The Dedalus Book of Absinthe E-Book

Phil Baker

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 402

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

High acclaimed and the definitive social history of absinthe

Das E-Book The Dedalus Book of Absinthe wird angeboten von Dedalus und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

Praise for The Dedalus Book of Absinthe:

“James Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake described a character as ‘absintheminded’, while lesser punsters spoke of absinthe making ‘the tart grow fonder’. It reaches across time, this ‘potent concoction of eccentricity and beauty’. Alluring, then informative and witty.”

Time Out

“Dwarfish Bohemian psychopaths in stove-pipe hats, ageless Louisiana vampires, Victorian books bound in human skin, fin-de-siècle brothels, strange Goth subcultures and lice- ridden poets: yep, it’s a history of absinthe. There’s cultural history by the bucket load, possibly the worst Victorian poetry ever to have seen the light of day for a century, along with the full story of today’s absinthe boom … An indispensable guide for the contemporary absintheur.”

Class: the magazine of bar culture

“literate and cheerfully squalid … a model of popular cultural history … brilliant”

Gary Lachman in The Fortean Times

“engaging, curious, and gruesomely hilarious”

Andrew Jefford in The Evening Standard

“For someone who actually likes the beastly stuff, Phil Baker writes very well and drily … I greatly recommend the tasting notes of current brands at the end …”

Philip Hensher in The Spectator

“informative and hair-raising”

Roy Herbert in The New Scientist

“… packed with enjoyable anecdotes and eccentric absintheurs, and reveals why it has been the most demonised of all alcoholic drinks”

The Sunday Times

“Absinthe is a brilliant book full of arresting facts and new illuminations.”

Gay Times

“Phil Baker’s consistently enjoyable study is meticulously researched, liberal with its quotations, comprehensive in its range, and light in its telling.”

The Literary Review

“This is all great stuff, and sets us up for the extended coda of the modern absinthe revival – both in its American gothic variant of New Orleans and Anne Rice vampires and its British co-option into the hell-bent twenty-first century drink-drug cocktail culture. Turning finally from the drinkers to the drink, we get the bottom line on whether the wormwood in absinthe makes it a more trippy intoxication that other spirits, or more toxic (or, as it turns out, both). Rounded out with an appendix of classic absinthe texts, another of road-tests of the currently available brands, and plenty of notes and sources, this is a very appealing package – tastier, definitely cheaper and probably more illuminating than the drink itself.’’

Mike Jay in Black Ice

“One of the most fascinating themes in this witty, erudite and desperately poignant study is that of the cultural war waged between England and France at the end of the 19th century. English moralists would wax not very eloquent on the sapping effects of absinthe on the susceptible French soul, always uncomfortably aware that the French were producing writers and artists of a calibre unmatched in England.”

Murrough O’Brien in the Independent on Sunday

“Still, as alcohol, absinthe is harsh, potent stuff. If only the booze went down as easily as the book. The Dedalus Book of Absinthe, ably written by Phil Baker, is a well-researched and entertaining wealth of fact and fancy, anecdotes and information about the Green Fairy. Interspersed with historical accounts of absinthe production and legislation are debauched accounts excerpted from the writings of famous debauchees, among them Hemingway, Picasso and Van Gogh. Also surveyed are the rituals of libation, including digressions on the appropriate hardware.”

Prague Pill

“This splendid book also discusses the rituals and modus operandi of absinthe drinking, with a short chapter on the medical properties and effects of the drink, and includes a collection of apposite French poetry and prose. It also includes a useful appendix where current brands are tested and given a ‘a Dowson rating’. All in all, a most entertaining and informative read, for which Mr. Baker is to be commended.”

The Chap Magazine

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Publishing History

First published by Dedalus in 2001, reprinted 2002

First premium edition 2006

First e-book edition 2011

The Dedalus Book of Absinthe © Phil Baker 2001

The right of Phil Baker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988

Printed in Finland by Bookwell

Typeset by Refine Catch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.

THE AUTHOR

Phil Baker reviews regularly for a number of papers including The Sunday Times and The Times Literary Supplement. The author of a book on Beckett and a short history of psychogeography, “Secret City”, he has just completed a biography of Dennis Wheatley and is researching a study of the artist, Austin Osman Spare.

CONTENTS

Prologue Three Coffins in the Morning

Chapter One What does absinthe mean?

Vice – Marie Corelli – the Sublime – Aleister Crowley – George Saintsbury – the part for the whole

Chapter Two The 1890s

Enoch Soames at the Café Royal – Fleet Street nights – Arthur Symons – Oscar Wilde – the backlash – The Green Carnation – Smithers and the Savoy

Chapter Three The Life and Death of Ernest Dowson

Stranger in a Strange Land – faithful in his fashion – “like a protoplasm in the embryo of a troglodyte” – Jekyll and Hyde – a night out in the East End – Paris and religion – peacefully in Catford – Yeats is mistaken

Chapter Four Meanwhile in France

Alfred de Musset – Baudelaire – Verlaine – Rimbaud

Chapter Five Genius Unrewarded

Communication with Other Planets – Strindberg the alchemist – Villiers de L’Isle Adam – Alfred Jarry – a Man of Letters

