De Quincey - So Original, So Truly Weird - by Richard Holmes - The New York Review of Books 2016 PDF

8/16/2020 De Quincey: So Original, So Truly Weird | by Richard Holmes | The New York Review of Books
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De Quincey: So Original, So Truly Weird
Richard Holmes
NOVEMBER 24, 2016 ISSUE
Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey

by Frances Wilson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 397 pp., $30.00
1.
If you saunter or dream your way along the narrow streets running east of London’s Covent Garden, drifting like a ghost
amid the late-summer tourists, you may eventually come to the Café Murano at 36 Tavistock Street. Look carefully
upward, and you will notice on the wall above, half-hidden between two tall windows, a discreet blue commemorative
plaque that makes a startling and possibly sinister announcement. It was in this building (actually in a set of rooms at the
back) that Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) wrote his disturbing masterpiece, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, in
1821.
Today this elegant quarter of bars and restaurants seems an unlikely location for opium eating. Yet it was behind this solid
London brickwork that De Quincey first opened up his astonishing “apocalypse of the world within.” Here he exultantly
described his first experience of drug-taking:
https://www-nybooks-com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/articles/2016/11/24/de-quincey-so-original-so-truly-weird/?printpage=true 1/10
Heavens!…what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit!…Here

was a 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 corked up in a pint bottle: and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons
by the mail coach.
The truth of De Quincey’s ecstatic discovery of opium is far more complicated than
this lighthearted (and rather attractive) account would imply. For a start, the drug was
not especially rare or exotic at the time, but easily obtainable from any pharmacy as a
household medicine and mild painkiller, even given in small doses to babies. It was De
Quincey’s sheer excess and unlikely endurance (he lived to be a ghostlike seventy-
four) that, coupled with his kaleidoscopic literary powers, made him so original and so
truly weird. Nor did he eat opium, but drank it in an infusion with brandy as a glowing,
tea-colored, slightly bitter liquid called laudanum, and as a result he became an National Portrait Gallery, London
alcoholic as much as an addict, and what would now doubtless be called a Thomas De Quincey; photogravure after an
dysfunctional personality. 1855 chalk drawing by James Archer
In the last decades of his life he was spending £150 a year on the drug (from an
income of £250), permanently in debt and pursued by creditors, continually adopting false names and shifting lodgings
(he would simply abandon his rooms when they overflowed with his books and papers), often dressed in castoffs and
writing barefoot (a friend observed “an army coat four times too large for him and with nothing on beneath”), and largely
unable to support an ever-growing family of eight children and a suicidal wife (who died prematurely of exhaustion and
typhus at the age of forty-one).
It was De Quincey’s peculiar genius to transform this pathological tragedy into something rich and strange, and to create
for himself a uniquely marketable soubriquet in the journals of the day as “The English Opium Eater,” which he used for
the rest of his life. The truth is, his original Confessions has no real location at all. The whole of the book is what De
Quincey called “a palimpsest,” many layers of fact and fiction, pain and exultation, memory and dream, time and place,
overwritten one upon another, over many years. A sequel followed in 1845, and a series of revisions as Autobiographic
Sketches in 1853.
His visionary opium world, composed of “oriental imagery and mythological tortures,” remains essentially unearthly,
savage, and displaced:
I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paraquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas: and
was fixed for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms…. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with
mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by
crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.
This is one of the many reasons it is so hard to write a plain, factual biography of De Quincey with any kind of
conviction. It requires not merely scholarship, but a special mixture of imaginative agility and nimble scepticism and, one
might add, the patience of a saint.
As far as one can tell, De Quincey was nineteen, a privileged student at Oxford, when he first tasted the drug, one “wet
and cheerless Sunday afternoon” on a trip to London in 1804. But two years before he had run away from Manchester
Grammar School, another expensive education, and had an affair with a fifteen-year-old prostitute in London, who
became his famous romantic and retrospective invention “Ann of Oxford Street.” His obsession with her (and many other
young women and girls, which he called his “nympholepsy,” and which may or may not have been pedophilia) also
