Guilty Thing (19 page)

Once again he was living opposite Mr Clarke but there is no mention in De Quincey's diary of his former friend or of the biographers, Shepherd, Roscoe and Currie. He does not say why the literary coterie has been dropped, but it is presumably to do with the ‘profane way' in which they had spoken of Coleridge (as a politician rather than a poet) two years earlier. It is always curious to see what information diaries contain and what they omit; in Grasmere, Dorothy Wordsworth had recently been keeping a journal which detailed the movements of the sky but made no mention of her brother's forthcoming marriage, an event whose impact on her life she was dreading. De Quincey recorded only those things he could say to no one other than himself. He writes nothing about the war with France because his thoughts on Napoleon, an ‘idol of fear', were being well aired in his daily conversations: ‘Of that gilded fly of Corsica –
Bonaparte
 – I said just now (what I have applied to others too – using it as a general curse) “May he be thirsty to all eternity – and have nothing but cups of
damnation to drink
”.'

For a man who preferred his own company, De Quincey was dependent on a host of people with whom he threw himself into talk: ‘
talk about the war
 – the immense wealth of England and the proportionate superiority of honour on her part to that of other nations in thus risking her wealth – talk of free will – origin of evil – association of ideas – the incompatibility of eternal punishment – talk about Rousseau, love etc.'. One night, to relieve his own apathy, he talked about ‘the clouds which hang thick and heavy on my brain'. Did he talk to Everton society about his recent experiences as a down-and-out? There is no mention of London in these pages; poor Ann – if she ever existed – has been, for now, forgotten. As an autobiographer, De Quincey would write obsessively about his past and coat every experience with meaning, but as a diarist he is fixed in the present tense.

Mrs Best provided him with breakfast and tea, but De Quincey spent his evenings either with Mr Cragg – asked by Elizabeth Quincey to keep a close eye on the truant – or with Cragg's friend, James Wright, one half of the Liverpool printing house, Merritt and Wright. De Quincey referred to the two men as W and C, but they were not the W and C he wanted to spend his time with. While he suffered their ignorance in literary matters, they suffered a good deal in the company of their guest. Surly and arrogant, De Quincey enjoyed the combat of conversation and the sense of his own superiority. His companions, he noted with pride, assumed that he ‘looked down' on them ‘with contempt
as inferior beings
'. When not fighting his corner, he employed the frigid and distant politeness he claimed to have rehearsed in the company of Hannah More; otherwise he adopted a chilly silence which was broken only to deride his host's literary opinions. Like all adolescents, De Quincey was aware of the image he projected, and he recorded in his diary the occasions on which he felt that his rudeness had triumphed. One evening James Wright suggested that ‘seeing a play well performed. . . [is] the greatest pleasure human nature is susceptible of'. ‘“Do you think so, Sir?” said I.' Silence followed. Another time, Mr Cragg asked if De Quincey liked
The Odyssey
, ‘which he himself thought mightily entertaining'. ‘“No,” said I coolly.' Silence again. Sometimes they were joined by ladies, who De Quincey amused by ‘saying that there was some
road down to hell
by which I might descend for a short time'. The bright-eyed boy who had charmed the whole of Ireland was nowhere to be seen.

His identification with Chatterton was now sealed: ‘Last night my
Chattertonian melancholia
. . . returned for the 1st time this two years,' De Quincey noted in April. He does not feel suicidal or depressed: he feels ‘Chattertonian'. He later described a vision in which ‘
I see Chatterton
in the exceeding pain of death! In exhausted slumber of agony I see his arm weak as a child's – languid and faint in ye extreme. . . stretched out and raised at midnight.' De Quincey's thoughts often formed themselves as pictures. A few days later, under the heading ‘POETS', he listed the individuals he considered the most important, from the seventeenth century to the present day:

Edmund Spenser
;

William Shakespeare;

John Milton;

James Thomson;

William Collins;

Thomas Chatterton;

James Beattie;

Robert Burns;

Robert Southey;

S. T. Coleridge;

William Wordsworth!!!

Q. Gray?

A.
NO

The exclamation marks after Wordsworth denote wonder, but also warning.

He was concerned about his persona. ‘What shall be my character?' De Quincey wondered, ‘wild – impetuous –
splendidly
sublime? Dignified – melancholy –
gloomily
sublime? Or shrouded in mystery – supernatural – like the “ancient mariner” –
awfully
sublime?' When he thought of ‘character', Coleridge increasingly came to mind.

But what were De Quincey's characteristics? He made a new heading, ‘Notes on my own character': ‘
A few days ago
. . . I became fully convinced that one leading trait in my mental character. . . is –
Facility of impression.
My hopes and fears are alternately raised and quelled by the minutest – the most trivial circumstances – by the slightest words. . . witness the strong effects which striking descriptions of a
new sort
have
. . .
To me these are always paintings. Thus is my understanding triumphed over by my heart.' This is a sound account of his rapid responses, sensitivity to language, proximity to fear and powerful visual imagination. On 28 April he made another list:

     The Sources of Happiness.

      
1.
Poetry; –

      
2.
Pathos; –

      
3.
Glory; –

      
4.
Love; –

      
5.
Benevolence; –

      
6.
Music.

The presence of poetry as the antidote to his current apathy is so resounding that he must have struggled to find the following five items. There are moments in the diary when we recognise the Opium-Eater of his later writings: ‘
I image myself
looking through a glass. “What do you see?” I see a man in the dim and shadowy perspective and (as it were) in a dream. He passes along in silence, and the hues of sorrow appear on his countenance. Who is he? A man darkly wonderful above the beings of the world; but whether that shadow of him, which you saw, be ye shadow of a man long since passed away or of one yet hid in futurity, I may not tell you.'

