Guilty Thing (55 page)

‘The Household Wreck' is a tale of terror whose strength lies in the husband's half-conscious sense that it is he and not Agnes or Barratt who is the guilty party: the cause of his wife's suffering and death. In
Suspiria de Profundis
, De Quincey would describe how as a child ‘the crime which might have been was in my mind the crime which had been' and the vertiginous possibilities of this scenario are dramatised here. Wanting to tell a tale of grief, he describes instead only impotence and rage; rather than protect his wife, his narrator wallows in self-pity: ‘
misery has a privilege
,' he says, ‘and everywhere is felt to be a holy thing'. He battles with the past ‘
as though it were a future thing
and capable of change'. As in a dream, ‘The Household Wreck' refigured the elements of De Quincey's waking life: Agnes is found guilty of the crime De Quincey had accused Coleridge of committing; when his wife needs him, her husband is absent, coming ham-fisted to her rescue only when it is too late. The presence of a man called Ratcliffe is a reference to the other household wrecks by which De Quincey was haunted.

Hamlet-like, the hero of ‘The Household Wreck' is an avenger unable to act. De Quincey now wrote another tale for
Blackwood's
on the same theme, which he called ‘The Avenger'. Here the hero, Maximilian Wyndham, returns to his native Germany from fighting at Waterloo. A series of vicious murders takes place in the city where he lives, one of the victims being Maximilian's own young wife, who is called Margaret. In each case the murderer enters the house of the victim and slaughters its occupants. With a killer at large, the fear of the locals is compared to ‘
that which sometimes
takes possession of the mind in dreams – when one feels one's-self sleeping alone, utterly divided from all call or hearing of friends, doors open that should be shut, or unlocked that should be triply secured, the very walls gone, barriers swallowed up by unknown abysses, nothing around one but rail curtains, and a world of illimitable night, whisperings at a distance, correspondence going on between darkness and darkness, like one deep calling to another. . .'

Thus De Quincey brings the terror inward, turning it into an opium trance. The murderer is revealed to be Maximilian himself, avenging the slaughter of his Jewish family, carried out by the same dignitaries many years earlier. As in ‘The Household Wreck', the city has two faces; what seems to its other inhabitants to be a ‘perfectly average' place is experienced by Maximilian as ‘a place of dungeons, tortures and tribunals of tyrants'.

While their father made himself invisible, De Quincey's children delivered his messages and manuscripts. They were instructed to be light on their feet but on ‘three separate times', he complained to Tait in April 1838, ‘in three separate lodgings, I had been traced by the emissaries of my creditors; and always through the carelessness of my children, who suffered themselves to be followed unconsciously'. His winged offspring became a familiar sight: one bookseller recalled how ‘
Mr De Quincey's young, fair-haired
English laddies' came on their father's behalf to ask for loans, and his copy was delivered to Tait by a daughter who would throw the package into the room and shout ‘There!' before rushing off.

What can it have been like to have De Quincey as a father? Florence, on whom ‘the main burden fell', left a vivid description. Running his errands, she got to know the ‘
north and south banks
of the Canongate, George the Fourth Bridge, the cross causeway &c as hideous dreams, my heart rushing into my mouth with the natural terrors of footsteps approaching and rushing down again into my shoes when left to quiet and the ghosts'. The fear he had of his children being followed was, Florence felt, a source of pleasure to De Quincey. ‘It was an accepted fact among us that he was able when saturated with opium to persuade himself and delighted to persuade himself (the excitement of terror was a real delight to him) that he was dogged by dark and mysterious foes.' This way her father absolved himself of guilt for absconding from Holyrood, a ‘home without any competent head where truly no home should have been, and where as truly he could by no possibility have done any work had he remained'.

As far as De Quincey's children were concerned, there was no ‘reality' to his ‘
groanings unutterable
about creditors and enemies'. We know from the records that there was a great deal of reality to these groanings, but Florence's sense of things reminds us that, for those who knew him, De Quincey lived in a paranoid world of his own construction.
This same love of ‘concealment and lurking enemies', she believed, explained why her father would allow no help in arranging his financial affairs. Some of De Quincey's friends ‘gave up under the impression things were too bad to be meddled with, others that there was nothing to be arranged, others – which was the truth – that he didn't like to have them arranged as it disturbed
the prevailing mystery in which he delighted
'.

