The Dedalus Book of Absinthe

by Baker, Phil

  One evening in December 1929, Crosby was due to meet Caresse and his mother, and then go on to dinner and the theatre with the poet Hart Crane, whom Harry had earlier introduced to absinthe. Instead he met his current mistress, Josephine Bigelow – who, interestingly enough, looked remarkably like him – at the Hotel des Artistes in New York. They took their shoes off and lay on the bed fully clothed for a while, then Crosby shot her through the temple and lay there for a couple of hours as the sun went down, before shooting himself between the eyes. Ezra Pound wrote that Crosby had died from “excess vitality”, and that his death was “a vote of confidence in the Cosmos.” Perhaps it was, but it is hard not to feel that the Curse of Literature helped to do him in as well.

  Remaining illegal in America after the war, absinthe was largely a memory of old New Orleans until it gained a new identity through the Gothic subculture: one of the best recent absinthe pages on the Internet is run by a woman named Mordantia Bat. Absinthe figures in Anne Rice’s 1976 vampire novel Interview with the Vampire, but not in quite the way one might expect. It is not, in this case, good for vampires. Claudia, who has plans of her own, has found and drugged two angelic orphans to provide Lestat with blood, but he is stricken after drinking it:

  “‘Something’s wrong with it,’ he gasped, and his eyes widened as if the mere speaking were a colossal effort. He could not move […] He could not move at all. ‘Claudia!’ He gasped again, and his eyes rolled towards her.

  “‘Don’t you like the taste of children’s blood…?’ she asked softly.

  “‘Louis…’ he whispered, finally lifting his head just for an instant. It fell back on the couch. “‘Louis, it’s… absinthe! Too much absinthe!’ he gasped. ‘She’s poisoned them with it. She’s poisoned me. Louis…’ He tried to raise his hand. I drew nearer, the table between us.

  “‘Stay back!’ she said again. And now she slid off the couch and approached him, peering down into his face as he had peered at the child. ‘Absinthe, Father,’ she said, ‘and laudanum!’

  “‘Demon!’ he said to her. ‘Louis… put me in my coffin.’ He struggled to rise. ‘Put me in my coffin!’ His voice was hoarse, barely audible. The hand fluttered, lifted, and fell back.

  Bad stuff.

  In Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Dracula, Gary Oldman’s Count falls in love with Jonathan Harker’s fiancée Mina, who reminds him of his long dead love. Wearing a distinctly West Coast pair of shades, he follows her to an MTV version of Victorian London. After talking to her in the street, they go to a drinking parlour with a table for two and a bottle of absinthe, with which the Count performs the spoon and sugar ritual. “Absinthe is the aphrodisiac of the soul”, he tells Mina: “The Green Fairy who lives in the absinthe wants your soul – but you are safe with me.” Coppola’s prop department had surpassed themselves to borrow a particularly fine absinthe spoon for its blink-and-you-miss-it appearance on the screen. The spoon, with a sinuous plant motif, belongs to Marie- Claude Delahaye, a key figure in the French revival of interest in absinthe†.

  By now the idea of absinthe was finding its place within a San Francisco and West Coast tendency towards a kind of kinky Victorianism, with substances to match. In 1994 Newsweek magazine reported that “in the lofts and garrets of the Pacific Northwest, artistic types looking for inspiration in a glass are beginning to dust off the drugs their forefathers made famous.” Opium, opium tea, and laudanum were all reportedly making a comeback alongside absinthe, accompanied by clothing that the London Times called “Victo-grunge”. And in the same year, young New Orleans based Goth writer Poppy Z. Brite published her story, ‘His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood’ in the collection Swamp Foetus:

  “To the treasures and pleasures of the grave,” said my friend Louis, and raised his goblet of absinthe to me in drunken benediction.

  “To the funeral lilies,” I replied, “and to the calm pale bones.” I drank deeply from my own glass. The absinthe cauterised my throat with its flavour, part pepper, part licorice, part rot. It had been one of our greatest finds: more than fifty bottles of the now-outlawed liqueur, sealed up in a New Orleans family tomb. Transporting them was a nuisance, but once we had learned to enjoy the taste of wormwood, our continued drunkenness was ensured for a long, long time. We had taken the skull of the crypt’s patriarch, too, and now it resided in a velvet-lined enclave in our museum.

