Opium, drugs, and literature: did Coleridge create homemade heroin?

DeQuncey's opium nightmares, by Christophe Huet

One of the most obvious effects of opium addiction on a writer's powers is that it induces indolence, absence of feeling, a state in which the power to observe is detached from the power to sympathize with what is observed. At it's very outset, this state of mind can be useful to a poet; there are times when he needs detachment. But in the long run it is deadly. The dislocation of objects and events from the feelings which they normally arouse is in the end destructive of poetic truth.

-- Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968)

In the 21st century, writing about drugs -- when it does happen -- seems to center around two conflicting poles: the confessional tell-all of the reformed, or the boosterism of the pharmaceutically relieved. The power of big pharma has ruled out most other approaches to the role of drugs in our collective health, mental, physical, or otherwise.

Back when the term drug culture meant different things to different people, however, the role of drugs (most of them now illicit in America and Europe unless under the care of a physician) on the imagination was a topic of some debate. Alethea Hayter's Opium and the Romantic Imagination is a rich study of literature's most famous, mostly British, users of opiates. Her book is a careful examination of a group of writers who had little in common besides their daily doses of opium, usually in liquid form or in combination with alcohol available as a pain-killer called laudanum.(Coleridge, c. 1810)

As the opening quote above suggests, Hayter found nothing to really surprise the general reader of Romantic literature. Although she finds that the regular ingestion of opiates created in the individual writer a paradise-like state of reveries and dreams, she does conclude with a creative paradox for the writer: Though opium may then present him with unique material for his poetry, it will take away from him the will and the power to make use of it.
In other words, the artist may fall under the spell of fantastic ideas and visions induced by drug use and then, in a diabolical twist, the drugs themselves take away the ability to transcribe these ideas through the resulting indolence and detachment. Hayter is also quick to describe the majority of Romantic writers associated with drug use (de Quincey, Crabbe, and Coleridge especially) as prodigious procrastinators -- victims of their own drug use. Creativity may be a gift, but industry is a virtue: whether or not their opium use made them indolent, the combined output of these writers is, substantially, not of the first rank:

It is the great plans that are destroyed. Writers can still write, and in fragments write well, when they have been addicted for many years; and this is not necessarily only during withdrawal periods. ... But the holding-together has gone, the great luminous images which shed light and pattern across all the wide tracts of a writer's imagination do not radiate any more. The images are still there, but some are darkened, some are luridly spot-lit, all are enclosed. The effect (is) what Baudelaire called the 'paysage opiace' ... some of these images -- the fairly obvious poppy, the honey-dew, the temptress, the buried temple -- may be conscious or unconscious equivalents for opium itself.

Fragments written well: the most famous being Coleridge's Kubla Khan (1815), which the author describes as "a vision." The writing of the poem was interrupted by a visitor, and when Coleridge sat down to resume writing he found the images had vanished. There are more detailed experiments, and expressions of the opium dream, from other lesser-known writers. Erasmus Darwin's recreation of an opium dream in The Loves of the Plants (1789) is based on his medical knowledge and is an outline of what became familiar to many readers as the imagery of opium visions: 

Sofa'd on silk, amid her charm-built towers,

Her meads of asphodel and amaranth bowers,

Where sleep and silence guard the soft abodes

In sullen apathy PAPAVER nods.

Faint over her couch in scintillating streams,

Pass the thin forms of Fancy, and of Dreams;

Froze by enchantment on the velvet ground,

Fair youths and beauteous ladies glitter round;

On crystal pedestals they seem to sigh,

Bend the meek knee and lift the imploring eye. ...

Flushed with new life, descending statues talk,

The pliant marble softening as they walk,

To viewless lutes aerial voices sing,

And hovering lovers are heard on rustling wing ...

The pinnacle of the book is an imaginative leap: Hayter describes a creative mind under the influence of opium. She imagines a writer inside Piranisi's 1790 Carceri di'invenzione (Imaginary Prisons). The result is a horror story, all the scarier if one imagines the daily frame of mind of Coleridge, de Quincey, and other addicts in their advanced state of addiction. For some this was a considerable burden, rather than a relief from pain: Hayter quotes a contemporary of Coleridge, who estimates his opium usage at "a hundred drops a day" in 1801; in 1814, when the writer was receiving surreptitious supplies from a local chemist, this was as much as two pints a day -- the equivalent of 20,000 drops of opium!

