Literary Rogues (4 page)

Not everyone believed Coleridge's sob story. “
Every person who has witnessed his habits
, knows that, for infinitely the greater part, inclination and indulgence are its motives,” remarked the poet Robert Southey, a close friend and his wife's brother-in-law.

Southey may have been right: Coleridge and his friends, including Wordsworth and the poet Charles Lamb, had long been fascinated with the effects intoxication could have on their creative endeavors. They looked up to the Scottish poet Robert Burns, an acute alcoholic who died at age thirty-seven of rheumatoid endocarditis. It was widely believed, even by Burns's own mother, that the poet's drunkenness was the match that lit his muse. Coleridge contributed a poem to a volume sold to raise money for Burns's widow and six children. The tragic end to Burns's career only made his whiskey-and-sex-filled poetry all the more alluring for Coleridge and other European poets, who made pilgrimages to Burns's grave to pay their respects.

Coleridge's own medicated state resulted in his famous poem, “Kubla Khan,” in 1797. One afternoon, after dozing off for three hours at his desk, he woke up with the poem fully formed in his head. He began to write down his vision but was interrupted by a knocking at the door. After he spent about an hour entertaining his visitor, he returned to the poem but found that, “with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images,
all the rest had passed away
like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast.” Frustrated, he shelved the fragment.

“Kubla Khan” might have been lost forever had Coleridge not recited the partial poem to Lord Byron in 1816. Leigh Hunt, another poet who happened to be in another room with them, recalled that Byron was “
highly struck with his poem
, and saying how wonderfully he talked.” Byron convinced his publisher, John Murray, to print “Kubla Khan” with an introduction explaining the circumstances surrounding the narcotic vision; the poem is now among the most widely read and anthologized pieces of romantic literature.

Despite the inspiration Coleridge derived from his drug use, his predilection for walking while stoned nearly cost him his life on several occasions. He once walked for eight straight days before sobering up—and found himself some 250 miles away from his house. During another one of his disappearances, police found a man's lifeless body in a park with Coleridge's name printed inside his collar. Before long, Coleridge turned up alive—and missing his clothing, which had been stolen from a launderer by the vagrant who died in them.

Coleridge's blatant disregard for his own well-being was too much for his friends and family. He separated from his wife in 1808, and Wordsworth wrote him off as a lost cause in 1810. Coleridge's literary career continued unabated, however, and he wrote poetry, criticism, and lectures all under the influence.

After a near-fatal overdose in 1813, Coleridge retired to a home in Bristol where he hoped to wean himself off laudanum. “
I had been crucified
, dead, and buried, descended into Hell, and am now, I humbly trust, rising again, though slowly and gradually,” he wrote to a friend in May 1814.

His rehab failed. In 1816, he moved into the home of a physician in Highgate, a London suburb. Despite the doctor's attempts to regulate his patient's laudanum dosage, Coleridge secretly obtained additional supplies from a local druggist. “I have in this one dirty business of laudanum a hundred times deceived, tricked, nay, actually and consciously LIED,” Coleridge wrote. At this point it was clear to him that he would never let go of opium, or it of him. They were wed for life.

In 1834 Coleridge died of heart disease, though his spirit had long since been broken. “
When I heard of the death of Coleridge
, it was without grief,” Charles Lamb said. “It seemed to me that he long had been on the confines of the next world, that he had a hunger for eternity. I grieved then that I could not grieve. But since, I feel how great a part he was of me. His great and dear spirit haunts me.”

“
If once a man indulges himself in murder
, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.”

—
THOMAS DE QUINCEY

A
t no time during the two years he was enrolled at Manchester Grammar School did
Thomas De Quincey
(1785–1859) feel that he fit in. Although he was a merchant's son, he resented the way the institution treated commerce as a religion and worshipped money as a god. He made few friends. “Naturally,
I am fond of solitude
; but everyone has times when he wishes for company,” he wrote to his mother, complaining of being besieged by a “profound melancholy.”

His mother, who was trying to raise De Quincey's brothers and sisters alone in the wake of her husband's death, had no time for her son's complaints. De Quincey's melancholy, she told him, “is produced
by your sick mind
, which no earthly physician can cure.” It is not surprising that, prior to the start of his third year at Manchester, De Quincey dropped out in order to pursue his true calling: writing.

De Quincey's plan to become a writer was simple: he would travel to the English lake district, home to his idol, William Wordsworth.

Before he could make the trek north, however, he had second thoughts. Instead of visiting Wordsworth unannounced, the dropout decided to go on a walking tour of Wales. De Quincey's family was solidly middle-class and did not want for money, and an uncle with a sympathetic ear agreed to support De Quincey's wanderlust.

Of course, his uncle could only send his nephew money if he knew where he was, and it appears De Quincey intentionally failed to keep his family apprised of his whereabouts. Thus he soon found himself in dire need of financial support.

After a few months, some family friends stumbled upon the derelict De Quincey wandering the streets of London. They were shocked to learn he had been living among vagrants, homeless children, and prostitutes. Most days, he had eaten little more than a single piece of bread. The friends fed and housed De Quincey and returned him to his family.

De Quincey's mother enrolled him in Worcester College at Oxford. After living in the underbelly of London, he could not argue with her about returning to school. He recommitted himself to his studies and even made friends. Sort of. He found the other young college men “to be a drinking,
rattling set
, whose conversation was juvenile, commonplace, and quite unintellectual.” Still, he hung out with them for their wine. Life wasn't too bad. Although he still felt the pangs of depression, things had been much worse for him on the streets of London.

