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| Book Buzz: What's new on the list and in publishing The story of a Harlem teen named Precious is set to hit the big screen; "pioneer" cooking is hot; and Target gives a boost to ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
My hero: Alan Ross by William Boyd I can visualise Alan Ross's expression – ineffably polite, but just failing to disguise his displeasure at being called anyone's hero. Perhaps "exemplar" would be a better word, given that he was the first writer I properly came to know and also the first editor to publish me, selecting one of my unsolicited short stories for his literary journal London Magazine in 1978. I was 26 – it was to be an association that lasted until his death in 2001.When you are an aspiring young writer – and if you don't come from a literary background – the first writers you meet take on an almost totemic significance. You think: so this is how to live; these are the attitudes to strike; these tastes are the ones to cultivate. Walking into the small cramped offices of the magazine was a revelation for me. Books everywhere, of course, but there were two dogs sprawled under his desk, and big vivid modern art on the walls. Alan was an unchangingly youthful, tanned, dark-haired figure even though he must have been in his mid-50s then. He took me to an Italian restaurant and we drank powerful cocktails. It was impossible not to be smitten. There was a sophisticated raffishness and glamour about him as well – nothing seedy or earnest. He owned racehorses. He loved women and travel. He had known Evelyn Waugh and Dylan Thomas and Ian Fleming. He was a poet and a brilliant writer on cricket.Alan was a diffident man, and the classy veneer of his life disguised something of a tormented soul (his experiences as a young naval officer in the war haunted him all his days), but I think what he inadvertently taught me – and he never remotely sought to be a mentor – was a kind of generous eclecticism to life and culture that was embodied in the 30 years or so he edited London Magazine. He was the opposite of parochial, his interests were wide and not elitist, his enthusiasms were carefully hedonistic. He was a very fine writer of prose – his two volumes of memoirs are small classics – and his poetry is limpid and evocative. It was a very important encounter for me.FictionWilliam Boydguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The English Opium Eater by Robert Morrison A new life reveals the colourful Thomas De Quincey – addict, essayist and genius – as a troubled soul and a terrible snob, discovers James PurdonA couple of years ago, while flicking through Iain Sinclair's London: City of Disappearances, a copious anthology of writing around the capital's erasures, I turned to the section of contributors' notes, hoping to learn more about the writers represented in the book. The entries – some offbeat, some straight – didn't disappoint, except in one regard. Where was Thomas De Quincey? Not where he ought to have been: in good company between film-maker Chris Petit and poet Tom Raworth. Although he had furnished the collection with two extracts, both from Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, his biography was nowhere to be found.Veteran absconder in life, in this afterlife De Quincey seemed to have managed a trick that even Houdini couldn't pull off: a posthumous escape. It seemed, in its own way, a fitting disappearance. Uncredited, he could at last give his many creditors the slip. And what sort of contributor's note could properly apprehend the Opium Eater?"The dreamer," De Quincey had written, half a century before Sigmund Freud, "finds housed within himself – occupying, as it were, some separate chamber in his brain … some horrid alien nature." He spent his life courting that strange presence, living out the contradictions that inspired and destroyed him. In Robert Morrison's scholarly and sympathetic account, De Quincey divided in himself and divisive in his own time. Predisposed to addiction, he gave way to it completely. Opium, alcohol, book-buying – all these he indulged in excessive quantities. Intriguingly, Morrison also calls greater attention to De Quincey's use of prostitutes than has previously been the case.Escape, whether on foot or on drugs, was an instinct acquired early: sent to a strict Manchester boarding school by his over-pious mother, De Quincey fled. He was soon brought back into the fold, but with typical stubbornness refused to return to school, instead persuading his guardians to fund a solo tramp through the Welsh countryside. Chafing against even these indulgent terms, he lost touch with home and slept rough in the Marches until ill-health and penury drove him to seek freedom, if not fortune, in London.Under the exigencies of debt, and perhaps wearying from the struggle with his own divided allegiances, De Quincey was driven to crowd-pleasing journalism. For the Conservative Blackwood's he remained a high Tory, writing "as a champion of aristocratic privilege", however sharp the torments of his own poverty. In the more Liberal Tait's, he was willing to concede the merits of