One Long River of Song

by Brian Doyle

  Here are the names of some of his books: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; The Book of Los; The Everlasting Gospel; The Book of Thel; The Book of Urizen; The Song of Los; The Four Zoas; Songs of Innocence and of Experience shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul; Milton; and Jerusalem. These last two were among his last, and both were begun at Felpham, before the trial. It is quite possible that Blake was writing Milton on the morning of August 12, when he walked out into his garden and noticed Private John Scolfield, of His Majesty’s Royal Dragoons, standing at the garden gate, with a sneer upon his face.

  If you account it Wisdom when you are angry to be

  silent and

  Not to shew it, I do not account that Wisdom, but Folly.

  Every Man’s Wisdom is peculiar to his own Individuality.

  Between three o’clock, when the jury retired, and eight o’clock, when the foreman stood to announce the verdict, Blake probably remained seated. Possibly he read, drew, or painted. He apparently had an astonishing capacity for concentration, and many times he spent eight hours at a time writing or drawing. It may be in this case that he simply sat there in the room thinking. There were no rules then, as there are none now, about activity during intermissions in trials; while the jury is deliberating, the accused, if he or she is not physically restrained, may stand on his head, imitate a cricket, mutter poems, or stare abstractedly into space. But this interregnum ends at the moment that the jury files back into the courtroom and the foreman stands and William Blake stands and stretches himself to his full height (about 5 feet 5 inches), and waits to hear whether he is a free man or whether he will be deported to Australia or hung by the neck until he is dead.

  Every Night and every Morn

  Some to Misery are Born.

  Every Morn and every Night

  Some are Born to sweet delight.

  Some are Born to sweet delight,

  Some are Born to Endless Night.

  The courtroom hushes; Blake’s eyes are nearly popping out of his head as the foreman forms the words

  Not

  and then with a rush as the crowd begins to roar

  Guilty

  and the courtroom explodes.

  “In defiance of all decency,” the Sussex Weekly Advertiser reported, the court was “thrown into an uproar by noisy exultations” and Blake was rushed out of the Guildhall in a roaring tide of townspeople. Hayley, ecstatic at the verdict, paused to drip some sarcasm on the judge, who he thought “bitterly prejudiced” against Blake: “I congratulate your Grace,” said Hayley, “that after having been wearied by the condemnation of sorry Vagrants, you have at last had the gratification of seeing an honest man honorably delivered from an infamous persecution. Mr. Blake is a pacific, industrious, & deserving artist.”

  “I Know nothing of Him,” snapped the Duke.

  “True, my Lord, your Grace can know Nothing of Him,” said Hayley, driving home the lance; “& I have therefore given you this Information: I wish your Grace a good Night.” And off he went with Blake to dinner at the home of a mutual friend, Mrs. Poole.

  I think about that dinner once in a while—what they ate, what Blake thought, who got drunk. Probably Hayley pontificated, as he did that well, and he had, after all, paid Blake’s legal fees. I suppose Mrs. Poole smiled happily on her friend Blake, released from the shadow of the noose. And Billy Blake, Billy Blake—did he drink too much? Was he merry? Or did he sit there like a rock in a stream and think about his darling Kate, sick in bed in their new flat in London, and in his mind take her in his arms and tell her Kate, we are free, free, free, Kate, free, and the world will never again bind us and we will forge ahead and make our art and start over and earn our bread and worship the Lord and be free free free free free?

  A Robin Red breast in a Cage

  Puts all Heaven in a Rage.

  A dove house fill’d with doves & Pigeons

  Shudders Hell through all its regions.

  William Blake, poet and printer, disappears almost completely from the public record after his trial. From 1804 through 1809 he scrambled without much success to make a decent living as an engraver. In 1809 he held a one-man show of his paintings at his brother’s house. The show failed miserably, and its only reviewer, Robert Hunt of The Examiner magazine, called Blake “an unfortunate lunatic.” In 1812 he exhibited four paintings at the Water Colour Society. In 1816 he was listed in A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authours of Great Britain and Ireland, although the entry made him out to be an eccentric. From 1808 to 1819, Blake sold perhaps a couple of dozen engravings per year. He told an art dealer that he and Catherine made do for many years on an income of about a guinea a week; the equivalent, today, of a couple living for seven days on about twenty dollars. He kept working, though—“I never Stop,” he told one friend—and the years slipped by until it was 1827 and he was suddenly seventy years old, “being only bones & sinews, All strings & bobbins like a Weaver’s Loom.”

  Trembling I sit day & night, my friends are

  astonished at me,

  Yet they forgive my wanderings. I rest not

  from my great task!

  I have been writing this essay for more than a year now. I have been taking notes for it for five years. Over the course of those years I have asked myself, many times, why I’m doing this. A careful account of the trial for sedition of the poet and printer William Blake, in the year 1804, on a fitfully wet day in January, in a wooden room by the sea—why?

