Two Cockney Visionaries
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Wftiting TWO COCKNEY VISIONARIES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL THE STRENGTH of Peter Ackroyd's Blake (Knopf, 399 pp., $35.00) lies in the biographer's ability to explain so much that had...
...The round orb suggests an eyeball scrutinizing us...
...In the 1760s the Scottish clergyman James Macpherson cooked up a "primitive" Celtic epic and...
...A surfeit of rationalism in the preceding generation had caused a backlash among his contemporaries, Ackroyd notes, and many of them favored the works of the scientist turned mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg (16881772), who preached that the veil between the material and spirit worlds is quite flimsy...
...He gets inside Blake's skin, sees with the artist's luminous, spirit-haunted eyes, and reasons with his blend of political and religious radicalism, craziness and mystic perception...
...Granted, in Blake we can glimpse facets of other writers' interpretations, from Alexander Gilchrist's 1863 portrait of the artist based on interviews with those who had known him, to Harold Bloom's "Apocalyptic Romantic...
...Thus...
...It expresses Blake's protest against the Newtonian universe ruled by physical law, where matter appears deified, spirit dismissed as superstition...
...Engraving is a tedious craft, requiring many careful steps before the plates are ready for the acid that etches the design ultimately printed on paper...
...Its popularity seems to lie in its aura of mystery, which remains undiminished reading after reading...
...and is] continually aware of [London's] symbolic existence through time...
...It is the Ratio...
...The artwork this helped to inspire seems to fascinate Ackroyd more than Blake's writings...
...The exposure of these hoaxers did not trouble Blake or their other admirers...
...Still, there are moments when one wonders whether the Cockney visionary of this book is actually Ackroyd himself...
...In other words, it is the artist's comment on the "watchmaker god" of 18th-century Rationalism who is indifferent to his creation save as a scientific experiment...
...those who otherwise ignore poetry usually know its opening stanza...
...The preoccupied being, with his oversized mechanical drawing tool, appears inhumanly detached...
...Ackroyd reminds us that Songs of Innocence, Proverbs of Hell...
...His rebellion was part of the first flowering of Romanticism...
...Chasidim, Theosophists, and Mennonites...
...So intense was Blake's visual memory, Ackroyd argues, that the apparitions he experienced were often external projections of images he had once studied: "The angels which he saw were, at least in part, the angels of his childhood reading...
...The prophets and saints sprang from his reminiscence of Biblical illustrations," while historical figures who sometimes conversed with him can be traced back to those tombs in Westminster Abbey...
...they were engraved onto the plates along with the illustrations...
...In fact, their forms were suggested to him by the carvings on tombs in Westminster Abbey that he was sent to draw as a teenager, during his apprenticeship as an engraver...
...There being always new things to comprehend and appreciate in the poet's illuminated books, Blake is far from the last word on the Londoner...
...and to a gothic medievalism representing a less materialistic past...
...In contrast to the Renaissance artist's compassionate deity imparting life to Adam, the Ancient seems a kind of cosmic technician...
...To further personalize his work, he usually hand-colored his prints and books of poems, "justifying his art against the general trend toward standardization and mechanical conformity in print-making or bookselling...
...For him it symbolized the triumph of imagination over matter...
...Most of us are unlikely to experience any such epiphany, yet can recognize its tone as being closer in spirit to the visions of the 12th-century Hildegard of Bingen or the 16th-century Jakob Bohme than to schizophrenic hallucinations...
...the biographer concludes, because of a mercurial temperament, but because his development as an innovator resembled the growing mastery of an art, where increasing skill allows ever more perfect execution...
...Even his archangels and deities are London-born...
...Words were for him objects carved out of metal," not mere counters to be moved around in clever patterns, but revelations like the tablets of the Law God gave to Moses...
...The work of this "Cockney visionary," born in a working-class district of the British capital, is "preoccupied by light and darkness in a city that is built in the shadows of money and power...
...He saw in them the spirit of British history and art— the essence of a past he understood as a period of human creativity not shackled to the mechanical rhythms of his era...
...But as we look closer there is something a bit repellent, almost menacing about Blake's version...
...That is not to say the poet's mind never changed...
...It merely showed that any imaginative person could absorb the wisdom of ancestors, and use their voices to prophesy to the current age...
...But it is also Urizen in Blake's own mythology, representing the horizon, [and] reason, whose emblem is the Eye...
...Ackroyd finds, sought the "authority of the past," and of Eternity, which he found in London...
...Though most of us couldn't sum up its meaning to save our lives, we intuit what Blake was getting at: the existence of a savage force in the world, inimical to our well-being...
...It is the Great Architect...
...The Tyger," the most widely read poem in English, continues to bum bright in textbooks and anthologies...
...How many Romantics has he impersonated—all of them having certain things in common: psychic gifts, rebellion against a philistine culture and its narrow understanding of reality, and above all, a penchant for seeing England in heroic terms...
...Well, ventriloquism has always been part of a certain kind of biography, and Ackroyd certainly does it with panache...
...Any slip along the way can ruin hours, perhaps days of precious effort...
...Yet the composite assembled from a plethora of sources definitely becomes Ackroyd's own Blake, who moves through a London at once realistic and mythological—a city the fiction writer/biographer has evoked before in novels like Chatterton, English Music, The House of Doctor Dee and, most recently, The Trial of Elizabeth Cree...
...Revulsion at the Industrial Revolution had turned the interests of many to ghost stories, to the emotional manifestations of religion expressed by such diverse groups as Methodists...
...Besides, when analyzing the engravings and the poetry, the author stands apart and gladly sits at Blake's feet, paying tribute to genius...
...It is the Moral Law, representing the 'dividing rule' and 'scales' of abstract rationalism...
...The best known, "Ancient of Days," depicts the Creator with flowing white beard and hair, kneeling in the sun and using a giant compass to draw the earth...
...The author makes his case convincingly, and his book's lavish plates illustrate borrowings from all the above sources, not to mention Fra Angelico, Greek sculpture and Renaissance painting...
...Blake's engravings are similarly tantalizing...
...the question of why, if God is "good," he permits, in the Scripture's words, evil to "prowl about, seeking someone to devour...
...It is the Druid...
...Nevertheless, this biography brings alive an artist whose powers of expression continue to move us...
...Blake (1757-1827) spent no time in Bedlam, though he spoke to angels and sat in his garden naked with his wife playing "Adam and Eve...
...They were truths written in imperishable substances...
...ACKROYD'S THEORY that Blake cannibalized the work of others (not always consciously) calls attention to an affinity he has with the poet...
...At the same time, Ackroyd acknowledges a strangeness in William Blake that passes logical explanation, and that the visionary poet and artist himself proclaimed in passages such as the following: "What it will be Questioned When the Sun rises do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty" (with the idiosyncratic capitalization and eschewing of punctuation magnifying the intended ecstatic effect...
...Writers & Wftiting TWO COCKNEY VISIONARIES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL THE STRENGTH of Peter Ackroyd's Blake (Knopf, 399 pp., $35.00) lies in the biographer's ability to explain so much that had seemed puzzling about his enigmatic subject...
...He has in previous works ventriloquized such voices as Thomas Chatterton, George Meredith, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde...
...It is the evil god of this world...
...he has a sense of energy and splendor, of ritual...
...His epics and lyrics envision streets where historical and mythical characters brush shoulders with ordinary 18th-century peddlers and shopwomen, chimney sweeps and students...
...The naves imprinted themselves on his psyche and became his "most sacred recollections...
...In the 169 years since his death, Blake's power to disturb and inspire people with the startling images of his writings and engravings has not diminished...
...In a sense, Ackroyd is a chameleon who takes on the psychic coloration of his subject...
...But Blake loved this labor...
...By the time one finishes his biography, one has learned a great deal about Blake's profession and how its technique affected the way he viewed the world...
...He tends, Ackroyd writes, "instinctively toward those great London forms, spectacle and melodrama, and is often preoccupied with the movement of crowds and assemblies...
...in Bristol, the teenage Thomas Chatter-ton pretended to have discovered ballads by a 15th-century monk that proved to be his own precocious work...
...At first, this might seem a fairly conventional image of God the Father, done in a manner reminiscent of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco...
...Milton, and Blake's other poetic volumes were not set in movable type...
...Blake himself...
...It is Satan," Ackroyd declares...
...The metropolis, in many ways as much the subject of Ackroyd's biography as the poet, was for Blake the picture of human degradation and misery, yet also of teeming, vigorous life—at once a vision of Hell and of the new Jerusalem rebuilt "in England's green and pleasant land...
...In a recent issue of the London Review of Books, Iain Sinclair called Ackroyd "an unparalleled literary vampire, a gutter and filleter of texts, a master of synthesis," who absorbs what he reads like a sponge, then uses the digested material to fashion his own mosaics...
...Personally, I would rather watch a talented writer impersonate his subject than a cynical one cut his betters down to size...
...His ideas continually evolved—not...
...It is Moses...
Vol. 79 • June 1996 • No. 3
