Guilty Thing
Page 20
De Quincey likened Wilson’s fearlessness to that of Robin Hood, and his ‘marvellous versatility’ to the Athenian general, Alcibiades. But in his love of ‘the stormiest pleasures of real life’, Wilson resembled William, that ‘horrid pugilistic brother’ who had died nine years earlier, in 1799. The masochist in De Quincey responded readily to authority, and in partnership with Wilson he retrieved his role in the nursery at Greenhay.
Wilson, meanwhile, was rebuilding his cottage at Elleray. The Wordsworths were unable to accuse him of destroying their view because Wilson planned a building with only one storey. ‘I abhor stairs,’ he explained, ‘and there can be no peace in any mansion where heavy footsteps may be heard overhead.’ De Quincey described the house as ‘a silent commentary on its master’s state of mind, and an exemplification of his character’. It was, Wilson described, to be approached ‘by a fine serpentine avenue’ after which you ‘enter slap-bang through a wide glass door into a green-house, a conservatory of everything rich and rare in the world of flowers. Folding-doors are drawn noiselessly into the walls as if by magic, and lo! Drawing-room and dining-room stretching east and west in dim and distant perspective.’ De Quincey, who delighted in Elleray, described it as the project of a man in ‘the very heyday of a most tempestuous youth’.
Throughout the autumn of 1808, Coleridge was absorbed in writing, launching, and selling The Friend. De Quincey, to make himself useful, subscribed to no less than five copies and proposed, in a plan as dreamy as any of Coleridge’s own, that the journal be printed, at his own expense, on a private press they would set up in Grasmere.
Wordsworth was preoccupied with events in the Peninsular War. On 30 August 1808 an agreement, known as the Convention of Cintra, had been signed in Portugal allowing the French army, defeated by the Anglo-Portuguese forces under Sir Arthur Wellesley, to peacefully evacuate the country in British ships. Back in Britain this was seen as an own goal; an English triumph had been turned into a French escape. Four years later, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron described how ‘Britannia sickens, Sintra! at thy name.’ The Spanish and Portuguese had been scandalously betrayed by the English army, and Wordsworth, for whom there was no cause greater than that of Liberty, began a tract in support of ‘the hopes and fears of suffering Spain’. Coleridge’s politics coincided with his own, and the 10,000-word pamphlet Wordsworth eventually produced was the fruit of long discussions between the two men. De Quincey, seizing the opportunity to collaborate with the collaborators, threw himself into Spanish and Portuguese affairs. As a long-time admirer of Edmund Burke – whose prophetic style was being used by Wordsworth as a model – he was in a position to advise the poet on the construction of his first political essay.
Apprenticing himself to Wordsworth, De Quincey began his tenure as a journeyman. As his brother William had done with Loutherbourg, Thomas would study at the feet of a master. During this time De Quincey considered himself ‘more intimately connected’ with Wordsworth ‘than any other person, not being a member of his family, can pretend to have been’. He was closer to Wordsworth even than Coleridge, who was either in bed or sweating over The Friend, so that ‘by day or by night he rarely walked’. De Quincey and Wordsworth regularly walked both by day and by night. In order to collect the newspaper and catch up with the latest events in Spain, they would leave the house at midnight and walk four miles to Dunmail Raise to meet the carrier that brought the London newspapers. Beneath the vault of stars, Wordsworth would place his ear to the road and listen for the sound of the wheels ‘groaning along at a distance’. Perhaps this was the origin of De Quincey’s false memory of the scene in ‘Aladdin’ where the magician places his ‘ear to the earth’ and ‘fastens his murderous intention upon the insulated tread’ of the small Arab boy.
