THURSDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2010


KLMNO BOOKWORLD


The fascinating life of an English writer, essayist and ‘opium eater’


ThomasDe Quincey BY MICHAEL DIRDA


RobertMorrison’s deft biography of


T BILL O'LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST


BABYPICTURE: Eugene Carriere’s portrait of his daughter Arsene is more symbolistic than sugarcoated, downplaying her innocence.


The decadent ‘Arsene’ commands from above


corcoran from C1


have channeled a real infant’s ability to get the notice of adults —including her 50-year-old dad. Thanks to that dad and his


skills as a painter, “little” Arsene seems almost to overflow her frame, as though she’s too great a force to be contained by mere gilding. Her baby clothes waft around her and out of the picture like an aura of power. The extrav- agant brushwork that renders them seems more suited to the clouds in an “Apotheosis” or “As- sumption” than to a standard baby picture. That brushwork is part of what allows this painting to compete, even from 15 feet up on the wall. The painting also profits, I


think, from art-historical links to the tradition of the grotesque and caricature. Arsene’s portrait has more than a bit in common with Leonardo’s great drawings of the human oddities he met on the streets of Florence and Milan, or with their descendants in Daumi- er’s cartooning of the freaks of human nature. Carriere (senior) didn’t make


any effort to tamp down his daughter’s presence in the world, to make her “just” a baby. Baby- hood isn’t sugarcoated in this painting; there’s no petroleum jelly on the lens. If anything, Carriere seems to leave lenses — and 19th-century baby photos — behind altogether, in favor of an almost symbolist approach to


painting his offspring. His por- trait of this “innocent” has whiffs of the self-described “decadent” art of fin de siecle France. “Arsene looks every bit the hap-


py, well-fed child,” wrote one re- cent art historian — but she sure doesn’t to me. I’ve overheard Cor- coran staff referring to her as the Demon Baby, and that seems much nearer the mark. The rattle she grasps so tightly could as easily be a succubus’s amulet as a tot’s plaything. Little Arsene is all dressed up


like your standard malleable baby, assigned roles and behav- iors by the adults around her. That’s how babies had always appeared in art. But there’s also a sense, in Carriere’s portrait, of the new ideas of infancy and child- hood that his little girl was born into. Freud’s “Studies in Hyste- ria,” with its claims about infant sexuality and trauma, was four years old already when she came into the world. By 1900, babies weren’t un-


tainted blank slates for grown- ups to write on. They had become powerful creatures who could shape and torment the adults they would later become. Arsene’s dad truly captured his daughter’s potential. gopnikb@washpost.com


6


ONWASHINGTONPOST.COMTo read more of Blake Gopnik’s


dispatches from the Corcoran Gallery’s Mantel Room, visit washingtonpost.com/style.


Toxic cloud clings to


Dear Amy: In October I started a new job. I


haven’t been there too long, and so I’muncomfortable bringing up an uncomfortable topic withmy officemate. I also don’t want to bring this up to anyone else I work with. My officemate takes smoke


co-worker after smoke break ASK AMY


allergies. Take this to your supervisor.


breaks frequently during the day, and anytime he comes back in the office I get the whiff of cigarette smoke. This is a problemforme because I have severe allergies — not tomention that I amstill being exposed to carcinogens and all the toxic secondhand smoke that wafts offmy co- worker. I get bad headaches and sore throats during the day because of this. I amunsure of what to do, but I


need to do something because I amtired of being subjected to toxic smells. Offended by Smoking in D.C.


Thismonth, the surgeon


general released the government’s newest report on smoking, outlining themyriad health risks associated with cigarettes. The report says, “Even brief


exposure to secondhand smoke can cause cardiovascular disease and could trigger acute cardiac events, such as heart attack.” (The full text of this report can be seen at surgeongeneral.gov.) As you can tell fromyour co-


worker, people who smoke emit byproducts of their habit long after they’ve stubbed out a cigarette. This affects you. You have the right to work in


an environment that doesn’t make you ill. Along with this right comes


the responsibility for you to let someone know that this exposure is aggravating your


Explain the effect this is having on you and ask if you can shift your workspace to another part of the office.


