On the Road with Penguin Classics · Penguin Random House UK

Confessions of an English Opium Eater with Will Self

September 29, 2022·1 hr 16 min·5 clips

Will Self describes the psychological terror of heroin addiction from personal experience while standing on Soho streets.

Shaftesbury Avenue does a lot of the work here. The episode puts the listener where De Quincey imagined his first encounter with the drug, then lets the street's later reputation darken the picture. The walk is not scenery. The history of scoring heroin there in the 60s and 70s gives the conversation a way to talk about dependence as a body problem and a mental ritual. The guest talks for long stretches, and the episode is better for it. He describes addiction as a grim closeness to choice: relief seems near, but it also seems to belong to something outside control. Magical thinking slips in through a small example, avoiding cracks in the pavement, and becomes a plain, nasty model for the bargains an addict makes with chance, dealers, and the body. Crowley arrives through that same route. The conversation connects Alastair Crowley's occult self-invention with drug memoirs, autobiography, class performance, and the odd theatre of calling someone the Beast. De Quincey stays in the background, pulling later writers into his orbit as they turn intoxication, dependence, and self-myth into books that are confession and performance at once. The tone is calm, even when the material is not. Burrows gets the last word, with Junkie and the airport dream from My Education leaving him shut out by a cold bureaucratic figure. The ending stings a little. Education means appetite, fear, and the stories people make out of both.

As heard by us

A sharp literary walk from De Quincey's opium reveries to Crowley, Burroughs, addiction, myth, and street memory.

De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater anchors a walk through literary addiction, beginning where opium reverie meets Shaftesbury Avenue's later life as heroin ground.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Walk Shaftesbury Avenue where De Quincey, Crowley, and Burroughs turn the street into a haunted literary map.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from On the Road with Penguin Classics