At Edgbaston on the first morning of an Ashes Test, the brass section of the Barmy Army finds the tune before the players reach the middle. A man in a replica shirt, three pints in by eleven, plants his feet and sings about a chariot of fire he has never thought about for a single waking second of his life. Around him twenty thousand throats take up Blake’s four questions and Parry’s slow climb. The Australians stand at the boundary rope and wait it out. Then the cricket starts.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) would say that every one of those throats is buying the same thing the suffragist bought in 1918, the Women’s Institute member bought in a village hall in 1924, the Labour delegate bought in 1945, and the High Anglican waving a flag at the Royal Albert Hall buys on the last night of the Proms. Each is buying a place in something that does not die. That is the trade Becker put at the center of his work. Man knows he will rot. He cannot live with the knowledge, so he builds a hero system, a scheme of meaning that lets him earn the feeling that his life counts in a scale larger than his body and longer than his years. The hero system tells him what counts as significance and what he must do to deserve it. Live up to it and he wins a kind of immortality. Fail it and he is nothing, a thing that eats and excretes and stops.
What Becker did not stress, and what the song shows, is that one object can carry many hero systems at once. The cricket man and the suffragist and the Tory and the Welshman who refuses to sing it are not arguing about a song. They are running incompatible immortality projects through the same sixteen lines. The lines hold because they stay abstract. Blake (1757-1827) gives them a city, a land, and a war, and never says whose. “Build Jerusalem.” Each man hears a different city. “England’s green and pleasant land.” Each hears a different England. “I will not cease from Mental Fight.” Each hears a different war and a different enemy. The vagueness is not a flaw in the poem. The vagueness is what lets a nation that agrees on almost nothing sing one thing together.
Start with the city.
For the man who set the tune, the city was a truce he did not want. Robert Bridges (1844-1930), the Poet Laureate, found Blake’s stanzas in 1916 and wanted music to stiffen a country bleeding out on the Somme. He asked Hubert Parry (1848-1918) to write something a crowd could roar. Parry wrote it in a day and handed it to Walford Davies with a line that has the whole problem in it. “Here’s a tune for you, old chap. Do what you like with it.” He gave the city away at the moment of its birth, and people did what they liked with it. Parry soon turned against the war-fever movement that first sang it. He withdrew. Then Millicent Fawcett (1847-1929) asked whether the women fighting for the vote might have it, and Parry, relieved, said yes, and orchestrated it for their concert, and assigned the copyright to the suffrage union. For Fawcett the city was the franchise. The holy city was a country where a woman counted as a citizen, where her name went in a ledger that decided things. She built her Jerusalem with petitions and prison terms, and the song told her that the building was sacred work and that she would be part of the wall whether or not she lived to see the gate.
For Clement Attlee (1883-1967) and the men who came home from a second war and threw out Churchill, the city was the welfare state. Attlee promised to build a new Jerusalem and meant hospitals, council houses, a pension, a school place for a miner’s son. The land of the song was a country that fed its poor. The Labour conference still closes by singing it, next to “The Red Flag,” and the men of the Durham Miners’ Gala sing it over their banners, and for them the eternity on offer is the commonwealth that outlasts the man, the union that buries you and looks after your widow. The city is justice, and the worker who pours his life into the lodge and the branch earns a place in something that does not stop when his lungs do.
Walk into a village hall in the 1920s and the city changes again. The Women’s Institute took the song as its own without a vote, the way a family takes a name. The press called it jam and Jerusalem and meant it as a sneer, and the women wore the sneer like a sash. Here the holy city is the parish that holds. It is the cake stall, the flower show, the minutes read aloud, the slow keeping of a place against the years. The eternity is continuity. A woman gives her afternoons to the institute and joins a line of women that runs back before her and on past her death, and the green and pleasant land she sings about is the lane behind her house and the church she will lie beside.
Now the patriot at the Albert Hall on the last night, flag in each fist, who would call the Labour man a fool and the suffragist a memory. For him the city is England herself, chosen, Anglican, imperial in the old grain even now. King George V (1865-1936) heard the orchestral version and said he liked it better than the national anthem, and a certain Englishman has agreed with his king ever since. The land is the realm. The war is the long war for the realm’s honor, fought now with a song instead of a fleet. His immortality is the nation. He will die and England will not, and by singing he folds himself into her and borrows her permanence.
