Guilty Thing (40 page)

The boy was stunned – for on similitude

In dissimilitude, man's sole delight,

And all
the sexual intercourse of things
,

Do most supremely hang.

In Grasmere, the sexual intercourse of things was disturbing Wordsworth, who did what he could to prevent the blossoming of his neighbour's affair with Margaret Simpson. Thus De Quincey now found, when he roused himself with the bats and the owls, that Wordsworth, like Gil-Martin in Hogg's future novel,
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
, appeared by his side. ‘
It drove me crazy then
, it drives me crazy now,' he recalled in a passage later removed from his ‘Lake Reminiscences'. The stalker was himself being stalked. ‘I found myself in the same situation almost every night,' De Quincey railed. Wordsworth was ‘possessed' by ‘a malicious purpose', and De Quincey felt ‘almost a hatred' for him. How, unless he had ‘corresponded with fairies', had Wordsworth known where De Quincey was going? ‘He could not: it was impossible. I am sure it was.' De Quincey hid his love life from his family, but in September 1815 Wordsworth wrote to Mrs Quincey to inform her not only that her son was ‘about to marry' (which was not true) but that his bride was from the lower orders. Margaret may, although De Quincey furiously denied it, have replaced Mary Dawson as his servant; it was whispered that De Quincey's wife ‘had often
made his bed before she ascended it
'. This would explain why he stressed, in his
Autobiographic Sketches
, that the position of housekeeper to the cottage had been competed for by many fine and highly respectable young ladies.

Their courtship caused consternation up at Rydal Mount. Dorothy, who had known ‘Peggy' Simpson all her life, described her as a ‘
stupid heavy girl
' who had been ‘reckoned a Dunce at Grasmere School', and she and William mocked De Quincey's lyrical accounts of her ‘beauty', ‘good sense' and ‘angelic sweetness'. Clearly jealous, Dorothy spoke of Margaret as a rival and consistently ridiculed De Quincey's affection for her. The mockery got back to De Quincey who later said that: ‘Nothing causes a greater rankling in the heart, than to find that you have laid open its finer feelings and have got laughed at for your pains.' De Quincey was in love, but he was also falling apart. Two months later Sara Hutchinson wrote that ‘
Quince was often tipsy
and in one of his fits had lost his gold watch. . . He doses himself with Opium and drinks like a fish and tries in all other things to be as great a gun as Mr Wilson.'

While De Quincey was dreaming by day and courting by night, Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo and in June 1815 over twenty years of war came to an end. The emperor was exiled to the island of St Helena, and Charles Lloyd, suffering a mental breakdown, was institutionalised. All the local houses that De Quincey had once loved now lay empty. When he walked in Lloyd's former garden he could hear the voices of his young family ‘re-echoed', and lying by the river De Quincey listened once more to the music of the water, rising like ‘choral chanting –
distant, solemn, saintly
'.

Reality and reverie took on the same texture in De Quincey's current twilight world. An intruder in his dreams was a wanderer he called the
Dark Interpreter
, whose role, like that of a Greek chorus, was to recall the dreamer ‘to his own lurking thoughts'. The Dark Interpreter repeated in the cryptonyms of dream language the words that De Quincey had spoken during the day, but it was not only in dreams that the figure made his appearance: at times the Dark Interpreter was ‘outside, and in open sunlight'. De Quincey seemed now to ‘live, and to converse, even when awake, with. . . visionary companions much more than with the realities of life'. One Easter morning he stepped from his cottage and, blinking in the light, saw before him ‘the domes and cupolas of a great city'. Grasmere had become Jerusalem, and sitting in the garden, tears streaming down her face, was Ann. ‘
So I have found you at last
,' De Quincey said and suddenly there they were, back in the lamplight of Oxford Street.

