The Dedalus Book of Absinthe

by Baker, Phil

  “Leave that,” she said, gesturing to my drink.

  The way she guided me across the floor made me feel like I was at the end of a stunted conga line, and my shouts of, “How are you?” and, “Where are we going?” went unheard or unheeded by her. We finally arrived at a passageway that looked like it led to the kitchen, but was blocked by a short velvet rope between two brass posts, and a large man wearing an earpiece and microphone. He raised a handheld ultraviolet light at us, but seeing Ronnie, he lowered it, unclipped the rope, and moved it aside. I mumbled thanks and Ronnie dragged me, not into a kitchen, but rather a small sitting room populated by a number of thin, impossibly attractive women and a few heavy, but very tan, men. One of the men, moustachioed and dressed like an Edwardian, I recognised as a producer of sexual thrillers that were constantly surrounded by rumours of his on-set perversion. Everyone in the room was sprawled lethargically on plumply stuffed couches, and though seeing was difficult due to the stygian atmosphere, I made out several bottles of greenish liquid, and several more bellshaped glasses, littering the small tables in front of us.

  “Care for an absinthe, dear?” Ronnie asked. My eyes adjusted to the dark, and I looked at her. She was stunning and a little outrageous in a crushed velvet cloche and a man’s cut suit of dark silk that draped open, showing her black lace bra.

  “Absinthe,” I repeated. After witnessing it at several functions, I had done some research and knew it had disappeared early in the century through a combination of laws and intolerance. “I thought the stuff makes you insane?” I asked, communicating a fact I had learned.

  “Only when it contains too much wormwood, friend,” a refined but obese man spoke from across the room. “Wormwood is the root that gives absinthe potency. Without wormwood you are drinking mere pastis.”

  Ronnie placed a glass in my hand and directed me to a sofa. “Sit,” she said.

  “So is there wormwood in this variety? How do you know if it contains too much?” I asked.

  “Don’t be silly, darling, the wormwood is what makes it what it is. But this batch has the right amount,” she said, pouring a small splash of the green liquid into each of our glasses. She then laid a silver strainer-type spoon shaped like the Eiffel Tower across each, rested a few sugar cubes on top of them, and began trickling water over the apparatus and into the glasses. Witnessing the process, I remembered the people with the teacups and flask at Asylum the night we had met.

  “All these people?” I asked, gesturing out toward the main room of the club.

  “Some. Some are on cocaine or other drugs. Some are just drunk. Some are sober. What’s the difference?” she said, removing the strainers and stirring the sodden sugar cubes into the mixture, which was now turning a cloudy whitish-green.

  “No difference.” I shrugged, accepting the glass she offered.

  She raised hers and we touched rims. I paused for a moment, breathing deeply, but knew that I was going ahead and saw no sense in waiting. I drank a healthy slug, draining half the glass. It was faintly licorice tasting and refreshing, not minty, though, as I expected due to the colour. It was cold too, from the water, I supposed.

  “Do you like?” Ronnie asked, curling into me.

  “I think so,” I said, swallowing the rest, feeling its tendrils reach out into my blood.

  As if from a great distance I heard the mustachioed man say to somebody, “Yes. Chernobyl. That’s the word for wormwood in the Russian tongue. The coincidence is quite devastating, no?” I realised he was talking to me when he clapped me warmly on the shoulder.

  “This stuff could bring back the days of ennui,” I mused lazily, now knowing why all in the room were laid out like so on the couches.

  “No, my good man, ennui is passé”, said the mustachioed man on his way out of the room. “These are the days of fear. Strictly fear.” I shuddered and drank again.

  As the night wore on, and the absinthe flowed, I began to feel a sensation of forgetfulness take hold of me. I briefly fought to recall something that Oscar Wilde had said about absinthe. The first stage is like ordinary drinking, the second when you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you persevere, you will enter upon the third stage, where you see things that you want to see, wonderful curious things… But his words melted away, as did the sucking gravity-like feeling that had once trapped my feet and held them to the earth.