The success of Hayter's imaginative description she details in the book's postscript: "I was often asked while I was writing this book whether I had completed my researches by taking opium myself. No curiosity or wish for new experience could nerve me to enter such a world of wretchedness ... Their (the addicts') paradises may have been wholly or partly artificial; their hells were real."

Filled with great detail and an eyebrow-raising theory or two -- did Coleridge really create homemade heroin? -- Hayter's well-researched and entertaining book is a scholarly look at drug use and its role in the creation of Romantic literature. By looking at the settings, theory, and practice of drug use through the 17th-19th centuries, Hayter provides historical context to an otherwise loosely-grouped list of writers: the careers of DeQuincey, Poe, and Baudelaire are examined in detail as well as lesser lights such as Francis Thompson and Wilkie Collins. Published in 1968 when interest in the culture of drugs, its uses and effects were at a peak this book is certainly an artifact of the period, but Hayter's research is thorough enough to remain an excellent source of material, as well as debate, on the value of drug use in art. 

Writing it all down: for the Beats, too much was never enough

Bill Morris at The Millions has had enough. His end-of-2010 post Will you Beat Hagiographers Please Be Quiet Please (with its intentional double please), about the ongoing parade of films and books lionizing the beat generation, contains some valid points about the myth-making and the saint-making machinery of American popular culture. "It's just a bunch of guys trying to get published," Morris quotes James Franco-as-Ginsberg in the movie Howl, and this is an observation Morris generally agrees with. He notes, as well, the increasing trend toward what Joyce Carol Oates has called "pathography" -- that the facts of a creative individual's life are as important as his art, with an emphasis on dysfunctional detail -- in literary biography.

It's ironic that Morris would find this abundance of lurid, personal psychology unwarranted in the biographies of beat figures like Kerouac and Burroughs -- writers who seemingly suffered from logorrhea so much more than most in letters and journals and scribbled diaries and, finally, in books. Many of them wrote everything down and some, it seems, were impatient waiting for the ink to dry before turning their lives into literature.

Their personal lives, and the stories they fashioned from them, form a carnival ground of (in Oates's phrase) “dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct.” With the beats, it's all there on the blotted page, with the "artifice" of fiction very nearly removed from the "art" of the story. But learning more about a writer's life, Morris writes, doesn't count for nearly as much as the books themselves:

... Since we live in an age that’s obsessed with personalities and celebrities, it’s not surprising that so few readers are satisfied with loving a book and so many insist on knowing as much as possible about the person who wrote it. While this appetite has inspired literary biographers to produce a long shelf of pathographies and other monstrosities – does the world really need Norman Sherry’s three-volume biography of Graham Greene? – it has also resulted in some well researched and finely written literary biographies that did what such exercises do at their best: they led readers back to the subject’s books.

Among these I would include Blake Bailey’s recent biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever and, strangely enough, Ann Charters’s thorough and balanced 1973 bio of Kerouac. In her introduction, Charters wrote insightfully, if a bit clunkily: “The value of Kerouac’s life is what he did, how he acted. And what he did, was that he wrote. I tried to arrange the incidents of his life to show that he was a writer first, and a mythologized figure afterward. Kerouac’s writing counts as much as his life.”

I would argue that his writing counts more than his life, much more. Eventually Charters seemed to come around to my way of thinking. In 1995, after she’d edited two fat volumes, Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956 and The Portable Jack Kerouac, I interviewed her for a newspaper article. “I wanted (the book of letters) to be a biography in Jack’s own words,” she told me. “His life is in his books, but on the other hand the most essential thing is missing from those novels. What he tells you in the letters is that the most important thing in his life is writing.”

At the time The Gap was using Kerouac’s image – and images of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and other ’50s icons – to sell its khaki pants. In the face of such shameless hucksterism, Charters’s insistence on the importance of Kerouac’s writing seemed both quaint and heroic to me. It still does today, as the hagiographers keep bombarding us with abominations like One Fast Move or I’m Gone and Howl and A Man Within. ...

