The third strand in Ruskin and Morris’s concept of craft, the politics of work, was inherent to nineteenth-century political philosophy. Primary concerns were the nature of work, the moral welfare of the worker, the health of society, and the causal connections among them. Karl Marx (1818–1883) was the most famous theorist to travel this road, but others included Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929). Ruskin famously wrote about the “degradation of the operative into a machine” in The Stones of Venice, where he went on to say:
It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men.9
Ruskin and Morris welded the ideas of the applied arts, the vernacular, and the politics of work into a theory of production intended to counteract the evils of industrial capitalism. Their craft worker would make objects of aesthetic merit from start to finish in salubrious surroundings, with personal responsibility for quality. Such improved conditions of labor would promote psychological health and produce better citizens.
As it turned out, though, the Arts and Crafts Movement never realized its ambition to transform society. It foundered on two rocks. One was financial: The workshops set up by Morris and others could only succeed by creating fashionable consumer goods for the wealthy few. Work organized along the lines of craft simply could not compete economically with mass production. The other was the cataclysm of the First World War, which transformed the cultural landscape in ways that made the concerns of the movement seem irrelevant.
The Arts and Crafts Movement failed to deflect the juggernaut of industrialization in any noticeable way – either in regard to means of production or conditions of labor. Nonetheless, it left a lasting imprint on the conversations of design and object making. The aesthetic ideas of Ruskin and Morris would influence the Bauhaus in Germany, de Stijl in the Netherlands, art nouveau in France, the Wiener Werkstätte in Austria, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie School of architecture in the U.S., among other notable manifestations.
The ideology of craft continued to inform the conversation of object making throughout the twentieth century. It shaped the ways in which people thought about what should be made, who should make it, how it should be made, and why it was made. Although the Arts and Crafts Movement petered out, the discussion it inaugurated continued to reverberate, until finally the concept of craft so permeated the public mind that the making of most non-art, non-manufactured objects throughout history came to be called craft in retrospect. Certainly, for my generation of craftsmen, the theories of Ruskin and Morris were pivotal, whether or not we had ever heard mention of their names.
CHAPTER 4
Live from New York
WHEN I PICKED UP a hammer right out of college, I discovered that skilled manual work offered spiritual rewards to which academic institutions and my parent’s social milieu were oblivious. My subsequent decision to quit carpentry for furniture making turned out to be equally fateful, although at the time I intuited the difference between the two occupations more than I rationally understood it. As a carpenter I had worked with my hands. As a furniture maker I began to work creatively with my hands, which has made all the difference. Becoming a carpenter may have been a process of self-definition and self-transformation, but as I gained competence the daily work of carpentry became a known quantity. Designing and building furniture, on the other hand, has never lost the challenge of exploration and the delight of discovery. While it is possible to calcify in a creative field – to stop asking new questions and stick with what one knows – by its very nature furniture making offers doors to new experience at every turn.
As a young carpenter, I found ready employment and I had a role model in Carl Borchert, whose integrity and independence provided signposts to a good life. As a nascent craftsman in a society where the trade of furniture making had apparently vanished, I was going to have to find my way on my own. The first step would be to make the transition from wanting to become a craftsman to actually being one.
Frederick, Maryland
In June of 1975, a year and a half after I made my first cradle, I packed a truckload of handmade furniture into a well-worn Ford Econoline van that had succeeded my pickup truck, boarded a ferry from Nantucket to Woods Hole, and drove to Frederick, Maryland, to participate in my first major craft show. I had no idea what to expect. What I found were scores of young craftspeople setting up a nomadic encampment that was a cross between Woodstock and a medieval market fair. Craft shows were highly informal events in those days, often as not held in livestock barns on county fairgrounds. I didn’t sell more than a few small boxes, but it was affirming to have people connect to my work.
I was single again (my own damn fault) and had spent the past winter aching over Gail in a claustrophobic house on a dirt road about two miles outside of town. My workshop was down in the tiny, windowless basement, where I had to duck floor joists every time I moved. I don’t remember everything I made in the course of those ten months, but they included an oak cabinet for a tugboat someone was converting into a yacht, heart-shaped mahogany boxes for Valentine’s Day, a walnut quilt rack, a set of carved walnut boxes that a customer characterized as “canary coffins,” and a run of six cherry rocking chairs. I was hugely ignorant – I barely had a clue how to sharpen a chisel and would pretty much hack away at wood with a hand plane – but lovely objects still took shape under my hands. Looking back, it amazes me.
On the morning I left for Frederick, Bear Boy was strangely apathetic. I had to lift him into the passenger seat of the van. By the time we reached New York City he could barely walk. I took him to the Animal Medical Center and two days later learned over the telephone, from Frederick, that he had lymphoma. The next day I called back to discuss treatment and was told that he had died overnight.
When I returned home after a week off-island, I was ready to leave Nantucket for good. Heartbreak over Gail was one reason, the absence of Bear another, plus I didn’t want to be there for the tidal wave of real estate development that even then was looming on the horizon. Mostly, though, I was ambitious to be a furniture maker, and the craft show had made it clear that living on the mainland offered more opportunities to learn and to sell. The amiable search for a good life that I had embarked upon five years earlier had been hijacked by a passion for furniture making that drove me forward with its own logic. I was becoming aware that a good life was not some Shangri-La waiting to be stumbled upon. One constructed it from the materials at hand.
Frederick Again
Having decided to leave Nantucket, I arbitrarily settled upon Washington D.C. as my next home. But the only house I found that met my three requirements – inexpensive rent, space for a workshop, and sufficient distance from neighbors that the sound of a table saw wouldn’t bother anyone – was forty miles to the west in Frederick, Maryland. So to Frederick I returned.
The subsequent year in Frederick was one of semi-monastic isolation. All I did, Monday through Saturday, was make furniture in a one-car garage under the house. In particular, I recall a drop-leaf walnut table, a cherry trestle desk, a red oak bed with a pattern of hearts sawn out of the headboard, and a sculptural music stand. I gained confidence. My work was shown in galleries in New Jersey and Washington. I was written up in the Washington Star. A senator invited me to see Jefferson’s writing desk at the State Department prior to ordering a small writing desk of his own.
I didn’t know a soul in Frederick. There were weeks when the full extent of my personal human interaction consisted of thanking the cashier at the supermarket. The telephone rarely rang, and when it did I would limber up my croaky voice with practice hellos before