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Guilty Thing: A life of Thomas De Quincey Story & image David Lisle
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OH SURE, EVERYTHING’S FUN AND GAMES UNTIL SOMEBODY PISSES OFF THE PANCAKES.
NE W OU ED T N ITI OW O N !!
The essential guide to Healing in the Northern Rivers For your FREE copy email your name and address to byronhealing@echo.net.au or pick up one from the Echo office in Mullum Read it online: byronhealing.com.au, follow us on: instagram.com/byronhealing facebook.com/byronhealing
12 May 9, 2018 The Byron Shire Echo
It is widely believed the world was made in seven days. I don’t subscribe to this trope, but my world was remade in the seven days I was immersed in Frances Wilson’s brilliant biography, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincy. The book takes the reader on a hectic ride through the life of De Quincey, ‘Romantic acolyte, professional doppelgänger, transcendental hack.’ A friend of Coleridge and dogsbody to Wordsworth, De Quincey left an indelible mark on literature and modern culture. His writings ranged widely – and included political economy, the Opium Wars, the French Revolution, murder as an artform, Afghanistan, mythology – though he is best remembered for his memoir, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. It first appeared in instalments in the London Magazine where he announced himself as the ‘pope of opium’. By his own reckoning, Confessions was a palimpsest: a manuscript over which successive versions are layered without totally expunging the earlier writing. The first version of Confessions was written in 1821 when De Quincey was in his mid-thirties. During the remainder of his life – and he remarkably made it to the ripe old age of 74 – he kept revising and reprising it, building layer upon layer of memory, reflection and experience, indulging it with imagination and mystery. The result was a work straddling the boundary between fiction and non-fiction. This is intentionally so, for memory was an enduring fascination for him. Confessions spawned two
interconnected genres: the ‘pharmo-picaresque’ literary tradition – or the drug book – replete with all the glory of drug taking and the awful horror of addiction; and the recovery memoir. Opium, which he first tried on a ‘wet and cheerless’ Sunday afternoon, as a nineteen-year-old student at Oxford, would be the making of De Quincey. It gave him a character to write in (the Opium-Eater), dissolved his self doubt, vanquished his fear and anxiety. Opium also gave him the faculty to dream, and dreaming, for De Quincey, was a powerful way of apprehending the world. He had glimpsed the sublime, and for the rest of his days he would chase the magic that this first taste afforded. Wi t h d r a w i n g f r o m opium was ‘by degrees infinitely worse than leprosy’ and the addiction destroyed him emotionally. It also fed into his other great affliction, debt. Opium and debt provided insulation from ‘the ordinary tide of human affairs’ and shared something else: the cure for opium withdrawal was opium, while debt could be pacified
by more borrowing. De Quincey’s life reads like a dance with these twin nemeses. He won many battles with opium but lost the war, remaining a lifelong addict. Yet in his final years, as royalties flowed from both sides of the Atlantic, his writing began making real money, and he escaped the torment of debt. De Quincey’s first debt was incurred as a child to the local bookseller. He was obsessed with books, and this ‘gluttonism’ transformed a pleasure into a torment, the excess of which tipped him into madness. ‘His reading provided a guide through the maelstrom of consciousness’ but life was simply too short to extract all the honey from the hive. Literature was the foundation of his character. He never considered any other vocation than writing and his success was a tribute to unceasing graft and judicious innovation. The word autobiography was not then in general circulation but the emerging genre was ‘the current charging the literature’ of the time. De Quincey would become ‘its consummate practitioner.’ A critic
lamented that ‘egotism is the spirit of the age’. De Quincey’s genius was in presenting himself as the original recreational-drug user in nineteenth century England – a time when ‘the whole country was marinated in opium’. It was an extremely common medicine, taken for everything from headache to heartache. But by ‘recasting a household habit as a personal and unique transgression’, De Quincey performed a subtle and ultimately successful ruse, securing himself an enduring cult following. As a journalist and biographer – most notably of himself but also the Romantic poets – De Quincey was a sorcerer, always conjuring. His life was similarly strange, elusive, and difficult to contain or clarify. Biography that merely produced a ‘hackneyed roll-call’ of a subject’s life was for him ‘wearisome and useless’. Frances Wilson set out to write about her subject on his own terms, aspiring to a De Quinceyan biography. In this she is tremendously successful. Guilty Thing is a gripping tale told with speed and verve. It’s sublime.
continued from page 11 party insurance protection, let alone disabled access and facilities. Ultimately this has forced the market price of rentals to unsustainable levels for local people, destroyed any community that may still exist in residential areas as vacant houses are sold with the promise of huge STHL returns. Further, this inaction has seen house prices soaring, with the promise of STHL revenue, all of which which is completely illegal under our LEP. The same Local Environment Plan that took forever to finish as there was so much community input but that input now appears null and void.
There is a solution, it is quite simple: 90 days’ maximum for any STHL in a residential area, a holiday register for all accommodation to be subscribed to by all operators large and small, with extra rates applying for all STHL properties of more than one bedroom, all bed-and-breakfasts operators letting more than one bedroom need a Council DA or be shut down and fined. Surely Council could employ three people to look up all the internet platforms and book a room. If successful and if that business is not registered then heavy fines would apply. Council merely have to vote for a register in Cham-
bers with T&Cs and for a moratorium of six months to apply to those who wish to be accommodation providers to register and as was the case in Germany this Register would certainly settle things down and make more long-term accommodation available as some would consider registration and therefore tax implications simply not worth the effort. Damien Antico Byron Bay
Zinman herself, but in the interests of good editorial practices, I would like to suggest that you avoid printing terms like ‘surrendering’ when referring to ‘traditional allopathic medicine’, which I can only assume means insulin. People with type 1 diabetes are wholly dependent on insulin, injected subcutaneously, to stay alive. No amount of yoga or anything else is going to change that, and we are blessed to live in a country where this drug is available to anyone who needs it, so we don’t have to die of our condition (as many other thousands of people do in other places). Expressing the idea of surrender is ungrateful and
Living with diabetes
I’m writing in concern about an article on p5 of this week’s Echo, ‘Easing diabetes with yoga’. I realise this article was probably written by Rachel
Byron Shire Echo archives: www.echo.net.au/byron-echo