  The usual exhaustion and incoherence that accompany heavy drinking was far off as Ronnie continued to pour. She moved closer to me too with each glass, and soon it was as if we were communicating deeply with one another although neither of us spoke. Others in the room began to drift away. I did not witness them walk out, but suddenly they were no longer present. All at once Ronnie and I were suddenly alone in the room, except for the cozy velvet furniture, and then we were all over one another. Our hungry mouths found fabric, then flesh as we grappled blindly. My equilibrium left me as I entered her. I felt I was mounting boundless horizons, tumbling through an ocean of green effluvium, then went into blackness.

  Returning to sentience much later, I was disappointed to find her gone. I rubbed my eyes and peered around the room, discovering I was completely alone. I had a brief moment when I felt the same accordion-like feeling in my chest that I had earlier, but I tucked my shirt in, drew myself back together, and gave myself a sprinkle in the face from one of the leftover water decanters. I checked my watch and found it was past four o’clock, but amazingly the music still pumped relentlessly outside. Walking back into the slightly less populated club, I began to look for her.

  A quarter of an hour elapsed, and after wading through the crowd of dwindling revellers, I was still empty-handed. My spirits began to sink along with my hopes of finding her as the absinthe faded, and I realised I was utterly alone. I located a pay phone and dialled Ronnie’s number, only to reach her answering machine. I swore the filthy machine was against me. With no sign of her, or any of the others from the private room, and still a little lit from the strange head the absinthe brought, I went to my car. Upon finding it intact, I headed for home.

  Along the way, fighting to stay focused, I finally recalled what Oscar Wilde had said of absinthe. I had gotten it slightly wrong the first time, I supposed, because I was already well past the fourth glass when I had thought of it, but now his words reverberated in me. 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…

  THE UNREPENTANT

  CRONSHAW

  Somerset Maugham has a memorable picture of the unrepentant absinthe drinker, Cronshaw, who also seems to be in possession of the secret of life. He figures in Maugham’s 1915 novel, Of Human Bondage. Cronshaw has returned from Paris and is now living at “43 Hyde Street”, Soho. It is in a shabby restaurant in Dean Street that Philip, the idealistic young doctor, meets Cronshaw again.

  Cronshaw had before him a glass of absinthe. It was nearly three years since they had met, and Philip was shocked by the change in his appearance. He had been rather corpulent, but now he had a dried-up, yellow look: the skin of his neck was loose and wrinkled: his clothes hung about him as though they had been bought for someone else; and his collar, three or four sizes too large, added to the slatternliness of his appearance. His hands trembled continually. Philip remembered the handwriting which scrawled over the page with shapeless, haphazard letters. Cronshaw was evidently very ill.

  ‘I eat little these days,’ he said. ‘I’m very sick in the mornings. I’m just having some soup for my dinner, and then I shall have a bit of cheese.’

  Philip’s glance unconsciously went to the absinthe, and Cronshaw, seeing it, gave him the quizzical look with which he reproved the admonitions of common sense.

  ‘You have diagnosed my case, and you think it’s very wrong of me to drink absinthe.’

  ‘You’ve evidently got cirrhosis of the liver,’ said Philip.

&nbs
p; ‘Evidently.’

  He looked at Philip in the way which had formerly had the power of making him feel incredibly narrow. It seemed to point out that what he was thinking was distressingly obvious; and when you have agreed with the obvious what more is there to say? Philip changed the topic.

  ‘When are you going back to Paris?’

  ‘I’m not going back to Paris. I’m going to die.’

  The very naturalness with which he said this startled Philip. He thought of half a dozen things to say, but they seemed futile. He knew that Cronshaw was a dying man.

  ‘Are you going to settle in London then?’ he asked lamely.

  ‘What is London to me? I am a fish out of water. I walk through the crowded streets, men jostle me, and I seem to walk in a dead city. I felt that I couldn’t die in Paris. I wanted to die among my own people. I don’t know what hidden instinct drew me back at the last.’

