Guilty Thing (23 page)

When spring came he moved out of his college rooms and took lodgings in the nearby village of Littlemore. By now De Quincey had ‘entered the cave of Trophonius'; the image referred to the Greek architect who was swallowed up by the earth.

Thus it was that six months would pass before he wrote again to Wordsworth. ‘
When you gave me permission
to write you must have wondered, (when you remembered me) that I made so little use of it,' De Quincey's next letter began. His silence was due to being absorbed in ‘little, & then unknown cares' and only now that he had ‘retired to this little village' could he ‘marshall [his] thoughts afresh'. Afraid that Wordsworth might think his admiration for
Lyrical Ballads
had been exaggerated, he described his first ‘acquaintance' with the poems. Like everything De Quincey said to Wordsworth, the story he now told was tailored to make their friendship seem as inevitable as a breaking wave.

‘
Some years ago
spending my holidays at Bath I was shewn the poem of We are Seven which was handed about in manuscript. Between this period & that when I afterwards discovered the volume from which it was taken, a long time intervened.' During this long interval, De Quincey explained, he had become ‘intoxicated' with the ‘delirious and lawless pleasures' of literature as low as ‘German drama'. He would have lost himself in a ‘frenzy' of melodrama had it not been for the ‘purer & more permanent pleasure' he had, from his ‘infancy', found in the ‘Love of Nature'. In his attempt to ‘wean' himself from Gothic turbulence, he ‘looked round for some guide who might assist to develop & tutor to new feelings, & then it was that from a recollection of the deep impression made on me by the short poem I have mentioned I knew where to seek that guidance, & where I sought, I found it'.

De Quincey's way of paying homage was to claim complete identification with his idols. Wordsworth had no idea that his pupil was not quite the reflective mirror he presented himself as being, that he quite happily balanced a love of the Gothic alongside the ‘purifying pleasures' of contemporary poetry. He was now, De Quincey explained to Wordsworth, awaiting the hour when he too could become his ‘own Master' and ‘live with those Brothers & Sisters who still remain to me, in solitary converse with Nature'. Of De Quincey's surviving siblings, Richard had run away to sea, Henry was still at school, and Jane and Mary had shown no interest in setting up house with their delinquent brother.

Only after posting the letter did De Quincey discover, to his frustration, that Wordsworth had written to him twice since August. The first of the letters had been forwarded from the Priory to Bristol, and then on to Oxford, and the second had been waiting for him at Worcester College. Amongst the information contained, Wordsworth told De Quincey that he was writing a poem ‘on his own life', and that Coleridge had become separated from them during the Scottish tour due to illness. De Quincey, now dashing off a supplementary letter, expressed delight in the prospect of the anticipated poem and suggested that should Coleridge try the waters at Bath, he could find him lodgings in the city. He then replied in detail to Wordsworth's query about his moral virtue. Intemperance, De Quincey explained, was ‘disgusting' to him; he was immune to the dissolute temptations of college life; he had ‘not much to reproach [himself] with', and nothing in his conduct could make Wordsworth ‘
repent the notice
you have taken of me'. His description of himself was, for the moment, true.

That summer, 1804, De Quincey celebrated his nineteenth birthday. On the same day, the newly crowned Napoleon spent his thirty-fifth birthday reviewing his troops stationed in Boulogne. His ancient throne was placed on the top of a hill, surrounded by 200 bullet-riddled and bloodstained banners brought from his victories at Lodi, Marengo and Areola, a piece of theatre reported in detail in the English papers.

In the autumn De Quincey returned to London for reasons unexplained, but which were almost certainly to do with borrowing money against his patrimony. As the interminable negotiations with Mr Dell once more creaked into action, he awoke with rheumatic pains in his face. These he attributed to his morning ritual of immersing his head in cold water. After twenty-one days of agony a fellow student recommended opium and soon afterwards, on a ‘
wet and cheerless
' Sunday afternoon, De Quincey found himself back on Oxford Street and entering a druggist's shop. The druggist was a ‘dull and stupid' man, but in De Quincey's mind he became a ‘beautific vision . . . sent down to earth on a special mission to myself'. His first taste of ‘eloquent opium' produced one of the most celebrated passages in his
Confessions
:

In an hour
, oh! Heavens! What a revulsion! What an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! What an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes: – this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened up before me – in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was the panacea. . . for all human woes, here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered: happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket: portable ecstasies might be had corked-up in a pint bottle: and peace of mind could be sent down in gallows to the mail-coach.

Opium was the making of De Quincey. Under the pseudonym of ‘the Opium-Eater' he would find the ‘character' he had been searching for in the pages of his diary, and in the drug itself he discovered the ‘master key' to the ‘diviner part of his nature'. With opium by his side, his ‘moral affections [were] in a state of cloudless serenity; and over all [shone] the great light of
the majestic intellect
'. He could dissolve self-conflict, eliminate self-recrimination, divest himself of fear and anxiety. He found the peace which had eluded him since that midsummer day in 1792. He could ‘run away' from his ‘
torments
'; he was no longer pursued by whispers, footsteps, hysterical rivers, angry mobs or mad dogs. As George Gilfillan put it in his portrait of De Quincey, opium ‘
shut him up
(like the Genie in the “Arabian Tales”) in a phial filled with dusky fire'.

