Guilty Thing (64 page)

Peter Ackroyd,
Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem

‘I wonder,' said Jorge Luis Borges, ‘if I could have existed without De Quincey?' Many people could not have existed without De Quincey. The last of the Romantics, in all other things he came first.
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
spawned two genres: the recovery memoir, and what Terence McKenna has called the ‘pharmo-picaresque' literary tradition. In 1822 the
Confessions
were translated into Russian, and in 1828 Alfred de Musset produced the first French ‘translation', which he furnished with a further 5,000 words, including a section in which De Quincey rediscovers Ann of Oxford Street bejewelled in a ballroom, hanging on the arm of a baron. Musset's version of the
Confessions
inspired the nightmarish programme music of Berlioz's
Symphonie fantastique
(1830), in which the despairing hero tries to poison himself with opium, only to suffer visions in which he believes he has murdered his beloved, been condemned to death, and witnesses his own execution and funeral, marked by a witches' sabbath, and equally Balzac's novella
Massimilla Doni
in 1837. Twenty years later Fitz Hugh Ludlow's
The Hasheesh Eater
appeared in America: ‘And now, with time, space expanded also. The whole atmosphere seemed ductile, and spun endlessly out into great spaces surrounding me on every side.' One hundred and thirty years on, in William Burroughs's
The Place of Dead
Roads
, Kim Carson ‘opens the door to go out of the druggist's shop' just as ‘some one comes in with a puff of fog and cold air. Boy about eighteen, angular English face. . . rather like the young De Quincey.'

Reading De Quincey, wrote Baudelaire, affected ‘my whole emotional and aesthetic orientation' and he described, in his 1860 translation of
Confessions
in
Les Paradis artificiels
, the solipsism of the Opium-Eater as ‘an appalling marriage of man to himself'. In Wilkie Collins's
The Moonstone
(1868), the opium-addicted Ezra Jennings (a partial portrait of Collins himself) recommends the London passages of the ‘far-famed'
Confessions
as an account of how a man can ‘occupy himself actively, and. . . move about from place to place under the influence of opium'. In his opium stupors, Jennings has hellish dreams. In one, ‘I was whirling through empty space with the phantoms of the dead, friends and enemies together. In another, the one beloved face which I shall never see again, rose at my bedside, hideously phosphorescent in the black darkness, and glared and grinned at me.' For Jean Cocteau in
Diary of an Addict
 – based on his opium withdrawal in 1928 – ‘Opium is the woman of destiny, pagodas, lanterns.'

While the
Confessions
have ensured De Quincey's cult status, his essays on murder anticipated our construction of, and obsession with, Jack the Ripper. Alfred Hitchcock, who modelled his own dandy killers on John Williams, described ‘On Murder' as a ‘delightful essay'. Murder, Hitchcock counselled, was not the province of the ‘underworld thug': it ‘should be treated delicately', and ‘brought into the home where it rightly belongs'. Both Dickens and Dostoevsky – who went into exile with the
Confessions
in his pocket – used the motif of knocking as a way of entering their murderer's minds. ‘Suddenly,' Dostoevsky wrote of Raskolnikov, outside the money-lender's flat in
Crime and Punishment
, ‘he heard the careful placing of a hand on the handle of the lock and the rustle of clothing close to the door and listening, just as he was doing outside it, holding her breath and probably with her ear to the door'. After murdering Tigg Montague in
Martin Chuzzlewit
, Jonas springs from the wood ‘as if it were a hell'. But it is no longer the wood that Jonas fears; his fear has diverted ‘to the dark room he had left shut up at home. He had a greater horror, infinitely greater, of that room than of the wood. . . His hideous secret was shut up in the room, and all its terrors were there; to his thinking it was not in the wood at all.' Stopping at an inn for a glass of beer, he hears ‘a knocking within'. He imagines a similar knocking on the door ‘of that infernal room at home', a knocking ‘which would lead to rumour, rumour to detection, detection to death. At that instant, as if by some design and order of circumstances, the knocking had come. It still continued; like a warning echo of the dread reality he had conjured up. As he could not sit and hear it, he paid for his beer and walked on again.' In D. H. Lawrence's short story, ‘The Prussian Officer' (1916), the orderly, having murdered his captain after giving him a tankard of beer, hides out in the woods. Sequestered in some deep recess, he hears a knocking – ‘A great pang of fear went through his heart. Somebody was knocking.' It is a bird tapping a branch, the ‘tap tap tap' a sign that the pulses of life were beginning to beat again.

