by Baker, Phil
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 over
seer 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]
&nb
sp; ‘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.