  Louis and I, you see, were dreamers of a dark and restless sort. We met in our second year of college and quickly found that we shared one vital trait: both of us were dissatisfied with everything.

  Not everyone has been impressed with Brite’s writing (although you could forgive her a lot for the title ‘Are You Loathsome Tonight?’) but I did once see a girl on the London Underground, possibly a tourist, dressed in a black lace dress and combat boots and reading Swamp Foetus with every appearance of rapt satisfaction.

  Absinthe moved further into mainstream counter-culture with the 1997 video for the track ‘The Perfect Drug’ (available in a ‘Domination Mix’ and an ‘Absinthe Mix’) by dark and doomy S/M oriented U.S. band Nine Inch Nails, in which Trent Reznor is seen preparing absinthe amid Edward Gorey-style landscapes, and perhaps regretting having murdered a girl. Along with Nine Inch Nails, Gothic rocker Marilyn Manson is also said to buy crates of absinthe from the United Kingdom. Underground ‘absinthe clubs’ were alleged to be springing up in D.J.Levien’s absinthe pulp fiction Wormwood, a fictional state of affairs only possible because absinthe remains illegal in America. Its legal status caused speculation when Presidential wife Hillary Clinton was photographed in Prague with a glass of absinthe in front of her. Did she actually drink any, people wondered, or was it a neat counterpart to her husband’s trick of ‘not inhaling?’

  In Britain, meanwhile, absinthe meant something very different. Absinthe was never banned in Britain, largely because, as we have seen, it remained a drink for intellectuals, and never showed signs of becoming popular with the masses as it had in France; it never became a ‘problem’. Instead it continued quietly within the cocktail drinking culture of the 1920s, much to the disapproval of a 1930 writer in the medical journal The Lancet. In his article ‘Absinthe and Absinthe Drinking in England’, C.W.J.Brasher opens by noting that his readers may be unaware that absinthe – banned in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and Bulgaria – is still imported into England.

  Dr.Brasher cites three well-heeled gents who, reading slightly between the lines, are evidently being treated for dipsomania:

  I have been informed by a member of an exclusive London club that when a cocktail is ordered it is customary to inquire whether a “spot” shall be added – that “spot” being absinthe. Another London clubman states that “the cocktail ‘with a kick in it’ is often ordered by the more hardened cocktail drinker” and that “kick” is obtained by the addition of an extra quantity of the basic spirit… of the cocktail or of a variable amount of absinthe. A third patient states that “when in my club a cocktail is ordered, the waiter inquires ‘with or without?’ – i.e. with or without absinthe.”

  Brasher proceeds to review the case against absinthe in some detail, largely from French sources, adding a few scary flourishes of his own.

  Brasher’s views on absinthe are close to those of the French, but there is a more moderate English view when Evelyn Waugh’s brother Alec gives a glimpse of cocktail-era drinking in his book In Praise of Wine. He recalls drinking absinthe in the Café Royal’s Domino Room:

  I took it with appropriate reverence in memory of Dowson and Arthur Symons, Verlaine, Toulouse- Lautrec, and the Nouvelle Athènes. I only drank it once for I loathed the taste of it. In those days you ordered a dry martini ‘with a dash’, a dry martini was half gin and half vermouth and a dash was not Angostura bitters but absinthe. Even thus diluted I thought it ruined the cocktail. But I daresay I should like it now.†

  In Evelyn Waugh’s 1928 novel Decline and Fall, absinthe figures as a comic symbol of a life that is both ‘fast’ and
morethan a little rotten. Expelled from Oxford for indecent behaviour (of which he is entirely innocent), the earnest young Paul Pennyfeather slides into a chain of bizarre misadventures which begin with a horrible school-teaching job and end with a prison sentence. He is sent to prison after becoming involved with Margot Beste-Chetwynde, whose seemingly gracious lifestyle turns out to be funded by an Argentine prostitution business, The Latin-American Entertainment Co Ltd. Perhaps the reader should have seen a sleazy end on the cards after Margot is described as “gazing into the opalescent depths of her absinthe frappé”, especially as it seems to have been mixed by her worldly ten year old son.