In ‘The Decay of Murder', published in the
Cornhill Magazine
in 1860, Leslie Stephen impersonated De Quincey's style to complain that the current spate of ‘intelligent' detective fiction was like ‘a drug in the market'. For Oscar Wilde, there was ‘no essential incongruity between crime and culture', and in ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison', his essay on Thomas Griffin Wainewright, Wilde included among his subject's artistic attributes his skills as ‘a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age'. The heroine of Ibsen's
Hedda Gabler
counsels Eilert Lovborg to commit suicide with artistic grace: ‘Do it beautifully'. In ‘Decline of the English Murder', George Orwell complained that ‘you never seem to get a good murder nowadays', and Jean-Paul Sartre included in
Saint Genet
a chapter called ‘On Fine Art Considered as Murder'. ‘The criminal kills,' Sartre observed; ‘he is a poem; the poet writes the crime.' In Nabokov's
Despair
, Hermann Karlovich, who kills his doppelgänger (who in fact looks nothing like him), explains to the reader that ‘An artist feels no remorse, even when his work is not understood, not accepted.' Truman Capote, in his ‘non-fiction novel',
In Cold Blood
, describes how Perry Smith, who murdered the Clutter family in their home in Holcomb, Kansas, admitted that he had always wanted to make something artistic. ‘And now, what has happened?' Smith says to Capote: ‘An incredible situation where I kill four people and you're going to produce a work of art.'

Humbert Humbert's observation in
Lolita
, that you can ‘count on a murderer for a fancy prose style', is the perfect De Quinceyan epigram, and Virginia Woolf found in De Quincey's fancy prose style a model for her own. The ‘Time Passes' section of
To the Lighthouse
 – in which Woolf experiments with the expansion and contraction of time in the rooms of the now empty house – was composed alongside her essay on ‘Impassioned Prose'.

De Quincey's dreams are hailed by Borges as ‘the best in literature', and we return to his opium descent in Alice's fall down the rabbit hole. In Wonderland, Alice drinks from a mysterious bottle similar to those found in apothecary shops, and talks to a caterpillar on a mushroom smoking a hookah. For J. G. Ballard, De Quincey was an inventor of dystopias;
Crash
might be seen as the twentieth-century equivalent of ‘The English Mail-Coach'.

For Baudelaire, De Quincey was the first flâneur; for Guy Debord, his mapping of the mind onto the movements of the city made him the original psychogeographer; for Iain Sinclair psychogeography began with De Quincey's image of the north-west passage in
Confessions
.

As editor of
The Westmorland Gazette
, De Quincey anticipated our finest tabloid traditions, while an example of De Quinceyan memoirs might be
Sir Vidia's Shadow
, Paul Theroux's frank account of the breakdown of his relationship with V. S. Naipaul and
Iris as I Knew Her
, A. N. Wilson's recollections of Iris Murdoch. De Quincey's portrait, in the ‘Lake Reminiscences', of Dorothy and William Wordsworth as impassioned, fervent and feral inspired Emily Brontë's creation of Cathy and Heathcliff in
Wuthering Heights
: the Brontës were avid readers of the Edinburgh magazines. His ‘Lake Reminiscences' were also the blueprint for Lytton Strachey's iconoclastic
Eminent Victorians
, the biography that punctured our reverence for the past. ‘The first duty of the biographer,' said Strachey, is ‘a becoming brevity. . . The second. . . is to maintain his own freedom of spirit. It is not his business to be complimentary; it is his business to lay bare the facts of the case, as he understands them.' It was from De Quincey that Lytton Strachey learned the fine art of character assassination.

