Guilty Thing (43 page)

What De Quincey did next was all too predictable: he took his opium article to the
London Magazine
. Armed with a letter of introduction from Wordsworth – this was the second time since De Quincey's marriage that the poet had come to his rescue – he met the new editors, John Taylor and James Hessey, and secured himself a commission. Nothing was known at the
London
about his support for
Blackwood's
in the fatal row, and De Quincey lived in terror of his duplicity being revealed.

In order to write his opium piece he stayed in the city during the summer of 1821, but rather than return to his former lodgings on Great Titchfield Street he installed himself in John Scott's former rooms at 4 York Street (now Tavistock Street), Covent Garden. Five months earlier, Scott had left this building feet-first. Only De Quincey could have sought such a domestic arrangement: having quarrelled with William Blackwood, he secretly aligned himself with another man who had quarrelled with Blackwood and been killed as a consequence. By now he openly identified with Scott. ‘
To speak conscientiously
', whispered De Quincey to Wilson, he could not ‘wholly approve of everything' that
Blackwood's
had done in the duel business. He referred, in particular, to the magazine's ‘contemptuous' treatment of Keats, who had died in Rome in the same week that Scott had died in London; ‘snuff'd out', said Byron, by a bad review. Keats's
Endymion
had been described by
Blackwood's
as ‘imperturbable drivelling idiocy'. De Quincey himself thought the poem ‘
the very midsummer madness of affection
'.

That summer, De Quincey, his daily laudanum intake down to 300 drops, scuttled through the London streets in a state of high anxiety, revealing to Taylor that he ‘had a sort of feeling or ominous anticipation, that possibly there was some being in the world who was fated to do him at some time a great & unexpiable injury'. Taylor assumed that ‘
Wilson might be the man
.' Withdrawal from opium released his paranoia, but De Quincey's fears were, as ever, not entirely ungrounded. John Wilson was a dangerous beast, and De Quincey's betrayal of
Blackwood's
was bound to have repercussions. ‘
These things Wilson can never forgive
,' he told his new friend, a lawyer called Richard Woodhouse. ‘They will rankle in his mind: and at some time or other I am sure he will do what he can to injure me. I care not for myself, but there are quarters through which he can injure me.' These quarters referred to Margaret, alone and unprotected in Grasmere while her husband was alone and unprotected in the capital. De Quincey worked throughout August so that the article could appear in the September edition of the magazine, and he could return home to the bosom of his family.

Writing in haste in the former rooms of the murdered editor, De Quincey produced ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
:
Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar'. The story had been forming itself in his mind for years: a man returns to London where, in his youth, he had undergone terrible sufferings. These became the cause of his later trials as an opium addict. His early sufferings had been external – he was cold, hungry and homeless – while those he experienced as an adult were internal, and revealed themselves in dreams. De Quincey hoped that his narrative would prove ‘useful and instructive' but the nobility of this intention was undermined by his announcement that opium was the ‘
true hero
' of the tale. Amongst other things, ‘Confessions' is a fan letter addressed to opium itself.

The
London
paid him well (his fee was ‘ultramunificent') but as De Quincey was now renting three homes – Dove Cottage, Fox Ghyll and 4 York Place – the money did not go far. In desperation, he asked if Coleridge might now return the £300 he had loaned him in 1807. It was not to be. ‘I feel,' Coleridge apologised, ‘that I am lingering on the brink.' So too was De Quincey. In the week of his thirty-sixth birthday he was threatened with arrest for an unpaid bill and so hid himself in the ‘tumult of coffee houses'. He was penniless, ill, and waiting to be bludgeoned to death by
Blackwood's.
It will not have gone unnoticed by him that he had reached the same age as Scott when he died, and that little had changed between the life he was currently leading and the past he was writing about: De Quincey had been on the run then and he was on the run now. Meanwhile, his narrative was expanding and required a second instalment. The first part – an account of how he ran away from school, wandered in Wales, and came to London – was completed at the end of August and appeared anonymously in a twenty-page spread buried deep in the magazine.

The readers loved this strange story. ‘
Everyone who noticed the magazine
at all is interested in the Fate of the Opium-Eater,' announced the delighted Taylor, who was praised by Shelley's publisher for having ‘“the best prose writer in England” as a contributor'. The first instalment proved so popular that the second instalment was presented as the lead article for the October issue. It was divided by De Quincey into three sections: ‘The Pleasures of Opium', in which the author described the happiness he had discovered on that wet Sunday afternoon; ‘Introduction to the Pains of Opium', which contained the appearance of the Malay; and ‘The Pains of Opium', where he compared the ‘architecture' of his dreams with those of Piranesi. The sections replicated the movement from euphoria to nightmare of Coleridge's ‘Christabel', ‘Kubla Khan', and ‘The Pains of Sleep'. He concluded by (falsely) assuring his readers that while he was still ‘agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating', ‘shattered' and ‘racked', the worst of his addiction was now over.

