Opium and Reptiles

Hearing the tale, you will be forgiven for thinking this is a penny dreadful, but while having that style (and indeed, the original publication was a magazine serial), it is an autobiography. The timing of his life matters, so bear with me for a minute. Thomas de Quincey was the smart kid from a rich family, who was bored in boarding school and so ran away. A third of the book relates his early life in school and wandering homeless for a couple of years, all with nary a bit of opium in sight. Eventually, he goes off to Oxford, and then (finally) in 1804 discovers the substance which led to the title which was the only reason anyone ever cared enough to read his autobiography. Until 1812, it was a once a week habit. Then came the breaking point, and from 1813 through 1819, he was a full-scale addict, taking high doses daily. In 1821, Confessions was serialized in three parts, relating his fall into addiction and his rise out of it. It was a hit.

Obviously, the next step was to put it into book form in 1822, where De Quincey added an appendix that noted many readers had the impression he had kicked the opium addition because, well, he wrote the narrative in a manner that pretty much said he had done so. However, he reveals that he still takes opium, just not as much. He spent the rest of his life as a low grade addict. So, the feel good ending turns out not to be so feel good after all.

The autobiographical details aren’t really enough to turn this into a classic; there are no horrifying stories of the dastardly deeds done by the English Opium Eater prowling the dark back alleys of London. So what keeps this book on the fringes of “Books worth Reading”? The prose is good, so that helps. But the heart of the book is De Quincey’s lengthy descriptions of the Pleasures and the Pains of opium.

One way to read this book, then, is as a cost-benefit analysis of picking up an opium addiction. I know that makes me sound like an economist, but, honest, it is De Quincey who is writing like an economist. The timing of what follows is, let’s say, curious. Recall that his daily opium use was from 1813 to 1819. Shortly before that, De Quincey discovered an amazing subject: “I had been led in 1811 to look into loads of books and pamphlets on many branches of economy.” Huzzah! (“Huzzah” is the kind of word thy used in 1811.) Ah, but we rejoiced too soon: “I saw that these were generally the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect; and that any man of sound head, and practised in wielding logic with a scholastic adroitness, might take up the whole academy of modern economists, and throttle them between heaven and earth with his finger and thumb, or bray their fungus heads to powder with a lady’s fan.” Ouch. A year later, De Quincey is an opium addict. Let us hope this was not causal.

But wait, there’s more. In 1819, De Quincey breaks his habit. What else happened in 1819?

At length, in 1819, a friend in Edinburgh sent me down Mr. Ricardo’s book: and recurring to my own prophetic anticipation of the advent of some legislator for this science, I said, before I had finished the first chapter, “Thou art the man!” Wonder and curiosity were emotions that had long been dead in me. Yet I wondered once more: I wondered at myself that I could once again be stimulated to the effort of reading: and much more I wondered at the book. Had this profound work been really written in England during the nineteenth century? Was it possible? I supposed thinking had been extinct in England. Could it be that an Englishman, and he not in academic bowers, but oppressed by mercantile and senatorial cares, had accomplished what all the universities of Europe, and a century of thought, had failed even to advance by one hair’s breadth? All other writers had been crushed and overlaid by the enormous weight of facts and documents; Mr. Ricardo had deduced, à priori, from the understanding itself, laws which first gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had constructed what had been but a collection of tentative discussions into a science of regular proportions, now first standing on an eternal basis.

Who knew David Ricardo was such a magnificent writer? I always thought he was tedious.

But, despite this fascinating foray into economic analysis, the real subject matter of the book is opium. De Quincey clearly thinks his book will convince you of the horrors of opium, that the cost-benefit analysis is heavily weighted on the cost side. He was wrong about his own book; I think it is fair to say that the benefits seem larger than the costs.

De Quincey waxes quite poetic about the benefits:

Oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for “the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,” bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure from blood; and to the proud man a brief oblivion for
Wrongs undress’d and insults unavenged;
that summonest to the chancery of dreams, for the triumphs of suffering innocence, false witnesses; and confoundest perjury, and dost reverse the sentences of unrighteous judges;—thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles—beyond the splendour of Babylon and Hekatómpylos, and “from the anarchy of dreaming sleep” callest into sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties and the blessed household countenances cleansed from the “dishonours of the grave.” Thou only givest these gifts to man; and thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!

Contrast that to the pains of opium: it gives you bad dreams and hallucinations. He found himself surrounded by a menagerie of ugly birds and reptiles:

The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him, and (as was always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and fascinated.

Now that doesn’t sound too good. But, compare it to the encomium to the “just, subtle, and mighty opium” above, and it isn’t hard to see that the book might induce many a soul to decide that the good outweighs the bad. After, all, you get the good with the small doses, right? The bad only becomes a problem when you take a lot, right? So, just don’t take a lot, see, and everything will be OK. All of which leads me to wonder how many other attempts to dissuade a person from taking a hallucinogenic substance led to an increase in the use of the substance.

Part of the problem with De Quincey’s book is that if you really want a literary experience of drug addiction, Confessions of an English Opium Eater doesn’t even compare to Hunter S, Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (To be fair: the strongest mind altering substance I have ever used is coffee, so I am not an expert on whether De Quincey or Thompson is more accurate, just which is more literarily interesting.) An example? How about this:

Terrible things were happening all around us. Right next to me a huge reptile was gnawing on a woman’s neck, the carpet was a blood-soaked sponge – impossible to walk on it, no footing at all. “Order some golf shoes,” I whispered. “Otherwise, we’ll never get out of this place alive. You notice these lizards don’t have any trouble moving around in this muck – that’s because they have claws on their feet.”

Are reptiles a constant occurrence in hallucinogenic episodes?