Pipe Dreams: The Drug Experience in Literature
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Gilbert Alter-Gilbert is an essayist, translator, and critic. His fictive histories Poets Ranked by Beard Weight and Desktop Digest of Despots and Dictators: An A to Z of Tyranny have been widely acclaimed.
Gnostic Clock: A Tenebrist Miscellany, a collection of pessimist writings through the ages, is forthcoming from Coyote Arts.
Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). Major post-romantic and proto-symbolist French poet best known for his daringly innovative volume of verse, Flowers of Evil, which created a scandal upon its debut. An important art critic, literary impresario, and translator of Edgar Allan Poe who, prior to being rediscovered in France by Baudelaire, had already lapsed into semi-obscurity in the United States. Like Maupassant, died from syphilitic infection.
William James (1842–1920). American medical psychologist and philosopher. His father Henry was a Swedenborgian clergyman, and his brother Henry was the noted novelist. He overcame crippling neurasthenia to become a leading proponent of the philosophical school of pragmatism, and of “functionalism” in consciousness theory. He was a pal of Charles Peirce and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Wrote The Principles of Psychology; The Will to Believe; and The Varieties of Religious Experience, from which this selection is excerpted.
Marie Corelli (1855–1924). Pen name of Mary Mackay. English. Educated in a French convent, Corelli began writing after a psychic experience convinced her she should take up literature. She eventually authored more than thirty novels—all of them moralistic, sentimental romances. Achieved immense popular success, and was said to be Queen Victoria’s favorite novelist. The fortune she made from book sales enabled her to retire to Stratford-on-Avon, where she apparently fancied herself Shakespeare’s successor. She fought encroaching development of the area, and died alone and neglected. Her books include Ardath; The Soul of Lilith; and The Sorrows of Satan.
Ernest Dowson (1867–1900). English poet; part of the coterie of fin-de-siècle
English Decadents. A chum of Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, and Richard Le Galli- enne. Conceived a violent infatuation for the twelve-year-old daughter of a Soho tavern-keeper—the inspiration for the Cynara of his well-known poem “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae.” Dowson, along with W. B. Yeats, was exposed to mescaline by Havelock Ellis. Born the child of wealthy parents, he dropped out of Oxford University and took up residence in a tumbledown dockside shack in the seedy Limehouse district. Haunted by his father’s death and by his mother’s suicide six months later, he became self-destructive and dissolute, and used opium, absinthe, and hashish. His health was destroyed by alcoholism. A friend found him dying in a Parisian wine cellar, and brought him back to London, where he expired from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-two. A master of elegiac verse, he was the author of Dilemmas and Decorations: bitter products of a poet who had passed through the dark night of the soul.
Jean Richepin (1849–1926). Popular French poet and dra- matist who produced several collections of short fiction dealing with innumerable imaginative theses often set at the extremes of human experience, including this one which features his character Harry Sloughby, the fictitious Englishman who figures in several of his stories. In terms of themes, if not of treatment, Richepin was well ahead of his time; a sort of Rod Serling of gaslamp France.
(Pierre Jules) Théophile Gautier (1811–1872)
was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, and art, drama, ballet and literary critic. At first an aspiring painter, Gautier was famous for the carefree Bohemian lifestyle he shared with many of his artist cronies. He maintained lifelong friendships with prominent romanticist authors and artists of his day and was a much beloved and esteemed figure on the contemporary cultural scene. Gérard de Nerval was one of many close literary comrades with whom he associated from an early age. At the so-called “Battle of Hernani” accompanying the debut of Victor Hugo’s groundbreaking play, Gautier is still remembered for the bright red sash he sported as a member of the pro-romantic faction during the clash. Credited as the first to formally expound the theory of art for art’s sake, Gautier made his living as a journalist, an occupation he found distasteful. He was a popular travel writer and found employment as personal librarian to Mathilde Bonaparte, cousin of Napoleon III. Eventually, he was elected chairman of the National Society of Fine Arts and served as director of the
Revue de Paris. In his youth, along with fellow poet Charles Baudelaire and others, he regularly indulged in the use of drugs such as hashish and opium.
