by Baker, Phil
Homeless, toothless, intermittently insane, Dowson had lasted until 1900. He could hardly have died in a more fitting year. W.B.Yeats recalled the Nineties coming to an abrupt end:
Then in 1900 everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic church; or if they did I have forgotten.
He was wrong about the absinthe.
† Which can be found whole at the back of this book.
† “You have to accept personality for what it is. You shouldn’t regret that a poet is a drunk, instead you should regret that drunks are not always poets”
† I.e. Huysmans’ En Route (1895).
Chapter Four
Meanwhile In France
Paul Verlaine in the Café Procope, inkwell and absinthe in front of him. Photo copyright Bibliothèque Nationale.
Gaston Beauvais, the doomed absintheur of Marie Corelli’s Wormwood, is a man with literary aspirations: he has even written a short study of Alfred de Musset. Musset was among the first of the major French poets to fall victim to absinthe, although it comes to look like an occupational hazard as the nineteenth century goes on. Musset is a melancholy writer, whose work is often about lost love. His first published book was a self-expressive translation of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, full of personal digressions and even ‘improvements’; Musset re-unites De Quincey and Anne, the lost child prostitute, in a sentimental happy ending, as if he found the original unbearable.
Musset drank for some years at the Café Procope, and at the Café de la Regence, on the corner of the Rue Saint-Honore and the Place du Palais Royal. There is a second-hand account of him in the Goncourt journals:
Dr.Martin told me yesterday that he had often seen Musset taking his absinthe at the Café de la Regence, an absinthe that looked like a thick soup. After which the waiter gave him his arm and led him, or rather half-carried him, to the carriage waiting for him at the door.
Musset’s absinthe drinking was well known. Nearly sixty years after his death, when absinthe was about to be banned, a politician with vested interests named Alfred Girod (from the absinthe manufacturing district of Pontarlier) did everything he could to defend it. It was ridiculous to endanger such a successful French industry. The anti-absinthe lobby claimed it turned men into ferocious beasts, he said – but he had a glass every day, and did he look like a mad dog? Finally, in desperation, he said it had inspired the poetry of Alfred de Musset. How could they possibly ban that?
In his lifetime Musset was made a member of the Académie Française, but he often missed their meetings. When somebody remarked that Musset often absented himself, Villemain, the Secretary of the Academy, couldn’t resist a bitter pun: you mean to say, he said, that he absinthes himself a bit too much.
There is a poem dedicated to Musset by another poet of the time, Edmond Bougeois, about the thin green line between being inspired and being washed up.
Anxious and grieving, in the smoky enclosure
Of a café, I dream, and, dreaming, I write
Of the blue tints of the sun that I love
When I see its light in a glass of absinthe.
Then the mind scales the highest peaks
And the heart is full of hope and the scent of hyacinth
I write and write, saying; absinthe is holy
And the green-eyed muse is forever sovereign.
But alas! A poet is still just a man.
With the first glass drunk, for better writing
I wanted a second, and the writing slowed.
The tumultuous waves of thought dried up
And deserted, my brain became hollow:
It only needed one glass, and I drank two.
Musset’s younger contemporary, Charles Baudelaire, the author of Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), became fixed in the public mind – particularly on the other side of the channel – as vice incarnate. He was more complex than that, and Christopher Isherwood has tried to pin down some of his contradictions. He was a religious blasphemer, a scruffy dandy, a revolutionary who despised the masses, a deeply moral individual who was fascinated by evil, and a philosopher of love who was ill at ease with women. In his Intimate Journals Baudelaire writes, “Even when quite a child I felt two conflicting sensations in my heart: the horror of life and the ecstasy of life. That, indeed, was the mark of a neurasthenic idler.”
Baudelaire was a great explorer of the new sensations of urban life, of early ‘modernity’ and what we might now call alienation and neurosis, extending the domain of art and poetry to cover previously taboo subjects and find a new, strange beauty in them. He was a great exponent of dandyism, considered as an attitude or a philosophy rather than just a matter of clothing. He was also completely unimpressed by the idea of ‘progress’, hated the banality of modern life, and was inclined to believe in Original Sin. Late in his life he began to fear madness. He tried to give up drink and drugs and took up prayer with a new intensity, praying not only to God but to Edgar Allan Poe (whom he revered, and translated into French), as some people might pray to a saint to ‘intercede’ for them.
Isherwood writes, “Paris taught him his vices, absinthe and opium, and the extravagant dandyism of his early manhood which involved him in debt for the rest of his life.” Baudelaire also translated De Quincey’s Confessions of An English Opium Eater and wrote his own classic accounts of hashish, opium and alcohol in Les Paradis Artificiels and in his essay ‘Wine and Hashish Compared as a Means for the Multiplication of the Personality’. Jules Bertaut’s Le Boulevard includes a picture of Baudelaire rushing into a café, the Café de Madrid, and moving the water jug: “the sight of water upsets me”, he says, before sinking two or three absinthes with a “detached and insouciant” air.
