The lovable masochist

Duncan Fallo well

Itte Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey Grevel Lindop (Dent pp. 433, £12).

De Quincey (1785-1859) was the first writer to turn himself into a personality cult and thereby be able to earn a living. He didn't actually do anything else. He wasn't famous for novels or poems or plays or histories. He didn't have a cover such as Rousseau had for his personal revelations. He was just an opium addict who could write. But he wrote about it so curiously and so close up against the reader, with a familiarity that was original and sometimes shocking, that he made himself sufficiently notorious to survive: that he sold his Confessions outright for £40 is just another example of his often breathtaking stupidity. One aspect of him leads directly to William Burroughs but another, as directly, to the News of the World.

First published in 1821 as a series of articles in the London Magazine, De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater invented the idea that drugs can make a person more interesting. The importance of this in an Age of self-dramatisation is seriously underestimated by Alethea Hayter in her well-known study, Opium and the Roman& Imagination. Opium could introduce the Immensities into an otherwise banal life. With it, self-indulgence was turned into an art. Through it, all drugs came to be incorporated in the artist's revolt against normality, his pursuit of ecstasy. To warn of danger was no use. Danger was the whole point. Art itself was dangerous or should be. And ever since, it has been essential for an artist to be interesting rather than healthy. The alcoholic swaggerings of Malcolm Lowry and Ernest Hemingway are part of the same desperate syndrome. Indeed Baudelaire thought wine preferable to hashish or opium for experiments in the 'multiplication of personality'.

Both Romanticism and Industrialisation and later Darwinism encouraged a view of man as the plaything of impersonal forces. Instead of being an expression of God in a rational universe, man became the victim of Nat re.This cosmic schizophrenia gave rise to two things. Firstly, life became an essentially masochistic experience. Inner achievement was brought about by inflictions from the outside. Salvation was externalised. The role thus made available for drugs is obvious. What technology became to manufacture, ie. an agent external to man in the promotion of his products, so drugs became to a certain breed of artists.

Secondly, the loss of informal intimacy with the Creation gave rise to the compensating cult of individualism. The ego became paramount in the determination of meaning. The vagaries of the imagination were endowed with a significance they do not usually possess. Dreams were ennobled to visions. The most extreme example in recent times was the case of Timothy Leary who imagined that the presence of God could be triggered by the chemical LSD. In fact, as William Burroughs and Jean Cocteau discovered, the most 'revealing' feature of drug use comes about through the effort of will required to overcome an addiction.

In all these respects De Quincey is the archetypal figure, especially in his lack of self-motivation, his need to activate his system from the outside. He gave the predicament a glamour it never lost until recently, when the spectacle of heroin addiction made the entire concept of a drug cult seem childish. But for De Quincey, too, self-indulgence soon ceased to be a facet of curiosity. Opium became the flagship of his masochism. Of his childhood he wrote: had a perfect craze for being despised; I doted on it; and considered contempt a sort of luxury I was in continual fear of losing'.

As he grew up his personality became increasingly reflexive. All 'mind expanding' drugs, by relieving the individual of responsibility, increasingly move the mind away from synthesis and towards osmosis, away from sequence and towards simultaneity, away from doing and towards being. For this reason cannabis has genuinely aphrodisiac properties. But with chronic use the feeling for time and space, a prerequisite for any created structure as well as for mental health, is substantially weakened and the result is scrappy, rhapsodic work of brief span. Hence De Quincey's remarkable abilitiesand everyone agrees that intellectually he was a very gifted man were diffused in hack journalism.

Through the undermining of the synthetic will, his actions became extremely vulnerable to passing moods. De Quincey was a manic depressive. He found the abrasions of acute poverty essential to that flow of adrenalin necessary, in the absence of a private income, to the building of a life. The laziness which lay behind this can be traced to the death of his father on the threshold of prosperity, so that the entire family his brothers were equally unfocussed had expectations beyond their means. In his lifelong battle with sloth he repeatedly wrecked situations congenial to his success in the subconscious knowledge that material comfort would immobilise his brain. He fenced ludicrously with deadlines. As a prick to his lassitude, he would often allow the first half of an article to be set up in type while he struggled with the second half.

Everyone is familiar with the man who can only come alive under threat. In fact this is nearly all men. But it is not the artist. And in his passionate attempt to turn himself into an artist, De Quincey's morbid love of persecution at times becomes indistinguishable from self-destructiveness. This aspect of the romantic quest reaches a lurid climax in the fate of Oscar Wilde, rightly considered a martyrdom. That De Quincey was not destroyed diminished his status, his purity, but it is also a testimony to the glorious ingenuity which makes this biography so delightful to read. His many and narrow escapes from largely selfinflicted difficulties gives the story a nail-biting, Buster Keaton madness unusual in the life of a man of letters, distinctly modern in style.