Dear Amy: We enjoy receiving Christmas


letters fromfriends telling about the events of the past year. What is shocking and totally


inappropriate is the death notices enclosed in the letters: “Merry Christmas, and oh by the way, Momdied inMay.” If the person’s passing is not


important enough to notify people at the time it happens, it is tasteless to stick the death notice in a wish for a happy holiday. Thank you for letting us voice


our opinion in thismatter. Shocked in Va.


I disagree with you. It seems tome thatmost


people use these annual holiday letters as a way to update others on the events that have had an impact on their families throughout the year. People have different orbits of


friends and acquaintances. The holiday letter tends to get sent to the outer circle—the one comprising themost people. I receive holiday cards and


letters fromseveral people each year whomI would never expect to notifyme personally about a death in the family. You imply that a death isn’t


“important enough” if you haven’t been notified of it at the time. It doesn’t seemto have


occurred to you that you aren’t


“important enough” to receive this news personally.


Dear Amy: A church friend is getting


married soon at the church we both attend. I received the gift registry


(complete with printout of the entire registry list) in themail but without a wedding invitation. What gives?


Annoyed Some church communities


celebrate weddings as a congregation-wide affair. Is it possible that your pastor


has issued a come-one-come-all wedding invitation fromthe pulpit? If not, I don’t know what


gives. And you don’t know what gives. And so I think you should disregard this solicitation unless you receive a clearer directive, i.e. something to RSVP to.


Write to Amy Dickinson at askamy@tribune.comor Ask Amy, Chicago Tribune, TT500, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611. © 2010 by the Chicago Tribune Distributed by Tribune Media Services


“ Leonard Bernstein’s ” Metro Weekly


O V E R


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homas De Quincey (1785- 1859) stands,withWilliam Hazlitt and Charles Lamb,


among the best essayists of the romantic era. Aside from a Gothicky novel called “Kloster- heim,” virtually everything De Quincey wrote was relatively short, though his range was ex- ceptionally broad: conservative political tracts, tales of terror (the best is “The Avenger”), arti- cles about classical literature and assort- ed literary reminis- cences, chiefly of the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. At the end of his life, his collected works spanned 14 volumes. This is remarkable


because, for most of his adult existence, De Quincey was an opium addict, an al- coholic in all but name, and a man who spent years dodging creditors, constantly moving from one rented room to another. What money he didn’t spend on lau- danum — his preferred opium- alcohol mixture — he spent on buying thousands of books, many of them pricey and rare. For years he rented Dove Cot- tage, Wordsworth’s old home in the LakeDistrict, and essentially used it to store his library and papers. Though from an upper- middle-class family and excep- tionally well educated in Latin and Greek,DeQuincey nonethe- less dropped out ofOxford, even- tually married his housekeeper (who bore himeight children) and was regularly shamed by public announcements of his nonpayment of bills. He con- tributed to multiple maga- zines, Blackwood’s being the best known, and sooner or later quarreled with nearly all his editors. In person, he was diminutive (under five feet tall) and exceptionally courtly in hismanner and speech. Today De Quincey is re-


membered, and by some re- vered, for his evocative (at times purple) prose and for two or three of themost influ- entialworks of the 19th centu- ry, the most famous being the


autobiographical “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.” No less an authority than William Burroughs has called “Confes- sions” “the first, and still the best, book about drug addiction. . . . No other author since has given such a completely analyti- cal description of what it is like to be a junky fromthe first use to the effects of withdrawal.” In this lucid, deeply re-