  Answering this question is like trying to answer the very good question, Why do you write? I don’t know why I write, exactly. Catharsis, the itch to make something shapely and permanent, the attempt to stare God in the eye, the attempt to connect deeply to other men and women, because I can’t help myself, because there is something elevating in art, because I feel myself at my best when I am writing well. Because because because. Because this essay is my way of befriending and comprehending Billy Blake, whom I greatly admire in absentia.

  Why do you admire him so?

  Because he told the truth, because he shoved an insolent leering soldier down the road and stuffed him through a doorway, because he saw angels and saints and talked openly about his visions. Because he published his work himself. Because he was a tender and difficult and solicitous friend. Because he took great pride in his engraving and worked endlessly on plates to make them perfect. Because when he knew he was going to die he lay in his bed singing softly. Because he smiled at the deft poetry of the message when his wife served him an empty plate at dinner to remind him that they were starving. Because he wasn’t satisfied with extant mythology and so built a vast grand impenetrable one of his own. Because in all the things he wrote he never mentioned his weight, which was ample, or his height, which was not. Because he single-handedly rescued the ampersand—&—from oblivion. Because in the few drawings of him he is alert, intent, attentive. Because even when his work was dictated whole to him by angels and prophets, he edited heavily. Because he and his wife used to sit naked in their garden and recite passages from Paradise Lost. Because when he was asked to recite his poems at parties he got up and removed his coat and sang his lyrics aloud while dancing around the room, which is why he was subsequently not invited to parties anymore. Because he taught his wife, a farmer’s daughter, to read. Because he rose first every morning and laid the fire and made tea for her. Because he was endlessly exuberant. Because once at a dinner party he suddenly said to the child next to him, “May God make this world as beautiful to you as it has been to me,” a sentence she remembered the rest of her life. Because he held his opinions firmly. Because his wife said she never saw his hands still unless he was asleep. Because to walk with him “was like walking on air and talking with the Prophet Isaiah,” said his young friend George Richmond. Because he took great care to leave no debt at his death. Because he wrote and then threw away “six or seven epic poems as long as Homer, and twenty tragedies as long as Macbeth,” judging them not worthy of publication or engravin
g. Because in the ringing fury of his lines there is also great mercy. Because even when he was sick unto death he engraved a little business card for his old friend George Cumberland. Because he could not stop painting and died with his pencil in his hand. Because he bought a new pencil two days before he died. Because the very last thing he drew was his wife’s face.

  It is this last detail that catches my heart.

  But thou O Lord

  Do with me as thou wilt!

  for I am nothing,

  & vanity.

  I have scoured many books for accounts of Blake’s last day. I’m not sure why. We all die in the end, and the grace or gracelessness with which we leave is meat only for the morbid. Yet I want to know how Billy stepped into the next room. I want to know how firmly he held his opinions in the face of annihilation. I want to know him in the last moments that he wore a body like mine, in the last moments that he saw crows, spoons, apples, angels. I want to hear his heart.

  He died on a Sunday in late summer. By this time he was completely bedridden, “his ankles frightfully swelled, his chest disordered, old age striding on,” noted a friend. Blake himself knew that he had not long to live. “Dear Cumberland,” he had scribbled in April, “I have been very near the Gates of Death & have returned very weak & an Old Man feeble & tottering, but not in Spirit & Life, not in The Real Man, The Imagination, which Liveth for Ever. In that I am stronger & stronger as this Foolish Body decays.…”

  On the morning of August 12—exactly twenty-three years, to the day, after he met Private John Scolfield, of His Majesty’s Royal Dragoons—Blake awoke early and painted for a couple of hours. Then, according to his wife, he said “I have done all I can” and dropped the painting on the floor. She sat down at his bedside.

  “Kate, stay as you are. You have been an angel to me, I will draw you,” he said.

  When the drawing was finished he signed it “Mrs. Blake drawn by Blake,” and wrote her name in large letters under his signature.

  Then he began to sing.

  He sang “Hallelujahs & songs of joy and triumph, with true exstatic energy,” for the rest of the afternoon—hymns and then, for hours, his own poems. At about six o’clock, he told Catherine that he was going to that country that all his life he had wished to see, and that he would always be about her.

  “Then,” wrote his friend Richmond (no relation to the Duke), who was at his bedside, “his Countenance became fair, His eyes Brighten’d, & He burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven,” and he died.

  Have pity upon me, have pity upon me,

  O ye my friends;

  For the hand of God hath touched me.

  After a minute Richmond reached over and closed his eyes—“to keep the visions in.” Richmond then left. As he paused in the door, he looked back. The last thing he saw, he wrote later, was Catherine kissing William’s hands.

  Catherine died four years later. She often talked to her husband as if he was in the room, and in her last hours called continually to him, to say she was coming and would not be long from his side.

  It is said that she died with one of his pencils in her hand.