Of course he was a hypochondriac. Vanity and self-regard are at the heart of all dreamers. It is no accident that the first word of the Confessions is T, that all the work by which De Quincey is remembered is strictly autobiographical. Opium especially encourages internalising in this way and from here it is an inevitable step to an obsession with the body state. Even after he married and had a large family, he spent too long by himself, dozing between sleep and wakefulness, so that for much of the time he occupied an interzone where one is prone to unexpected fluctuations of horror and bliss.

It takes several years of sustained consumption to become an opium addict but when one has done so, the drug behaves in a notoriously twitchy way. Any one of these twitches, 'especially in a man so predisposed to anxiety, can be magnified into an intimation of physical disaster. Physical and mental pain became interchangeable and there is no doubt that he suffered a great deal. Delinquency in youth became anguish in adulthood. He made the best of it in Suspiria De Profundis by outlining a pathetic theory of suffering as the mechanism by which the mind is enlarged. De Quincey went for long walks, towards the end of his life, not less than six miles a day. He discovered this to be an effective antidote to the torment of opium withdrawals. It Is remarkable how the body can turn spontaneously to what is good for it. It has recently been found that exercise, as well as physical pain, stimulates in the body the production of a chemical very similar in structure to morphine, opium's active ingredient. Hence the sense of well-being which so often follows physical exertion. George Bernard Shaw recommended exercise to writers generally, since writing is such a top-heavy, brain dominated, sedentaryoccupation that the nerves are continually agitated, accompanied by a dangerous build-up of electrostatic in the System. For this, sexual activity is the most beneficial exercise of all; if only Virginia Woolf had known.

De Quincey was five feet tall and had a crushing inferiority complex about it. All his life he was determined to walk with the great. Procrastination is the result of this conflict. Wordsworth, who understood mountains rather better than he understood people, wrote 'he is strangely irresolute'. Mr Lindop's index has a special entry for 'Projected Works'. Artistic creation is the precipitation of an idea into concrete reality. The process by which this comes about is complex and frequently painful. Great force of personality and great physical energy are required for the necessary concentration. Opium threw the equation right out of balance. The dreams became too grandiose and the energy, intimidated, inadequate for their fulfilment. Contemplation turned him into a perfectionist and subjected him to the tyranny of the masterpiece, ie. writer's block. He became an expert in punctuation and a finely florid prose writer but a fundamental channel of expression remained constipated. The books went unwritten. Paradoxically, the Journalism was so good that, collected between hard covers, De Quincey has never been out of print.

Nonetheless, the'Lakers', with whom he tried to associate on equal terms and failed, became indignant at what they regarded as a lack of moral fibre. Wordsworth particularly has been criticised for his patronising attitude, but De Quincey's pretentiousness must have been very tiresome at times. This was partly his insecurity, his craving for love and reassurance. No love came from his .Parents. His father, a Manchester merchant, died from tuberculosis when Thomas was seven. His mother, a cold, religious woman, lived to be 90 but they were never close (in 1825 she wrote to her son 'how many children have you?') Throughout his life his dearest died on him. This happened with such regularity that, in the face of it, his innate optimism must be elevated to something close to greatness.

But what really annoyed Wordsworth was the uppishness of the little man. De Quincey condescended from other men's positions. This is always embarrassing when one encounters it but for Wordsworth it was plain charlatanism, a quality which revolted his high mindedness (unlike De Quincey, he had none of the actor in him). Opium put a further strain on the friendship: one junkie in the gang was enough and that had been De Quincey's other hero, Coleridge. Reconciliation became impossible when in the 1830's, after Coleridge's death, De Quincey began to publish a series of very personal articles, later collected into his other good book, Recollections of the Lake Poets. The gossip in them which so offended Wordsworth and his acolytes is what makes them valuable to us.

What would De Quincey have been without his opium? Less, probably. His was a naturally messy nature and opium at least gave him — and us — a peg on which to hang his unruly spirit. Mr Lindop has made good work of the mess. I-lis biography is intimate but reliable. It is filled with quotation, but not so much as to refrigerate the narrative. De Quincey is as lovable and maddening as ever — and far more shapely than he was. In a year in which I am reading nothing but biographies, this is the most attractive one so far.