The Dedalus Book of Absinthe

by Baker, Phil

  The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof

  (This is the end of every song man sings!)

  The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain

  Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain;

  And health and hope have gone the way of love

  Into the drear oblivion of lost things.

  Jad Adams quotes an Oxford contemporary of Dowson, who remembered his philosophical pessimism as being largely based on his reading of the German philosopher Schopenhauer: “He never changed the opinion, then formed, that nature and humanity are, in the mass, abhorrent, and that only those writers need be considered who proclaim this truth, whether subtly or defiantly.” Certainly nobody ever regarded Ernest Dowson as a healthy mind in a healthy body. He wrote from the failing dock to a friend, “I feel like a protoplasm in the embryo of a troglodyte. If you see a second hand, roomy coffin, fairly cheap will you please purchase same and have it sent down here.”

  One of the few things not to pall on Dowson was drink, especially absinthe. “Whisky and beer for fools; absinthe for poets”, he would say; “absinthe has the power of the magicians; it can wipe out or renew the past, annul or foretell the future.” Writing to Arthur Moore in October 1890, he asks:

  How is your health? The absinthe I consumed between nine and seven of the morning on Friday seems to have conquered my neuralgia, but at some cost to my general health yesterday! The curious bewilderment of the mind after much absinthe! One’s ineffectual endeavours to compass a busy crossing! The unreality of London to me! How wonderful it is!

  Seven in the morning? It is a horrendous regime. Not only the bewilderment but the curious unreality are very vivid, like Wilde’s de-familiarisation of the top hat.

  On another occasion Dowson and Lionel Johnson shouted, late at night, up at their friend Victor Plarr’s window in Great Russell Street. Plarr’s light promptly went out. Dowson wrote to Plarr to apologise for having “violated the midnight silence of Great Russell Street”; “Forgive me if it was real and not an absinthe dream,” he says, “as many things seem nowadays.” Something of the dreamlike quality of a night out with Dowson is captured in R. Thurston Hopkins’ memoir ‘A London Phantom’.†

  Dowson’s Aunt Ethel preferred his more sensible brother, Rowland, and remembered Ernest as a Jekyll and Hyde character, writing beautifully (she was thinking of his translation work, from which he scratched a living) “and then taking awful drugs, absinthe and other things… He was a queer mixture, clever but a fearfully weak character and like a madman when he got drink or drugs.”

  Dowson was a small, lightly built individual of great urbanity and politeness, but after he had been on the absinthe he would pick fights with Guardsmen. He was taken in for being drunk and disorderly so often that a magistrate greeted him with, “What, you here again Mr Dowson?” Arthur Symons remembers:

  Sober, he was the most gentle, in manner the most gentlemanly of men; unselfish to a fault, to the extent of weakness; a delightful companion, charm itself. Under the influence of drink he became almost literally insane, certainly quite irresponsible. He fell into furious and unreasoning passions; a vocabulary unknown to him at other times sprang up like a whirlwind; he seemed always about to commit some act of absurd violence.

  Frank Harris gives a grim picture of a night out with Dowson in the East End: “a nightmare; I can still hear a girl droning out an interminable song meant to be lively and gay; still see a woman clog-dancing just to show glimpses of old, thin legs, smiling grotesquely the while with toothless mouth; still remember Dowson hopelessly drunk at the end screaming with rage and vomiting insults.”

  Dowson’s Jekyll-and-Hyde personality extended into his love life. W.B.Yeats writes of Dowson’s devotion to the restaurant-keeper’s daughter, with whom he played a chaste game of cards once a week: “that weekly game of cards,” saysYeats, “that filled so great a share of Dowson’s emotional life.” He adds that “Sober, he would look at no other woman, it was said, but, drunk, desired whatever woman chance brought, clean or dirty.” This situation is the basis of Dowson’s famous poem ‘Cynara’, the first verse of which runs:

  Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine

  There fell thy shadow, Cynara! Thy breath was shed

  Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;

  And I was desolate and sick of an old passion

  Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:

  I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! In my fashion.