became part of his drug experience. Sometimes he looks rather like the original dropout.
Yet he did not became seriously addicted to opium until 1813, when he was twenty-eight and living in the Lake District as
the increasingly frustrated amanuensis of his onetime idols, Wordsworth and Coleridge. It was not until he was thirty-six,
with his wife and children and a growing mass of debts, that he again came to London and dashed off his Confessions.
Presented as an artless outpouring—“guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice”—it was actually
commissioned as two highly professional, well-paid articles for the newly founded London Magazine. He was still
completing its “sequel,” the Suspiria de Profundis (“Sighs from the Deep”), this time for Blackwood’s Magazine, when he
was sixty and adrift in Scotland.
The true subject of the Confessions, he now said, was not so much opium itself as the potential grandeur of the “human
dreams” it inspired:
The machinery for dreaming planted in the human brain was not planted for nothing. That faculty, in alliance with
the mystery of darkness, is the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy…the magnificent
apparatus which forces the infinite into the chambers of a human brain, and throws dark reflections from eternities
below all life upon the mirrors of the sleeping mind.
Paradoxically, this ingeniously extended metaphor is in fact drawn from a modern science of the external world,
observational astronomy, and the advent of the great Victorian reflector telescopes—the “one great tube.” It turns out, as
just one more surprise, that the penniless De Quincey had been lodging for many weeks in the Glasgow Observatory at
the time he wrote Suspiria. He had simultaneously written a long article about Lord Rosse’s forty-foot “Leviathan”
telescope and the discovery of an image of what he termed a cruel “monster” in the constellation of Orion.
Indeed it is easy to overlook De Quincey’s remarkable erudition, which stretched far beyond mere drug literature. He had
an outstanding education (despite his truancies) in Greek and Latin, and could deliver a speech in fluent classical Greek.
He had covered a vast range of miscellaneous reading (hence his constantly overflowing lodgings, in one of which he
filled his bath—presumably unused—to the brim with books and magazines), and a dazzling speed and facility in
journalistic writing. He was capable of turning out—or spinning out—a ten- or twenty-thousand-word article in a matter
of days. Admittedly this produced many longeurs, and his prose could be as interminable as Coleridge’s talk, which De
Quincey described as meandering “like some great river, the Orellana, or the St Lawrence.”
He covered in his articles an astonishing spectrum of subjects—for example, Homeric literature, political economy, the
Chinese Opium Wars, California, free trade, emigration, the French Revolution, Afghanistan, Irish liberation, the Church
of Scotland, the Corn Laws, mythology, evil, or the antislavery campaign. He could also write vividly about personalities,
not just the famous essays on Coleridge and Wordsworth, but on Judas Iscariot, Immanuel Kant, Joan of Arc, Malthus,
Aristotle, Euclid, Lamb, Hazlitt, David Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, Percy Shelley, or the Sphinx. His mind started as a
huge Romantic echo chamber and finished as a chaotic Victorian pantechnicon of miscellaneous learning. Altogether this
makes his life peculiarly difficult to define and contain.
2.
Thomas De Quincey himself had strong views on the shortcomings of conventional biography. He believed it was
“wearisome and useless” when merely “chronologically arranged,” as a slavish narrative of events. This merely produced
“‘the hackneyed roll-call’ of a man’s life.” The essence of any life was its “doubleness,” its exterior and interior
existences, and the access to these was governed by “single” scenes and “deep impressions.”
Frances Wilson is not a conventional biographer, and she seems to know instinctively
about this doubleness. She has set out, with immense energy and flair, to “hunt” De
Quincey “through all his doubles,” and unlike previous biographers, notably Grevil
Lindop (1981) and Robert Morrison (2009), she intends to write what she calls the first
“Quinceyan biography.”
Much to the purpose, she has written wonderfully about the Lake District circle, in The
Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth (2008). This book achieves a strikingly empathetic
account of Wordsworth’s “wild” sister, in all her mixture of passions and frustrations.
Young De Quincey already has a significant walk-on part here, and Wilson describes
him as “ever the most acute” of the commentators on Dorothy, and gives him the final
envoi on the last page of the biography: “farewell, impassioned Dorothy!”
It might seem less relevant that Wilson’s most recent book was about the sinking of the
Titanic (2012). Yet this may be curiously appropriate. In it she restructures a well-
known story from a highly unusual point of view, that of the manager of the White Trustees of Dove Cottage
Thomas De Quincey; according to Frances

