Guilty Thing (59 page)

This same issue of
Tait's
contained an unsigned review of Edgar Allan Poe, whose poem ‘The Raven', about a tapping at his chamber door, had that year appeared to acclaim. Poe, for whom the Opium-Eater was one of ‘the first men in England', had praised
Confessions
as a feast in which ‘the ludicrous is heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical'.
Confessions
is reworked in ‘The Man of the Crowd';
Klosterheim
inspired both ‘The Masque of the Red Death' and ‘The Purloined Letter'; Poe satirised the
Blackwood's
house style, and, in ‘Diddling Considered As One of the Exact Sciences', he parodied the murder essays. He joked that the
Confessions
had been written by Juniper, his pet baboon, and in ‘The Murders on the Rue Morgue', Poe aped De Quincey's obsession with the tigerish John Williams by unveiling his own murderer as an escaped orang-utan.

But it was in his 1839 short story ‘William Wilson' that Poe tapped most unnervingly into the De Quinceyan mindset. ‘William Wilson', whose name combines all the Williams in De Quincey's imagination – William Wordsworth, William Quincey, William De Quincey, John Williams, John Williamson and John Wilson – thinks his ‘patronymic' (son of William) ‘very common', and his first name ‘plebeian'. To protect his identity, he is writing this personal history under a pseudonym which sounds like, but is not quite, William Wilson. Having been raised in an ancient house in England, he starts school on the same morning as another boy with the same name, who was born on the same day and imitates him in all things. Thus William Wilson is forced to hear twice as often the names he so despises. Horrified by the coincidence, he runs away and lives a drunken and debauched life during which he is stalked by his doppelgänger. At a masquerade ball where they appear dressed in the same outfit, William Wilson stabs the other William Wilson, who tells him that ‘thou hast murdered thyself'.

If De Quincey read this story, he said nothing about it. Nor did he once mention Poe's name.

The 1840s saw colossal advances in steam, speed and light. A railway link had opened between Edinburgh and Glasgow, allowing De Quincey to experience the thrill of ‘eternal hurry' as he journeyed between the two cities. Photography became a popular hobby, and De Quincey was the only Romantic known to have his photograph taken. In Nichol's Glasgow observatory, he saw the theatre of the heavens through ‘Lord Rosse's almost awful telescope'; he had seen infinity many times before but never through an instrument like this. Advances had also taken place in underground plumbing systems, and De Quincey now encountered his first basin with hot and cold running taps. As the water ran into ‘the nearly brimful' bowl, recorded John Findlay, journalist on
The Scotsman
and his new friend, De Quincey ‘stood paralysed. His alarm was lest the basin should overflow and
deluge the room
.' A drowned world had long been a feature of De Quincey's dreams.

He was living through what he described as a ‘perilously centripetal' storm in need of balance by a counter impact in religion or philosophy. This centrifugal force he produced in 1845, in the form of a ‘sequel' to the
Confessions
, entitled
Suspiria de Profundis
 – ‘Sighs from the Depths'.

‘
Of all the tasks I ever had in my life
,' De Quincey told Robert Blackwood, the writing of
Suspiria
was ‘the most overwhelming'. He intended the work to consist of thirty-two autobiographical fantasias or ‘noonday visions' with titles such as ‘The Dreadful Infant' and ‘The Nursery in the Arabian Deserts'; some of these pieces were lost, some were burned in various fires at his desk, others were never written. The five papers that
Blackwood's
ran during the spring and summer of 1845 make up a fragment of the projected whole.

Employing his impassioned prose, De Quincey began with his fear that the agitations of modern life would destroy man's latent grandeur, which was found in solitude and dreams. The reason, he explained, that he was able to dream ‘
more splendidly than others
' was because he ‘took excessive quantities of opium'; and the reason he took excessive quantities of opium was because certain experiences in childhood ‘had left a weakness in one organ which required (or seemed to require) that stimulant'. There was another, unstated, reason why he preferred dreaming to wakefulness: in dreams De Quincey could see the world once more through the eyes of a child. In his writing, the word ‘dream' no longer meant simply the actions of the mind during sleep; De Quincey's dream world now resembled a place like Lewis Carroll's Wonderland or
J. M. Barrie's Neverland
. A boy who never grew up, De Quincey was the quintessential Peter Pan.

He had described in his
Confessions
, De Quincey revealed, only a fraction of what he had suffered. Preceding his days on the streets of London, an experience ‘of
intolerable grief
' had driven ‘a shaft for me into the worlds of death and darkness which never again closed, and through which it might be said that I ascended and descended at will'. A battered and bereaved old man, De Quincey now drew back the curtain on the opening scene of his life.

In the first of the essays, ‘The Affliction of Childhood' (the title recalls Wordsworth's ‘The Affliction of Margaret'), De Quincey returned to the midsummer afternoon in 1792 when he crept into his sister's bedroom to see her dead body beneath an open window. The midday sun was showering torrents of splendour onto her frozen eyelids, and a solemn wind began to blow. In that instant he was introduced to self-consciousness, loss and the sublime; he understood that ‘life is finished', and knew for certain that his sister would ‘rise again' to ‘illuminate the hour' of his own death. Next came the doctors to open up Elizabeth's head, after which the door to her room was locked, ‘the key was taken away – and
I was shut out for ever
'. From this day forwards, De Quincey was a figure on the outside.