Chapter Six From Antiquity to the Green Hour

The useful herb – bitterness – a tonic is invented – the Bat d’Af – bourgeois habits under the Second Empire – the Green Hour – Bohemia – inspiration

Chapter Seven Before the Ban

Bad scenes at the Absinthe Hotel – female troubles – Zola, Manet, and Degas – Orpen – absinthe and the workers – ‘it kills you but it makes you live’ – absinthism and the spectre of degeneration – sad news about Toulouse-Lautrec – Picasso – not before time

Chapter Eight After the Ban

Nostalgia – death in America – Hemingway – Harry Crosby – American Gothic – the English are amused

Chapter Nine The Absinthe Revival

Prague – The Idler – Johnny Depp has need of a crate – an open secret – mixology – the French are not amused – the birth of La Fée – the Charenton Omnibus revisited – laissez faire – dissenting voices – a word from Mr. Social Control

Chapter Ten The Rituals of Absinthe

Fire and water – the louche – modus operandi – a pleasure in itself – the absinthe professors – the language of absinthe – more classic methods – Valentin has a better idea

Chapter Eleven What Does Absinthe Do?

A different experience – placebos and learned intoxication – absinthism revisited – thujone – the strange case of Vincent Van Gogh – recreational wormwood abuse – the mystery solved – coca wine and the speedball effect – ‘alcohol kills you slowly’

Appendix One Some absinthe texts

Appendix Two Modern brands tested

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

Toulouse-Lautrec’s absinthe cane. Photo MuséeToulouse-Lautrec, Albi.

Prologue

Three Coffins in the Morning

News of a particularly ugly tragedy swept across the European headlines in the month of August 1905. A thirty one year old man named Jean Lanfray, a Swiss peasant of French stock, had drunk two glasses of absinthe, taken his old army rifle out of the cupboard, and shot his pregnant wife in the head. When his four year old daughter Rose appeared in the doorway to see what was happening, he shot her too. He then went into the room next door, where his two year old daughter Blanche was lying in her cot, and blasted her as well. At this point he tried to shoot himself but botched it, and staggered across the yard to fall asleep holding Blanche’s dead body.

Next morning, now in police custody, Lanfray was taken to see the corpses of his wife and children. They were laid out dead – and here creeps in the kind of horribly picturesque touch that might have pleased Dickens – in three differently sized coffins. It must have been a sobering sight.

The public reaction to the Lanfray case was extraordinary, and it focused on just one detail. Never mind the fact that Lanfray was a thoroughgoing alcoholic, and that in the day preceding the murder he had consumed not only the two absinthes before work – hours, in fact, before the tragedy – but a crème de menthe, a cognac, six glasses of wine to help his lunch down, another glass of wine before leaving work, a cup of coffee with brandy in it, a litre of wine on getting home, and then another coffee with marc in it. Never mind all that, or the fact that he was known to drink up to five litres of wine a day. People were in no doubt. It must have been the absinthe that did it. Within weeks, a petition had been signed by local people. 82,450 of them. They wanted absinthe banned in Switzerland, and in the following year it was. No drink, not even gin in Hogarth’s London, has ever had such a bad reputation.

Chapter One

What Does Absinthe Mean?

L’Absinthe by Benasset. Copyright Musée Carnavalet.

“You tell me you have become an absintheur – do you know what that means?”

Marie Corelli, Wormwood

What does absinthe mean? It is one of the strongest alcoholic drinks ever made, with an additional psychotropic potential from the wormwood it contains, but the idea of absinthe has developed a mythology all of its own. Even the word has a strange ring to it. It barely sounds like an alcoholic drink at all, although it does sound like a substance of some kind, recalling amaranth – a never-fading flower symbolising immortality – and nepenthe, a sorrow-lulling drink or drug, and also a carnivorous plant.

As we shall see, wickedness is often to the fore when people talk about absinthe, particularly in the English-speaking world. But it isn’t quite sin that we’re dealing with here, although it’s somewhere in the same spectrum. Absinthe doesn’t necessarily have the creeping luxuriousness of sin. It’s too powerful, for one thing. Absinthe – particularly in France – has often meant something a bit more brutal and degraded: it isn’t so much about sin as vice.

Having begun as a tonic in Switzerland at the close of the eighteenth century, absinthe became associated with the French colonial army in Algeria by the middle of the nineteenth. Taking a glass of absinthe became respectable and almost universal bourgeois habit under the gilded Second Empire, but by the Empire’s end it was already developing two rather more particular and dangerous meanings. It was associated on the one hand with poets, painters, and Bohemianism in general, and on the other with working class alcoholism (particularly after the horrors of 1870–71, when the Franco-Prussian War was followed by the uprising and annihilation of the revolutionary Paris Commune). The absinthe problem grew worse in the 1880s, when failing grape crops resulted in absinthe becoming cheaper than wine. Eventually these meanings came together at the junction where Bohemia meets Skid Row, spelling out a generalized ruin for artists and workers alike. Absinthe – no longer “the green fairy” but “the green witch” and the “queen of poisons” – became the demonized object of a moral panic. It was by now strongly associated with insanity, and it became popularly known as “the Charenton omnibus”, after the lunatic asylum at Charenton. “If absinthe isn’t banned,” a French prohibition campaigner wrote, “our country will rapidly become an immense padded cell where half the French will be occupied putting straitjackets on the other half.”

