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Reflections on middlebrowism and the genius of William Blake

by James Graham


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'You can see what I see, if you choose'

Reflections on middlebrowism and the genius of William Blake

Sometime last century in America, I got into quite a lengthy discussion about culture with a group of people I had happened to run into in my travels. I think I can best describe them as fully committed middlebrows. They shunned, for example, all but the very lightest of classical music. 'There aren't any good tunes in it', one said. Well, well. Verdi's Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves? I've heard that a hundred times and it never palls. It's a wonderful tune. At the heavier end of the classical music spectrum, the 11th Symphony of Shostakovich lives and breathes melody, subtle and changing, sweet and brash. Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra is lavish with both rhythm and melody. No good tunes: you might as well say there are no nice flowers at the Chelsea Flower Show.

Their middlebrow mentality seemed more than just a habit of a lifetime; it seemed a conscious thing with them. They didn't actually call themselves middlebrows, but they worked hard at being just that. They had inventories of highbrow works of art that they regarded as too heavy, shows on in New York that they wouldn't go see. They all loved the theatre, but for them the theatre was 'from Showboat to Sondheim' and excluded 'heavy' drama which lacked spectacle and consisted mainly of 'actors talking on a stage' as someone else put it. So much for Chekhov, Ibsen, Lorca, and Miller. Just actors talking on a stage.

At the same time there was a canon of lowbrow creations that they felt they could be unreservedly snobbish about. There was unanimity about what they saw as the trashiness of Roseanne, which is one of the sharpest and funniest of American comedy shows. But this was working class comedy and not acceptable. They lived their cultural lives within a narrow strip. Fences ran along both sides; great art was beyond the pale on one side, and the best of popular culture on the other.

It was an odd experience, meeting them. I'm sure it was just my bad luck, and of course there are many Americans who don't build those fences. The American theatre is vibrant and experimental; American literature needs no introduction. (Of course, this crowd hadn't read Saul Bellow or Gore Vidal, or if one or two of them had they weren't admitting it.) I'd known middlebrows before, but never anyone so self-conscious or defensive about it. At the root of it was this, I think: they felt threatened, not perhaps by Roseanne, but certainly by 'high art' - especially by those actors talking on a stage. It wasn't that they were incapable of appreciating high art - they were all very articulate and must have been at least High School graduates - they simply chose not to go there. They had their lives sorted, insofar as they could; they had built their stockades. They were almost as chary of art as they were of Saddam Hussein. And up to a point, that would be all right; if they were happy with what Dwight Macdonald called 'midcult', well that would be fine. But they didn't seem happy with it; they seemed almost beleaguered - they seemed to suffer from a cultural insecurity bordering on neurosis. And they gave out other vibes too: knowing, superior vibes, strong impulses to let the stranger know that they were culturally so very au courant and sophisticated, and - no less important - that they were elevated enough to despise Roseanne and all her works.

This whole experience, and these conclusions I had drawn from it, came back to me recently when I read a Guardian article by Dylan Evans, titled 'Mozart redeems my mediocrity'. The writer refers to Shakespeare, Leonardo and others and laments the fact that so many people seem to feel it's 'humiliating and threatening' to think they could never 'paint or write anything comparable to their achievements'. It runs very close to that meanness of spirit that grudges a friend or colleague some well-deserved success.

But, Evans goes on, 'to me [genius] is liberating and inspiring. It is precisely the realisation that I will never be the equal of Mozart or Goethe that allows me to sit back and enjoy what they have bequeathed to me. It is my recognition of their greatness, my admission of the immeasurable superiority of their talent, that redeems my mediocrity.' I feel exactly in tune with this. It makes me sadder when I think now of my American acquaintances, and less inclined to mock them. What a shame they had to stay always within the bounds of their little buttercup meadow.

What I want to do now is put an object on show that many readers will have seen before. It is a work of genius. It is my recognition of its greatness, and the realisation that I can never produce its equal, that allows me to rejoice in it.

The Chimney Sweeper

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry 'Weep! weep! weep! weep!'
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved; so I said,
'Hush, Tom! never mind it, for, when your head's bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.'

And so he was quiet, and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight! -
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel, who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins, and set them all free;
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind:
And the angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke, and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm:
So, if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

William Blake.

