Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (22 page)

In the real world, Blake's political arch-antagonist was King George III. But could the same age that produced despondency in Blake have gradually restored the king's bright spirits? Recalling the British history I had read in preparation for my college entrance examinations—Pitt the Elder and the Younger; Admiral Nelson's glory and his undoing—I spend time trying to position Blake among his contemporaries. I realize this is not the place for a review of English history; with Blake as my guide, I must return at once to my son. But I want to set down just one episode from history. It was commonly held that the shock of losing the American colonies had driven King George insane; in his intrigu-ingly entitled book
America's Last King,
Erdman introduces a scene that foreshadowed a second bout of madness. On February 13,1801, while at prayer, the king abruptly rose from his knees and startled the church full of people by shouting the 95th Psalm at the top of his lungs, words that seemed well suited to his frenzied mind: “For forty years I loathed that generation and said ‘They are a people who err in heart, and they do not respond to my ways.’” As it happened, 1801 was indeed the fortieth year of George's reign. It is worth noting, Erdman writes, that George was identifying with Jehovah. Kneeling again, the king went back to prayer and prayed for a long time despite the cold stone floor and the icy winter air that set his bones to shaking.

Rumors of this incident reached Blake, and are reflected in additions he made at the time to
The Four Zoas,
which he revised frequently. King Urizen, who attempts to control all things with reason, is a representative figure in Blake's mythological world; and a hint of the mad King George shadows Blake's portrayal of Urizen:

What attracts me to Blake so powerfully is that he not only formulates his own unique mythological world based on a tradition that extends from Christianity to esoteric mysticism, he also empowers his mythology to develop on its own by infusing it with energy from his life and times. And the motion he achieves in this way allows him to drive his mythological world through and beyond his motifs of contemporary politics and international relations to a place beyond time. For me, these two facets of the same achievement account for Blake's magnetic power.

When I began reading the vast and richly articulated mythological world of Blake's Prophecies, I couldn't help wondering what force in particular could have driven him to produce this voluminous quantity of verse day after day. The booksellers had published
The French Revolution
only, and at that, only one of the seven volumes Blake had originally planned. The fact remains, Blake composed these massive poems in isolation, revision after revision, without orders from the bookshops or response from readers. And, with the censors in mind, he concealed his true meaning beneath complex layers of mythological invention. This was in consideration of George Ill's oppressive monarchy; at the same time, Blake's disapproval of the king drove him each day to hone and polish his verse to its utmost brilliance. Erdman draws on his reading of contemporary sources to re-create this process persuasively.

Erdman's disclosures leave me wondering whether Blake and his faithful, lifelong companion, Catherine, might not have engaged in biting criticism of the king's reign in their private moments together at home. That prospect leads me in turn to what feels like the discovery of a new truth about a famous episode that ended with Blake being brought to trial.

In 1800 Blake left London and spent time in a house by the ocean that he later characterized as “three years of sleep at the Atlantic seaside.” During that time, supported by the dilettante poet William Hayley, Blake painted miniature portraits and printed illuminations that were unrelated to his mythological world. Gradually his discontent grew, and toward the end of his stay at Felpham, Sussex, he was charged with a crime. Had the ensuing trial taken a wrong turn, he might well have been sentenced to death for treason. Based on the sworn deposition quoted in Erdman, the incident may be summarized as follows: One day, Blake discovered a soldier unknown to him wandering in his garden. The garden was a sacred place to Blake, for he had beheld wood sprites attending a funeral in the shadow of fallen leaves. The soldier symbolized to him the crudeness and cruel bestiality of this fallen world. Blake pushes the soldier out of his garden; the soldier seeks revenge by claiming that Blake cursed the king and his subjects in a loud voice and accuses him of plotting to overthrow the monarchy. Britain's highest court eventually finds Blake innocent. Even so, portions of the deposition struck me as likely to have occurred. As Blake and the soldier are shoving each other around, Catherine appears and eggs her husband on. She declares moreover her intention to join battle herself so long as a single drop of blood remains in her body. “My dear,” Blake exclaims, “surely you don't intend to fight against France?” “Of course not! I shall do whatever is in my power for Bonaparte's sake!”

