Stranger from Paradise: a Biography of William Blake. - book review

In spite of the strength of such insights about both the poetry and designs, Bentley's readings of specific works are often hurried, appearing out of balance with the carefully documented biographical details. Though this problem is in part created by treating the works in very short sections, not only are the discussions fleeting, but the absence of critical perspective even suggests, at times, an adversarial relationship between the biographer's and the literary critic's approaches. By enigmatically challenging the reader to "winnow the facts from the evidence" in his preface, Bentley opens the biography with a disclaimer that it is "time to let the unmediated evidence for Blake's life speak for itself," admitting, nevertheless, that "evidence" is never "neutral" (xxii-xxiii). Bentley expresses irritation at biographical leaps made by Blake critics, such as the common assumption of a friendship between Mary Wollstonecraft and Blake leading to the conclusion--arrived at "more by critical ingenuity than by fact"--that Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion and "Mary" are associated with Wollstonecraft (111). Yet Bentley makes his own leaps, such as the reductive comparison between the British government's paranoia about Tom Paine's influence and "hysterical governments [that] later demonized Napoleon, Hitler, and Castro" (112). Nevertheless, when Bentley returns to his discussion of Blake's reaction to Paine, he shrewdly suggests that Blake "submerged his distrust of Paine's easy Deism in his admiration for Paine's courage and integrity as a political radical" (113).

The biography is thus on its surest footing when it holds to its intention to reveal the life through the poetry and designs. For instance, Bentley connects the Songs of Experience version of "Holy Thursday" to the Blake family's hosiery business, since St. James's Parish was a customer: "Some of the poor were unable or unwilling to raise their children, and every church had records of babies `Found by the Church' or `dropped in the Lane'" (87). In the yet more complicated case of Jerusalem, Bentley traces the way Blake interweaves into the poem's mythos biographically-based characters; Hand, for example, derives from the "pointing hand identifying editorial contributions in The Examiner," a composite of the three Hunt brothers who edited, printed and wrote such scathing criticism as Robert Hunt's anonymous review of the 1809 exhibition and descriptive catalogue: Blake, he writes, is "an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement, and, consequently, the notice and animadversion of the EXAMINER, in having been held up to public admiration by many esteemed amateurs and professors as a genius" (313, 333).

What led many of Blake's detractors to label him mad was the corporeality of his spiritual forms, as seen in the negative reviews of Night Thoughts (172-73). Of Blake's designs for The Grave, one review criticizes Blake for giving "real bodies" to "spirits," leading Blake to explain that such "connoisseurs and artists" would "do well to consider that the Venus, the Minerva, the Jupiter, the Apollo, which they admire in Greek statues, are all of them representations of spiritual existences of God's immortal, to the mortal perishing organ of sight; and yet they are embodied and organized in solid marble" (306). By contrast to these attacks, the Ancients gave strong support to Blake's expression of the visionary. John Varley, a painter and astrologer, was fascinated by Blake's "Visionary Heads," convinced that these portraits of Blake's ghostly visitors were connected to the "spirit world of astrology" (369). Nevertheless, even some of Blake's most devoted followers attributed to him an albeit idealized madness. The Baptist Minister, John Martin, proclaimed that if Blake is cracked, "his is a crack that lets in the Light" (176), and Edward Fitzgerald stated that Blake was "quite mad: but of a madness that was really the elements of great genius ill sorted: in fact a genius with a screw loose" (132-33). The Ancients, however, thought Blake "singularly sane," and Bentley agrees, claiming that "Blake viewed the world from the vantage point of Enthusiasm" (381, 383).