He sent Wordsworth a fawning fan letter, riddled with lines such as “
Without your friendship
, what good can my life do me?” Wordsworth's response was measured but not entirely dismissive: “
My friendship it is not in my power
to give: … a sound and healthy friendship is the growth of time and circumstance, it will spring up and thrive like wildflower when these favor, and when they do not, it is in vain to look for it.” De Quincey kept himself busy at school by reading poetry and, now that he had the money, visiting prostitutes. One diary entry from Sunday, May 22, 1803, cites the activity: “
enjoy a girl in the fields
for 1s. and 6d.”

In 1804, a toothache caused De Quincey to try laudanum, possibly for the first time. The drug not only relieved his pain, but also became his new best friend. “Happiness might now be
bought for a penny
, and carried in the waistcoat pocket: portable ecstasies might be had corked up in a pint bottle,” he later wrote, barely able to contain his enthusiasm. He attended operas and concerts under the influence of opium and discovered his enjoyment of the arts was greatly enhanced. While in school, he limited his recreational intake to once every three weeks or so.

When he turned twenty-one, he received a sizable sum of money from a patrimony set up by his father. This influx of cash meant that De Quincey no longer had to answer to his mother. He finished his college course work but failed to show up for his final exams and left Worcester without a degree. It's unclear what his reasoning was for not taking his finals. If he had shown for them, there's no doubt he would have passed: one of his examiners called him “the
cleverest man
I ever met with.” It didn't matter, because he now had the money to do whatever he liked, regardless of his education.

He met Samuel Coleridge through a mutual friend, and the two quickly bonded over their love of Wordsworth. Coleridge, who had at one time been a fanboy just like De Quincey, introduced him to Wordsworth in 1807. At just under five-foot-ten, Wordsworth was, in De Quincey's words, “
not a well-made man
.” De Quincey, however, barely stood five feet tall, so he had little room to talk. The best way to compensate for his short stature, De Quincey wrote, would be to acquire “a
high literary name
” (no pun intended).

Improbably, but just as De Quincey had once expected, he and Wordsworth became fast friends. De Quincey moved in with the Wordsworth family for several months before settling into Wordsworth's old home at Dove Cottage. Wordsworth even named De Quincey a godfather to his third son, William Junior, in June 1810.

De Quincey had high authorial ambitions, wishing to “become the
intellectual benefactor of my species
” and “the first founder of true philosophy.” He started out translating German authors and editing a magazine, where he published poetry by Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He had many other offers to write essays, including one from Lord Byron's publisher, John Murray, but De Quincey had trouble completing work in a timely manner. While he was not yet thirty, he clearly had a long way to go in order to be the “intellectual benefactor” of humanity.

One of De Quincey's chief procrastinations was reading. While reading is the greatest training any author can have, De Quincey went seriously overboard with his habit. He blew through much of his inheritance, building an enormous library containing at least five thousand volumes. He accumulated so many books, in fact, that he barely noticed the five hundred books Coleridge had borrowed from him at any given time. “He
lives only for himself
and his books,” Wordsworth's sister-in-law, Sara Hutchinson, wrote of De Quincey. When he finally married and had children, he had to rent a second house—one for the family and the other for his books.

De Quincey and Wordsworth's friendship soon fell apart. Some historians believe that De Quincey's opium use bothered the elder poet. Wordsworth, unlike De Quincey, did not drink or use opium to excess. He criticized poets like Robert Burns who couldn't control their habits. “It is probable that he would have
proved a still greater poet
if, by strength of reason, he could have controlled the propensities which his sensibility engendered,” Wordsworth wrote of Burns.

It's also possible that De Quincey may have stuck his nose where it didn't belong. “Mrs. Wordsworth is
a better wife
than Wordsworth deserves,” he is reported to have said. Wordsworth had his own opinions on De Quincey's love life as well. After De Quincey fell in love with an uneducated farm girl, Wordsworth tried to dissuade his friend from pursuing her. Such an uncultured girl could never appreciate his genius, Wordsworth argued. De Quincey married her, however, pounding another nail into the coffin of his friendship with Wordsworth.

After years of casual use, De Quincey began taking laudanum on a daily basis in 1813. At the height of his addiction, he took eight thousand drops of laudanum a day (about eighty teaspoons). He disengaged from the hustle and bustle of modern life, “
aloof from the uproar
of life; as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife, were suspended.” De Quincey lost his sense of reality. In one particularly vivid drug-induced haze, he hallucinated three goddesses named the Sorrows, who condemned him “to see the things that ought not to be seen—
sights that are abominable
.”

Like Coleridge, De Quincey concluded that recreational drug use could take its toll on both body and spirit. “
Nobody will laugh long
who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion,” he wrote. His reservations had done little to stop his gradual slide into hopeless addiction, which he chronicled in a series of anonymously published essays for
London Magazine
in 1821. The essays were too celebratory for Coleridge, who viewed his own addiction as a curse. Opium caused him “
unutterable sorrow
,” he wrote, adding that De Quincey “boasts of what was my misfortune.”

Perhaps responding to such criticisms, De Quincey added an appendix on opium withdrawal to the
London Magazine
essays when they were compiled as a book. He also added a significant introductory section, detailing his time spent on the streets before his drug addiction, and segmented the parts of the book on opium addiction into three distinct sections: “The Pleasures of Opium,” “Introduction to the Pains of Opium,” and “The Pains of Opium.”
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
, published under De Quincey's name in 1822, proved to be even more popular with the public than the essays had been.