undergarments.

Byatt's wonderful novel The Children's Book, focused on a community of artists during the same period (William Morris makes an appearance), and this book is another product of her interest in the question of how great art is made.

The year of the book backlog

I realized as I looked back over this year's reading that I hadn't read a single book that actually came out in 2014. I'm so far behind that I haven't yet got to Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, which I had intended to read as soon as it came out. Ditto for the incomparable Marilynne Robinson's Lila.

Here is just how dawdling I am: I finally read A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which I've had on my shelf since it was published in 2009. What a beautiful, haunting story it was, set during the gloaming of Victorian England through the end of WWI. Epic in scope, it traces a history of the arts in those years -- painters and potters, writers and dramatists -- through a sprawling Bohemian family and their circle of friends. Some of the characters reminded me of the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, which brought another long-neglected book out of the dust -- Jean Moorcroft Wilson's momentous biography of Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet (volume one is a hefty 600+ pages). I believe Wilson could tell you what Sassoon had for lunch on any given day -- it's that thorough. I bought it hot off the press in ...1999! Ye Gods, I actually gave Wilson enough time to complete and publish the second volume, which came out last May. I hope it won't take me another decade and a half to get to it.

In retrospect, I pretty much disappeared down the rabbit hole of the WWI era this year. I returned to Graves' stunning The Great War and Modern Memory, which is the book that inspired my master's thesis and introduced me to Sassoon, Graves, and Wilfrid Owen in the first place. I began the year with Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, and finally read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, and Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover -- a much better book than I was expecting it to be. I think it's reputation has been distorted by all the sensation it stirred up with it's frank sexuality, but there's so much more to it. The Great War looms large, of course -- with its shattered men, the fractured relationships between the sexes, and the increasing assault on nature of a rampant mechanization and industrialization that was ushered in by the cataclysm on the Western Front.

 In no particular order, here are some of the other books I read this year and enjoyed:

Lewis Lockwood's life of Beethoven, which taught me a thing or two amongst all the stuff about his music that went right over my head...

Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark, a lovely novel which chronicles the growth of an artist through the life of its heroine, Thea Kronborg.

Indiana by George Sand -- someone I'd like to read more from... (recommendations?)

Incarnadine, beautiful poems by Mary Szybist.

My Own Country by Abraham Verghese about treating AIDS patients in the 80s in the small cities and towns of Appalachia.