First published in the Times Literary Supplement
The poems in Sidereal are full of people who cannot sleep. The opening lines of “Pinnacles” are characteristic of the exhausted wakefulness of Rachel Boast’s speakers: “And as there is no chance of sleep / you’ll spend the hours considering all the sounds / rain could be against the fabric of the tent ...”. Boast rearranges impressions and images like someone on the brink of sleep, merging Confucius, Canaletto and fencing terminology in another poem, but the effect is not dreamlike. She builds up “precision”, “skill” and “accurate intent” in the poem’s slender two-line stanzas until “you are ... / foregrounded in broad awareness”.
The attraction of night-time for Boast is, above all, the cosmos, and the parts of it which are not visible in sunlight. The epigraph from Samuel Taylor Coleridge strikes the keynote: “unmeaning they / As moonlight on the dial of the day”. It is fitting then that her collection takes its title from the sidereal day, which is based on the Earth’s relation to the stars rather than the Sun. She has a light touch with the technical language of astronomy, which she balances with conversational circumlocutions and anchors with plain, subtle rhymes. In “The Hum”, a poem about the process of writing, the effect is intimate:
Then in that way you have
When you persist, like a siderostat,
In fixing me in your view
What I’ve kept hidden becomes visible to you
A drawback of Boast’s sharp-witted, poised verse, however, is that she is too easily “habituated to the Vast”. The phrase, set in italics, is borrowed (again from Coleridge), and the feeling comes at several removes. Boast is most comfortable describing unwieldy emotions in the second person, as though addressing herself calmly. It is, perhaps, too easy to conclude “Agrarian Song”, a poem which captures the spirit of a warlike “god of the soil”, with a glance at the heavens: “Plant in me / the effort of your dark songs. / Constellate them”. But when the crotchety note of the long-term insomniac surfaces in her poems, Boast is more mischievous, even bracingly rude. She says “good riddance to the English apology” in the placidly titled “Peace and Plenty”: just what is needed to disrupt the solar system.
Recommends: Rabindranath Tagore
First published in Prospect (Issue 189)
Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Painter
Victoria & Albert Museum, 11th December-4th March, Tel: 020 7942 2000
The 150th anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth this year has seen a resurgence of interest in his work. Yet two of his most prominent champions, Amartya Sen and Amit Chaudhuri, have complained that his poems—written in Bengali and difficult to translate—are under-read in the west.
Unlike his poetry, Tagore’s paintings do not suffer from the language barrier; he even declined to give them titles. An exhibition opening at the Victoria & Albert Museum in December offers another approach to this extraordinary figure, who had already won the Nobel prize for literature when he took up painting in his sixties.
Tagore’s early sketches—doodles he drew around the crossed-out words and revisions on his manuscripts—are some of his most immediate works. They show fantastical creatures, which he would later describe in a typically poetic fashion: “a bird that can only soar in dreams” or “a probable animal that had unaccountably missed its chance of existence.”
On loan from Visva-Bharati University, many of the paintings on show have never been displayed outside India, where Tagore’s work has been a major influence on artists such as Jamini Roy and Eleena Banik. This exhibition, one of only a handful in Britain since the 1930s, is a rare chance to appreciate Tagore first-hand.
Recommends: The Genius of Illumination
First published in Prospect (Issue 188)
Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination
British Library, 11th November-13th March 2012, Tel: 01937 546546
The illustrations in Henry VIII’s personal copy of the Psalms are as revealing as the annotations he made in its margins. On display at the British Library from November, the drawings show a stout, doublet-clad figure—indistinguishable from the Tudor king—doing battle with Goliath and posing as King David. Jean Mallard, the artist and scribe, clearly knew how to flatter.
The library’s first major exhibition of illuminated royal manuscripts—beautifully decorated, handwritten volumes collected by the kings and queens of England—gives a fascinating insight into their owners’ lives. Ranging from the 9th to the 16th centuries, the exhibition includes a parchment roll nearly five metres long, tracing the genealogy of the royal family back through William the Conqueror and the Anglo-Saxon kings. One of the most intriguing manuscripts is a 13th-century bestiary describing real and imaginary creatures, accompanied by moral lessons. A lion’s skull, excavated from the Tower of London’s moat, is displayed alongside it as a reminder that the king of the beasts had his place at court, among the exotic animals of the royal menagerie.
The manuscripts on show are remarkably well preserved, having remained hidden from view in private collections for centuries. This vibrant exhibition offers a chance to appreciate the beauty of the handmade book, but also to see some of the best surviving examples of medieval and Renaissance decorative art as art in its own right.
Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination
British Library, 11th November-13th March 2012, Tel: 01937 546546
The illustrations in Henry VIII’s personal copy of the Psalms are as revealing as the annotations he made in its margins. On display at the British Library from November, the drawings show a stout, doublet-clad figure—indistinguishable from the Tudor king—doing battle with Goliath and posing as King David. Jean Mallard, the artist and scribe, clearly knew how to flatter.
The library’s first major exhibition of illuminated royal manuscripts—beautifully decorated, handwritten volumes collected by the kings and queens of England—gives a fascinating insight into their owners’ lives. Ranging from the 9th to the 16th centuries, the exhibition includes a parchment roll nearly five metres long, tracing the genealogy of the royal family back through William the Conqueror and the Anglo-Saxon kings. One of the most intriguing manuscripts is a 13th-century bestiary describing real and imaginary creatures, accompanied by moral lessons. A lion’s skull, excavated from the Tower of London’s moat, is displayed alongside it as a reminder that the king of the beasts had his place at court, among the exotic animals of the royal menagerie.
The manuscripts on show are remarkably well preserved, having remained hidden from view in private collections for centuries. This vibrant exhibition offers a chance to appreciate the beauty of the handmade book, but also to see some of the best surviving examples of medieval and Renaissance decorative art as art in its own right.
The Salt Book of Younger Poets
Five of my poems are printed in the anthology. Four new ones: "The Winter Empress," "Mistakes in Closed Captioning," "Relics" and "The Wife’s Lament." "Apollo’s Hyacinths" first appeared in Pomegranate.
The Salt Book of Younger Poets showcases a new generation of British poets born since the mid-80s. Many of these poets embrace new technologies such as blogs, social networking and webzines to meet, mentor, influence and publish their own work and others’. Some poets here were winners of the Foyle young poet awards when at school. Some have published pamphlets in series such as tall-lighthouse Pilot and Faber New Poets. All of them are working away on first collections. This is a chance to encounter the poets who will dominate UK poetry in years to come.
N.B.: The Independent recommended that you buy a copy for your Valentine.
The Salt Book of Younger Poets showcases a new generation of British poets born since the mid-80s. Many of these poets embrace new technologies such as blogs, social networking and webzines to meet, mentor, influence and publish their own work and others’. Some poets here were winners of the Foyle young poet awards when at school. Some have published pamphlets in series such as tall-lighthouse Pilot and Faber New Poets. All of them are working away on first collections. This is a chance to encounter the poets who will dominate UK poetry in years to come.
N.B.: The Independent recommended that you buy a copy for your Valentine.
Review: Sandgrain and Hourglass by Penelope Shuttle
First published in the Times Literary Supplement
Penelope Shuttle invokes Blake’s “world in a grain of sand” and “eternity in an hour” in her title, Sandgrain and Hourglass. These poems of loss and mourning, following from Redgrove’s Wife, pay tribute to her late husband Peter Redgrove’s love of “the microcosmic – / sandgrains, water droplets / chips of granite . . . ” and range across continents, from Penzance to Baghdad, by way of meditations on “Distance” and “Telling the Time”. With a glancing comparison to Rembrandt, “the Master of the Small Landscape”, Shuttle also ushers in allusive worlds of painting, literature, hagiography and folklore, into which her grief expands. In “Gifts”, she offers to take the sufferings of the famously unfortunate upon herself, but at the same time enters into a competition, as though challenging them: “Take my breasts / St Agatha / Take my tongue Philomela”.
Anne Boleyn, John Milton and Hannibal Lecter – Shuttle’s pantheon includes those who inflict pain as well as those who suffer – are rivals too and therefore they provide her with a yardstick of sorrows. But grief proves the mother of invention in this collection, as Shuttle dreams up more devices for quantifying memories and auditing the past.
Penelope Shuttle invokes Blake’s “world in a grain of sand” and “eternity in an hour” in her title, Sandgrain and Hourglass. These poems of loss and mourning, following from Redgrove’s Wife, pay tribute to her late husband Peter Redgrove’s love of “the microcosmic – / sandgrains, water droplets / chips of granite . . . ” and range across continents, from Penzance to Baghdad, by way of meditations on “Distance” and “Telling the Time”. With a glancing comparison to Rembrandt, “the Master of the Small Landscape”, Shuttle also ushers in allusive worlds of painting, literature, hagiography and folklore, into which her grief expands. In “Gifts”, she offers to take the sufferings of the famously unfortunate upon herself, but at the same time enters into a competition, as though challenging them: “Take my breasts / St Agatha / Take my tongue Philomela”.
