Was William Blake, long regarded as one of the greatest English artists and poets, actually Irish? The idea may come as a shock to those who sing Blake’s words to what has become England’s alternative national anthem, Jerusalem. But evidence unearthed for my new book, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, suggests there may be some truth in the idea, promoted by WB Yeats, that Blake was in fact the son of a Dubliner.
Scholars have argued until now that Yeats’s claim came entirely out of his conviction that a genius as visionary as Blake (who customarily saw angels in trees) had to be Irish; that this was just another reflection of the Celtic Twilight in Yeats’s monocled eye. Yet a new look at the story suggests an alternative possibility.
Blake was long dead and largely forgotten when Yeats published, for the first time, Blake’s collected poems in 1893. The introduction, co-written with Edward John Ellis (a Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet whose wife had already banned Yeats from their house because she suspected he was casting spells on her husband), relayed the tale told by a relative of Blake’s, one Dr Charles Carter Blake.
Apparently one John O’Neil got into financial and political “difficulties”, “and escaped both by marrying a woman named Ellen Blake, who kept a shebeen at Rathmines, Dublin”. To elude his pursuers, O’Neil took her name; as did his illegitimate son (by another woman), now named James Blake. It was this Blake who, supposedly, settled in London, trading as a hosier in Soho, siring five children – among them, William Blake. Carter Blake knew this story, so he told Yeats, because another of O’Neil’s sons, by Ellen Blake, had settled in Malaga, Spain, where he worked in the wine trade.
I was as suspicious as others have been of this story – not least because Carter Blake, an anthropologist and paleontologist, also claimed to be able to astrally project his body. Yet I discovered, to my surprise, that at least that part of Carter Blake’s claims was true. A company with Galway roots, Browne & Blake, operated in Malaga in the 1750s; one of the family became a famous general, Joaquín Blake y Joyes, who had an Irish mother, Inés Joyes y Brown, herself a well-known writer.
The Prado in Madrid still preserves a proud portrait of the admiral. It’s uncanny: with his strong head, blue eyes and strands of red hair – elements that William Blake, his exact contemporary (both born in 1757), shared – the resemblance is as striking as it is suggestive.
Back in 1893, Yeats and Ellis were confident. “The very manner of Blake’s writing has an Irish flavour,” they declared. They did not disclose that their informant, Carter Blake, was a fellow Theosophist and member of the occult Order of the Golden Dawn. Nor did they mention that Carter Blake lived just around the corner from Yeats in Bloomsbury, an area notorious for its bohemians and alternative beliefs.
Truth be told, Carter Blake was a decidedly dodgy character, at least to modern eyes. He espoused eugenicist and racist ideas that would certainly not have endeared him to his putative ancestor: William Blake was vehemently opposed to the slave trade, and discrimination of any kind. Carter Blake would meet a sad end. The last we hear of him in the historical record is a letter written on his behalf by his 13-year-old daughter, begging for money for the family, for whom her sick father could no longer provide.
As I read Yeats’s own copy of his book in the National Library of Ireland, I thought of James Joyce reading it too, maybe even in the same seat. And I thought of the two writers meeting outside in Kildare Street, and how they’d gone together to a local cafe where Joyce, whose fabulous arrogance exceeded even Yeats’s, declared to the older poet that he had met himself too late for Joyce to have any effect on Yeats’s career.
But this tale hides a remarkable literary legacy. Whether or not Blake was of Irish descent doesn’t really matter: Joyce believed that he was. And so Blake’s radical art became the specific inspiration behind one of the most radical texts of the 20th century.
In March 1912, self-exiled to Trieste, Joyce delivered a lecture on Blake to his students in the local college. Sadly, the first and last pages are missing; we will never know what they contained. But in those that remain Joyce spoke admiringly of how William [Blake] would wake first and light the fire and boil the kettle ready for his sleeping wife Catherine, known as Kate; rising from his bed after visionary ecstasy, as Joyce wrote, amazed that Blake’s visions should have appeared in their poor London room, and no other incense greeted their coming than the smell of East Indian tea and eggs fried in lard.
Anyone familiar with Ulysses – which Joyce was already beginning to write – will recognise this scene. It was a direct and sensual augury of Leopold Bloom preparing breakfast for his wife in their Dublin house, cooking offal for his dozing Molly. But it was also a vivid echo of Joyce’s relationship with Galway-born Nora Barnacle: Kate and Nora, both lacking formal education, both passionately vital women whose influence on their partners’ art was essential and tangible. When Joyce evoked William and Kate, he was also evoking himself and Nora. “Isn’t this perhaps the first time in the history of the world that the Eternal spoke through the mouth of the humble?” he asked his students, who may or may not have been amazed.
[ Chris Fitzpatrick: I re-read Ulysses after 45 years. It did not go wellOpens in new window ]
Blake’s influence on Joyce ran deep. As Richard Ellman, Joyce’s biographer, points out, Ulysses’s most strangely visionary sequence, Circe, directly riffs on Blakean themes, with Stephen Dedalus quoting Blake as he encounters two British soldiers, Privates Carr and Compton, who accuse him of insulting their monarch, “I’ll wring the neck of any bugger says a word against my f**king king”. It was a kind of revenge in Blake’s name, a re-enactment of an infamous episode in 1804 when the artist-poet was threatened with a trumped-up charge of uttering traitorous words when he’d frogmarched out a drunken grenadier he’d found trespassing in his garden.
Joyce delights in taking up Blake’s literal revenge, as Dedalus turns Blake’s bitter stab at “Old England” in his Auguries of Innocence into “old Ireland”, hurling the words at the imperialist troopers like a grenade,
The harlot’s cry from street to street
Shall weave old Ireland’s windingsheet
Joyce even goes on to reprise the scenario in Finnegans Wake, in which a pair of British soldiers in Phoenix Park are portrayed as buggers ready to drop their pantaloons for one another.
In London Blake had associated with revolutionaries who had close links to the United Irishmen during the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Two centuries later, that notional Irishness would prompt a psychological study of Blake, written by WP Witcutt in 1946, which claimed that the poet-artist ought rightly to have been named Liam O’Neil – the image of a London Irishman given away by “his flame-like golden-red hair on end, standing up all over his head”. You might even see this William-Liam-O’Neil-Blake take his place as a hot-tempered, “strong-limbed, copper-haired Irish boy”, in a punkish sketch drawn by Kate Blake in a portrait of her lover as a young man. He could have been Johnny Rotten or Ziggy Stardust – both inventions of part-Irish artists.
[ Euler’s Identity: James Joyce and the most beautiful equation in mathematicsOpens in new window ]
I admit that, as with Yeats, the part Irish in me romanticises this tale. And yet I did find a remarkable final clue in an article on Blake by Courtney McGrail in the Irish Catholic in 2015, quoting the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1854, which confidently asserted that “the engraver of high but wild genius” was born in Ireland.
Maybe Yeats wasn’t so deluded after all. The past is still happening, reinventing itself. As I came to finish my book, I was finally given access to a precious bible: William Blake’s Notebook, now carefully preserved in the British Library, where I was granted a morning with it, under unarmed guard.
There was his famous Tyger, eyes burning bright. There were angels turning into trees, and God creating Adam, Satan’s viperous coils already entwined his leg. And there was a delicate sketch of a woman perched on the edge of a bed, rolling her stockings up her shapely legs, while her partner lies back in what looks like post-coital bliss.
It was the very image of Leopold and Molly Bloom. But it was also a deeply touching memory of William and Kate, on a lazy sunny morning, lost in each other’s intimacy.
Philip Hoare’s William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love is published by 4th Estate.
