A basic duty of any reviewer is to say what the work in question is about. That is something of a challenge in this case. William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love is obviously, and winningly, animated by the overpowering excitement that the author feels when he encounters the works of William Blake. ‘People tell me I get over-excited, as if excitement were rationed,’ Philip Hoare tells us. ‘Well, bollocks to that.’ Still, despite the eloquence of such statements, very few of the many pages in this book are devoted to discussing particular works by Blake. Someone who had mistaken it for a helping hand through the complexities of the Blakean universe would end up feeling warmly encouraged in the pursuit, but not exactly enlightened. ‘He’s the Willy Wonka of art, your golden ticket to other worlds’ is a representative declaration. ‘Like the sea you can’t be for or against him.’ Got that? 

It is quite true that if you happen to have spent time immersed in the intricate complexities of scholarly commentary on Blake, of which there is a great deal, there is a certain momentary liberation in being told that the object of your interest was ‘an astro-priest launched into … the alien dust as the sun turned black and his spirit hurtled on’. But this is a long book, and though in many ways it is a boisterously enjoyable read, there is an odd gap at the heart of it where a more straightforward offering might have exhibited something like expertise. ‘People often appear drowning in his works,’ Hoare tells us at one point, ‘the way I feel out of my depth when I discuss them.’ What, then, is there to say about his art? ‘It doesn’t flap or fuss. It is what it is.’ For all its demotic vigour, this book is a piece of unabashed impressionistic criticism. Hoare is given to observations such as ‘Blake fills our minds with colour; it all comes flooding in.’ There’s nothing wrong with such utterances, but they do raise the question that all impressionistic criticism raises. As T S Eliot once put it, ‘What, we ask, is this for?’ Hoare, who is no fool, anticipates such puzzlement. ‘Am I reading the right book? you may ask,’ he remarks on page 122. And I suppose his answer has a rough kind of charm: ‘It’s a bit late now; we’re a third of the way through and there’s a lot more of this to come.’

A lot of what comes in William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love is about fellow enthusiasts rather than about Blake himself. It opens with Derek Jarman at the Avebury stone circle, treading in the footsteps of Paul Nash; then, by what Coleridge called the ‘streamy nature of association’, we follow Nash on his first trip to London in 1906, where, at the Carfax gallery, he saw an exhibition of Blake’s pictures. These moved him greatly – or, as Hoare puts it, ‘A crack in the sky opened up and a hand reached down.’ Another cut then takes us to John Singer Sargent in 1894 painting his memorable portrait of W Graham Robertson, who later illustrated a book called Pan’s Garden by his friend Algernon Blackwood, who purchased a great collection of Blake’s pictures from the family of his devoted patron Thomas Butts. Those were the paintings displayed in the Carfax gallery. As Nash looked at them, says Hoare, he saw ‘the god behind the machine’ – the machine in question being the modern industrial world of ‘science and rationalism’, that familiar bogey whom we can all deplore while enjoying its many benefits. 

The artists whom Hoare admires embraced, instead of that dismal place, what he calls ‘the queerness of the other world’, the sort of alternative reality championed by Yeats and the Order of the Golden Dawn – a visionary company keen to escape ‘an oppressive material world’ – of which Robertson and Blackwood were members. Blake was first among their prophets, seeking to throw over the bad pseudo-religion of reason and fill ‘the skies with angels and falling stars, the land with snarling beasts and blasted trees, and the sea with carnivorous fishes and dragons of the deep’.

The last items on that list are of particular significance, for among Hoare’s other books is a memorable account of the lives of whales. Those noble creatures play an unexpectedly large role in this work too. He gathers several sightings in Blake’s poetry (‘a whale, I lash/The raging, fathomless abyss’). They are certainly creatures suited to Blake’s sense of the delightfully monstrous. Hoare has also tracked down numerous documented sightings of whales in Blake’s London, and finds other things too. Lambeth, where Blake lived for a time, was, it turns out, ‘home to two manufactories busily refining spermaceti oil brought back by British whale ships sent to the South Seas with their harping irons’. The Blakes’ flat in South Molton Street was over a shop selling corsets ‘stiff with whalebone, as worn by the Prince of Whales’. As that pun indicates, Hoare writes about all this with exuberance (‘Personally I believe sea serpents existed’), while cheerfully acknowledging his waywardness: ‘But I digress. Whales do that to you.’

Later chapters grow yet more digressive. We find Jarman at a house party with Iris Murdoch, who gazes upon the company ‘with her big blue-grey-violet eyes’. Then we jump to Gerard Manley Hopkins arriving in Dublin in 1884, and then to our author in the same city tracking down his ancestors. We have a glimpse of the studio of Francis Bacon, among the detritus of which is a copy of Blake’s life mask, and there is a brief sojourn with Joyce, before we encounter Lawrence of Arabia in his cottage. These passages are all well done, though the connection with Blake can feel exiguous at points: Hoare remarks that his Irish ancestors had lived in their house ‘since Blake lived in London’ and that ‘like Blake, Lawrence was delighted with his cottage’. 

Still, it is only when we come to the pages devoted to Nancy Cunard and her splendid friends that it feels as though we really have wandered off into a different, and less appealing, place. It is impossible not to find these spoilt beautiful things vastly less interesting company than cantankerous, impecunious, great-hearted Blake. If Cunard really did believe that ‘being boring is the greatest crime’, then she was a moral idiot. But then, as I grow deeper into middle age, I become more and more impatient with those bright young people of whom you can plausibly say such things as ‘he has china blue eyes and Stephen Spender is a little in love with him’.

Hoare’s passion for Blake is a marvellous thing, as is his admiration for Nash, but I ended the book wondering if Nash was really much like Blake at all. Hoare himself concedes one difference which might seem fundamental: ‘Unlike Blake, who filled his art with them, Nash would leave people out.’ Blake despised landscape, which, free of the distraction of the human form, was Nash’s home ground; it is quite impossible to imagine Blake returning with ever-intensifying passion to a particular natural scene in the way that Nash kept coming back, in his magnificent paintings, to the Wittenham Clumps. Blake was emphatic: ‘Natural Objects always did & now do weaken, deaden & obliterate Imagination in me.’ Nash, it seems to me, was utterly absorbed by them. In his deep sense of artistic vocation, he cherished Blake’s example, but his eyes were looking somewhere quite different.