One night, when Wordsworth was ‘slowly rising from this effort, his eye caught a bright star that was glittering between the brow of Seat Sandal and of the mighty Helvellyn. He gazed upon it for a minute or so, and then, upon turning away to descend into Grasmere, he made the following explanation: “I have often remarked, from my earliest days, that if. . . the attention is energetically braced up to an act of steady observation, or of steady expectation, then, if this intense condition of vigilance should suddenly relax, at that moment, any beautiful, any impressive visual object. . . falling upon the eye, is carried to the heart with a power not known under other circumstances”.’ This was precisely the kind of insight that De Quincey looked for in the man who knew the secrets of the universe. No matter that he pushed De Quincey off the road as they walked back to Allan Bank with their copy of the Courier, or that his legs were too short for his torso – Wordsworth had proved himself a sorcerer.
Since their move to Allan Bank in the spring of 1808, Dove Cottage had lain empty and Dorothy suggested that De Quincey take over the tenancy for the next seven years. This was the greatest honour she could have bestowed on him and more than he had dared to hope for – the cottage was as sacrosanct to Dorothy as the vale was to Wordsworth: ‘They who are dwellers in this holy place,’ the poet had proclaimed in ‘Home at Grasmere’, ‘must needs themselves be hallowed.’ The offer was not made entirely out of friendship. One benefit of having De Quincey as their neighbour was that his vast book collection, as Dorothy put it, would prove ‘a solid advantage to my brother’. Wordsworth was forever complaining about his ‘lack of commerce with passing literature, especially bulky works, for we have no neighbour that buys them’, and when new books did appear he had to wait his turn while they were passed around the neighbourhood. There were solid advantages to Dorothy as well. With De Quincey as their tenant, she could keep the house and garden in her life. ‘We have now almost a home still,’ Dorothy informed her friend Jane Marshall, ‘at the old and dearest spot of all.’ She set about preparing the cottage: De Quincey would need plenty of bookcases (deal, she insisted, and not his preferred mahogany, which was too expensive), as well as new rugs and calico curtains. De Quincey, meanwhile, sent his mother and sisters a plan of his six rooms, and asked Jane to send him a similar plan of the house they were now building in Wrington, Somerset. ‘I am,’ Jane replied, ‘a little surprised at such a requisition from you – a metaphysician and an architect! A monstrous incongruity!’ De Quincey’s pursual of abstract thought in a room he had measured with a ruler might appear paradoxical, but it had a clear logic: the more infinite his world became, the more he took down its dimensions.
Surmising from her brother’s letters that Miss Wordsworth had a significant role in his current happiness, Jane teased him about consulting the taste of ‘that beautiful and wild-hearted girl’, who will be the ‘best judge of what will please herself’.
In the heat of mutual enthusiasm another decision was made: De Quincey agreed to oversee the production of Wordsworth’s ‘Cintra’ pamphlet in London. His expertise in punctuation confirmed him as the ideal candidate for the task. For Wordsworth, the appearance of this tract was part of his duty as poet; he was writing as a ‘man speaking to men’. As a spokesman for freedom, his mission was to teach the people to ‘guard their own liberties’, and explain that war determines the destiny not only of nations, but of humanity itself.
The Convention of Cintra had been signed the previous summer and it was now late February 1809; public interest in the affair was fading and in order for Wordsworth’s efforts not to have been wasted, his pamphlet needed to appear quickly. The next few months showed both Wordsworth and De Quincey in their worst lights, and brought to an end any promise of long-term intimacy. At the centre of the problem was Wordsworth’s dislike of writing; he found ‘penmanship. . . unendurable’, prose far more so than poetry, and Dorothy, who had formerly relieved him of the strain by working as his secretary, now had her hands filled with nephews and nieces. De Quincey, who thought he had been elevated to the position of editor in a partnership of equals, took on, as far as Wordsworth was concerned, the feminine role of faithful domestic. Had Wordsworth been less arrogant and more unde
rstanding of the strain he was placing on De Quincey, had De Quincey been less in awe of Wordsworth and more experienced in the ways of writers and writing, and had communications between Grasmere and London been swifter, the experience might not have been as traumatic.
