Antonia Hildebrand is a poet, short story writer, screenwriter, novelist and essayist. Her first published short story appeared in Downs Images and in Woman’s Day‘ Summer Reading’ and she has since been widely published in journals, magazine and anthologies in Australia as well as Britain, the USA and Ireland. She is the author of nine books, including three books of poetry, two short story collections, two essay collections and novels. Her novel ‘The Darkened Room’ was published by Ginninderra Press in 2022. Her poetry collection, ‘Broken Dolls’ was published by Tangerine Books in 2024.

TO BREATHE

By Antonia Hildebrand

London 1822

“So”, Doctor Benson said, “do you see these angels in the trees all the time or only sometimes?”

The old man he spoke to was not an inmate of Benson’s asylum. Benson was compiling a case history on him, though, for the archive of his mental hospital. Through their mutual friend, Mr Robinson, Benson had offered the impoverished old man a guinea to be interviewed. He regarded the old man as a most interesting case.

The old man looked at Benson kindly. It was almost a look of pity and the thought came to Benson that the poor fellow actually felt sorry for him. An intolerable thought or at the very least a discomfiting one.

“I see angels when they’re there,” the old man said, reasonably.

His white hair stood out around his head and shafts of light from the window illuminated it so that he seemed to have a halo himself. There was in any case something luminous and strange about the fellow. His clothes were worn but not worn out and his large brown eyes were shrewd and full of life. What was it about him that made him seem so odd? Dammed if he could put his finger on it but the mad always looked strange. Whether it was because they knew they were mad or suspected others knew, he couldn’t say. All his years of experience had never answered that question – and many others.

“Are you a spiritual man?” Doctor Benson asked.

The old man smiled and looked out the window. He seemed not have heard.

“The word spiritual comes from the Latin, spirare, to breathe,” he said.

“We cannot avoid breathing can we? Spirituality is our natural state; how then can I avoid it?”

Those extraordinary eyes. The fellow had done those violent and blasphemous paintings. They were like nothing Benson had ever seen before, full of nude bodies and strange colours, but were they the work of a genius or a madman? As soon as he saw those paintings he wanted to meet the man who’d painted them. Especially when he heard from others that he was regarded as a mad genius. Madness and genius were closely allied, he knew that; but could anyone be both? The thought came unbidden that society could not and would not permit anyone to be both. It was too disruptive of the idea of an orderly society. The genius was a sort of hero and a hero could not be mad.

“Your paintings are very unusual. Very striking indeed. How do you

paint them?”

“Well,” the old man said, looking out the window again, “I take a millboard – thick is best for my purpose – then I take ink or colour and I make a design very quickly so that no colour has time to dry. This I print on to paper and then I colour it up in watercolour.” He looked at Benson and his eyes were gleaming, he gestured excitedly as he spoke. “The advantage of this method, for my purpose at least, is that each print can be varied slightly so that no two are the same. That’s the way it is with human beings is it not? No two

the same?”

He smiled and now his eyes gleamed with mischief. Benson felt uncomfortable and off balance somehow.

“And your themes? Are they always biblical?”

“There is much to learn in the bible and much to unlearn.”

The old man’s eyes were now focused on something, perhaps some scene from the Old Testament, just to the right of Benson’s head.

“Do the angels tell you what to paint?”

“Not that I’m aware of. I’ve never spoken to them or attempted to communicate with them in any way.”

“Why not?”

“Because, my dear sir, it’s enough for me that they exist. I ask nothing more of them,” he laughed softly and looked straight at Benson. The doctor flinched and looked away. Who could bear the scrutiny of eyes that saw angels? Benson had to check himself at this point. Thinks he sees angels, he told himself firmly. Delusional. He reached for the word and held on to it.

The old fellow’s face had an expression of exceptional sweetness when it was not animated by some strong emotion.

“Are you happy with your life?” Benson asked him.

“I live for art, as I always have. I wanted no other trade and I have had no other. Yes, I’m happy. Though it is a happiness few understand. You yourself would find it as impossible to understand my happiness as the camel would find it to pass through the eye of the needle. I don’t hold it against you though, nor should you hold my strange happiness against me.”

The old man was thinking as he spoke that to tell this doctor, this imprisoner of the mad, that he spoke regularly with a being he thought of as “the Spirit” or that he was assailed constantly by visions which the doctor would see as hallucinations would be most unwise. He would not be unwise.

