A House of Air. Hermione Lee

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      Blake was one of those for whom, in William James’s definition, ‘religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather.’ He spoke with his visions on equal terms, sat down with them and answered them back. They came as welcome visitors: Jesus Christ, the angel Gabriel, Socrates, Michelangelo, his own younger brother Robert, dead at the age of nineteen. What seemed external reality he called a cloud interposed between human beings and the spiritual world, which would otherwise be too bright to bear. He wanted us all to know this. At one point in his biography of Blake, Peter Ackroyd speaks of him as ‘keeping his own counsel,’ but, as the book shows, Blake didn’t. It was his mission to recall us from materialism to the freedom and joy of the imagination, and it was humanity’s duty to listen to his prophecies.

      The Blakes were a plain-living London tradesman’s family, pious, sober, dissenting and radical. William (1757—1827), the third child of James and Catherine Blake, was born on Broad Street, a little to the southeast of what is now Oxford Circus. A workhouse and a slaughterhouse were just around the corner, but so too, to the south, was Golden Square, where the gentry lived. William saw the face of God at the window when he was seven or eight years old, wrote poetry as a child, and was apprenticed at fourteen to James Basire, engraver to the Society of Antiquaries. A republican his whole life, he was involved (we don’t quite know how) in the riots of 1780, when the London crowds battled the militia and set fire to Newgate prison.

      Perhaps on this account, perhaps because of an illness and a disappointment in love, William was sent across the river to recuperate at the house of a market gardener in Battersea. A year or so later he married the gardener’s daughter, Catherine Boucher. He started well enough, opening his own print shop and developing what he called ‘W. Blake’s original stereotype.’ This was a method of relief printing on copper, each impression being hand-tinted, so that no two were alike. In this way the Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, and the great series of prophetic books were offered (quite unsuccessfully) to the public. His work as a jobbing engraver began to run out, and he had to retreat to a cottage at Felpham, on the south coast. But although Felpham was a place of inspiration—it was the first time Blake had ever seen the sea—he was back three years later in the soot-and-dung-laden air of London that suited him and his wife so well.

      ‘In his later life,’ Mr Ackroyd writes, ‘he was known only as an engraver, a journeyman with wild notions and a propensity for writing unintelligible verse. He laboured for his bread, eccentric, dirty and obscure.’ It might be added that he was childless, and there is no way of calculating the pain that caused him. But Blake is also the poet of joy, and it could be argued that he was a fortunate man. Although he created the overwhelming tyrant figure Urizen, or old Nobodaddy, his own father seems to have been mild enough, never sending William to school because ‘he so hated a blow.’ Blake’s loyal wife, illiterate when they married, was, as he said, ‘an angel to me.’ (He had fallen in love with her because she pitied him, which seems to surprise Mr Ackroyd, but pity was the great eighteenth-century virtue that Blake most earnestly tells us to cherish.)

      Although his earnings ran out, he was never without a patron, and although he had always kept radical company, he never got into serious trouble. When he was living in Felpham he was arrested after a row with a drunken soldier who accused him of speaking seditiously against the King—and so he very well may have done—but at the quarter sessions, where poor Catherine deposed that yes, she would be ready to fight for Bonaparte, Blake was miraculously acquitted. And at the end of his life he acquired a new circle of much younger admirers, artists who called themselves Ancients and understood, partly at least, Blake’s transcendent view of history and eternity. One of them, George Richmond, closed Blake’s eyes when he died in 1827 in his two-room lodgings, and then kissed them ‘to keep the vision in.’ ‘Yet there was really no need to do so,’ says Mr Ackroyd, feeling perhaps he has earned the right to a fine phrase. ‘That vision had not faded in his pilgrimage of seventy years, and it has not faded yet.’

      Mr Ackroyd’s Blake is much more reader-friendly than his Dickens. This time he doesn’t make what have been called his Hitchcock-like appearances in the text, but he is there at your elbow, a brilliant guide and interpreter. Blake, he says, ‘is a “difficult” poet only if we decide to make him so,’ and he fearlessly expounds the prophetic books and the technique of their illustrations, which conjure up in dazzling orange, green, violet, and crimson ‘a wholly original religious landscape.’

      Like all his predecessors, Mr Ackroyd is left with the (possibly not true) ‘familiar anecdotes.’ Did Thomas Butts (a respectable civil servant) really find the Blakes sitting naked, in imitation of Adam and Eve, in their back garden? Did Blake really encounter the Devil on his way down to the coal cellar? Mr Ackroyd tells the stories as they come. Blake, like Yeats, mythologized (but never falsified) himself, and the best thing is to accept the myth. More important to Mr Ackroyd is the re-creation of the poet as a great Londoner—part of his long-term biography of his home city. He invites us to accompany Blake, in his knee breeches and wide-brimmed hat, on one of his long walks through the streets. This is not in itself a new idea. Stanley Gardner, in 1968, was one of the first to study the county survey of late-eighteenth-century London inch by inch and to suggest (for example) that Blake’s Valley of Innocence must have been the green fields of Wimbledon, where orphans at that time were put out to nurse. Mr Gardner didn’t supply his readers with a map, nor does Mr Ackroyd, but he is immensely more detailed. ‘A woman filling her kettle at the neighbourhood pump, the washing hanging out from poles…the bird cages and pots of flowers on the windowsills, the shabby man standing on a corner with a sign in his hat saying “Out of Employ,” while another sells toy windmills, the dogs, the cripples, the boys with hoops.’ These things, of course, aren’t what William Blake saw: he saw walls reddened with soldiers’ blood or blackened with the soot that killed off young chimney sweeps, while a single bird cage was for him enough to set heaven in a rage.

      But this is emphatically not a political biography. Its object isn’t to enlist Blake as a primitive Marxist but to show him as an individual of genius, awkward to deal with, sometimes nervous, often contradictory, but incorruptible. Blake himself believed there were eternal ‘states’ of rage and desire, even of selfhood, through which a man passes, keeping his soul intact. ‘He knew precisely what he saw,’ says Mr Ackroyd affectionately, ‘and with the sturdy obstinacy of his London stock he refused to be bullied or dissuaded.’

      Blake was unaccountably true, indeed, even to his strangest prophecies. He had promised his wife that he would never leave her, and after his death he came back, she said, for several hours a day, sat down in his usual chair, and talked to her.

      New York Times Book Review, 1996