Some artists go through a long, slow process of public evolution. Others seem to suddenly burst into life, like a firework. It is astonishing to read William Blake’s early ballad “Song (How sweet I roam’d),” written when he was fourteen, and encounter the fully-formed sensibility of his first mature period.
How sweet I roam’d from field to field,
And tasted all the summer’s pride
‘Til I the prince of love beheld
Who in the sunny beams did glide!
He shew’d me lilies for my hair
And blushing roses for my brow;
He led me through his garden fair,
Where all his golden pleasures grow.
With sweet May dews my wings were wet,
And Phoebus fir’d my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.
He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.
It’s all there: the simple words that hide complex irony and ambiguity, the uncertain, shifting nature of the speaker (at once Blake, a young girl, a songbird), the sexual undercurrent, the language of brightness, gold, energy, life. He would continue in this vein, through Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, building and building his private cosmos until, in the dizzying and often incomprehensible worlds of his late “prophetic books” Milton and Jerusalem, he ventured too far out for most to follow. But even at his most obscure, the visionary power of his art shines through, pulsing with vitality and shimmering with otherworldly beauty.
“For me,” said the anarchist poet and critic Herbert Read, “Blake is absolute. Shakespeare is richer, Milton is more sonorous, Hopkins is more sensuous—but Blake has no need of qualifying epithets.” Perhaps no one else in the canon inspires such mystic devotion and fierce connection.
Anecdotes of his influence have become as much a part of his legend as anecdotes of his life. His voice spoke suddenly out of a whirlwind to a young Allen Ginsberg, masturbating in his East Harlem apartment. Robert Mapplethorpe stole a print from America: A Prophecy from the rare book store he worked at and then, fearing discovery, flushed it down the toilet; his soulmate Patti Smith rejoiced at the idea of Blake forever being a part of the waters of New York. Alan Moore claimed that it was not enough to study or revere him, one must become him. Blake’s exhortations to the divine imagination make him a kind of personal deity for artists; relationships with him have a strangely personal character.
All this means that there are many Blakes, perhaps one for each of his devotees. He reflects our anxieties, our aspirations, our cares. Reading about him is, I have found, uniquely fruitful compared to most poets; each time and place invents him anew. In their approach to the familiar biographical material, in their building up or tearing down of myths and apocrypha, in their creation of Revolutionary Blake or Queer Blake or Patriotic Blake, his biographers and critics tell us much about who we are at any given time, and what we choose to value in our poets, our artists, and our saints. So it was in this spirit that I undertook a journey through a few of the major Blake texts of the last thirty years, from straightforward biography to esoteric collage, in hopes that they would show me something both of our time and of the visionary man at their center, who spoke to angels, and who may have become one himself.
London, 1995. A tumultuous century for Britain: war, deprivation, decolonization, crisis, austerity. Now, at the end of history, green shoots of optimism were beginning to show: Thatcher and the grim grey 80s in the rear view mirror, Pierce Brosnan on the screen and “Parklife” on the radio. A new Britannia needed new myths and new values, new ways to characterize the national spirit that didn’t spring out of being masters of half the globe. So Peter Ackroyd’s Blake, when it appeared, was something close to a phenomenon, hailed by everyone from the Socialist Worker to the Daily Mail as the ultimate biography of a renovated and reinvigorated national saint. It seems incredible that a biography of William Blake could reach number three in the national nonfiction bestseller list, but in the heady days of the 1990s, such things were apparently possible.
Ackroyd, one of the last of his kind, was the man for the job: an English man of letters in the truest sense, not a lifelong academic surfacing every so often to offer a book to the public, but an enthusiastic, talented, and staggeringly productive amateur who stands or falls on the strength of his work. His output includes, among other things, biographies of Eliot, Dickens, Shakespeare, and Chaucer, a six-volume History of England, begun in 2011 and finished in 2021, the massive London: The Biography, and sixteen novels as of this writing, many of them requiring no small amount of historical research. He is more like a Victorian sage than a modern writer; one imagines him polishing off a few bottles with Carlyle and Ruskin before going home to dash off another fifty pages of flowing prose.
