In 1790, 126 years after John Milton was buried beneath the floor of St Giles’s, Cripplegate, his coffin was broken open by builders renovating the church. The verger, drinking in a local hostelry, boasted about the find. A crowd gathered. Soon the poet’s remains were being torn to pieces. A publican tugged at the teeth. When they didn’t come away easily somebody knocked them out with a stone. A pawnbroker got hold of the jaw. People were clamouring to get into the church. The gravedigger started charging sixpence for entrance. To dodge payment people climbed in through the windows. Ribs, hair, scraps of skin, were carried off. Within a few days several thousand people had each been sold what they believed to be one of the true teeth of the author of Paradise Lost.
As with his body, so with his poem. In his clever, wide-ranging book, Orlando Reade shows how Milton’s great epic has been dug up and dismembered, its pieces repurposed in often mutually contradictory ways by a succession of ideologues, activists and devout admirers projecting their own preoccupations on to his narrative.
To William Blake, Milton celebrated prelapsarian innocence: “It’s only Adam and Eve, you know,” explained Blake to a visitor startled to find the poet and his wife naked in their summer house. To Max Weber he was describing the origins of capitalism. To Virginia Woolf, he was the epitome of high seriousness. Woolf encouraged Elizabeth Bowen to keep a diary, not to record “tea parties, but Milton and so on”.
Reade is an academic, but his book is mercifully unlike most academic works. It is witty and sardonic. Immersed in Miltonic poetry, he has caught the habit of simile-making, and he uses imagery to slip modern notes into his account of the venerable 17th-century text. Satan and Beelzebub, conversing as they lie on the burning lake, hold their heads above the surface “like two lizards in a jacuzzi”. God, wary of accepting love too easily, is “definitely a cat person”.
Reade writes himself into the book, not as a sleuth-researcher nor a lofty pedagogue. He is sensitive and shockable. A contemporary source reports that Milton’s young wife left him because she didn’t like hearing him beating his students: Reade comments that this is “a detail that shivers on the page” and we feel him shivering as he writes. He confesses that, when he first encountered it, he felt “defeated” by Paradise Lost. It was only when he began to teach others to read the poem that he found his own way into it. Now, he is an enthusiast.
Commenting on Milton’s comparison of Satan to an eclipsed sun that “disastrous twilight sheds/On half the nations” he gives us the historical information that the censor was so alarmed by this passage, with its promise of “change to perplex monarchs”, that he considered banning the poem’s publication. He alludes to its critical reception, noting William Wordsworth’s response with a just-perceptible touch of irreverent flippancy: “He found this metaphor so sublime it made him feel faint.” But he also gives us his own view straight: “If you aren’t seduced by this poetry you aren’t reading it right.” I imagine Reade is an excellent teacher.
His book has two components. One is a summary of the story told in Paradise Lost, the other is the story of its reception and reimagining. Milton’s poem switches from Hell to Heaven, from flashback to prophetic vision. Reade follows its zigzags, adroitly matching his episodic account of its afterlife to its key passages. It’s an ambitious structure, but he manages the intertwining of his paired strands so deftly that it feels smooth.
At the core of Paradise Lost, there is an area of uncertainty. Milton was a revolutionary who served in the Commonwealth government and defended the people’s right to rise up and remove a tyrant. When, in his poem, he speaks in the voice of Satan, leader of the rebel angels, he argues as he himself might have done. But Milton was also a devout Christian. Monarchs such as the first two Stuart kings of England, who believed that they were God’s representatives on Earth, might delude themselves, but the authority of God himself was not to be challenged. The tension between Milton’s politics and his piety gives his epic its fascinating contrariness. In it, a deity Reade accurately describes as “legalistic and unlikable” contends with a villain who is allowed superhuman charisma, and who is given speeches of such grandeur and plausibility one cannot but be moved. That ambiguity is like the broken soil in which vegetation flourishes. Generations of Milton readers have found it fertile ground for mutually contradictory creeds.
Reade traces Milton’s influence on subsequent canonical authors, but this book is not primarily about literary history. The biggest story that Reade is telling is that of slavery. He notes that Milton introduces the theme early, when Beelzebub asks why God hasn’t killed all the rebel angels, and concludes it is so that they can “do him mightier service as his thralls”. The angels-turned-devils are slaves, doing God’s “errands in the gloomy deep”. Reade traces that theme of enslavement through a succession of authors and political activists.
