CHAPTER 7

LIKE SHINING FROM SHOOK FOIL

It was 1982. I was nineteen and sitting in a van parked on a road in Pinner and I was as unhappy as only a nineteen-year-old can be. Belief in God had crept up on me, sneaking in through the openings made by my interest in the occult. After all, if there were more things in heaven and earth than could be encompassed in that flat philosophy, then some of the other strands of my young belief could be pulled together: magic, fantasy, wonder. Could a horizontal world of material things encompass even a single tree?

We had moved house, from one suburb to another. Until I was ten we’d lived off the Archway Road, in a three-storey house my parents had scrimped and saved to buy; it had cost them £3,600 (yes, you are reading that right). But the house came with a controlled tenant: up at the top, occupying the second floor and seldom descending from it was old Mrs Boots. As a controlled tenant, she had absolute tenure of her flat, and the rent, now paid to us, was set. Unfortunately, it had been set in 1948. My parents had, in effect, bought two-thirds of a house – which was why the house was cheap enough for them to afford. Just. Mrs Boots had her cooker on the landing between her two rooms and there was no more chance of moving that than there was of moving her.

To afford the mortgage, my parents rented out the first-floor rooms, leaving the ground floor of our own house for the four of us. The tenants were mostly young women, attracted by the homely atmosphere of living in a house with a family, and my brother and I made friends with many of them. In memory, most were nurses, or student nurses, but there was one exception: Mr Kaseem.

Mr Kaseem was Nigerian. My parents, when they had first married, had spent many days tramping fruitlessly from one advertised bedsit to another. “Oh, yes, Mrs Albert, we have a nice, clean room, ideal for a young couple,” the landlord or landlady would say when they rang from a call box, the coins clicking in as the money ran down, only for the door to open and the welcoming face to stiffen when it registered my father’s brown skin.

“It’s taken.” And the door would close.

An old Quaker lady – Auntie Dorothy for ever after – took them in finally, giving them a room in her house in Kentish Town. Even after my brother and I were born, and we moved out because the room had become too small, Auntie Dorothy remained a family friend. She was a spinster, with the customary fondness for cats, and she gave my parents a clock that they have still, while my father would pop round to repair her television and radio whenever they broke down.

In such a context, owning their own house, even if it came with a controlled tenant, became a major consideration for my parents, and in 1965 they had finally saved – and I mean saved: not a single penny was spent upon themselves beyond the absolute necessities – enough to buy 25 Davenant Road.

So when Mr Kaseem came looking to rent a room, there was no stiffening of face – although with a name like Kaseem and a thick Nigerian accent, there wasn’t much doubt when he rang that the face at the door would be black – and he took one of the first-floor rooms.

It did not work out. Of all the tenants we had, he was the only one my parents asked to leave. He did so with ill grace and muttered threats, which, naturally, we did not take seriously. However, it turned out Mr Kaseem’s threats were serious.

A week later the doorbell rang in the evening, unexpectedly, and my father went to answer it. My mother, not sure why, followed after him, just in time to grab his arm as Mr Kaseem attempted to pull him out of the house – so that the three friends Mr Kaseem had brought with him could start throwing punches too. My mother held one arm, Mr Kaseem pulled the other – my father an unlikely object of tug-of-war – while Mr Kaseem’s friends tried to grab hold. Coming to see what was going on, my mother screamed at my brother and me to hide – and I did, under the bed. My brother, braver than I, tried to help, grabbing Father’s leg and holding on. The shouts and screams drew neighbours from their houses and, from the other first-floor flat, Rita, a student nurse from Ireland, and her boyfriend. (My parents had told Rita in no uncertain terms that her boyfriend could visit but under no circumstances was he to stay the night – they took in lodgers, they did not run a bawdy house.)

Other hands joined the struggle and my father, enraged, shook off his assailants. It was only my mother’s restraining hand that stopped him pursuing Mr Kaseem and his friends as they made their escape.