Throughout these years, Wilson's life had been running alongside De Quincey's on parallel tracks. In the year that Margaret died, Wilson lost his own wife, after which he left Edinburgh, and from now on he and De Quincey saw one another only sporadically. For Florence, their friendship was ‘an illustration of Coleridge's, “Alas, they had been friends in youth”, each indebted to the other at critical periods of their improvident lives for kindly help, perhaps not admitted as generously as they might have been by Professor Wilson
when he was the successful man
'.

The January 1839 edition of
Tait's
opened with an essay called ‘Lake Reminiscences, from 1807–1830, By the English Opium-Eater, No 1 – William Wordsworth'. Building on the success of his portrait of Coleridge, De Quincey now promised to provide his readers with ‘sketches of the daily life and habits' of the whole Wordsworth circle. What followed would cross-pollinate biography with gossip, literary criticism and local history, but it was as autobiography that De Quincey saw his ‘Lake Reminiscences', which he later grouped together in his collected work under the title
Autobiographic Sketches with Recollections of the Lakes
. A black comedy about a Messiah who rejects his disciple, the ‘Lake Reminiscences' might be seen as a parodic inversion of Boswell's
Life of Johnson
.

It was now that De Quincey, the avenger, described the deep, deep magnet of William Wordsworth, his longing to meet the poet, his delay of four and a half years, his first sighting of Dove Cottage, the day on which he saw his hero descending down the garden path and the night that followed, ‘the first of my personal intercourse with Wordsworth', which was also ‘the first in which I saw him face to face'. ‘In 1807 it was,' De Quincey's ‘Lake Reminiscences' began, ‘at the beginning of Winter, that I first saw William Wordsworth.'

Autobiographic Sketches
had borrowed
The Prelude
's narrative frame, but in ‘Lake Reminiscences' De Quincey used his first-hand knowledge of the poem to prove his intimacy with the poet. Despite Wordsworth's current ‘slovenly' appearance, wrote De Quincey, he had ‘
assumed the beau
' at Cambridge, donning silk stockings and powdering his hair, and the first time he got ‘bouzy' was when he visited the Christ College rooms which had once been occupied by Milton. Wordsworth's own college rooms, De Quincey revealed, had been above the kitchen, where from ‘noon to dewy eve, resounded the shrill voice of scolding from the female ministers of the head cook'. These Boswellian details, presented as the fruits of private conversations, were gleaned from ‘Residence at Cambridge', Book Third of the unpublished
Prelude.

De Quincey's moment of glory was yet to come. ‘
And here I may mention
,' he revealed to the readers of
Tait's
, ‘I hope without any breach of confidence, that, in a great philosophic poem of Wordsworth's, which is still in M.S., and will remain in M.S. until after his death, there is, at the opening of one of the books, a dream, which reaches the very ne plus ultra of sublimity.' He was referring to the dream of the Arab in Book Fifth. In De Quincey's account of these lines the poet, reading
Don Quixote
by the sea, falls asleep and dreams that coming towards him across the sands is an Arab on a dromedary. In his hands are two books. One is Euclid's
Elements
and the other ‘is a book and yet not a book, seeming, in fact, a shell as well as a book, sometimes neither, and yet both at once'. Applying the shell to his ear, the dreamer hears a prophecy that the world will be destroyed by flood. The Arab is on a ‘divine mission' to bury the books and thus save ‘two great interests of poetry and mathematics from sharing in the watery ruin'. Thus he continues on his way, ‘with the fleet of waters of the drowning world in chase of him'.

De Quincey's readers will have found in his various writings versions of Wordsworth's dream before. The Malay who appeared at Dove Cottage was another Arab dream, while in the
London Magazine
De Quincey had recalled Walking Stewart advising him to bury his most precious books ‘seven or eight feet below the surface of the earth'. De Quincey doubted that his betrayal of Wordsworth's trust, which today would land him in court, could ‘in any way affect Mr Wordsworth's interests', but few things could be more irritating to the poet than to discover that the contents of his yet unpublished masterpiece had been stolen from him and spilled out in a piece of popular journalism.

