The Road of Excess: A History of Writers
on Drugs
by Marcus Boon
Cambridge,
Mass. and London, England: Harvard, 2002
ISBN 0-674-00914-2. $29.95
Reviewed by George Gessert
ggessert@igc.org
As an art student I learned to use oils, acrylics,
vodka, marijuana, and mescaline. I also tried video and morning glory
seeds. My education in art was partly an education in drugs, which was
rather common in the 1960s, and probably is even more common today.
What is the significance of drug use among artists? According to Marcus
Boon in The Road of Excess, visual artists, writers and musicians, by
experimenting with drugs and by recording and reflecting on drug experiences,
have aligned drugs with scientific-materialistic culture in such a way
that they have become indispensible to its functioning.
The word "drugs" has several meanings, two of which are important
in The Road of Excess. Drugs can mean illegal consciousness-altering
substances. According to this marijuana is a drug, but tobacco is not.
A second, less politically-circumscribed meaning is substances that
people take to alter consciousness, irrespective of legal status. Boon
recognizes both meanings of the word. His primary concern, however,
is not politics, but the effects of consciousness-altering substances
on writing and culture. In this review, I will use the word drugs in
the broad sense.
According to Boon, modern constructs of drug use began in late 18th
century Germany. German romanticism was a rebellion against scientific-materialistic
culture, but a rebellion rooted in the belief system it rejected. A
key feature of German romanticism was search for transcendence without
resort to traditional religion. Novalis, who had tuberculosis and used
opium medicinally, came to believe that sickness and opium, which arose
from nature, could lead the soul beyond nature. "All sicknesses
resemble sin in that they are transcendences," he wrote. He associated
his own sickness with "excess sensibility", or extravagent
soulfulness which, like opium, was a way of becoming God, hence a sin.However,
sickness and opium use were also ways of perceiving the world anew.This
interpretation of drug experience, as a material path that partakes
of sin and death, but transforms perceptions, and can renew life, has
been with us in one form or another ever since.
Novalis sought a realm beyond nature. English romanticism tended to
be less idealistic, having arisen as much in reaction to the horrors
of industrialism as to philosophical materialism. However, in Britain
drugs answered many of the same needs as in Germany. De Quincy tried
opium because he suffered from neuralgia, one of those vague 19th century
afflictions that may or may not have been psychosomatic. The drug relieved
his symptoms, but also produced sublime visions, which he found irresistable.
In Confessions of an English Opium Eater he evokes the German
romantics, and presents opium as a gateway to hells and paradises free
of the theological trappings of institutional religion. De Quincy also
used opium to enhance the pleasures of music and social life, but even
his recreational use partook of the sublime, because of extreme highs
and lows, and addiction.
During the 19th century many writers and artists experimented with opium,
and after 1840 with hashish, and coca. Boon mentions Coleridge, Delacroix,
Daumier, Sir Walter Scott, Poe, Baudelaire, Balzac, Alexandre Dumas,
Rimbaud, Conrad Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Yeats, among many
others. Opium and hashish not only tied romanticism to science, but
spanned Europe and its colonies, infusing into Western consciousness
molecules of the mysterious East. Records of opium and hashish dreams
during this period are overrun with Orientalist imagery.
Science added to the possibilities. By 1850 surgery and dental work
often involved laboratory-derived anaesthetics. Emerson established
the Transcedentalist position on anaesthetics (and all drugs), as "quasi-mechanical
substitutes for the true nectar", but when Oliver Wendell Holmes
experienced chloroform on a visit to his dentist, he was thrilled by
the philosophical possibilities. Thoreau and Margaret Fuller also had
chloroform experiences, but were more circumspect. Other writers explored
ether, and William James considered nitrous oxide a door to the Hegelian
absolute. In The Varieties of Religious Experience James wrote "Sobriety
diminishes, discriminates and says no; drunkenness expands, unites,
and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in
man."
Most nineteenth century writers conceptualized drug experience as travel
through exotic and dangerous realms. Such travel was only for people
outside of ordinary life: the desperately poor, the sick, aristocrats,
and artists. The height of Western opium culture was in early 20th century
Paris. Among the smokers were Debussy, Satie, Apollinaire, Alfred Jarry,
Colette, Proust, and the young Picasso. According to Boon, this was
a culture devoted to "pleasure, passivity, control, measure,"
whose core values were 19th century. World War I was the
watershed. It put an end to the aesthetization of opium and other drugs,
and brought the contemporary legal-medical apparatus into play. Prohibition
in one form or another has been with us ever
since.
After World War I, a culture devoted to power, speed, and death emerged.
