Guilty Thing (45 page)

It's perfectly dreadfu', yon pouring in upon you o' oriental imagery. But nae wunner. Sax thousand draps o' lowdnam! It's as muckle, I fancy, as a bottle o'whusky. I tried that experiment mysel, after reading the wee wud wicked wark, wi' five hunner draps, and I couped ower, and continued in ae snore frae Monday night till Friday morning. But I had naething to confess.

The Shepherd had ‘naething at least that wad gang into words', his opium experience being just ‘clouds, clouds, clouds hovering round and round'. He is told by North that he should write a book about the clouds anyway. Moving the conversation forwards, the Shepherd asks ‘But how's Wudsworth?' ‘I have not seen him since half-past two o'clock on the 17th September,' replies the Opium-Eater.

It is doubtful that he was amused by his ‘Noctes' persona. Teased by Lamb about his
Confessions
, De Quincey had reacted badly. There were, he grandly explained, ‘
certain places & events
and circumstances, which had been mixed up or connected with parts of my life which have been very unfortunate, and these, from constant meditation & reflection upon them, have obtained with me a sort of sacredness'. Should they be referred to ‘by others in any tone of levity or witticism' it seemed to him ‘a sort of desecration & harrowing, analogous to the profanation of a temple'.

It was through the ‘Noctes' that
Blackwood's
poached the Opium-Eater from the
London Magazine
and turned him into their own creation. De Quincey's ‘personality' was further embedded in the culture of
Maga
with the appearance of the parodic ‘
Confessions of an English Glutton
'. Like the Opium-Eater, the English Glutton finds that in ‘profess[ing] himself a slave to gluttony – the commonest failing of all!' he is alone of his kind. The way to ensure immortality, he learns, is to ‘pour' his ‘fatal story' into the ‘confiding and capacious bosom of the public' as ‘the Wine-drinker, the Opium-Eater, the Hypochondriac, and the Hypercritic' have all done (the Wine-drinker referred to Charles Lamb's 1813 essay – republished by the
London
in 1822 – ‘Confessions of a Drunkard'). A glutton since ‘August 1764' when he was ‘precisely two years and two months old', he is now an eater of everything (except opium). A plate of pork, he confesses, ‘smoking in his rich brown symmetry of form and hue', plunges him into ‘
media res.
Never shall I forget the flavour of that first morsel – it was sublime!' Thus De Quincey's rainy Sunday afternoon becomes a steaming Sunday roast. Discarding both knife and fork, the Glutton thrust the beast ‘wholesale' into his mouth ‘until at last my head began to swim – my eyes seemed starting from their sockets. . . a fullness of brain seemed bursting through my skull – my veins seemed swelled into gigantic magnitude – I lost all reason and remembrance, and fell, in that state, fairly under the table.' These horrors, however, are now behind him. ‘Forty-two years have passed since that memorable day – forty thousand recollections of that infernal pig have flashed across my brain.' As for his ‘dreaming hours', the Glutton suffered ‘quotidian repetitions of visions, each more hideous than the former. I dreamt, and dreamt, and dreamt – of what? Of pig – pig – pig – nothing but pig.' He saw ham in the landscape and ham in the clouds. Pursued by Hogg (the pun was intended), he ‘tumbled headlong down thousands of thousands of fathoms, till I was at length landed in a pig-stye, at the very bottom of all bottomless pits'.

The parodies of the Opium-Eater were tributes rather than attacks:
Blackwood's
revenge came later, and when it was least expected.

Gill's Hill Cottage, where the corpse of William Weare was hidden in a pond.

‘The murder is a good one, and truly gratifying to every man of correct taste. Yet it might have been better.'

12

Imagination, Impaired and Restored

Like one, that on a lonely road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round walks on

And turns no more his head,

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread.

