Guilty Thing (61 page)

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, clutching at some visionary object in the air, fainting, praying, raving, despairing! Figure to yourself, reader, the elements of the case. . . From the silence and deep peace of this saintly summer night, – from the pathetic blending of this sweet moonlight, dawnlight, dreamlight, – from the manly tenderness of this flattering, whispering, murmuring love, – suddenly as from the woods and fields, – suddenly as from the chambers of the air opening in revelation, – suddenly as from the ground yawning at her feet, leaped upon her, with the flashing of cataracts, Death the crowned phantom, with all the equipage of his terrors, and the tiger roar of his voice.

The ‘rapture of panic' and fantasia of guilt, which returned ‘a thousand times' in his future dreams, is described in
Suspiria
's final section, ‘Dream Fugue', where De Quincey sees the terrified girl at the prow of a boat in the ‘
desert spaces of the sea
', a frigate flying towards her while he, helpless, looks on. ‘The deeps opened ahead in malice to receive her, towering surges of foam ran after her, the billows were fierce to catch her.' There she stands, ‘sinking, rising, fluttering, fainting' through storms, ‘through the darkness of quicksands, through fugues and the persecution of fugues'.

The unknown woman joined the gallery of girls whose deaths he had been unable to prevent.

In the autumn of 1849 he appeared at the offices of
Hogg's Instructor
, the journal founded by James Hogg the younger. From one pocket of his cape – a garment three sizes too large – De Quincey produced a roll of manuscript and from the other a small brush; uncurling the sheets he carefully brushed each one, placing them individually in the editor's hands, ‘
with a grave upward glance
to see how [he] was getting on'. Thus he proposed himself as a new contributor, and from 1851 everything De Quincey wrote, including essays on the guilt of Anne Boleyn, the etymology of the Westmorland dialect, the opium trade in China, and a further autobiographical series called ‘A Sketch from Childhood', would be published by Hogg. De Quincey's ‘Sketch', the most magnificent version of his memories so far, now centred on the death of Elizabeth and opened with the following sentence: ‘About the close of my sixth year, suddenly the first chapter of my life came to a violent termination.'

Hogg, an amiable and patient man, left a loving memoir of De Quincey in which he recalls the ‘gifted, ingenuous and noble' author, aged seventy, ascending ‘like a squirrel' a ravine on the Esk, and suffering ‘unheard-of-misery' when invited out to dinner. On one occasion Hogg ran into Wilson who asked: ‘Well, how is friend De Quincey?' He was, regretted Hogg, on his way to see him, rather complaining.
‘Ah!' said the Professor
, ‘I hope it is only caused by one of those small matters about which he is so frequently worrying himself, such as the loss of a manuscript or some other trifle. . . Say to him when you call that I would be pleased if he would come and dine with me to-morrow at the usual hour. You know the difficulty of dragging him out to dinner. Say that we are to have no strangers, and that I will see to a dish of hare-soup
a la
De Quincey being on the table.'

It is unlikely that De Quincey took up the invitation. It was with Hogg that he now discussed the smaller matters of the day, from the thrill of boxing matches to ‘a murder surrounded by mysteries'. When it came to the latter, Hogg noted, De Quincey was always able to ‘track out the missing
links in the chain of evidence
'.

No sooner had De Quincey abandoned Tait for Hogg than
Tait's
ran a paper by the pathologist John Paget on ‘The Philosophy of Murder'. The world is changing, argued Paget, and so too are murder methods. ‘
Crowbars, masks and dark lanterns
are
outré
and behind the times. The highway-gentleman of the last century, dressed and curled. . . he too is passed away with the times he illustrated, and his place is filled by men of business – by march-of-intellect operators in chloroform and new and improved strangulators.' In order to execute the ‘cool, nicely considered, artistic crime' the modern murderer employs arsenic or strychnine: ‘Poisoning,' concluded Paget, ‘(the word crawls from the pen like a snake) is the prevailing style'; it is ‘the kind of murder that even a lady might do with clean hands – that even Macbeth might have found some comfort in. “Out! Out, damned
spot
!”'

De Quincey's
oeuvre
was now, in the words of George Gilfillan, ‘
scattered in prodigal profusion
through the thousand and one volumes of our periodical literature'. In America, a Boston firm of publishers called Ticknor and Fields took on the challenge of compiling a twenty-two-volume edition of his collected works, something De Quincey believed to be ‘
absolutely, insuperably, and for ever impossible
'. This they achieved by going through thirty years' worth of journals and cutting out the essays signed XYZ, the Opium-Eater and Thomas De Quincey. Without Ticknor and Fields, ‘hardly the sixth part of my literary undertakings, hurried or deliberate, sound, rotting, or rotten, would ever have reached posterity'. But there was unease as well in De Quincey's response to the project. ‘
It is astonishing
,' he mused, ‘how much more Boston knows of my literary acts and purposes than I do myself.' With this advantage over him, the Opium-Eater feared that ‘if on any dark December morning, say forty or fifty years ago, I might have committed a forgery (as the best of men will do occasionally) Boston could array against me all the documentary evidence of my peccadillo before I should have time to abscond'.

