Bill Goldman, 1950—2020

My friend Bill Goldman died aged 70 in May this year. I have taken far longer to write these notes than I intended thanks to my continuing post-Covid 19 fatigue. I apologise now for any errors, omissions, infelicitous expressions or, indeed, lapses of tone in what follows.

William David “Bill” Goldman, Blake scholar, was born in 1950 in St Pancras, London, the first child and only son (there are two younger sisters) of Joan and William Goldman. Bill’s father, Willy, born 1910 in Mile End Old Town, was a significant memorialist of the Jewish East End. Willy Goldman married as his third wife, Mavis Joan Allsop, in St Pancras, London, in 1950.

Bill entered Sir William Borlase Grammar School in 1960, a good grammar school in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. He left aged 16 with 7 GCEs and one O/A level (Use of English, A-grade) to work for BBC Publications, sorting and delivering office mail. By 1970 he had acquired the qualifications for university entrance and went to the University of Essex to study English Literature. Bill dropped out after two years. I don’t recall him ever speaking about the period following except that it led to his religious conversion around about 1977, of which he wrote “I met Jesus my Saviour and acknowledged Him as such … I love the Bible and regard it as God’s Word as it claims to be”. (To me, this kind of talk is close to meaningless. If the Bible is God’s word, then God is a really crap mathematician. See 1 KINGS 7:23.) I can see that conversion gave Bill’s life a stability it might otherwise have lacked but I think it also made him vulnerable to the Christian flat-earthists, worshippers of Blake’s “old Nobodaddy aloft”, who were/are a feature of the Richmond church he joined.

He needed now to gain enough credits to complete his degree. By 1991 Bill had completed 2 credits with the Open University and the final year of a full-time English degree at the University of Roehampton, and both institutions independently awarded him upper second-class Honours. This enabled Bill to study for an MA in Literature & Politics, 1776-1832, at Roehampton (1993-1996). Bill himself would have paid tribute to the encouragement he got from Dr Susan Matthews to keep studying and complete his MA. 

I must have met Bill for the first time in 1995. We both started our PhD research around then; and both of us were part-time students. I continued to work as a librarian while Bill earned some income as a private tutor in Richmond. (Richmond being the kind of place it is, Bill taught quite a few children of pop-stars and the like, tutoring for 11-plus, Common Entrance, GCSE, A-level, & beyond.) He continued tutoring privately after his return from China in 2008.

In 1996 Bill began work for his PhD at King’s College, London. His research focused on the influence of William Blake on Robert Browning, and on their affinities as poets and their joint legacy to modernism. He wrote

These two poets, I argue, profoundly influenced and continue to influence modernist/modern poetry. Moreover, I have established that Browning was influenced by Blake: not least in the sense that Blake provided him with an example of a Romantic poet who was a genuine visionary, and one whose personal and poetic life continued to inspire and with whom Browning never became disillusioned (as he did with Shelley). Blake’s example, his living “in the power and glory” as Browning put it in a letter to Elizabeth Barrett in 1848, encouraged Browning profoundly in persevering with his own essentially visionary poetry, and his own reading of history (given in all its “poetical vigour” to use Blake’s phrase re true history). This visionary quality, and a poetic way of reading history which is ultimately Biblical in its inspiration, is what these two poets passed on to Modernism, which without their influence would arguably have been but a bleak thing.

Bill’s involvement with the Blake Society began in 1997 and lasted until completion of his PhD in 2005 and subsequent move to China. For many of those years Bill was Programme Secretary of the Society, contacting Blake scholars, curators, restorers, and creative artists & writers responding to Blake’s works and inviting them to speak to the Blake Society (mostly at the City of Westminster Archives Centre) in London. I got into the habit of phoning him (often about Blake Society matters) at 11pm or later. Bill loved to talk. After an hour’s conversation, I could politely break off the conversation once “the iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve”. He himself gave a talk to the Society in 2003: “‘Oh Mercy’: William Blake & Bob Dylan”. It made a bit of a change from Robert Browning. Bill’s last involvement with the Society was in 2005, when he was joint-editor of Blake Journal, 9.

In 2003, his PhD approaching completion, Bill was found a post as lecteur at Paris X Nanterre (now Université Paris Nanterre), for one year. As might be expected, his French improved quite dramatically but more importantly he gained the experience as a teacher of English to undergraduates that stood him in good stead for later posts as Foreign Expert at Chinese universities.

Bill’s thesis: “‘Prophetic History’: Blake, Browning and the Visionary Tradition”, was accepted for a University of London PhD in 2005. I think Professor Leonée Ormond, his eventual research supervisor (an earlier supervisor left for another university and Bill declined to follow), played an important supportive role in encouraging Bill to complete his PhD.

He then took up an offer to teach in universities in China, staying for three years. In September 2005, he started work at the University of Science and Technology (Hefei, Anhui Province) as a “foreign expert”, teaching English & American literature, with English conversation, etc. Bill then moved to Tsinghua University (a major research university in Beijing), in 2006, playing a similar role, and to Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, in 2007. Founded in 1897, Zhejiang University is one of China’s oldest institutions of higher education. Late in 2007, Bill was found collapsed in the street in Hangzhou. Rather than submit to treatment in a Chinese hospital, with all the communication difficulties that might pose (he spoke a little but very limited Chinese), Bill opted to return to London where he was diagnosed with a brain tumour (and also prostate cancer). The operation to remove the tumour was successful, and Bill resumed tutoring privately in Richmond, while working on the book of his doctoral thesis.

