The way to Bradford

It’s unusual to receive a lecture invitation in which the title as well as the subject is given in advance. But I was glad to be invited by the Bradford Literary Festival to talk about “William Blake and the American Dream.” It felt like a good time to consider how the “American Dream” – always a phantasm – had now become a nightmare with masked ICE agents detaining, imprisoning and deporting undocumented immigrants and legal residents alike. Bradford would be a good venue for the lecture: It’s a de-industrialized city of about 400,000, with 100,000 people of South Asian descent. Anti-immigrant sentiment in the past led to violence there, though it’s been spared the recent upsurges. What would Blake have said after walking the ethnically diverse streets of Los Angeles, London or Bradford?  

I left Norwich at 8 a.m. on the EMR (East Midlands Railway) to Bradford with a change in Peterborough. Speeding through Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and then Yorkshire, there’s scant evidence of Blake’s “green and pleasant land.” I saw instead fields of sugar beets, potatoes, wheat and barley, little interrupted by meadows or hedgerows. There’s industry too, big box stores, and lots of new subdivisions consisting of single-family brick homes surrounded by asphalt parking lots. Woods are an exceptional sight and appear mostly as islands in large agricultural fields with no corridor for mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and insects. In truth, there’s little nature left in the U.K. – it’s what my wife Harriet and I miss most about our former home in rural Florida. But the U.S. is catching up with Britain in the despoliation race. Trump’s Bureau of Land Management boasts its determination to cut down as many trees and mine as much land as it can.  

“British trains are not what they used to be,” I told Harriet sitting beside me. She’s heard my complaint before, and this time managed to suppress an eye roll.  When I first traveled in the U.K. in the mid-1970s, the trains wereones in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938): t still like the he carriages contained compartments with doors accessible by a narrow corridor on one side. They were shabby but romantic. Open-plan cars largely replaced them in the 1980s, and it’s been downhill from there. The interior of our carriage was the expected symphony of greige plastic and faded blue velveteen, but the train was fast and quiet — conducive for reading and reflection. By the time we arrived in Bradford at noon, I was sleepy, but we’d have enough time to visit the art museum and have a rest before my lecture at six.  

Portrait of Mai

The Cartwright Hall Art Gallery is a vast, neo-Baroque affair, opened in 1904, and now housing a modest collection of mostly Victorian and Edwardian period art plus some works by David Hockney, who grew up in Bradford. We were there to see Joshua Reynolds’ Portrait of Mai (1776) on loan from the National Portrait Gallery and the Getty Museum.  I’d seen the picture before, but not since it was cleaned and jointly purchased (for about $60 million) in 2023 by the two museums. It’s a great artwork to be sure – in a minute I’ll say why — but it’s necessary first to quash the hype. The reason for the picture’s high price and celebrity is that it appears to bleach the stain of British colonialism. Mai is tall, dark and handsome. He stands in the approximate posture of the revered sculpture, The Apollo Belvedere (Roman, presumed copy of an older Greek bronze), and is swathed in pristine, cream-colored robes and sash, with white neckerchief and turban. (Some writers claim Mai’s costume is made of tapa or barkcloth, but I think it’s cotton and linen.) Fully life-size, with deep brown eyes and full lips, the tattooed figure (look at his left hand) has a celebrity air. In L.A., Mai will be a star. In London, at the NPG, he was a balm for the British imperial conscience. Only a nation that revered its colonial subjects, the throngs of visitors likely thought, can have produced such a picture.

The historical Mai was born in about 1753 in Ra’iatea, a small island in the Leeward archipelago in the South Pacific. When he was a child, his home was attacked and his father was killed by invaders from Bora Bora. After a brief period of captivity, he emigrated first to Huahine Island, and then to Tahiti. In 1767, Tahiti itself was attacked and conquered by the British, who dominated it – sometimes with the cooperation of local elites — until losing it to the French in 1846. The subsequent century was one of conflict, population decline (mostly from imported disease), exploitation, tourism and ethnocide. Traditional Tahitian culture barely survived the onslaught. Today, Tahiti’s inhabitants are proud and independent, but they are still political subjects of France.