Fitz Hugh Ludlow (1836–1870). A Presbyterian minister’s son raised in Poughkeepsie, New York, the youthful Ludlow coaxed the local apothecary into allowing him to experiment with opium, chloroform, ether, and tincture of cannabis (the patent medicine “Tilden’s Extract”, available over-the-counter at six cents a dose). In 1857, he published The Hasheesh Eater, which created a sensation, and became a best-seller. Practiced anesthesiology as a student at the Union College Medical School and was admitted to the bar, but abandoned law for literature. Edited Vanity Fair and was active as a theater, art, and music critic. Authored another drug-themed book, The Opium Habit, which was published in 1868. He died in Switzerland, where he had gone in search of a cure for a pulmonary disorder. Walt Whitman was one of his chums at Raffs Beer Cellar in New York, and Mark Twain, an ardent admirer, is said to have released nothing for publication without Ludlow’s review and approval. Nature painter Albert Bierstadt accompanied Ludlow on an epic trip through the largely unexplored American West.
J. C. O’Day. This confessional anecdote (1899) by an American physician regards his misadventures with a locomotive after taking an overdose of cannabis extract. Written for Plexus magazine in 1891.
Hendrik DeLeeuw (1891–1977). Dutch explorer, lecturer and ethnologist who wrote exposées of prostitution and drug addiction such as
Fallen Angels and Flower of Joy, and studies in social anthropology such as Java Jungle Trails; Cities of Sin; The Story of Rubber; and The Romance of Spice. He specialized in the sort of exotic travel and adventure literature typically featured in men’s magazines of the 1950s such as Esquire, Stag, Argosy, and True.
Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859). Running away from school at age seventeen, English author-to-be Thomas de Quincey tramped throughout Wales and became a beggar in London, until he was rescued from utter destitution by a streetwalker. Later he enrolled at Oxford University, but left without taking a degree. There, he had begun using opium for relief from a chronic facial ailment, and became habituated. He formed fast friendships with fellow Lake Poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, whose cottage, at Grasmere, in the Lake District, he rented. He is also known for his elegant and insightful essays such as On Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth. His Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was published in 1822. At the height of his addiction he was consuming a daily dose sufficient to kill a man several times over.
Harry Hubbell Kane (1854–?). American journalist and social historian who authored the comprehensive treatise Opium Smoking in America and China at a time when this problem was just becoming a major phenomenon in American cities, especially in major ports such as San Francisco and New York. A work of social anthropology which stands out by virtue of its detailed observation and scientific analysis.
Stephen Crane (1871–1900). American author whose style of robust naturalism influenced succeeding generations of writers from Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser to Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. A frequenter of New York’s Bowery and Hell’s Kitchen slums, he was an impressionistic journalist who covered not only the Gotham beat, but the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 and the Spanish American War. During his stint as a correspondent in the latter he was rumored, probably falsely, to have used drugs. He survived shipwreck and both wars only to be cut down by tuberculosis at age twenty-eight. Like another famous consumptive, Doc Holliday, he had a reckless disregard for his health. Author of The Red Badge of Courage; The Black Riders and Other Lines; and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. A friend of the American literati Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells and of their English counterparts Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and H. G. Wells.
Charles (John Huffam) Dickens (1812–1870). Victorian novelist, probably the most popular and successful of his day. Creator of many memorable fictional characters in numerous established classics including Great Expectations; David Copperfield; A Tale of Two Cities; The Pickwick Papers; and Oliver Twist. The excerpt reprinted here forms the opening chapter of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens’s last and, perhaps, moodiest novel, left unfinished at his death.
Claude Farrère (1876–1957), pseudonym of Frédéric-Charles Bargone. French naval officer and literary exoticist in the tradition of Pierre Loti, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad. Having, by 1918, attained the rank of capitaine de corvette, Farrère passed his naval career putting into remote and colorful ports around the world and spent several years in the Far East. He won the Goncourt Prize in 1906, and was elected to the French Academy in 1935. Author of Opium Smoke; Battle; and My Travels.
Santiago Dabove (1899–1951). Argentine author of Death and All Its Trappings, an odd assortment of occult fantasy, science fiction, cruel tales, and metaphysical minitexts with morbid preoccupations. The same volume also contains apocalyptic meditations, accounts of doomed narcissi, and two drug-themed compositions: “Magic Treatment,” which concerns peyote, and the item presented here. When a de- tractor faulted Dabove because the sum total of his lifelong literary output consisted of the single title mentioned above, Dabove’s friend Jorge Luis Borges defended him with the observation that not many people manage to produce so much as one book.