‘Mr De Quincey has taken
a fit of solitude
,' Wordsworth wrote to R. P. Gillies in April 1816. ‘I have scarcely seen him since Mr Wilson left.' His remark suggests that Peter Quince now only visited Rydal Mount in the company of that great gun, Mr Wilson. Later that year, Lloyd escaped from his asylum in York and walked to Grasmere where he threw his arms around De Quincey and wept. His pursuers were close at hand; he would be captured and returned; he knew he would be safe in Dove Cottage but refused to stay. ‘I dare say,' he told De Quincey, ‘you think you know me; but you do not, and you cannot. I am the Author of all Evil; Sir, I am the Devil. . . I know also who you are: you are nobody,
a nonentity, you have no being
.' Lloyd revealed to De Quincey that ‘
his situation internally
was always this: it seemed to him as if on some distant road he heard a dull trampling sound, and that he knew it, by a misgiving, to be the sound of some man, or party of men, continually advancing slowly, continually threatening, or continually accusing him'. He tried to rid his mind of this sound but it returned again and again, ‘still steadily advancing, though still at a great distance'.

At about this time another visitor knocked on the door, also needing sanctuary. ‘There is a sort of demon downstairs,' De Quincey was informed by his servant, who was probably Margaret Simpson. Standing in the hall in a turban and loose white trousers was a Malayan man with ‘sallow and bilious' skin, ‘veneered with mahogany by marine air', and ‘tiger-cat' eyes which were ‘small, fierce, and restless'. His ‘gestures and adorations' were ‘slavish' and he ‘worshipped' De Quincey ‘in a most devout manner'. The man knew no English and De Quincey knew only the Arabic for barley and the Turkish for opium. Wanting rest, the Malay lay down on the stone floor and slept. He awoke refreshed, and to cheer him on his way De Quincey presented him with a large piece of opium which the stranger ate whole in one mouthful. ‘The quantity was
enough to kill three dragoons
and their horses, and I felt some alarm for the poor creature; but what could be done?' Did the Malay survive the opium? The man ‘fastened upon my dreams, and brought other Malays with him, worse than himself, that ran “a-muck”'.

Did this event, recorded in
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
, really take place? Could De Quincey have even answered that question? The figure came out of the
Arabian Nights
and De Quincey's Oriental nightmares, but he was also a version of the Arab on a dromedary in the dream described by Wordsworth in
The Prelude
 – a mysterious personage making his lonely way to an unknown destination.

Visiting Rydal Mount soon after staying with his mother in Westhay, De Quincey was able to pass on to Wordsworth the compliment that Hannah More approved of
The Excursion.
‘As usual,' purred Sara Hutchinson, ‘Peter is very entertaining, now that he is fresh.' When Crabb Robinson visited Grasmere in the summer of 1816, he reported that the tenant of Dove Cottage was looking ‘very much an invalid'. De Quincey was ‘dirty, and even squalid. I had read a bad account of him from Wordsworth. . . It appears that he has taken to opium, and, like Coleridge, seriously injured his health. I understand, too, though Wordsworth was reserved on the subject, he has entangled himself in
an unfortunate
acquaintance
with a woman
.' Crabb Robinson also understood, as he made his way between Grasmere and Rydal Mount, that Wordsworth and De Quincey were now avoiding one another. ‘De Quincey still praises Wordsworth's poetry,' he noted in his diary, ‘but he speaks with no kindness of the man.'

The year 1816 was known as the year without a summer. A volcanic eruption on an Indonesian island had created enough ash in the atmosphere to block out the sun, and in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, Byron, Shelley and Mary Shelley took advantage of the darkness to hold the ghost story competition which resulted in the birth of
Frankenstein.
In May, at the request of Byron, three fragments by Coleridge were published in a slim volume. The first was ‘Christabel', the ballad about a Sapphic vampire that Wordsworth had excluded from the
Lyrical Ballads
; the second was ‘Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream', an opium reverie heard entirely as music; and the third was ‘The Pains of Sleep', described by Coleridge as ‘
an exact and most faithful portraiture
of the state of my mind under influences of. . . Opium'. The movement of the trilogy – from pleasure to pain – went to the heart of the opium experience, and the preface to ‘Kubla Khan' became mythical.

In the summer of 1797, explained Coleridge, he ‘had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmore confines of Somerset and Devonshire'. To cure ‘a slight indisposition', opium had been prescribed and he fell asleep while reading the following sentence from ‘Puchas his Pilgrimage': ‘Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.'

The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as
things,
with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions . . . On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved.

The writing was interrupted by a knock on the door and Coleridge ‘was unfortunately called out by a
person on business from Porlock
'. When he returned, ‘with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images' the dream had vanished from his mind like ‘the surface of a stream in which a stone has been cast'.