‘For years,' said Borges of Thomas De Quincey, ‘I thought that the almost infinite world of literature was in one man.' But one almost infinite man, it seems, runs through a world of literature. We are all De Quinceyan now.

Notes

Abbreviations

Coburn – Kathleen Coburn (ed.),
The Letters of Sara Hutchinson, 1800–1835
, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954

‘Confessions' – De Quincey, ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater', in Barry Milligan (ed.),
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings
, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003

Diary – ‘Diary, 1803' in Barry Symonds (ed.),
Writings, 1799–1820: The Works of Thomas De Quincey
, vol. 1, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000

Eaton
 
– Horace A. Eaton,
Thomas De Quincey: A Biography
, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936

Griggs – E. L. Griggs (ed.),
Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
, 6 vols, Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–57

H. A. Page
 
– H. A. Page,
Thomas De Quincey, His Life and Writings, with unpublished correspondence
, 2 vols, London: John Hogg and Co., 1877

Hogg – James Hogg,
De Quincey and His Friends, Personal Recollections, Souvenirs and Anecdotes of Thomas De Quincey, His Friends and Associates
, London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1895

Japp
 
– Alexander H. Japp (ed.),
De Quincey Memorials, Being Letters and Other Records Here First Published
, 2 vols, London: Heinemann, 1891

Jordan – John E. Jordan (ed.),
De Quincey to Wordsworth: The Biography of a Friendship
, London: Cambridge University Press, 1962

Lindop – Grevel Lindop,
The Opium Eater
, London: J. M. Dent, 1981

‘Mail-Coach' – De Quincey, ‘The English Mail-Coach', in Milligan (ed.),
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Masson
 
– David Masson (ed.),
The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey
, 13 vols, London: A & C Black, 1897

Middle Years – Ernest de Selincourt (ed.),
The Letters of Dorothy and William Wordsworth, The Middle Years
, part 1, 1806–1811; part 2, 1812–1820, revised by Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967

Morrison – Robert Morrison,
The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey
, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2009

‘New Paper' – De Quincey, ‘A New Paper on Murder as a Fine Art', in Robert Morrison (ed.),
On Murder
, Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2006

‘On Knocking' – De Quincey, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth', in Morrison (ed.),
On Murder

‘On Murder' – De Quincey, ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts', in Morrison (ed.),
On Murder

‘Postscript'
 
– De Quincey, ‘Postscript [to On Murder as One of the Fine Arts]', in Morrison (ed.),
On Murder

Recollections
 
– David Wright (ed.),
Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets
, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970

‘Second Paper' – ‘Second Paper [on Murder as One of the Fine Arts]', in Morrison (ed.),
On Murder

‘Suspiria'
 
– ‘Suspiria de Profundis', in Milligan (ed.),
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

The Prelude

Suppose the Earth. . .
Kathleen Coburn (ed.),
The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1794–1826,
Princeton University Press and Routledge, 1957–90, vol. 3, 1808–1819.

the hardest building to describe in London. . .
Ian Nairn,
Nairn's London,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014, p. 111.

closely shut up. . .
The Times
, 11 Dec 1811, p. 3.

I said I belonged to the house. . .
The Times
, 11 Dec 1811, p. 3.

Marr, Marr
. . .
The Times
, 11 Dec 1811, p. 3.

The child, where's the child?
. . .
The Times
, 11 Dec 1811, p. 3.

What is true of friendship. . .
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton
, with an introductory preface by J. Payne Collier, London: Chapman and Hall, 1856, p. 93.

Coleridge said in his advertisement. . .
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Biographia Literaria
, edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, I, p. 60n.

the only man to whom. . .
Griggs, I, p. 334.

scene of struggle
. . .
Recollections
, p. 293.

Few writers . . .
had so keen
. . . Peter Ackroyd,
Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem
, London: Minerva, 1995, p. 38.