These cities do not agree. The franchise, the welfare state, the parish, the realm. Becker’s point is that they need not agree to do the same work for the men who hold them. Each city tells its holder that his small life feeds a large and lasting thing. Each lets him be a hero on terms he can meet. The song does not reconcile the cities. It lets four crowds who would not share a pub share a tune, because the word Jerusalem is empty enough to fill four ways.
Then there is the man who wrote it, who meant none of this.
Blake stood trial for sedition in 1803 and was acquitted, charged after he said “Damn the King!” to a soldier in his garden. He cheered the French Revolution while England fought it. His city is not a country at all. His Jerusalem is the freedom of the imagination from the cage of reason and law and church. The dark Satanic Mills, the phrase the country has spent two centuries pinning on the cotton trade, may not be mills in Blake’s hand. Scholars have long argued that the mills are the churches, the grinding machines of doctrine and conformity, and a Bishop of Durham, N. T. Wright (b. 1948), granted the point from his own pulpit. F. W. Bateson (1900-1978) called the song an “anti-clerical paean of free love” and found it droll that the churches and the women’s clubs sang it without hearing what they sang. The bow of burning gold and the arrows of desire are weapons of the inner apocalypse, the Mental Fight against the buffered, rule-bound, deadened self. Blake’s hero is the prophet who sees, is appalled, and speaks. His eternity is vision. He inscribed under the poem a wish that all the Lord’s people might be prophets.
The country took this man’s furious inward gospel and made it the music of the establishment he hated. That is not a betrayal anyone planned. It is Becker’s logic working as it must. A hero system needs a sacred object, and a sacred object that stays a little blurred can serve hero systems its maker never imagined. The vessel survives by not insisting on its contents.
The same logic has a hard turn, and the song shows that too. Becker wrote a second book, Escape from Evil, and it notes that the hero system that gives a man his immortality also gives him his enemy. To be one of the chosen builders, there must be someone outside the wall. The men who march under a nationalist flag have sung this song too, and they sing it to mean a white and narrow England, and they are not misreading the word so much as filling its emptiness with their own love and fear. The Welshman and the Scot hear the same emptiness and refuse the song, because the word in the line is England, not Britain, and a hymn that lets the Englishman feel chosen reminds them they are the unchosen next door. The arrows of desire point outward as easily as in. Every Jerusalem has a wall, and a wall has two sides, and the men on the wrong side know the song means them.
And yet the vessel keeps opening. A South African soprano sang a new setting at the Proms in 2020, written by Errollyn Wallen (b. 1958), born in Belize, who put blues and dissonance under Blake’s words, and a part of the country howled at the desecration while another part heard the city widen to take her in. The London Community Gospel Choir has sung it, and a gay men’s chorus, and, in one documentary survey of who claims the thing, naturists. The crowd that holds the song now is not the crowd Parry wrote for or the crowd Blake cursed. The word Jerusalem is still empty enough to fill. New men and new women pour new eternities into it, and the old patriot at the Albert Hall and the new singer onstage are, against everything they believe about each other, performing the same act. Each reaches past his own death by joining a thing that does not die.
The film took its title from the chariot and made the song into the music of two runners chasing a kind of permanence on a beach, one for his God and one for his people, neither for England, and the country wept at both and called the picture its own. Chariots of Fire is the song in miniature. A vessel that every watcher fills with the eternity he already wanted.
Back at Edgbaston the three-pint man finishes the last line and does not know that he has sung an anti-clerical hymn to free love, a suffrage anthem, a socialist promise, a parish keepsake, and an imperial boast, all in ninety seconds, and that the Australian at the rope has understood none of it and feared all of it. He sits down. He believes he has sung about cricket and about being English and about beating the old enemy, and he has, because the song let him. The wonder is not that one country sings one song. The wonder is that the song lets each man bury a different fear under the same tune, and call the burial England, and go home feeling, for the length of a Test match, that he will not die.
