Guilty Thing (60 page)

Great storms and driving mists dictate the moods of
Suspiria de Profundis
. In a sudden squall, De Quincey attacks those ‘men that pass for good men', who ‘degrade' other men of ‘intellect or character'. Men such as these ‘respect you: they are compelled to do so: and they hate to do so'. They co-operate with ‘any unhappy accidents in your life', they ‘inflict a sense of humiliation upon you, and. . . force you into becoming a consenting party to that humiliation'. Such men we are likely, in the hour of death, to ‘salute with the valediction – Would God
I had never seen your face
'. Wordsworth was such a man but so too was Professor Wilson; both were indebted to De Quincey; both had philosophised a good deal during the worst stages of his poverty, but neither had given him a guinea.

Another man he could not forgive was William Maginn, who had slandered him in the
John Bull
as the first humbug of the age. De Quincey's appearance had been savagely mocked, his wife's virtue had been grossly insulted, his family's honour had been scandalously impugned, the nobility of the ancient De Quincey name had been challenged, De Quincey's son William had been humiliated; but what the Opium-Eater chose to publicly defend in
Suspiria
was the reality of the house in which he had lived during the winter of 1802. Maginn had doubted that a building such as this existed on Oxford Street, and De Quincey would not be seen as having lied about, or embellished, the wretchedness of his past suffering. The empty house had actually been, he revealed, on Greek Street. He was now at liberty to give the address because the attorney whose home it was had since died, and would therefore not recognise the description and be provoked into producing some counter
Confessions
of his own.

Amongst De Quincey's notes for future
Suspiria
was an account of a man called Symonds who, in revenge for a woman's scorn, ‘committed several murders in a sudden
epilepsy of planet-struck fury
'. Symonds later confessed to the prison chaplain that ‘as he rushed on in his hellish career, he perceived a dark figure on his right, keeping pace with himself'. He had been attended in his crimes, De Quincey noted, by the Dark Interpreter himself.

De Quincey would have a base in Mavis Bush cottage for the rest of his life, but for the most part he preferred not to be there. His habit of camouflaging himself in city crowds while his family resided in the country was ingrained, and he continued to rent rooms – the exact number is uncertain – in Edinburgh and Glasgow, which he loaded with treasure before moving on. In Mavis Bush itself, a tin bath being stored in his study was filled to the brim with papers which, under his strictest orders, were not to be moved. De Quincey was pursued, said James Hogg's son (also called James Hogg), ‘by
Chinese-like reverence
for written or printed paper. Newspapers and magazines, which reached him from all parts of the world, he preserved with religious care.' He was also astonishingly careless. Two tea chests of papers were left for storage in a booksellers in Glasgow, the name and address of whom De Quincey promptly forgot, and candle fires turned many of his papers to ash (it was habitual for his daughters to point out to De Quincey, as he worked, that his hair was alight).

The chaos of his filing system was recalled by a Glasgow friend, Colin Rae Brown. In 1847 De Quincey, then residing in the city with a certain Mrs Tosh, had to leave when her daughter was struck suddenly with fever. What was he to do? Where on earth could he go? De Quincey was in a whirl. And then, ‘“Ah,” he answered, putting his hand to his forehead, “that reminds me that I have been paying the rent of apartments in Renfield Street for a number of years. Many valuable books and papers are or should be still there.” As he thus spoke,' wrote Rae Brown, ‘
I stared, almost agape
, in downright amazement.' So back De Quincey went to his mean little room at the Youilles'.

In appearance he resembled a cartoon of poverty. He wore stockings without shoes or shoes without stockings, his ancient jacket was a size too large, his neck-tie looked like a piece of straw. During his daily walks De Quincey was mistaken for a tramp, and he became known in the two cities for what David Masson, his future biographer and editor, remembers as ‘the absolute uncertainty of his whereabouts'. Scuttling through the night streets, invisible as a mole, the Opium-Eater made the occasional public appearance. In one account of his arrival at a dinner party, a commotion was heard in the hall ‘as if some dog or other stray animal had forced his way in. . . What can it be? Some street boy of some sort?' Enter De Quincey, dressed in whatever he could get his hands on – a ‘boy's duffle great-coat, very threadbare, with a hole in it, fragments of a particoloured belcher handkerchief. . . list shoes, covered with snow. . . and the trousers! – someone suggests that they are mere linen
garments blackened with writing-ink
'.

His conversation remained mysterious in tone and remarkable in range, the drawback being that De Quincey rose to his best when it was ‘
rapidly becoming tomorrow
'. ‘The first difficulty,' one of his admirers recalled, ‘was to induce him to visit you. The second was to
reconcile him to leaving
.' As the guests departed for their beds, De Quincey stayed on at the table, sometimes for weeks at a time.

Elizabeth Quincey died in January 1846. ‘She was above ninety-seven,' calculated her son. He had last seen his mother fourteen years before, although they had been in regular contact about money. Under the terms of her will, Thomas continued to receive his annual allowance. The rest of the estate was left to Jane, her other surviving child.