Anne Boleyn, John Milton and Hannibal Lecter – Shuttle’s pantheon includes those who inflict pain as well as those who suffer – are rivals too and therefore they provide her with a yardstick of sorrows. But grief proves the mother of invention in this collection, as Shuttle dreams up more devices for quantifying memories and auditing the past.
Review: Dragon Talk by Fleur Adcock
First published in the Times Literary Supplement
The manufacturers of Dragon speech recognition software should be flattered by the title poem of Fleur Adcock’s most recent collection. “Dragon Talk” ought to describe an elderly matriarch’s sharp tongue, as Adcock later hints in a picture of her granddaughter and baby “just off to a lecture on Beowulf”. Instead, the discovery of this resource, which frees writing from fine motor skills, sparks a love affair with the program’s “phantasms” as well as its hardware: “Your microphone, kissing my lips, / inhaled my words”.
Adcock’s spirited appreciation of this new technology is in keeping with her lifelong habit of curiosity, which enlivens this largely autobiographical collection. Its longest section, “My First Twenty Years”, approximates a child’s outlook, with often hesitant descriptions of immediate circumstances. Adcock’s line of vision typically meanders through apparently straightforward, unrhymed lines, recalling inventions and fads with a mixture of clarity and awe. Meanwhile, she raises one eyebrow at the enduring innovations of her time: “case solved – I think” is her verdict on the post-1945 success of the Biro. The appended misgiving may have something to do with the fate of the less popular “Glitterwax”, which she calls “the apotheosis of modelling clay”. It is difficult to sing the praises of modern technology unreservedly, if tastes can be so unpredictable that “the world has decided to live without it”, this “plasticine of the gods.”
The manufacturers of Dragon speech recognition software should be flattered by the title poem of Fleur Adcock’s most recent collection. “Dragon Talk” ought to describe an elderly matriarch’s sharp tongue, as Adcock later hints in a picture of her granddaughter and baby “just off to a lecture on Beowulf”. Instead, the discovery of this resource, which frees writing from fine motor skills, sparks a love affair with the program’s “phantasms” as well as its hardware: “Your microphone, kissing my lips, / inhaled my words”.
Adcock’s spirited appreciation of this new technology is in keeping with her lifelong habit of curiosity, which enlivens this largely autobiographical collection. Its longest section, “My First Twenty Years”, approximates a child’s outlook, with often hesitant descriptions of immediate circumstances. Adcock’s line of vision typically meanders through apparently straightforward, unrhymed lines, recalling inventions and fads with a mixture of clarity and awe. Meanwhile, she raises one eyebrow at the enduring innovations of her time: “case solved – I think” is her verdict on the post-1945 success of the Biro. The appended misgiving may have something to do with the fate of the less popular “Glitterwax”, which she calls “the apotheosis of modelling clay”. It is difficult to sing the praises of modern technology unreservedly, if tastes can be so unpredictable that “the world has decided to live without it”, this “plasticine of the gods.”
Review: The Gift of Boats by Jane Routh
First published in the Times Literary Supplement
An incomplete and often unreliable photographic record is the starting point for many of Jane Routh’s reflections in The Gift of Boats. Sometimes old snapshots are misleading. If the poet remembers “the exact shade of pink” her bike was painted, why is she “smiling and proud” next to a black Raleigh in “Memory’s Bicycles”? But when a picture could recover the lost “faces for names” in Routh’s notebooks, she finds “memory’s camera not even unpacked for ordinary days”. Getting the shot means being prepared at any moment and that is not likely, Routh suggests, in middle age, “when memory’s seen it before / and isn’t laying much down”. In these poems, taking a photograph is an event in itself, which alters its subject, except for the rare master “so light on his feet / as not to disturb even the air”.
While a poem on the page does not disturb the air, Routh’s poems ask to be read aloud, making much of plosive and onomatopoeic disturbances. Many begin with a jolt (“Better scuttled”, “World comes knocking”) and gather momentum through the modulations of alliterative lines (the “re-caulked and commodious hull”). With a broken photometer in her pocket, Routh embraces photgraphy’s imperfections and its blind spots. The darkroom replace associations “of endings, of night, of fear” with “the dark of beginnings / an orderly dark you know / your way round in” in “A Day’s Work”. Routh sees the risk in bringing something out of the dark or up from the depths. A boat would be better off “scuttled” than filled in with concrete and turned into a gaudy garden ornament amid a “square lobelia sea”, she insists in the opening poem.