Judging from Blake's sketches, Catherine was a large, buxom woman with plain features. Uneducated, she had signed their marriage certificate with an
X
; but in later years she acquired the skills she needed to assist Blake in inking and printing his engraving plates. It seems unlikely that Blake or Catherine used the crude language that appears in the soldier's testimony. On the other hand, the content of the language ascribed to them corresponds, to a curious degree, to the thinking they shared. Blake was terrified when he was shown the deposition, Erdman supposes, and likely felt obliged to bemuse the spies who seemed to be watching him by obscuring his criticism of King George with enigmatic metaphors. Erdman places the incident at the beginning of the transition to the long silence that Blake maintained until his later years.

What I imagine is that Blake and his wife did have the conversation the soldier remembered, but not in the coarse and vulgar language that he claims he heard. Napoleon was not yet emperor at the time, and Blake still viewed him as a liberator carrying the firebrand of the French Revolution. In his version of the future, the essence of his longing, the power of the revolution would extend to England and enable liberation there (not that it took Blake long to become disillusioned with Napoleon and account him a hateful oppressor).

Inasmuch as the High Court pronounced Blake innocent, there is no basis for believing the soldier's story; nevertheless, when I picture Blake reduced to creating work that was antithetical to his beliefs while relying for support on a gentleman poet of mediocre talent even as he critiqued the times in long Prophecies understood by fewer people than understood his paintings—Hayley ridiculed them as works of madness—and when I imagine that he might have possessed, even in his mid-forties, the physical strength to repel a soldier, and that, as the soldier insisted, his wife Catherine might have had recourse to violent language in expressing a radical purpose of mind, I feel deeply moved. In fact, it seems likely that Blake and Catherine were both silent as Blake struggled with the intruder; and that the language reported by the soldier had passed wordlessly between their souls—somehow, the vanquished soldier had managed to hear the voice of silence.

As I allowed my thoughts to circle this episode of violence, a scene from my childhood surfaced in my memory. I was taken there by the power of certain words Blake used repeatedly. The scene involved my father, who died during the war. I have written about my father's death numberless times, not explicitly perhaps but alluding unmistakably to him. Now for the first time, a scene I had forgotten came back to me, and in its vivid light I seemed to discover something new about my life: that my chagrin as a child at wartime authority, and my father's death, and my response to Japan's defeat at the end of the war were of a piece, a single context. My experience of things through Blake's mediation continues to feel mysterious.

Before and during the war years, my family was in the bark business. We bought up Mitsumata bark from neighboring farms and paid the farmers to soak it in water until it softened and then to peel away the rough outer layer and the pulpy yellow layer underneath with scrapers we supplied. When the underbark had been bleached white in the sun, we picked it up in small bundles, which we compressed into flattened oblong bales and delivered to the national mint, where the bark was used in making paper currency.

As a child, it appeared to me that my father revealed different aspects of himself as he worked at the various facets of his business with scarcely a word spoken. In negotiation with the farmers, partly as a function of my naive assumptions about him, he seemed to have the air of a patriarch. Sitting with his legs folded beneath him on the wooden floor as he bundled the strips of bark, peeling the remaining pulp away with his darkly gleaming knife, he appeared to be an artisan, the image that feels closest to me and my daily work with pen and paper. In the final stage of the process, as he operated the bark press in a dark corner of the warehouse alongside the prefectural highway, he struck me as a factory worker. Watching him contain and direct the violent force that issued from inside him, I had my most vivid sense of my father's physical body as an adult.

The bark press was an oak plank that was bevel-geared at both ends to vertical iron bars ten centimeters around. The handles that operated the gears were also iron bars that extended from both sides of the contraption. As the handles were pushed forward by two men standing on either side of the machine, the warehouse echoed with the crunching of the bark bales beneath the plank; when the brake was released and the handles were pulled back in the opposite direction, the gears that moved the plank clanked back to the top of the iron bars and the process began again:
crunch, crunch, crunch, clank, clanks clanks
When the bales of bark had been compressed to one fifth of their original bulk they were bound in tough bark cord and thudded heavily to the wooden flooring that was laid beneath the press only.