In America, where the British magazines were regarded as setting the highest possible standard, the Opium-Eater was considered a master. ‘
No Englishman cares a pin
for De Quincey,' despaired Nathaniel Hawthorne. ‘We are ten times as good readers and critics as they.' It was De Quincey whom Ralph Waldo Emerson, visiting Edinburgh in February 1848, most wanted to meet, expecting him to be ‘some figure like the organ of York Minster'. During their conversation, De Quincey revealed to Emerson that he had copied Wordsworth's poem on the growth of his own mind into five notebooks. He also said that it had been the poet's habit to ‘appropriate what another said so entirely as to be angry if
the originator claimed any part of it
'.

Later that year De Quincey penned what would be his final letter to Wordsworth, now Poet Laureate. His purpose was to introduce his former mentor to a certain ‘
Mr Neocles Jaspis Mousabines
', an accomplished young Greek scholar who ‘honours your name and services to this generation' and has been ‘powerfully and unaffectedly impressed by the study of your works'. Would Wordsworth have any time in his schedule to ‘converse' with this latest acolyte? Wordsworth's reply has not survived, but eighteen months later, on 23 April – the day on which Shakespeare was both born and died – the poet breathed his last. His widow now took from the drawer her husband's autobiographical poem, which she named
The Prelude
, and sent it to the publisher. It was an ‘inappropriate' title, thought De Quincey; ‘he designed it as the opening to a great poem, but as the great poem was never finished,
the “Prelude” stands as an opening to nothing
'.

In 1849 ‘The English Mail-coach' was published in
Blackwood's
. It would be De Quincey's last contribution to
Maga
, and the essay stands as the crowning example of the effect of opium addiction on the imagination. Divided into four parts, ‘The Glory of Motion', ‘Going Down with Victory', ‘The Vision of Sudden Death' and ‘Dream Fugue', De Quincey returned to his love of velocity, in the days before trains, when the mail-coach, like ‘some mighty orchestra' obedient ‘to a supreme baton', distributed around the land the news of Napoleon. As ever, the prose is driven by nostalgia – ‘Even thunder and lightning, it pains me to say, are not the thunder and lightning which I remember at the time of Waterloo' – and De Quincey's subject is less the historical past than the life of his dreams, tyrannised even today by the ‘
terror and terrific beauty
' of the mail-coach.

In one of his most potent and brilliant diversions, De Quincey now described the way in which dreams contain, in compound images, ‘
the horrid inoculation
upon each other of incompatible natures'. In dreams, he suggests, images are injected into one another – the dragon, for example, ‘is the snake inoculated upon the scorpion'. The term was apt for a man who inoculated himself with opium, but ‘most frightful' of all these ‘dream horrors' is that in which the dreamer finds
himself
inoculated with ‘some horrid alien nature'. What if this ‘were his own nature repeated'? What if ‘not one alien nature, but two, but three, but four, but five, are introduced into what he once thought the inviolable sanctuary of himself?' In his fantasy of escalating antibodies, De Quincey was back inside the Piranesian dreamscape, endlessly climbing the stairs of his own Carceri.

He then, in ‘The Vision of Sudden Death', recalls how coming home many years ago after a visit to his mother, he had warmed himself with ‘a small quantity of laudanum' and sat, as he liked to do, in the ‘drawing room' of the mail-coach next to the driver. This monster of a man had only one eye and, in his hallucinogenic state, De Quincey watched the lid flicker and shut as the charioteer fell into a deep sleep. Meanwhile the horses thundered on into the dawn, led by the ‘great saucer eyes of the mail'. The woods and fields on either side were cloaked in silvery mist, and despite the comatose state of his companion, De Quincey felt as safe as a child in his older sister's arms. Suddenly he heard wheels ahead. ‘A whisper it was – a whisper from, perhaps, four miles off – secretly announcing a ruin that, being foreseen, was not the less inevitable.' What could he do to ‘check the storm-flight' of the ‘maniacal horses?' The slumbering Cyclops had the reins held tightly in his grip, and De Quincey was unable to loosen them. They were coursing down an avenue as straight as a ‘cathedral aisle', at the end of which appeared a small gig, a tug in the line of a great cutter. On the bench sat a pair of cooing lovers, their heads bent towards one another. ‘Between them and eternity' lay ‘but a minute and a half'. De Quincey cried out in alarm and the couple took in the hurricane tearing towards them on the wrong side of the road. ‘Fast are the flying moments, faster are the hoofs of our horses'; rising, the young man pulled hard on the reins but too late – the charging block on which De Quincey sat whirled, with the force of twenty Atlantics, past the tiny cart, clipping the back wheel: ‘the blow, from the fury of our passage, resounded terrifically'. Rising ‘in horror', De Quincey turned around to observe the wreckage: the carriage was trembling, the horse was standing still, the driver was ‘like a rock. . . But the lady –'