An incomplete and often unreliable photographic record is the starting point for many of Jane Routh’s reflections in The Gift of Boats. Sometimes old snapshots are misleading. If the poet remembers “the exact shade of pink” her bike was painted, why is she “smiling and proud” next to a black Raleigh in “Memory’s Bicycles”? But when a picture could recover the lost “faces for names” in Routh’s notebooks, she finds “memory’s camera not even unpacked for ordinary days”. Getting the shot means being prepared at any moment and that is not likely, Routh suggests, in middle age, “when memory’s seen it before / and isn’t laying much down”. In these poems, taking a photograph is an event in itself, which alters its subject, except for the rare master “so light on his feet / as not to disturb even the air”.
While a poem on the page does not disturb the air, Routh’s poems ask to be read aloud, making much of plosive and onomatopoeic disturbances. Many begin with a jolt (“Better scuttled”, “World comes knocking”) and gather momentum through the modulations of alliterative lines (the “re-caulked and commodious hull”). With a broken photometer in her pocket, Routh embraces photgraphy’s imperfections and its blind spots. The darkroom replace associations “of endings, of night, of fear” with “the dark of beginnings / an orderly dark you know / your way round in” in “A Day’s Work”. Routh sees the risk in bringing something out of the dark or up from the depths. A boat would be better off “scuttled” than filled in with concrete and turned into a gaudy garden ornament amid a “square lobelia sea”, she insists in the opening poem.
Review: The Ache of Appetite by Rachel Hadas
First published in the Times Literary Supplement
The Ache of Appetite is firmly rooted in the everyday, as the opening “Home Remedy” suggests: “if life’s a loaf, a poem is a slice”. Yet Rachel Hadas hesitates to make sharp divisions in her real or imagined experiences:
A poem need not be a diary
entry or letter, dream report, or shred
of the observations of the day,
nor thumbnail answer to what someone said.
The poems that follow work through many of these forms, as Hadas recounts a dream about her doctor, meditates on a set of coasters and weighs Keats against Kafka while giving blood, all with journal-keeping closeness. The sense of an event, meanwhile, is staved off in the more self-conscious poems, with abstract titles such as “Attention”, “The Flow” and “Event Horizon”.
Hadas’s preferred mode is the list, running details together without explaining their relations to one another, and often doubting their reality. Starting with “A sneeze; a gull; an argument”, detail accumulates in “Event Horizon” until the eye is lost in “Remorseless foreground, / no one thing more real than any other”.
Slicing life’s loaf is not just problematic but also painful in the second half of the collection, as Hadas comes to terms with her husband’s early-onset dementia. After the “dream logic” of a chance meeting with his doctor at a railway station, Hadas is recalled “to a maimed mind / Back to a lopped life”. Writing a poem is a way of reclaiming excised experience, though falsifying memory is among its risks and it is, the short “Mnemonic” warns, all too easy to “Abstract the daily / quota; spread out; re- / distribute into parcels of energy”. Hadas is, instead, at her best when dispensing the “strong medicine” of wry humour—contemplating the loss of her husband and parents she jokes, “I’m nothing / if not an equal opportunity misser” — making light of the new language of illness and officialese that has “infiltrated” her “glossary”.
The Ache of Appetite is firmly rooted in the everyday, as the opening “Home Remedy” suggests: “if life’s a loaf, a poem is a slice”. Yet Rachel Hadas hesitates to make sharp divisions in her real or imagined experiences:
A poem need not be a diary
entry or letter, dream report, or shred
of the observations of the day,
nor thumbnail answer to what someone said.
The poems that follow work through many of these forms, as Hadas recounts a dream about her doctor, meditates on a set of coasters and weighs Keats against Kafka while giving blood, all with journal-keeping closeness. The sense of an event, meanwhile, is staved off in the more self-conscious poems, with abstract titles such as “Attention”, “The Flow” and “Event Horizon”.
Hadas’s preferred mode is the list, running details together without explaining their relations to one another, and often doubting their reality. Starting with “A sneeze; a gull; an argument”, detail accumulates in “Event Horizon” until the eye is lost in “Remorseless foreground, / no one thing more real than any other”.