Our experience of it begins with the simple things. We are impressed by the simple language - this poem of dismay and protest is written in the language of nursery tales. We feel pity for the boys, that they should be so cruelly abused. We know that what is done to them is wrong. We extrapolate into our own time and think of child labour in the poor world. We feel equal pity, and pass judgement equally on the modern exploiters, who use children because they are cheaper than adults. We are moved by the boy who is the speaker in the poem, by the way he comforts his unhappy friend. We are moved by the vision of liberation - though there seems to be something not quite right about it. Certainly the Angel seems a poor liberator.

But 'The Chimney Sweeper' isn't a simple thing. It isn't like some plain but beautifully shaped piece of pottery that we look at and say, 'I like that very much', and there's an end to it. No, this is a poem with a depth almost beyond fathoming. Blake's 'Songs of Innocence' might have been given alternative titles, none of which would have done much to sell copies, but which might have spelled out for the reader what was meant. The meaning of the book's title is at least twofold.

First, the Songs might have been called Songs of Unexpanded Consciousness: of a poverty of awareness of the full context of one's life. This kind of poverty leads us, among other things, to suppose that our circumstances, our plight, the way we see human relations operating around us from day to day: that these things are the natural law, the way human beings are, the way the universe is ordered. What do mice do? They eat bread and grain and live as long as they can, until a cat gets them. What do little boys do? They climb chimneys and their lungs fill with soot, and they live until they die. The chimney-sweepers can't go to the mountain top and look down, and see the true nature of the master who possesses them as chattels and who exploits them. They can't see that King George who reigns over them is no better than the wicked king of the fairy tales. They can't understand that their situation comes at the end of a century of cumulative dispossession, which has seen the expansion of manufactories, and in which the artisan weaver has become the hired servant of the textile industry capitalist. A century too of growing poverty and inequality, the deliberate creation of which is not the work of God or Nature but of man - of men who can be named, of King George and his forebears, of Pitt the Elder and Pitt the Younger, of Bristol merchants and Norfolk landowners. These men have created the conditions in which a father has to sell his son to a master of chimney-sweeps. Of course, the children are too young to understand such things, but even those who survive into manhood will have little access to such understanding.

Alternatively the Songs of Innocence might have been called Songs about the Victims of Innocence. Each boy chimney-sweeper is a unique human being of inestimable worth. The poem resonates with Blake's belief that this is so. In his later years Blake was once asked what he thought of Jesus Christ. He said, 'He was the greatest man who ever lived. And so am I. And so are you.' And so are the young chimney-sweepers, every one. But they are reduced to a far, far lesser status. They are not merely innocent children; they are kept in innocence, for innocence is blameless ignorance. Their innocence is a part of their deprivation.

I have said the Angel is a poor liberator. The dream in which he appears is deceptively beautiful : the boys dive into the river, wash away all the soot, no doubt dowse each other and wrestle with each other in the water; and then, magically, they find themselves rising into the air to 'sport in the wind'. But they have been released from their coffins so that all this can happen. It is nothing but the old religious pie in the sky. Tom will be sure to sport in the clouds - after he is dead. Meanwhile he should 'be a good boy', serve his master, clean the chimneys of the masters of indentured leather-workers and watchmakers, live humbly and honour the King.

And Tom wakes from his dream, and as he collects his bag and brushes he is happy. This is innocence. Knowing no better, he is comforted by the promise of the Angel, and cannot see that the Angel is an agent of the ruling elite and its hierarchy, and an advocate of the exploitation and cruelty their social system makes possible. For Tom, an understanding of the conditions of his life, and of the possibility that he and his comrades might even become historical agents, able to act against their oppression, is not as out of reach as we might suppose; and yet it is as remote as the ends of the universe. Tom's happiness is heartbreaking.

Much of Blake's book is heartbreaking, but it is also a bright illumination. It's a true vision. Blake is quoted as having said blithely, 'You can see what I see, if you choose. You have only to work up imagination to the state of vision, and the thing is done.' Ah, Mr Blake, thank you for the compliment. Alas, the state of vision comes less easily to me. I may become able to see what you see, but only because you put what you see into incomparable poetry. But I will try. I will read your work and share in it, and not place it beyond any pale, not exile your vision from the country of my imagination.

I can't illuminate the world as Blake did. But how can I envy him or grudge him his genius? Rather, I stand before his portrait and say, 'Sir, I honour you. You were a great poet and a good man.'

How sad that my middlebrow American acquaintances, some of whom had travelled to Alaska and Patagonia and China, and taken the Trans-Siberian train from Beijing to Moscow, were so afraid to travel in the realms of gold.

James Graham.



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