Coleridge, ‘The Ancient Mariner'

Debt swallowed debt, like one deep calling to another. Home in Grasmere in 1822, De Quincey's time was spent beating back the butcher, the grocer, the wine merchant, the haberdasher, the butterman, the dressmaker, the landlord, all demanding payment. He would dread the sound of knocking, and the suspense in the house when knocking was expected. His current income was around £250 a year, composed of £100 from Elizabeth Quincey – now suffering the indignation of being known as the Opium-Eater's mother – £100 from his Uncle Penson, and the rest made up from his writing. It was equivalent to the income of a country parson. Frugality was essential, but De Quincey understood only excess; during his worst excesses he spent £150 a year on laudanum. Excess was in the blood; his mother's extravagant property speculations and repeated home improvements had drained her own coffers, leaving her reliant on the generosity of her brother.

At the core of De Quincey's personality were his addictions. Opium was one and debt was another; his relationship to both was a manifestation of the same fear. Without the insulation they offered, he was faced with the ordinary tide of human affairs. Opium and debt allowed De Quincey to live a second life, apart and with himself alone. They removed him from the crowd and had him trapped: just as opium cured the effects of opium, the solution to debt was to borrow. A credit-based economy is a catastrophe for an addict, but the logic of debt made sense to De Quincey. ‘You know there is such a thing,' he once explained, ‘as
buying a thing and yet not paying for it
.' De Quincey was at home in the realm of indebtedness, intellectual or financial. Despite his fascination with political economy – a subject he chewed over for the
London Magazine
in thousands of indigestible words – money would always remain for him an abstract idea. When little Paul Dombey asks his father, in Dickens's novel, what money is, Mr Dombey replies: ‘Gold, and silver, and copper. Guineas, shillings, half-pence,' as he jingles them in his pocket. Money was never so solid for De Quincey; any coins in his pocket disintegrated like a rope of sand. Money frightened him: lethal, insidious, invisible, it circled around his person, pursuing him in its absence like footsteps on the road. When it came his way he quickly passed it on to friends, ridding himself of the evidence. De Quincey's primary expenditure, apart from opium, was on books: book-buying was another addiction. He bought hungrily, greedily, avidly, regardless of cost and then, because he had nowhere to store his booty, he paid rent for rooms he could not afford. He was well trained in the business of bolting when reality began to bite.

His laudanum intake now swerved between 160 and 300 drops a day. Battling with ‘
infantine feebleness
' and ‘a torpor of the will', he reduced it to 130 drops; for a month it ‘plunged' to 80 drops, and then to 60. For ninety hours in the summer of 1822, De Quincey took no laudanum at all. The results were sleeplessness, restlessness, excessive sweating, ‘unspeakable, unutterable misery of mind' and ‘the wretchedness of a lunatic'. A benefit was that, momentarily, his powers returned: ‘I have a greater influx of thoughts in one hour at present than in a whole year under the reign of opium,' he wrote. Those thoughts ‘which had been frozen up' now ‘thawed' and streamed in on him. But he soon resorted to his usual levels of ingestion, and the drug once again ‘
aggravated the misery
which for the moment it relieved'. And so the wheel turned. What he wrote under the influence afterwards filled him with self-loathing. Opium-writing became, he explained to Mary Russell Mitford, ‘
overspread with a dark frenzy
of horror', as though ‘wrapt' in a ‘sheet of consuming fire – the very paper is poisoned to my eyes. I cannot endure to look at it, and I sweep it away into the vast piles of unfinished letters or inchoate essays.'

In November 1822 Margaret gave birth to their fourth child, a son called Francis. On 9 December he returned to London with the aim of clearing his debts. ‘
Why am I now in London?
' he raged to Hessey and Taylor from his rooms opposite their Fleet Street offices, ‘Are you aware – 1. Of the enormous sacrifice I am making in
personal happiness
by staying at a distance of 300 miles from my own family? 2. . . of the
price in money
at which I am doing this? 3. Have you ever asked –
whose interests
this residence in London was meant to serve?' It was a confused rage, directed mainly at himself. Without his editors on his doorstep, nothing would get written, and if nothing was written there would be no payment. De Quincey was also aware – as were all the
London
contributors – that
Blackwood's
, to whose editor he had been similarly obnoxious, was the superior publication.