Baudelaire wrote nothing specifically about absinthe, and when he writes about alcohol he calls it generically “wine”, as in his famous prose-poem ‘Drink!’ (‘Enivrez-vous’, literally, ‘get drunk’):
It is necessary to be drunk all the time. That is everything; it’s the only question. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time breaking your back and bending you towards the ground, you must get drunk without respite.
But on what? On wine, poetry or virtue, it’s up to you. But get drunk.
And if sometimes, on the palace stairs or on the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake up, the drunkenness already going or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, anything that flies and flees, anything that moans and groans or rolls or sings or speaks, ask them what time it is: and the wind, the star, the bird, the clock will answer you: “It is the hour to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, get drunk; get drunk unceasingly! With wine, or poetry, or virtue, as you prefer.”
This is not just about alcohol, although various people from Rimbaud to Dowson to Harry Crosby would later behave as if it was. Wine is a symbol, almost like the ‘wine’ in Persian mystical poetry, and the real issue is about maintaining a state of manic intensity and inspiration that defeats time. The closest parallel is perhaps Walter Pater’s conviction that to “burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life”, in his ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance.
When Baudelaire writes of “wine”, the poem that is closest to the absinthe poetry of the same era (sounding its distinctive notes of poison, greenness, oblivion, and death) is probably ‘Poison’ in Les Fleurs du Mal, some of which runs
Wine knows how to clothe the most sordid slum dwelling
In a miraculous luxury
And makes fabulous porticos surge up
In the gold of its red vapour
Like a sunset in a hazy sky.
[…]
All that is nothing compared to the poison that flows
From your eyes, from your green eyes
…
All that is nothing to the terrible marv
el
Of your saliva that bites
Which plunges my remorseless soul into oblivion
And sets it spinning and swirls it swooning
Towards the shores of death.
Baudelaire is ultimately concerned with something for which drink and drugs are only symbols or intimations, and he writes in ‘Invitation to the Voyage’ that, “Each man carries within him a dose of his own opium”. Drugs, drink and syphilis caught up with Baudelaire and he died at 46, already brought low by a stroke. Towards the end he was taken in by nuns, but they threw him out again for his blasphemies and obscenities.
Baudelaire was a seminal figure for the 1890s’ poets. Baudelaire found his artistic materials in the proto-modernist squalor of the Parisian metropolis, and so Eugene Lee- Hamilton’s luxuriantly wallowing sonnet about him is as much about the place as the man. It is from his 1894 Sonnets of the Wingless Hours, a title that already suggests time hanging heavy with Baudelairean ennui but enlivened, in this case, with “vague fumes of musk, with fumes from slums and slimes” and “the gorgeous iridescence of decay”:
A Paris gutter of the good old times
Black and putrescent in its stagnant bed
Save where the shamble oozings fringe it red
Or scaffold trickles, or nocturnal crimes.
It holds dropped gold; dead flowers from tropic climes;
Gems true and false, by midnight masquers shed;
Old pots of rouge; old broken vials that spread
Vague fumes of musk, with fumes from slums and slimes.
And everywhere, as glows the set of day
There floats upon the winding fetid mire
The gorgeous iridescence of decay:
[…]
Absinthe comes further into the foreground with Paul Verlaine. He was the figure whose absinthe drinking did most to confirm it as a Bohemian cult, despite the all too visible effect it had on him. Verlaine was widely seen as something of a split personality. On the one hand there was his exquisite poetry – deliberately vague, exquisitely suggestive but impossible to pin down, conjuring evanescent emotional landscapes – and on the other there was the absinthe-soaked horror of his life, which remains genuinely appalling. Verlaine attacked his wife on several occasions, and even tried to set fire to her. He shot and wounded Rimbaud with a revolver, and he attacked his own mother more than once, taking a knife to her at the age of seventy-five because he wanted some money. Later in life he repented the years gone by, and blamed his excesses on absinthe.
For a long time absinthe was a self-conscious part of Verlaine’s identity. The playwright Maurice Maeterlinck was in a Belgian railway station at Ghent one day when a train rolled in which must have seemed to have some kind of maniac on board:
The Brussels train came to a halt in the almost deserted station. A window in a third class carriage opened with a great clatter and framed the faun-like face of the old poet. ‘I take sugar with it!’ he cried. This was apparently his usual greeting when he was on his travels: a sort of war-cry or password, which meant that he took sugar with his absinthe.
Verlaine was the only child of exceptionally doting parents. His mother had finally succeeded in producing him after a series of miscarriages, and she kept the foetuses pickled in jars in their house, which must have been a little oppressive. One night Verlaine had a furious row with her and smashed the jars. He was rather ugly, and in his teens he became unhappily aware that he was not very attractive to women. One of his teachers remembered, “a hideous mug that reminded one of a hardened criminal”, and a friend’s mother was horrified to meet him; she thought he was, “like an orang-utan escaped from the Jardin des Plantes”.
