Opium (7 page)

Most people considered opium taking for pleasure a peculiarly Eastern custom, a quaint pastime or an eccentric vice. When he appeared in literature, as in Dr Russell's
History of Aleppo,
the opium user was an object of curiosity rather than of censure or alarm.

This eccentric vice paved the way for another, less common use for opium. For most of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century it was, for a select few, not just a miraculous catholicon but the key to a cupboard containing untold marvels.

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Pleasure-domes in Xanadu

Opium alters the recognition and perception of certain sensations. Dr John Jones wrote of how it wonderfully distorted candle flames, how the sound of a pin dropped into a brass bowl was magnified and changed, how church bells sounded as if heard along a ‘hollow valley'. At the end of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries, this warping of sensation, in addition to the dreams and visual images opium promoted, was to have a profound effect upon the arts, in particular literature.

The period is called the Romantic Revival, its writers known as the Romantics. The name was loosely applied to a body of European authors roughly between 1775 and 1835 who rejected the prevalent rules of classicism and neo-classicism. At the core of Romantic literature was a resurgence of the imagination, flights of fancy allied to narrative rather than description. Romanticism contained a new awareness of nature and the natural world, emphasised the need for spontaneity in thought and action, attaching considerable importance to natural genius exhibited through imagination. It also embodied a more liberated and subjective expression of passion, pathos and personal feelings. Opium, and the liberty of thought it produced, was instrumental in the development of the Romantic ideal.

In Europe, the movement included such writers as Goethe, Schlegel, Hölderlin, Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël and Pushkin, whilst in Britain it embraced Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron and Thomas De Quincey, the core of the period extending between 1798, when the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth published
Lyrical Ballads,
and 1832, when Sir Walter Scott died.

The awareness of opium and its effects suddenly became a topic of discussion with the 1821 publication in Britain of De Quincey's autobiographical
Confessions of an English Opium-eater.
It was the first time opium addiction, or as De Quincey put it, ‘the marvellous agency of opium, whether for pleasure or for pain', was laid bare in a book in which its author stated opium, rather than himself, was the true hero of the piece.

When De Quincey, who was born in Manchester in 1785, discovered opium is debatable. Some accounts suggest he first took it medicinally at the age of seventeen, others claiming he encountered it whilst a student at Worcester College, Oxford: he wrote it was in 1804 when he was twenty, purchased at the recommendation of a fellow law student from a chemist in London's Oxford Street to cure toothache and neuralgia. Whenever it was, De Quincey never forgot his first taste:

… in an hour, O heavens! What a revulsion! What a resurrection, from the lowest depths, of the inner spirit! What an apocalypse of the world within me. That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes; this negative effect was swallowed up … in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea … for all human woes; here was the secret of happiness …

Opium offered De Quincey new routes of evasion from his confused state of mind about his future and his misery over the loss of his companion, a prostitute with whom he lived in penury in London whilst studying law, who left him when he returned to his family. Opium became his new destination in life. He stressed it did not create anything new but embellished what already existed, heightening awareness of latent thoughts and imagination: as he put it, a man who spent his life talking about oxen would dream of oxen under its influence.

Early in his opium-eating days, De Quincey would take a draught of laudanum then set off to walk about London or to attend the opera. Knowing the drug heightened mental sensitivity to outside stimuli, he used its euphoria to expand his consciousness, to stretch the pleasure of being in the ordinary world with an ability to reach beyond the prosaic and mundane. Listening to opera became an exquisite pastime: even the sound of young ladies in the audience speaking Italian took on the qualities of the music which, heard through opium, stirred up memories, not as direct recall but ‘as if present and incarnated in the music'. Even the calls of market traders and banter of customers sounded like a weird music, the opium also eradicating the concept of time and altering perceptions of space. De Quincey often walked great distances, oblivious as to how long he was out.

It was of this time that De Quincey wrote his famous eulogy to opium:

O just, subtle, and all-conquering opium! that, to the hearts of rich and poor alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for the pangs of grief that ‘tempt the spirit to rebel', bringest an assuaging balm – eloquent opium!… thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples … beyond the splendours of Babylon and Hekatompylos; and, ‘from the anarchy of dreaming sleep', callest into sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties, and the blessed household countenances, cleansed from the ‘dishonours of the grave'. Thou only givest these gifts to man: and thou hast the keys of Paradise …

Although the lassitude of opium frequently removes the desire to record what wonders are experienced – and De Quincey himself reported how he wanted to write down what his intellect had undergone but found himself riddled with a ‘powerless and infantile feebleness' – the dreams can be so exquisite and amazing as to outstrip the powers of literacy. In time, these visions spill over from the state of narcosis into everyday thought.

This ability to visualise outside opium-induced sleep was summed up by De Quincey in four important observations. The first was ‘that, as the creative state of the mind increased, a sympathy seemed to arise between the waking and the dreaming states of the brain in one point – that whatsoever I happened to call up and trace by a voluntary act upon the darkness was apt to transfer itself to my dreams.' In other words, the imagination could, in part, decide what the opium had as its raw dream material. Second came the awareness that ‘my dreams were accompanied by deep-seated anxiety and funereal melancholy, such as are wholly incommunicable in words.' These emotions were surely a part of De Quincey's own psychological make-up, although a sense of inexpressible melancholy is common to many addicts' experience: it may well be an expression of the calmness opium promotes. His third observation was that ‘the sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both powerfully affected.' This distortion provided a strange and omniscient visual imagery in addicts, often filled with fantastical buildings and structures, land- and seascapes and mountain vastnesses. Finally, ‘the minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived. I could not be said to recollect them … but placed as they were before me, in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all the evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I recognised them instantly.' The ability to recollect experiences is the stuff of the writer's art.