Ahmad Mahmood (1941–2002). Born in Ahvaz, Iran. Engaged in illegal political activities during his youth, was arrested, jailed, and exiled, and was never able to finish school. He learned to write outside academic circles, holding twenty different jobs while steeping himself in the study of literature and polishing his craft. By the mid-1980s, following publication of his long novel Zero Degree, he had achieved sound recognition, and became a familiar face on the con- temporary Persian literary scene. Known for his depiction of the miserable lives of the inhabitants of the harsh desert regions of southern Iran, one of his best-known stories deals with people who sell their blood out of indigence and desperation. “Junkie Monkey,” his tale of a pathetic animal exploited by all-too-human relatives is reminiscent of those made famous a generation earlier by Sadegh Hedayat.
Sampurnanand (1891–1969) was an Indian social philosopher, a friend of Jawaharlal Nehru, and author of The Individual and the State and Memories and Reflections. An apologist for and explicator of Indian and Hindu thought, he was involved with the mediation of policy issues during the post-independence period in India (1948).
(Henry) Havelock Ellis (1859–1939). British physician and pioneering experimental psychologist noted for his ground-breaking Studies in the Psychology of Sex in seven volumes, which was banned in England as obscene, and whose availability in the United States was restricted to members of the medical profession until the mid-1930s. A leader in this field, like Kinsey and Krafft-Ebbing, and a champion of sex education. Authored books on a variety of scientific and literary subjects. Convinced the poets Ernest Dowson and William Butler Yeats, both of whom had had prior experience with opium and hashish, to try mescaline, which he imported to England from North America in the late 1890s. The results were published in his 1911 book The World of Dreams.
Peruvian Eugenio Buona, whose real name is Francisco Vallebuona Cardenas, has published various volumes of poetry and, in 1966, the collection of stories Mercedes Rueda, which has been said to be characterized by a “direct prose, almost blood-curdling for its rawness; heterodox and insolent.” Buona, along with the poet Marco Antonio Corcuera, published between 1967 and 1969 a beautiful review dedicated to verse. Since 1968, he has written the weekly column “At the Earth’s Roof” for the Daily Express of Lima. “Ayahuasca” derives from his book 3 Stories and 60 Chronicles.
H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells (1866–1946). British historian, social philosopher, and gaslamp era writer of speculative fiction; founder, with Jules Verne, of modern science fiction. Wrote The Time Machine; The Invisible Man; The War of the Worlds; The Shape of Things to Come; The Mind at the End of its Tether; and The Island of Dr. Moreau. Grew increasingly pessimistic as he aged. A social crusader, he became, in later years, a sort of secular prophet and public advisor on the ills of the world, and a self-appointed voice of scientific thought and rationalist futurism.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864). Scion of old Puritan stock, Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and spent most of his life in the state, from the Berkshires to Boston. All his life, he was plagued by guilt over the part played by his ancestors in the Salem witch trials, and other acts of religious intolerance. He spent several months at the Brook Farm Utopian commune, and was acquainted not only with Herman Melville but with the principals of the Transcendentalist circle including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott. He took a job as surveyor for the port of Salem, and worked for awhile at the Boston customs house. He wrote a biography of his Bowdoin College classmate and later U. S. president Franklin Pierce, and died while sojourning in the White Mountains with this old confrère. About two years before his death, he aged very suddenly; his hair turned white, he suffered nosebleeds, and inexplicably became obsessed with scrawling the figure “64” on slips of paper. A profound moral allegorist renowned for such books as The Scarlet Letter; The House of Seven Gables; and Twice-Told Tales, Hawthorne was an inimitably insightful psychologist and masterful proponent of the symbolic romance.
Gaston Danville (1870–?) was the pseudonym of a certain A. Blocq, a Frenchman about whom little else is known, except that he authored Infinities of Flesh, which appeared in 1892, followed by Stories (1893); Psychology of Love (1894); Towards Death (1897); Magician Lover (1902); Perfumes of the Voluptuous (1905); and Magnetism and Spiritism (1908).
(Henri René Albert) Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893).