De Quincey took rooms in Great Titchfield Street, the road on which, six years earlier, he had waited in vain for Ann to appear. He hoped, perhaps, to see Ann’s face in the crowd and be relieved of the guilt he felt towards her. His time was spent waiting for Wordsworth to deliver fresh pages and for printers to prepare proofs. No sooner had the proofs appeared, than Wordsworth wanted rewrites: De Quincey was deluged with orders, in the poet’s illegible script, for corrections, additions, insertions, emendations, further research and footnotes. Progress was torturously slow and De Quincey was hopelessly unconfident. When one of Wordsworth’s sentences was incomplete, rather than add the missing words he returned the leaf to Grasmere for the author’s correction. Thus another week was wasted. More time was lost when a near-hysterical Wordsworth ordered De Quincey to ‘stop the press’ in order to incorporate a minor change, and on 26 March, De Quincey received from Wordsworth no less than four separate letters detailing changes which had to be made. On 28 March, Wordsworth was still concerned that his ‘meaning’ was ‘undeveloped’.
Meanwhile the compositor, who was drunk a good deal of the time, allowed the first set of proofs to be filled with ‘monstrous errors’, and De Quincey was forced to ask for ‘a dozen’ further sets before the errors disappeared. More weeks were wasted, and the news was now filled with the scandal of the Duke of York and his mistress, Mrs Clarke. To keep the pamphlet up to date with developments in Spain, Wordsworth asked De Quincey to compose a footnote on the French victory at Saragossa which De Quincey laboured over as though it were an examination. Wordsworth then breezily rejected what De Quincey produced on the grounds that his assistant’s thoughts did not (unlike those of Coleridge) coincide with his own. It was over this sensitive point that De Quincey snapped, complaining to Dorothy ‘of the very great injustice which he has done me’. Their opinions on Saragossa, he stressed, were precisely the same; his careful work – the first occasion on which he had written anything for publication – had been barely read, and what Wordsworth did read he had misread. For De Quincey, there could be no greater insult. His own pride was immense, but not as great as that of Wordsworth whose pride was a realm of its own: ‘Never describe Wordsworth as equal in pride to Lucifer’, he later wrote. ‘No; but, if you have occasion to write a life of Lucifer, set down that possibility, in respect to pride, he might be some type of Wordsworth.’
Ticked off by Dorothy, Wordsworth apologised to De Quincey after his own fashion: ‘it gives me great concern, to find that after all your fatigue, confinement, and vexation, you should have suffered such mortification. . . but I must quit the subject, my penmanship is very bad, and my head aches miserably’. Wordsworth’s usual response to complaints about his own behaviour was to announce, De Quincey later learned, that he ‘will have nothing to do with fending and proving’. Dorothy’s letters could not have been more different. ‘You must take it as proof of my affection that my penmanship is so bad,’ she wrote in early May, ‘for in proportion as my Friends have become more near and dear to me I have always been unable to keep my pen in such order as to make it write decently.’
Throughout the spring, Dorothy and Mary, desperate to get the pamphlet out of their lives, smoothed the path, calming Wordsworth in his irritation with De Quincey, thanking De Quincey for his hard work – ‘you have indeed been a Treasure to us. . . having spared my Brother so much anxiety and care’ – and reassuring him, again and again, that they were all, especially young Johnny, looking forward to his return. Sara Hutchinson, in a postscript to a particularly mortifying letter from Wordsworth, wished that De Quincey could see ‘your orchard just now, for it is the most beautiful spot upon earth’. Dorothy was upset that the laurels in his orchard had been ‘cruelly mauled’ by a gardener, and now looked like ‘dismembered creatures’. Mary, writing to thank him for his labours, added that ‘the workmen are now very busy about your cottage’. ‘Your cottage is painted,’ wrote Dorothy in June, ‘and I hope will be ready by the end of the next week or the beginning of the week after.’ Even Wordsworth grudgingly added, at the end of a long complaining missive, that ‘your house is in great forwardness and very neat’.
