The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘A sprinkle of chaos is needed’
Is there more to William Blake than X-rated fancies and sub-Tolkien silliness?
WILLIAM BLAKE
VS THE WORLD by John Higgs
312pp, W&N, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £9.99
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In 1797, a Welshman (of course) called James Tilly Matthews was convinced the country was being controlled by an Air Loom, a machine powered by “pressurised gases, pneumatic chemistry and strange mesmeric fluids”, which was kept “somewhere near London Wall”. The apparatus propelled “gas from the anus of a horse” into the atmosphere, sending invisible signals and dictating the way politicians and public figures behaved.
For his belief that “unseen others” were manipulating events, Matthews was diagnosed a schizophrenic and incarcerated in Bedlam. Yet as John Higgs says, eccentric ideas and conspiracies concerning the “spiritual reality behind human action” were meat and drink to William Blake, who sat naked in the garden talking to Adam and Eve, and who was always on the lookout for angels, “Fairy elves”, ghostly monks and priests, and thistles that spoke. Blake claimed with all seriousness that he held regular conversations with Socrates, Moses, Jesus, Edward III and Milton. Indeed, Jesus once told him he had visited Cornwall, to inspect tin mines with Joseph of Arimathea – hence the poem (later hymn) “And did those feet in Ancient Time/ Walk upon England’s mountains green”, not that there are mountains in Cornwall.
If Blake eluded a lunacy diagnosis, it’s perhaps because, as Higgs says, he was left alone as “impoverished and misunderstood, alternately mocked and ignored”. He lived in a pickle off the Strand, roughly where the Savoy is today, and “an air of natural gentility is diffused over him”, according to a contemporary. Blake didn’t seem dangerous or seditious, and was known for a “sweetness and kindness”, as he quietly pottered about with his illuminated texts.
Examine those texts, however, as Higgs has done, and they are crammed with depictions and descriptions of “thunderous warriors” and “chariots of fire”. Blake hardly needed to imagine any of this, as the epoch in which he lived was characterised by black clouds, flame and slaughter – the Gordon Riots, the American Declaration of
Independence, and the French Revolution – which meant “troops were billeted across the South Coast, ready for any French invasion”. The period was symbolised on the Continent by merciless Napoleonic eagles, and at home by George III’s “bouts of mania”.
To place Blake in his vibrant times is a useful task – but when Higgs tries to “grapple with abstract philosophical ideas and arcane mythologies”, matters become very boring, like when Ezra Pound, another visionary, got going about economics and usury. For Blake, it seems, when he cooked up epic and allegorical characters with names like Beulah, Urizen, Udan-Adan, Orc, Golgonooza and Oothoon, he was apparently trying to say something important about how feeling and emotion are superior to reason and intellect. He was keen on investigating “modes of perception”, and
Blake was basically a ‘nudist obsessed by sex who talked to angels for inspiration’
“states of awareness; nothing less than the nature of human consciousness and of the imagination” was on his mind. Alternatively, it was just the sort of incomprehensible and resounding balls that people who like superheroes in Marvel comics, Hobbitry and CS Lewis’s religiosity always like.
Blake was born near the Tyburn gallows in 1757. He went to drawing school and copied plaster casts of classical statues at the Royal Academy. He likewise studied the architecture of the tombs in Westminster Abbey. He trained as an engraver, scratching intricate patterns “of lines, dots, stippling or cross-hatching” on sheets of copper. Blake was also an etcher, painting with an acid-resistant varnish directly on to the metal plates. His poetry, woven into the designs, was written backwards – mirror-writing. “He alone excels in that art,” it was said.
By all these means, Blake composed, designed and printed his own works. His wife, Catherine – an illiterate who signed the wedding certificate with the letter X, as if she were in a saucy film – did the handcolouring. The little books, Songs of Innocence and Experience and the
rest, sold for between three and seven shillings. After Blake’s death, and his widow’s in 1831, his papers were destroyed “in lavish quantity” by the executors and the copper plates were melted down for scrap, as it was believed “the inspiration had come from the Devil”.
Because X-rated some of the ideas did seem. Higgs is not wrong to say Blake was basically a “nudist obsessed by sex who talked to angels for inspiration”. His cherubim and seraphim could have costarred with Robin Askwith in Confessions of a Window Cleaner. “Sex on Earth,” we are told, “must correspond with something in heaven,” (ie, the angelic host is surely at it like knives), and Higgs fills us in on 18th-century religious cults who made orgies mandatory. The intention of Blake’s own art, apparently – all those volcanoes and sunbursts and apocalyptic skies – was to depict “a blissful, post-coital embrace from the whole universe”. No wonder Robin Askwith kept dropping his bucket.
Blake’s wife believed him “to be the finest genius on Earth”. Today, many would concur. An exhibition of his paintings and prints in 2019 at the Tate attracted 233,000 visitors. And to make Blake hip and cool, Higgs makes mention of the “psychedelic counterculture of the Sixties”, the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, Deepak Chopra, Ayn Rand, punk rock (twice), Instagram, Obi-Wan Kenobi (twice, at least), LSD, tantric sex (I never have the time, do you?), yoga, Mumsnet and Leonard Cohen. We’ve digressed from tigers burning in the forest at night.
Though on the whole I find Blake contrivedly giddy and portentous, and the concept that we all live “in a mental model of reality rather than reality itself ” is one I can take or leave, I enjoy the mercurial, gnomic epigrams: “Opposition is true friendship”; “Energy is eternal delight”; “Everything that lives is holy”. I agree with the notion that the trouble with heaven is it would be hell, and faced with the regimentation of existence (bills, brown envelopes, insurance premiums, Pilates, governments telling us off) “a sprinkling of chaos is needed”.
Blake retained a child’s absorption, or egotism, all his born days. (He and Catherine were childless.) His pictures are childlike or primitive daubs, as if involving thick wax crayons. I was moved to learn that after a career of “trials and misfortune, horrors and wonders”, on the final day of his life, in August 1827, he spent his last coins sending out for a new pencil.