His Blake is a very fine biography indeed; elegant and erudite. No boring family tree sections here, Blake is born on page 1 and dies on page 391 and in between we are treated to a compelling narrative of his apprenticeship, his life in London, move to the coast, and return, his touching relationship with his wife Catherine, his visions of angels and conversations with spirits, his innovative etching work, which he called “printing in the infernal method,” his idiosyncratic political beliefs and sexual radicalism, his struggle for the recognition he never achieved, and the small circle of followers and supporters he accrued in his later years.
Ackroyd‘s Blake tends to be less the lonely visionary of popular myth and more of a sociable, garrulous working artist. There is a pleasing materiality and tangibility to him and his world, we hear much about his studies at the Royal Academy, his friendships with fellow artists John Flaxman and Henry Fuseli, his encounters with Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the laborious technical process of etching and engraving. One gains a new appreciation for his work via Ackroyd’s evocation of the sweat, the heat, and the smells of the chemical fumes that were required to produce his prints, which were then intricately colored by hand (the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, I learned when I saw them in person, are each about the size of a baseball card). He handles the question of Blake’s visions with sensitivity, refusing to pathologize or dismiss them. And, as London is Ackroyd’s great, career-spanning subject, there are many wonderful, list-y evocations of the sights and smells and bustles of the turn of the nineteenth century. The reader closes the book with Blake’s art still mostly mysterious (Ackroyd is rather vague on the details of Blake’s philosophical system), but with his world agreeably illumined.
Yet there is at times a creeping sense that Ackroyd, in his role as unofficial national biographer, has tamed Blake, has made a wild visionary into a lovable kook. “Blake was in no sense a ‘Romantic’ artist, like those of the next generation,” he hums approvingly, “[...] he was a lower middle-class tradesman, a mystic intimately involved in the world of commerce and craft.” And elsewhere: “Lesser writers such as Richard Savage and Thomas De Quincey found refuge from the world in alcohol, or opium, or the madhouse; Blake, the greatest and least respected of eighteenth-century artists, continued his profession as an engraver until the end of his life. There is a heroic achievement even in that.” He isn’t wrong, necessarily, but still one bristles a bit. Blake, the ultimate nonconformist, made into a model of bourgeois respectability? Blake, whose declarations and proverbs are confounding and troubling even today, who tapped into some tiger-force we have not yet begun to understand, celebrated for his dutiful labors and loving marriage? Ackroyd makes a convincing case against the Marxist strain in Blake criticism, saying that Blake was too much his own man to be strongly linked to England’s long tradition of dissenting groups like the Ranters and Muggletonians, but one still wishes for some acknowledgement that he was more than just another dignified bust to be placed on the wall of great British heroes alongside Wordsworth, Nelson, and Queen Victoria.
Not to worry. There were other forces invested in not letting this come to pass. Ackroyd had a shadow, a magus who stalked the streets of London: Iain Sinclair, poet, novelist, and psychogeographer, who has made a life out of excavating the secret history of the capital via Sebaldian rambles around its backstreets and forgotten corners. Once, Ackroyd and Sinclair had been colleagues in the same poetic circles—Sinclair a fearsomely modernist disciple of Pound and Olson, Ackroyd charming and gossipy, a Kensington Frank O’Hara—and Ackroyd had borrowed heavily from Sinclair’s poem Lud Heat for his novel Hawksmoor (both of which went on to inform Alan Moore’s From Hell). Both men were chroniclers of England and its myths, but in different forms; Ackroyd smooth and feline on the BBC promoting his majestic biography of Dickens and novels about Milton and John Dee, Sinclair speaking from the gutters for the madmen, murderers, and holy fools. Blake, being somewhere between the two camps, was contested territory.
“Customizing Biography,” Sinclair’s review of Blake from the February 1996 London Review of Books, is a long, rambling masterpiece of back-handed sneering, malice, jealousy, and contempt. It is not a furious hatchet job or jeremiad; there are no killer lines built for the retweet and restack. But if you read it carefully, you come to understand the full force of Sinclair’s disdain. Blake, Sinclair implies in his trademark clipped and circular style, is another dull brick of popular English nonfiction, another bland biography for Guardian dads and Radio 4 aunts, bent on dissecting the magic and mystery of art and killing it on the operating table in the process. Ackroyd is “a well-informed tour guide who has done the work, chewed up the culture gristle, the carcass of facts, to make it palatable for the rest of us.” His paragraphs “rush breathlessly along like video presentation commentaries in the London Dungeon or the Globe Theatre. History whispering insistently in the shell of the ear.” Dead history, Britain as a heritage exhibit for eager tourists and rapacious financiers. The whole enterprise of this kind of literary biography, Sinclair asserts, is “vampiric,” a “golden brick from the pyramid in the window of Waterstone’s… Should we not allow dead writers, after all this time, the privilege of being forgotten? Lost lives, and grateful to be so.”
