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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Simply Exotic

Simply Exotic

Most people have had at least some borderline experience of drug addiction and the problem of withdrawal symptoms. If any of us were to forget about tea or coffee for twenty-four hours, both our minds and our bodies would remind us sharply. We would feel perhaps curiously tired and vacant. At this moment I am knocking off cigarettes. The palms of my hands sweat; my sight blurs easily; I have pains in the neck and shoulders; my nose runs; I have a bad taste in my mouth; my mind has very little peace; and above all, I am absurdly half-convinced that without tobacco I cannot think well or write well.

A girl I know took some tablets of methedrine recently. She had no wish to sleep and a strong sense that the people she was with were unusually beautiful. After the bout she was very tired and had confused surrealist dreams. But it is foolish of me to look so far for examples. Alcohol is the dominant drug page 36 of our culture, non-addictive for a majority, semi-addictive for some, deeply addictive for a special minority. Even now, after ten years, an alcoholic who has acquired the habit of dryness, I remember the great dread at the end of a bout, when one knew that a terrible purgatory of physical cramps, diarrhoea, violent dreams verging on hallucination, inability to speak or think, cosmic remorse (‘I am Judas and Cain; I am the man who throttled the canary’) self-loathing and fear of one’s neighbours, lay between the cessation of drinking and an apparent normality. And one knew that the temporary cure lay in one’s reach – a few beers, one or two whiskies. I do not see how the pains of the opium-addict can be worse than those of the alcoholic and permit a retention of life and general sanity; but I can believe that they are just as grim, and that the hideous nature of the withdrawal symptoms may be a large factor in preventing the breaking of the habit.

In our century drug-taking is democratic, and I suggest that in fifty years our great-grandchildren will be going as regularly to the clinic to be unhooked from dependence on one drug by medically supervised administration of other drugs as we now go to the dentist to get our teeth filled. One sees the beginning of the mass use of drugs in the widespread use of barbiturates and stimulants and tranquillisers as a kind of domestic aid to living. This democratic drug-taking seems to me a fairly reasonable human response to a social desert where there are no altars and nobody loves anybody. Bears and hedgehogs hibernate in winter; newts turn themselves into old leather – why should human beings not also move, aided by drugs, from an environment they can neither endure nor change, into some version of the prenatal sleep? My own solution would be to break my back trying to shift the social boulders; but I do recognise that my response is abnormal. And one does not need heroin to achieve the drug-taker’s trance. A box of strong cigars, a few glasses of brandy and ginger ale, a TV set talking to itself in the corner, and most of us could drowse quite happily while half the world died of hunger in the street outside. The interesting thing about our own century is that both the young and the old now look for this nirvana, whereas once it was the old but not the young.

I see Alethea Hayter’s book against this general background. De Quincey, Baudelaire, Crabbe, Coleridge, Wilkie Collins, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Francis Thompson, Keats – her opium-users, whether habitual or occasional, belong to a special group, the aristocracy of letters. To use laudanum, say, as an anaesthetic for neuralgia, was normal social behaviour in their times. The view of drugs was different from our own. No detectives ever hammered on Walter Scott’s door while he composed The Bride of Lammermoor under the influence of opium; nor, for that matter, was there any danger that Baudelaire would be prosecuted for experimenting with hashish. The habit was simply exotic. Nowadays we have the vast democratic use of drugs, and, along with it, the savage and muddled legal penalties which are always a sign that the page 37 society is dealing with a phenomenon which it has created and can neither understand nor control. Panic legislation is always bad legislation.

Alethea Hayter argues somewhat thinly that Keats may have been briefly an addict. It seems likely that he used opium; but with no more significance than when an American lad or lass smokes a marihuana cigarette, in company, out of curiosity, and then goes on to do other things. Nevertheless the value of her book is considerable. I had always wondered where a poet as staid as Crabbe got those marvellous nightmare passages in Peter Grimes from where the fisherman’s dead father and the murdered apprentices walk on the stagnant river and throw water, fire and blood in his face. The ordeals of Coleridge’s addiction are of course famous; and De Quincey was in a sense a professional literary addict. Their claustrophobic visions of imaginary palaces are analysed by Alethea Hayter with sympathy and authority.

It is a far cry from these leisurely literary gentlemen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to William Burroughs shuddering in his junkie’s cave or Allen Ginsberg freaking out on LSD. The difference does not lie in the invention of one or two newer and stronger drugs. It comes rather from the stripping away of a social scaffolding, for addicts and those who have no addictions whatever, as a hobo living in an old house might indiscriminately hack down panelling and balustrades to get some wood to shove in the stove on a cold night. We are in this limited sense a very functional culture.

1969 (575)