Morris is half right. Today's hot-house atmosphere of celebrity and promotion is a blurry mix of authenticity and the artificial. Some would argue rightly everything in ad-land is all packaging. But so what? Morris's own griping about the commercialization of Kerouac seems quaint itself this late in the advertising game -- the appropriation of Kerouac's image doesn't make what he wrote less "authentic," it only questions the decisions of his estate. If fans find this kind of legend-buffing intriguing, it may be that the link between beat writers and beat writing comes close to solving the mysterious alchemy between personality and page. And that leads readers back to the words themselves -- which is Morris's basic starting point.

For many readers the movement's legacy of writing-it-all-down is a key to finding the raw material of fiction in real life. For fans, too, beat literature can seem a kind of romantic ideal, opening the gates to self-expression and revelation. Then the trick, of course, is to find a public outlet, and the internet seems to be obliterating that hurdle more rapidly every day. We can all make messes of our lives, and we now have the means to tell everyone -- friends and complete strangers -- about it.

Making real and discernible art out of a messy and careening life takes perception and some amount of craft, however, and there a writer is on his own without a net. There is a simple way past the image-crafting and the cults of personality, the flood of films and the biographer's "pathography." Writers like Morris suggest it, if a bit over-wrought, in his essay: it used to be called "letting the words speak for themselves."

This just in: a nineteenth-century list of the hundred best books

Clement K. Shorter,

pictured in Vanity Fair (1894)

November is the start the inevitable best-of list-making season. With the holiday season immediately ahead, lists of books, films, and other cultural markers of a year's swift passing are a way to gently nudge the recent memory of culture-just-past. At the very least, lists are a reminder of how much annual creative effort goes unheeded, even with the best of intention and a bedside already crammed with books. (As if just reading The New York Times Book Review isn't enough already, filled with reviews of books-I-really-should-get-around-to.)

The idea of list-making of course is not new, but the amount of "great books" and "essential reading" trumpeted at years' approaching end has always been overwhelming. The Times Literary Supplement, in London, upped the ante in October: a best-of list, from 1898, of 100 essential novels from one well-meaning correspondent, certainly one whose bedside stack never contained a celebrity tell-all or pop-star confessional.

A journalist and author of numerous books on the Brontë sisters named Clement K. Shorter tried his hand at compiling the 100 Best Novels for a journal called The Bookman. The ground rules were simple: the list could feature only one novel per novelist, and living authors were excluded. The Times columnist who unearthed the list, Michael Caines, makes some well-founded remarks about the inevitable vagaries of literary taste, and about our contemporary passion for championing younger -- presumably living -- authors. 

Caines also adds some long-view comment about Shorter's choices  ("would you have chosen Silas Marner over Middlemarch?") and titles of special interest. The list is worth a browse if only to see how much there is unread, just to catch up to the 20th century.

Shorter's top 25 best books of all time,1898. The full list is at the Times Literary Supplement. 