In 1773, Captain James Cook made his second visit to the island (the first was in 1769), part of a planned circumnavigation of the Southern Hemisphere. That’s when he met the 20-year-old Mai. Cook was initially unimpressed, calling him “dark, ugly and a downright blackguard,” but his junior officers were struck by the young man’s liveliness and strength, and persuaded Cook that this was the native who could best impress Cook’s patrons in England, including George III. For Mai, it was an opportunity, he later said, to obtain the “men and guns” needed to expel the “usurpers” from his country.

In London, Mai was a hit. He was introduced at the Court of St. James, the Houses of Parliament, and at various great estates across England. He went to the theatre, visited public houses, and met, among others, Samuel Johnson, Frances Burney, and the king. His portrait was painted by Reynolds and other artists, including Nathaniel Dance-Holland, and everyone remarked upon his beauty and grace. Here was Rousseau’s “noble savage” incarnate — and the decadent British could learn a lesson or two from him. Mai departed England for home in late June 1776, intent on overthrowing the Bora Bora warriors governing his homeland. The timing of his repatriation may have been spurred by the example of other anti-colonial uprisings, especially the American one. War had broken out a year before at Lexington and Concord and George Washington had just been named Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army.  Mai would return home, he may have thought, a veritable Washington. For unknown reasons, however, Cook did not deposit him on Ra’iatea, but on Huahine, 30 miles distant. There, he was provisioned with a house, some guns and firing powder, and a pair of Maori servants. He fought and won a skirmish with a competing local tribe, but by 1779 was dead, whether from bullets or disease is unknown. 

During his two years in London, Mai was widely considered a messenger from the New World and a symbol of all that was wrong with the old. (For many people at the time, the New World included Pacific islands as well as the Americas.) A writer in the London Chronicle put into Mai’s mouth the following rebuke to anyone who would call him barbarian: “We [in Tahiti] practice the virtues you only teach; [we are] enemies to luxury…[and] never go to war except from a principle of self-preservation or self-defense….you deserve the appellation [barbarian] yourself.” Other broadsides, newspapers, and pamphlets contained similar observations. One anonymous author published in 1775 a satiric Historic Epistle from Omiah to the Queen of OTaheiti: 

…Fate’s decrees have hurled
A wand’ring vagrant in the northern world;
A world of prejudice where error rules
By folly bred, and rear’d in fashions schools….
Yet in cool blood [Britons] premeditately go….
To murder wretches they cannot know…
and ruin thousands worthier than themselves. 

Beautiful Mai, it was widely agreed, held a mirror up to Britain, and the reflection was ugly. 

Reynold’s picture suggested that Mai was the equal of any man, even the English king. His pose in fact, may have been derived from Dance-Holland’s Portrait of George III, shown at the first Royal Academy exhibition of 1768. (Reynolds was Academy president.) The Mai portrait is a symphony of white, grey, beige and tan – James McNeill Whistler a hundred years early. The suppleness of the deferential right hand, combined with the flat, tattooed otherness of the left, conveys the dual character of the noble savage in a nutshell. By his grace, Reynolds’ Omai therefore signified to many at the time the immorality and even savagery of British colonialism, the very opposite of the liberal ingenuousness the picture suggests today. 

By the 1780s, as C.A. Bayley and others have argued, the tide in public opinion had turned against indigeneity. Threats to British imperial rule – from America and France – meant that charity toward others was subordinated to national honor, power, pride and most of all acquisition of wealth. The slave system returned vast riches that few English grandees were willing to sacrifice, despite rising protests from abolitionists. The British imposed increasingly despotic power over its colonies, and it was the rare man who would exclaim as William Blake did in America a Prophesy (1793) “For Empire is no more, and the Lion & Wolf shall cease.”  The cry was aspirational and potentially seditious. He repeated it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, published at about the same time: “The son of fire” — that’s the heroic figure of the mythical Orc — “stamps the stony law to dust….Empire is no more, and now the lion and wolf shall cease.”