radicalism, though in private correspondence and conversation he reserved "Jacobin" as his highest term of opprobrium. A staunch abolitionist, he hated all forms of slavery – especially the "chain of abject slavery" in the form of laudanum that had "inextricably wound itself" around his organs. Yet his rage against these oppressions was in direct conflict with his reactionary views on the Peterloo massacre and the Sepoy rebellion, on Catholic emancipation and the enfranchisement of the common people. He was – it should be stated clearly – a terrible snob and a fascist avant la lettre. His politics combined with his habits to make him unintelligible to modern eyes. Champagne socialists are so common as to be unremarkable; De Quincey was a laudanum Tory.Not even family life escaped these contradictions: in 1817, De Quincey married a poor farmer's daughter, causing a scandal among his ostensibly radical friends, the Lake Poets. Dorothy Wordsworth and Charles Lamb come out of the exchange particularly badly, gossiping ungenerously about their friend's new bride. De Quincey had no monopoly on hypocrisy.Still, Morrison is clear: he was capricious, devious and untrustworthy, neglecting both his family and his professional obligations. Pity the unsuspecting editor who commissioned a piece and expected copy to be delivered on time. His name became a byword for unreliability – and yet, while his literary arrears grew to match his financial debts, commissions kept coming. More than once, he was able to promise articles in lieu of bail to escape from debtors' prison: no other writer could outstrip the arch and erudite spirit behind the poppy-purple prose. If, by some miracle, a promised manuscript appeared one day on an editor's desk, it was sure to be the best of its kind. He was without doubt a genius, renowned as one of the finest linguists of his time. "That boy," said the headmaster at Bath Grammar, pointing out the teenage De Quincey to a colleague, "that boy could harangue an Athenian mob, better than you or I could address an English one."It was a life marked by unfulfilled promise, as well as broken promises. Chemical assistance and natural ability were enough to inspire De Quincey to three of the finest essays in the English language: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; "On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts"; and "The English Mail-Coach". But he flagged. Suffering through the cycle of highs and lows, as well as the symptoms of periodic withdrawal, De Quincey couldn't sustain himself through the months required for the longer writings envisaged in his youth; his "whole constitution and habit of mind", according to James Hogg, "were averse from sustained and continuous work of the kind".Yet what we have is remarkable, and – given De Quincey's carelessness with his drafts – it is remarkable that we have so much. He lived in a blizzard of paper that settled in drifts around the several lodgings that he owned, rented, and fled. Much was auctioned off by frustrated landlords; still more was abandoned and forgotten by the author, despite the punctiliousness with which he viewed the integrity of his published work. The pattern poses obvious challenges for a biographer, and Morrison deserves high praise for undertaking extensive research that succeeds in unravelling the strands of De Quincey's politics, his addictions, and the psychological traumas of bereavement and inadequacy that opium and imagination turned into a private typology of suffering.There are, unsurprisingly, some problems with pace: in the middle of the book a reader is increasingly beset, as De Quincey himself was, by editors and creditors. "Mrs Newbon was demanding her rent … Miss Craig was after him for rent … David Nicolson sued him again for £12.1s.8½d." Happily, the tedium of book-keeping is alleviated by anecdotes culled from the range of De Quincey's acquaintance, many of them disparaging; an equal number adoring; all arresting. Among the best is an evening in Edinburgh when the editor John Wilson visited his friend to find him naked except for an outsize greatcoat. Launching into a soliloquy on transcendental philosophy, he became agitated and the coat fell open. "De Quincey 'thought it not of any consequence'. Wilson agreed. De Quincey folded the coat 'round him and went on as before'."In style, Morrison wisely plays it straight, writing with a combination of perspicacity and generous puzzlement, and leaving the verbal fireworks to his subject. We will probably never know how completely De Quincey was taken in by his own delusions, or how many of his fabrications felt real in the writing. Thanks to Morrison, however, the life is clearer than it has ever been, and the danger of disappearance less present.Biographyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Beauty, Utility, Eccentricity, Adultery This history examines the Bauhaus movement through the lives of six of its artists. feeds.nytimes.com |
Trends, triumphs of the 2009 book year Yes, Stephenie Meyer had another frighteningly good year with her sexy teen vampires and werewolves. But the mega-series wasn't ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |