PicoZ

OPIUM AND THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION by Althhea Hayter. 388 pages. University of California. $7.50.

As old as art itself is the artist’s hope that some easily repeated trick of technique, some simple arrangement of circumstances or some infallible method of tapping the subconscious, may induce those high moments of creativity that are as precious as they are rare.

The English Romantics were inclined to place their bet on dreams. Essayist Charles Lamb wrote of a friend who used to measure aspiring poets by their answers to his question: “Young man, what sort of dreams have you?” Byron’s poem The Dream took on aspects of a Romantic manifesto:

The mind can make

Substance, and people planets of its own

With beings brighter than have been.

Behind their faith that dreams produced superior art, some Romantics pursued a corollary faith: that opium produced superior dreams. In a gracefully written, witty survey, British Scholar Alethea Hayter skeptically checks out a few case histories.

For most of the 19th century’s mind blowers, opium meant laudanum, an alcoholic solution of the drug used as a common painkiller. Laudanum was cheaper than beer and regarded as scarcely more harmful. George IV took it for hangovers. Under such names as “Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup” and “Venice Treacle,” it was prescribed for children more or less as aspirin is today.

Miss Hayter is definite about the effects of opium. It makes the user hypersensitive to sights and sounds while simultaneously putting a mystical distance between him and the real world. It obliterates the sense of time. In the early euphoric stages of addiction, it produces a serenity genteelly referred to as “invulnerable self-esteem.” In later stages, it induces traumatic nightmares.

As she casts her suspicious eye over the literary poppy field, Miss Hayter cannot be quite so definite about opium’s effect on the working poet. Though Coleridge claimed that Kubla Khan sprang to his mind full-fledged from a dream —and is a fragment only because a tradesman interrupted him while he was writing it down—Miss Hayter is unimpressed. She admits that the euphonious fragment was the product of what the poet called “a sleep of the external senses.” But she insists that his dreams usually were “disappointingly dull,” and suggests that much hard polishing must have gone into the poem after Coleridge woke up. Coleridge generally had chronic difficulty finishing his major poetic and critical works. The last lines of the fragment, moreover,

For he on honeydew hath fed And drunk the milk of Paradise

are beautiful enough to suggest that the sleepy poet may have decided to quitwhile he was ahead.

Wilkie Collins, who regularly took what for others would have been lethal doses of laudanum, composed “a major piece of work,” Miss Hayter admits, when he wrote The Moonstone—a Chinese box of a novel in which the actions of an opium-drugged man are described by an opium-using author. She points out, though, that Collins did not directly utilize his hallucinations. His forte—tight construction of narratives—was rare for a Victorian and hardly the sort of thing to be aided by drug taking. Quite the contrary.

An Ox Is An Ox. Not even Thomas De Quincey, who “lied, prevaricated and romanced about his addiction,” in The Confessions of an English Opium Eater, thought that opium could make a poet of a non-poet. As he put it, a man who talked of oxen would dream of oxen. Miss Hayter goes farther than that. She suspects that the price of a few passingly vivid images may be permanently somber sensibilities. The opium-using poet may begin with sunny pleasure domes —what Coleridge called “phantoms of sublimity.” But he ends, Hayter suggests, with the Imaginary Prisons of the 18th century Italian engraver Piranesi; he plunges down inverted towers into a darkness full of endless staircases that lead solitary prisoners nowhere. Though opium may present a poet with “unique material for his poetry,” Hayter concludes, in the long run it “will probably take away from him the will and the power to make use of it.”

If a writer believes, like the late Jean Cocteau, an opium-and-arts dabbler, that “dreams can be a kind of education,” he will do far better to follow the example of the Gothic novelist, Mrs. Radcliffe. She gobbled indigestible food at night in hopes of inducing nightmare visions. In the end, Alethea Hayter makes obvious, all writers have to face the banal truth that confronts everyone: in art, as in life, there are few long-term shortcuts.

ncG1vNJzZmismaKyb6%2FOpmaaqpOdtrexjm9tbGxiaH9wrs6ooqxllJ7AssHInquippdiwLq%2B1Klm