All this might just be considered as a particularly poetic version of the usual turf wars and scholarly skirmishes that sometimes flare up in the sedate pages of the LRB. But two-thirds of the way through, Sinclair does something that elevates his review above axe-grinding. He dreams up an alternative way of evoking or commemorating Blake.
I removed the glossy dustwrapper with its gilded relief script and its reproduction of The Good and Evil Angels Struggling for the Possession of a Child. Then, in a gesture of reckless sacrifice, I broke the book’s spine and hacked the wad of text into portable portions, sealing each one in a plastic envelope – before setting off, on foot, to seek out the traces of Blake in the city. I would leave each envelope, after I had finished with it, in the hands of whoever was primed to receive it.
Does his subsequent narrative of his visits to Blake’s former dwelling places, many of which have become anonymous tower blocks or run-down seaside towns, illuminate the mystery of his work any more than Ackroyd’s cradle-to-grave narrative does? I wouldn’t necessarily say so, but nevertheless, the attempt is something in itself, a way to look for the living poet, to seek to commune with him beyond the medium of pop biography or television special or publicly funded culture hour, to honor his declaration: “I will not Reason or Compare, my business is to Create.”
The review (if one can still call it that) concludes with what I suspect is a fictional encounter between the two, both on a shopping errand in Central London. Sinclair is still trying to take the measure of Blake, Ackroyd has moved on to a novel about Milton and a biography of Thomas More and “two or three others… lined up and ready to go.” He has been “granted the Einsteinian gold card,” appointing him as “the memory conduit for a literary culture that was disappearing as fast as he processed it.” There is perhaps a small note of reconciliation or acceptance in Sinclair’s accounting of this meeting; you simply can’t control Ackroyd’s graphomania, any more than you can control the waves crashing on the shore.
Sinclair is right to insist on Blake as a living force and a living practice, to sternly guard him against commodification. My younger and more fiery self would have thrilled to his righteous assault on the flattening conventions of biography and agreed entirely that we can only truly know Blake through his work and through our own minds, not through some smooth factual narrative. But Ackroyd is also not the silver-tongued gentrifier that Sinclair paints him as, he is, as the writer Paul Heron once waggishly put it, “a volcel, gay Bede for our times.”
A 2013 New York Times profile revealed him as a veritable monk, celibate since his partner’s 1994 death, who spends his mornings in research, his afternoons in writing, and “finishes the day reclining on a bed in a room adjacent to his book-lined office, writing a novel, in longhand.” He rarely leaves the city, shuns readings and literary festival appearances, and hasn’t seen a film or gone to the theatre since the 1980s. When asked to comment on the 2011 London riots, he replied, airily, that riots were a regular feature of the city’s life going back to the days of Wat Tyler and Jack Cade. He is devoted to the city and its inhabitants the way St. Teresa and Hildegard were devoted to God.
In other words, Sinclair fails to see that Ackroyd, despite his recognition from the establishment, is like him—a magus, a true freak. Just as Blake’s “Jerusalem” is a chest-thumping patriotic hymn that springs, upon investigation, from an unimaginably strange source, Ackroyd’s conventional-seeming biography comes from a singular mind. And anyway, Sinclair should never have gotten so worked up. Blake will never be a relic. He is far, far too big to ever be truly co-opted or tamed.
And as always, he moves with the times. Two recent books, John Higgs’s William Blake vs. the World and Philip Hoare’s William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, exemplify two very 21st-century genres: one the breezy TED-talk explainer, Why (difficult or obscure artist) Matters, How (difficult or obscure artist) Can Change Your Life, and so forth, the other the hybrid bio-memoir-critical-history as practiced by Olivia Laing, Geoff Dyer, or Matthew Specktor. And like Ackroyd and Sinclair, they embody two contrary approaches to Blake, the historical and the personal. One attempts to explain Blake, the other to encounter and commune with him.
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