The French did ban absinthe in 1915, scapegoating it for the national alcohol problem, and for the French army’s unreadiness for the First World War. But it lived on in Spain and Eastern Europe, and now, in the aftermath of a new fin-de-siècle, absinthe is back, bringing all its connotations with it. For three recent writers on the subject, absinthe has a spread of meanings: for Regina Nadelson it suggests “sweet decadence” and “a history rich in carnal and narcotic connotation”, while as a social problem, it was “the cocaine of the nineteenth century”. For Barnaby Conrad its history is one of “murder, madness and despair”, and it “symbolized anarchy, a deliberate denial of normal life and its obligations”. And for Doris Lanier, absinthe was “associated with inspiration and freedom and became a symbol of French decadence” – so much so that for her the word “absinthe” evokes “thoughts of narcotic intrigue, euphoria, eroticism, and decadent sensuality”.

And in addition to all that, absinthe will always be associated with the old fin-de-siècle: the 1890s of Oscar Wilde and Ernest Dowson at the Café Royal, and the French symbolists who preceded the English Decadence, such as Verlaine and Rimbaud. In London, before the current revival, attitudes to absinthe were always bound up with impressions of Paris, and with what Aleister Crowley says somewhere is “the average Cockney’s idea of Paris as a very wicked place”. It is an attitude to France and all things French that lasted well into the second half of the twentieth century. Take Lou Reed’s line “like a dirty French novel – ooohhh” on the Velvet Underground track ‘Some Kinda Love’, or Patti Smith on the cover of the Smith fanzine White Stuff, posing with a lurid pulp edition of Montmartre writer Francis Carco’s novel Depravity.†

Depravity is certainly the keynote of Marie Corelli’s 1890 anti-absinthe novel Wormwood, a book so sublimely over the top it makes The Phantom of the Opera look like Pride and Prejudice. It tells the story of Gaston Beauvais, a once decent and intelligent man who becomes a complete moral leper through his fatal encounter with absinthe, and brings total ruin upon himself and all around him. “Let me be mad”, cries Beauvais:

… mad with the madness of Absinthe, the wildest, most luxurious madness in the world! Vive la folie! Vive l’amour! Vive l’animalisme! Vive le Diable!

Corelli soon makes it clear that aside from the absinthe, Gaston has another filthy personal problem. He is French.

The morbidness of the modern French mind is well known and universally admitted, even by the French themselves; the open atheism, heartlessness, flippancy, and flagrant immorality of the whole modern French school of thought is unquestioned. If a crime of more than usual cold-blooded atrocity is committed, it generally dates from Paris, or near it; – if a book or a picture is produced that is confessedly obscene, the author or artist is, in nine cases out of ten, discovered to be a Frenchman.

[…] There are, no doubt, many causes for the wretchedly low standard of moral responsibility and fine feeling displayed by the Parisians of today – but I do not hesitate to say that one of those causes is undoubtedly the reckless Absinthe-mania, which pervades all classes, rich and poor alike. Everyone knows that in Paris the men have certain hours set apart for the indulgence of this fatal craze as religiously as Mussulmans have their hours for prayer… The effects of its rapid working on the human brain are beyond all imagination horrible and incurable, and no romanticist can exaggerate the terrific reality of the evil.

It must also be remembered that in the many French cafés and restaurants which have recently sprung up in London, Absinthe is always to be obtained at its customary low price, – French habits, French fashions, French books, French pictures, are particularly favoured by the English, and who can predict that French drug-drinking shall not also become à la mode in Britain?

Having been introduced to “the Fairy with the Green Eyes” by his friend Gessonex, a mad artist, Beauvais embraces destruction by way of a melodramatically horrible descent that takes him to the Paris morgue and the cemetery at Père Lachaise en route. “You tell me you have become an absintheur,” says Gaston’s father “do you know what that means?”

“I believe I do,” I replied indifferently. “It means, in the end, death.”

“Oh, if it meant only death!” he exclaimed passionately… . “But it means more than this – it means crime of the most revolting character – it means brutality, cruelty, apathy, sensuality, and mania! Have you realised the doom you create for yourself…?”

Gaston ends up a veritable Mr Hyde, “a slinking, shuffling beast, half monkey, half man, whose aspect is so vile, whose body is so shaken with delirium, whose eyes are so murderous, that if you met me by chance in the day-time, you would probably shriek for sheer alarm.”

But you will not see me thus – daylight and I are not friends. I have become like a bat or an owl in my hatred of the sun!… At night I live; at night I creep out with the other obscene things of Paris, and by my very presence, add fresh pollution to the moral poisons in the air!”

It is easy to laugh at Marie Corelli, but perhaps she deserves our grudging respect. And she makes absinthe sound like something the Addams Family might crack open at Christmas: this is absinthe as bottled doom.