It was in this context that, when they had saved enough money to buy a house unencumbered with a controlled tenant, my parents moved out, rather than in. They could have afforded a similar, three-storey Victorian terrace house closer in to town, but Islington was such a slum they didn’t even think of moving there. So, in common with all the Italian and Asian immigrants, we moved outwards – to a nice, 1930s, semi-detached house on the border of Palmers Green and Wood Green. The houses had followed the Piccadilly Line as it bored through London’s chalk underlayer, fanning out from the Charles Holden-designed stations that united form and function in a manner that still calms even today’s rushed commuters and must have delighted those first commuters, newly liberated from the smoke of London to live amid the parks and greenery of Metroland.

We lived at 90 Norfolk Avenue for ten years. When we moved in, the heating was still coal-fired and the coal man would call round in his big, soot-marked lorry every week to unload bags of coal for the coal bunker in the back garden. I can propose, from personal experience, an inflexible law of fire lighting: the ease with which a coal fire lights is inversely proportional to how cold and wet the person trying to light the fire is. In winter, ice formed on the inside of the bedroom windows as the night’s exhalation froze, and clothes, left carefully at the end of the bed before sleeping, were pulled inside the blankets to be changed into while pulling the bedclothes tight to retain the sleeping warmth. It occurs to me that I might be a member of the last generation to experience this; and the tightness of family life, when all the warmth was confined to one room with a burning fire and all the rest of the house was a fridge, with only the kitchen offering an alternative source of warmth, at least while meals were being cooked.

And then, the spread, the expansion, the sheer warmth, when the men came and laid in the pipes and put up the radiators. Central heating. I retired to my room and my books. Would I have become what I have if we had remained huddled before the fire? For good and ill, I doubt it.

Alone with my loves, I found my way back towards God – and thoroughly miserable that made me.

We moved again. To Arnos Grove, and a house left unoccupied for ten years. We were rich now, or seemed so by our standards, for my father, at the age of fifty, had started in business on his own, repairing televisions and the new-fangled video recorders for his old employers, John Lewis. And my brother and my mother and I all helped, with varying degrees of interest and commitment. My brother, relieved to be finally shot of school, took to the work with ease, learning his way around circuit boards and valves (yes, when we started there were still plenty of televisions around that used the old, beautiful thermionic valves). My mother left her job as a merchandiser – putting Brown & Paulson baby food out on the shelves of supermarkets – to run the office side of things, answering the phone, making out invoices, ordering spares. And I, the young intellectual, the boy with the book, rode along in the van as muscle. Those televisions were heavy. And, another invariable rule: the higher people lived in a block of flats – particularly one where the lift had broken – the bigger and heavier the television they owned.

I was not a happy young man.

Set upon academic tramlines leading to a career in science (my mother, naturally, wanted me to be a doctor but scientist sounded a reasonable second best), I had derailed myself with books. Determined on becoming a physicist and unlocking the secrets of the universe, and earning myself the third and vacant place beside Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, I’d made the mistake of getting interested in, first, the occult and then, fatally, philosophy.

Philosophy may be the love of wisdom, but in the teenage boy it is the path to madness. Never is the mind so plastic, so impressionable, so ready to make intuitive leaps and imaginative associations – there is a reason the greatest scientists generally make their most groundbreaking discoveries when barely old enough to shave. If I had just kept on the tracks I’d set for myself, I would have gone straight on to university after leaving school at eighteen – admittedly totally naïve but at least set firmly upon habits of study that would have seen me through my degree. But I had discovered Plato. I followed him, struck with teenage wonder, out of the Cave and into… well, I wasn’t really sure. A world that was wider and stranger than I had believed, a world where, maybe, elves and dwarves and dragons might have a home as well as photons, electrons, and protons, but a world that, on a personal level, had drawn down to sitting on the floor in my bedroom and living only in books. You see, I’d made the mistake of deciding to take a year between leaving school and going to university. I was going to write a book; I was going to wander and wonder and travel and get a job; I was going to get a girlfriend. That was what I was going to do. What I did was sit in my room.

I tried to write a book. The book meandered through a couple of hundred pages before boring itself to a stop. The job was tried, and left, the travels never started. And, rather unsurprisingly, no girls showed any interest in a tongue-tied, spot-ridden teenager whose idea of conversation was giving a lecture on Plato’s archetypes. Mind you, that would have been an improvement; as it was, I never actually managed to pluck up the courage to talk to any real, live girls.