Long before opium enhanced his visions, De Quincey recognised what he called his ‘constitutional determination to reverie'. From an early age he would ‘view' himself as preceded by a ‘
second identity
projected from my own consciousness', akin to the shadowy perspective in the back of the glass. The German novelist, Jean Paul Richter (known as Jean Paul) put it differently: ‘there are two forms of you present in the room at any one time'. It was Jean Paul who coined, in his 1796 novella
Siebenkäs
, the term ‘doppelgänger'.

De Quincey's sense of being accompanied by a duplicate is one of the reasons why he was such an effective autobiographer. His
Confessions
and
Autobiographic Sketches
present two selves: the man of experience who holds the reader in the palm of his hand, and the child of innocence who is the subject of the story. The two figures move back and forth in the narrative, anticipating and reflecting on one another. What makes De Quincey's writing so unnerving is that he felt rivalrous with this other self; his mind was ‘haunted' by jealousy of the ‘ghostly being' who walked before him.

There is nothing in De Quincey's adolescent diary so far, however, that the reader would not expect to find. Apart from being pedantic, other-worldly, dramatic and self-absorbed, he is acutely self-aware. Noting his encounters with prostitutes there is none of the eulogising over angels and noble defenders that we find in the
Confessions
: he is mired in self-disgust. ‘Seized with the delicious thought the [sic] of the girl give her two shillings'; ‘enjoy a girl in the fields for 1s and 6d'; ‘go home with a whore to Everton where I give all the change I have; is 2d'; ‘go to the same fat whore's as I was at the last time; – give her 1s and a cambrick pocket handkerchief; – go home miserable'. The unexpected occurs in his encounter with a vagrant: ‘
walked into the lanes
; – met a fellow who counterfeited drunkenness or lunacy or idiocy; – I say
counterfeited
, because I am well convinced he was some vile outcast of society – a pest and disgrace to humanity. I was just on the point of hitting him a dab on his disgusting face when a gentleman (coming up) alarmed him and saved me trouble.'

Reading this passage, you think there must be some mistake. Is this the young Romantic so transformed by the social sympathies of the
Lyrical Ballads
that he too became a ‘vile outcast'? When he wrote for publication, De Quincey presented himself as elevated by his identification with the marginalised and the dispossessed, as a figure who straddled boundaries, who conversed alike with lords and leech-gatherers, Etonians and street-walkers. Here he gives us a Wordsworthian encounter – one that Wordsworth himself would have turned to advantage – but instead of seeing the vagrant as a visionary, De Quincey sees him as ‘vile' and wants to punch him.

His bourgeois reflexes appear to be as deeply rooted as his childhood reading and his grief for his sister, but De Quincey's response has nothing to do with class antagonism. What makes him angry is that the outcast is ‘counterfeiting' his ‘drunkenness or lunacy'; he is a fake and therefore perhaps too close for comfort. Currently concerned with what ‘character' he might adopt himself, De Quincey had also recently posed as a vagrant while Chatterton, who he is going about impersonating, masterminded the most notorious counterfeit identity of the previous century.

All the time, he was moving closer and closer to his goal. The eleventh of May was spent in preparation, visiting James Wright and drinking coffee, before going back to Mrs Best's to ‘write a rough copy of [a] letter to
Wordsworth
'.

‘
Sir
,' De Quincey nervously began. ‘I take this method of requesting–' This was clouding into heavy weather and so he crossed the sentence out, replacing it with, ‘What I am going to say would seem strange to most men; and to most men therefore I would
not
say it; but to you I will, because your feelings do not follow the current of the world.' As an opening line it could hardly be better; his letter to Wordsworth was De Quincey's first masterpiece. The poet was described in his own terms as a singular figure, and the use of the word ‘strange', which Wordsworth himself employed in the preface to the
Lyrical Ballads
, was a stroke of genius. De Quincey went hesitantly forward, and after several more crossings-out he came up with the next paragraph:

From the time when I first saw the
Lyrical Ballads
I made a resolution to obtain (if I could) the friendship of their author. In taking this resolution I was influenced (I believe) by my reverence for the astonishing genius displayed in those delightful poems, and in an inferior degree, for the dignity of moral character which I persuaded myself their author possessed. Since then I have sought every opportunity. . . and resolved many a scheme of gaining an introduction into your society. But all have failed; and I am compelled either to take this method of soliciting your friendship (which, I am afraid, you will think a liberty), or of giving up almost every chance for obtaining that without which what good can my life do one?

In ‘painful circumstances' and amidst ‘gnawing anxieties', he continued, thoughts of Wordsworth's friendship had provided his ‘only solace'. Not that De Quincey would impose on his ‘hallowed solitude' or detract his attention from the ‘sweet retreats of poetry'. He was, De Quincey stressed, ‘but a boy', and as such came accompanied by neither ‘friends' nor worldly ‘connections'. And nor was it only Wordsworth he held in high esteem; De Quincey revered ‘each dear soul in that enchanting community of yours', all of whom ‘to me . . . are dearer than the sun'. The line, from ‘Ruth', describes a father's love for his children. Despite his hallowed solitude, Wordsworth was not a lone figure but part of an ‘enchanting community', a ‘fellowship' of genius, a magic circle a world away from the Everton coterie.

De Quincey then reached his climax: ‘What allurements can my friendship, unknown and unhonoured as I am, hold out to you?' What indeed?