A House of Air - Hermione Lee

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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

       SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE Talking Through the Darkness

      Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804—1834, by Richard Holmes

      Ten years ago, in 1989, Richard Holmes left Coleridge under the stars on an April night in Portsmouth, starting out, in one of the many impulsive moves of his life, for Malta. He asked us to imagine how it would have been if the poet had died on the voyage, as he and all his friends clearly expected. He would then have been remembered as the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a brilliant young Romantic early extinguished. But he didn’t die, and the next three decades, Holmes told us, would be more fascinating than anything that had gone before. This second volume, he said, would be subtitled ‘Later Reflections,’ but it has turned out to be ‘Darker Reflections.’ Possibly he himself has changed a little in this time. In any case, ‘darker’ suggests the water imagery that haunted Coleridge even more closely as his life flowed to an end. Holmes hoped to make him ‘leap out of these pages—brilliant, animated, endlessly provoking—and invade your imagination (as he has done mine).’ Certainly, in his superb second volume, he has succeeded in this.

      He also has to show his subject as frequently sunk in melancholy, constipated, a heavy drinker and addicted (as he had been since the winter of 1801) to opium. Coleridge went to Malta in 1804 partly on account of his health, partly to escape from his marriage and perhaps from his long-term infatuation with Wordsworth’s sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson, partly—since Malta was a wartime base for the British fleet—in hope of getting some kind of administrative post. He did get employment, as diplomatic secretary to the Governor, for whom he wrote what are now called position papers on Britain’s strategic situation in the Mediterranean. As a hardened journalist, quick to seize the main points of any situation, Coleridge, as long as he was sober, had no difficulty with the work.

      On his return to England he made it clear that he was not coming back to his wife, although he always did his erratic best to support her and their three children. Lecturing seemed the ideal occupation for the great talker who rarely paused for an answer, and he lectured, on and off, for almost the whole of the rest of his life—at Bristol (where he was an hour late for his first appearance, having been secured by his friends and deposited on the platform), at the Royal Institution (where he collapsed into opium and missed five engagements), at the Philosophical Institution, at the Surrey Institution, at the Crown and Anchor, at the Royal Society of Literature (on Prometheus). Organizers were always ready to book him, audiences almost always ready to hear him. What did he look like? Like a wildly dishevelled Dissenting minister. What did he sound like? Sometimes he was unintelligible, but when he caught fire (as for instance in his celebrated lecture on Hamlet) it was agreed that he talked as no man had talked before him.

      In

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