There is, I suspect, a larger percentage of lifelong bachelors among philosophers than any other branch of academia (with the possible exception of mathematicians), for a very good reason: while there may not, strictly, be any more to life than ontology, this is not necessarily best brought up on a first date. Nor, indeed, my life as a werewolf (if you ever read this, Inari, I am sorry).

I was miserable, and doing nothing. My parents and brother were working all the hours they had, and some they had not, setting up the business. It was taken as read that I would not be joining this – I’d been the academic one all along – but then I, er, dropped out of university.

I’d had my year off. For me, it was a year out, a grey hole in memory, but such was the pallor it cast that when I eventually started on my degree – in physics and philosophy – I could not continue. The press of people, the shock of contact was all too much. First, I stopped going to lectures, wandering around the university. Then I stopped going to the university at all, and wandered the streets. Then I stopped even doing that, and stayed at home.

By the time my parents found out, it was too late. I’d missed too much and I was out. To buy off their anger and disappointment, I agreed to try for medical school, but in the meantime, rather than sit at home, I agreed to help with the business.

Which was how I found myself sitting in a van in Pinner. My father had gone in to repair a television. I sat outside, to be called upon should the TV need to be taken back to our workshop (the business had expanded from the kitchen table to premises on the North Circular Road).

The radio was playing. I wound down the window. A bush, thick with overgrowing honeysuckle, hung over the pavement. The Isley Brothers were playing on the radio, and as the scent of summer filled the van, the harmonies of “Summer Breeze”, and then the guitar solo that ends the song, spiralling into the sun, joined together, and the world, the world was still, listening. Everything, everything balanced upon that point; everything was listening and everything heard.

And I, I was happy, with the unreflective, natural joy that does not even realize its gladness until it is spent.

Amid the unrelenting misery of those years, those few minutes sitting in a van in, of all places, Pinner, still sparkle, offsetting the grey surrounding them.

It was a taste, a small taste no doubt but still a taste, of what I had decided I wanted: the direct experience of God. I wanted out of the Cave; I wanted to see and feel and hear clear, without the awful pig monkey of my own self-awareness sat upon my shoulder, whispering into my ear. I wanted the direct and truthful vision of, well, Truth. I wanted to know, not with the sort of recursive, reflective knowledge that comes of the endless stream of words running through my mind, but to know in my blood and bones, in my bowels and gut, in my heart; knowledge as sight.

By this time, I’d read enough to know what I was after: the mystical vision of God. The fire that burst upon Blaise Pascal.

The year of grace 1654,

Monday, 23 November…

From about half past ten at night until about half past midnight,

FIRE.

GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob

not of the philosophers and of the learned.

Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.

… Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.⁷⁵

But vision had not burst upon me like Pascal’s Godbomb – I had had intimations, sentiments, senses, but not more. I desired the mountains and the solitary wooded valleys, I wanted to sail to those strange islands, but the problem was simple: I lived in London. I lived in the city that had given birth to the modern world and there was a distinct lack of mountains, no solitary wooded valleys (unless you counted Highgate Wood), and definitely no strange islands.

There is, at the heart of the obscure and unspoken but deep feeling the English have for their country, a profound but understated nature mysticism. I was not English, but my reading had poured some of that nostalgic homelonging into my soul: the River and even the Wild Wood in The Wind in the Willows, Hampshire’s Watership Down, the Shropshire hills of the Lone Pine books and, most of all, the Shire. The natural mysticism of the English is nature mysticism. God walks amid meads and daffodils, on mountains green and amid pleasant pastures. That was the path I wanted to take – indeed, I’d been given a glimpse of what it brought during my vision from Pinner – but, but… The first fact of London’s geography is the river and the second the people: the overwhelming, never-ending mass of people. God wasn’t going to be found in sylvan groves – not when Metroland had extinguished the dells and copses of Middlesex and, in the end, consigned the county itself to solitary cricketing remembrance. But others through London’s long past had met God, face to face, amid the streaming, teeming hordes and, of these, the foremost was, undoubtedly, William Blake.