Amongst the correspondence currently heaving its way between London and Grasmere was a letter from De Quincey to Johnny, who wanted to be a printer. It is written with such care and charm that we can see in an instant why Dorothy felt such affection for her new friend. Wordsworth venerated childhood but was a distant and severe father; De Quincey had a clear affinity with children; he entered immediately into Johnny’s world and allowed him access to his own. His letter contains a Piranesian picture of De Quincey’s visits to the printer whose tardiness was causing him so much trouble:
When I get to the house where this man lives, I go first into a very dark passage, then I come to a stair-case which goes round and round and keeps getting darker and darker till at last it is so very dark that they are obliged to have a candle burning there all day long, even in the very middle of the day. When I am at the top of this stair-case, then I push against a door which opens and then shuts again of its own self – as soon as I have gone in – without my touching it I got through this door; and then I get into a large room full of men all printing; then I go into another room still bigger where there are more men printing; and in one corner of this room, a little wooden house is built with one window to it and one door – the least little place you ever saw; there is only room for about 2 men to sit down in it.
There is nothing patronising in his description of the building: De Quincey gives the stairs, doors and rooms exactly as he experienced them himself, and his ‘sweet letter’, said Dorothy, brought ‘perfect joy in the house’. In other letters to Johnny he enclosed pictures he had drawn for the child’s bedroom wall, and promised to teach him how to swim, fly a kite, walk on stilts and sail a boat. It was the adult world De Quincey found hard to engage with. He confessed in a letter to Wordsworth that he felt ‘guilty of a crime’ in not replying to Dorothy for ‘so long a time’.
The Cintra pamphlet was finally ready for the printers in early May, at which point Wordsworth, in a sudden panic that he was to be thrown into Newgate prison, wanted it read for libel. Another week was wasted with De Quincey underlining any passage he felt was vulnerable, and the press eventually ran on 15 May. In a ‘paroxysm of joy’, De Quincey dispatched the first four finished copies to Grasmere. Wordsworth, who had now lost interest in the venture, responded with neither pleasure nor gratitude, but a list of errata: there were misquotations, incorrect words, the punctuation might have been improved, and one potentially libellous passage about Lord Wellesley which Wordsworth had ordered De Quincey to cancel was still there. As far as Wordsworth was concerned, De Quincey had failed in his task. Cornered and pointed at, De Quincey was indignant: ‘About the supposed libel. . . I am anxious to be acquitted on this point – on which I am not at all in fault.’ Quick to side with Wordsworth was a gleeful Coleridge: De Quincey’s collaboration with the poet had ended, as his own had done in Lyrical Ballads, by his work being unacknowledged and his voice silenced.
Coleridge, who understood De Quincey all too well, expressed to Daniel Stuart, editor of the Courier, his ‘vexation and surprise that Wordsworth should have entrusted anything to him beyond the mere correction of the Proofs’. He had, said Coleridge, ‘both respect and affection for Mr De Quincey, but saw too much of his turn of mind, anxious yet dilatory, confused from over-accuracy, & at once systematic and labyrinthine, not fully to understand how great a plague he might easily be to a London Printer, his natural Tediousness made yet greater by his zeal & fear of not discharging his Trust, & superadded to Wordsworth’s own Sybill’s Leaves blown about by the changeful winds of an anxious Author’s Second-thoughts.’
He remained in London after the pamphlet appeared, paralysed by the future. There had been a suggestion that he accompany Wordsworth and John Wilson on a trip around Ireland, which he let slide. Wilson then proposed that he and De Quincey visit Spain in September: this also never happened. His continuing silence was making Dorothy anxious: ‘Sometimes we fancy that you are on the point of setting off to Grasmere, and therefore have delayed writing, and at times I, being of a fearful temper, fancy that you are ill. . . We have been so long used to receive your letters regularly that we take very ill to this long privation of that pleasure.’