The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. By G.E. Bentley Jr. Yale. 522pp, £25 in UK.
William Blake. Edited by Robin Hamlyn and Michael Phillips. Tate Publishing. 301pp, £25 in UK.
The catalogue of the Tate Britain Blake exhibition earlier this year, edited by Hamlyn and Phillips, makes a handsome introduction to this astonishing artist. In the exhibition itself much was made of Blake's artistic roots in the Gothic but little of his spirituality. It was as if his extraordinary visions as poet and painter could be put down to madness and left at that. Rational materialism still rules the aesthetic across the water - witness the attempts to make Stanley Spencer into a kind of heightened social-realist whereas, in fact, he, too, is a disconcerting visionary in the mould of Blake.
Blake is part of an alternative, partly submerged and certainly subversive English tradition which goes back to John Bunyan. He and his wife Catherine belonged to a wonderful world of dissenting religious cults, of Ranters, Swedenborgians, Muggletonians, what the 18th century called Enthusiasm, anti-clerical, anti-royalist ("everyone is King and Priest in his own house").
G.E. Bentley's definitive, documentary-style biography covers all this and much else besides. It is written with a lucidity of language and thought which one associates with a particular and now disappearing generation of American scholarship. It does not promise new facts about the Blakes. What it does offer is richer detail of the life surrounding them, much of it uncovered over the past three decades.
To give one example. In 1809, Blake had a disastrously unsuccessful exhibition of paintings in his brother's shop on Broad Street (for which he wrote a violent but important Descriptive Catalogue. For nearly ten years after this, he and Catherine virtually disappear from public view ("I am hid"). This has always been a problem for Blake's biographers.
Bentley covers the gap with a lively recreation of the group of friends and acquaintances around the Blakes, like the young art-student, Seymour Kirkup, who left a vivid memoir of what it must have been like to be in Blake's company at the time.
G.E. Bentley has been at the centre of Blake studies for 50 years and is responsible for collecting primary materials connected to the poet in the remarkable volumes Blake Records. He is about to bring out a new edition which will include materials used in the writing of this book.
Blake was a child of London and wrote one of the great lyrics about the city. But it was a London where he could walk up Tottenham Court Road and out into the countryside of Willan's Farm with its "fields of Cows". As a child he saw "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars" as well as other angelic figures among the hay-makers, on Peckham Rye. When the Blakes spent an important sojourn away from their beloved Soho they crossed Westminster Bridge and into the village of Lambeth with the countryside stretching beyond. The "satanic" modernity of the city in Blake exists beside the opening of natural landscape with its promise of renewal.
The scale of his world may help us to understand why he is one of those rare artists who attempted to bring all existence into a single vision. To do so he invented his own mythology, populated by figures with outlandish names, Los, Enitharmon, Urizen, engaged in a cosmic struggle of good and evil across a series of epic books ending with the masterwork Jerusalem.
To enter this imagined universe is to enter something as hermetic as Finnegans Wake or Pound's Cantos. And like Joyce and Pound, Blake suffered a particular kind of failure, the failure to communicate everything. It is a failure which is inherent in much great art of the highest ambition. Those artists who have attempted this have frequently been dismissed by the rest of the world as unhinged.
For most readers, though, Blake is the poet of the "simple" lyrics of Songs of Innocence and Experience or a poem like "The Tyger". But Blake intended the Songs to be read, not as single, child-like lyrics but in opposition to their contraries, innocence to experience, the whole adding up to the contradiction which he perceived to be at the heart of existence.
His best known poem, "The Tyger" first hits us with an immediate, frontal completeness. We feel we have taken it all in. Only later do we find that it echoes with endless possibility in its "fearful symmetry". Coleridge, who of all contemporary poets had the best sense of Blake's range, said of this poem: "I am perplexed".
The final "church" of William and Catherine Blake consisted of two rooms where they laboured side by side in grime and poverty over the engraving stone.
We eat little, we drink less
This Earth holds not our happiness
Bentley is very good at showing how Blake the engraver married word and image into unity, virtually creating a new kind of book or, perhaps, bringing back the illuminated book of the past. In effect, he ended up writing and painting each book by hand, the work becoming a total artifact. The sheer physical effort was enormous. In a nice Blakean irony, at the heart of the etching process, each word, each drawing had to be written and sketched in reverse so that the printed page offered a "true" representation. Blake was a master of reversed writing. He even played tricks on his reader leaving the finished writing reversed so that the reader is obliged to reach for the mirror to read it.
Beside him throughout was Catherine, a remarkable, barely literate woman who printed beside him and prepared his colours. She knew exactly what he was about, perhaps the only one. They were apart for only six weeks in a marriage that lasted for 45 years. Bentley uses as an epigraph one of the remarks made by Catherine when she was asked what it was like to live with him. "I have very little of the company of Mr Blake," she answered, "he is always in Paradise."
Thomas Kilroy's new play, Blake, is about William and Catherine Blake.