How Much Did Jim Morrison Know about William Blake?

Everyone knows the Doors are named for the doors of perception – but that phrase comes from Aldous Huxley's book on hallucinogens as well as from Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Morrison quotes 'Auguries of Innocence' in 'End of the Night' on the first Doors album: 'Some are Born to sweet delight / Some are Born to sweet delight / Some are Born to Endless Night'. But that is the only direct Blake reference in Morrison's recorded lyrics. Is that it? Did Morrison only do a little vague and random dipping into Blake? Or was Ray Manzarek right to think of him as an authority on the visionary poet? 'I wonder what Blake said... Too bad Morrison's not here. Morrison would know' (Manzarek, as recorded by Joan Didion in The White Album, passage reprinted in Rocco's Doors Companion, p. 13).

In interviews, Blake seems to come readily to Morrison's lips. He demonstrates a basic acquaintance with famous lines from Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In a 1968 interview with John Carpenter for the Los Angeles Free Press, he remarks (without attribution), 'Opposition is true friendship, ha!' (in Hopkins, Lizard King, p. 205). Speaking with Lizze James in 1969, Morrison's thoughts go to Blake when asked about the 'apocalyptic vision' of his work on the first Doors album (1966-7): 'It used to seem possible to generate a movement... they'd all put their strength together to break what Blake calls "the mind-forged manacles" ... The love-street times are dead' (Lizard King p. 279). They also turn to Blake when the topic is erotic mysticism: 'Blake said that the body was the soul's prison unless the five senses are fully developed and open. He considered the senses the "windows of the soul". When sex involves all the senses intensely, it can be like a mystical experience' (p. 281). Though initially this seems not the most subtle reading of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell's cleansing of the doors of perception, it picks up on the implications of 'sensual enjoyment' (MHH 14) carried forward into Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and detects Blake's odd slide from windows to doors as transparent inlets of perception. A fuller knowledge might underlie these fairly obvious quotations: Blake actually does call the senses 'This Lifes dim Windows of the Soul' in The Everlasting Gospel, just before the more widely known lines, 'And leads you to Believe a Lie / When you see with not thro the Eye'.

Manzarek, in his autobiography Light My Fire: My Life with the Doors, recounts his memories of Jim Morrison's book collection: 'very eclectic, but also standard... we were all reading the same thing... Except Jim had more! A wall of books' (p. 78-9). Though he doesn't list Blake specifically, his omission from such an impressively full, typically bohemian bookshelf would be remarkable. Beyond his own collection, Morrison could also find Blake in the libraries of the colleges he attended. When Howard Smith asked him his opinion of the value of university, Morrison says, 'If they have a good library, that's about it... the main key to education is reading, basically. You could do the same thing on your own' (in Lizard King p. 296). At UCLA, as well as having access as a student, he would have spent steady time in the stacks when he worked in the Powell Library from early 1964 until he was fired in August of the same year for lack of punctuality (as Davis narrates in his biography, p. 55). Unfortunately the library no longer has shelf lists to recreate the holdings from that time, but a look at the current collections shows that there may have been a good deal of Blake available: of pre-1964 editions, not only the Complete Writings edited by Geoffrey Keynes (1957), but also Poems of William Blake edited by W. B. Yeats (1938), Prophetic Writings of William Blake edited by Sloss and Wallis (1926), and further selections by Amelia H. Munson (1964), John Sampson (1960), Alfred Kazin (The Portable Blake, 1946), and Frederick E. Pierce (1915), plus in the way of criticism, The Divine Vision and Ruthven Todd's Tracks in the Snow. The reference department at UCLA's College Library were very kind in response to my queries, and shared the information that the Powell building housed the undergraduate College Library collection as well as the research collection while a new library was built for the latter (completed in 1964). My assumption, without being able to check acquisition dates, is that pre-1964 items in the College Library collection would have most likely been found in the Powell Library stacks where Morrison shelved books. (If the search is opened beyond the undergraduate to the research collection, there are of course many further possibilities; for instance, that is where Frye's Fearful Symmetry is.)

Morrison may have done some purposeful Blake research in the library, since he wrote an essay on Blake for an English class in Romanticism. This was English 154, Spring Semester 1965. I am very grateful to the instructor, Fredrick Burwick, for sharing his memories of teaching Morrison. (And I want to credit and thank David Fallon for pointing out the connection.) Burwick recounts, 'He showed me a paper on Hieronymus Bosch that he had written for a community college in Florida and wanted to know whether he might submit a similar paper on Blake. His Bosch paper focused on the visionary/hallucinatory experience of The Garden of Earthly Delights. I agreed that a similar approach to Blake's illuminated works was possible. I remember that he wrote on MHH and referred to other Blake plates, but I can't recall any details of the work he submitted'. One of Morrison's main interests in Blake, then, was vision and intoxication: 'Jim asked me if Blake did drugs. I told him that I didn't think so'. (Burwick later wrote about Blake's imagery of ergot poisoning from rotting grain – there is lysergic acid (LSD) in ergot fungus – in his book, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (1996), a fascinating and thoroughly researched account of Blake's insight into the significance of this illness, and its dual potential of vision and suffering.)

It was in the previous summer, 1964, while Morrison was working in the library, that he began to write in his 'Notes on Vision' notebook that became The Lords, half of The Lords and The New Creatures, the one book of his poetry to be commercially published in his lifetime (by Simon & Schuster in 1969). Though it owes much to Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty and Rimbaud's principle of the derangement of the senses, there are specific Blakean echoes. It owes much to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. There are formal parallels: The Lords is a hybrid collection of verse and prose, veering among literary composition, philosophical musing, sensory exploration, and cultural commentary. Morrison's 'Cure blindness with a whore's spittle' (p. 37) sounds like it could be a Proverb of Hell. A description of a 'happening... in which ether is introduced into a roomful of people through air vents' breaks down the borders between audience and performer, while 'the gas acts out poems of its own through the medium of the human body' (p. 39), tempting comparison with Blake's Illuminated Books as multimedia experiments in composite art, dominated by the expressive Human Form Divine (which sometimes inhabits the words themselves, especially in titles), and demanding active participation from their readers.

As the passage goes on, it becomes evident that not only form, but also concepts and vocabulary are shared with The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Morrison writes,