That judgement would come as a surprise to his contemporaries. They, even the few who appreciated his work, thought he was mad. It didn’t help that he was the son of a hosier. Blake’s formal education amounted to being taught to read and write – he left school at ten. His informal education had begun six years earlier, when God looked in through the window. The four-year-old William screamed. A few years later, a slightly older Blake saw in Peckham Rye “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars”.⁷⁶

There are people like this, who walk in vision. Whether we choose to accept or ignore the reality of those visions is up to us, but it depends, reasonably enough, on the life evidence of the person in question. Blake saw visions, and denounced the rich and the powerful, while remaining faithful to his wife and working hard to support them; and during this time he produced one of the greatest bodies of artistic and poetic work in English history: if this be the product of madness, let the visions come, say I. But these visions are not always benign and even Blake, who normally defined his very idea of himself by what he saw, yet might bewail the stamp they left upon him:

O why was I born with a different face?

Why was I not born like the rest of my race?⁷⁷

Others, still, are driven into madness or exile through what they see.

There was a man I visited, a couple of times, to repair his television. Let’s call him John. He lived in a bedsit in Edgware, one of the Metroland suburbs of London that were built during the 1930s as the underground lines ate into Middlesex, covering its fields and copses with rows and crescents of semi-detached, Tudor-style houses – I live in one myself. John rented a room in one of these, but it was not like other rooms. John was bearded – two decades before beards became hipster badges – and in his thirties. The walls of his room were covered with holy pictures and photographs, in particular images of the Sacred Heart (for those not raised upon Catholic devotions, those are the slightly weird images of Jesus with his heart exposed and red in the middle of his chest), and of Padre Pio. St Pio of Pietrelcina was a Capuchin monk, stigmatic, visionary, and miracle worker who lived in the Gargano Peninsula of Italy – the bit that sticks out like the spur of the Italian boot – from 1887 to 1968 and who has, judged according to a quick travelling count of pictures, photos, and statues on display in southern Italy, overtaken Jesus as God’s right-hand man and is poised on the shoulder of the Blessed Virgin Mary. If this all reads as just too shocking for Protestant sensibilities, honestly, don’t sweat it. It really doesn’t mean Catholics worship Mary, or Padre Pio; it’s more a quite calculated Mediterranean response to the supernatural economy: whom should I go to in order to present my petition? In this, it bears a thoroughgoing resemblance to the Italian national economy, particularly in the south, where connections, preferably familial but anything will do, are crucial for landing positions, jobs, and contracts. And no, this is not nearly as corrupt as it sounds, but a rational response to a state apparatus so creaking and incompetent that the only way to achieve an end is via the clear channels of obligation rather than the clogged arteries of governmental bureaucracy.

Entering John’s room was like walking into the mind of a religious obsessive, but the man himself was kind and thoughtful. He offered me tea as I worked on his television – always a sure way to win favour with a workman – and then, when I asked about the pictures, he began to talk; slowly, hesitantly at first, and then in torrents of words.

John had been a monk, a novice in the same order that Padre Pio belonged to, but when it came time for his final vows, he had been asked to leave the monastery. The monks did not want him. He saw too much, and too often, and he burned with it. Such a fire makes for fascinating conversations with visiting repairmen and an uncomfortable community. They cast him out. Now John worked shifts in a local factory making biscuits, and saw visions there, and held his tongue, lest he be cast out again. He would return each night alone to his room walled with images of the one man who might have been able to speak, as one who knows, to John. But Padre Pio was dead, and though sometimes John saw him too, the Capuchin spoke not to him, but wept with him, as they maintained their lonely suburban vigil of prayer.

It turned out that John, although no longer a monk, still kept monastic hours: rising at 3 a.m. to pray through the dark watches of the night for the world that slept unheeding around his solitary cell.

Was John mad? He saw visions, he heard voices – even his fellow monks had cast him out. Yet he was still able to work – just. There had been a previous couple of jobs where visions had broken upon him unexpectedly and left him helpless, gasping, and entirely unable to screw tops on bottles or check the cherry atop a cherry Bakewell. And he lived independently, unsupported by state or church. Was John mad? I did not think so, although meeting him, I began to realize the price, in loneliness and derision, the vision of God might demand.