  […]

  ‘I don’t know why you talk of dying,’ [Philip] said.

  ‘I had pneumonia a couple of winters ago, and they told me then it was a miracle that I came through. It appears I’m extremely liable to it, and another bout will kill me.’

  ‘Oh, what nonsense! You’re not so bad as all that. You’ve only got to take precautions. Why don’t you give up drinking?’

  ‘Because I don’t choose. It doesn’t matter what a man does if he’s ready to take the consequences. Well, I’m ready to take the consequences. You talk glibly of giving up drinking, but it’s the only thing I’ve got left now. What do you think life would be to me without it? Can you understand the happiness I get out of my absinthe? I yearn for it; and when I drink it I savour every drop, and afterwards I feel my soul swimming in ineffable happiness. It disgusts you. You are a puritan and in your heart you despise sensual pleasures. Sensual pleasures are the most violent and the most exquisite. I am a man blessed with vivid senses, and I have indulged them with all my soul. I have to pay the penalty now, and I am ready to pay.’

  Philip looked at him for a while steadily.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid?’

  For a moment Cronshaw did not answer. He seemed to consider his reply.

  ‘Sometimes, when I’m alone.’ He looked at Philip. ‘You think that’s a condemnation? You’re wrong. I’m not afraid of my fear. It’s folly, the Christian argument that you should live always in view of your death. The only way to live is to forget that you’re going to die. Death is unimportant. The fear of it should never influence a single action of the wise man. I know that I shall die struggling for breath, and I know that I shall be horribly afraid. I know that I shall not be able to keep myself from regretting bitterly the life that has brought me to such a pass; but I disown that regret. I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.’

  ‘D’you remember that Persian carpet you gave me?’ asked Philip.

  Cronshaw smiled his old, slow smile of past days.

  ‘I told you that it would give you an answer to your question when you asked me what was the meaning of life. Well, have you discovered the answer?’

  ‘No,’ smiled Philip. ‘Won’t you tell it me?’

  ‘No, no, I can’t do that. The answer is meaningless unless you discover it for yourself.’

  † The Bun Shop, or Bun House, was at 417 the Strand: it is now a wine bar and restaurant, Da Marco’s.

  † See Chapter Five of this book.

  Appendix Two

  Some Available Brands

  The charm of old labels. Anti-Semite Brand, launched in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair. Pernod, the great absinthe firm, was partly Jewish-owned. The Inoffensive Brand, on the other hand, was inoffensive because it contained no thujone. Copyright Marie-Claude Delahaye.

  Since Hill’s absinthe came in from the cold in 1998, a tidal wave of absinthe and would-be-absinthe drinks has hit the market. Several of these are not absinthe at all. Someone has to say it. But broadly speaking, there are two styles of absinthe: there is the true French (or Spanish) style, which is very much like Pernod, except stronger, and often greenish rather than yellow. This should “louche” or go cloudy when water is added. Then there is the East European “Bohemian” style, which is often bluish, doesn’t louche, and is frequently compared to things like window-cleaning fluid. I say “style” because some of the worst East European-style absinthes are now made in France. Conversely, a couple of East European brands are good.

  All comments are given ‘without prejudice’, as they say in legal circles. So in a darkened room, after invoking the departed spirit of George Saintsbury, off we go.

  PÈRE KERMANN’S ABSINTHE (60% alcohol) French, but East European-style

  By far the best thing about this is the label, which features a nice old monk sitting in his cell like a giant hamster and writing “Mon Absinthe Sera Tonique et Digestif” in an olde booke. The advice underneath is worth a second glance too: “Avec une morale saine et une hygiene rationelle l’homme ne meurt que de vieillesse.” With healthy morality and sensible living, a man need only die of old age. Which is no doubt true, but what is it doing on a bottle? What are they trying to tell us here?