“You write poetry too, I’ve heard.”

“Yes.”

“Can I hear a poem?”

The old man immediately spoke in a clear, pleasant voice, “When he hath tried me I shall come forth like gold. Have pity on me O ye my friends for the hand of God hath touched me.”

“But surely that’s…”

“From the Bible. Yes, it is. You asked to hear a poem and that’s what the Old Testament is.” The man sniffed and looked away.

While Doctor Benson remained convinced that the old man was mad, he felt as if he (the sane one, the physician) was floundering and being tested somehow.

“What are you working on at the moment?”

“An engraving of Dante’s Inferno. My poems are mostly very long,” he said as if apologizing for his former behaviour. “And difficult,” he added. “I’ll be using some of the guinea you’re paying me, in the making of my engraving, I expect.”

Benson felt pleased and despised himself for it. “You realize you’ll probably die poor, don’t you?” he told the old man by way of revenge, though he wouldn’t have called it that. He would have called it research.

“I’ll die and I’ll certainly be poor when I do it but the imagination lives forever and art and money are bad bedfellows. Do you know of Thomas Lawrence?”

“I don’t, no.”

“Nor will you. He’s a rich man, like you. A fashionable portrait painter. His name will die with him. Mine will not die with me. One day the world will know my achievements for what they are. You know, Mr. Thomas gave me twenty pounds because he felt sorry for me, but,” he leaned forward, eyes bright, “I feel far sorrier for him. Poor fellow.” He shook his head.

Benson thought that one of the advantages of being mad was that one’s delusions gave certainty – something no amount of rational thought could give. The old man had faith. He believed that even his poverty was a sign of his future greatness.

“So, you’re laying up riches in heaven,” Benson couldn’t keep the smirk out of his voice, though he managed to keep it off his face.

“Not at all. I’m simply doing what I was meant to do with my life. I agree with you in one respect – I was not meant for this world. Indeed not. This world and I are not friends; I’ve known that since I was a child. I saw my first angels when I was a child of eight. They filled an entire tree and they shone like stars. Their wings were so bright they blinded me. It was some time before I could see again and when I could the angels had gone. I sat down on the ground and wept. I wanted them to come back. I’m sure the memory of their beauty is what led me to art.”

“You were obviously a child of powerful imagination,” Benson spoke smoothly and calmly and the old man turned to him with that sweet expression.

“Of course I was. But I didn’t imagine it. No, not at all.”

His face was closed now. His mouth stubborn. Benson decided he’d gone too far. The last thing he wanted was a distressing scene or even a collapse that would necessitate admitting the old man to the asylum. He was not someone that Benson wanted to have to see or know about while he went about his business with his lunatics. The man was not only disturbed, he was disturbing. Or at least Benson found him so. He had dealt with all kinds of lunatics – cursing, spinning, raving, violent and catatonic but he had never been as disturbed by these as he was by this man.

But now it was suddenly obvious to Benson why this old man saw angels. When one thought about his life it was easy to understand. Here was a man who craved the beautiful and the sacred and how did he live? Surrounded by the ugliness of the modern city and the sordidness of its inhabitants; constantly assailed in ear and eye and even in thought by the profane. The life of the impoverished artist could be a long suicide – it could lead to despair – yet this man seemed happy and fulfilled. Dissatisfied with the world he lived in he had created another world of angels, sacred deeds, great sin and a hope of redemption that many of the poor who lived on London’s streets and in its hovels had lost. His world was one of delusion but it had saved him from despair and defeat. He had re-created the world. He was his own Messiah. The dangers in this were obvious to Benson though he had to admit there were no signs of “delusions of grandeur” in this man. He was humble and sweet natured. In a last attempt to stamp his authority on the proceedings Benson asked him, “Where did you train as an artist?”

“When I was ten my parents sent me to Henry Par’s Drawing School which is at 101 The Strand. It’s on the right hand side as you go into the city, as you probably know.”

Benson didn’t and began to feel that there were probably a large number of things this old man knew that he didn’t. He twisted away from the feeling.

“Even Michelangelo,” the man went on, “once remarked that it was necessary to learn to draw correctly in youth. Many people have told me I’m an exceptional draughtsman. I was taught at the right age, you see.”