Star Line, J. Bruce Ismay, who was doomed not to drown in the wreck, but to survive, Wilson in Guilty Thing, he ‘was the only
by taking to a lifeboat intended for “women and children first,” and suffering a Romantic to have had his photograph taken’
lifetime’s shame and obloquy in consequence. The book experiments with time and
fatality, so different kinds of secret guilt and moral ambiguity steadily accumulate behind the surface narrative.
All this makes Wilson especially prepared for the ambiguous, shape-shifting, changeling, illusive quality in De Quincey.
She sees the need for stylistic fireworks as well as steady scholarship to illuminate his life. She writes with speed,
flamboyance, and constant changes of viewpoint and perspective, offset by moments of calm, shrewd analysis:
His Confessions and his 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…. 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.
She is determined to keep pace with both figures.
One particular method she employs to capture her Quinceyan prey is to net him with snapshot phrases and pin him with
provoking aphorisms. He is first introduced briskly, in bold thick outline, as the “Romantic acolyte, professional
doppelgänger, transcendental hack.” But soon his shape is beginning to shimmer and distort, “a figure on a perpetual
staircase,” and a man living in a world “designed by Piranesi.” These transformations continue throughout the biography
and give it much of its fascination and originality. As a young man visiting Grasmere, De Quincey is a polite, shy,
diminutive guest (under five feet tall) with manners of “porcelain.” Then he is the biddable literary groupie, first to
Coleridge and then to Wordsworth: “used as a library, a babysitter, a tutor, a secretary, and even at times…a bank.” But
this “façade of meekness disguised turbulence and ferocity.” The episode in which De Quincey takes over Dove Cottage,
fills it with thirty chests of books, and then savagely cuts down the orchard and the moss hut beloved of Dorothy (and
symbol of her love for Wordsworth) is psychologically one of the most revealing and dismaying passages in the whole
book.
Later, after he fled to Scotland and published in Blackwood’s Magazine, De Quincey is a “cartoon of poverty,” with a
moth-eaten jacket “a size too large” and a necktie that looks “like a piece of straw.” The vengeful biographical writer,
who now sells his Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets (1834–1840) as an occasional series to Tait’s Edinburgh
Magazine, becomes master of “the fine art of character assassination.” These essays are in reality “tale[s] of pursuit and
revenge.” Yet his portrait of Dorothy Wordsworth, “all fire…Egyptian brown …wild eyes,” is by contrast tender and
extraordinarily perceptive. He praises her “sexual sense of beauty” but laments the way her love for her brother eventually
limited and damaged her own undoubted genius. Perhaps De Quincey might have married Dorothy, Wilson speculates,
rather than the “strapping” farmer’s daughter, the long-suffering Margaret Simpson.
But by the end he is living in a dream world that “resembled a place like Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland or JM Barrie’s
Neverland.” He is a boy who never grew up, “the quintessential Peter Pan.” Yet he is also the sophisticated,
autobiographical genius whose works will influence the Brontës, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar
Wilde, as well as William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Peter Ackroyd, and even Alfred Hitchcock. He is the man whose
dreams were hailed by Borges as “the best in literature.” He is one of the few English authors now issued in the classic
French Éditions Pléiade (2011).
So another problem emerges: How to bring all these paradoxes, all these scintillating and constantly shifting images, into
a steady biographical focus. How far can the biographer really improve on the blue plaque in the Café Murano?
3.
Charles Baudelaire, after partly translating the Confessions as Les Paradis artificiels (1860), thought that nothing could
possibly be added to De Quincey’s autobiography. Its defining shape was enclosed, involuted, and “naturally spiral.” Yet
the different traditions of De Quincey biography are surprisingly rich and varied. There is his friend David Masson’s
brisk, defensive life of 1881, justified shortly after by the fourteen-volume Collected Writings (1889). There is Edward
Sackville-West’s dreamy A Flame in Sunlight (1936), eventually corrected by Grevel Lindop’s scholarly and skeptical
The Opium-Eater (1981) with “modern medical and psychological views of addiction” and much “scrutinizing” of the
testimony and “checking” of the external evidence.
This in turn was followed by a spectacular new edition of the Works (2000–2003), under Lindop’s general editorship and
