Thomas De Quincey Nine Ten Never Sleep Again
I f e'er there was a one-book wonder, that wonder was Thomas De Quincey. Few people could name some other volume after Confessions of an English language Opium Eater, and even so his collected works run to 21 solid volumes – mostly essays, including such classics as "On Murder, Considered equally One of the Fine Arts". But equally Frances Wilson writes in this exceptional biography, "Opium was the making of him", and the Opium Eater persona stuck. It more answered his dilemma in a teenage diary, agonising over his "character": should he be "wild – impetuous – splendidly sublime? Dignified – melancholy – gloomily sublime? Or shrouded in mystery – supernatural – like the 'ancient mariner' – awfully sublime?"
De Quincey was inappreciably the kickoff person to take opium – everybody took it in his twenty-four hours, and, more than than that, they took it for granted – nor was he the first person to take information technology recreationally, as we might say today (or equally he puts it, "for luxurious sensations"). But he was the outset person to frame it so exotically, with an orientalism that is by turns playful – the championship of English Opium Eater is a joke, an oxymoron that we barely hear at present, because "opium eaters" were implicitly Turks – and beautifully horrifying: "I ran into pagodas, and was fixed, for centuries, at the meridian or in secret rooms: I was the idol; I was the priest: I was worshipped; I was sacrificed … I was buried for a chiliad years … "
De Quincey fabricated opium sublime and, in a word, romanticised information technology. His writing combined the monumental introspection of Wordsworth, still new, with the drug-doom of Coleridge, and stirred them together with a large nuance of his own charm. The upshot fabricated opiates seem intrinsically bound up with what he elsewhere calls "cloak-and-dagger haunts of feeling"; "that inner earth, that world of clandestine self-consciousness, in which each of us lives a second life." It is thanks to De Quincey that John Updike could refer casually to "the writer in his opium den", past which he ways any sensitive mod writer in artistic privacy: opium has become a metaphor, a quintessence of subjectivity itself.
De Quincey's shifting relationship with Coleridge and Wordsworth, particularly the latter, is central to the book. He began as a immature fan, writing a list of poets he admired and putting three exclamation marks after Wordsworth's name, and graduated to become his hero's friend, lodger and dogsbody. Finally it all concluded in resentment and hatred, afterwards he had failed to brand sufficient impression on Wordsworth'south elephantine ego. Of all the pains De Quincey suffered with the Wordsworth family, generally slights and disrespect, the worst was the infant death of Wordsworth'south daughter Catherine. She seems to have had Down'due south syndrome and De Quincey doted on her. His grief when she died was and so severe that for a couple of months he lay downward nightly on the grave, and it appalled some witnesses: Henry Crabb Robinson, another figure in the Wordsworth circumvolve, thought there was a "womanly weakness" most information technology.
De Quincey'south fate was sealed not when he offset took laudanum, but when his ix-year-old sister Elizabeth died when he was vi. There was something sacred about sisters for him, and the verse form that first attracted him to Wordsworth was the somewhat mawkish "Nosotros Are Seven" – where the number stands not for historic period but for the siblings a little girl insists are in her family, when in reality just five are still living. Lost girls, dead girls and brother-sis friendships were lifelong obsessions for De Quincey, particularly in the example of Ann, the child prostitute who befriended him in London afterwards he ran abroad from school. He left town to borrow coin and they arranged to meet once more at the corner of Dandy Titchfield Street, but when he returned Ann was not there London was already so vast and bearding that he never plant her again or discovered what had happened to her: "If she lived, doubtless we must take been sometimes in search of each other, at the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths of London: perhaps fifty-fifty within a few feet … amounting in the finish to a separation for eternity."
Everything recurs in De Quincey, and the theme of a daughter in danger comes round over again in his essay "The English Mail-Coach", recounting a journeying – he liked to sit down on the exterior, with the driver, afterwards dosing himself with laudanum – going at a breakneck gallop, when he realised the driver was asleep: and not merely couldn't he exist woken, simply the coach was bearing downwards like a juggernaut on two young lovers in a frail carriage, and they didn't seem able to hear De Quincey shouting until information technology was almost too late. In a coda to the essay, "The Dream Fugue", this already dreamlike episode comes back further transformed into nightmare, when he is on lath a triple-decker warship bearing down on a girl in a gunkhole. As Wilson says: "The unknown woman joined the gallery of girls whose deaths he had been unable to prevent" and she goes farther in seeing the piece equally a forerunner to JG Ballard's Crash.
Ballardian or not, De Quincey was a pioneer in sensationalism, and Wilson'south other cracking theme is his obsession with murder, explored in successive versions of "On Murder". This begins every bit a satire on the thought of the "aesthetic", newly arrived from German philosophy, but De Quincey warms to his theme a little as well enthusiastically, particularly when he gets his teeth into the Ratcliffe Highway murders. Murder too gave De Quincey the chance to indulge his arch sense of humour, with homicide every bit a slippery slope: "for if once a homo indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think niggling of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination."
More than opiates, the intoxicating matter in De Quincey is his writing itself, with its soaring heights and abyssal depths – a verticality that made 19th-century critic Leslie Stephen recollect of the rising and plunging of a bat, an appropriately gothic creature – and its sense of "involutes" or emotional constellations, as in his profound insight that "far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us equally involutes (if I may coin that word) in chemical compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, than always achieve us directly, and in their ain abstract shapes … "
This is a superb book, more than tangly, obsessive and excitable than previous biographies, and in that sense more than in melody with its subject. It is packed with interest from the early days in Bath with his mother (where past strange chance they lived in the firm that Edmund Burke, smashing theorist of the sublime, had but left) to the last debt-ridden days in Edinburgh. Finally, in the words of his daughter Emily, every bit "the waves of death rolled faster and faster over him" he suddenly rose every bit if from an "abyss" with his artillery in the air and the words "Sister! Sister! Sister!" He died as he had lived, in character to the end.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/23/guilty-thing-frances-wilson-review-thomas-de-quincey-biography
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