‘William Blake and the American dream’  

A nice crowd turned out for my lecture – perhaps 50 or so – plus an expert respondent, Prof. Jason Whittaker from the University of Lincoln. My real audience, however, was Harriet. If she stayed awake throughout, I knew I was doing ok. Halfway through, her eyelids drooped a few times, but that was all. 

I began my presentation with a bit of a warmup, and then proceeded to discuss American slavery, British abolitionism, Blake’s book, America a Prophesy, and finally Blake’s radical version of the American Dream. The following is a very truncated version of the talk:

At PS 196 in Forest Hills, Queens in the early 1960s, patriotism was big. There was the obligatory Pledge of Allegiance every morning, singing the national anthem at assemblies, and flag duty: the daily, ritualized raising and lowering of the American flag. There were honor guards with young flag bearers, and mandated instruction about how to dispose of old or tattered flags: they were never to be thrown in the trash, only burned or buried with requisite ceremony. Most of all, there were classroom lessons that inculcated the “American Dream” – the idea that everyone in the U.S., regardless of their origin, could achieve success and wealth. Even amid a booming economy, the idea seemed farfetched to me. My parents were smart and worked hard – why weren’t they rich and successful?What about all those poor, Black people I saw when we went shopping for discount clothes in Jamaica, Queens? Where was their American Dream?

The Kennedy Assassination in November 1963, the expanding quagmire of Vietnam, Nixon and Agnew’s corruption, Watergate, recession and inflation damaged the American Dream, perhaps irreparably. Good riddance, I thought back then, it was all a charade, a cover for inequality, racism and empire. And today, just when we thought the American Dream was dead and buried, up it rises under another name, MAGA, only more dangerous, reviving traditional hatreds, expanding inequalities, and further concentrating political power in the hands of a handful of oligarchs from tech, finance, oil, aerospace and the media.

But the American Dream wasn’t always phony, as revealed by William Blake’s America a Prophesy (1793). The handmade, illuminated book, was created during Blake’s most literarily successful period, when he drew equally upon both elite and plebian cultural traditions. Mozart’s Magic Flute, performed for popular audiences two years earlier, at Emanuel Schikaneder’s Theater auf der Wiedenlike, was a similar, though much more financially successful, composite enterprise. Blake produced ten, uncolored copies of America — presumably lower priced — hoping to create a demand for still more. The move was unsuccessful.

America is at once an adventure story — possibly inspired by captivity and other popular narratives, and an example of mythmaking, like the tales of Ossian. It’s thus non-linear, describing at the same time, the cause, conduct, and outcome of the American Revolution against British rule. Blake mentions or alludes to several historical participants (George III, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Revere, etc) while introducing allegorical characters (Orc and Urizen) who represent supervening social and political forces. The two registers – real and allegorical — sometimes meld together and sometimes appear in conflict. And then there are the pictures, which tell still another, but parallel story.

In the printed, hand colored frontispiece to America, we see a winged giant, chained to a stone slab, his head between his knees. The giant here is named Orc, personification of energy, who has passed the torch of revolution from America to Britain. The ruined city gate in the print may be New Gate after which the notorious prison was named. It was destroyed during the Gordon Riots of 1780, a popular uprising in which Blake was a participant. Beside him is the naked daughter of Urthona, “soft soul of America”, sitting on a carved block, protecting her two children.

Plate 6 of America represents the dialectic of slavery and emancipation. It shows a naked young man with curly hair (like the artist when young) and splayed legs, sitting atop a grave. The whole figure recalls the following ‘Proverb of Hell’ from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793): “the head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion.”

America a Prophesy, Plate 3, 1793. Photo: Yale Center for British Art (Public domain).