William Blake paid much of that price too, but at least he was blessed with kindly and understanding parents. James and Catherine Blake were Dissenters, although of which sect is not known: they were buried in Bunhill Fields, the graveyard reserved for Nonconformists. The mortal remains of their most famous son would later join them there. Although the exact site of William’s body has been lost, a plaque shows roughly where he lies.

While Blake’s academic schooling ended when he was ten, James and Catherine Blake well knew their third child was no run-of-the-mill boy and they supported him as best they could: displaying his youthful drawings and poems on the walls in their house, enrolling him at the Henry Pars Drawing School on the Strand for four years, and even giving him an allowance to buy old prints. The dealers came to know this earnest, pugnacious, strange boy well, and did him deals when no other buyer was in prospect. When his studies at the Drawing School ended, the fourteen-year-old Blake, rather than entering one of the newly created art schools, was apprenticed to James Basire, engraver. His indenture is still kept at Stationers’ Hall, London.

There’s no reason to doubt the explanation Blake later gave a friend for this: the cost of coming under the tutelage of a professional artist being too high, Blake asked his father to secure him the cheaper post of apprentice engraver.

From Basire, Blake learned the patience and hard, physical skills necessary for the engraver: through the rest of his life, the knives and copper, the dyes and presses and rollers that were the engraver’s stock in trade were his constant companions.

Unschooled, Blake taught himself. Apprentices were expected to work twelve-hour days with only Sunday off, but the youth managed to immerse himself in words as well as pictures: echoes of and allusions to Shakespeare and Jonson, Milton and Spenser pepper his work. Blake was no fan of the newfangled use of oil in painting that had been pioneered by the likes of Rubens and Rembrandt, decrying its smudging of line and blurring of outline. Look at one of his engravings, say The Ancient of Days where Urizen, bending double, geometrizes the world into being. The figure of Urizen stands in sharp, engraved relief from the background. Thus is it in Blake’s art and mind: the particular, blazing in the light of his imaginative vision, highlighted against the general background – for everything that lives is holy, and all that lives in Blake’s art is holy, its life a gift of God’s secret fire.

Such a young man was not likely, after seven years’ apprenticeship, to simply knuckle down to earning a living as an engraver, turning the pictures of others into mass-produced prints for a newly wealthy middle class looking to ape its aristocratic models but without the financial means to buy original works of art. Prints were signals of aspiration and arrival, saying that those with taste and money to display them had moved well above the common mass of men, even if they were not (yet) among the titled. The young Blake applied to the Royal Academy Schools, submitting a drawing and testimonial. He was accepted, and began the six years of training. Tuition was free and in the evenings, so the students could support themselves by working during the day. The Royal Academy Schools had only been going for eleven years when Blake joined, but already the signal desire of its founders – to found a school of English art to match those of the past – was showing signs of success. Not only were notable artists being produced, but the English, who had heretofore shown not the slightest interest in daubs of paint stuck up on walls, were beginning to patronize galleries and exhibitions and, more importantly, to stick their hands into their wallets to pay for new ones.

While visiting relatives in Battersea, the young Blake met Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a market gardener and the woman who was to become his wife. Blake had already had one marriage proposal turned down but it was as well. It is unlikely that any other woman would have supported and encouraged, renewed and restored Blake as she did, even though, as evidenced by the “X” she inscribed in the marriage register, she came to him illiterate. Unlettered Catherine might have been, but she was not unintelligent, and she learned to print and colour her husband’s work. Upon his deathbed, Blake drew a final portrait of Catherine, telling his wife: “You have ever been an angel to me.” Would that we all might say the same as death nears: I think I will.

Although Blake was to become, in effect, an exile at home later in life, at this time he moved among and heard much of contemporary London thought. In particular, he accepted the idea, made fashionable by the passion for antiquities, that before and alongside Christianity, there was a body of ancient wisdom, passed on in the writings of such figures as Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, Paracelsus, and Jacob Boehme, that was almost another revelation. Indeed, during his apprenticeship, Blake had lived opposite Freemasons’ Hall – and the Masons believed themselves to be the inheritors of knowledge held from before the Flood.

Blake’s father died in 1784 and William moved with Catherine into the house next to his mother, at 27 Broad Street. With his fellow apprentice to James Basire, James Parker, Blake set up a print shop, the two men living with their wives above the shop. They had timed their venture well, for print-making was expanding rapidly in London, and business was good enough for William and Catherine to move round the corner, to 28 Poland Street, into a four-storey house with a basement.