The press was installed at the rear of the warehouse in shadows as dark as the corner where my dog had whelped her pups. When I see words like “grinding mill” or “wheel” or “wine press” that have a negative connotation in Blake, I recall the crunching and clanking noises it made. Blake used “wheel” and “mill” to evoke the taxonomy of reason, with Urizen at its apex, that was responsible for mankind's delusions; “wine press” and “grinding mill,” as in the verses from
America
I quoted above, are symbols of labor that is not appropriate for mankind just expelled from Eden. Seeing the words on the page, I recalled an incident involving the bark press that occurred the year before my father died, and thought I could also see that it was somehow linked to the episode of violence in Blake's garden.

For the first time ever, the governor of the prefecture visited our village in the valley on an inspection tour. The gesture was probably intended as an encouragement to local cottage industry, part of the government's wartime campaign to increase production “on the home front.” My father must have received advance notice from the village office: jacketed in a brand-new smock of thick cotton stiff as a board and looking like a different person—now that I think of it, he was my current age—he sat waiting in a wooden chair with his back to the press in the darkness, a bale of processed bark glowing softly at his side, his head lowered pensively. Peering in at him in the pale light from where I stood outside at the edge of the road, I was already feeling uneasy.

Having stopped along the way at the lumberyard and the soy-sauce brewery downriver, the governor and his entourage came up the high road with our village headman and the police chief from the neighboring town leading the way. Just inside the warehouse everyone stopped to listen to our village headman describe for the governor's benefit the history of bark processing in our village. My mother was peering into the darkness from just under the eaves at the entrance, and even from where I stood at the rear of the group of adults I could see the reason for the worry I could read in her face and the tension in her body. The plan was undoubtedly to follow the headman's explanation with a demonstration: small bundles of Mitsumata were already loaded into the press. But the machine required two operators, one on each handle, and my father's partner had gone off to war ten days ago. A replacement had not been summoned. The governor's party waited, heads thrown back as they peered imperiously down their noses into the semidarkness where my father sat alone, his chin buried inside the stiff cotton collar of his smock, his eyes on the ground in front of him.

“You there!” a voice snapped at my father. It was the police chief, in an officious tone of voice he never used with anyone, certainly not with my father, not even with the livestock—it felt like a tone of voice that had never been heard in our valley in the forest. I shivered, and I felt my mother shivering at my side. But my father remained seated, and as he lowered his head again the police chief stepped toward him and delivered a reprimand: “You there! What are you waiting for?”

Slowly my father rose, threw his weight against the iron handle, tightened down on the crunching bark, and then cranked the oak plank clankingly back to the top of the press. He repeated the process, moving back and forth with the handle, staring into the space ahead of him as if he were not being observed. Forcing the horizontal axis down on one end only seemed to be bending the machine; if the iron bars came loose from the oak base in which they were seated, the crank handle would spin backward out of control and knock my father off his feet. I shuddered. Just then, my father released the handle and moved to the front of the machine on his way to the other side, approaching the governor and the others quietly. Standing at my side, my mother, who was ten years younger than my wife is today, made a mournful sound as though she were swallowing a scream in her throat. At the hip of the cotton jacket that gave my father the look of a foreign soldier in uniform, he wore a hatchet he used to trim the stiff cords that bound the bark; as he moved toward us quietly the hatchet handle was gripped in his hand, his elbow jutting from his body. But he walked past the adults as though lost in thought, seized hold of the other handle, and continued his work, with difficulty at first and then with powerful motions that became more fluid, flattening the crunching bark and reversing the handle with a clanking of gears. Presently the governor and his party filed off toward the chestnut collection station upriver, but my father continued to work, moving back and forth to operate the cranks on both sides of the machine until he had completed the baling.