now running to an alarming twenty-one volumes, including some 250 extended essays written over forty years. “Reading
his collected works,” remarks Frances Wilson gleefully, “is like falling into Pandemonium.” The fullest biography is still
that by Robert Morrison (2009), who has written many critical essays and introductions on the subject, makes confident
use of the new Works, and also gives us the most detailed and sympathetic account of De Quincey’s chaotic domestic life,
especially with his sweet, harassed wife Margaret and his eight hapless children (only three daughters eventually
survived). It is a fine and learned study, yet perhaps it keeps too close to the brickwork.
Cultural and psychological interpretations have also flourished, notably Angela Leighton’s essay “De Quincey and
Women” (1992) and John Barrell’s The Infection of Thomas De Quincey (1991), both of which ingeniously explore the
complex mythology of De Quincey’s self-proclaimed “nympholepsy,” the worship of the series of unattainable, lost,
damaged, or frankly dead girls or young women that recurs throughout his works and that may or may not be sexual.
These studies move in different directions (Barrell’s is a dazzling analysis of De Quincey’s “orientalism”), but both agree
on a psychological key. This is the death of De Quincey’s eight-year-old sister Elizabeth in 1792, when he was only six,
and his account of a traumatic visit to her beautiful corpse in a locked but sun-filled front room, and a stolen last kiss of
her marble lips until, hearing footsteps on the stairs, he slinks away “like a guilty thing.” From then on, we are to
understand, he was a haunted creature.
The phrase (an echo from both Hamlet and Wordsworth) gives Wilson her title and another biographical key. But true to
the Quinceyan principles of chronology, she makes us aware that the account of his visit to his sister’s corpse does not
actually appear in the original Confessions of 1821 at all, but is gradually elaborated over forty years after, first appearing
in an early Autobiographical Sketch of 1834, then in the Suspiria of 1845, and then again in 1853. (As virtually
everything of De Quincey’s was first published in one of the magazines, and later revised and re-revised endlessly, the
textual history of his account is so complicated that all scholarship seems to retain a faint opium haze around the edges.)
The problem of biographical authenticity across such elapsed time, or dream time, is not dissimilar to that of Gérard de
Nerval’s lost early love in his contemporary masterpiece, Sylvie: Souvenirs du Valois of 1854.
De Quincey’s haunting account has already been picked out and praised by Virginia Woolf: “the art of biography…is
being transformed…[by] the slow opening up of single and solemn moments of concentrated emotion.” Wilson’s own
comment is lyrical, and then characteristically sharpened to a sudden point:
Few autobiographers have given us a more remarkable, or convoluted, childhood scene—part memory, part
midsummer daydream, part opium reverie—or one that propels us more swiftly into the furnishings of their
imagination. It is an example of what De Quincey calls his “impassioned prose,” which takes flight mid-sentence….
What De Quincey describes is terror recollected in tranquillity.
It is here that Wilson introduces her new master theme: not merely opium but what she calls, in an unexpected concussion
of two contrasted ideas, De Quincey’s “preoccupation with murderers and poets.” While the first half of her book largely
concerns his spoiled but solitary adolescence, his discovery of the Lyrical Ballads, and his strange dreamlike pursuit of
Coleridge and Wordsworth, up to the point that he is established in Dove Cottage, the second half has a quite different
tone. It bursts into a vision of dreamlike terror, sudden death, and horrific violence, with events that took place in London
in the winter of 1811. These, she argues, provide the touchstone that “ignited his genius.” They will lead him to another
kind of masterpiece, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (yet another extended text, eventually appearing in
three parts in 1827, 1839, and 1854), and take him northward on to Edinburgh and Glasgow and poverty.
At this point she takes an immense risk. She opens her book not, as one might expect, with the ornate opium dream of his
sister’s death in 1792, but with a thoroughly bloody and precise murder scene in 1811. At “ten minutes to midnight” on
December 7, 1811, an entire household—Mr. and Mrs. Marr, their young apprentice, and even their baby—had their
skulls hammered in with a builder’s maul and their throats cut at 29 Radcliffe Highway, in the poor dockyards quarter of
London’s East End. Having described this action with forensic care, Wilson suggests that Thomas De Quincey had a
