Book Review: The Last Opium Den

The Last Opium Den by Nick Tosches is more an essay than a book. It runs just 74 pages, and those pages measure just four by six inches with margins one inch wide. Like Harry Frankfurt’s short but dense On Bullshit, it’s a hardbound essay for the end table that can be read in an afternoon. But unlike Frankfurt’s popular pocket book, I enjoyed reading Tosches’ essay.

Tosches wrote journalism, biographies, and poetry between the late 1970s and early 2000s, and was a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. He is best known for his biography of Jerry Lee Lewis (said to be “the best rock ‘n’ roll biography ever written” by Rolling Stone magazine) and was prone to writing profiles, especially of complex characters—those who danced in both (lime)light and shadow. The Last Opium Den is essentially a profile of what no longer exists in the world: the opium den. How can you profile what doesn’t exist? You document your search for it, which is what Tosches does in this petite but reverential travelogue.

For the uninitiated, an opium den is exactly what it sounds like: a dusky backroom in which patrons smoke opium. Prevalent in the 18th and 19th centuries, especially in China, these rooms were sometimes disreputable, sometimes dainty, but always dens of iniquity. As Tosches writes:

Hua-yan jian, they were called: flower-smoke rooms. The flowers were courtesans; the smoke was opium. The flower-smoke room: the celestial perfumed salon of timeless serenity where one could suck on paradise while being paradisiacally sucked.

The flower-smoke rooms, which thrived in Shanghai and Hong Kong from the nineteenth century until the early 1930s, were of all sorts, from lowly brothels to chambered quarters of sybaritic splendor. The vast majority of them, I have been assured, were of the former sort.

My friend told me that the last and lowliest of the hua-yan jian had shut down many years ago. As for even the most low-down, humblest, and flowerless hole-in-the-wall remnant of an opium den, there was not one left in all of Hong Kong.

Though Europe and America were home to opium dens in the 1800s, they had long been extinguished by 2001 when Tosches took up the search, so he bypassed the Western world and went straight to Asia. After exhausting the trails in China, which proved unsuccessful, he heads to Thailand, where pimps of twelve- and thirteen-year-old lady-boys welcome him with alacrity. The hero’s journey is fraught with diversions. Will this author, who is clearly comfortable with the fringe of society and his own primal urges, digress?

The Last Opium Den is the romantic ravings of a writer in his late years, the soliloquy of an American man of sophisticated age and taste with means to gratify his urge for the mysterious and lost art of smoking opium in its unadulterated form and method. These ravings are not deranged, however. They are lavish and luxurious, crackling with a sustained lyricism that befits the beloved subject.

So, then. Why opium? That’s why. And why the opium den? The answer to that can be expressed in one word: romance.

Visions of dark, brocade-curtained, velvet-cushioned places of luxurious decadence, filled with the mingled smoke and scents of burning joss sticks and the celestial, forbidden, fabulous stuff itself. Wordless, kowtowing servants. Timelessness. Sanctuary. Lovely loosened limbs draped from the high-slit cheongsams of recumbent exotic concubines of sweet intoxication. Dreams within dreams. Romance.

Opium and literature have maintained a romantic relationship so long that Wikipedia has an entry devoted to it, entitled “Opium and Romanticism.” Truth is, you’ll find more about the history of opium on Wikipedia—and its relation to literature—than you will in Tosches’ essay. There are other texts about opium better suited for the history buff, the art collector, the backyard gardener, the garage chemist.

But The Last Opium Den should appeal to lovers of both Word and Substance, even if opium remains for them a fantasy. Absinthe, wine, and tobacco are sufficient partners, if you’ve ever been in love with them. Perhaps cocaine qualifies. And I wouldn’t rule out psychedelics. Hell, wherever there be doorways to the other side, you’ll find a creative subclass of the human species gathered there—musicians, writers, painters—some going in and out, some begging with languor for access, some languishing at the threshold from a return trip. Do you need to have spent time lingering in those doorways yourself to appreciate Tosches’ essay? Probably. Then again, perhaps the book will give you a taste, and that will be enough.

If you have spent time there, however, you know that although such pathways offer escape, that is not the point. And that is what Tosches reminds us. Whether or not it begins as a running-away-from, the descent into those chemical warrens inevitably culminates in a deeper experience of life by giving one access to other forms of consciousness, altered states of mind. That’s to say nothing of the colorful consequences that can accompany such pursuits and enrich the lives of those who’d be damned. Intoxication, in the end, may be the best mode of intersubjectivity, the best means by which we access other lives, the desire for which is grounded in a lust for living. For those who don’t use drugs, there are books.

My limousine pulled up outside. It looked like a hearse. I decided to live. That is the ever elusive point: the point that eludes us all too often unto the grave.

That’s how Tosches’ story begins, and how all good stories begin. But, in case you want to read this little literary eulogy, I won’t tell you how it ends.