Literary Rogues Page 3

  3

  The Pope of Dope

  “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

  At 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.

  An anonymous book was quickly published to provide a counterpoint to De Quincey’s, titled Advice to Opium Eaters. Its purpose was to warn others from copying De Quincey, though a more cynical reader might think that the anonymous author’s true aim was to capitalize on the popularity of Confessions. Because of his high profile, De Quincey was widely blamed by doctors, politicians, and priests for a rise in recreational drug use in the nineteenth century.

  De Quincey, for his part, was explicit in stating that the fantastic dreams a literary man like himself experienced as a result of opium use were not representative of the layman’s experience. “If a man ‘whose talk is of oxen’ should become an opium-eater, the probability is, that (if he is not too dull to dream at all)—he will dream about oxen.” Of course, plenty of authors imitated him in search of the fantastic dreams he wrote about. Louisa May Alcott, Branwell Brontë, and Wilkie Collins were among a long list of writers who followed De Quincey down the path of opium addiction.

  In the original edition of Confessions, De Quincey called the book “the doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium: of which church I acknowledge myself to be the only member.” In a revised edition of the book, thirty-five years after the first edition was published, De Quincey updated this line to read, “This is the doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium; of which church I acknowledge myself to be the Pope.”

  “Those who have read the Confessions will have closed them with the impression that I had wholly renounced the use of opium,” he wrote in the revised edition’s epilogue. In truth, he had never quit. Opium was perhaps the only way he could have weathered the final four decades of his life, a roller-coaster ride of fame, financial difficulties, the loss of five of his eight children, and the death of his beloved wife. He had little choice but to keep using. “Without opium I can’t get on with my work, which the publishers are urging me to complete,” he told a friend in 1854. De Quincey was laid up with a swollen foot and leg, and his doctor had advised him to quit opium to speed his recovery, which he couldn’t do. “The work must be done; the opium can’t be left off,” he said. “The leg must take its chance.”

  De Quincey died five years later of natural causes unrelated to his drug abuse.

  4

  The Apostle of Affliction

  “Problem: bored. Solution: sex, alcohol, firearms.”

  —DANIEL FRIEDMAN ON THE LIFE OF LORD BYRON

  Nearly two hundred years after his death, Lord Byron (1788–1824) continues to make headlines: in 2008, the Sun, a British tabloid, ran a sensational story about the poet under the headline, “Lord Byron’s Life of Bling, Booze and Groupie Sex.” As a young boy, however, George Gordon Byron was an unlikely candidate to leave such a lasting impression upon the nineteenth-century literary landscape. He later recalled that as a child he was “neither tall nor short, dull nor witty,” before adding that he was “lively—except in my sullen moods, and then I was always a devil.”

  When his grandfather passed away, George Gordon became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, Lord Byron. You can tell everything you need to know about Byron’s family history by looking at the nicknames of his relatives: his grand-uncle was known as “the Wicked Lord,” and his father went by the moniker “Mad Jack” Byron. Mad Jack was deceased when young George Gordon inherited his title, and management of the family estate fell to the new Lord Byron—who was only ten years old.

  Despite his mother’s caution, Byron quickly found himself borrowing money against the lands he stood to inherit, to support his lavish appetites. Although he was born into money, he never seemed to have enough. What exactly did Byron spend his money on? Aside from upkeep on his family’s rapidly deteriorating estate, Byron collected exotic animals. Over his life he would amass a veritable zoo of animals, including a bear, several monkeys, a goat with a broken leg, a wolf, horses, dogs, cats, an eagle, a crow, a falcon, peacocks, guinea hens, and an Egyptian crane.

  Despite his affluence, the young Lord Byron was constantly plagued by “black moods.” He was apt to break down over the slightest thing. “I cry for nothing,” he once wrote. “Today I burst into tears all alone by myself over a cistern of goldfishes—which are not pathetic animals.” His macabre habits, such as firing pistols indoors and drinking wine from his ancestors’ skulls, did little to alleviate his depression.