lifelong obsession with these murders and that in them we can find “dispersed in anagram” the story of his whole life.
(The riddling phrase is skillfully lifted from De Quincey’s own essay on Charles Lamb.) It is, she suggests, his dreams of
violence that lie even deeper than his opium dreams. “His murder essays always take us to the seabed of his psyche.”
It is, in every sense, an arresting opening and a striking thesis, and provides in effect the deathly pre-title sequence to the
second half of her biography. But having introduced the scene, Wilson holds back its implications for nearly two hundred
pages, a truly Quinceyan gamble with the reader’s attention span. Only then comes “the point where De Quincey’s life
broke in half.” From here on she brilliantly exploits the themes of impending violence, murderous hatred, and suspended
terror in so much of De Quincey’s later work: as an editor of the Westmoreland Gazette (1818–1819) fascinated by true
crime stories; as the acute literary critic with his psychological analysis of “the hell within” in the “Knocking at the Gate
in Macbeth” (1823); as the genial biographer secretly taking his revenge on—or sticking the knife into—his fallen poetic
idols, Coleridge and Wordsworth (but sparing Dorothy), in his Recollections (1834–1845); or as the dandy essayist who
strikes a new perverse pose in On Murder:
Everything in this world has two handles. Murder for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle, (as it
generally is in the pulpit, and at the Old Bailey); and that, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated
aesthetically, as the Germans call it, that is, in relation to good taste.
The final 1854 part of this essay has De Quincey’s gripping and bloody reconstruction, forty-three years after the event,
of the Marr murders at Radcliffe Highway in 1811. With its repeated sinister themes of “knocking” at a closed door in the
middle of the night, or of being “suspended” in terror on a staircase, it forms a grand reprise of so many of De Quincey’s
autobiographical “deep moments,” or what he called, in an evocative term, his “involutes.”
Wilson can now show that these include even the climactic collision scene in the third part of De Quincey’s essay The
English Mail Coach (1849), the “Vision of Sudden Death.” Here the vulnerable young woman in the fragile carriage
(another of De Quincey’s nympholeps) undergoes a fearful countdown to destruction as the huge, hurtling nighttime
mailcoach thunders down upon her. (Inventing a peculiarly modern narrative device, De Quincey literally counts down to
the moment of impact, “a minute and a half…seventy seconds…twenty seconds…fifteen…five seconds more…Oh!
Hurry, hurry…”) She escapes by a hair’s breadth, with only a glancing blow that leaves her carriage “alive with
tremblings and shiverings.” Yet she herself at the breathless end of the essay is suspended in a kind of orgasm of
Quinceyan terror:
But the lady—! Oh heavens! will that spectacle ever depart from my dreams, as she rose and sank upon her seat,
sank and rose, threw up her arms wildly to heaven, clutched at some visionary object in the air, fainting, praying,
raving, despairing!
Wilson observes evenly that we can now see that throughout his life De Quincey had approached murder and death in so
many different guises, all of which magnificently displayed his chameleon genius: “from the position of Shakespearean
critic, satirist, reporter, Gothic novelist and self-plagiarist.” Moreover this gives her the chance for one of her own
memorable pyrotechnic displays as a biographer. In the late self-defining piece On Murder, Wilson writes,
De Quincey’s object was to prove that [the murderer] Williams was an actor, a connoisseur, a dandy, an aesthete, a
scourge of God who walked in darkness, a tiger, a man of snaky insinuation, and a domestic Attila. The murderer
was, like Wordsworth’s vision of the poet, a solitary artist, lonely as a cloud.
And of course, like Thomas De Quincey himself. It is particularly for these daring passages that one admires this risky,
sprightly, passionate biography, which goes further than anything previously in catching the strange, elusive Opium Eater,
and which could never for a moment be mistaken for a blue commemorative plaque.
© 1963-2020 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.

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8/16/2020 De Quincey: So Original, So Truly Weird | by Richard Holmes | The New York Review of Books

De Quincey: So Original, So Truly Weird

Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey

Heavens!…what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit!…Here

Thomas De Quincey; according to Frances

She is determined to keep pace with both figures.

© 1963-2020 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.

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