The first of the ‘Lake Reminiscences' ended with a cliffhanger: ‘I acknowledge myself,' De Quincey revealed, ‘to have been long alienated from Wordsworth. Sometimes even I feel a rising emotion of hostility – nay, something, I fear, too nearly akin to vindictive hatred.' His great ‘fountain of love' for the poet and ‘all his household' had dried up, and he found himself ‘standing aloof, gloomily granting (because I cannot refuse) my intellectual homage'. On whose side did the fault lie? On Wordsworth's, ‘in doing too little', or on De Quincey's ‘
in expecting too much
'? Both were to blame, De Quincey suspected. He then announced that for the next instalment he would ‘
trace, in brief outline
, the chief incidents in the life of William Wordsworth': few biographies have begun in such a manner.

De Quincey was not, like Hazlitt, a great hater. In his essay ‘On the Pleasure of Hating', Hazlitt argued that ‘Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.' But had De Quincey felt hatred alone towards Wordsworth he could never have described his colossal ego with such clarity, nor could he have explored so well the impact of colliding with such a thing. His subject in the ‘Lake Reminiscences' is not vindictive hatred but disappointed love. In one passage he described:

The case of a man who
, for many years, has connected himself closely with the domestic griefs and joys of another, over and above his primary service of giving to him the strength and the encouragement of a profound literary sympathy, at a time of universal scowling from the world; suppose this man to fall into a situation in which, from want of natural connections and from his state of insulation in life, it might be most important to his feelings that some support should be lent to him by a family having a known place and acceptance, and what may be called a root in the country, by means of connections, descent, and long settlement. To look for this, might be a most humble demand on the part of one who had testified his devotion in the way supposed. To miss it might – but enough. I murmur not; complaint is weak at all times; and the hour is passed irrevocably, and by many a year, in which an act of friendship so natural, and costing so little, (in both senses so priceless,) could have been availing.

Wordsworth has never been granted the same biographical immediacy as Coleridge, and without De Quincey he would have remained for us a distant figure in a black coat. The comic details in the ‘Lake Reminiscences' allow him that vital extra dimension: Wordsworth, De Quincey revealed, had not been an amiable child, and nor did he make a performance of gallantry around women: ‘
a lover
. . . in any passionate sense of the word, Wordsworth could not have been'. There are memorable portraits of him slicing through the uncut pages of De Quincey's new copy of Burke with a buttery knife, beating down the rent of Allan Bank when the chimneys smoked, and growing prosperous on the back of benefactors, patrons, legacies and bequests. Any need for money, De Quincey noted, was met by a convenient death; when Wordsworth's family began to increase, a wealthy uncle, feeling ‘
how very indelicate it would look
for him to stay any longer', promptly departed this world. Those standing in Wordsworth's way politely ‘moved off', for fear of being bumped off. Wordsworth's business sense was immaculate: ‘
Whilst foolish people supposed him
a mere honeyed sentimentalist, speaking only in zephyrs and bucolics, he was in fact a somewhat hard pursuer of what he thought fair advantages.' Hazlitt's sketch of the poet in
The Spirit of the Age
described, without De Quincey's personal animosity, the same chill arrogance (‘
He admits of nothing below
, scarcely of anything above, himself'), the same dismissal of other writers (‘
He condemns all French writers
. . . in the lump'), and the same disengagement with the world beyond nature (‘
If a greater number of sources
of pleasure had been open to him, he would have communicated pleasure to the world more frequently'). Hazlitt was indifferent to Wordsworth's indifference towards him; his mastery lay in evaluating the poet's character as though it were lines of verse. De Quincey's own mastery lies in the vulnerability of his anecdotes, the friction between biographer and subject, the focus on himself as the receiving consciousness. For all his Greek, he was a born journalist. ‘The
truth and life of these Lake Sketches
,' gasped Mary Russell Mitford when she put down her copy of
Tait's
, ‘is wonderful.'