  He is always haunted by his previous love, and he is unable to lay it to rest with prostitutes or riotous living:

  I cried for madder music and for stronger wine

  But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire

  There falls thy shadow, Cynara! The night is thine …

  Yeats writes that one of the Rhymers Club members (possibly Symons) had seen Dowson drunk in a Dieppe café with what Yeats rather haughtily calls, “a particularly common harlot” – evidently a bit of a shocker, even by Dowson’s standards – and Dowson had caught him by the sleeve to whisper excitedly that they had something in common. “She writes poetry!” he said, “It is like Browning and Mrs Browning!”

  Dowson’s letters are filled with references to his absinthe drinking, giving a picture of an 1890s night life that would give anyone the shakes. On a typical evening, Dowson and his friends would meet at a public house on Shaftesbury Avenue, the Cock, and those arriving after about six would generally find Dowson there already, with his glass of absinthe before him, scribbling verses on a scrap of paper or an envelope. Around seven they would move on, either to the theatre, which Dowson wasn’t particularly fond of, or to Sherwood Street for dinner at the restaurant where he fell in love with Adelaide. Sometimes the nights were heavier, like the one described below from July 1894, when Dowson went drinking with an actor called Charles Goodhart. The background is that Dowson and his friends have been looking after a sick girl called Marie, probably an actress, who had taken a drug overdose and developed a ‘brain fever’ as a consequence; everyone has been under great stress.

  Goodie and I met in the evening. He had a charming man with him, a twenty-ton opium eater, who had run away with his cousin and is now to marry her. We met at 7 and consumed four absinthes apiece in the Cock till 9. We then went and ate some kidneys – after which two absinthes apiece at the Crown [a public house on the Charing Cross Road]. After which, one absinthe apiece at Goodie’s club. Total 7 absinthes. These had seriously affected us – but made little impression on the opium- eater. He took us back to the Temple in a cab. This morning Goodhart and I were twitching visibly. I feel rather indisposed; and in fact we decided that our grief is now sufficiently drowned, and we must spend a few days on nothing stronger than lemonade and strychnine. But the previous strain on our nerves had been terrible. I wish you had seen more of Marie. Her charm was really remarkable – it was not only men but women that it struck. She made an immediate conquest of Missie and her mother who didn’t at all take to Hoole’s or Marmie’s irreproachable fiancées – in fact of everyone who came across her.

  But I must say I’m deucedly glad she’s gone.

  Write and give me your nouvelles – and forgive any incoherences in this scrawl. My hand has a palsy of the first quality, and my head is full of noises.

  Some of these mornings were enough to give even Dowson second thoughts about the green stuff. Writing to Arthur Moore in February 1899, he heads his letter “Whisky v Absinthe”; “In the High Court of Justice Intoxicating Liquors Division”:

  On the whole it is a mistake to get binged on the verdant fluid. As a steady drink it is inferior to the homely Scotch… awoke this morning with jingling nerves and pestilential mouth… I understand that absinthe makes the tart grow fonder. It is also extremely detrimental to the complexion… I never presented a more deboshed [sic] appearance than I do this morning.

  Dowson usually referred to absinthe in more positive terms. He and his friends drank r
egularly at the Café Royal, near Piccadilly, an opulent establishment modelled on the great French cafés of the Second Empire, where he always looked forward to a glass. “Would the gods I had some absinthe on board. Good old Café Royal”, he wrote to Arthur Moore, and later, “We will walk to the Royal and absinthe; that may restore me…”. This was a matter of months before his death. Closer still, he wrote “I will one day stay my tremulous course outside No.7 [Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where Arthur Moore lived] – and we will absinthe – be it never so deleterious.”

  Dowson’s absinthe prose-poem, ‘Absintha Taetra’ (Terrible Absinthe), is remarkable for the anxiety that it conveys (with the “tiger eyes” of the future), and its sense of a man hunted down and beset by both future and past. With absinthe, an artificial paradise is revealed, at least for a little while, and the piece attempts to render a druggish experience that goes beyond ordinary drunkenness. But like Arthur Symons’s ‘The Opium Smoker’, the point is that nothing is really altered.

  ‘Absintha Taetra’

  Green changed to white, emerald to an opal: nothing was changed.

  The man let the water trickle gently into his glass, and as the green clouded, a mist fell from his mind.

  Then he drank opaline.

  Memories and terrors beset him. The past tore after him like a panther and through the blackness of the present he saw the luminous tiger eyes of things to be.