In these four points, it is surprising De Quincey does not mention the manner in which opium contorts or alters colours. In ordinary dreams, colours (if they appear at all) are unenhanced and realistic. In an opium dream, reds darken to maroons and blood crimsons, blues blacken to the colour of an early night sky, whilst yellows become solid and more luminescent. What is more, colours take on an almost tangible texture so the hue becomes only a part of their impact: one does not just see them, one also feels them.

Undoubtedly, opium was a Pandora's box of literary tools to the imaginative and erudite mind. It provided unique visual images, afforded a kind of mental time travel, gave a new way of observing the mundane and acted as an
aide-mémoire.

When De Quincey became habituated, he called opium his ‘Divine Poppy-juice, as indispensable as breathing': it was his release from physical pain and mental anguish, but it gave him more. Through the freemasonry of addiction characteristic amongst addicts, he gained a sense of kinship with others with whom he shared the common belief that opium set them above normal mortals, for it gave such magnificent visions. In other words, it took him into another, miraculous universe where the incredible was accessible.

As addiction increased, his dreams changed. The visual images remained, yet they metamorphosed. Visions of Babylonian architecture gave way to torments. Emotions such as joy were replaced with guilt. De Quincey became haunted by a sense of unfathomable dread, imprisonment or of being pursued by an ill-defined, terrible hunter.

De Quincey recorded, for the first time and in spectacular detail, just such an agonising dream, the likes of which are familiar in advanced opium addiction. He had met socially a Malay trader and, although their meeting was brief, it impacted itself upon his mind, for the Malay became an incubus in De Quincey's imagination:

The Malay has been a fearful enemy for months. Every night, through his means, I have been transported into Asiatic scenery … in China or Hindustan … I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed … Thousands of years I lived and was buried in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses by crocodiles, and I was laid, confounded with unutterable abortions, among reeds and Nilotic mud … Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, brooded a killing sense of eternity and infinity … The cursed crocodile became for me the object of more horror than all the rest … I was compelled to live with him; and (as was always the case in my dreams) for centuries. Sometimes I escaped, and found myself in Chinese houses. All the feet of the tables, sofas, etc., soon became instinct with life; the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into ten thousand repetitions …

In addition to dealing with the pleasures and pains of opium-eating, De Quincey intended to write a third part to his book to counteract his critics who rightly claimed the first edition was loaded in favour of the pleasurable side of drug taking. Ironically, he was too wracked by the pain of trying to break his addiction to write it. He succeeded in reducing his daily consumption by 85 per cent but he could not completely eradicate the habit. Opium was, he stated, the only means he had of being truly happy.

De Quincey's controlled addiction does not seem to have made his life unduly miserable for he was contentedly married, kept his addiction manageable and, although he frequently locked himself away for weeks on end with his laudanum and books, he was always a keen and erudite conversationalist. Yet, had he completed his writing, he might have produced a valuable cautionary text: instead, he brought the subject into the open.

De Quincey was not unique. There was a substantial number of creative artists – most but not all of them writers – who were also addicted and who, through their addiction, changed the direction of Western literature.

One of these was George Crabbe. At the age of thirteen, he was apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary and, three years later, to a surgeon: such training familiarised him with opium. In 1775, he returned to his birthplace of Aldeburgh in Suffolk to work as a warehouseman before setting up in medical practice. At the same time, he began to publish poetry and, in 1781, took holy orders. For the rest of his life he lived as a priest and writer.

His addiction began around 1795 when he started to take opium to cure migraine attacks. At about the same time, his third son tragically died and his wife began to develop into a manic-depressive. Whether or not the migraine was brought on by the stress or, as his doctor suggested, by an intestinal illness (perhaps a duodenal ulcer similarly prompted), or whether in fact Crabbe took opium as a release from his private anguish, is immaterial. The fact remains he became quickly habituated and continued to be so until he died, although he managed to keep his habit secret from his parishioners. His son, who was also his biographer, wrote that his father took a constant but only slightly increasing dose to which he attributed his long and generally healthy life: Crabbe died in 1832, aged seventy-seven.

Crabbe's earlier poetry had been skilful but unexciting. It was after his addiction was established that he wrote his best, most searching work. Much of Crabbe's later writing shows an influence of opium: one poem in particular, perhaps his most famous and enduring, is rich in drug imagery. It is one of a long sequence of poems collectively entitled
The Borough,
written between 1804 and 1810: it is called ‘Peter Grimes'.

The story, set in the dismal estuarine creeks of the Suffolk coast which Crabbe knew so well, is the harrowing tale of a cruel fisherman who murders his father, then abuses and negligently kills two apprentice boys. Grimes gets away with the crimes but he is made a social outcast, forbidden by the magistrates to employ another apprentice. He is forced to live a solitary life in a bleak landscape of swamps, mud-banks and ditches where he grows insular and, stung by guilt, mad. Spectres of his father and the apprentices wait for him in the marshes and inlets, standing mute as he rails at them and tries to justify his sins. At last, on his deathbed, Grimes recounts the agonies he has had to endure from the ghosts.

And when they saw me fainting and oppress'd,

He, with his hand, the old man, scoop'd the flood,