While Carlyle, when he had finished the ‘Confessions', concluded that it would be a ‘thousand times better' to ‘
die
than have anything to do with such a
Devil's own drug
', the lawyer Sir James Mackintosh responded with ‘
more delight than I know how to express
'. One reviewer condemned the author's ‘secret, selfish, suicidal debauchery', and another – for the
Edinburgh Review
 – accused him of lifting the appearance of the Malay from a scene involving a visiting Highlander in Hogg's short story ‘The Adventures of Basil Lee'. The other notices were glowing. The Opium-Eater was a writer of ‘first-rate talents', declared the
Imperial Magazine
.
The United States Literary Gazette
thought his language ‘sometimes powerful and magnificent in the extreme'. Who, readers wondered, could have written such a thing? The painter and poisoner, Thomas Griffin Wainewright, unmasked himself as the author; Edgar Allan Poe declared it was the work of Juniper, his pet baboon. Coleridge, who knew exactly whose confessions they were, felt ‘unutterable sorrow' when he read them. With ‘morbid vanity', he wrote, De Quincey had ‘made
a boast of what
was my misfortune'. De Quincey's celebration of opium was in opposition to Coleridge's condemnation, and his focus on the pleasure principle was a criticism of Coleridge's denial that he had ever used opium for anything other than medicinal purposes. Addicts typically compare and contrast their addictions, and Wordsworth suggested that in order to exonerate himself, De Quincey had simply transferred his own guilt onto the figure of the conveniently sinking mariner. It was only Crabb Robinson who saw that De Quincey's ‘fragment of Autobiography' was written ‘in emulation of Coleridge's diseased egotism'.

De Quincey promoted himself as the first to sing a hymn to the poppy's intellectual pleasures as opposed to its curative qualities, but everyone knew, from Coleridge's own preface, that ‘Kubla Khan' was the product of an opium dream. De Quincey's only reference to his precursor in the ‘Confessions' was to note the high ‘quantity' of Coleridge's consumption, which ‘greatly exceeded' his own; the high quality of Coleridge's opium-saturated imagination is not mentioned.

The importance of Coleridge as the first literary opium-eater is confirmed in the essay by Elia (Charles Lamb) called ‘
Witches, and Other Night Fears
', which immediately followed the second instalment of De Quincey's ‘Confessions'. As a child, Elia confessed, he saw ‘fiendish faces' looking down at him as he slept but in adult life he was ‘mortified' by the poverty of his dreams. ‘They are never romantic, – seldom even rural. . . I have travelled along the Westmorland fells – my highest Alps, – but they were objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition.' How was it, Elia asked, that his friend Coleridge was able to ‘solace his night solitudes' with ‘icy domes, and pleasure houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and songs of Abara, and caverns “Where Alph, the sacred river, runs”', while he himself was unable to ‘muster a fiddle'? The answer, of course, was that Coleridge ate opium.

The ‘Confessions' appealed as an account of dreams and an account of addiction, but principally as an account of the author himself.
Autobiography
 – although the word was not yet in general circulation – was the current charging the literature of the first half of the nineteenth century, and De Quincey was to be its consummate practitioner. ‘
Egotism is the spirit of the age
,' wrote one of the ‘Confessions' reviewers, ‘and the object of every author is to describe his own thoughts, his own feelings, his own passions.' ‘Egotism,' wrote Thomas Colley Grattan in his parodic ‘Confessions of an English Glutton', which appeared in
Blackwood's
in January 1823, ‘has become as endemical to English literature as the plague to Egypt or the scurvy to the northern climes.' When Wordsworth proclaimed of
The Prelude
that it was ‘a thing unprecedented in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself' he was echoing Rousseau, whose
Confessions
, published in 1784, had opened with the assertion that ‘I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, when complete, will have no imitator.' De Quincey, who imitated everyone, declared in the opening pages of his own ‘Confessions' that there were ‘no precedents' that he was ‘aware of' for the type of ‘impassioned prose' he employed. He described his writing as ‘self-accusation' and contrasted it with the ‘self-abuse' of ‘French literature'. One of the many ironies woven into the dense fabric of his ‘Confessions' is that while De Quincey opened with an attack on the ‘spurious and defective sensibility of the French', it is this sensibility that he impersonated. And it was to be in France, through
Les Paradis artificiels
, Charles Baudelaire's 1860 translation and adaptation of De Quincey's
Confessions
, that he would find his most sympathetic readers.

But De Quincey did more in his ‘Confessions' than describe his own thoughts, feelings and passions: as a confessor he gave himself personality, and the Opium-Eater would take on a life of his own. ‘What can be done without personality?' asked Christopher North in the ‘Noctes' in March 1822. Personality was not the
London
house style: ‘everything that can fairly be called
personality
should be avoided
', Scott had ruled when setting up the magazine, by which he meant the sort of arrogance and buffoonery that
Blackwood's
promoted. Personality meant celebrity, and De Quincey's celebrity was sealed when a reviewer of the ‘Confessions' said he was unsure if the ‘character in which the Opium-eater speaks be real or imaginary'.
Blackwood's
writers all passed themselves off, so the Shepherd puts in the ‘Noctes', as ‘sometimes for real, and sometimes for fictitious characters', but since the days of his youth De Quincey had been anxious about attacks on his ‘veracity,' added to which the power of the recovery memoir has always rested on humility and truth. He thus responded to this particular reviewer's ‘impeachment' of his identity in a letter to the
London Magazine
. ‘
The entire “Confessions”
,' he wrote, ‘were designed to convey a narrative of my own experience as an opium-eater, drawn up with entire simplicity and fidelity to the facts.' He now promised a third part which would redress the ‘overbalance' various reviewers had noted ‘on the side of the
pleasures
of opium' at the expense of the ‘pains'. This much trumpeted final instalment never appeared.