  But he drank opaline.

  And that obscure night of the soul, and the valley of humiliation, through which he stumbled were forgotten. He saw blue vistas of undiscovered countries, high prospects and a quiet, caressing sea. The past shed its perfume over him, to-day held his hand as it were a little child, and to-morrow shone like a white star: nothing was changed.

  He drank opaline.

  The man had known the obscure night of the soul, and lay even now in the valley of humiliation; and the tiger menace of the things to be was red in the skies. But for a little while he had forgotten.

  Green changed to white, emerald to an opal: nothing was changed.

  Dowson’s regime had a disastrous effect on him. Another member of the Smithers circle, Vincent O’Sullivan, author of Houses of Sin, remembered Dowson:

  Dowson’s neglect of his personal appearance went to lengths which I have never seen in anybody else still on the surface, and hardly in bums and beats… The thing about Dowson was that he did not want to remedy it… to spend money on baths and clothes and remedies seemed to him to be putting money to the wrong account.

  This description (which is also a remarkably early use of the word ‘beat’) gives some indication why the fastidious Beardsley despised him. Arthur Symons described Dowson as looking like Keats, but his life took its toll on his appearance. When Smithers published Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, it had a grim cover picture by William Horton, and Oscar Wilde claimed this picture was “a horrible caricature of Ernest”. He wrote to Smithers, “The picture on Hunger grows more like Ernest daily. I now hide it.” Shades of Dorian Gray…

  Dowson was a loyal friend to Wilde after his downfall, andspent time with him in France. These were bad days for Dowson, who was in the depths of his miseries over Adelaide, but they had their peaceful moments: writing to Reggie Turner from Berneval-sur-Mer, Wilde adds “Ernest had an absinthe under the apple trees!” He had written to Alfred Douglas the day before, teasing him about the dating of his letters. “Do you ever really know the day of the month?” he asks, and adds, “I rarely do myself, and Ernest Dowson, who is here, never.” Wilde always defended Dowson’s drinking. When somebody said, “It’s a pity he drinks so much absinthe,” Wilde shrugged his shoulders and said: “If he didn’t drink, he would be somebody else. Il faut accepter la personnalité comme elle est. Il ne faut jamais regretter qu’un poète est saoul, il faut regretter que les saouls ne soient pas toujours poètes.†

  William Horton’s cover for Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, published by Leonard Smithers in 1899. Wilde claimed the picture was “a horrible caricature of Ernest”, and that likeness increased daily until he had to hide it.

  Some of Dowson’s habits seem to have rubbed off on Wilde. Dowson persuaded him to go to a heterosexual brothel to acquire what he called “a more wholesome taste”, but Wilde didn’t altogether enjoy it. “It was like cold mutton”, he said quietly to Dowson when he emerged again, and then (loudly, so that the cheering crowd who had followed them could hear), “But tell it in England, for it will entirely restore my character.” Wilde also seems to have followed Dowson in his drinking. Writing to Dowson and asking “Why are you so persistently and perversely wonderful?”, Wilde adds:

  I decided this morning to take a Pernod. The result was marvellous. At 8.30 I was dead. Now I am alive, and all is perfect, except your absence.

  A few days later he wrote Dowson a note to entice him over: “My dear Ernest, Do come here at once: Monsieur Meyer is presiding over a morning meal of absinthe, and we want you.”

  Dowson was an ardent Francophile, and he spent a long time in Paris (“the only city”, as he called it), where he almost starved. Writing from 214 rue Saint-Jacques, he tells Arthur Moore that he and Connell O’Riordan are finding things hard: “Connell smokes and drinks nothing in order to have his two square meals and I tighten my belt in order to allow myself a sufficiency of cigarettes and absinthe. As for women… we dare not even look at them.” Writing to O’Riordan, then safely back in London, Dowson details a few days of his life. The night before he has managed to get a free dinner at the house of the Vicomte de Lautrec (not the painter, although Dowson also knew him), where they also smoked hashish and played ouija. “We got a message from Satan”, Dowson reports, “but he appeared to have nothing of the slightest importance to say.”