Twelve years later, when he first became an opium-eater, memories which had lain dormant in his mind unveiled themselves before him. ‘
Again I was in the chamber
with my sister's corpse – again the pomps of life rose up in silence, the glory of the summer, the frost of death.' The nurse who had been cruel to his sister, Jane, appeared ‘dilated to colossal proportions', standing ‘upon some Grecian stage'; with her hand uplifted ‘like the superb Medea', she ‘smote me senseless to the ground'. ‘If there was one thing in this world,' De Quincey said of this younger self, ‘from which, more than from any other, nature had forced me to revolt, it was brutality and violence.'

Addiction is now believed to be a shield against childhood trauma, but De Quincey made this link himself in
Suspiria
where he moved seamlessly from the death of his sister to the memory of his first debt – ‘three guineas deep' – to the local bookseller.
^*
A ‘deep anxiety now began to oppress me as to the course in which this mysterious (and indeed guilty) debt would finally flow. . .' In a passage of dazzling insight, he reminded the reader that ‘though a child's feelings are spoken of, it is not the child who speaks
. I
decipher what the child only felt in cipher.'

An adult sympathises with himself
in childhood because he
is
the same, and because (being the same) yet he is
not
the same. He acknowledges the deep, mysterious identity between himself, as adult and as infant, for the ground of his sympathy; and yet. . . he feels the differences between the two selves as the main quickeners of his sympathy.

The subject of
Suspiria
might be described as the double life, De Quincey's abiding interest for over half a century. It is not only adulthood that splits us in two; the rational self will always operate alongside the Dark Interpreter. We inhabit reality by day and dreams by night, and our dreams replay our lives in hieroglyphics.

Suspiria
, thought John Wilson, was superior by far to the
Confessions
. De Quincey's words rose from the page like music; his genius was in full bloom. Never moving from the subject of the two selves, De Quincey considered the nature of suffering, the structure of memory, and the amplification of space and elasticity of time under opium. Simulating the experience of an opium dream, he presented the Victorians with a performance of High Romanticism fuelled by spontaneous overflows of powerful feeling, longings for the infinite and unbounded, fearless descents into the childhood imagination, and a deep knowledge of the numinous. ‘Did you read
Blackwood
?' Elizabeth Barrett asked a friend; ‘And in that case have you had deep delight in an exquisite paper by the Opium-Eater, which
my heart trembled through from end to end
? What a poet that man is! How he vivifies words, or deepens them, and gives them profound significance.' There is nothing to compare with
Suspiria de Profundis
, although many writers have since drawn on its helium quality. De Quincey, as Virginia Woolf put it, had ‘made a class for himself'. In the terminology of Wordsworth and Coleridge, he had created the taste by which he was to be judged.

The second section, ‘The Palimpsest', compares the workings of memory to a parchment on which writing has been erased but not totally expunged. ‘
What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest
is the human brain? Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet in reality not one has been extinguished.' Like water in water, ‘endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness' and only death, fever or opium can revive them. De Quincey had used the same image in
Confessions
when he described the ‘veil' dividing ‘our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions of the mind'. A thousand accidents will rend this veil away, but ‘the inscription remains forever'. The image had also appeared in a note by Coleridge to his poem, ‘The Wanderings of Cain' – ‘I have in Cain tried to recover the lines from the palimpsest tablet of my memory' – but De Quincey elaborated on it in such a way that the palimpsest became an essential and inevitable way of thinking about the mind. Men themselves, he suggested, could be palimpsests: Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, was ‘a palimpsest' of Thomas Carlyle. Palimpsests were another form of double: ‘
the traces of each successive handwriting
', De Quincey explained, ‘have, in the inverse order, been regularly called back: the footsteps of the game pursued, wolf or stag. . . have been unlinked, and hunted back through all their doubles'. It was the same image as the one he used to describe the task of the biographer.

The third, and most celebrated, section of
Suspiria
is a prose poem with the mythical title, ‘Levanna and Our Ladies of Sorrow', and in the fourth section De Quincey broaches the Coleridgean topic of the ‘Apparition of the Brocken'. ‘At first,' he says of the spectral form that haunts the Harz Mountains, ‘from the distance and the colossal size, every spectator supposes the appearance to be quite independent of himself. But very soon he is surprised to observe his own motions and gestures mimicked; and wakens to the conviction that the phantom is but
a dilated version of himself
.' Like the Dark Interpreter, like William Wilson, and like the satanic Gil-Martin in Hogg's
Confessions of a Justified Sinner
, the Apparition of the Brocken reflects to the world the things we bury within. The form was, De Quincey explained, ‘solitary. . . in the sense of loving solitude' but it had ‘been known to unmask a strength quite sufficient to alarm those who had been insulting him'. Herein lies De Quincey's finest self-portrait.