1. Don Quixote - 1604 – Miguel de Cervantes

2. The Holy War - 1682 – John Bunyan

3. Gil Blas - 1715 – Alain René le Sage

4. Robinson Crusoe - 1719 – Daniel Defoe

5. Gulliver’s Travels - 1726 – Jonathan Swift

6. Roderick Random - 1748 – Tobias Smollett

7. Clarissa - 1749 – Samuel Richardson

8. Tom Jones - 1749 – Henry Fielding

9. Candide - 1756 – Françoise de Voltaire

10. Rasselas - 1759 – Samuel Johnson

11. The Castle of Otranto - 1764 – Horace Walpole

12. The Vicar of Wakefield - 1766 – Oliver Goldsmith

13. The Old English Baron - 1777 – Clara Reeve

14. Evelina - 1778 – Fanny Burney

15. Vathek - 1787 – William Beckford

16. The Mysteries of Udolpho - 1794 – Ann Radcliffe

17. Caleb Williams - 1794 – William Godwin

18. The Wild Irish Girl - 1806 – Lady Morgan

19. Corinne - 1810 – Madame de Stael

20. The Scottish Chiefs - 1810 – Jane Porter

21. The Absentee - 1812 – Maria Edgeworth

22. Pride and Prejudice - 1813 – Jane Austen

23. Headlong Hall - 1816 – Thomas Love Peacock

24. Frankenstein - 1818 – Mary Shelley

25. Marriage - 1818 – Susan Ferrier

As Caines wryly notes, Shorter then bent his own rules by including 8 additional novels by living authors, “writers whose reputations are too well established for their juniors to feel towards them any sentiments other than those of reverence and regard,” in Shorter's own words. If you make the rules, you are free to break them just as well, although it is not noted whether Shorter's recommendation of the 1881 novel Mark Rutherford by W. Hale White created any rush to the booksellers. 

Kurt Vonnegut, born November 11, 1922: "the secret of good storytelling: to lie, but to keep the arithmetic sound."

Kurt Vonnegut on Mark Twain, 2007: " ... He himself was the most enchanting American at the heart of each of his tales. We can forgive this easily, for he managed to imply that the reader was enough like him to be his brother. He did this most strikingly in the personae of the riverboat pilot and Huckleberry Finn. He did this so well that the newest arrival to these shores, very likely a Vietnamese refugee, can, by reading him begin to imagine that he has some of idiosyncratically American charm of Mark Twain." Earlier in his remarks, Vonnegut explained Twain's "necessary miracle":

... This is the secret of good storytelling: to lie, but to keep the arithmetic sound. A storyteller, like any other sort of enthusiastic liar, is on an unpredictable adventure. His initial lie, his premise, will suggest many new lies of its own. The storyteller must choose among them, seeking those which are most believable, which keep the arithmetic sound. Thus does a story generate itself.

The wildest adventure with storytelling, with Missouri calculation, of which I know is A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. It was written in this sacredly absurd monument -- as were Tom Sawyer, A Tramp Abroad, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, from which I have quoted, and the world masterpiece,Huckleberry Finn. Twain's most productive years were spent here--from the time he was 39 until he was my age, which, is 56. He was my age when he left here to live in Europe and Redding and New York, his greatest work behind him.

That is haw far down the river of life he was when he left here. He could not afford to live here anymore. He was very bad at business.

About A Connecticut Yankee: its premise, its first lie, seemed to promise a lark. What could more comical than sending back into the Dark Ages one late nineteenth-century optimist and technocrat? Such a premise was surely the key to a treasure chest of screamingly funny jokes and situations. Mark Twain would have been wise to say to himself as he picked that glittering key, "Keep your hat on. We may wind up miles from here."

I will refresh your memories as where he wound up, with or without his hat. The Yankee and his little band of electricians and mechanics and what-have-yous are being attacked by thousands of English warriors armed with swords and spears and axes. The Yankee has fortified his position with a series of electric fences and a moat. He also has several precursors to modern machine guns, which are Gatling guns.

Comically enough, thousands of early attackers have already been electrocuted. Ten thousand of the greatest knights in England have been held in reserve. Now they come. I quote, and I invite you to chuckle along with me as I read:

"The thirteen gatlings began to vomit death into the fated ten thousand. They halted,they stood their ground a moment against that withering deluge of fire, and then they broke, faced about, and swept toward the ditch like chaff before a gale. A full fourth part of their force never reached the top of the lofty embankment; the three-fourths it and plunged over-to death by drowning.

"Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance was totally annihilated, the campaign was ended, we fifty-four were masters of England! Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us."

End quote.

What a funny ending.

Mark Twain died in 1910, at the age of 75 and four years before the start of World War I. I have heard it said that he predicted that war and all the wars after that in A Connecticut Yankee. It was not Twain who did that. It was his premise.

How appalled this entertainer must have been to have his innocent joking about technology and superstition lead him inexorably to such a ghastly end. Suddenly and horrifyingly, what had seemed so clear throughout the book was not clear at all -- who was good, who was bad, who was wise, who was foolish. I ask you: "Who was most crazed by superstition and bloodlust, the men with the swords or the men with the Gatling guns?"