De Maupassant’s mother, while pregnant, was convinced she was about to give birth to a genius. During his early teens, he saved eccentric English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne from drowning and was rewarded with the gift of a mummified hand. A protégé of Gustave Flaubert, he was expelled from school for writing obscene verse. Always a lady-killer, he maintained a lifetime of dalliances with women; a propensity possibly inherited from his playboy father. During his early adulthood, he used to pick up girls at a favorite Parisian dive, La Grenouillere, for one-night- stands, and from one of these he contracted the venereal disease which eventually led to his derangement. A languidly handsome yachtsman and man about town, he eventually attempted suicide, was interned in a sanitarium, and died insane from the advanced stages of tertiary syphilis. Called by Hippolyte Taine “the sad bull,” he was addicted to ether, like Jean Lorrain.
Jean Lorrain (1855–1906). Nom de plume of Paul Duval, flamboyant homosexual and social butterfly of Belle Époque France. Addicted to ether, Duval was the author of Affidavits of an Ether-Drinker; Masks; and Imbiber of Souls, collections of fantastic tales, and of the decadent novel Monsieur de Phocas. Like Gautier, he was a celebrity journalist of prodigious output but, unlike Gautier, he offended just about everyone. He fought a pistol duel with Marcel Proust, and was challenged at one time or another by Guy de Maupassant, the journalist René Maizeroy, and Paul Verlaine. He was once sued for defamation of character and, on another occasion, for outraging public morals. He was an etheromane and an aesthetic upstart, and cultivated about himself a legend of amorality, provocation, and decadence. He had a childhood crush on Judith Gautier, daughter of the famous Romantic writer and wife of Catulle Mendès, and he never outgrew this infatuation. He also doted on Sarah Bernhardt, who put up with his adoration but kept him at arm’s length, refusing to act in any of the several plays he wrote for her. He hung around with the Hydropaths, a clique of literateurs in bohemian Montmartre and, later, at a salon, met Barbey d’Aurevilly, under the sway of whose ideology of “dandyism” he enthusiastically fell. He knew everyone who was anyone in fin de siècle Paris, where he did the rounds with the likes of Rothschilde and Colette. He “wrote vicious reviews ... in which he cultivated a scathing rhetoric,” as one scholar has put it. At various spas he took water cures for his tuberculosis and degenerated digestive system (ulcerated by ether), and died from a perforated colon after giving himself an enema.
Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869). English physician and lexicographer who spent 50 years compiling his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, first published in 1852. This opus went through 28 editions by the time of his death, and has been regularly reprinted ever since. Roget was an erudite and decorous philologist and inventor who practiced medicine in London and kept thorough, blow-by-blow records of his experiments with laughing gas.
Benjamin Paul Blood (1832–1919). American poet and socialist thinker. Author of Pluriverse and of the curious tract The Anesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy (1874), in which the state of consciousness induced by the inhalation of nitrous oxide is described as one of “primal prestige and appalling solemnity” leading to an “initiation into the secret of life.”
Maurice Level (1875–1926). French sportsman, bon vivant, and knight of the Legion of Honor, Level was a writer of the Human Document school, many of whose stories, with their ironic twists and “shocker” endings, were adapted by the Grand Guignol Theater in Paris. A trained surgeon and brain specialist, he was condemned by a skating accident in Switzerland in 1910 to a life of limited physical exertion, and he gave up medicine for literature, eventually authoring more than 700 stories, some of which are collected in English translation in Tales of Mystery and Horror (1920).
Horacio Quiroga (1878–1937). Like Edgar Allan Poe, his illustrious forebear and idol, Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga was a negative romantic. He spent most of his maturity in Misiones, a jungle district at the corners of Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil, where he tried to establish a small plantation of cotton while composing his darkly pessimistic tales of modern gothicism, and periodically dabbling in drugs, clinically noting the effects in detailed personal journals.
Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). Bisexual English occultist who called himself ‘Master Therion,’ ‘Great Beast 666,’ and ‘The Mage.’ Variously a pornographer, alpinist, great white hunter, poetaster, cult-leader, necromancer, self-styled prophet, yogi, and fakir, he climbed Kangchenjunga (K2) in the Himalayas, and scaled volcanic peaks in Mexico, atop one of which he lived for three weeks on champagne. One of his homosexual followers committed suicide, and he was known to drive his female consorts insane: three of his wives were institutionalized. He was a chess champion, a spy, is supposed to have shot two Indians in Calcutta, masqueraded as an Egyptian sultan, a Scottish laird, A Free Irish, and a Russian count. One of his mistresses, whom he called “scarlet women,” stabbed him with a carving knife. He set up the Abbey of Thelema in Sicily, from which he was expelled by Mussolini when one of his acolytes died from enteric fever after drinking the blood of a sacrificed cat during a Black Mass. He became persona non grata in Italy and France. He was a votive, along with leading members of the Irish literary renaissance, of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and used drugs—opium, hashish, morphine, ether, and cocaine in prodigious quantities. Was a guru to L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, staged his own suicide in Hell’s Mouth, Sicily, and later turned up in Berlin for an exhibition of his paintings. He promoted “elixir of life” pills which contained his own semen. He filed his incisors to points, and defecated on carpets because he considered his feces holy. All in all, a huckster nonpareil in the mystico-occult humbug tradition of Cheiro, Mesmer, Blavatsky, and Gurdjieff. In 1910 Crowley went to the Detroit headquarters of the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company to secure their newly developed extract of peyote, which he brought back to England and used to turn on the audiences at his lectures. He sampled every drug available as a vehicle for transcendence. He designed a new Tarot deck, and abridged the I Ching; he claimed to communicate telepathically with a Higher Intelligence ... etc., etc....
Fred V. Williams. San Francisco crime reporter circa 1920. Author of The Hop-Heads: Personal Experiences Among the Users of Dope in the San Francisco Underworld—“Police Gazette”–style portraits of the daily lives of junkies.
Edward Levinstein (1831–1882). German medical historian who was one of the first to make a systematic examination, in Die Morphiumsucht (1878), of the emerging problem of morphine addiction.
Jordan Jones. American poet, essayist, translator, and publisher; the author of Sand & Coal and The Wheel and editor of the lauded but alas now defunct avant-garde journal Bakunin. His translations from René Daumal’s The Anti-Heaven have appeared in a variety of magazines and in chapbook form. “Angel Rivera and the Sidewalk Jesus” is an excerpt from a picaresque novel-in-progress. He is the editor of Coyote Arts Press.
Greg Boyd is an American novelist, translator, and belle lettrist who created the celebrated but now-defunct Asylum magazine and founded Asylum Arts Publications. A publisher and gifted factotum of the book arts, Boyd also makes woodcuts, and illustrates, edits and designs fine limited editions. Among his own books are Carnival Aptitude; The Nambuli Papers; and Horny (all from Asylum Arts).
San Francisco litterateur m. i. blue is a regular participant in area poetry readings and spoken word events, and has published sporadically in a rich variety of literary journals. He has said that he “longs to live as an old dog sleeps: deeply, twitching with dreams.”
Count Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a landed Russian nobleman who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Following a mid-life spiritual crisis, he adopted a posture of asceticism, rejecting private property, renouncing material possessions and instituting schools for the education of his serfs. He became increasingly known as a social philosopher and reformer, and espoused severely moralistic views in accordance with his beliefs as a born-again Christian. Prior to this transformation, Tolstoy had been a rather profligate youth, given to gambling and carousing and, when his professors wrote him off as ineducable, he left university and embarked on a brief military career. Like fellow Russian aristocrats-turned-anarchists Prince Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin, Tolstoy’s political philosophy was influenced by the ideas of radical French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and he fervently advocated non-violence, rejected government authority and official church doctrine, championed oppressed peasants against the entrenched feudal system which still prevailed in Russia during his lifetime, and embraced pacifism and vegetarianism. Best known as the author of the novels Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich; and War and Peace, Tolstoy also penned morally prescriptive texts intended to cure social ills. Some of these are The Kingdom of God is Within You; What is to be Done?; The Dream Shattered Sixty Years Ago; and Why do Men Stupefy Themselves? The latter is a sympathetic document compassionately treating the general subject of intoxication as an avenue of hedonism and personal escape, as well as a metaphysical problem brought about by the inner emptiness men feel as a result of spiritual poverty and affliction.
Michael Stephans is an American author of such works of poetry and prose as Bright Size Life; Mythematics; and The Color of Stones. In addition to his literary endeavors, he has pursued a career as a composer and musician, having performed with such jazz and pop greats as Cal Tjader, Charlie Byrd, David Bowie, and The Rolling Stones.