De Quincey tried to return to the experience of this rainy afternoon for the rest of his life; his future addiction was born of the hope that he might feel once again this initial euphoria. But like everything to do with Oxford Street, it simply evanesced. So too did the druggist himself: ‘
I sought him
near the stately Pantheon and found him not: and thus to me, who knew not his name (if indeed he had one) he seemed rather to have vanished from Oxford-street than to have removed in any bodily fashion.'

We have always been in awe of opium. Fossilised poppy seeds found at the remains of a lake village in Zurich suggest that the drug was consumed in the late Stone Age; Egyptian scrolls reveal that Ra recommended it for headaches; Homer relates how Helen, pitying the dejection of Telemachus and his men after Troy, pours an ointment into their wine called ‘no sorrow'; Sibyl sedates Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog at the gates of Hades, with an opiate, and Galen prescribed opium as an antidote for ‘confusion' in the elderly. ‘It is time, poppy, to give up your secrets,' said Diocles of Carystus in the fourth century AD, and for his next fifty-five years De Quincey remained convinced that the poppy allowed him access to the ‘inner world of secret self-consciousness' in which ‘each of us lives a second life apart and with himself alone'.

While crude opium, the juice of the seed heads, forms a sticky brown cake which can be chewed, smoked or injected, a tincture dissolved in wine or brandy produces laudanum, a bitter-tasting ruby-coloured liquid which, sweetened with nutmeg or another spice, can be served from a wine decanter. Like Coleridge and many of his contemporaries, De Quincey was a laudanum-drinker rather than an opium-eater, which raises a question about the sensational title he gave his
Confessions
. The effects of laudanum, De Quincey noted, were the opposite of drunkenness. While wine ignited a fast-burning fire, laudanum created a steady gemlike glow; wine aggravated what laudanum sedated; wine disordered the faculties that laudanum focused. What De Quincey discovered that day was that the doors of perception could be cleansed by experiences other than poetry, that opium also offered ‘
an absolute revelation
of untrodden worlds, teeming with power and beauty, as yet unsuspected amongst men'.

At first he would plan his indulgences in advance, and take himself to London once every three weeks for a debauch of opium and opera. He felt his world now ‘spiritualised and sublimed'; having swallowed the magic potion, he would purchase a cheap seat high up in the gallery of the King's Theatre and, shivering with pleasure, absorb the experience of the contralto, Giuseppina Grassini, singing Neapolitan revivals of Andreozzi's
La vergine del sole
, Nasolini's
La morte di Cleopatra
and Fioravanti's
Camilla
. Opium gave De Quincey a form of synaesthesia, allowing him to see in the ‘elaborate harmony displayed before me, as in a piece of arras-work, the whole of my past life'.

He then walked, ‘
without much regarding
the direction or the distance, to all the markets, and other parts of London, to which the poor resort on a Saturday night, for laying out their wages'. Laudanum London bore no relation to the cruel city he had known two years before. ‘Like the bee, that extracts its materials indiscriminately from roses and from the soot of chimneys,' his tonic ‘overruled' the differences between wealth and poverty. Imagining himself invisible, he walked amongst the crowds, taking in ‘the motion of time' and the rhythm of talk. ‘Whenever I saw occasion, or could do it without appearing to be intrusive, I joined their parties; and gave my opinion upon the matter in discussion.' His mother had once described herself as his steering map; now, when the city fell silent, De Quincey would ‘steer' his own way ‘homewards upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage'. Since John Cabot was sent by Henry VII in 1497, Arctic voyages to discover a north-west passage to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans had been plentiful. Navigating back to his lodgings through the labyrinthine streets, De Quincey identified himself with a whole host of ancient mariners feeling their way forwards through the emerald green ice. When the terrible isolation of addiction took hold, these walks amongst the multitude became a happy memory.

As an ‘opium-eater', De Quincey found not only found a literary identity, but a subject suited to his style. He was never to be, like Dorothy Wordsworth, a miniaturist. He thought in terms of accumulation and he piled his sentences high; he observed distortion rather than detail, crowds rather than individuals. A face, for De Quincey, rarely had features. ‘
It was my disease
,' he said, ‘to meditate too much and to observe too little'; he ‘suffered', said Virginia Woolf, ‘from the gift of seeing everything
a size too large
, and of reproducing his vision in words which are also a size too large'. But his writing could always support the weight of his reveries, and opium gave voice to De Quincey's stylistic insatiability.

During his London visits, he introduced himself to Charles Lamb, another of London's night-walkers and a friend of the poets. A clerk at the East India House on Leadenhall Street, Lamb lived in the Temple with his sister, Mary, who in a fit of lunacy eight years earlier had fatally stabbed their mother at the supper table. The same height as De Quincey, Lamb was gentle and teasing, with a great deal of eclectic learning, a love of puns and a severe stammer. De Quincey professed to admire his writing and so Lamb invited him to supper, only realising when the conversation turned immediately to his knowledge of Coleridge, that he was being used. Irritated by De Quincey's duplicity and by the reverential manner in which he couched his enquiries, Lamb had fun at his guest's expense by ridiculing the authors of
Lyrical Ballads
, ‘their books, their thoughts, their places, their persons'. ‘The Ancient Mariner' – a poem Lamb pretended to dislike – also came into his line of fire, leaving De Quincey to gasp: ‘
But, Mr Lamb
, good heavens! How is it possible you can allow yourself such opinions? What instance could you bring from the poem that would bear you out in these insinuations?' ‘Instances!' said Lamb: ‘oh, I'll instance you, if you come to that. Instance, indeed! Pray, what do you say to this –