The history of absinthe has some sobering themes: addiction, ruin, and mortality. Bitter rather than sweet, the aesthetic charge it carries is not so much beautiful as awesome, or sublime in the old sense of the word (the sense in which Edmund Burke used it in his proto-Gothic essay ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’). The sublime involves awe, and feelings not unlike terror. A writer on the Internet mentions the Old Absinthe House at New Orleans and notes that the marble bartop is “allegedly pitted from ancient absinthe spillage. One wonders, though, what absinthe does to the human body if it can eat through solid rock” [my emphasis]. It is probably the water dripping and not the absinthe at all, but the frisson is palpable; people want absinthe to be fearful stuff, with the distinctive form of pleasure that fearful things bring.

Richard Klein has argued that cigarettes are sublime. They have, he says, “a beauty that has never been considered as unequivocally positive; they have always been associated with distaste, transgression and death.” Co-opting Kant into his argument, he defines the sublime as an aesthetic category that includes a negative experience, a shock, a menace, an intimation of mortality, the contemplation of an abyss. If cigarettes were good for you, says Klein, they would not be sublime: but

Being sublime, cigarettes resist all arguments directed at them from the perspective of health and utility. Warning smokers or neophytes of the dangers entices them more powerfully to the edge of the abyss, where, like travellers in a Swiss landscape, they can be thrilled by the subtle grandeur of the perspectives on mortality opened by the little terrors in every puff. Cigarettes are bad. That is why they are good – not good, not beautiful, but sublime.

If we follow Klein’s argument, then absinthe is even more sublime.

So, to contemplate the history of absinthe is a pleasure with a shudder in it. It is not unlike the feeling invoked by Thomas de Quincey in his discussion of what he calls the “dark sublime”. He argues that it is not only great things that are sublime (mountains, or storms), but that small things can be sublime as well, by virtue of their associations: the razor, for example, with which a murder has been committed, or a phial of poison…

But enough of all this ruin and darkness. It is time to call the first witness for the defence.

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) commandeered the legacy of the late nineteenth-century occult revival so effectively that in the twentieth century his name was virtually synonymous with magick. He liked to be known as The Great Beast, after the monster in the Book of Revelations, and when he was vilified by the Beaverbrook newspapers in the 1930s he achieved widespread notoriety as “the wickedest man in the world”. Somerset Maugham knew him in Paris – the character of Oliver Haddo in Maugham’s novel The Magician is based on him – and of the many verdicts on Crowley, Maugham’s is the most succinct: “a fake, but not entirely a fake.”

In Paris, Crowley hung out in the upstairs drinking room at a restaurant called Le Chat Blanc in the Rue d’Odessa (where Maugham met him). This was back in the days when Pernod was a major brand of absinthe, and not the pastis it was later forced to become. Crowley was an inveterate practical joker, and when his long suffering friend Victor Neuburg came to join him in Paris, The Great Beast couldn’t resist giving him some advice:

He had been warned against drinking absinthe and we told him that was quite right, but (we added) many other drinks in Paris are terribly dangerous, especially to a nice young man like you; there is only one really safe, mild, harmless beverage and you can drink as much of that as you like, without running the slightest risk, and what you say when you want it is “Garcon! Un Pernod!”

This advice led to various misadventures. Crowley’s own absinthe drinking took place not in Paris but in New Orleans, where he wrote his absinthe essay ‘The Green Goddess’:

What is there in absinthe that makes it a separate cult? The effects of its abuse are totally distinct from those of other stimulants. Even in ruin and in degradation it remains a thing apart: its victims wear a ghastly aureole all their own, and in their peculiar hell yet gloat with a sinister perversion of pride that they are not as other men.

But we are not to reckon up the uses of a thing by contemplating the wreckage of its abuse. We do not curse the sea because of occasional disasters to our marines, or refuse axes to our woodsmen because we sympathise with Charles the First or Louis the Sixteenth. So therefore as special vices and dangers pertain to absinthe, so also do graces and virtues that adorn no other liquor.

For instance:

It is as if the first diviner of absinthe had been indeed a magician intent upon a combination of sacred drugs which should cleanse, fortify and perfume the human soul.

And it is no doubt that in the due employment of this liquor such effects are easy to obtain. A single glass seems to render the breathing freer, the spirit lighter, the heart more ardent, soul and mind alike more capable of executing the great task of doing that particular work in the world which the Father may have sent them to perform. Food itself loses its gross qualities in the presence of absinthe and becomes even as manna, operating the sacrament of nutrition without bodily disturbance.

There is another other section of particular interest, where Crowley considers absinthe and artistic detachment. There is beauty in everything, he says, if it is perceived with the right degree of detachment. The trick is to separate out the part of you that really “is”, the part that perceives, from the other part of you that acts and suffers in the external world. “And the art of doing this”, he adds, “is really the art of being an artist.” Absinthe, he claims, can bring this about.

At one point Crowley raises the already rather Masonic tone of his essay even higher by quoting a poem in French.“Do you know that French sonnet ‘La légende de l’Absinthe?’”, he asks the reader. It would be surprising if very many readers did, because he had written it himself. He published it separately in the pro-German propaganda paper The International (New York, October 1917) under the pseudonym “Jeanne La Goulue”: a famous Moulin Rouge star painted by Toulouse-Lautrec.