  The entertainment comes to an abrupt end when you actually taste the drink, which is pretty horrible. The taste is very synthetic, with a hint of vanilla flavouring and perhaps a faint suggestion of something like Curaçao; the artificial- looking colour already primes you to think of Curaçao. It is not aniseedy, and the thin, burning, mouthwash-type taste is basically watered raw alcohol with some artificial flavourings. It is also lighter and slightly bluer in colour than absinthe ideally should be, and it fails to louche; it just dilutes.

  Looking at the label on the back in more detail, we find this only purports to be “a reminiscence of the French notorious banned drink” and that it contains “wormwood Artemisia Vulgaris”. This is not the true wormwood (Artemisia Absinthium), but the appropriately named mugwort. For aftershave drinkers only.

  Dowson rating: zero

  TRENET (60% alcohol) French, but East European-style

  This is very much like Père Kermann’s; almost suspiciously so. If anything, it tasted slightly staler and more medicinal, like a long forgotten cough syrup. But that makes it sound more pleasant than it is.

  Again, it only promises to “remind you of the notorious banned drink”. The best thing about this, compared to Kermann’s, is that it has the good manners to come in small bottles, so it only costs three pounds to find out that you don’t like it. However, it has been sighted more recently in large bottles shaped like the Eiffel Tower.

  I am told both Père Kermann’s and Trenet are manufactured in Le Havre on the Channel Coast, conveniently close to the know-nothing British.

  Dowson rating: zero

  HAPSBURG (72.5% alcohol) Bulgarian

  Very green and very strong. Some aniseed flavour competes with sheer alcohol and somewhat murkier and staler artificial- type flavourings. Again, not especially pleasant.

  Dowson rating: one

  PRAGUE (60% alcohol) Czech

  At last, after the previous trio, we’re getting into the realms of something less poisonous, although it’s still nothing to get wildly excited about. A reasonably aniseedy taste is combined with a touch of mintiness.

  The label advises that it is “best served with sugar or honey, and may be diluted with tonic or spring water to taste”. Given that most East European absinthes are agreed to taste like anti-dandruff shampoo, this might seem like an incongruously elegant nod towards gracious living. But to be fair, it’s not so bad.

  Dowson rating: three

  HILL’S (70% alcohol) Czech

  This is the granddaddy of the Czech absinthes, the brand that started it all. It’s an open secret that this translucent bluish drink is not very pleasant, although it certainly gets you drunk. As we have seen earlier in this book, the flavour has attracted various insulting comparisons. But to taste this is to realise what brands like Trenet and Père Kermann are imit
ating. In comparison to them, this is richer, fuller, almost spicier. It is not very aniseedy and it doesn’t louche, but mixing it with water gives off a faint bouquet of something like cinnamon.

  Dowson rating: three

  SEBOR (55% alcohol) Czech

  The slightly tacky and exploitational UK advertising mentions Van Gogh’s ear, and promises a much stronger hallucinogenic effect than its major UK competitor, which is presumably a now outdated reference to Hill’s. Sebor contains 10ppm thujone, while Hill’s apparently contains a nominal 1.8ppm or less. I didn’t see lizards on the wall, mutilate myself, or get the urge to beat my loved ones to a bloody pulp, but this is a very good brand nevertheless.

  Very green, slightly darker than most, Sebor is smooth with a little aniseed flavour combined with a strong liquorice. Above all it has a rich, herbal, ‘medicinal’ taste which is very aromatic and slightly peppery. This strong dry herbal quality reminds me a little of Underberg, and of King of Spirits. It also has a pleasantly dry aroma, like old dark wedding cake.

  I find that – initially at least – this seems to produce a stimulating, ‘bracing’ quality of intoxication. This was comfortably well ahead of the other East European absinthes (in fact it’s a different animal) until King of Spirits arrived. It louches slightly with ice and cold water.

  Dowson rating: four

  KING OF SPIRITS (70%) Czech

  Who is this ferrety-looking little maniac on the label, somehow shiftier than your full-blown schizophrenic but clearly not an entirely well man? According to the caption it is supposed to be Vincent Van Gogh, although you’d hardly know it. So I’ve grown to think of this as Maniac Brand.