Within the early autumn of 1800, an odd couple confirmed up in Felpham, a small village on England’s West Sussex coast: the printer, artist, poet and general-purpose visionary William Blake (1757-1827), with spiky pink hair and eyes burning like that of the tiger he conjured in a poem, and Catherine (“Kate”) Blake, his spouse and intrepid assistant, at all times able to take a dip within the sea when the chance arose. “It was a shock for the villagers” once they arrived, notes the biographer and critic Philip Hoare in William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, a gloriously unclassifiable e book, “like discovering new age hippies had moved in in a single day”.
The Blakes, the soot of London nonetheless clinging to their garments, had by no means seen an ocean earlier than. Within the salty air, the tangy water, they tasted a brand new form of freedom that, Hoare argues, manifested itself of their work, too. In Blake’s hallucinatory poem Milton, written and illustrated in Felpham, the poet of Paradise Misplaced descends from the skies to save lots of a world overshadowed by “darkish Satanic mills”, beholden to the legal guidelines of mechanics, not these of the spirit. In one in all his illustrations, Blake drew himself strolling exterior his Felpham cottage whereas an angel hovered over him within the timber, trying, Hoare quips, “like a blown-in plastic bag”.
Tossed ashore
Blake later referred to the three years he spent in Felpham as his “slumber on the banks of the ocean”. However he was actually conscious whereas he was there: “My Eyes extra & extra / Like a Sea with out shore / Proceed Increasing”, he wrote to a buddy. Hoare, an ocean fanatic and ferocious swimmer, who has devoted a number of books to the subject, together with the prize-winning Leviathan or, The Whale (2009), is aware of exactly what Blake was speaking about. People are “what the ocean leaves behind”, Hoare states—underwater particles tossed ashore to wrestle and decay. However in our creativeness, in poems and work, we will return to what we have now misplaced. The androgynous figures in Blake’s prints—Michelangelo-esque sculptures free of the stone, pretty our bodies flying, mendacity, writhing, their lengthy limbs stretched, unfold or bent—drift by way of a fantastical world as fluid as the ocean. There are, after all, stunted types of life right here, too: Blake’s Newton (round 1795-1805) portrays the discoverer of common gravity, the embodiment of Satanic purpose, sitting on a mossy rock on the backside of the ocean, compass in hand, nonetheless drawing his geometric figures.
Different Blake works are much less poignant than horrifying. Within the miniature The Ghost of a Flea (round 1819-20), for instance, a scaly, reptilian factor ambles away, holding a cup crammed with blood. Blake’s imaginings are, claims Hoare, visceral experiences, motion work of types, and they don’t even want color for impact. Take Illustrations of the Guide of Job (1825), the place the phrases wreathed round Blake’s depictions of Job’s trials (during which Blake recognised his personal) leap off the web page as in the event that they have been, in Hoare’s impressed analogy, the inter-titles in a silent film.
‘Actual and peculiar’ characters
William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love is Hoare’s model of a Blake print, a meandering, undulating reverie conjuring a procession of characters each actual and peculiar: lovers of Blake and lovers of the ocean; the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins; the novelist-seafarer Herman Melville; the artist-photographer Paul Nash; the writer-philosopher Iris Murdoch; the archaeologist and soldier T.E. Lawrence. These are Hoare’s sea monsters, queer, amphibious rebels towards dry orthodoxy, set on this planet to remind us that guidelines are there to be damaged. Hoare admits to a specific infatuation with the writer-activist Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), whose elongated physique might have been drawn by Blake—ethereal and pale to the purpose of abstraction whereas nonetheless unsettlingly feral: “an egret able to strike”, a grass snake, with fingers formed like a crab’s claws. Milton was Blake’s guardian angel; the “ivory-armed” Cunard is Hoare’s. He hung her portrait on a wall of his London house.
Some readers would possibly give up earlier than the sheer quantity of element Hoare lobs at them. Like Melville’s Ishmael, he has swum by way of libraries, and he lets you understand about it: you’ll hear about each outrageous costume Lawrence ever donned, or the variety of bracelets Cunard wore (12). However that’s completely OK: William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love is a e book to dive into and get misplaced in; you would possibly discover a new world if you are at it. If Blake was, as Hoare has it, the “Willy Wonka of artwork”, Hoare is our Charlie Bucket of criticism. To me, one of the crucial highly effective moments comes on the finish of the e book when, on a darkish, overcast day in Cambridge, a librarian on the Fitzwilliam Museum palms Hoare his hero’s steel-rimmed glasses, 3.50 dioptres on the left, 3.25 on the fitting, with handy loops on the ends. As Hoare lifts Blake’s specs as much as his eyes, the solar bursts by way of the window, as if to verify what his e book has already confirmed: “I’m seeing what he might see.”
• Philip Hoare, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, printed 10 April by Fourth Property, 304pp, 16 pages of color illustrations, £22 (hb)