Apollo, mourning the demise of Hyacinth

Would not cede victory to death.

His soul, adept of transformation

Had to find a holy alchemy for beauty.

So from his celestial hand he exhausts and crushes

The subtlest gifts from divine Flora.

Their broken bodies sigh a golden exhalation

From which he harvested our first drop of – Absinthe!

In crouching cellars, in sparkling palaces

Alone or together, drink that potion of loving!

For it is a sorcery, a conjuration

This pale opal wine aborts misery

Opens the intimate sanctuary of beauty

– Bewitches my heart, exalts my soul in ecstasy.

Aleister Crowley

Absinthe used to be found wherever there was French culture; not only in Paris and New Orleans but in the French colonies, notably French Cochin-China (Vietnam). In his Confessions, Crowley recounts an incident in Haiphong that he found “deliciously colonial”. A large building on the corner of a main street was to be demolished, but the Frenchman in charge of the work could not be found. Finally the overseer of the construction workers ran him to ground in a combined drinking house and brothel, where he was solidly under the influence of absinthe. But he was still able to talk, and perfectly happy to calculate the explosive charge required using a stub of pencil on the marble slab of his table. He slipped up with his decimal point, however, and a charge of dynamite a hundred times too big took down not just the building on the corner but the entire block. No doubt the absinthe was to blame: as Crowley helpfully reminds us, it is “not really a wholesome drink in that climate”.

Aleister Crowley would be in favour of absinthe. He had to be: he was the wickedest man in the world. For a more impartial judge, we can turn to George Saintsbury. Saintsbury (1845–1933) was once the grand old man of English letters. Unashamedly pleasure-oriented in his approach to literature, he was a master of the connoisseurial ‘wine-tasting’ mode of literary criticism, with its almost mystical overtones. What has been called, “the social mission of English criticism”, had no appeal for Saintsbury. Social conscience was never his strong point, and his idea of heaven would probably have been reading Baudelaire while sending little children up chimneys. George Orwell mentions Saintsbury in The Road to Wigan Pier, with a kind of back-handed admiration for his politics. “It takes a lot of guts,” says Orwell, “to be openly such a skunk as that.”

A bearded, bespectacled, appropriately Mandarin-looking old man, Saintsbury was famed for his extreme erudition, his odd but often brilliant judgements (Proust reminded him of Thomas De Quincey, for example), and his phenomenally rambling syntax. A fragment has been preserved for posterity: “But while none, save these, of men living, had done, or could have done, such things, there was much here which – whether either could have done it or not – neither had done.”

Saintsbury’s extreme connoisseurship of wine and other drinks led to a Saintsbury Society being formed in his honour, back in the hedonistic 1920s, which still exists. Before he died he was particularly adamant that there must never, ever be a biography written of him. What did he have to hide? We don’t know. But here he is on absinthe, from the liqueur chapter of his famous Cellar Book:

… I will not close this short chapter without saying something of the supposed wickedest of all the tribe – the ‘Green Muse’ – the water of the Star Wormwood, whereof many men have died – the absinthia taetra, which are deemed to deserve the adjective in a worse sense than that which the greatest of Roman poets meant.† I suppose (though I cannot say that it ever did me any) that absinthe has done a good deal of harm. Its principle is too potent, not to say too poisonous, to be let loose indiscriminately and intensively on the human frame. It was, I think, as a rule made fearfully strong, and nobody but the kind of lunatic whom it was supposed to produce, and who may be thought to have been destined for lunacy, would drink it ‘neat’ […]

A person who drinks absinthe neat deserves his fate whatever it may be. The flavour is concentrated to repulsiveness; the spirit burns ‘like a torch light procession’; you must have a preternaturally strong or fatally accustomed head that does not ache after it.

There is another reason for not drinking it neat, which is that this would lose the ritualistic, drug-like fascination of preparing it according to a method: “you lose all the ceremonial and etiquette which make the proper fashion of drinking it delightful to a man of taste.” More about the various methods later, but Saintsbury’s is one of the most lovingly described.

When you have stood the glass of liqueur in a tumbler as flat-bottomed as you can get, you should pour, or have poured for you, water gently into the absinthe itself, so that the mixture overflows from one vessel into the other. The way in which the deep emerald of the pure spirit clouds first into what would be the colour of a star-smaragd [an old name for an emerald], if the Almighty had been pleased to complete the quartette of star-gems…

And here we have to interrupt Saintsbury for a moment, strange old buffer that he is. He is about to say that watching the pure spirit turn cloudy is a very agreeable experience, but before he gets there he is going to sidle, by way of a footnote, into a digression about his love of jewels, and the rarity of star gemstones. The star gems, he says in his lipsmacking little note, are

As yet only a triad – sapphire (which is pretty common), ruby (rarer), and topaz, which I have never seen, and which the late Signor Giuliano, who used to be good enough to give me much good talk in return for very modest purchases, told me had seen only once or twice. But an ordinary emerald in cabochon form, represents one of the stages of the diluted absinthe very fairly.