The verses accompanying Plate 6 read:

The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;

          The bones of death, the cov’ring clay, the sinews shrunk and dry’d.
          Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! Awakening!
Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds are burst;

Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field,
Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air
Let the enchainèd soul, shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years,
Rise and look out; his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open;
And let his wife and children return from the oppressor’s scourge…
For Empire is no more and the Liaon & Wolf shall cease.”

According to Blake, the just completed revolution must be re-enacted. Slaves will rise from their graves (meaning be emancipated), break their shackles, and help establish a republic more joyful and free than the one actually created. That’s Blake’s American Dream in a nutshell.

The revolution Bake describes will spread globally – first to Britain, and then everywhere. All “enchainèd soul(s)” are freed, all captives “redeemed” – Blake writes, referring back to the Book of Revelations and anticipating Trotsky’s internationalism.Blake labeled this book and some subsequent ones “prophesies,” by which he simply meant they told the truth.Three years later, he wrote: “Prophets in the modern sense of the word have never existed. Jonah was no prophet in the modern sense for his prophecy of Nineveh failed. Every honest man is a Prophet, he utters his opinion both of private & public matters.” Honesty however, had become risky.When Blake wrote America a Prophesy, freedom of speech and expression were under grave threat in Great Britain. Just a year earlier, the king issued a proclamation promising “to prosecute with severity all persons guilty of writing and publishing seditious pamphlets tending to alienate the affections of his Majesty’s subjects, and to disturb the peace, order, and tranquility of the state.” America a Prophesy was seditious by this definition, but its many shifts in space and time, and deployment of allegory probably left the censors uncertain of Blake’s meaning. Or the book may simply have passed beneath the radar. But Blake was afraid of arrest. He chose that year to publish anonymously his incendiary The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and wrote in his notebook at the time: “I say I shan’t live five years, and if I live one, it will be a wonder.” He wasn’t referring to his always robust health but to the notorious “Treason Trials” against Thomas Paine, Daniel Isaac Eaton and many others. The obscurity of most of the rest of Blake’s prophetic books, including the final one, Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Great Albion (1804-20), protected him from prosecution. Asked to name his favorite authors, another prophetic author, William Morris, writing 50 years after the poet’s death, included Blake “at least that portion of Blake that mortals can understand.”

I concluded my lecture in Bradford by discussing Blake’s impact upon the counterculture of the 1950s and ‘60s, and his indirect role in undercutting the American Dream of my childhood. Allen Ginsberg, the poet-muse of the anti-war protestors at the Pentagon in 1967 and Chicago in 1968, based his whole career on Blake’s prophesies. What prophet will rally us today against the American nightmare, I asked? 

“And did those feet in ancient time…”

There’s a longstanding debate about the meaning of the preface to William Blake’s illuminated book, Milton a Poem.  Set to music by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916, “Jerusalem” as it’s called, has since become a popular hymn or anthem. It’s been sung in support of, and in opposition to war, and in the campaign for women’s suffrage. It’s been used in films, performed at royal weddings, party conferences, and school graduations, and during the opening of the London Olympics in 2012. Blake, who aspired to fame but wound up “pictor ignotus” (unknown painter) according to his first biographer, would have been delighted by the celebrity, but frustrated that his lines are so little understood:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

To be fair, the four, rhyming stanzas are confusing or even contradictory. Parts are militant and parts pastoral: “Bring me my Bow of burning gold/…Bring me my Spear. O clouds unfold:/Bring me my Chariot of fire.”  And in the last stanza, “Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand.” Elsewhere in the poem, the focus is on green mountains, pleasant pastures, and desire, probably sexual desire, given the accompanying phallic arrows.  