And I suggest to you that the fatal premise of A Connecticut Yankee remains a chief premise of Western civilization, and increasingly of world civilization, to wit: the sanest, most likable persons, employing superior technology, will enforce sanity throughout the world.

Shall I read the ending of A Connecticut Yankee to you yet again?

No need. ...

"Literary Lives" (Edward Sorel): skewering reputations with an illustrator's pen

Some claim the comics page as their first exposure to literature ("once you can read the words in the balloons, the drawings are a zillion times funnier," cartoonist Matt Groening says his brother explained to him before he could read). Edward Sorel's Literary Lives is a collection of cartoons lampooning the careers of ten writers -- in sharp, acerbic, sometimes wildly funny episodes -- andall of them are far from a Classics Comics telling of literary history. Depending on your appreciation of Yeats, Jung, and Ayn Rand (to name three whose tales appear), Sorel's pen skewers or demolishes the reputations of some of the world's prominent literary figures.

It's not surprising that the skepticism and anti-authoritarianism evident in his political cartoons surfaces in Literary Lives. He's always had a mistrust of authority, Sorel said in an interview when the book was published, in 2006. Frankly, he admits, "there may be some deep psychological need I have in tearing down people who are better artists or writers than I am." While he was creating the biographies, which originally appeared in The Nation and The Atlantic, the artist realized that "once artists or writers receive a lot of fame they seem to think of themselves as godlike, and they change a lot."

Tolstoy repents a life of dissipation at the age of 34, by Edward Sorel

This realization created a change in Sorel's approach. Tolstoy was only "just odd and kind of crazy," Sorel explained, and his first piece, on the life of Honore Balzac, turned out to be quite sad; Balzac spent much of his life trying to win the approval of his mother, and was a very sympathetic character. Not surprisingly, the Balzac biography isn't included here. Sorel told an interviewer it "wasn't funny."

After these first two installments, the artist decided to bring out the darker and more unpleasant traits of his subjects which most biographies ignore. As he put it, "avarice, duplicity, and selfishness can be amusing. Vices are amusing, and these are all writers with vices."


"They weren't all bad ... but some of the others were nasty. (Lillian) Hellman was nasty and Bertholt Brecht was one of then 10 worst people in the whole world, I'd say. And so was Carl Jung. I was not too fond of Sartre. No, they were nasty pieces of work."

The aging Yeats is shown infatuated by Maud Gonne, who turns him down; then he turns his attentions to her daughter. Norman Mailer sneaks into the hospital and suggests to his recovering wife she doesn't tell the police the truth, that he stabbed her at a party: it might hurt his New York mayoral campaign. Sorel can be gently satiric as well: he imagines Proust's hometown filled with billboards advertising madelaines and, in the Illiers-Combray town square, there's a Cafe du Temps Perdu.

There's more: During the Nazi occupation of France, where he is a successful playwright, Jean-Paul Sartre (in tuxedo) gets his cigarette lit by a German soldier. Next to Sorel's child-like script declaring A Cult Is Born, Ayn Rand holds a biblical tablet emblazened with the words Push Grab Take Keep to frenzied admirers. And, as can be expected by Sorel's distrust of idealogues, Yeats comes under fire for his admiration of Mussolini.

Carl Jung in his fantasy as an Aryan Christ, by Edward Sorel

This sort of satire lends itself to the single-panel layout of each page, as the hunan follies (and character flaws) of each artist gets the full-color Sorel treatment. Jung imagines himself as an Aryan god holding the golden-haired Brunhilde; another panel shows Jung, in 1933, suggesting to a group of psychologists that "the Jews be forced to dress differently so they are not mistaken 'for people like ourselves'."

I'll be the first to admit I can't read Ernest Hemingway -- not skewered here, but with hope there'll be more Sorel to come -- without thinking of Kurt Vonnegut's assessment of Hemingway's war novels: "He was never a soldier, and never shot a human being except, finally, himself." Exactly. Whatever a reader thinks of a writer for good or bad, casting a critical eye on the foibles of heroes is great fun in Literary Lives. It's also a hell of a lot more entertaining than the entire library of Classics Illustrated comics.