This would have been the ideal time for Catherine to fall pregnant, but she never did. None of William’s siblings produced children, suggesting an inherited infertility; the thought of Blake as a father, playing with the angels playing with his firstborn, remains sadly unfulfilled. Of all his siblings he was closest to his young brother Robert, helping him also to enrol at the Royal Academy Schools. But Robert fell ill. William tended him through his last weeks, not leaving his side and barely sleeping for his final fortnight upon this earth, until “[a]t the last solemn moment, the visionary eyes beheld the released spirit ascend heavenward through the matter-of-fact ceiling ‘clapping its hands for joy’”.⁷⁸

But that was not the end of Blake’s intercourse with Robert for, thirteen years later, he wrote: “with his spirit I converse daily & hourly in the Spirit & see him in my remembrance in the regions of my Imagination. I hear his advice & even now write from his Dictate.”⁷⁹

His brother dead, Blake slept as one dead, for three days and three nights.

Blake was engraver, poet, and painter: three very different skills. He excelled at each; how could he combine them? In the end, his brother told him. His dead brother. William related that Robert Blake appeared to him in vision and imagination and told him what to do. Having mastered the process, Blake was able to print his own books on his own printing press, combining pictures and words through the medium of engraving. Blake kept the first works he completed by his new method with him throughout his life, printing, colouring, and binding them until his death, for in them he achieved a unity of thought and art and vision that he had been seeking all along.

The titles of these two little series are telling: “All Religions Are One” and “There is No Natural Religion”. Reading them, as a youth, I had the breadth of background to wish the first true while lacking the depth of education to understand what was meant by the latter. A child of immigrants, I wanted all religions to be one, particularly since I could claim a fair slice of them in my family’s past. Here was one of England’s great poets and artists saying what I hoped. I bought a poster of The Ancient of Days and stuck it on my wall.

Blake, with his new method of creating word and image, of inscribing word in metal as God carved the tablets of Law he gave to Moses, was becoming as much prophet as poet, at least in his mind. Railing against the dry, mechanistic world of Newton and the Deists, positing their God as a slightly more efficient engineer, setting the cogs in motion and then letting the clockwork run, Blake offered his visions and his images, bathed in spiritual light.

The body, in art and life, was the vehicle of that light and had once been unsullied and pure. Blake, in common with some of the radical sects of the time, saw in the prelapsarian nakedness of Adam and Eve the purity of mankind’s original, unfallen state and, never one to do things by halves, set about copying them. William and Catherine Blake had moved to Lambeth at the end of 1790, setting up home at 13 Hercules Buildings, Westminster Bridge. Hard though it is now to imagine, Lambeth was then a bucolic place, with open fields visible from their house, and the ponds, streams, and bogs of the original marsh the haunt of birds and little creatures. The Blakes were doing well enough financially to afford a house with a garden, front and back, and these gardens were a delight to them, although the neighbours seem to have been of different mind. While reciting passages from Paradise Lost, William and Catherine Blake, in order to get into the characters of Adam and Eve when they spoke in the poem, would sit in the garden of Hercules Buildings in prelapsarian dress: that is, completely naked.

As balance to the apparent innocence and naivety of this scene, think on Blake’s temper, and his prickly if uncertain sense of self-worth. He believed himself to be poet and prophet, an artist working at the highest level, but the only person who unreservedly agreed with this opinion was his wife – his originally illiterate wife. It took peculiar, almost maniacal levels of self-belief to keep working with so little public recognition, particularly since Blake’s early career had suggested that public acclaim might be forthcoming, only for it all to dribble and slide away throughout his life. Every new work or even his invention of relief printing, which he had been sure would make his fortune, came to naught. Blake could either give up and devote himself to commercial printing – he was a fine craftsman and could have amply supported himself and his wife this way – or continue in his lonely groove, etching out visions that no one wanted to see. He chose the latter, and maybe could have done no other. As a young man, he was on the fringe of various fashionable societies, where people as eminent as Henry Fuseli, Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Godwin met, talked, and dined; his direct speech first bought him entry and then excluded him from such company. Unanimity and accord was still the end point towards which polite conversation aimed, although as the eighteenth century neared its end such ideals were withering before the realization that there were permanent differences that could not be occluded, “parties” that could not be reconciled. At first, Blake must have been good value at table, but he soon tired of the badinage and raillery associated with these gatherings. In all likelihood, the literary great and good of the time probably divested themselves of a man of lower social class who insisted upon the truth of his opinions with a fierceness that brooked no debate.