THE ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER A Biography of Thomas De Quincey By Robert Morrison. Pegasus. 462 pp. $35


searched biography, Robert Morrison makes plain that De Quinceywasn’t just a recreation- al user, but truly a slave to his habit. He would regularly pop pills — laudanum capsules that he kept in a snuffbox — even in the presence of company. Al- though De Quincey tried repeat- edly to break the drug’s hold over him, the conse- quent shakes, fevers and depressions would even- tually destroy his resolve. And yet two sections of “Confessions” are honest- ly titled: “The Pleasures of Opium” and “The Pains of Opium,” for the drug lift- ed some of life’s burdens, even as it imposed others. It also allowed for vivid, hallucinatory dreams and memories, often of the dead: the beloved sister whom De Quincey lost when young, the prosti- tute Ann who shared his earlymiseries, the 3-year- oldWordsworth daughter he played with and adored, his own deceased


children. In opium visions they might all, for a moment, live again. Throughout his life De Quinc-


ey wrote repeatedly about him- self in what one might call sup- plements to the “Confessions.” These include “Suspiria de Pro- fundis” (“Sighs From the Depths”) and “The EnglishMail- Coach,” which opens with a pae- an to speed, to the thrill of racing along pitch-black roads at night,


and ominously titles one chapter “TheVision of SuddenDeath.” If, in some lights, De Quincey may be viewed as a proto-Burroughs, as well as a British cousin to Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, he might with a stretch even be seen as an ances- tor of the J.G. Ballard who wrote “Crash.” As a practicing literary critic,


De Quincey memorably distin- guished between “The Litera- ture of Knowledge and the Liter- ature of Power,” that is, between thoseworks that addto our stock of learning, that teach, and those that move us and affect our souls. “The Literature of Knowl- edge” is inherently provisional and, like any science text or cookbook, open to additions and revision; not so the “Literature of Power.” As De Quincey writes, “Agood steam-engine is properly superseded by a better. But one lovely pastoral valley is not su- perseded by another, nor a stat- ue of Praxiteles by a statue of Michael Angelo.” Thishard-scrambling journal-


ist’s other permanent contribu- tion to scholarship — an anthol- ogy favorite—is “On the Knock- ing at theGate inMacbeth.”Here De Quincey probes the “peculiar awfulness” and “a depth of so- lemnity” he had always felt when, after Macbeth and his wife have murdered the king, they suddenly hear the sound of knocking at the castle door. In De Quincey’s view, the killing of Duncan occurs during a “sus- pension and pause in ordinary human concerns,” in a kind of temporal “parenthesis,” and the knocking signals the return to the normal goings-on of the world,while also revealing to the Macbeths the full horror ofwhat they have just done. Murder, in fact, always deeply


fascinated De Quincey and comes to the fore in his wittiest essay, the savagely deadpan “On MurderConsideredasOne of the


FineArts.”Conceivedas a lecture to a society of connoisseurs, it remains the foundational text for the grisly black humor of films such as “Kind Hearts and Coronets” or Patricia High- smith’snovels about the talented Mr. Ripley. As our lecturer ob- serves: “Somethingmore goes to the composition of a finemurder than two blockheads to kill and be killed, a knife, a purse, and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poet- ry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.” Alas, the wholly aesthetic


murder can be elusive: “Awk- ward disturbances will arise; people will not submit to have their throats cut quietly; they will run, they will kick, they will bite; and, whilst the portrait- painter often has to complain of too much torpor in his subject, the artist in our line is generally embarrassed by too much ani- mation.” What’s more, the practicing


connoisseur requires firmness of character. Otherwise, “if once a man indulges himself inmurder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing, and fromrobbing he comes next to drinking and Sab- bath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.” If you’ve never read Thomas


DeQuincey, you should first pick up a good selection of his writ- ings. Afterwards, when fascinat- ed by the man, as you will be, turn immediately to this excel- lent, detailed and often harrow- ing biography, “The EnglishOpi- um-Eater.”


bookworld@washpost.com


Dirda reviews books every Thursday in The Post.


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