  Now, after an absinthe at the D’Harcourt café, and spending his last money on tobacco and cigarette papers, Dowson is back home “chez moi” for a bread roll, a piece of Brie and half a bottle of wine; he puts a sketch of his table top in the letter, numbering the items along with his “various literary effects”. Next day he has to buy a bread roll instead of a stamp, and on the third day he continues the unposted letter: “this morning lo there was a letter and £1 and I went out with tears of gratitude in my eyes and had an absinthe and afterwards a breakfast.”

  Dowson had been received into the Catholic Church at Brompton Oratory in September 1891, and in London he was in the habit of dipping his crucifix into his absinthe before he drank. In Paris he attended the beautiful church of Notre Dame des Victoires, which previously “I only knew from Huysman’s marvellous novel”†; “I was immensely impressed by the sort of wave of devotion which thrills through the whole crowded congregation.” Jad Adams recounts that when he was in Dieppe, Dowson would spend hours in a side chapel of the church at Arques, kneeling in adoration before a painting of St. Wilgefortis, known in France as Livrada. Wilgefortis was the daughter of a pagan king, but she became a Christian and took a vow of virginity. When her father wanted to marry her off to the King of Sicily, Wilgefortis prayed for God’s help to avoid the marriage, and this arrived when she grew a beard. When the King of Sicily decided not to marry her after all, her father had her crucified instead. It was to this bearded female martyr that Dowson addressed his devotion, evidently moved by her story. As Adams comments, “You could always count on Dowson to be out of the ordinary.”

  Aside from simple alcoholism, we can see those metonymic, part-for-the-whole associations at play in Dowson’s drinking; when he drank absinthe in London he was drinking Paris, and when he dipped his crucifix in it, he was drinking his religion.

  Inevitably his physical and mental health began to break under the life that he was leading. In 1899 he was staying at the Hotel Saint Malo in the Rue d’Odessa and drinking heavily, chiefly in the Latin Quarter and the all night market workers’ bars around Les Halles. Along with the artist Charles Conder he went to La Roche Guyon to take a break from the punishing Paris routine, but by now he was showing pronounced symptoms of absinth
ism. Conder wrote to William Rothenstein that Dowson, “had a fit in the morning which left his mind in a most confused state and with a most extraordinary series of hallucinations. I left him there as he refused to come to Paris.”

  Dowson did return to Paris later, and it was there that his friend Robert Sherrard found him, “slumped over a table sticky with absinthe”. Dowson’s nerves were now completely shot, and he told Sherrard he was afraid to go back to his hotel room. He had become terrified of a statue on the mantelpiece. “I lie awake and watch it,” he said; “I know that one night it means to come down off its shelf and strangle me.”

  Sherrard was another drinker, and a duellist. Dowson described him as, “charming but the most morose and spleenful person I have yet encountered. His conversation is undiluted vitriol.” Sherrard was capable of shouting anti-Semitic slogans and firing his revolver into the ceiling. Nevertheless, it was Sherrard and his wife who took Dowson in and looked after him at the end of his life, in their house – sometimes rather genteelly described as a cottage, but in fact an ordinary terraced house in the shabby suburb of Catford, South-East London, with another family downstairs – where Dowson died.

  Dowson liked to reminisce about Paris, and he told Sherrard that he felt literary life hadn’t worked out for him. “In future”, he said, he would devote his energies to something else. Dowson was coughing badly, and Sherrard fetched him some ipecuanha wine from a chemist. The coughing continued, and Sherrard sent for a doctor. While he was gone, Dowson told Sherrard’s wife, “You are like an angel from heaven, God bless you.” Sherrard returned, and as he lifted Dowson into a sitting position to ease his breathing and mop his forehead, Dowson’s head slumped. He was thirty-two.

  Wilde wrote from Paris to Leonard Smithers – who was himself bankrupt by now – and asked him to put some flowers on Dowson’s grave. Wilde’s letter contains his famous epitaph on Dowson: “Poor wounded wonderful fellow that he was, a tragic reproduction of all tragic poetry, like a symbol, or a scene. I hope bay-leaves will be laid on his tomb, and rue, and myrtle too, for he knew what love is.” On the centenary of Dowson’s death the Eighteen Nineties Society laid a wreath of rue, rosemary and myrtle on Dowson’s headstone, after which members of The Lost Club poured absinthe over his grave.