That fierceness could take physical form. The most notorious episode occurred when the Blakes moved to Felpham in Sussex between 1800 and 1803. Blake was forty-three and his career was going nowhere, but he had found a patron and friend in the writer William Hayley, who suggested he move to Felpham, where Hayley had his home. The move went well initially, but Blake began to chafe under Hayley’s well-meaning but patronizing patronage, and resolved to return to London. The Blakes had still not left in August when a soldier, John Scolfield, came into the garden. The gardener had invited him, but Blake did not know this, and invited the dragoon to leave. When Scolfield refused, and words were exchanged, Blake, despite being the older and shorter man, physically ejected him from the garden, but the argument continued down the road to the Fox Inn, where what passed between Blake and Scolfield was witnessed by a number of people. Although indicative of Blake’s temper, and his fearlessness, the matter would normally have ended there. But Scolfield later charged Blake with damning the king of England and making seditious comments in favour of the French. With England at war with Napoleonic France, and in fear of invasion upon the very coast where the Blakes were living, this charge was serious: Blake was summoned to appear before court. Given the republican views espoused in Blake’s works and his initial joy at the French Revolution, the idea that Blake, in the heat of fury, might have called curses down upon the king or supported the enemies of the soldier in front of him doesn’t seem at all unlikely, but when the case came before court Blake’s lawyer, and his character witnesses, were sufficient to see him acquitted.

Blake saw visions of eternity, but he saw them clothed in the smoke and grime of London: he was a poet and prophet of the city and, after three years away, he had to return to it. He wrote, after his return: “I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoy’d, & that I may converse with my friends in Eternity, See Visions, Dream Dreams & prophecy & speak Parables…”⁸⁰

The Blakes moved into a house at 17 South Molton Street, Mayfair – it was not nearly as fancy an address then as it is now – and declined into a life of obscurity that flirted on the edges of the real, abject, not-enough-money-to-eat poverty that then afflicted Londoners who were down on their luck. Blake, an accomplished engraver, should have had enough work to keep them, particularly since there were no children to feed, but he complained: “Every Engraver turns away work … Yet no one brings work to me.”⁸¹ In part, this seems to be because Blake had acquired a reputation for being late with his engravings: visitors reported finding him lost, rapt in vision, when he should have been grinding copper plates or rolling out prints. While at Lambeth, the Blakes had been sufficiently wealthy to be worth robbing. In Mayfair, and for most of the rest of their lives, it would have been a desperate and disappointed thief who broke into their home, unless he had an unexpected appreciation for unsold copies of Blake’s “illuminated books”.

What is an artist to do when public and peers turn away? The obvious course is something different, and Blake did attempt that at various points. But whenever he tried to follow public taste, his efforts were rebuffed, the subsequent humiliation all the greater for the sense that he had sold his gifts to curry favour.

Change, then? Admit the truth espoused by the wallets of his contemporaries and give up? To us, now, with the benefit of a retrospect denied him, of course the answer is no. But we are talking about a lifetime of obscurity, of decade after decade of work done, and ignored, save by his faithful wife – and the value of her approbation must surely have gnawed at Blake. In “Auguries of Innocence”, the poem where prophecy and lyric come together into their most perfect alignment, Blake answers doubt with all the force at his command:

He who mocks the infant’s faith

Shall be mock’d in age and death.

He who shall teach the child to doubt

The rotting grave shall ne’er get out…

He who replies to words of doubt

Doth put the light of knowledge out…

A riddle, or the cricket’s cry,

Is to doubt a fit reply…

He who doubts from what he sees

Will ne’er believe, do what you please.

If the sun and moon should doubt,

They’d immediately go out.