His rooms were described by a visitor as a ‘German Ocean of Literature', with volumes ‘flooding all the floor, the table and the chairs, – billows of books tossing, tumbling, surging open'. This ocean found its way into De Quincey's writing. In his ‘Letters to a Young Man Whose Education Has Been Neglected', which appeared in the
London
between January and July 1823, he described his oceanic feeling for books. In his youth, he ‘
never entered a great library
, suppose of 100,000 volumes, but my predominant feeling was one of pain and disturbance of mind' that there were not years in a lifetime in which to read everything. Books were reduced to nothing but counting: De Quincey could ‘extract the honey' from one-twentieth of this hive; ‘subtracting' works of reference, such as dictionaries, there ‘would still remain a total of not less than twelve hundred thousand books over and above what the presses of Europe are still disemboguing into the ocean of literature'. A Portuguese monk, he continued, had shown how, ‘with respect to one single work, viz:
The History of Thusanus
', that to ‘barely. . . read over the words (allowing no time for reflection) would require three years labour, at the rate of (I think) three hours a-day'. Reading at the rate of 400 pages a day – ‘all skipping being barred' – meant that the most a man could hope to accomplish in thirty years was 10,000 volumes. A sixty-year lifespan allowed him to ‘travel through' only 20,000, ‘a number not, perhaps, above
five per cent
of what the mere
current
literature of Europe would accumulate in that period of years'. His ‘gluttonism' for books, De Quincey explained, turned what should be a pleasure into a ‘torment'; the excess of it all tipped him into ‘madness'. Meanwhile, his landlord was after the rent and so he absconded to a local inn and hid for a while beneath an alias.

In May 1823, Hazlitt published his own confessions,
Liber Amoris.
One of the strangest books ever written, Hazlitt's subject was his obsessive love for a servant girl, and De Quincey, who knew about obsession and had married his servant, was one of the book's few sympathetic readers. The two men occasionally walked home together after a late-night party, and in their only recorded conversation (recorded by De Quincey) their talk turned to the Duke of Cumberland's servant, who had been found with his throat cut. The coroner's jury concluded that the victim had tried to kill the duke and then killed himself, but rumour had it that the duke himself had murdered the servant, who had discovered him in bed with his valet. De Quincey the royalist stood by the official verdict, while Hazlitt the Jacobin ‘would hear no reason', insisting that ‘all the princely houses of Europe have the instinct of
murder running through their blood
'.

After eight months in London, De Quincey scraped together the fare back to Grasmere where he arrived in time to celebrate his thirty-eighth birthday in August 1823. In September, the
London
ran his magical essay on ‘Walking Stewart', the ‘sublime visionary' last seen by De Quincey in 1812 when he had been overtaken by three simulacra of Walking Stewarts on his way through Soho. That same month, from the chaos of Fox Ghyll, De Quincey wrote a paper on Malthus's ‘Essay on Population'. Malthus described a populace veering out of control. The human race was doubling, trebling, quadrupling itself and hurtling towards extinction: it was a theory calculated to thrill De Quincey. Much of what he said in his essay, however, had been anticipated by Hazlitt himself, who complained to the editors that while he did ‘not wish to bring any charge of plagiarism', ‘credit' was due. In two sweating pages of self-defence, published in the
London
, De Quincey drew on the question of ‘“running away” with the credit of another'. The concept of credit was close to his heart, he teasingly explained, and ‘
Mr. Hazlitt must permit me to smile
when I read that word used in that sense: I can assure him that not any abstract consideration of credit, but the abstract idea of a creditor. . . has for some time past been the animating principle of my labours.'