The Book That Changed My Life: 'Paradise Lost'

 James Burkinshaw

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Ms Hart’s inspiring article about the way her English teacher, Mr Pike, brought King Lear alive at A level made me think about how a combination of teacher and text changed my life also. 

Satan and the Rebel Angels
(by William Blake)

When my A level class was told we were going to be studying John Milton's Paradise Lost (Books I and II), we were unenthused. A seventeenth-century Christian epic aiming to ‘justify the ways of God to man’ did not promise either the earthy passion of DH Lawrence’s novel, The Rainbow, or the savage humour of Edward Albee’s drama, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (the two other texts we'd studied).

But, from the moment I encountered the central character of Satan, presented not as the traditional archetype of evil but as a defiant antihero fighting a tyrannical God, I was fascinated. Furthermore, I was swept away by the cosmic dynamism of the poem, the way in which characters soar and plummet from the heights of Heaven to the depths of Hell. This seemed true psychologically as well as physically; I have never since found a more vivid description of the power of imagination than Satan’s claim (while he suffers agonising torture) that "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." I was intrigued by the way in which Milton's brilliance as a writer (his ability to present Satan as a psychologically complex and thus sympathetic, even tragic, figure) subverted his stated religious purpose. As the critic William Empson notes, Milton's artistic triumph is not in spite of his philosophical failure but because of it.

This sense of Satan as rebel hero was reinforced when my teacher, Brian Stephan took us to the British Library to see William Blake’s artistic response to Milton's poem (see above). This was typical of his approach, encouraging us to see texts, and art forms, as interconnected: a seventeenth-century, Puritan poet inspiring a response from an eighteenth-century, Romantic artist, but also himself responding to those writers who had preceded him. Mr Stephan taught not only English but Latin and Greek. A simile describing the fallen angels lying “Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks/In Vallombrosa” led to an entire lesson in which he recited in Greek, Latin and Italian, the images from Homer, Virgil and Dante to which Milton was alluding, suggesting the way in which texts respond to each other backwards and forwards across centuries, cultures and languages. Later, at university, we would talk about "intertextuality", but in Mr Stephan's classroom it seemed less abstract and theoretical, more lived and experienced.

His facility with ancient languages only added to our impression that Mr Stephan was old enough to have known Homer personally - although, when you looked at school photographs (going back forty years or more), he never seemed to have looked very much different, reinforcing the sense that he somehow transcended time. Adding to his oracular aura was the fact that Mr Stephan's voice was so inaudible that you struggled to hear him if you were sitting more than three rows back. Which is why his was the only lesson we rushed to early to guarantee a front-row seat. We didn't want to miss a word. Or gesture. I have never since met anyone who could convey so much through the twitch of an eyebrow or shrug of a shoulder (often accompanied by a chuckle - again, almost inaudible). This further contributed to his rather shamanic quality.

That ironic, subversive chuckle was at the heart of his unpretentious and expansive love of all art forms, embracing Greek tragedy and gangster movies, Bach and 'Blue Moon'. A gifted musician, Mr Stephan was equally at home playing church organ or jazz piano, leading to rumours he had played in a swing band in Paris in the 1940s (alongside the persistent story that he had worked for MI5). Certainly, he played Paradise Lost like a musical instrument: he made every line, phrase or word resonate, whether it led us to Catullus or Ian Fleming, Hieronymus Bosch or Django Reinhardt & the Quintette du Hot Club. I am not sure I was conscious of this at the time, but what I was learning was that all artistry - 'high' and 'low', 'ancient' and 'modern' - is interwoven and interdependent, that it is as complex, as contradictory and as un-categorisable as human beings themselves, and that to study literature of any era is to explore what it means to be a human being.

Related article: On the 700th anniversary of the 'somma poeta's' death, James Burkinshaw asks, 'Why the Hell should we still read Dante?'