  Social interactions only worsened his mood: “An animated conversation has much the same effect on me as champagne,” he said. “It elevates me and makes me giddy, and I say a thousand foolish things while under its intoxicating influence. It takes a long time to sober me after; and I sink, under reaction, into a state of depression, out of humor with myself and the world. I find an interesting book the only sedative to restore me.”

  When he wasn’t reading, spending money, or brooding, Lord Byron wrote poetry. He felt that he had some catching up to do with his literary elders. Shakespeare, for instance, “had a million advantages over me—besides the incalculable one of having been dead for one or two centuries,” which he termed an attractive quality “to the gentle living reader.” He published several volumes of poetry in his late teens, including Fugitive Pieces and Hours of Idleness, to little acclaim.

  Since proper gentlemen simply did not dirty their hands with an industrious task like writing, Byron gave his copyrights away to friends and family to avoid being mistaken for a lowly author. Poetry? ’Tis no more than a hobby, like shooting pistols indoors! It’s unclear if any of his peers in the House of Lords bought into this logic. Even when his books later became bestsellers and his debt was mounting to burdensome levels, Byron refused to accept payment for his work.

  When he turned twenty, Byron picked up his pen and paper and left England. He traversed the European and Asian continents, plugging any hole he could find. He is reported to have slept with two hundred women while in Venice—in the course of just one year. And that doesn’t include the dozens of teenage boys biographers have linked him to during the same period. “He has no indisposition that I know of but love, desperate love, the worst of all maladies in my opinion,” his mother lamented.

  In 1811, Byron returned to England. Despite his adventures, he was completely bored with life. “At twenty-three the best of life is over. I have seen mankind in various countries and find them equally despicable. I grow selfish and misanthropical.” In his private journal, he continued his rant: “I am tolerably sick of vice which I have tried in its agreeable varieties, including wine and ‘carnal company.’ ” Even seeing his poems in print had failed to uplift his spirits. “I have outlived all my appetites and most of my vanities—even the vanity of authorship.”

  Ironically, it was only after this point that his career really took off, with the publication of the first canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Byron awoke one morning and found himself famous, he joked. He was only half kidding.

  When Byron came of age, Europe was in the final days of the Enlightenment, a massive period of upheaval that pulled the continent solidly out of the ignorance and error of the Middle Ages and into the intellectual light of the eighteenth century. While academics welcomed the Enlightenment with open arms, the common man was highly skeptical
of the new world order. The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), the American Revolution (1775–1783), and the French Revolution (1789–1799) all contributed to the sense that the world was quickly spinning out of control. The young, sensitive writers who came to be known as the Romantics were attuned to the growing sense among the populace that the eighteenth century was too fast-paced for its own good. With the publication of the first canto of Childe Harold in 1812, Byron became the poster child for the Romantic era overnight.

  Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was vaguely based on Byron’s travels through Portugal and the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. Childe Harold, the disaffected young hero, sets out on his own in an uncaring, cruel world to recapture a sense of wonder that the Enlightenment had bleached from nature and industry had run roughshod over.

  English readers of all classes snapped the narrative up as Byron’s publisher serialized it from 1812 to 1818. The Duchess of Devonshire wrote that Childe Harold “is on every table, and Byron courted, visited, flattered and praised whenever he appears. He is really the only topic of conversation—the men jealous of him, the women of each other.” Melancholy and disillusionment were in vogue, and Byron was as melancholic and disillusioned as they came.

  But as Byron’s fame blossomed, he couldn’t shake the feeling that his glory days were behind him. “Fame is but like all other pursuits, ending in disappointment—its worthlessness only discovered when attained,” he later said. “People complain of the brevity of life. Should they not rather complain of its length, as its enjoyments cease long before the halfway-house of life is passed, unless one has the luck to die young?”