Benson nodded. “Were your parents religious?” he asked him.

“My parents were dissenters and they espoused radical politics. Don’t seek an answer there to the course my life has taken. Shakespeare has one of his characters say that a man is author of himself and knows no other kin.

That is certainly the case with myself. My mother even beat me once for speaking of my visions.” The sweet expression slipped briefly and bitterness took its place. “Only once but I never forgot it.”

Soon after Benson terminated the interview and paid the old man his guinea.

“Thank you, Sir, it’s been most interesting,” the old fellow said, as if Benson had been the subject of his research and not he of Benson’s. Then with a slight bow he went on his way.

As the strange old man was walking away Doctor Friars came out of the adjoining room. The connecting door had been left slightly ajar so that Friars could take notes for his own research purposes. Friars had a chilling presence (which was most unfortunate since he had a first class mind) and he often had an unsettling effect on the patients. When he swept down the halls of the asylum in the long black cloak he favoured he looked like a large bat.

The lunatics had been known to fall to their knees and to address him

as “God”. Benson turned to Friars.

“Well he’s certainly mad but he’s harmless,’ Benson said.

Friars did not agree and would have locked him up in an instant.

Friar’s eyes narrowed. “What’s his name?”

Benson told him and he wrote it neatly at the top of the file that he held in his hand. “William Blake,” he wrote in his beautiful handwriting.

Being in possession of a guinea, the old man was able to travel back to his house in Fountain Court by coach. He paid the coachman, walked up to his front door and knocked. His wife opened it. She was very pale and looked almost ready to faint.

“Oh my dear!” she gasped. “I thought I’d never see you again. The thought of you in that horrible place was more than I could bear.”

Her husband helped her to a chair. “Sit down Catherine,” he said in a kindly way and went to fetch her a tumbler of water.

“What did he say? The Doctor? And did he pay you?”

“So many questions my dear. Don’t distress yourself. He was very pleasant and yes, he gave me a guinea. Now I can begin the engraving.”

“But what did he say?” his wife insisted.

“He said I was harmless,” he shouted, suddenly furious. He threw the tumbler of water across the room and swept their already cracked and chipped dishes off a sideboard on to the floor where they made a satisfying smash. His wife looked at him in surprise and then she started to laugh. He found he had to laugh too.

“Harmless!” he laughed and shouted.

He threw the word out the open window as if it was a lighted flare or a dagger. The people in the neighbouring houses heard the shouting and laughing but they were used to strange goings-on in that house. The angels in the tree outside his back door smiled at each other. Their man was in fine form today. Soon, they knew, he would pick up pen or brush and go on with his work. They liked to watch him work. They liked to toss ideas his way and then watch the passion they aroused at work in him. Incapable of passion themselves they still had an appreciation of it. They knew it was what moved the planets; that the whole incredible machinery of creation had been born of it and that this man also needed it to create. He existed between two worlds, as they did. His was the mind that would have been theirs had they been matter and not spirit.

That night in bed with his wife asleep beside him the old man remembered going down the steps of the lunatic asylum, quite happy and a guinea richer, when he became aware of something moving at one of the barred windows. He looked back and saw one of the lunatics rocking backwards and forwards, his eyes upraised and his mouth moving as if in prayer or perhaps in conversation with someone who existed only in his mind. The old man watched the rocking man behind the barred window and as he did he put into the lunatic’s mouth the words he himself had written:

O why was I born with a different face?

Why was I not born like the rest of my race?

He had hurried down the steps then, afraid that he had seen a vision of his own future.

Now lying awake in the dark he knew that he had to think of something else or he would never sleep, so he remembered himself at the age of ten.

It was high summer and he had eaten blackberries from some bushes on the edge of the road. He saw himself on that golden day; red haired and rosy cheeked, sturdy and joyous as he tramped along the road. Then he saw all the moments of his life as if they were beads on a string and felt for the first time that he could make sense of them. He watched his ten-year-old self sitting at the kitchen table with a piece of paper he had found in a drawer, with pen and ink. He marvelled at the innocence and, above all, the hopefulness of the boy as he started to write his poem. All the old man’s faith in his past and in his destiny came back as he read the first two lines the boy had written:

How sweet I roam’d from field to field.

And tasted all the summer’s pride.

Soon he slept. And dreamed no dreams.