Hayter Opium and the Romantic Imagination

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30601-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 396 Seiten

Does the habit of taking drugs make authors write better, or worse, or differently? Does it alter the quality of their consciousness, shape their imagery, influence their technique? For the Romantic writers of the nineteenth century, many of whom experimented with opium and some of whom were addicted to it, this was an important question, but it has never been fully answered. In this study Alethea Hayter examines the work of five writers - Crabbe, Coleridge, De Quincey, Wilkie Collins and Francis Thompson - who were opium addicts for many years, and of several other writers - notably Keats, Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire, but also Walter Scott, Dickens, Mrs Browning, James Thomson and others - who are known to have taken opium at times. The work of these writers is discussed in the context of nineteenth-century opinion about the uses and dangers of opium, and of Romantic ideas on the creative imagination, on dreams and hypnagogic visions, and on imagery, so that the idiosyncrasies of opium-influenced writing can be isolated from their general literary background. The examination reveals a strange and miserable region of the mind in which some of the greatest poetic imaginations of the nineteenth century were imprisoned.

Alethea Hayter (1911-2006) read modern history at Oxford, and after a period writing for Country Life she joined the British Council, retiring in 1971. Her many books include Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1962), The Wreck of the Abergavenny (2002) and the acclaimed Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968). She was appointed Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hayter, Alethea

Leseproben

II

CASE-HISTORIES

Ever since the publication of The Confessions of an English Opium Eater in 1822, most statements on the effects of opium addiction on the imagination and mental processes of addicts have been either derived from the untypical case of De Quincey, or made in reaction against it. De Quincey himself gave a warning about this; he was a philosopher, he said, and therefore his opium visions were philosophical; but the plain practical man who took opium would have either no visions at all, or visions of his plain practical affairs.1 But the warning was disregarded. Generalizations as to how opium affects the mental operations of all addicts began and continued to be made from the individual cases of De Quincey and Coleridge. Before I discussed them and the other well-known literary addicts mentioned later in this book, it therefore seemed essential to make a short survey of how opium affects the non-literary addict, for comparison. The statements in this chapter are based on reports and case-histories by doctors on the addicts under their care in hospitals, prisons and asylums and under treatment at home, and in a few cases on accounts by the addicts themselves. These drug-takers were men and women of all kinds—lawyers, clergymen, actors, soldiers, housewives, prostitutes, clerks, waiters, workers in textile factories. Some were respected figures in regular professional employment, some were convicted criminals, some were insane. None were well-known writers.2

The Americans and the French have produced much of the published work on opium addiction, in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though medical and general studies are now beginning to appear in Britain, as our own experience of addicts grows with the recent growth of the habit here. The recent American surveys, based on carefully controlled experiments made on statistically adequate samples, are far more valuable for the general study of the subject than the nineteenth-century reports, which were often distorted by preconception, superstition and emotion, though the writers were sometimes excellent clinical observers. But in its bearing on the nineteenth-century literary addicts, recent scientific research on opium can be misleading in another way. Most modern American research is based on addicts who take the opium derivatives heroin or morphine by injection; recent French research sometimes also includes the smoking of opium. But the early nineteenth-century literary addicts all took their opium in the form of laudanum, alcoholic tincture of opium; this has a weaker opium content than morphine or heroin, and its action is affected by the addition of the alcohol. Moreover both the pipe of the opium smoker and the hypodermic syringe of the heroin addict have come to have a mystique of their own, a complex of feeling and ritual which affects the addict’s reaction to his drug in a way not known to the laudanum drinker. What the modern addict takes is different in itself, and differently administered; and he takes it in a different climate of opinion. All the American addicts on whom recent medical surveys have been based were guilty of what is now in itself a crime; they knew themselves to be legally and socially reprobated; they endured danger and ruinous expense in getting supplies of their drug. In Britain the fact of being a heroin addict is not at present in itself a crime, but even for those who get heroin legally on prescription it is an act of defiance and protest, of separation from normal society, generally dominating the addict’s time and thoughts and creating a special way of life. And there are increasing numbers who depend on illicit supplies, and who therefore have the same dangers and high costs as the American addicts.