So. He likes the way that absinthe turns first into emerald…

and then into opal; the thinning out of the opal itself as the operation goes on; and when the liqueur glass contains nothing but pure water and the drink is ready, the extraordinary combination of refreshingness and comforting character in odour and flavour – all these complete a very agreeable experience. Like other agreeable experiences it may no doubt be repeated too often. I never myself drank more than one absinthe in a day…

Saintsbury’s curious little testimony brings out a number of salient points, all of which we shall meet again later: the strength of absinthe, its bad reputation, the element of ritual involved in drinking it, and its persistent affinity with aestheticism.

Corelli is against absinthe, Crowley is for it, and Saintsbury is nicely (even exquisitely…) balanced. But for each of them, living through the heyday of absinthe, we can see that it was already a mythic substance.

Writing about the idea of an “ideal drink”, Roland Barthes suggests it should be “rich in metonymies of all kinds”; it should, in other words, be rich in all those part-for-the-whole, tip-of-the-iceberg associations and symbolic workings of why we want what we want. People who like the idea of Scotland can drink Scotch; people who believe in transubstantiation can drink the blood of Christ; and people who drink wine can be happy in the knowledge that it’s about grapes and sunshine and good soil and vineyards and what-have-you. When Keats wants wine, in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, he wants it “Tasting of Flora and the country-green, / Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth! / O for a beaker full of the warm South!” It is not unlike the methods of advertising.

Whatever absinthe means, it is not a beaker full of the warm south. It is an industrial product, as synthetic as Dr Jekyll’s potion, and whatever metonymies are in play are not from the rural landscape but from urban culture. Aestheticism, decadence, and Bohemianism are well to the fore, along with the idea of nineteenth-century Paris and 1890s London. As an advert for Hill’s brand of absinthe has it, with no apologies to The Artist Formerly Known As Prince: “TONIGHT WE’RE GONNA PARTY LIKE IT’S 1899!”

† Carco (“the author”, says the jacket, “of ONLY A WOMAN and PERVERSITY”) was an eminent French novelist before the ‘Berkley 35 cents Library’ got its hands on him, a winner of the Grand Prix du Roman of The Académie Française and a member of the Académie Goncourt.

† Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book IV Prologue. Lucretius meant it was bitter.

Chapter Two

The Nineties

Aubrey Beardsley’s cover for Vincent O’Sullivan’s Houses of Sin, published by Leonard Smithers in 1897. Wilde told Beardsley his drawings were like absinthe.

Absinthe will forever be associated with the fin-de-siècle decadence of the 1890s, the absinthe decade. Max Beerbohm’s incomparable comic creation Enoch Soames – the author of two slim collections of verse entitled Negations and Fungoids – could hardly have drunk anything else. We first meet Soames at the old Café Royal, “in that exuberant vista of gilding and crimson velvet set amidst all those opposing mirrors and upholding caryatids, with fumes of tobacco ever rising to the pagan and painted ceiling”. Beerbohm and the painter William Rothenstein invite him to sit down and have a drink:

And he ordered an absinthe. ‘Je me tiens toujours fidèle’, he told Rothenstein, ‘à la sorcière glauque.’ [I am forever faithful to the glaucous witch]

‘It is bad for you’, said Rothenstein drily.

‘Nothing is bad for one,’ answered Soames. ‘Dans ce monde il n’y a ni de bien ni de mal.’ [In this world there is neither good nor bad]

‘Nothing good and nothing bad? How do you mean?’

‘I explained it in the preface to Negations.’

‘Negations?’

‘Yes; I gave you a copy of it.’

‘Oh yes, of course. But did you explain – for instance – that there was no such thing as good or bad grammar?’

‘N-no,’ said Soames. ‘Of course in Art there is the good and the evil. But in Life – no.’ He was rolling a cigarette. He had weak white hands, not well washed, and with finger tips much stained by nicotine. ‘In Life there are illusions of good and evil, but’ – his voice trailed away to a murmur in which the words ‘vieux jeu’ and ‘rococo’ were faintly audible.

Soames is not just a bad poet but a Diabolist; a devil worshipper, or thereabouts:

“It’s not exactly worship”, he qualified, sipping his absinthe. “It’s more a matter of trusting and encouraging.”

Talentless, posturing, and desperate, Soames sells his soul to the Devil in return for the promise of posthumous fame. But he was on the highway to hell in any case. He was an absinthe drinker.

The 1890s were a bizarre decade, often seen as the end of the old Victorian certainties and decencies, and the birth of the Modern. It was a time of “fantastic attenuations of weariness, fantastic anticipations of a new vitality”. Wilde and Beardsley reigned, but amid the extreme preciousness, Grub Street poverty was endemic among writers in a way that it had not been for the Romantics and the earlier high Victorians.