I remember attending several academic conferences with Bill. There was the Millennium Conference on Blake at Essex where his planned paper (on Blake and Browning, of course) was at least twice as long as specified. I helped him cut it down to a twenty-minute paper and it went over really well. Bill and I were also at the BARS Conference at Keele, in 2003, where all the Blake papers were delivered in an obscure room in the old building up three flights of stairs. “Mrs Rochester’s room” I called it.

Other conferences followed. In 2007, Blake at 250: Celebrating the 250th Anniversary of the Birth of William Blake, at the King’s Manor, University of York. Bill’s paper was “Blake, Browning and Modernism”. And at Literary London 2009: Representations of London in Literature (an annual conference at Queen Mary, University of London), a paper about the creative work of his late father with the evocative title: “‘... a sort of Proust of the Whitechapel Road’: Willy Goldman and the new writing of the ’30s and ’40s”. (I wish I knew where that quotation came from.) Then in 2010, Blake, Gender and Sexuality in the Twenty-First Century, St Aldate’s Church, Oxford, where Bill’s paper, “Jerusalem the Lilly” went disastrously wrong. With hindsight, I now think that this is when we should have realised the brain tumour was returning.

We met up a few times after that. It was clear his condition was deteriorating but Bill seemed unwilling to admit there were any problems and we continued to email each other. Then in May 2016, I went with Valerie Doulton (an old friend of Bill’s and mine) to see Bill at his sheltered accommodation in Twickenham. It was not the easiest of experiences. Apparently he had started having epileptic fits the previous week. Admitted to hospital, he was released with a new series of prescription drugs. He took the drugs for a day or two and then began refusing his medication. Tess, his carer, tried and tried to get him to take his medicine and Bill got angrier and angrier and more and more unpleasant; there was no rationality to what he was saying. Were the personality changes, which we’d not properly understood on previous occasions, caused by the tumour? Or were perhaps a side effect of his drugs? Tess, his carer, was worried that Bill refusing his medication would result in a return of the fits and put him back in hospital. He was very lucky to have Tess looking after him. I couldn’t have coped like she did. 

With Leonée Ormond. (Photo by Val Doulton.)

Val and I continued to see Bill, ever more frail, a few times after that until my Christmas card was returned “not known at this address”. Then, in May this year, I got an email from Magnus Ankarsjö in Sweden telling me that Bill had died the previous week. (Magnus has occasional contact with Bill’s sister Emma.) Magnus wrote that Bill “died very peacefully, with Emma by his side holding his hand and speaking consoling words to him. And sad that this is, it was what we have been expecting for quite some time. I’m surprised that he stayed alive for so long, considering his serious condition.”

That Emma was with him is some comfort; many people in our current terrible circumstances have had to die alone.

★

BILL GOLDMAN’S PUBLICATIONS

William David Goldman.—Ladies of my Dreams.—[Hampton]: The author, 1994. [25] p.
        There are probably other poems and short stories that remain untraced.

Bill Goldman.—“A Guide to the Books of William Blake for Innocent and Experienced Readers, by Henry Summerfield: [review]”, Blake Journal, 4 (London: Blake Society, 2000), pp. 78-82.

Bill Goldman.—“The Archaeology of a Letter: Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 9 July 1846”, Browning Society Notes, 28 (Nottingham: University of Nottingham, 2003), pp. 18-35.
        An essay on the previously-unknown influence of William Blake on the younger poet, and how the latter mediated Blake’s work to a later generation of modernists. Although he is primarily interested in analysing a letter written by Robert Browning that reveals his response to William Blake, Bill also addresses to some degree Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s view of Blake. In addition, he includes an interesting analysis of the contexts for Barrett Browning’s “Catarina to Camoens” (pp. 29-32), in which some errors in earlier scholarship are corrected.

William David Goldman.—“Prophetic History”: Blake, Browning & the Visionary Tradition.—London: University of London, 2005.
        Thesis (Ph. D.)—University of London.—1v. ; 31 cm.
        On his return from China and initial recovery from the brain tumour, Bill began rewriting his thesis for academic publication. I have a copy of his first revision. Unfortunately the recurrence of his illness put a stop to any further work.

Bill Goldman.—“The Other Side (one word more for Robert Browning) [a poem]”, Blake Journal, 9 (London: Blake Society, June 2005), pp. 61-62.

Bill Goldman.—“Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media [review]”, The Glass, number 23 (Oxford: Christian Literary Studies Group, 2011), pp. 57-60.
        How modernist poets invented “China” for their own purposes, and the relation between their concept of Chinese “pictograms” and the reality.
        I believe there was an earlier review in The Glass, on Ruskin and his "baby tawk" letters to Joan Severn, but I have been unable to trace any fuller detail.

William Goldman.—“Zoe Bennett & David B. Gowler, editors, Radical Christian Voices and Practice: Essays in honour of Christopher Rowland [review]”, The Glass, number 25 (Oxford: Christian Literary Studies Group, Spring 2013), pp. 65-67.

★

I give the last word to Magnus Ankarsjö, speaking for all Bill’s friends:

Thank you for all the good moments and experiences we shared. It was an honour and a great pleasure to know you. I am glad that you are now at peace.

★