Its drugs, such as morphine and heroin, were stronger than opium, darker,
and more dangerous. The image of the drug user as an aristocrat or aesthete
was replaced by new stereotypes: innocents seduced and ruined, evil
Orientals, potent blacks, human parasites, zombies. Drugs became weapons
in race and class wars, yet the typical addict in the 1920s remained
the same as in the 19th century, a middle-aged or elderly person who
had become habituated in the course of medical
use. Boon writes that "There has been no major advance in the narcotic
literature [writing about opium and its derivatives] since the 1950s
- or even the 1930s ... [because] ... the situation of addicts is roughly
the same as it has been since World War I."
Boon divides drugs into five major categories: narcotics, that is, opium
and its derivatives; anesthetics, such as ether and sodium pentathol;
cannabis, especially marijuana and hashish; stimulants, which include
coca, cocaine, crack, caffeine, amphetamines, and methamphetamines;
and psychedelics, which include peyote, LSD, psilosybin, DMT, and in
certain circumstances hashish and opium. Some artists specialize. Paul
Bowles and Louis Armstrong favored cannabis, while Jules Verne, Ibsen,
Zola, Victor Hugo, and Rodin preferred coca. However, many artists use
a variety of drugs. For example, Proust used ether, belladonna, aconite,
opium, morphine, heroin, barbituates, caffeine, and injections of adrenhalin.
(We dont know what was in that madeleine.)
Many writers create under the influence. Kerouac wrote Mexico City Blues
and Doctor Sax on marijuana, and On the Road on benzedrine. Ginsburg
wrote the second half of Howl on peyote. Sartre took barbituates, caffeine,
and corydrane (a mixture of amphetamine and aspirin), and wrote The
Critique of Dialectical Reason "under the effects of contradictory
drugs." In 1963 and 1964 Philip Dick wrote eleven novels while
on Semoxydrine, a methamphetamine. One of these, The Three Stigmata
of Palmer Eldrich, is among Dicks most powerful works. W. H. Auden
used benezdrine every day for twenty years, beginning in 1938. Voltaire
is said to have consumed 72 cups of coffee a day, but the first writer
to fully exploit caffeine was Balzac. He recognized that to make a living
from writing, quantity of words was at least as important as quality.
Coffee fosters relentless production through what Boon calls "technologically
assisted dictation". Balzac reportedly consumed 50,000 cups over
his lifetime and apparently used coffee to write almost all of his works.
Coffee brings up a question: why ask which works of literature were
created under the influence of drugs? Isnt the more relevant question:
which works were not created under the influence? The list might be
short, at least after World War II. I should say that Im writing
this review on Mountain Dew, a mixture of caffeine and refined sugar.
Although the literature of drugs contains many instances of nonmaterial
transcendence, the imagery and techniques of what Boon calls "chemically
configured" writing tends to favor a purely material outlook. What
drugs offer is not escape from matter, but control, reevaluation, and
reconciliation. Drugs achieve this by dissolving rigid or overly simple
ways of organizing experience, and by flooding consciousness with new
constructs (or, in the case of anesthetics like sodium pentathol, by
revealing the nonexistence that coexists with the flow of consciousness.)
This may explain why many mammals and birds seek intoxication: new ways
of looking at things sometimes improve the odds.
Today people take drugs not only to experience extraordinary states
of consciousness, but to feel normal. Prozac is only one of a host of
consciousness-smoothers. I read in the newspaper recently that an epidemic
of depression is sweeping the world, costing billions in lost productivity
every quarter, so antidepressents may be the wave of the future. Boon
speculates little about the future, although he mentions Brave New
World, A Scanner Darkly, and The Three Stimata of Palmer
Eldrich, all of which envision societies shaped by drugs. He might have
added Stanislaw Lems The Futurological Congress, in which
an invisible world government dispenses drugs through air and water
to create mass hallucinations of everything from food and social mobility,
to free choice, and, for those rare souls who seek it, drug-free reality.
The Road of Excess contains a few errors. According to Boon the
concept of addiction did not exist before the 19th century. However,
addiction was well known much earlier in the East. Boon writes that
recreational drug use was invented by DeQuincy, but in Europe and the
Americas tea, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco were well-established as
recreational drugs long before the 19th century. The Road of Excess
might have been strengthened with a discussion of the British opium
trade, which could have provided perspective on opium use in Europe.
However, here Boon may have faced a choice between saying almost nothing,
and writing another book, given the enormity of British crimes in Asia,
and their unfamiliarity to most readers. Fortunately these omissions
and errors do not compromise The Road of Excess as a whole. This
is an important book about the role of drugs in our culture. The
Road of
Excess is also quietly hopeful. At least, thats how I interpret
Boons story of ongoing exploration, experimentation, and discovery.