  Absinthe plays a grimly comic role in another Waugh novel, Scoop, this time by virtue of its extremity. William Boot, journalist for the Fleet Street paper The Beast, is drinking some “genuine sixty per cent absinthe” with a gloomy Dane named Olafsen:

  “…What are you drinking, Eriksen?”

  “Olafsen. Thank you, some grenadine. That absinthe is very dangerous. It was so I killed my grandfather.”

  “You killed your grandfather, Erik?”

  “Yes, did you not know? I thought it was well known. I was very young at the time and had taken a lot of sixty per cent. It was with a chopper.”

  “May we know, sir,” asked Sir jocelyn sceptically, “how old you were when this thing happened?”

  “Just seventeen. It was my birthday; that is why I had so much drunk. So I came to live in Jacksonburg, and now I drink this.” He raised, without relish, his glass of crimson syrup.

  Olafsen is bad news when he is drunk.

  “When I was very young I used often to be drunk. Now it is very seldom. Once or two time in the year. But always I do something I am very sorry for. I think, perhaps, I shall get drunk tonight,” he suggested, brightening.

  “No, Erik, not tonight.”

  “No? Very well, not tonight. But it will be soon. It is very long since I was drunk.”

  The confession shed a momentary gloom. All four sat in silence. Sir Jocelyn stirred himself and ordered some more absinthe.

  There is less of this drily comic British reasonableness in the authentic and evocative accounts of expat drinking given by Malcolm Lowry, an Englishman in Mexico, and Samuel Beckett, an Irishman on the continent. Lowry was an alcoholic for all of his adult life, suffering, as he once put it, from “delowryum tremens” during the “Tooloose Lowrytrek” of his existence. Asking a friend, “Do you mind if I have a swig of your cooking sherry?” and finishing the bottle was relatively normal behaviour for Lowry: he also drank aftershave, and he once drank a whole bottle of olive oil in the sad hope that it was hair tonic. He saw elephants in Soho and vultures on his washbasin, and he shook so badly that he had to improvise a pulley system to get a drink to his mouth.

  In Lowry’s 1947 Mexican novel, Under The Volcano, a minor character named Monsieur Laruelle drinks anis because it reminds him of absinthe: “his hand trembled slightly over the bottle, from whose label a florid demon brandished a pitchfork at him.” The main mention of absinthe comes during an evocative strew of details, suggesting the drinking life as a phantasmagoric whirl of ill-spent time:

  The Consul dropped his eyes at last. How many bottles since then? In how many glasses, how many bottles had he hidden himself, since then alone? Suddenly he saw them, the bottles of aguardiente, of anis, of jerez, of Highland Queen, the glasses, a babel of glasses – towering, like the smoke from the train that day – built to the sky, then falling, the glasses toppling and crashing, falling downhill from the Generalife Gardens, the bottles breaking, bottles of Oporto, tinto, blanco, bottles of Pernod, Oxygénée, absinthe, bottles smashing, bottles cast aside, falling with a thud on the ground in parks, under benches, beds, cinema seats, hidden in drawers at Consulates …

  ‘Oxygénée’ was a famous brand of absinthe, advertised by a picture of a florid-looking man in a state of robustly chubby well-being, with the improbable slogan “C’est ma santé” (“It’s my health”).

  The whirling effect of Lowry’s list is comparable to the young Samuel Beckett’s evocation of drinking on the Continent in his early novel, A Dream of Fair to Middling Women, where the same brand rates an incidental mention: “Money came from the blue eyes of home, and he spent it on concerts, cinemas, cocktails, theatres, aperitifs, notably these, the potent unpleasant Mandarin-Curaçao, the ubiquitous Fernet-Branca that went to your head and settled your stomach and was like a short story by Mauriac to look at, Oxygénée…” It is very different from his equally evocative account of another quality of drunkenness back home, drinking “all the stout that helped to bloat the sadness of sad evenings.”

  After the Second World War, with the jazz-age cocktail era long gone, absinthe had an even lower profile in Britain, surviving as little more than a faint cliché about the Nineties or Paris. In some childish cartoons about “the art look” that Swinging Sixties art dealer Robert “Groovy Bob” Fraser did when he was at his prep school, one of them is captioned “the old Bohemian hardened by many years of drinking absinthe, and cafés of Montmartre.” Given that Fraser (already noted as “lacking in team spirit”) was aged about ten at the time, he was even then showing the promise of a not altogether wholesome career†.