The line begins with Olaudah Equiano. Equiano was abducted from his home in West Africa and sold into slavery. After years of hard labour, he bought his freedom, and in 1789 he published his autobiography. Writing about the notoriously cruel slave-plantations of Montserrat, Equiano quotes Milton on Hell. The island is the place where “Hope never comes/That comes to all, but torture without end.” Equiano doesn’t name his source: perhaps he didn’t want to people to think he was comparing enslaved people like himself with devils.
To Baron Vastey, a Haitian man of mixed race writing in 1814, it is not enslaved blacks but white colonists who are like Milton’s devils. Driven out of Haiti in the 1790s by the Haitian revolutionaries under Toussaint Louverture, they were “vanquished thunderstruck and precipitated into the abyss” like Satan and his followers. As they fight back, struggling to regain “the empire of which a just and retributive God has for ever deprived them”, Vastey describes them as resembling “the infernal spirits in their horrible assemblies… such as the immortal Milton has described them”.
White slave-owners and the black people they enslaved keep recurring in the story Reade is tracing, their respective relationships with Milton’s narrative repeatedly reconfigured. In 1857, in New Orleans, the members of a society calling themselves the “Mistick Krewe of Comus” (a reference to Milton’s masque) staged a procession through the streets for Mardi Gras. Arriving at the Gaiety theatre the Mistick Krewe, wearing huge papier-mâché masks that turned them into monstrous giants, acted out four scenes from Paradise Lost, including that of the creation of the world as described to Adam by the Angel Raphael.
In Milton’s account, God the Son takes a pair of golden compasses and draws a circle containing the universe “and all created things”. Within this circle all is order, light and beauty – “the black tartareous cold infernal dregs” having been drained off into the surrounding Chaos. Reade suggests that this vision of a world purged of blackness was read by white supremacists such as the Krewe members, as “an idealised vision of racial segregation”. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, the racial politics of the Mistick Krewe’s Mardi Gras spectacles became increasingly explicit. One included effigies of abolitionists being consigned to Hell. Another was a celebration of “the Aryan Race”. A third ended with thousands of Confederate veterans sounding out the “rebel yell”.
Move into the next century and, handy-dandy, the devils and the heavenly host have swapped places again. To Malcolm X, reading Paradise Lost in the prison library in Massachusetts in 1948, it is not black people who are like the fallen angels , the black “dregs”, but their enslavers. To Malcolm, Milton’s vision provided confirmation modern America’s government was diabolical. Reade quotes an incarcerated Malcolm telling his brother “Milton and Mr Elijah Muhammad [leader of the radical Muslim sect the Nation of Islam] were actually saying the same thing”.
Reade’s book opens with that conversation in prison. It ends in prison as well – fittingly, since so much of Paradise Lost is about transgression, punishment and confinement. Reade notes that the 13th Amendment, which formalised the abolition of slavery in the United States, contains an exception. Convicted criminals could be sentenced to hard labour. Abolitionists congratulated themselves on being free at last of the guilt of slavery. But Reade suggests that, while penal servitude was still permitted, they flattered themselves. Milton, he writes, gives a vision of the penal system’s dark side, “the cruelty that often lurks within the will to punish”.
In prison, though, Reade himself found not darkness but enlightenment. He was there not as an inmate, but as an educator. For five years, as a PhD student at Princeton, he was a volunteer teacher on a programme for incarcerated students working towards a BA. He had, he writes “lost his way” as PhD students often did, “growing their hair and beards long, failing to write or producing knotty, ill-tempered, unreadable tracts”. He was nervous, afraid of his students’ contempt and afraid of failing them. But it was teaching them that set him on the road towards writing this book.
The password to Paradise Lost was one Milton announces in his very first line. Reade was teaching iambic pentameter, his class chanting that famous line aloud: “Of man’s first dis-o-be-dience, and the fruit…” One man raised his hand. The line that Reade had chosen to illustrate a rule, he pointed out, broke the rule. Too many syllables in “disobedience”. For Reade the simple observation was revelatory. “How smooth strong and elaborate it all is!” wrote Virginia Woolf of Paradise Lost, which she saw as a monumental “bogey” to be challenged. But Reade’s convict-student pointed to the fact that, far from being grandly marmoreal, Milton’s poem is infinitely self-disrupting. It tells of a revolution failed, but its ending celebrates freedom. The freedom to choose your own resting place in Eden, to explore the world that is all before you, to re-read a classic, to find a story that speaks to you and reframe it, to contradict your teacher, to seize on the kind of creative disobedience from which new ideas are born.
What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost
Orlando Reade
Jonathan Cape, 272pp, £22
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This article appears in the 07 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump takes America