De Quincey was now persuaded by Hogg to begin the Sisyphean task of putting together an English edition of his works, more extensive than its American sibling. All of his papers needed to be located; some had been burned by candles, others he vaguely remembered depositing in various lodgings. Miraculously, some of the dispersed manuscripts made their way back to him: when De Quincey was sheltering from a thunderstorm in the Royal Exchange Hotel, a waiter tapped him on the arm and politely handed over a bundle that had been left there for storage several months before. Former landladies, who received payment for their trouble, appeared at Hogg's offices with cartloads of packages; one of them – probably Mrs McIndoe – exploited the system by returning what turned out to be several parcels of straw.

In letters to Hogg, De Quincey documented the pandemonium into which he was now hurled: he was ‘utterly in the dark' as to the whereabouts of the paper entitled ‘Coleridge and Opium-Eating' – was it ‘
chez moi?
Or
chez la presse?
(I speak French, simply as being the briefest way of conveying my doubt).' Should the lost paper be
chez moi
, it would take him ‘half a day' to find; ‘as it is manifestly not on my table, I should proceed to postulate that it must have been transposed to the floor'. There was nothing De Quincey disliked more than the business of having to ‘stoop'. Referring to another mislaid essay, he despaired that despite ‘
working through most parts of the night
, I have not yet come to the missing copy. . . I am going on with the search yet, being walled in by superfluous furniture, in so narrow an area (not larger than a post-chaise as regards the free space), I work with difficulty, and the
stooping
kills me. I greatly fear that the entire day will be spent in the search.' As for the papers themselves, George Gilfillan chanced to see one of De Quincey's manuscripts and described the words as ‘
piled over each other's heads
, two, three, and four deep – erasure after erasure'. As Wilson said of De Quincey's style: ‘the best word always comes up'.

The exercise allowed De Quincey not only to locate, collate and order his writing but to rebuild it as well. Essays written under pressure were returned to at leisure. Writing to deadline, he said, forced a man into ‘
saying the thing that is not
'. Hammering away on these hurried pieces, he now added rooms, floors and staircases, higher attics and deeper cellars in an ever-increasing number of notes, afterthoughts, second thoughts, reflections and diversions. He chose as his title
Selections: Grave and Gay
: ‘Selections' reflected the incomplete nature of the project, and ‘Grave and Gay' comes from Book VI of
The Prelude
(‘Strange rendezvous my mind was at that time,/ A parti-coloured show of grave and gay'). Here was the parti-coloured mansion of De Quincey's own mind, revealed for all to see. Volume one, which appeared in May 1853, opened with
Autobiographic Sketches.
These might be described as a palimpsest of his essays for
Tait's
, sections of
Suspiria de Profundis
, and his recent ‘Sketch from Childhood' for
Hogg's Instructor
. Writing once again over the earlier versions of his youth, De Quincey cut some passages, extended others, and divided the whole into thirteen sections, echoing the thirteen books of Wordsworth's 1805
Prelude
. The titles he chose, after Wordsworth's own titles, were as follows:

The Affliction of Childhood

Introduction to the World of Strife

Infant Literature

The Female Infidel

I am Introduced to the Warfare of a Public School

I enter the World

The Nation of London

Dublin

First Rebellion

French Invasion of Ireland, and Second Rebellion

Travelling

My Brother

Premature Manhood

He was now alone of all his kind. In 1853 his daughter Margaret married and moved to Ireland, and in April 1854 John Wilson died. In the months before his friend's death De Quincey had considered enquiring after his health but was prevented from doing so by his real reason for writing, which was to retrieve, from one of Wilson's associates, a trunkful of books. ‘
My unfortunate chattels
,' De Quincey explained to John Findlay, ‘instead of being rescued from destruction, are plunged into a deeper and more hopeless oblivion than ever. This, you see, is what I want to know from Wilson, not, of course, where the books are placed, but the name of the gentleman to whom he introduced me.' Soon after Wilson's funeral, De Quincey remarked at a dinner party that the professor had surrounded himself with parasites ‘
who ministered to his vanity
', and that ‘the sickly, false sentiment of his works' had been mocked by the Wordsworths. He then entertained the company with a ‘droll' impersonation of Wilson's style of lecturing.