Slicing life’s loaf is not just problematic but also painful in the second half of the collection, as Hadas comes to terms with her husband’s early-onset dementia. After the “dream logic” of a chance meeting with his doctor at a railway station, Hadas is recalled “to a maimed mind / Back to a lopped life”. Writing a poem is a way of reclaiming excised experience, though falsifying memory is among its risks and it is, the short “Mnemonic” warns, all too easy to “Abstract the daily / quota; spread out; re- / distribute into parcels of energy”. Hadas is, instead, at her best when dispensing the “strong medicine” of wry humour—contemplating the loss of her husband and parents she jokes, “I’m nothing / if not an equal opportunity misser” — making light of the new language of illness and officialese that has “infiltrated” her “glossary”.
Review: A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers by Michael Holroyd
First published at The New Republic
WHEN IT COMES to reading other people’s diaries, biographers claim a sort of diplomatic immunity. In what he calls his final book, Michael Holroyd gleans salacious details from the life of Ernest Beckett, a womanising English nobleman (he inherited the title Lord Grimthorpe—a name Evelyn Waugh might have struggled to coin) and minor politician. “Ernest’s diary made it clear that an innkeeper’s beautiful daughter in Naples had fallen in love with him,” Holroyd writes half-admiringly. Yet the boundary between his world and Ernest’s is blurred when he discusses the diaries with Catherine Till, who believes that she may be the late lord’s illegitimate daughter. “I thought he was insufferably pleased with himself,” she tells Holroyd. “The diary was full of trite generalisations such as ‘Fringes and flirtations go together.’”
Personal links are in fact what drew Holroyd to Ernest’s story. Holroyd had already been entranced by Rodin’s bust of Eve Fairfax, Ernest’s abandoned fiancée, when he saw it in the early 1970s. Then he finds himself visiting the Villa Cimbrone, the palazzo in southern Italy where Ernest sought refuge from a disappointing career and financial embarrassment. He and Till search the house for clues to her paternity and drop in on Gore Vidal nearby. Holroyd returns seven years later at the invitation of Tiziana Masucci, who is organising a literary festival there. She is consumed by a passion for another of Ernest’s unacknowledged daughters, the novelist Violet Trefusis. “I don’t belong to them,” she says of her friends in Rome: “Violet is me!” Turning her “hypnotic gaze” on Holroyd, she convinces him of the novels’ importance.
This complicated, nebulous family promises more than a colorful cast of personalities. The family invites Holroyd to become one of the characters in its story, blending biography and autobiography. It is an irresistible invitation, as he has remembered that his first subject, the writer Hugh Kingsmill, “required of the biographer some account of his or her own life as a passport for travelling into the lives of others.” This spells the end of his diplomatic immunity, but the extended Grimthorpe family leads the way here too. Through their thinly disguised autobiographies and revisionist memoirs, they provide Holroyd with models of defensive secret-telling and keeping.
His book is named in honor of the enormous leather-bound volume that Eve Fairfax compiled over fifty years as a perennial country house guest. After her broken engagement, she drifted away from her family and lived on friends’ hospitality, “calculating exactly how long she could stay before her hosts became too irritated.” Each visit swelled her collection of autographs and wistful poetical tributes. Edith Sitwell’s ‘To Eve’ strikes the keynote: “I seek lost suns within your eyes;/ And find but wrecks of love’s gold argosies.” Hilaire Belloc, John Betjeman, and Somerset Maugham all left their mark on her book, as well as archbishops, generals and foreign royalty. Most intriguing perhaps is the signature of Mordaunt Milner—might he be Eve’s lost son, John Francis Mordaunt? Above all, Holroyd suggests, “this is a book of secrets.”
The potential for scandal in Eve’s book is contained by a web of tacit agreements and antagonisms, all of them relished by Holroyd. He is an expert reader of its “great empty spaces, its undergrowth of clichés.” This is partly because the biographer in him sympathizes with the book’s contributors. They were faced with the task of saying something insightful and original about Eve, but not so original as to be presumptuous, or so insightful as to be cruel.
Review: Maggot by Paul Muldoon
IN ONE OF Aesop’s fables, an overambitious frog tries to puff himself up to the size of an ox, and explodes. Paul Muldoon mocked this type of moralizing animal tale in his poem “The Frog,” in 1983. Attempts to find a “moral for our times” in the frog’s story are naïve, and threaten to turn sour, as Muldoon suggests:
What if I put him to my head
and squeezed it out of him,
like the juice of freshly squeezed limes…
The animals in Muldoon’s poems do not tell us how we should act, but they do allow us to “glimpse the possibility of what we might become.” This is how Muldoon puts it in his introduction to The Faber Book of Beasts. Writing about animals, he insists, comes with its own responsibility, the moral obligation to help people live their lives. “Nowhere is that responsibility thrown into sharper relief than in our accounts of the parallel lives of ‘our little kinsmen.’” In “Horses” (1998), for instance, Muldoon put this into practice, brooding on the parallel life of Chuang Tzu, who famously wondered whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or vice versa.