These are the states of mind and feeling on which opium now operates in those who take it, and since—as all authorities, early and recent, agree—it can only work on what is already in a man’s mind, it produces different effects in the minds of the self-conscious and ever-anxious addict of today from its effects in the minds of the early nineteenth-century addicts. They indeed felt guilt and anxiety, but guilt towards God and their families and their own wasted talents, not towards society and the law; anxiety about earning their living, but not about finding the money for the drug, or how they could get supplies. Different guilts and anxieties produce different patterns in the imagination, and not all the mental processes and limitations of a man in a prison infirmary in Kentucky in the 1950s, or a boy in a beat club in Chelsea in the 1960s, can be adduced to explain those of Coleridge, a century and a half earlier, living with his family among admiring friends beside a mountain lake. The argument works in both directions: because learned and brilliantly imaginative writers like Coleridge and De Quincey saw fantastic visions under the influence of opium, it does not follow that ordinary addicts will do so; but equally because uneducated unimaginative delinquents today see no visions under opium, it does not follow that Coleridge or De Quincey were either lying when they said they had such visions, or psychopaths because they had them.

In what follows, therefore, I have not taken only the pronouncements of recent researchers, but have made a consensus of the many points on which nineteenth-century and twentieth-century authorities agree, and where they differ, have given both views. I have not, however, adopted the most recent approved phraseology. The words ‘addiction’ and ‘habit’ or ‘habituation’ are now out of favour with the experts on drugs, who prefer to speak of ‘dependence’, which includes both physical and psychic dependence on a drug, whether taken periodically or continuously, and whether or not it includes tolerance. I have continued to use the word ‘addiction’ because it was the one known and used in the nineteenth century for the laudanum-drinkers with whom this book is concerned. In the early nineteenth century they were generally but rather illogically called opium-eaters, though they almost all took the drug in liquid form. There is no single word in English equivalent to the useful French word ‘opiomane’; ‘opium addict’ seems to me the nearest English equivalent which will be generally understood, and I have therefore continued to use it. For the same reason I have used the more familiar phrase ‘withdrawal symptoms’ in preference to ‘abstinence syndrome’ which is now preferred by the experts.

*

One of the most disputed problems is whether there is any type of personality specially liable to become a drug addict. In one classic modern American study of the subject, The Opium Problem by C. E. Terry and M. Pellens, the authors shrewdly suggest that doctors are biassed on this point by their own experience—prison doctors think that most addicts are criminal types, lunatic asylum doctors think that most addicts are mental defectives, doctors who run expensive private clinics think that most addicts are eminent intellectuals. The authors of The Opium Problem conclude that ‘this condition is not restricted to any social, economic, mental or other group … there is no type which may be called the habitual user of opium, but that all types are actually or potentially users’.3 At the other extreme from this view may be set the nineteenth-century doctor who felt able to pronounce that ‘a delicate female, having light blue eyes and flaxen hair’ was the most likely addict.4 There is plenty of evidence that opium addiction is not confined to any social class or any type of physique. But certain mental traits may predispose their possessor to become an addict. Leaving aside those who started taking opium simply as a pain-killer, on medical prescription, and the extreme cases of social deprivation or of mental abnormality, there seem to be two main and one lesser group of mental characteristics which may lead to addiction.

The first is a restless mental curiosity about strange and novel mental experiences; the defect of those who wish to enjoy or to observe special states of mind, and to do this by taking a short cut. This predisposition has been noted specially by such French authorities on addiction as Pichon, Chambard and Dupouy, and is found in the more imaginative and sensitive intellectual temperaments. In such minds as these, the example and the descriptions of other addicts can be fatally contagious. The whole literature of opium addiction, French and American, is strewn with quotations from addicts who avowed that they were first led to experiment by reading De Quincey. Roger Dupouy in his book Les Opiomanes tells of the French colonial administrators who had already made up their minds, before ever they left France for the Far East, to become opium addicts when they got there, because they had read De Quincey and Baudelaire and were excited by their descriptions of their visions.5 The fear of arousing curiosity to experiment is a heavy weight on anyone who undertakes to write even the soberest account of the effects of opium.

But this curiosity about a new kind of mental experience is not likely to be found in very many minds. The second predisposition to opium addiction is a much more common mental trait, the longing for peace and freedom from anxiety. Men and women who feel all kinds of suffering keenly, exaggerate its extent and the impossibility of bearing it, and lack the energy and resolution to conquer it; who are unable to face and cope with painful situations, who...