Better minds that mine have tried to resolve the contradictions. I’ll just focus on the question “whose feet?” There’s no biblical foundation for that idea Jesus Christ ever walked on “England’s pleasant pastures.” Could “those feet” instead have belonged to Joseph of Arimathea, a secret disciple who assumed responsibility for Christ’s burial? Stories about Joseph visiting England date back as far as the 12^th century William of Malmsbury (De antiquitate Glastionensis ecclesiae) though John Milton mentions the visit in his History of Britain (1670).  But that interpretation is impossible. The succeeding line, “And did the Holy lamb of God/On England’s pleasant pastures seen!” must be a reference to Jesus, according to the Gospel of St. John. Moreover, if you start a poem “And did those feet,” those soles must be damned important! They couldn’t belong to Joseph of Arimathea, a comparatively minor figure in the story of Christ’s passion. 

What is certain is that those feet, whether Jesus’s or Joseph’s, belong to a pilgrim or immigrant who travelled all the way from the Middle East to England. Reading Blake prophetically, we may fairly conclude they belong to South Asian immigrants who came to Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1950s and ‘60s to work in the factories and textile mills of Bradford and other cities. Many suffered housing and educational discrimination as well as racist violence. In the 1960s, there arose in Bradford, and elsewhere in the U.K., an Asian Youth Movement and United Black Youth League – influenced by the Black Panthers — that resisted racism and police intimidation. In 2001, a planned rally in Bradford by the British National Party and National Front, (both fascist or neo-Nazi organizations), led to violent confrontations with South Asian and anti-Nazi groups. Hundreds were injured or arrested. Since then, the city has been relatively calm and experienced considerable growth, though the textile and other factories are long gone. 

What I saw during my three days in Bradford was the ongoing effort to build Jerusalem “among these dark, Satanic mills.” On Sunday morning, Harriet and I knocked on the door of the Bradford Central Mosque. Though we’d made no prior appointment, a caretaker named Azim welcomed us with open arms and showed us around the interior, directing us with special pride to the heavenly light shining from portals in the golden dome, a reference to the ancient Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. We talked comparative religion – he was a serious scholar – and about the need for Jewish/Muslim solidarity in the fight against genocide in Gaza.

A little later, Harriet and I experienced a different kind of heavenly Jerusalem. Waking past row houses and within sight of a giant, derelict smokestack, we saw families coming and going from The Sweet Center, a Bradford institution we learned, since 1964. We walked into the restaurant and stood on a queue to order.  Most people were speaking Urdu; others, a different South Asian language I didn’t recognize. At the counter, we explained we were vegan and were uncertain about what to order. The two countermen – one about my age with a steel wool beard, and the other much younger and beardless, suggested the chana (chickpea curry) and Puri (fried chapatis) and tea. It was delicious and a meal Jesus might have eaten; chickpeas were plentiful in the Levant, and the bread was unleavened (mostly). The two men asked where we were from. Harriet said London. When I said “originally, New York,” there was great excitement – one of them had a cousin in Jackson Heights, Queens!  He told us to come back soon and meant it. 

Leaving The Sweet Center, I thought about the dozens of taquerias and pupuserias I used to visit in Eagle Rock and Highland Park in Los Angeles, decades ago, how delicious the food was, and how welcoming the Latino cooks and servers.  In recent years, taco stands, and food trucks have become fashionable places to go for quick, inexpensive meals in L.A., even among those who can afford anything. Some places are listed in guides to the best restaurants in the city. What was happening to them now? How many of their owners and staff have had to hide to prevent arrest and deportation. How many were already taken away in cuffs, accompanied by cries from their friends and families? How were their customers coping? Were they protesting or had they just moved on?

I thought too of all the shuffling feet I had seen in the pedestrian lanes at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, while driving from San Diego to Tijuana. And the legs and feet beneath stooped backs in strawberry fields, off highway 101 in Ventura County, CA. And Chicano children’s bare feet lined up at the ice cream truck on a Sunday at Montrose Beach in Chicago. When I think of those things, I understand the meaning of Blake’s “And did those feet…” and the promise and ruin of the American Dream. 

 

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