This was a man who had seen, and who staked his life upon what he had seen. To his great good fortune, he had a wife who believed him, yet retained sufficient managerial nous to remind him of the need for work through these thin years by placing an empty plate upon the table when there was no food to fill it, thus keeping them from the clutches of Lady Poverty.

There is a hidden penalty in growing up in an immigrant household: your parents, having grown up on different stories, don’t know what to read you as a child. My parents were set upon the value of reading, but as to the content, once I could read for myself, they left me to it. Undirected, my magpie readings ranged widely but haphazardly through the classics of children’s literature: I loved The Wind in the Willows, but never read Winnie the Pooh. I took the Swiss Family Robinson for my desert-island prototype but never walked the strand with Robinson Crusoe. And I first visited Middle-earth when I was fourteen, and went through the wardrobe in my twenties. But there is a passage there, in The Silver Chair, which expresses what I had come to believe. Puddleglum, the Marshwiggle (and if you don’t know what a Marshwiggle is, the name itself is a clue to his nature: Eeyore without the joy), and the children, Eustace and Jill, have been captured by the Queen of the Underworld and are being held captive in her gloomy kingdom. The Queen lays an enchantment upon them, making them forget the land above whence they came, that they might think only her own shadow realm real. As the spell takes hold, Puddleglum thrusts his hand into the fire, seeking in pain some clearing of the mind fog, and then gives reason for his belief, despite all doubt, all pressure, and every despair.

“One word, Ma’am,” he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for the Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”⁸²

There is one night I remember from my childhood above all others. This was the 1970s, and the miners were on strike, and the power workers, and the dustmen. There was a three-day week, which sounds rather delightful to my adult self, and regular blackouts. It was cold, and clear, and I looked up, and saw. The city’s glare drowns the stars, but with the lights out, I could see and understand for the first time what Tolkien meant when he wrote: “And thus was the habitation of the Children of Ilúvatar established at the last in the Deeps of Time and amidst the innumerable stars.”⁸³ To my eyes, looking up at the normal London night sky, there weren’t many more than could be counted on fingers and toes.

The stars came out. Staring up, I longed for Nightfall, when a civilization that has known only day sees, once in a thousand thousand years, the night fall and the stars come out. I understood then: we light our cities to hide from the stars. Modern civilization, with all its triviality and idols, could not long survive if, every night, we looked up into the deep.

William Blake was not trivial. Although there were hours and days, indeed months, of despair, there were consolations beyond understanding in his life. Speaking of those peers who, held high in contemporary esteem, patronized him, Blake said, “They pity me, but ’tis they are the just objects of pity, I possess my visions and peace. They have bartered their birthright for a mess of pottage.”⁸⁴ What’s more, the spiritual vision that had sustained him in his youth, but had withdrawn somewhat as he entered adulthood, returned full force as he neared his fifties, and remained with him until the end of his life.

William Blake died on 12 August 1827. In his last years, he had been adopted by a group of young artists who revered him; such approbation meant a great deal to a man so long ignored. Another artist, John Linnell, had become friends with Blake in 1818 and worked hard to support him, providing him with commissions that supplied a small but steady income.

Blake’s health worsened from the spring of 1825. He nearly died in the winter of 1826/27, reporting that he had been “near the Gates of Death & have returned very weak & an Old Man feeble & tottering, but not in Spirit & Life not in The Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever”.⁸⁵

On the day of his death, Blake turned to the one person who had supported him through all the years of labour and trial. “Stay, Kate! keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait – for you have ever been an angel to me.”⁸⁶ The drawing done, Blake began to sing hymns, telling his weeping wife, “My beloved! they are not mine. No! they are not mine.”⁸⁷

A friend, present that day, wrote shortly afterwards that Blake:

died on Sunday Night at 6 Oclock in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ – Just before he died His Countenance became fair – His eyes brighten’d and He burst out in Singing of the things he Saw in Heaven.⁸⁸

By the account she later gave, not even death separated William from Catherine Blake. She maintained her husband’s business, consulting with him on all things, despite his temporary incapacity through death, a process made easier since Blake would come and visit her each day, and advise her on business. Catherine Blake died four years after her husband, calling out to him that she would be with him soon.

Blake had seen, and I believed.

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.⁸⁹