There was a new attention to urban subjects and urban squalor, which was partly a response to grim London conditions and partly the influence of French writers such as Baudelaire. Homosexuality was coming to the fore as a coded tendency within aestheticism, only to be driven underground again after the Oscar Wilde trial in 1895. People felt they were living in a time of crisis and decline, exacerbated by the tendency to think in centuries: the fin-de-siècle is often a strange time, whether it is the 1590s, with the dark and morbid spirit of its proto-Jacobean drama, or the 1790s, with the French revolution and the guillotine. Writers with a grounding in classics and Latin felt that they were living through something akin to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and the decadence of Petronius. Occultism and High Catholicism were gaining converts. Pessimism and despair reigned, notably in the work of the quintessential Nineties poet Ernest Dowson, not to mention the verse of Enoch Soames. Peter Ackroyd provides an elegant role call;

“…those doomed poets and writers who make up the generation of the Nineties and who arrive in our midst with the intoxicating perfume of hot house flowers from that strange conservatory known as the fin-de-siècle; Richard Le Gallienne is here, together with Swinburne and Dowson and Symons, forming a strange litany of fluted lust and hopelessness.”

One night in 1890, the essayist and minor poet Richard Le Gallienne was offered some absinthe by the poet Lionel Johnson. Le Gallienne remembers that they were walking back from a public house after closing time, and Johnson invited him up to his rooms in Grays Inn, Holborn, for a final drink. Looking back in 1925, Le Gallienne says that Johnson’s warning on the stairs still makes him smile as he writes, “for it was so very 1890”: “I hope you drink absinthe, Le Gallienne,” said Johnson, “for I have nothing else to offer you.”

I had just heard of it, as a drink mysteriously sophisticated and even Satanic. To me it had the sound of hellebore or mandragora. I had never tasted it then, nor has it ever been a favourite drink of mine. But in the ’90s it was spoken of with a self-conscious sense of one’s being desperately wicked, suggesting diabolism and nameless iniquity.

Immediately those all-important associations and connotations came into play: “Did not Paul Verlaine drink it all the time in Paris! and Oscar Wilde and his cronies, it was darkly hinted, drank it nightly at the Café Royal.”

So it was with a pleasant shudder that I watched it cloud in our glasses, as I drank it for the first time, there alone with Lionel Johnson, in the small hours, in a room paradoxically monkish in its scholarly austerity, with a beautiful monstrance on the mantelpiece and a silver crucifix on the wall.

(A monstrance is a luxuriantly ornamental piece of High Church ornament, not unlike a reliquary, in which the consecrated Host is exposed for adoration). Johnson was a founder member of the Rhymers Club, a group of poets who met at the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street, including Le Gallienne, Dowson, Arthur Symons, and W.B.Yeats, who was a great admirer of Johnson’s poetry. Johnson was a fin-de- siècle figure but he was some distance from being a true Decadent himself, as his sharp essay on the Decadents shows.

First of all – says Johnson in his 1891 essay ‘The Cultured Faun’, published in The Anti-Jacobin – the true Decadent should be soberly dressed (just as much as William Burroughs in his “banker drag”, or T.S.Eliot, Aubrey Beardsley was noted for dressing like a man who worked in insurance, which he once did; he was said to look like “the man from the Prudential”). Then, says Johnson, the Decadent should be nervous, attracted to High Church ritual, cynical, and above all a worshipper of beauty; even if life also contains harsh and terrible realities, such as absinthe addiction.

Externally, our hero should cultivate a reassuring sobriety of habit, with just a dash of the dandy. None of the wandering looks, the elaborate disorder, the sublime lunacy of his predecessor, the ‘apostle of culture’. Externally, then, a precise appearance; internally, a catholic sympathy with all that exists, and ‘therefore’ suffers, for art’s sake. Now art, at present, is not a question of the senses so much as of the nerves… Baudelaire is very nervous… Verlaine is pathetically sensitive. That is the point: exquisite appreciation of pain, exquisite thrills of anguish, exquisite adoration of suffering. Here comes in the tender patronage of Catholicism: white tapers upon the high altar, an ascetic and beautiful young priest, the great gilt monstrance, the subtle-scented and mystical incense…

To play the part properly a flavour of cynicism is recommended: a scientific profession of materialist dogmas, coupled – for you should forswear consistency – with gloomy chatter about ‘The Will to Live’… finally conclude that life is loathsome yet that beauty is beatific. And beauty – ah, beauty is everything beautiful! Isn’t that a trifle obvious, you say? That is the charm of it, it shows your perfect simplicity, your chaste and catholic innocence. Innocence of course: beauty is always innocent, ultimately. No doubt there are ‘monstrous’ things, terrible pains, the haggard eyes of an absintheur, the pallid faces of ‘neurotic’ sinners; but all that is the portion of our Parisian friends, such and such a ‘group of artists’ who meet at the Café So-and-So.

Johnson was received into the Catholic Church in the same year that this essay was written, and he had a distinctly austere streak in his character. He once said to Yeats that he wished people who denied the eternal and permanent nature of damnation would realise how unspeakably vulgar they were.