  Absinthe (Albanian absinthe, no less) is also mentioned as a humorously horrible beverage in Kingley Amis’s novel The Biographer’s Moustache. It is clear that if absinthe has been earnestly Gothic and doomy in the USA, it has had a persistently comic aspect in England, where extremity and excess are seen differently, and wickedness is to some extent funny, as are foreigners, artiness, and exaggerated sophistication. From Enoch Soames to Robert Fraser there has been something funny about absinthe in Britain for much of the twentieth century: despite its real merits as a drink, you can’t help feeling that Tony Hancock might have liked a glass.

  † See end of book.

  † It is now in Madame Delahaye’s absinthe museum at Auvers-sur-Oise, along with the props department letter. The spoon can be seen on p.232 of her book L’Absinthe: Histoire de la Fée Verte.

  † Waugh also raises the interesting empirical point that absinthe seems to double the power of drinks taken after it. This is a widely noticed phenomenon, and it used to be said that “absinthe is the spark which explodes the gunpowder of wine”. Drink writer H.Warner Allen warned of this so- called “potentiating” effect, “Those who experiment with absinthe will do well to remember that it has the curious property of doubling the effect of every drink that is taken after it, so that half a bottle of wine at the meal which follows it will be equivalent to a whole bottle.”

  † Smooth and charismatic, Fraser was once London’s grooviest art dealer. He hung out with the Rolling Stones, and it is Fraser who appears handcuffed to Mick Jagger in Richard Hamilton’s print Swingeing London [sic] after they were busted for drugs together in 1967. His curriculum vitae also included a one night stand with Idi Amin. Fraser was known for his taste in modern art, and for the trail of unpaid bills his gallery left behind it. He became a heroin addict, and by the time of his death from AIDS in 1986 he was largely forgotten.

  Chapter Nine

  The Absinthe Revival

  Night of the demon: The Absinthe Demon by Jacques Sourian, 1910. Copyright ANPA, Paris.

  The recent absinthe revival has its origins in the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and Czechoslovakia’s 1987 ‘Velvet Revolution’, which led to the opening up of Prague to young Westerners. London-based musician John Moore, one time guitarist with the Jesus and Mary Chain and latterly a member of Black Box Recorder, first encountered absinthe in Prague in 1993:

  One winter, as I stood in a Prague bar, studying the bottles, I noticed one that looked particularly inviting. Filled with emerald green liquid, it looked like it could inflict damage. It was absinthe. I knew a little about absinthe but had never expected to try it. Like most people, I thought it had been banned and gone forever. […]

  The first effects were almost immediate. It felt like it had b
een injected rather than swallowed. There was no slow build up, no gradual seeping into the bloodstream. Armed with a glass of water, I finished the rest and then ordered another glass. A friendship had begun.

  The “absinth” Moore had discovered, spelt without the final ‘e’, was a Czech Bohemian brand called Hill’s. Compared to the old French absinthe, Bohemian absinthe is a different animal altogether: it is much less aniseedy, it doesn’t go cloudy with water, and it has its own novelty ritual preparation with flame, which was never done in France. In this instance Bohemia is a place rather than a state of mind, although any confusion between the two can have done the product’s image no harm.

  The Hill’s distillery business, Hill’s Liquere, was set up by Albin Hill in 1920, producing a range of spirits. Business boomed and in the 1940s the company opened a second factory: wartime Czech drink rationing was based on the volume of liquid rather than the strength of alcohol, so it made sense for drinkers to buy absinth and dilute it. But with the onset of post-war communism, Hill’s prosperity came to an end. The distillery was confiscated, and by 1948 official production of absinth had ceased. In 1990, however, with the return of a free market economy, Albin Hill’s son Radomil began producing absinth once again.

  John Moore wrote an engaging piece on absinthe for the groovy London slacker mag The Idler, which appeared in the Winter 1997 issue. In addition to a brief history and a sound overview, the piece contains a couple of points likely to pique readers’ interest: first, says Moore