A LITERATURE UNDER THE INFLUENCE

Writers' Odysseys into the Drug World

"Confessions of an English Opium Eater" may be the best-known
narrative in the rich history of drug literature, but Thomas De
Quincey is clearly not the only author to mine the depths of
drug-inspired writing. In Marcus Boon's ambitious book, "The Road of
Excess," De Quincey is but one player in a massive ensemble of
notable writers whose work is informed by their use - or study - of
mind-altering substances.

In an impressive display of scholarship, Boon meticulously chronicles
the connection between writers and drugs. From Samuel Taylor Coleridge
to Jack Kerouac, writers' personal odysseys into the dizzying world of
drugs are depicted with a novelist's eye for detail. Boon, an
assistant professor of English at York University in Toronto, creates
order of this heretofore largely uncharted history in five
well-rounded essays examining how literature has been influenced by
narcotics, anesthetics, cannabis, stimulants, and psychedelics.

Through liberal use of anecdotes, Boon helps transform what could have
been a dry recitation of cultural and literary artifacts into a feast
of historical surprises. In the opening pages, Voltaire, besieged by
pain on his deathbed in 1778, becomes delirious after taking opium.
Although his death could not be attributed to the opium alone (the
cause was most likely prostate cancer), the drug was clearly being
used in ample doses well before De Quincey so boldly publicized it in
his autobiographical "Confessions," published in 1821.

Drawing from yet another corner of obscure drug history, Boon notes
that Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), a noted physician and grandfather of
Charles, also had his day with opium long before De Quincey first took
the drug. The elder Darwin not only prescribed opium as an antidote to
hundreds of ailments but also wrote poetry about the poppy and other
plants in his "The Loves of the Plants" (1789). During that same
period, a fellow physician and the author of the widely read medical
text "Elementa Medicinae," John Brown (1735-1788), also touted the
medicinal virtues of opium. Offering another shade of context to the
opium saga, Boon reminds us that even William Shakespeare cast the
drug in the pages of "Othello."

In consistently engaging writing, Boon also describes the
popularization of morphine. Named after Morpheus, the god of dreams,
morphine first entered the lexicon of drug literature in 1805, when a
German pharmacist named Friedrich Serturner recorded his experiences
in taking the drug orally. Even the English poet Elizabeth Barrett
Browning partook of the oral morphine tradition that continued
throughout the first half of the 19th century. With the discovery of
the hypodermic syringe in 1850, morphine quickly won a following as an
injected drug.

Boon introduces a modern sensibility in noting that the concept of
addiction did not emerge until the 1870s, when German psychologists
identified some of the more lugubrious effects caused by frequent drug
use. Soon, the notion garnered support in France, where such notables
as Prince Otto von Bismarck, General Georges Boulanger, and the
neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot were already addicted to morphine. In
1877, one of the first addiction specialists, Edouard Levinstein,
offered his "authoritative" - yet short-sighted - opinion by noting
that morphine had no long-lasting, detrimental effects on one's
ability to function.

Though Boon could have easily focused his book more narrowly on, say, the
impact of drugs on 19th-century literature, it's gratifying to see that
he's given us much more than a mere historical account. The modern-day
heroin chronicler Ann Marlowe, author of the 1999 drug classic "How to
Stop Time: Heroin From A to Z," is featured in the book. To demonstrate
the influence of drugs on 20th-century writers, Boon introduces, among
others, the Beat writers Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, whose drug-induced
writing comes closer than any other written work to capturing the wild and
ultimately indefinable nature of the human thought process.

If one reads between the lines, Boon's chapter on stimulants presents
us with a compelling explanation for today's pervasive Starbucks
culture. Much like our highly commercialized coffee hangouts, the
early coffeehouses promoted what Boon so aptly labels a "culture of
conversation." But in the private lives of individual writers, the
almighty stimulant served a more utilitarian function. We learn that
Honore de Balzac, who was said to have consumed 50,000 cups of coffee
in his lifetime, attributed much of his speedy writing technique to
its effects. Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jean-Paul Sartre
also relied heavily on coffee.

In setting the stage for cocaine's emergence, Boon points out that
exhaustion was a frequent complaint among cocaine users when the drug
was first popularized in the 1880s. As evidence of its salutary
effects, sober medical accounts noted that cocaine delivered a
powerful form of relief from fatigue. Sigmund Freud praised cocaine
even more enthusiastically, noting that the drug cured morphine
addiction as well as an assortment of medical ailments. Later, of
course, it became apparent that cocaine was, in fact, addictive - a
pesky detail that forced Freud to reconsider his zealous promotions of
the drug.

Though it is a scholarly endeavor, Boon's new work reads more like a
wide-eyed, joyous romp through a literary statesman's funhouse, where
each room contains a masterfully told tale of opium or morphine,
peyote or LSD, coffee or cocaine. We see a gallery of our most prized
literary lions, many of them stripped bare of their pristine
reputations. It is mind-teasing exercise that is well worth the trip.

The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs

By Marcus Boon

Harvard University, 320 pp., illustrated, $29.95