Johnson’s agonised religious and monarchistic (in fact neo-Jacobite) sensibility can be seen from two of his most famous poems, ‘The Dark Angel’ and ‘By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross’. He slid into alcoholism after a doctor – with what now seems like criminal negligence – advised him to take up drinking for his insomnia. Yeats chronicles his decline in his Autobiographies. Le Gallienne could already see trouble in store on that night in Grays Inn, feeling that absinthe was “too fierce a potion” for a man as delicate as Johnson. But Johnson was devoted to alcohol, “because, particularly in the form of his favourite absinthe, it has for a time so quickening and clarifying an effect on the intellectual and imaginative faculties.” Later he developed a tendency to persecution mania, and believed that detectives were following him. A good friend of Ernest Dowson, Johnson haunted the pubs of Fleet Street and died in 1902, after falling off a bar stool.

Johnson’s fellow Rhymer Arthur Symons played a key role in shaping the 1890s. He edited the influential periodical The Savoy, and he wrote studies of Baudelaire, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, as well as his major work The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), which made modern French poetry better known in England and was regarded as something of a manifesto. He had already written an essay on ‘The Decadent Movement’. Symons’s own poetry is quintessentially Nineties in its impressionistic handling of sleazy urban subjects – theatres and cafés, equivocal actresses or prostitutes, and the life of lodgings and digs – complete with what were then ‘unpoetic’ details such as cigarettes and gas. At the same time he is capable of a heavy flowery aestheticism, and more fantastic touches such as the gaslit streets in his poem ‘London’:

… and in the evil glimpses of the light

Men as trees walking loom through lanes of night

Hung from the globes of some unnatural fruit.

His 1892 collection Silhouettes contains his poem ‘The Absinthe Drinker’:

The Absinthe-Drinker

Gently I wave the visible world away.

Far off, I hear a roar, afar yet near

Far off and strange, a voice is in my ear

And is the voice my own? The words I say

Fall strangely, like a dream, across the day:

And the dim sunshine is a dream. How clear

New as the world to lover’s eyes, appear

The men and women passing on their way!

The world is very fair. The hours are all

Linked in a dance of mere forgetfulness.

I am at peace with God and man. O glide

Sands of the hour-glass that I count not, fall

Serenely: scarce I feel your soft caress

Rocked on this dreamy and indifferent tide.

It is a companion piece to his earlier and more vicious poem ‘The Opium-Smoker’, which begins well (“I am engulfed, and drown deliciously”) but ends badly, revealing a rat-infested garret.

Symons was associated by reputation with drink and hashish, but he had only a slight experience of them. Havelock Ellis believes Symons to have drunk absinthe only once, with Ellis himself outside a Paris café. This is probably an under- estimate, but Symons was certainly no addict. Perhaps mindful of his reputation, Symons wrote in London: A Book of Aspects

I have always been curious of sensations, and above all of those which seemed to lead one into ‘artificial paradises’ not within everybody’s reach. It took me some time to find out that every ‘artificial paradise’ is within one’s soul, somewhere among one’s own dreams… The mystery of all the intoxicants fascinated me, and drink, which had no personal appeal to me, which indeed brought me no pleasures, found me endlessly observant of its powers, effects, and variations.

He would have had plenty of opportunity to observe it with friends such as Dowson and Johnson. Symons’s absinthe-free lifestyle did not protect him from a catastrophic nervous breakdown in 1907, but it may have contributed to his longevity, compared to his absinthe-drinking comrades. He survived Dowson, Johnson and Wilde by almost half a century, living on into the distant future of 1945.

The fortunes of aestheticism, decadence, and ‘Art for Art’s sake’ rose and fell with Oscar Wilde’s own, ascending from around 1880 and crashing disastrously in 1895. Wilde was a disciple of Walter Pater, whose book The Renaissance contained a manifesto of nihilistic aestheticism in its ‘Conclusion’. “It is my golden book”, Wilde said, “I never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence; the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written.” Wilde himself wrote the other great English decadent work, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Smouldering resentment against Wilde flamed into the open in 1895, when he was found guilty of homosexual offences and sent to prison, moving to France after his release in 1897.

The French litterateur Marcel Schwob was an acquaintance of Wilde, and he has left a wickedly exaggerated picture of the aesthete as he knew him in 1891. Wilde was, “a big man, with a large pasty face, red cheeks, an ironic eye, bad and protrusive teeth, a vicious childlike mouth with lips soft with milk ready to suck some more. While he ate – and he ate little – he never stopped smoking opium-tainted Egyptian cigarettes.” To complete this unappetising picture, Schwob adds that he was also, “A terrible absinthe-drinker, through which he got his visions and desires.”

In reality Wilde was not such a terrible absinthe drinker at that period, and his attitude to it seems to have varied with time; his drinking in general grew heavier as his life grew more unhappy, and eventually he came to like it. He once told the art critic Bernard Berenson “It has no message for me”, and he confessed to Arthur Machen – partial to a glass himself† – that “I could never quite accustom myself toabsinthe, but it suits my style so well.” He did accustom himself to it in the end, and in Dieppe, after his downfall, he said, “Absinthe has a wonderful colour, green. A glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world. What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?”

Wilde developed what his biographer Richard Ellmann calls “romantic ideas” about absinthe, and he described its effects to Ada ‘The Sphinx’ Leverson:

“After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”

“How do you mean?” asked Leverson.