  On All Souls Day

  All my life, when I thought about death coming for me,

  I wondered how he would come, and what costumes he

  Would wear (cancer coat? stroke suits?), and if I would

  Be a weenie, whining all the way to the end, or die wry,

  Smiling a bit and offering dry and entertaining remarks,

  But now I think I know myself well enough to know I’ll

  Be seriously interested in the whole thing. Can you chat

  with death, is that possible? Can you, you know, natter?

  I am not kidding. Every death is a whole new way to die.

  My stroke will be unlike Robert Louis Stevenson’s—not

  Just because he was younger or in Samoa or a lot thinner,

  But because I am made of love and song and amusement

  In ways he was not and could not know. My death is a new

  Country not just for me but for my death. I feel a passing

  Empathy for my death—it gets only the one shot at doing

  What it is designed to do. We are weirdly sort of partners.

  The poor bedraggled thing, waiting all these dozing years!

  I suppose I used to wonder if you could dicker and outwit

  Your death, but now only hope I will have a chance to dig

  It, you know what I mean? I don’t mean this in a macabre

  Way. It’s more like your death is a part of your life, right?

  I don’t want to live companionably with it for a long time,

  But it will be absorbing to get to know it a little before we

  Wander off into the wilderness. As soon as I die my death

  Does too, but who knows what happens to who I was? It’s

  Like this: I might get a whole new gig, as an otter or a bee,

  Or a glowering angel assigned to protect a Uruguayan boy,

  But old death expires like a yellowed coupon you discover

  In a coat you last wore to church to pray, on All Souls Day.

  Two Anesthesiologists

  I had occasion recently to spend half an hour listening to two anesthesiologists, which was unnerving, because I was supine and scared and about to endure their subtle craft, but fascinating, too, because they were seasoned and chatty and patently delighted to be quizzed about their work. I asked them all sorts of things, about their training and interests and nativities and hobbies and children and favorite music and writers; one of the two men, interestingly, was totally into old Roman writers such as Suetonius and Tacitus and Quintus Curtius Rufus, and he was startled and pleased when I told him I loved Plutarch and Edward Gibbon, and annually dipped back into both, to swim happily in Gibbon’s endless sentences and in Plutarch’s unreal ability to sketch a man’s character in a brief anecdote. But what really got them going, so much so that we were all nearly late for the matter at hand, was my question about what last remarks patients mumbled as the anesthetics took hold. It seemed to me that perhaps those remarks would reveal something revelatory of the patients’ priorities and state of mind, and this turned out to be true. They told me that they’d noticed gender differences, for example that men would often joke until the very second that they fell unconscious, probably as a defense against fear, while women were often very concerned about being properly covered with the blankets until the last possible second. In my experience, said one anesthesiologist, children tend not to cry or whimper, but to just stare at me in abject terror and fearful trust. A child on the table always rattles me. Always.

  Many men and women, said the other anesthesiologist, murmur something at the end about how if they do not emerge from the operation safely, could we please tell their loved ones how much they were loved? Please? And we always say yes we will, and we would, too, if it ever came to that, which it doesn’t. We are good at what we do, very careful indeed, very attentive, ferociously attentive, you might say. But then, he said, starting to laugh, yes, there are some hilarious and really odd things that people murmur at the very end. One man whom I thought was out cold suddenly opened his eyes and said Tell her the blue colander is under the sink. Another guy said, in the very last second, I didn’t do it, I tell you I didn’t. One woman said, so quietly that I could barely make it out, Why? Why? Just tell me why. But you can easily read too much into it, said the other anesthesiologist. I mean, the vast majority of what people say as they fade out is stuff like Can you scratch my foot? and Can I have another pillow? and Where are my car keys?, that sort of thing. But sometimes they will say things that make you realize we are all little kids when it comes to surgery. Believe me, even doctors and nurses and anesthesiologists are little kids when they are on the table. I have heard people whisper to their moms, and ask Jesus to hold their hands, and ask me to hold their hands, and ask me to place photographs of their kids over their hearts during the pro
cedure, which we cannot do, though I totally understand why you’d want your kids’ faces over your heart if you were afraid you were fading out of the world forever.

  We talked about how they’d handled being anesthetized themselves during small surgical procedures, and about how each and every patient was slightly different in the amount and type of anesthetic necessary, which is amazing when you think about it, how we can be so similar as regards anatomy and physiology but so individual at the same time. And then it was time for them to get to work on me, which they did. And I asked them afterward what, if anything, I had said at the very end, as I was fading out, and they grinned and said you were one of the ones who mumbled about your wife and kids, but you didn’t ask us to put their photographs on your chest.

  Joey

  A while ago I got sick.

  It was a thorough and major sick.

  Lost use of the old hands and feet,

  Which was, as you can imagine, weird.

  My kids called the sickness The Thing.

  The Thing went on for months and months.

  I could tell you lots of stories about The Thing,

  But there’s only one story that I want to tell you:

  Every morning my son got up early to help me

  Put my socks on. I would sit on the back stairs

  In the dark and he would wrestle my socks on

  And neither of us would say any words and I

  Still can’t think of anything cooler than that.