Muldoon’s new collection might be considered another “book of beasts,” an experimental bestiary. Almost all of the poems here are in some sense animal poems. Some of them—“Geese,” “A Porcupine,” “A Hare at Aldergrove”—announce as much. In others, such as “The Adoration of the Magi,” the approach is subtler. “A plume / of ox breath” and the braying of a child suggest the ox and the ass of the nativity scene. Throughout the collection, Muldoon tries to reimagine the natural world, the “sym- / biotic relationship” between man and beast, and the beastly side of man. The few poems concerned solely with people show them acting ruthlessly and evasively, as they “abbreviate / [their] most promising rlshps.”
It is unnerving that Muldoon places the maggot, a creature that feeds on the corpses of other animals, at the center of his vision. Yet he sees the process of decomposition as a source of vitality in these poems: death and decay unite all forms of life, as organic matter is eventually recycled. In reasoning this way, Muldoon himself recycles Hamlet's observation: “we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots.” Of course, this view makes no special claims for human life and says nothing of respect for the dead. For Muldoon, a body “beleaguered by pupae” does not bear thinking about in itself. Instead it prompts the breezy reflection: “Who knew that humus might lie beneath ‘humane’?” There is a maggot-like etymology here, as Muldoon makes connections between words, as well as creatures, by breaking them down into their smallest parts.
Review: The English Opium Eater by Robert Morrison
First published at The New Republic
In a gesture of admiration, Charles Baudelaire devoted half of his Artificial Paradises to a translation of Thomas De Quincey’s memoirs. “The work on opium has been written,” he explained, “and in a manner so dazzling, medical and poetic all at once, that I would not dare add anything to it.” Would-be biographers have perhaps shared these reservations: of all the Romantics, De Quincey has received the least attention from the “life-writing” industry. He wrote so voluminously of his own experience, of the traumas of his past as well as the “shadowy world” of his opium dreams, that there is little room to speculate on his inner life. The biographer is largely consigned to rehashing De Quincey’s version of events in a saner, scientific manner, or to parodying him.
Robert Morrison’s biography somewhat daringly, then, takes its title from De Quincey’s most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium Eater. While he draws on De Quincey’s reminiscences and self-analysis, Morrison also shows what De Quincey’s life looked like from the outside. In an opening vignette, we meet not the introspective sybarite of the Confessions but a down-at-heel, elderly magazine writer, who has walked eight miles to hand in his copy. Indeed, De Quincey’s tendency to bring hardship upon himself (and others) permeates the rest of the book. Born in 1785 into a wealthy family with aristocratic pretensions (hence the ‘De’), he ran away from Manchester Grammar School at 16, choosing to live alone and penniless in London. He began to dissipate his inheritance long before he was legally entitled to it by living determinedly beyond his means. He was, for most of his life, pursued by creditors, whom he eluded with gusto, although he was imprisoned for debt once and publicly humiliated on several occasions. His long-suffering daughter Florence described leaving the debtors’ sanctuary where they spent seven years as “one of the most lively foretastes of Paradise I have had in my life.”
By tracing De Quincey’s public persona as “The Opium Eater” through to old age, Morrison avoids reducing his subject to The Man Who Wrote The Confessions. Soon after he was identified as the author of the hugely successful (and originally anonymous) memoir, which was one of his first published works, he was able to trade on “the magic prefix ‘by the Opium Eater.’” It was the name under which he published his Gothic novel Klosterheim: or the Masque, the signature on many of his London Magazine articles, and the name used against him in gossip columns.
To some extent, the persona took on a life of its own, adding to the myths around the man, even when he was doing nothing at all. De Quincey never defended himself against accusations, for example, that the “stories about celestial dreams, and similar nonsense” in his Confessions had caused an increase in opium-related deaths, but such was his notoriety that he did appear in fictionalized form in a sketch in Blackwood’s Magazine, which broached the subject. Questioned on the “fifty unintentional suicides,” the caricature responds cagily: “I have read of six only, and they rested on no solid foundation.” Meanwhile, his celebrity as a profligate and a sage was laughable to the literary Lake District circle. Noting his indulgence in drugged solitude, Mary Wordsworth jibed, “The Seer continues in close retirement”.
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