Verlaine’s instability with drink showed itself early on: he frequented Lemerre’s bookshop in the Passage Choiseul, one of the Paris arcades, and Lemerre remembered that he never left the bookshop “without pausing for a break in a little café at the end of the passage. There he sometimes drank more than one absinthe, and very often [François] Coppée had great trouble in dragging him away.” Verlaine never liked to be dragged away. Another friend from his youth, Edmond Lepelletier, was coming back with Verlaine through the Bois de Boulogne after a night of drinking, when Verlaine wanted to go back to the Pré-Catelan for another drink. Lepelletier tried to restrain him, at which point Verlaine went berserk, unsheathed his swordstick, and chased him for his life.
A spate of bereavements – father, favourite aunt, dearest cousin – worsened Verlaine’s drinking. “It was upon absinthe that I threw myself,” he wrote of this period later, “absinthe day and night.” Marriage seemed to have a stabilising effect for a year or two, but things were already troubled when disaster struck in 1871: Verlaine met Arthur Rimbaud, a teenage poet with whom he became completely obsessed, destroying his marriage. Rimbaud was to give him some of the best and worst times of his life; looking back, after Rimbaud’s death, a sympathetic journalist encouraged him to recall the shooting incident. Surely Verlaine must have been relieved to find he had only wounded him? “No,” he said, “I was so furious at losing him that I’d have liked to know that he was dead… The boy had diabolical powers of seduction. The memory of the days we had spent wandering on the roads, wild and intoxicated with art, came back to me like a swelling tide laden with perfumes of dreadful delight … ”
Verlaine and Rimbaud went to London in 1872, living in a room in Howland Street, off Tottenham Court Road (now a wasteland of institutional buildings; nothing remains of the eighteenth-century house, which had a commemorative plaque put on it in the 1930s). Verlaine sent his impressions of London to Lepelletier. Things were a little different from Paris: ‘“We don’t have spirits,’ replied a maid to whom I put this insidious request: ‘One absinthe, if you please, mademoiselle.’” But in due course he discovered Soho, and a French café in Leicester Square, and on a subsequent visit he met his disciple Dowson and went to the Crown.
Rimbaud broke with Verlaine in 1873, which led to the shooting. Verlaine fired two or three shots, hitting Rimbaud in the wrist. They were in Brussels at the time and the wounded Rimbaud still wanted to leave for Paris, so Verlaine and his long-suffering mother accompanied him to the station. Here Verlaine, still in possession of the gun, became so agitated that Rimbaud called the police. Verlaine was initially charged with attempted murder, later reduced to criminal assault, but the real trouble came from the revelation of their relationship. Verlaine was sent to prison. Prison was good for him, at least in as much as he stopped drinking to excess and vowed never to touch absinthe again. He spent most of his time in solitary confinement, and returned to Catholicism. After his release he met Rimbaud once more, who encouraged him to blaspheme and, as Rimbaud put it, he made the ninety-eight wounds of Christ bleed again. Verlaine attacked Rimbaud, who hit back and left Verlaine unconscious; he was found next morning by some peasants.
Verlaine was now reduced to school teaching. He may not have been ideal schoolmaster material, given that he was an alcoholic pederast, but he made a very honourable job of it. Teaching French in the North of England, and in Bournemouth, was one of the more peaceful and stable periods of his life. Things started to slip after he was back in France, teaching English – which he couldn’t even speak very well – at the College Notre Dame in Rethel. He fell into a serious relationship with a pupil, Lucien Letinois, who seems to have reminded him of Rimbaud, and he also started drinking again. His teaching was better in the mornings. One of his pupils remembered him slipping into town after the morning classes ended at 10.30 and going to a small bar to refresh himself, where, “he imbibed so many absinthes that he was often incapable of getting back to the school without assistance”. He could have been a positive asset to any school that wanted a course in moral turpitude, but as it was the headmaster had to let him go. It was at this period that he wrote to Mallarmé about his miserable life (“Every happiness, except in God, is denied me …”), ending his letter in English: “Kindly write sometimes to your gratefully [sic] and s
o friendly, VERLAINE.” Absinthe in front of him, he continued with a postscript: “In haste, on my travels, I happen to be in a tavern … Still sugared, confused. Very worried. Excuse all horrors… ”
From now on he abandoned all hopes of respectability. He received another month in prison for threatening his mother with a knife, despite her protests to the court that he was really a good boy at heart. He settled completely into café life, becoming the presiding celebrity of the Latin Quarter. His poetic reputation was safe – so safe that the police were ordered not to bother him, whatever he did – but his health was beginning to fail. Frequently tramp-like in appearance, he had for some time looked much older than he was, and he suffered from diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, heart trouble, syphilis, erysipelas, and leg sores. A contemporary witness, Louis Roseyre, was shocked by just what a genuinely squalid sight he was, with his filthy beard and scarf, drunk and surrounded by hangers-on. He was usually accompanied by his ‘secretary’ a jester-like fool called Bibi-la-Purée, a homeless eccentric who wore a top hat and a huge bouquet in his tattered formal overcoat. Bibi crowned his undistinguished career at Verlaine’s funeral, where he stole all the mourners’ umbrellas.
